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 G E N D E R I N G T H E L A T E M E D I E V A L A N D E A R LY M O D E R N W O R L D

Edited by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

Gendered Temporalities
in the Early Modern World
Copyright © 2018. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Amsterdam University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World
Copyright © 2018. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Amsterdam University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Gendering the Late Medieval and Early
Modern World

Series editors: James Daybell (Chair), Victoria E. Burke, Svante Norrhem, and
Merry Wiesner-Hanks

This series provides a forum for studies that investigate women, gender, and/
or sexuality in the late medieval and early modern world. The editors invite
proposals for book-length studies of an interdisciplinary nature, including,
but not exclusively, from the fields of history, literature, art and architectural
history, and visual and material culture. Consideration will be given to both
monographs and collections of essays. Chronologically, we welcome studies that
look at the period between 1400 and 1700, with a focus on any part of the world,
as well as comparative and global works. We invite proposals including, but not
limited to, the following broad themes: methodologies, theories and meanings
of gender; gender, power and political culture; monarchs, courts and power;
constructions of femininity and masculinity; gift-giving, diplomacy and the
politics of exchange; gender and the politics of early modern archives; gender
and architectural spaces (courts, salons, household); consumption and material
culture; objects and gendered power; women’s writing; gendered patronage and
power; gendered activities, behaviours, rituals and fashions.

Books in the series:

Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World

English Aristocratic Women’s Religious Patronage, 1450-1550: The Fabric of Piety
Copyright © 2018. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

Chivalry, Reading, and Women’s Culture in Early Modern Spain: From Amadís de
Gaula to Don Quixote

Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Amsterdam University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Gendered Temporalities in the Early
Modern World

Edited by Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

Copyright © 2018. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

Amsterdam University Press

Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Amsterdam University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Cover image: Pietro della Vecchia (1608-1678), The Three Fates. The Fates, female deities in
Greek mythology who determined the length and course of each person’s life, often symbolized
time’s passing in Renaissance and baroque art. Photo Credit: Alinari / Art Resource, NY

Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden

Layout: Crius Group, Hulshout

Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by
the University of Chicago Press.
Copyright © 2018. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

isbn 978 94 6298 458 5

e-isbn 978 90 4853 526 2 (pdf)
doi 10.5117/9789462984585
nur 685

© The authors / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2018

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)
without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.

Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations
reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is
advised to contact the publisher.

Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Amsterdam University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Table of Contents

Introduction 7
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

Part I Temporality and materiality

1 Time, gender, and the mystery of English wine 19

Frances E. Dolan
2 Women in the sea of time 47
Domestic dated objects in seventeenth-century England
Sophie Cope
3 Time, gender, and nonhuman worlds 69
Emily Kuffner, Elizabeth Crachiolo, and Dyani Johns Taff

Part II Frameworks and taxonomy of time

4 Telling time through medicine 95

A gendered perspective
Alisha Rankin
5 Times told 115
Women narrating the everyday in early modern Rome
Elizabeth S. Cohen
6 Genealogical memory 135
Constructing female rule in seventeenth-century Aceh
Copyright © 2018. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

Su Fang Ng
7 Feminist queer temporalities in Aemilia Lanyer and Lucy
Hutchinson 159
Penelope Anderson and Whitney Sperrazza

Part III Embodied time

8 Embodied temporality 187

Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici’s sacra storia, Donatello’s Judith, and
the performance of gendered authority in Palazzo Medici, Florence
Allie Terry-Fritsch

Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Amsterdam University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 9 Maybe baby 213
Pregnant possibilities in medieval and early modern literature
Holly Barbaccia, Bethany Packard, and Jane Wanninger
10 Evolving families 235
Realities and images of stepfamilies, remarriage, and half-siblings in
early modern Spain
Grace E. Coolidge and Lyndan Warner

Epilogue

11 Navigating the future of early modern women’s writing 261

Pedagogy, feminism, and literary theory
Michelle M. Dowd

Index 283

List of figures

Figure 2.1 Tin-glazed earthenware mug, dated 1642, London.

Victoria and Albert Museum, London 48
Figure 2.2 Brass and iron spit jack, dated 1670, England. Victoria
and Albert Museum, London 53
Figure 2.3 E  lm chest, dated 1640, England. Victoria and Albert
Museum, London 56
Figure 2.4 S ilk, leather, and beadwork bag, dated 1625, England.
Collection of John H. Bryan, used by permission 63
Figure 4.1 ‘Astrological’ or ‘zodiac’ man in a portable folding
Copyright © 2018. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

almanac, 1451–81. Wellcome Library London 100

Figure 4.2 D  etail of Peter Slovacius’s 1581 almanac with zodiac
man and symbols indicating auspicious dates for
various procedures. Wellcome Library London 101
Figure 8.1 D onatello (Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi), Judith,
c. 1464, bronze, located between mid-1460s and 1495
in the garden of Palazzo Medici, today in the Sala dei
Gigli, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence. Photo: author 188
Figure 8.2 D  etail of Figure 8.1. Photo: author 204
Figure 10.1 J uan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, The Painter’s
Family, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria.
Used by permission 246

Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Amsterdam University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Introduction
Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks

Is time gendered? This collection of essays addresses this question with

a focus on the early modern period, an era that is itself designated by a
contested periodization. It examines gendered and embodied temporalities,
and the ways that time structured early modern lives and the textual and
material commemorations of those lives.
The essays examine aspects of gendered temporality in England, Italy,
Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Aceh, and Virginia, thus allowing trans­
regional and transnational comparisons. The authors come from different
scholarly disciplines, including art history, English, history, Spanish, and
women’s and gender studies, and several are written by interdisciplinary
groups of authors. The collection is divided into three parts—temporal­
ity and materiality, frameworks and taxonomies of time, and embodied
time—followed by an epilogue that considers how these issues play out in the
classroom, and explores the contemporary stakes of this research. The essays
draw on a broad array of textual and material primary sources—letters, me­
dicinal recipes, almanacs, scholarly works, poems, plays, court testimonies,
biographies and autobiographies, sacred stories, puzzles, wills, petitions,
financial records, royal edicts, mirrors for princes, paintings, sculpture,
needlework, and household objects. The use of a wide variety of material
objects as sources is particularly noteworthy. Material culture is becoming
an increasingly important part of the analysis of the past, and the essays in
the book that analyze how material objects express, shape, complicate, and
extend human concepts of time represent this trend. Among the material
Copyright © 2018. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

objects examined in the book is the human body, as some essays explore
somatic experiences of temporality in periods that range from the moment
to the family life course. Whether they use material or textual evidence,
or both, essays examine categories, definitions, and conceptualizations
of time set out by both women and men, and by individuals across the
social scale, thus examining elite and popular culture. Taken together, the
essays allow an assessment of the ways that gender and other categories of
difference condition understandings of time, and note how contemporary

Wiesner-Hanks, M.E. (ed.), Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Amsterdam
University Press, 2018.
DOI: 10.5117/9789462984585/INTRO

Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Amsterdam University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 8 Merry E. Wiesner-Hank s

and early modern conceptions of time inform one another and our work
as scholars and teachers.
Most of the essays in this volume began as presentations and conversa­
tions at the ninth Attending to Early Modern Women conference, held
in 2015 at the University of Wisconsin– Milwaukee, for which the title
was the rather playful: ‘It’s About Time’. In choosing this focus, we were
both responding to and extending the renewed critical attention that is
being paid to temporality. As the cultural theorist Emily Apter put it in
another playful phrase in a recent forum on feminist theory, ‘It’s Time’s
time.’1 Time and temporality are now featured in handbooks and guides
for undergraduate students as ‘critical concepts’ or ‘key terms’ they should
understand.2 After a decade or so in which some queer theorists rejected
periodization, chronology, change over time, and sometimes time itself as
teleological, heterosexist, and normalizing metanarratives and advocated
‘unhistoricism’ or ‘new presentism’, literary critics are increasingly calling
for approaches that recognize the communal investments of historicist,
feminist, and queer methodologies.3 In the same summer that Attending
to Women was discussing time in Milwaukee, the International Society of
Cultural History was doing so in Bucharest, with a conference focusing on
culture and time.4 Peter Burke has examined the history of the idea that time
is culturally constructed, and in the 2006 Natalie Zemon Davis lectures at
Central European University, Lynn Hunt focused on changes in chronological
frameworks, past, present, and future.5 These considerations assert what

1 Apter, ‘Women’s Time’, p. 1.

2 Handbooks include Adam, Time, and West-Pavlov, Temporalities. The revised Advanced
Placement course for European, world, and US history also includes periodization as one its
nine key historical thinking skills, thus extending this concern to secondary school students.
Copyright © 2018. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

(For European history, see: College Board, ‘AP European History’, 2017, https://secure-media.
collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/ap/ap-course-overviews/ap-european-history-course-
overview.pdf).
3 Queer theory’s rejection of futurity and of differences between past and present began
with Edelman, No Future, and Goldberg and Menon, ‘Queering History’. These were critiqued
by Valerie Traub, among others, in her ‘New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies’ and Thinking Sex
with the Early Moderns. Reviews of this debate, and calls to recognize commonalities as well as
differences, can be found in Friedlander, ‘Desiring History and Historicizing Desire’, several of
the essays in Loomba and Sanchez, eds., Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern Studies, and the
essay by Penelope Anderson and Whitney Sperrazza in this volume.
4 Five of the papers from this conference, along with several others, are in Arcangeli and
Korhonen, eds., ‘A Time of Their Own’. Some of the articles in this special issue focus on women’s
understanding and measurement of time.
5 Burke, ‘Reflections on the Cultural History of Time’. Hunt’s Davis lectures have been published
as Hunt, Measuring Time, Making History.

Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Amsterdam University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Introduc tion 9

many of the essays in this volume do: time is an embodied aspect of human
existence, but also mediated by culture; experiences and understandings
of time change, and the early modern period may have been an era when
they changed significantly, with the introduction of new vocabularies and
technologies of time; time is gendered and also structured by other social
hierarchies; material objects shape experiences and conceptions of time.6
The three essays in Part I, ‘Temporality and Materiality’, take up this focus
on objects. In ‘Time, Gender and the Mystery of English Wine’, Frances E.
Dolan examines what at first appears to be a familiar ‘timeless’ beverage
but was actually unstable and unknowable. Although we often associate
the English with beer, ale, and cider, wine was everywhere in sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century England, Dolan notes. More than a beverage, it was
invested with all kinds of significance, starting with the communion cup,
but those meanings were often contested. This was in part because wine,
while highly valued, had often fallen victim to the ravages of time and
transport by the time it reached English consumers, and was doctored by
those who sold and served it, from coopers and tavern keepers to cooks
and housewives. As a consequence, wine was widely distrusted as foreign,
spoiled, and adulterated. It was also understood to have its own timeline
or life course, moving from ‘fresh’, ‘young’, or ‘brisk’ wines that were prized
above older vintages to the spent wines that formed the basis for distilled
spirits and medicines. Wine’s unpredictability was associated with feminin­
ity, as it made women and men alike more disordered and vulnerable, but
was particularly dangerous for women, who were warned not to drink in
excess and praised for abstinence or moderation. Wine also occasionally
provided an opportunity for women, however, who joined experiments
in growing grapes and making wine in England. Ranging across a wide
variety of sources, from Elizabethan London to colonial Virginia, and from
Copyright © 2018. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

the sixteenth century to popular depictions of that period today, Dolan

tells the story of the gendering of wine, its consumption and production.
Tackling wine as a work in progress, she argues that wine connects us to the
past largely to the extent that it continues to be a mystery or a knowledge
problem, a beverage at once familiar and inscrutable.
We may not know what the wine consumed by early modern women
and men was, but we know it was served in drinking vessels and at all
hours of the day, as were other fermented beverages. In ‘Women in the Sea
of Time: Domestic Dated Objects in Early Modern England’, Sophie Cope

6 For a cross-temporal look at how objects we use to ‘tell’ time, especially calendars and
clocks, shape our experiences and conceptions of time, see Birth, Objects of Time.

Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Amsterdam University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 10  Merry E. Wiesner-Hank s

begins with one of those vessels, a tin-glazed earthenware mug inscribed

with the name of a woman and a date.7 She uses this and other domestic
dated objects to analyze the relationship between people and time, both
quotidian and eternal, focusing particularly on objects that circulated within
women’s networks, including cooking wares, chests, and embroideries. She
investigates how ideas of personal time were expressed by women through
the inscription of objects in their physical surroundings, arguing that such
objects demonstrate the significance of dates in marking and extending
social connections between women. Dated objects would ideally outlive
their owner and reach forward to posterity and beyond. Thus through their
inscriptions, women were able to mark out their own place in the much
wider sea of time.
In their jointly authored essay, ‘Time, Gender, and Nonhuman Worlds’,
the author team of Emily Kuffner, Elizabeth Crachiolo, and Dyani Johns Taff
continue this focus on the material, reaching beyond human temporal realms
to examine botanical, nautical, and disease-based perspectives on time that
disrupt hierarchies of gender and redefine ontological boundaries. They
discuss representations of the plant guaiac, used to combat the spread
of the so-called ‘French disease’ through Europe, that expose temporally
contingent definitions of masculinity, texts that portray human characters
with plant-like characteristics that contravene human chronologies, and
maritime metaphors in Shakespeare that disrupt human attempts to describe
masculine erotic desire as everlasting and female erotic desire as having
an expiration date. Their investigations reveal that nonhuman realms and
agents unsettle early modern writers’ attempts to establish essentialized
constructs of gender and time, thus revealing the interdependence between
human and nonhuman worlds.
The four essays in Part II, ‘Frameworks and Taxonomies of Time’, examine
Copyright © 2018. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

categories, definitions, and conceptualizations of time set out by early

modern women and men of varying social classes in Europe and Southeast
Asia. In ‘Telling Time through Medicine: A Gendered Perspective’, Alisha
Rankin analyzes the role of gender in concepts of medical time, where
multiple, overlapping systems of time—astrological, seasonal, liturgical,
horological—guided medical theory and practice. She first discusses Renais­
sance medical scholarship by male authors, including learned theories of the
four humors, treatises on disease, and almanacs, all of which embedded the
microcosm of the human in a macrocosm of time. She then shifts the focus

7 This chapter began as a paper at the Gender, Power, and Materiality in Early Modern Europe
1500–1800 conference held at the University of Plymouth in April 2016.

Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Amsterdam University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Introduc tion 11

to women’s concepts of medical time. Drawing on letters and medicinal

recipes written by German noblewomen, Rankin argues that women both
reflected broader reckonings of time and drew their own concepts of medical
temporality from the female body, including menstrual cycles, pregnancy,
and childbirth. Women thus engaged in deliberate attempts to understand
and pin down embodied time.
Educated noblewomen were not the only women who drew on many
languages of time to craft their own, as Elizabeth S. Cohen demonstrates in
‘Times Told: Women Narrating the Everyday in Early Modern Rome’. Using
the records of the criminal courts of Rome c. 1600, which include the voices
of non-elite women, many of them illiterate, from whom we seldom hear,
she finds that women’s testimony, delivered in intimidating formal settings
and recorded verbatim, carried serious legal weight. As complainants, as
suspects, and as witnesses, women had to remember, reconstruct, and tell
stories about recent and more distant pasts and to situate their accounts
within convincing temporal frames. Telling time orally was challenging,
and women, like their male counterparts, used varied narrative strategies
and temporal rhetorics to lend veracity to their tales. Cohen stresses that
the abstractions, precisions, and disciplines of official time—the sort that
we moderns take for granted—often gave way in early modern courts, as
in life, to less clear and less efficient, but nevertheless functional practices
of local time.
In ‘Genealogical Memory: Constructing Female Rule in Seventeenth-
Century Aceh’, Su Fang Ng takes us to Southeast Asia to examine the ways
in which a woman at the top of the social scale constructed genealogical
time as she memorialized her father. Four queens ruled Aceh, Sumatra
(present-day Indonesia), from 1641 to 1699; the first, Ṣafiyyat al-Dīn Taj
al-Alam, for 35 years. Ng analyzes similarities between Taj al-Alam’s symbols
Copyright © 2018. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

of royal power and her father Iskandar Muda’s, especially their claim to
Alexander the Great as a legendary ancestor. Contesting the genealogy her
husband crafted, Taj al-Alam reinscribed a continuous genealogy from her
father in her elaborate diplomatic letters sent to foreign kings, including
one sent to Charles II of England in 1661, and in royal edicts. Continuity in
the rhetoric of royal power shows a daughter’s appropriation of paternal
as well as royal power. By the end of the seventeenth century, the myth of
queenship was so prevalent that some English visitors believed Aceh had
always been governed by queens, testifying to the power of Taj al-Alam’s
reworkings of genealogical memory.
With ‘Feminist Queer Temporalities in Aemilia Lanyer and Lucy Hutchin­
son’, Penelope Anderson and Whitney Sperrazza explore times embedded in

Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Amsterdam University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 12  Merry E. Wiesner-Hank s

poems, and from Italy to England. They argue that the multiple temporalities
of Aemilia Lanyer’s ‘The Description of Cooke-ham’ and Lucy Hutchinson’s
Order and Disorder model a mutually galvanizing rather than antagonistic
relationship between feminist and queer theory. Lanyer’s and Hutchinson’s
texts return to long-standing feminist concerns: female communities, the
foundational stories of patriarchy, and a focus on desire both procreative
and emphatically not. But the theories the texts themselves manifest do
the work of queering—not as an alternative to, but in concert with—these
feminist concerns. For Lanyer, this involves not only a focus on the eroticism
of all-female communities, but also a lingering in a kiss oddly material and
suspended in time. For Hutchinson, it concerns the way that the impossibility
of procreative sex shows the needlessness of female harm. Lanyer’s and
Hutchinson’s feminist queer poems, Anderson and Sperrazza assert, rewrite
the sequence of events in order to imagine causality differently: pushing
back against received patriarchal narratives, they locate women at the
poetic origin not due to their reproductive capacities, but rather through a
consequentially queer desire founded upon disparaged affect.
Part III, ‘Embodied Time’, includes three essays that explore somatic
experiences of temporality in periods that range from the brief moment to
the generation. In ‘Embodied Temporality: Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici’s
sacra storia, Donatello’s Judith, and the Performance of Gendered Authority
in Palazzo Medici, Florence’, Allie Terry-Fritsch approaches Donatello’s
fifteenth-century bronze sculpture of Judith as a dramatic actor in Lucrezia
Tornabuoni de’ Medici’s sacred story, ‘The Story of Judith, Hebrew Widow’,
written in the 1470s. She traces how the performative cues of Lucrezia’s words
about how and when to look, listen, or imagine functioned to connect an
audience sitting in the garden of the Palazzo Medici somaesthetically with
the statue, thus prompting the opportunity for an active coproduction of the
Copyright © 2018. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

narrative that bound performers and audience together in their embodied

temporality. The essay highlights the strategies by which Lucrezia’s narrative
enfolds contemporary Florentine attitudes concerning justice, virtue, and
political power into Judith’s sacred history, and analyzes Lucrezia’s self-
fashioning in relation to both the textual and sculptural biblical heroine as
a strategy to give voice to her critical role within the family and the state.
Gazing at a statue in the Medici Palazzo garden was an experience
shared by only a few, but wondering whether you or someone else were
pregnant was an experience shared by many, and repeated often across the
life course in an era when pregnancy could not really be confirmed until it
ended. In ‘Maybe Baby: Pregnant Possibilities in Medieval and Early Modern
Literature’, Holly Barbaccia, Bethany Packard, and Jane Wanninger examine

Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Amsterdam University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Introduc tion 13

potentially pregnant women in the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, William

Shakespeare, and John Webster. All three authors write women characters
whose status as mothers-to-be they never totally resolve, thus creating
periods of uncertainty in the supposedly inevitable advance from one phase
of life to the next. Taken together, these authors and their ‘maybe maternal’
female characters illustrate the extent to which potential pregnancy ampli­
fies the inscrutability of women’s bodies and highlights the thwarted efforts
of other characters, readers, and audiences to interpret them. By introducing
the possibility of these women’s pregnancies but leaving their maternal
status unverif ied, Barbaccia, Packard, and Wanninger argue, Chaucer,
Shakespeare, and Webster create experiences of embodiment infused with
epistemological uncertainty and temporal complexity.
If individual bodies could be changeable and complicated, families
were even more so, as Grace E. Coolidge and Lyndan Warner explore in
‘Evolving Families: Realities and Images of Stepfamilies, Remarriage, and
Half-siblings in Early Modern Spain’. One in three children in early modern
Europe experienced the loss of a parent, with the possibility of the surviving
parent’s remarriage to a stepmother or stepfather bringing stepsiblings
or new half-siblings. Coolidge and Warner use advice literature that sug­
gested strategies to cope with the evolution of a family as it moved through
death and remarriage, along with archival records of testaments, estate
inventories, and guardianship arrangements to reveal the gendered patterns
of stepfamilies, in which strong relationships between adult half-siblings
suggest a shared family identity even as families evolved over many years of
extended fertility, a feature of many stepfamilies. Visual representations of
family groups are relatively rare in Spain, but one of the few family portraits
of the seventeenth century – The Painter’s Family by Diego Velázquez’s son-
in-law Juan Bautista del Mazo – captures the expanded age range as well as
Copyright © 2018. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

emotional connections and disruptions imposed by death and remarriage.

