Bumfodder: Cheap Paper, Ephemeral Print, and the

Unsettled Nation, 1651-1720

A Dissertation

SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA

BY

Jesse Dorst

IN PARTIAL FULLFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

J.B. Shank

June 2021

Copyright © Jesse Dorst 2021

i

Acknowledgements

This dissertation would not be possible without the help and support of many. I

would like to thank my advisor, J.B. Shank for his tireless efforts and unflagging

enthusiasm. I would also like to thank my examining committee for their kindness,

patience, and encouragement. My research was generously supported by residential

fellowships at the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, RI and the Newberry

Library in Chicago, IL. Without the opportunity to see and touch my sources in person,

this project would have been impossible. I also owe a debt of thanks to the Consortium

for the Study of the Premodern World and the Union Pacific Foundation of the Center for

Early Modern History at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, MN for providing

financial support for the writing process. Finally, I need to extend a special thanks to my

father, John Dorst, for his wisdom and to my partner in all things, Stephanie Gertken for

reminding me what is most important in life.

ii

For my mother, Holly, and my daughter, Jo. I wish you could have met.

I think you would have liked each other.

iii

Table of Contents

List of Figures…………………………………………………..iv Introduction…………………………….…………………..……..1 Chapter 1: Broadsides and Pamphlets…..………….……………27 Chapter: 2: Almanacs………………………….…..…………….63 Chapter 3: Small Books………………………………………..107 Chapter 4: Graphic Satires…………………..…………………143 Bibliography………………………….………….…………….180

iv

List of Figures

Figure 1: Detail from Dutch-men’s Pedigree…………………….25 Figure 2: Des waerelds doen en doolen,/Is maar een

mallemoolen…………………………………………………………..137 Figure 3: Detail from Arlequyn actionist…………………….....165 Figure 4: Detail from De kermis-kraam, van de actie-knaapen...166 Figure 5: Detail from De ridder van het gilde kalf………...……167 Figure 6: Law als een tweede Don Quichot, op Sanches Graauwtje

zit ten spot……………………………………………………....168

1

Introduction

Paperlessness is a virtue. Paperless classrooms and offices are seen as inherently

more efficient and speedy. A switch from paper to digital records promises improved

informational durability, consistency, and access. However, the rapid transition from a

paper-based information system to a digital one is having a profound effect on our

material environment. The digital revolution has proven that the context of a message

shapes everything about it even if the medium is the same. People digest tweets

differently than they do Medium articles even though they are both digital publications.

The core contention of this dissertation is that, in the Paper Age, the material qualities of

paper had a similar effect on readers. While all products of early modern presses were

printed on paper, the quality of that paper and its format shaped how people interpreted

their text. People digested single-sheet broadsides differently than small books, and small

books differently than large ones.

In this dissertation, I contend that the material conditions that shaped the crafting

of early modern papers, the considerations of cash-strapped printers regarding paper, and

how printed sheets were handled by readers played a significant role in shaping English

and Dutch national identities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I argue that

paper—its production, its distribution, and its material qualities—influenced the way

people understood the idea of the nation and their relationship to it. Specifically, I want to

address how cheap, affordable paper was necessary for developing a national

consciousness among the general reading public. Over these four chapters, I show how

2 the uneven distribution of papermaking infrastructure and materials shaped the formation

of national identities; how the broad distribution of paper objects democratized national

colonial ambitions; and how attitudes toward paper’s material limitations helped scuttle

the earliest attempts to formalize economic aspects of national belonging through the

issuance of state-backed, national currencies.

