To be a man in early modern society. The curious case of Michael Wigglesworth

History Workshop Journal

Volumn 41, Issue 1, 1996, Pages 154-165

  Bray, Alan ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0010214045     PISSN: 13633554     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/hwj/1996.41.155     Document Type: Article

References (47)

1. I have used the edition in 'The Diary of Michael Wigglesworth' in Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts Vol 35, Transactions 1942-1946, Boston, 1951, pp. 311-444, ed. Edmund S. Morgan.
2. This is cited below as 'Diary'. There is also The Diary of Michael Wigglesworth, 1653-1657: The conscience of a Puritan, New York, 1965, ed. Edmund S. Morgan.
3. The manuscript is in the care of the Massachusetts Historical Society: Wigglesworth papers, 15.7. It relates to the years 1653-1657. Dreams: 'Diary' pp. 369 and 324. Fantasies: 'Diary' pp. 322, 323, 350, 399, 406. Both are referred to in more general terms at 'Diary' p. 398, quoted below. The quotations in this paragraph are to 'Diary' pp. 350, 322; 323; 322. Quotations, whether from modern or original editions, are given according to the following rules. Spelling and obsolete forms of words generally (other than verb forms) have been modernised, as have punctuation and the use of capitals. Abbreviations have been expanded, except where they serve a metrical purpose. Dates are given with the year beginning on the 1 January. I have not preserved italic type. Titles of books have been similarly modernised in the text but not in the notes. Documents not in English are given in translation. Richard Crowder was strictly right in his claim that Wigglesworth nowhere details the subject matter of his sexual dreams, Richard Crowder, No Featherbed to Heaven: A Biography of Michael Wigglesworth, 1631-1705, Michigan, 1962, p. 62.
4. Wigglesworth did though detail the contents of his worrying sexual fantasies (or perhaps part of them), both at 'Diary' p. 350 as I discuss (and in the phrase 'unnatural filthy lust' at 'Diary' p. 322); and it is not unreasonable to link the two, as Wigglesworth does at 'Diary' p. 398. My attention was first drawn to the sodomitical nature of these comments by Jonathan Ned Katz in his Gay/Lesbian Almanac New York, 1983, pp. 94-100. This paper has been given in a number of earlier versions as a seminar paper and I have greatly benefited from the discussion of the participants. I owe a particular debt to Margaret Hunt, who commented on the paper at an early stage and to the trustees of the Georges Lurcy Fund at Amherst College, Massachusetts, who generally assisted me with my visit to the USA to give this as a paper.
5. The main sources for this are transcribed by A. Gordon Kinder in his Casiodoro de Reina: Spanish Reformer of the Sixteenth Century, London, 1975, Appendix III, pp. 99-112 (discussed by him at pp. 27-36.) 'Without the agreement of the will': absque consensu voluntatis, Kinder p. 105. 'Without decision': absque determinatione, Kinder p. 109. The boy on whether Reina was asleep: Kinder p. 106. The boy's later evidence: Kinder p. 33 note 66.
6. Doctor: 'Diary' p. 405. Baxter: Richard Baxter A Christian Directory London, 1673, p. 407
7. (Part I, Chapter VIII, Part 7, Paragraphs 1 and 2.1). Also in Cynthia Griffin Wolff 'Literary Reflections of the Puritan Character', Journal of the History of Ideas 29:1, January-March 1968, p. 20. February 1655 quotation: 'Diary' 398.
8. 'Diary' pp. 406, 399.
9. Memorials of Father Augustine Baker ed. Dom Justin McCann and Dom Hugh Connolly, London, 1933, pp. 41-44.
10. At page 34-35 he adds fornication and drunkenness to the list of the sins of the universities and contrasts the present state of the universities with what they ought to be: 'the seed or fountain of all virtue for the whole kingdom'. The principal source for Thomas Shepard's life is his autobiography 'The Autobiography of Thomas Shepard' in Publications of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts Vol 27, 1927-1930, pp. 343-400
11. cited below as 'Autobiography'; also in God's Plot: The Paradoxes of Puritan Piety, ed. Michael McGiffert, Manchester, 1972. pp. 33-77.