The future figures in many of the essays in this book, from wine made
for next year’s drinkers to testaments designed to divide inheritance among
children not yet born. In the final chapter, which serves as an epilogue,
‘Navigating the Future of Early Modern Women’s Writing: Pedagogy,
Feminism, and Literary Theory’, Michelle M. Dowd confronts that future
head on. She notes that the gendered nature of temporality takes on a
distinct set of meanings in the classroom, as we strive to make the past
in which early modern women and men lived and created simultaneously
strange and immediate to students who will shape the world in the years
ahead. She explores the challenges of teaching premodern women’s texts
within curricula where they are seen more often as comments on an era’s

Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Amsterdam University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 14  Merry E. Wiesner-Hank s

gender politics than a part of its literature, and where all teaching in the
humanities is threatened. Using Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam as a case
study, Dowd proposes that we can engage our students in more meaningful
discussions about how and why the fact of female authorship matters by
inviting them to consider the complex intersection between gender and
form, that is (somewhat paradoxically) to have them read it as a drama as
well as a female-authored text. The essay concludes by inviting strategic
advocacy for premodern women writers in the contemporary classroom,
advice that makes explicit what all the essays implicitly promote.
Concerns with the future evinced by so many of the female subjects of this
book as they wrote, built, spoke, planted, drew up wills, devised medicines,
embroidered, or just went about the business of their lives belie the notion
common in the early modern period (and to some degree our own) that
women and their ideas and desires were more time-bound, while men and
their ideas and desires were (and are) everlasting and timeless. Women
shaped the future because of their reproductive capacities, of course, and
several essays point out how concerns about childbirth and those about
time were connected, so much so that giving birth in German was referred
to as ‘going on her time’. But women shaped the future even more through
the textual and material products they created, ordered, or purchased that
allowed them to escape the bounds of human life. Their sense of obliga­
tion to the future extended beyond their own families and kin to the less
fortunate whose lives they extended through food or medicine, and to
imagined readers or viewers for whom their writings or needlework would
be interruptions of a time past in the flow of daily life. Sometimes these
products crossed normative gender boundaries and allowed women—both
real and invented—to challenge or queer patrilineal and patriarchal norms,
while at other times they reinforced them, or they did all of these at once, as
Copyright © 2018. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

conservative forms and usages sometimes made radical innovations possible.

How thoughts of the future shaped the actions of past actors is only one of
several themes that thread through the essays in the book. Another is how
people managed their time. Though men worried about women’s idleness,
which along with their wine drinking might lead to sexual excess, women
worried instead about not having enough time to carry out the various
tasks they needed to do. The earliest reference to the broadside ballad ‘A
Woman’s Work Is Never Done’, fittingly appears in the 1629 inventory of a
widow who sold ballads, no doubt one of many things she did to keep her
household going after the death of her husband, a common event, yet one
that marked a dramatic break in any family’s history.

Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Amsterdam University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Introduc tion 15

A third common theme is the complexity of experiences of time. Early

modern women and men lived in a number of times at once—planetary,
botanical, biblical, seasonal, liturgical, multigenerational, life-course, daily,
horological—which overlapped and conflicted. Embodied time was itself
multitemporal and nonlinear, experienced as a moment when one might
glance at a statue or sip a glass of new wine, an hour whose events one had
to later recall to a judge, a day spent writing, several months when one
(or a woman who mattered) might or might not be pregnant, or a lifetime
of gradual aging punctuated by the type of events that we still call ‘life-
changing’ as well as far more mundane ones.
Finally, several of the essays point to the importance of things that did not
happen as well as those that did: children who were not born, powerful men
who desired but did not rape, lineages that did not continue, vines that did
not grow, ideas about time that did not become modern. They encourage us
to think about the histories we have not inherited, as well as those we have.
The phrase that was the conference theme in 2015, ‘It’s About Time’, was one
heard often in the political rhetoric of the United States in 2016, but that
feminist future did not come to pass. Why it did not was in part because of the
central issue traced in this collection: the power of gender and imaginings of
gender in lives past, lives present, and lives feared or dreamed for the future.

Works cited

Adam, Barbara, Time, Key Concepts (London: Polity, 2004).

Apter, Emily, ‘“Women’s Time” in Theory’, differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural
Studies 21.1 (2010), 1–18.
Arcangeli, Allessandro, and Anu Korhonen, eds., ‘A Time of Their Own: Experiencing
Copyright © 2018. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

Time and Temporality in the Early Modern World’, special issue of Journal of
Early Modern Studies 6 (2017).
Birth, K.K., Objects of Time: How Things Shape Temporality (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2012).
Burke, Peter, ‘Reflections on the Cultural History of Time’, Viator 35 (2004), 617–26.
Edelman, Lee, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2004).
Friedlander, Ari, ‘Desiring History and Historicizing Desire’, Journal for Early
Modern Cultural Studies 16.2 (spring 2016), 1–20.
Goldberg, Jonathan, and Madhavi Menon, ‘Queering History’, PMLA 120.5 (2005),
1608–17.

Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Amsterdam University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 16  Merry E. Wiesner-Hank s

Hunt, Lynn, Measuring Time, Making History (Budapest: Central European Uni­
versity Press, 2008).
Loomba, Ania, and Melissa E. Sanchez, eds., Rethinking Feminism in Early Modern
Studies: Gender, Race, and Sexuality (New York: Routledge, 2016).
Traub, Valerie, ‘The New Unhistoricism in Queer Studies’, PMLA 128.1 (2013), 21–39.
— Thinking Sex with the Early Moderns (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2015).
West-Pavlov, Russell, Temporalities, The New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2012).

About the author

Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks is Distinguished Professor of History and Women’s

and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. She is the
long-time senior editor of the Sixteenth Century Journal, editor of the Journal
of Global History, and the editor-in-chief of the nine-volume Cambridge World
History (2015). She is an author or editor of more than 30 books and more
than 100 articles that have appeared in English, German, French, Italian,
Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Chinese, Turkish, and Korean. Her books include
scholarly monographs, translations, thematic overviews, edited collections,
textbooks, and source readers for the college classroom, and books for young
adult and general readers. Her research has been supported by grants from
the Fulbright and Guggenheim Foundations, among others.
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 Part I
Temporality and materiality
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Copyright © 2018. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Amsterdam University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 1 Time, gender, and the mystery of
English wine
Frances E. Dolan

Abstract
Wine was widely drunk in early modern England. But would we recognize it?
Time unsettles the meaning of this ‘timeless’ beverage because early modern
people were unable to control its effects on the wines they consumed.
Wine’s unpredictability was, in the early modern period, both associated
with femininity and, occasionally, an opportunity for women who joined
experiments in growing grapes and making wine in England so as to make
wine that was more dependable and affordable. Ranging across a wide
variety of sources, from the sixteenth century to popular depictions of that
period today, this essay argues that wine connects us to the past largely
to the extent that it continues to be a mystery or a knowledge problem.