In our digital moment, it is difficult to capture the tactile experience of an in-

person archival visit. Massive databases of digitized documents, indexed and quickly

searchable, shield us from the problems of volume and elide the tangible differences

among early modern publications, robbing them of their material particularity. The habit

of looking past the physical qualities of a particular document is not a recent

phenomenon, but as archival research becomes increasingly virtual the historical

information offered by touch becomes quieter and quieter. The result is a tendency to see

paper simply as alternative to parchment or vellum and ignore its complexity and

diversity. In reality, mills in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries churned out a wide

variety of materials that we tend to lump together as “paper.” There were thick,

cardstock like papers for playing cards and for game boards. There were durable papers

that could be printed with decorative designs for use around the home. There were fragile

papers destined for destruction. There were papers designed to be written on with pen and

ink. There were papers designed for use in screw presses and others for use in rolling

presses. There were expensive, highly engineered papers and cheap, roughly made

papers. In short, “paper” was—and is—a simple word that encompasses a complex

3 constellation of materials, each of them tuned to a particular use and saturated with a set

of expectations about their function and value.

With a broad spectrum of paper products available to them, early modern writers

and printers had to make decisions about the quality and type of the paper they intended

to use to send their words out into the world. This decision was largely driven by

economic considerations. The early modern printing industry operated on credit and thin

profit margins.1 Selecting the appropriate paper for a project could easily spell the

difference between a lucrative venture and a financial debacle. In selecting paper,

however, printers made a choice about how a particular printed text would circulate

through the larger information ecosystem. Thick, white, fine paper—the kind found in the

richly bound tomes—tended to benefit from the care and protection of whoever spent

good money to acquire it. Thin, cheap, brownish paper—the kind that made topical

pamphlets and single sheet ballads economically viable to printers—was likely to end up

as kindling or toilet paper. As historians, it is easy to be prejudiced in favor of those

expensive, luxurious papers. Their relative durability and their likelihood to benefit from

conscious preservation by their caretakers means they were more likely to find

themselves in an archive than were their cheaper, flimsier cousins. Because we historians

require that texts survive as fodder for our own research, it is easy to see texts printed on

disposable paper as inherently flawed. But the ephemerality of cheaper papers was a

feature, not a bug. The expectation that a publication would circulate for a short time then

1Andrew Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance (New Haven, MA: Yale University Press) 2010,

54-5. Kindle edition.

4 be destroyed or creatively re-purposed made room for a printer to churn out another,

similar publication and encourage the kind of repeat business that kept their operations

solvent. Indeed, this regular churn of ephemeral texts made possible the production of

those expensive, precious books so valuable to any historian of the print era. Without the

regular influx of ready cash that a cheap, gossipy, one-sheet publication could generate,

the whole system was liable to grind to a halt.

The economics of early modern printing, and papermaking in particular, are

important factors to consider when analyzing how a physical encounter with a piece of

print colored the reception of its content. The costs of making paper, moving paper, and

acquiring paper shaped the printing landscape at every stage of production. Fortunately,

bibliographers have amassed a great deal of information about precisely how paper was

produced, distributed and purchased. Philip Gaskell’s An Introduction to the New

Bibliography is a foundational text for matters of paper production, distribution, and use.2

The text offers a curriculum in how to approach the material elements of a textual object

as well as important practical information about the processes of papermaking,

bookbinding, and the paper market. It is essential to everything I do in this dissertation.

Attending to the material qualities of different sorts of paper and the implications

of those material qualities is central to my project. Wherever possible I communicate

whatever information I have about the physical condition and features of the texts I

analyze. I do my best to be honest about my own archival experiences touching and

2 Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, corr. ed. (New York, NY: Oak Knoll Press,

1995).

5 reading these documents, and I draw on the work of theorists of materiality and

workmanship to make sense of that experience. Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter,3 Daniel

Miller’s Stuff,4 and David Pye’s The Nature and Art of Worksmanship5 are particularly

important touchstones. Miller and Bennett take seriously the role of things in society and

their ability to shape human behavior and history. Their approach to analyzing and

interpreting objects clarifies the relationship between the physical qualities that made

paper well suited to mass production and the flood of texts underpinning the growth of

national sympathies. Pye offers a vocabulary for thinking about how things are made and

how their production shapes their social position. These are the core ideas I try to apply

to paper in the following chapters. Paper has received its due as a foundational matrix of

the pre-digital information landscape. But the very things that made paper uniquely well

suited to the mass production and broad distribution of texts also encouraged people to

use it in creative ways that had nothing what to do with reading whatsoever. Paper’s dual

life as both text and tool influenced how people gathered information and how they lived

their lives, but these functions were not entirely distinct. The fact that cheap, single sheet

broadsides could be easily and conveniently repurposed as toilet paper said something

about its cultural and intellectual weight. What was written on the paper might suggest to

the reader that just such an after-market function was particularly appropriate. Together,

3 Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham N.C.: Duke University

Press, 2010).