12. Thomas Shepard's memoir is the piece entitled 'An: 1639' and which begins 'The good things I have received of the Lord:', written in the same manuscript as that containing his autobiography. It is an account of his conversion and vocation, and is given in 'Autobiography' op cit pp. 393-395 (and in McGiffert's version also pp. 71-74). The passage I am referring to is in 'Autobiography' p. 393: He is the God that began to strive with me . . . although I oft resisted the Lord and neglected secret prayer and care of his ways a long time and . . . followed my bowling loose company until I came to that height of pride that for their sakes I was once or twice dead drunk and lived in unnatural uncleannesses not to be named and in speculative wantonness and filthiness with all sorts of persons which pleased my eye (yet still restrained from the gross act of whoredom which some of my own familiars were to their horror and shame overtaken with) 'Bowling': in the obsolete sense of excessive drinking. 'Loose': unchaste. Shepard then goes on to illustrate first the one and then the other; 'unnatural uncleannesses not to be named' is an indirect expression for sodomy, as in Edward Coke's 'Of Buggery, or Sodomy' in The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, London, 1644, p. 58:
13. 'a detestable and abominable sin amongst Christians not to be named'. In this last, the reference is to his intimate friends ('familiars'). 'Gross' cannot be a defining adjective; Shepard would scarcely have recognized degrees of wickedness in whoredom. It serves to intensify the disapproval of whoredom rather than to restrict the term to any particular act. The contrast is between the actions of his friends and his easy acceptance of what he saw ('speculative' - obsolete: in vision), something which pleased his eye. There is a parallel passage to this in 'Autobiography' The Third Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England, op cit p. 361
14. (and in McGiffert p. 40-41). Pledger: Cynthia Giffin Wolff 'Literary Reflections of the Puritan Character' Journal of the History of Ideas 29: 1, January-March 1968, p. 18.
15. The boy's mother: Kinder ' Journal of the History of Ideas op. cit. p. 105; see also p. 35.
16. John Donne, The Satires, Epigrams and Verse Letters ed. W. Milgate, Oxford, 1967, p. 52.
17. On the wordplay in Donne's epigrams see: Frank S. Caricato, John Donne and the Epigram Tradition, Fordham University Ph.D. dissertation, 1973,
18. although I have read the sexual innuendos here differently and M. Thomas Hester in 'Donne's Epigrams: A Little World Made Cunningly' in The Eagle and the Dove: Reassessing John Donne' ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, Columbia, 1986, pp. 80-91,
19. on the verbal tension in the epigrams which problematizes their material. Perkins: William Perkins, A Golden Chaine: Or, The Description of Theologie in The Workes of . . . M. W. Perkins Vol 1, Cambridge, 1608, p. 60.
20. Baker: Memorials of Father Augustine Baker, p. 43.
21. Reina and embezzlement: Kinder, Casiodoro da Reina, p. 113-114.
22. Memorials of Father Augustine Baker, pp. 34-35.
23. The Poems of John Marston ed. Arnold Davenport, Liverpool, 1961, pp. 140-146.
24. My comments on individual words are partly derived from Davenport's excellent notes. I have modernized the quotations following the rules in note 1. There is a perceptive discussion of the place of the sodomitical in Satire VII in this respect in Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics, Chicago, 1991, Chapter Five, esp. pp. 180-181. The woman that appears in the poem is the very epitome of deceitful appearance that the other figures have been reduced to. But while they have fallen to this state, she has not; the woman is what they have become.
25. The ideas about manliness I have described in this paper are related to those in Stephen Orgel's sensitive discussion of the love of women in English Renaissance theatre as threatening to a perilously achieved male identity, in Stephen Orgel 'Nobody's Perfect: Or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?' South Atlantic Quarterly 88: 1, 1989-1990, pp. 7-29