Keywords: wine; winemaking; early modern England; women; gender;

Shakespeare

We know early modern women and men drank wine. But we can’t know
exactly what that wine tasted like. As a knowledge problem, wine joins many
other mysteries of gendered experience in the past. Surviving evidence con-
firms an historical phenomenon we can call ‘English wine’ and some of the
ways in which it was gendered. As we will see, it is easy to document popular
Copyright © 2018. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

attitudes toward wine in ballads and plays. We can readily find recipes for
making, using, or ameliorating wine, as well as fulminations against and
paeans to it. We can also find references to wine in inventories and account
books, lyric poetry, letters and diaries, popular accounts of commensality
and of murder, recipe compilations, medical texts, the notebooks of early
experimental scientists, and in the surprisingly large literature advocating
English grape growing and wine making in the seventeenth century. Moving
across the social landscape, wine left archival stains that offer tantalizing

Wiesner-Hanks, M.E. (ed.), Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Amsterdam
University Press, 2018.
DOI: 10.5117/9789462984585/CH01

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 20  Fr ances E. Dol an

traces of its cultural centrality and its instability. To understand it, we need
to gather evidence from a range of sources, accepting that the resulting
assemblage will still be missing pieces and can never answer all of our
questions. As we try to pin down women’s lived relationship to wine as
consumers and producers, we find enigmatic hints, marginal comments,
texts of questionable provenance. No matter how widely we forage, the
specifics of how that wine smelled and tasted elude us.
In early modern England, most people, young and old, male and female,
queens and servants, routinely drank fermented beverages of some sort since
water was widely and wisely distrusted. Although we often associate the
English with beer, ale, and cider, those beverages they still manufacture and
export, wine, largely imported, was a favored beverage in England for most
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, until coffee, tea, chocolate, and
distilled spirits diversified beverage options and challenged its monopoly.
Wine had sacramental meanings, of course, in the communion cup at the
center of the celebration of the mass as well as in its supposed inversion,
the witches’ sabbath.1 Its sacramental meaning depended on its capacity for
transformation, its ability to become or be experienced as something else,
as well as its ability to change and bind its consumers. It was the lubricant
of good fellowship, from households to taverns to palaces. A standard gift to
and from royals and among aristocrats, it was so prized that it was the object
of piracy and profiteering; Sir Francis Drake, for instance, seized wine from
the Spanish.2 Fortunes were made in importing wine. Elizabeth I rented out
or farmed the right to collect customs duties on all imported sweet wines to
her particular favorites, first Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, and later the
Earl of Essex. While it could be a luxury good, and a marker of elite status,
wine was also a crucial part of recompense for servants, high and low.3
While wine was highly valued and widely drunk, it had often fallen victim
Copyright © 2018. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

to the ravages of time and transport by the time it reached English consumers’
cups. As a consequence, wine was widely distrusted as foreign, spoiled,
and adulterated. It was also understood to have its own timeline or life
course, moving from new wines that were prized above older vintages to the
spent wines that formed the basis for distilled spirits and medicines. Frugal
housekeepers and tapsters found uses for wine at every stage in its timeline,
from grape lees to vinegar, from new wine to distillations. Tackling wine
as a work in progress, most who served wine, from housewives to coopers

1 Bynum, Wonderful Blood; Camporesi, Juice of Life.

2 See Sebek, ‘More natural to the nation’, esp. pp. 107, 116; Fischer, ‘Digesting Falstaff’.
3 Somerset, Elizabeth I, p. 333; Braddock, ‘Rewards of Office-Holding’, esp. p. 45.

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 Time, gender, and the mystery of English wine 21

and tavern keepers, artfully amended and blended it. Did this make wine
foreign or domestic, a taste of the past, as it is often still called, or a fragile
compromise in the present? No one could be sure. That uncertainty was both
associated with femininity and, occasionally, an opportunity for women
who joined experiments in growing grapes and making wine in England.
The mystery of early modern wine is not only a function of the time that
has passed between now and then. Then as now, taste would have been
highly subjective, varying from person to person. More than that, early
moderns themselves struggled to anticipate and control the taste of their
wine because the process of importing and storing wine exposed it to the
ravages of time, temperature, and oxygen. While the causes of wine’s decay
were not fully understood, the effects were widely lamented. As we will
see, if we focus on early modern wine as a process unfolding in time, rather
than a stable product, we can see more clearly women’s roles as agents who
made and amended wine as well as consumed it.
Starting in the nineteenth century, the discovery of bacteria’s role in
making and spoiling wine opened up strategies for managing fermentation
and for preserving wine. But precisely because winemakers today have so
many ingredients and techniques available to them, the provenance and
contents of the wine we drink now remain less certain than we sometimes
like to think. Although many describe wine as a vehicle for tasting the time
and place where grapes ripened, this romanticization glosses over the many
interventions between vine and glass. What we know about early modern
wine is that it was inscrutable: unstable, contaminated, mixed up. What
we share with early modern drinkers, I contend, is uncertainty about what,
exactly, is in the wine we drink. It might seem as if wine links us to drinkers
in the past. But that link is tenuous. Ranging across a wide variety of sources,
from the sixteenth century to popular depictions of that period today, this
Copyright © 2018. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

essay argues that what appears to be the same comestible simultaneously

connects and divides the present and the past.

Gender and wine consumption

Various scholars have explored the relationships among alcohol, sex, and
gender in medieval and early modern Europe, demonstrating the associations
of drunkenness with violence, sexual excess, and disorder for both sexes. 4

4 Martin, Alcohol, Sex, and Gender; Kümin, Drinking Matters; Bloom, ‘Manly Drunkenness’;
Ellinghausen, ‘University of Vice’; and Pleasing Sinne.

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 22  Fr ances E. Dol an

But what was particular to wine? In The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert

Burton identifies ‘The two maine plagues, and common dotages of human
kind, Wine and Women, which have infatuated and besotted Myriades
of people. They goe commonly together’.5 Proverbs provide more concise
versions of the same warnings, linking wine and women as threats to the
male drinker: ‘wine and wenches empty men’s purses’; ‘wine and women
make [wise]men runnagates’.6 Numerous ballads elaborate on the various
plots by which wine and women conjoin to ruin men.7 We might view even
the most conventional advice about wine as gendered. ‘Wine wears no
breeches’ is an early modern version of ‘in vino veritas’, suggesting drunks
have no secrets.8 This proverb depends on the twin assumptions that wine
drinkers are men (who conventionally wear pants) and that, when they
drink, they surrender the gendered authority that was so often troped as
‘wearing the breeches’, exposing, even emasculating themselves.
Medical advice variously advised and prohibited wine consumption,
usually based on the gender and age of the drinker. Andrew Boorde, in his
The Compendious Regiment of Health, advises that ‘Wine […] doth comfort
old men and women, but there is no wine good for children and maidens’.9
This advice continued for more than a century. Wine was bad for children
and good for the old because it raised the body’s temperature. Thomas
Venner, for example, advises that only after 40 should men ‘begin to make
much of the use of wine’; then it should be ‘given with a liberall hand unto
old men’ especially from 60 to death.10 According to proverbial wisdom,
‘Wine is old men’s milk’.11 Wine benefited the old because it provided the
vitality and heat they lacked.