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

5 David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship, rev. ed. (Bethel, CT: Cambium Press, 1995).

6 Pye, Bennet, and Miller provide a model and a language for analyzing the material and

textual qualities of these sources side by side.

Acknowledging the complexity of early modern papers is not just a historical

curiosity. Considering the different kinds of papers available to printers and readers

complicates our understanding of “print” as a technology and as a culture in the early

modern period. Historians of the print era have a habit of letting books stand in for the

entirety of print culture. The dramatic impacts in the production and dissemination of

knowledge attributed to the growth of “print” are, upon closer examination, really the

product of an explosion in the production of books. More to the point, they are a product

of the explosion in the production of a certain class of books: intellectually and/or

artistically weighty books with clear impact on the thinkers of their own moment and

those that succeeded it. Not coincidentally, these books also tend to be physically

weighty objects well suited to preservation and archiving. For the modern historian of

print, the gravity produced by these weighty things draws in everything around them and

flattens out the topography of early modern print. The qualities attributed to hefty printed

books vis-à-vis the expansion and democratization of knowledge get applied to all

contemporary printed objects with little regard to the conditions of their production or

dissemination. But a single-sheet pamphlet or graphic satire was not a book. Almanacs

and card decks were not books. Even many books were not books in the sense of being

significant tomes worthy of rich, library-quality bindings. These other sorts of printed

objects circulated differently. They found different audiences and different uses. They

7 were not important and many of them did not even pretend to be. They were cheap words

printed on cheap paper.

The tendency among early modern historians to overlook the material diversity of

objects that can be called “print” produces the knock-on effect of seeing all printed

materials as participating in a common “print culture.”6 While certainly produced by one

type of printing process or another, the actual objects that came from early modern

presses could be vastly different in terms of the type of press that produced them, the

materials from which they were composed, the logic behind their production, the

audiences they targeted, and the habits surrounding their consumption. Within a given

analysis of a print culture of any period it is not uncommon to see historians situate

highly collectable art prints alongside the rough woodcuts of anonymous pamphlets as

equal, parallel evidence since, after all, they are both “print”.7 Homogenizing distinct

print types into one uniform print culture obscures vastly different networks of circulation

to which each was subject and effaces all any indication of who, exactly, might have

consumed these prints and why. Historians deem these elisions are necessary in order for

printed objects to be marshalled into a coherent historical narrative, but these conflations

hide the complexity of early modern print objects. As a result, the information they

contained or opinions they espoused get generalized and presented as representative of

the knowledge and opinions of a homogenized, early modern public. Remaining sensitive

to the different uses and expectations that surrounded a monumental book like the

6 Adrian Johns, "How to Acknowledge a Revolution." The American Historical Review 107, no. 1

(2002): 117-20. DOI: doi:10.1086/532099 7 For a prime example of this tendency, see Wim Klooster, The Dutch in the Americas, 1600-1800

ed. Norman Fiering (Providence, RI: John Carter Brown Library, 1997).

8 Nuremburg Chronical and those that conditioned the reception of a single sheet broadside

illuminate the diversity and heterogeneity of the reading public, and by extension the

distribution of information within any given population can be more precisely

illuminated.