26. and in Thomas Laqueur's discussion of the reaction in the Renaissance to effeminacy in a man as entailing a sort of phantasmagoric dissolution of his being, Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1990, especially pp. 125-6 and 123. I am much more wary though in drawing conclusions about femininity from the material I have used for this paper, in line with the conclusions Stephen Orgel and Thomas Laqueur have drawn about femininity from their own material: that in such a culture a woman did not exist as an ontologically distinct category, that she was in effect an incomplete male. Although I appreciate that much of the material I have used can be read in this way I think this would be mistaken, firstly because these texts do deal centrally with manliness and therefore make a very shaky basis for drawing indirectly conclusions about femininity. The source of the tension I see in them is rather between manliness and unmanliness generally than between being a man and being a woman. Secondly, as I indicate in the paper I think the assumptions in these texts have their own social niche and lack the general significance Thomas Laqueur writes of. It seems to me very probable that the ideas I have described here also rubbed along with other and contradictory ideas of what it was to be a man.
27. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England London, 1982.
28. Phyllis Deane and W. A. Cole British Economic Growth, 1688-1959 Cambridge, 1962.
29. Elizabeth Waterman Gilbody 'Demand as a Factor in the Industrial Revolution', in Facts and Factors in Economic History: Articles by former Students of Edwin Francis Gay ed. Arthur H. Cole et al., Cambridge, MA, 1932, pp. 620-639,
30. reprinted in The Causes of the Industrial Revolution ed. R. M. Hartwell, London, 1967, pp. 121-138.
31. Consumption and the World of Goods eds. John Brewer and Roy Porter, London and New York, 1993.
32. The views in these papers have subsequently been significantly modified in detail; of particular relevance here is the tendency to shift the perspective from the last quarter of the eighteenth century to the later seventeenth century and the early part of the eighteenth. This was raised in the initial reception of The Birth of a Consumer Society in reviews by B. A. Holderness, The English Historical Review, 99, 1984, 122-124
33. and Peter Borsay British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol 8, 1985, 235-236
34. and later reinforced by Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture in Britain 1660-1760, London, 1988
35. and Beverly Lemire, 'Consumerism in Preindustrial and Early Industrial England: The Trade in Secondhand Clothes' Journal of British Studies, 27: 1, January 1988, 1-24.
36. There is a valuable review of the continuing debate at that time in Joseph P. Ward 'Reinterpreting the Consumer Revolution' in Journal of British Studies Vol 29, 1990, pp. 408-414,
37. and there are still dissenting voices on the fundamental economics: Joel Mokyr 'Demand vs. Supply in the Industrial Revolution' in The Journal of Economic History Vol 37, 1977, No 4, pp. 981-1008;
38. there is a response to Mokyr's article in Ari Y. Ben-Shachar in The Journal of Economic History Vol 44, 1984, No 3, pp. 801-805
39. and a reply in The Journal of Economic History Vol 44, 1984, No 3, pp. 806-809.
40. Lorna Weatherill 'A Possession of One's Own: Women and Consumer Behaviour in England, 1660-1740' Journal of British Studies 25: 2, April 1986, 131-156.
41. Amanda Vickery, 'Women and the world of goods: a Lancashire consumer and hep possessions, 1751-81'; Consumption and the World of Goods pp. 274-301.
42. Laura Brown, Alexander Pope Oxford, 1985.
43. especially Chapter 3 'The Ideology of Neo-Classical Aesthetics Epistles to Several Persons (1731-5)' pp. 94-127
44. and 'Reading Race and Gender: Jonathan Swift' Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol 23, 1989-1990, No 4, pp. 425-443.
45. These authors have not suggested that the 'consumer economy' was prompted by female consumption alone but rather that there were differences in the way men and women consumed. This is particularly so of Amanda Vickery. I was prompted to some of these thoughts by a talk Roy Porter gave at the Institute of Historical Research in London in January 1990, when in commenting on eighteenth-century English medicine, he contrasted the eighteenth-century concern with the disease of 'consumption' with the negative attitude of the Christian Humanism of the previous century to consumption as excess. This talk was later reproduced in Consumption and the World of Goods, pp. 58-81.
46. Belinda: 'The Rape of the Lock' Canto I, line 138, in Pope: Poetical Works ed. Herbert Davis, Oxford, 1966, p. 91.
47. have concentrated largely (although not entirely) in this paper on masculine consumption in terms of consumables rather than durable objects. These were at least as important as durable objects in the eighteenth century's economic take off, as Carole Schammas has argued persuasively in 'Change in English and Anglo-American Consumption from 1550 to 1800' in Consumption and the World of Goods pp. 177-205.