5 Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, sec. 1.2.3.13, p. 291.

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6 Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, W 473, p. 474. See also Apperson, English Proverbs
and Proverbial Phrases, pp. 692–93.
7 See, for example, ‘The subtil Miss of LONDON’; ‘A Merry Dialogue’; ‘A Mornings Ramble’;
and ‘A Caueat or VVarning’. See also Wine and Women. On the association of wine and women,
see Scott, ‘Discovering the Sins of the Cellar,’ in which she emphasizes the homonyms cellar
and seller.
8 Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, W 490. Even ‘Put not good Wine into an ill bottle’
can have gendered implications. In The Arte of Rhetoric, Thomas Wilson elaborates on this as an
example of allegory or extended metaphor: ‘It is evill putting strong Wine into weake vesselles,
that is to say, it is evill trusting some women with weightie matters’, sig. N2r. This is connected
to advisories against women drinking wine since they were sometimes thought to have weaker
brains in general and thus poorer heads for wine.
9 Boorde, Compendious Regiment of Health, sigs. D1v–D2r.
10 Venner, Via recta, p. 40.
11 Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, W 483.

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 Time, gender, and the mystery of English wine 23

The drama provides another gauge both of the ubiquity of wine in early
modern England and the gendering of its consumption. According to Alan
Dessen and Leslie Thompson’s Dictionary of Stage Directions, wine is ‘the
most common item in tavern or banquet scenes or at other times when
figures drink’, appearing in about 65 stage directions. Shakespeare’s plays
mention wine at least 82 times. This doesn’t count the other words for
wine, including canary, malmsy, sack, and bastard.12 While some female
characters drink wine—Gertrude, for instance, pledges Hamlet with a
poisoned stoup of wine—it is male characters who most often call for wine.
‘Give me some wine; fill full’, requests Macbeth (3.4.90), trying to recover
from seeing Banquo’s ghost; ‘a Stoup of wine’ Sir Toby Belch demands in
Twelfth Night (2.3.111).13 In Antony and Cleopatra, Antony and Pompey call
for wine, but Cleopatra does not.
In Shakespeare’s plays, men’s wine drinking is as much a vulnerability as
it is an entitlement. In Richard III, the Duke of Clarence begs his executioner
for ‘a cup of wine’, is offered ‘wine enough’ then stabbed and drowned in ‘the
malmsey butt’ (malmsey was a fortified wine like Madeira; 1.4.147–48, 245);
his ghost later laments that he was ‘washed to death with fulsome wine’
(5.3.130). In The Tempest, Stefano exploits Caliban’s unfamiliarity with and
immediate lust for wine. The most famous manipulator of a man’s weakness
for wine would probably be Iago, who both insists on Desdemona’s sexual
availability through a leveling aphorism he appears to have invented—‘the
wine she drinks is made of grapes’ (2.1.239)—and exploits Cassio’s ‘very
poor and unhappy brains for drinking’ (2.3.29–30). He explicitly offers
Cassio ‘a stoup of wine’ (l.26; the very thing Claudius calls for and from
which Gertrude drinks in Hamlet). Cassio elaborates that he ‘could well
wish courtesy would invent some other custom of entertainment’, that he
has already had the one cup he allows himself, ‘craftily qualified’ or diluted,
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and that he is therefore reluctant to ‘task [his] weakness’. Iago plays on

Cassio’s desire to drink ‘to the health of black Othello’ and to conform to
what the other gallants desire. Iago has cunningly used wine to prepare his
pawns: Roderigo, who has ‘caroused’ to Desdemona ‘Potations pottle-deep’;
three Cypriots, whom he has ‘flustered with flowing cups’; and then Cassio,

12 Varriano, Wine. Varriano has his own calculations: ‘In the 26 plays in which they are men-
tioned, sack appears 44 times, Rhenish wine four, and claret and malmsey once each’, p. 178.
In her study of sack in the Henry IV plays, Sebek, ‘More natural to the nation’, p. 109, points to
the play’s ‘interest in anchoring the wine that Falstaff consumes and that flows abundantly in
Eastcheap in the Elizabethan “moment”’, when imports from Spain dominated consumption
despite ongoing war with Spain.
13 All citations of Shakespeare will refer to The Norton Shakespeare.

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 24  Fr ances E. Dol an

whose weakness he knows and on which he plays. He has created a ‘flock of

drunkards’ on watch and then thrown an inebriated Cassio into the volatile
mix. He keeps it going with the repeated cry ‘Some wine, boys!’ (2.3.65). While
Iago is undoubtedly a villain, his strategy is not unique in Shakespeare.
Lady Macbeth proposes that she will tempt Duncan’s two chamberlains
‘with wine and wassail’ so that they become ‘spongy officers’ who lose
their control over memory and reason (1.7.64, 71). She later specifies that
she has drugged their possets—a comforting drink of spiced milk curdled
with wine that was often served at bedtime. What’s more, she associates
their incapacity with her own stimulation: ‘That which hath made them
drunk hath made me bold./ What hath quenched them hath given me fire’
(2.2.1–2). Thus the wine cup is a crucial weapon in instigating and escalating
these two tragedies, Othello and Macbeth. Perhaps more surprisingly, Portia,
too, exploits a man’s taste for wine to keep control over her marriage plot.
She complains that one of her suitors, ‘the young German, the Duke of
Saxony’s nephew’, is always drunk by the afternoon and so advises Nerissa,
her servant, that they can eliminate him as a marriage prospect if they use
his weakness to game the casket test her father established to determine
her husband: ‘set a deep glass of Rhenish wine on the contrary casket; for
if the devil be within and that temptation without, I know he will choose
it. I will do anything, Nerissa, ere I will be married to a sponge’ (1.2.81–85).
Here, as in Macbeth, a female character uses the word ‘sponge’ to describe
men’s weakness for wine, a weakness she both disdains and exploits. When
male characters call for ‘some wine, ho!’ they cannot be sure exactly what
they are getting or why it is being offered. The cup of fellowship might be a
means by which the host gains control of the story at the guest’s expense.
In various genres, women might also be described as drinking wine to
excess. Ballads describe how men’s and women’s wine drinking made women
Copyright © 2018. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

more sexually vulnerable. One sums this up helpfully: ‘When Wine is settled
in your braine,/ you may be got with Child.’14 While wine was often linked to
heterosexual congress and risk, it also linked women to one another. In the
satirical pamphlet ‘Tis Merry When Gossips Meet, the gossips are drinking

14 ‘A new Ballad’. A female character in John Fletcher’s comedy The Wild Goose Chase (1621)
suggests that wine makes women more sexually vulnerable not only when they drink it but
when men do. Oriana advises her brother that as men drink sack ‘they ne’r speak modestly/
Unless the wine be poor, or they want money […] if in Vino veritas be an Oracle,/ What woman
is, or has been ever honest?/ Give ‘em but ten round cups, they’ll swear Lucretia/ Dy’d not for
want of power to resist Tarquine,/ But want of Pleasure, that he stayed no longer’, Act 1 scene 1,
sig. B2r.

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 Time, gender, and the mystery of English wine 25

claret and sack.15 In Middleton’s A Chastemaid in Cheapside, the gossips

at the Allwit Christening get drunk on ‘comfits and wine’ (3.2.49sd) and
the scene links their gossip and incontinence explicitly to wine. The Third
Gossip promises to tell the Fourth about her daughter’s ‘secret fault’ (which
turns out to be that she’s a bed-wetter) ‘when I have drunk’, and her friend
points out that ‘Wine can do that, I see, that friendship cannot’ (96–97).
Allwit is sure that the puddles under their stools are not ‘some wine spilt’ but
rather urine.16 According to these satires, the open ‘secret fault’ of women
socializing together is their incontinent consumption of wine. Do warnings
and satires suggest that enough women drank to provoke disapprobation or
that the very idea of women drinking wine—especially together—provoked
both mirth and terror? It is always hard to know.
Either way, texts in a range of genres constantly, even obsessively,
imagined women’s wine drinking.17 For example, in Paradise Lost, Milton
describes Eve, once ‘satiated’ with forbidden fruit, as ‘heightened as with
wine, jocund and boon’ (9.793). Milton’s simile requires readers to know how
women who are ‘heightened’ with wine would look and act.18 The simile
also draws on widespread unease about the connection between drinking
wine and poor judgment for women—and its potentially ruinous effects.
Thomas Tryon, for example, returns—repeatedly!—to the suggestion
that women should drink sparingly if at all. ‘Women ought not to drink

15 Rowlands, Tis Merry. Women drank with male friends as well as female. In Cavendish’s
Convent of Pleasure (3.6), a Citizen’s Wife, Mrs. Negligent, looking for her husband, enters a tavern,
‘where a Bush is hung out’, advertising that it sells wine. But she lingers to accept the wine two
gentlemen offer her, confiding ‘In truth, I find a cup of Wine doth comfort me sometimes’, p. 114.
16 Middleton, A Chastemaid in Cheapside; Paster offers an illuminating reading of incontinence
in the play in Body Embarrassed, pp. 52–63. I want to emphasize the central role of wine drinking
in this incontinence.
Copyright © 2018. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

17 While all the speakers in a dialogue called Wine, Beere, and Ale, Together by the Eares are
male (Wine is a gentleman and Beere is a citizen) several of them suggest that women drink
wine. Wine boasts to Beere: ‘I am a companion for Princes, the least droppe of my blood, worth
all thy body. I am sent for by the Citizens, visited by the Gallants, kist by the Gentlewomen: I am
their life, their Genius, the Poeticall furie, the Helicon of the Muses, of better value then Beere’,
sig. B2r. The unclear antecedent for ‘they’, following hard upon the reference to gentlewomen,
suggests that perhaps gentlewomen value wine as their genius. Beer points out that wine is ‘kept
under locke and key, conf inde to some corner of a Cellar, and there indeed commonly close
prisoner, unlesse the Iaylor or Yeoman of the Bottles turne the Key for the chamber-maid now
and then, for which shee vowes not to leave him till the last gaspe where Beere goes abroad,
and randevous in every place’, sigs. B2r–B2v. Asserting his own accessibility and mobility, Beere
associates women’s wine consumption with sexualized secrecy and confinement.
18 Goldstein wonders whether this drunkenness might be the result of ‘a psychosomatic
reaction to her disobedience, or because of the chemistry of this particular fruit, or both?’ in
Eating and Ethics, p. 189.

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 26  Fr ances E. Dol an

Wine or strong Drink, which are bad for Men, but an hundred fold worse for
Women’, he advises.19 According to him, wine is worse for women because
it encourages an inclination to a sexual excess to which, he points out, only
human females descend. This includes activities he deems unproductive,
such as having sex while menstruating or pregnant and marrying younger
men. In A Way to Health, which begins with a laudatory poem from a Mrs.
Ann Behn, he warns of

the too frequent drinking of Wine and strong Drinks, which heats the Seed,
and pervokes Nature, and make her lose her way, which is very pernicious
and dangerous to al sorts of People, but more especially to WOMEN; and
therefore the Ancients did direct those of that Sex, to observe an higher
degree of Temperance and Order than they prescribed to Men, as knowing
that the whole Wellfare and Preservation of Mankind did chiefly depend
on their good or ill Constitution.20

Note how Tryon’s concern with controlling women also asserts men’s
dependence on them for the ‘whole welfare and preservation of mankind’.
While some of Tryon’s concerns seem idiosyncratic, his recourse to the
ancients is not. In The English Gentlewoman, for instance, Richard Brathwait
similarly announces that wine drinking leads inevitably to adultery and that as

For these Feminine Epicures, who surfet out their time in an unwomanly
excesse, we exclude them the pale of our Common-weale. Be they of
what state soever, they are staines to their Sexe for ever. Especially such,
who carouse it in deepe healths, rejoyce at the colour of the wine, till it
sparkle in their veines, inflame their bloods, and lay open a breach to
the frailty of their Sexe. For prevention whereof, we reade [in Pliny] that
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kinsmen kissed their kinswomen to know whether they drunke wine or

no, and if they had, to be punished by death, or banished to some Iland.21

This is yet another instance of the fantasy we find everywhere in the early
modern period that disorderly women could be killed or banished, a fantasy

19 Tryon, Way to Health, sig. N8r.

20 Ibid., sig. N6v. In the earlier A Treatise of Cleanness, he states that: ‘The whole Preservation
of Mens Health and Strength does chiefly reside in the Wisdom and Temperance of Women.
Therefor the ancient Wise Men in former Ages, did direct and accustom their Women to a higher
degree of Temperance than the Men’, sig. B4r.
21 Brathwait, English Gentlewoman, sig. H2r. Brathwait here refers to Plinie, Historie of the
World, I, p. 418, sig. Nn5v.

Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Amsterdam University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Time, gender, and the mystery of English wine 27

that is always recalled wistfully as practice in some other time and place.
Kiss the girls and make them disappear. However different they may be,
Tryon and Brathwait both offer us vivid pictures of female desire enhanced
by wine and outside men’s control. Before cutting himself off with the
fantasy of a diagnostic kiss, Brathwait lingers over the vision of the ‘feminine
epicure’, risking the possibility of the reader who identifies with or desires
her. Sparkling in her veins, inflaming her blood, the wine she drinks seems
to become the blood it resembles, and therein lies its appeal and its danger.
We see the association of wine with bodily fluids in an erotic verse that is
often considered a curiosity or an embarrassment. In sonnet 63 of Barnabe
Barnes’s sonnet sequence Parthenophil and Parthenope (1593), the speaker
imagines copying the gods in taking different forms to gain access to his
mistress, contemplating encompassing various parts of her body as a glove,
a necklace, a belt. Parthenophil builds toward a discussion of becoming a
comestible, going inside rather than around. ‘Or that sweet wine which downe
her throate doth trickle,/ To kisse her lippes, and lye next at her hart,/ Runne
through her vaynes, and passe by pleasures parte’. Thomas Nashe ridiculed
this conceit as destined for the chamber pot, both fleeting and debasing.22
But what interests me is how the sonnet builds toward a desire to inhabit
the female body and imagines that the way to do that is as wine, which is
not quite digested as other nutrients might be but rather becomes part of
the body even as it passes through. Barnes’s conceit is affiliated with Ben
Jonson’s in much more famous and beloved lines: ‘Or leave a kiss but in the
cup,/ And I’ll not look for wine’.23 Jonson’s trick here is a displacement that
eludes Barnes. Contented with just a kiss in the cup, his speaker enjoins Celia
to drink to him only with her eyes, to quench their spiritual thirst with a
‘drink divine’. Just as, in the Song of Solomon, the bridegroom admires his
beloved’s mouth as ‘like the best wine […], that goeth down sweetly, causing
Copyright © 2018. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

the lips of those that are asleep to speak’,24 Jonson’s speaker imagines himself
as the drinker and his beloved as the drink. In contrast, Barnes puts the male
lover, Parthenophil, in the position of what will be consumed and imagines
an unsettlingly material mistress, Parthenope, who not only drinks but
urinates. Her lover, Parthenophil, combines aggression, imagining encircling
and then invading her, with the abjection of being consumed and then

22 Barnes, Parthenophil and Parthenophe, sonnet 63, sig. F4r; Nashe, Have with You, sig. Q2v.
23 Jonson, ‘Song: To Celia’. Wine’s supposed property of being human adjacent, a supplementary
bodily fluid, was described as being ‘homogeneall’. See Whitaker, Tree of Humane Life, and Dolan,
‘Blood of the Grape’.
24 Song of Solomon 7.8–9, 7.12.

Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Amsterdam University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 28  Fr ances E. Dol an

eliminated. But both Barnes’ and Jonson’s poems exploit the erotics of wine
as an animate extension of or supplement to the female body.
Because wine was so often associated with vulnerability, exemplary
women were praised for abstinence or moderation. According to the famously
ambivalent biography of Elizabeth Cary by one (or more) of her daughters,
while she ‘seemed not to have full power over herself in matter of diet’ and
had a weakness for sugar, ‘she by custome and nature never [drank] wine;
of which she never drunke more then a spoonfull att any time’.25 Of the
many contrasts between Elizabeth I and Mary Stuart, yet another is that
Elizabeth watered her wine, drinking more water than wine, while, by
various accounts, Mary Stuart both grew fat on wine and bathed in it.26 One
of Mary’s biographers, John Guy, argues that Mary asserted her queenship
even when imprisoned by maintaining the multicourse meals with wine
pairings that characterized the court. Apparently, she not only put on the
show but injudiciously indulged herself. Guy specifies her wine drinking as
particularly fattening.27 A letter from the Earl of Shrewsbury to Sir Walter
Mildmay (then Chancellor of the Exchequer and a member of the Privy
Council) in January 1569 complains that one of the unexpected costs of
housing Mary is the expense of procuring additional wine. He simply must
have more wine, he writes, because ‘truly two tonnes in a monthe have
not hitherunto sufficed ordinarily, besids that that is occupied at tymes
for her bathings, and suche like uses’.28 Each tun would be the equivalent
of about 252 gallons. A small bathing tub might have held around 40. To
place Shrewsbury’s request for more than 2 tuns a month for his household
or 24 per year in context, Elizabeth’s court went through about 300 tuns
per year at its heights, later reduced to 240. However little Elizabeth drank
herself, imported wine was a major expense for the court29—and for those
who entertained visits from her and her entourage.
Copyright © 2018. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

25 Elizabeth Cary, p. 144. There is some dispute as to which of Cary’s four daughters who became
Benedictines, Anne, Elizabeth, Lucy, or Mary, wrote the biography. Interest focuses on Anne
and Lucy.
26 On Elizabeth’s abstemiousness, see an undated manuscript attributed to John Clapham, a
member of William Cecil, Lord Burghley’s household: ‘The wine she drank was mingled with water,
containing three parts more in quantity than the wine itself’ (Read and Read, eds., Elizabeth of
England, p. 89). The editors claim that ‘these observations were rapidly composed within four
months of the death of Queen Elizabeth’ (ibid., vi). See also Somerset, Elizabeth I, p. 350.
27 Guy, True Life of Mary Stuart, pp. 431–32.
28 The letter, from the Talbot Papers, appears in Lodge, Illustrations, II, pp. 27–28.
29 Woodworth, ‘Purveyance for the Royal Household’. According to Woodworth, ‘The cellar was
expected to furnish annually from two hundred to three hundred tuns of wine. In the earlier
and more extravagant years of Elizabeth’s reign the household required three hundred tuns,

Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Amsterdam University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
 Time, gender, and the mystery of English wine 29

Shrewsbury’s request in this letter hardens into a ‘fact’ about Mary in the
index of Lodge’s Illustrations of British History, which includes the entries
‘baths of wine used by the Queen of Scots’, and also, under Mary, ‘used to
bathe in wine’.30 Neither the Earl of Shrewsbury nor his wife, popularly
known as Bess of Hardwick, seems to have been happy about having
Mary billeted upon them by Elizabeth, who established the arrangement
immediately after they married. It would last for more than 15 years and
inflame conflict between the couple, including suspicions about possible
adultery between the Earl and Mary (who was 20 years younger than Bess).31
Mary, a prisoner, did not like this arrangement either. As a consequence,
communications from the Earl or Countess of Shrewsbury, or Mary herself,
regarding the arrangement have to be read critically. This letter from the
Earl was written very early in Mary’s stay. Is it evidence that she bathed in
wine or served or drank it at bath time? Is it evidence of the Earl’s prurient
interest in her habits? Or is it an attempt to capitalize on her reputation as
a larger than life consumer to get more support for what quickly emerged
as a financially ruinous assignment? For my purposes, it serves as evidence
that even when wine finds a place in the story or appears in the index, its
meaning is simultaneously gendered and murky. From communion cup to
bathtub wine was always bearing significance beyond itself. But what it
signified was usually under debate.

Wine and time

Wine’s epistemological instability and its usefulness both depended on the

fact that it had its own life course; it was, for good and ill, in time. Because
early moderns did not know how to control the effects of time and air on
Copyright © 2018. Amsterdam University Press. All rights reserved.

wines, old wines were seldom valued as better than young ones. Time was not
a friend to early modern wine, which was most consistently praised as ‘fresh’,
young, or ‘brisk’. As a consequence, early modern links between women and
wine do not celebrate maturity—in the way that we see in popular culture

but later the amount was reduced to two hundred and forty tuns. Most of the wine was French
wine. The merchants who supplied it were English and often were the same men who furnished
groceries for the spicery. Besides French wine the court used a small quantity of sweet wine
which it bought from merchants trading in Spain and the Levant’, p. 55. By the end of Elizabeth’s
reign, the cellar had compounded with wine merchants in order to reduce brokerage fees and
exert more control over the quality of the wine.
30 Lodge, Illustrations, II, pp. 435, 441.
31 See Durant, Bess of Hardwick.

Gendered Temporalities in the Early Modern World, Amsterdam University Press, 2018. ProQuest Ebook Central,
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