The proliferation of printed texts throughout the late sixteenth and early

seventeenth centuries is the basis of many of the bold and compelling claims regarding

the significance of printing technology for the trajectory of human thought and

civilizational development. The ability of the printing press to produce vast numbers of

(nearly) identical texts8 has been credited with precipitating the Reformation,9 making

possible scientific thought and method,10 and fundamentally reorganizing societies.11

Cheaper, popular printed objects have been useful to historians eager to justify the

significance of print to early modern people across the socio-economic spectrum. Bold

and sweeping arguments about the influence of print on the whole of human history rely

on the ability of print to make knowledge simultaneously available to a larger group of

people than ever before. This, in turn, has led to expanding expectations of literacy in the

8 In his Nature of the Book, Adrian Johns’ takes issue with Elizabeth Eisenstein’s influential claim

about the ability of print to fix and standardize texts in ways that were impossible in a scribal context. His detailed materialist exploration of how printing was actually done shows there was a great deal of variation between individual objects that might be considered copies of the same text. However, he does not address Eisenstein’s more salient points about how print changed how people thought about the nature of information and its transmission.

9Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 164-8.

10 William Mills Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication, edited by American Council of Learned Societies (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1969), 23-4.

11 Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: the Making of Typographic Man, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), 124-6. Kindle edition.

9 decades and centuries after the wide-spread adoption of the printing press across

Europe.12 Ever since Elizabeth Eisenstein’s Printing Press as an Agent of Change made

“print culture” a viable subject of historical inquiry, determining who could and could not

read has been a vital question among those interested in the influence of the printed word.

The larger the reading public, the greater the claims one can make about the influence of

print on a given population.

The most concrete estimates of pre-modern European literacy rates rely mostly on

examinations of legal documents and extrapolations based on the percentage of people

who could sign their own name.13 Some scholars, however, have begun to embrace a

multiple literacy model that accepts that there are multiple ways of fruitfully engaging

with text. From this perspective, the inability to write one’s name is not necessarily proof

that one was incapable of reading, or at least engaging with textual objects. 14

Furthermore, the reading skills necessary for deriving pleasure from a vernacular

scatological screed are not as demanding as those required for making sense of an erudite

theological tract in Latin. Even those with no reading skills whatsoever might not be

entirely excluded from the world of print if they happened to hear texts read aloud in a

tavern or coffee shop. The sheer number and sustained interest in producing cheap

publications is often pointed to as evidence for a robust market among the not-so-well-to-

12 David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 43-6.

13 Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order, 42. 14Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in

Seventeenth-Century England (London: Methuen, 1981), 27.

10 do (and not-so-well-educated) for accessible reading material. Attention has also been

paid to the distribution of potential literacy and it is generally agreed that urban literacy

rates were higher and readers more economically diverse than rural populations where

literacy was, probably, significantly lower and more stratified.15 Taken together, these

trends and shifts in expectation have relied on the popularity of cheap prints to repeatedly

revise the literacy numbers upward and develop a narrative of increasing European

literacy beginning in urban centers and slowly spreading to the hinterlands over the

course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Not coincidentally, this has also

allowed historians of printed material to argue for the increasing significance of their

subject and to expand the population of historical people who were influenced by print

and in turn to treat the views expressed in topical, ephemeral objects as representative

and generalizable.

Challenges to traditional definitions of literacy, and the attendant increase in the

pre-modern significance of print and printing technology, have led some to challenge the

prerequisite of any kind of literacy when considering where and how historical

individuals encountered print. In her Cheap Print and Popular Piety, Tessa Watt argues

that what modern historians encounter as printed objects also circulated as images and

performances, neither of which demand literacy to be engaging. Her emphasis on extra-

textual encounter expands the potential audience for cheap print further down the

economic scale, but Watt is careful to point out that “cheap” is not synonymous with

15 Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 155-7.

11 “popular” or “folk” in the sense that cheap publications were only intended for an

unlearned or poor audience. “Cheap”, for Watt, is a threshold of accessibility that cuts

across many cultural divisions. The specific objects of her analysis are single sheet

ballads, a common and widely produced form of print which publishes new lyrics set to

familiar tunes and which often provide novel commentary on the issues of the day. Watt

is specifically interested in what the ubiquity of these cheap prints says about notions of

piety and worship among the general population of England in late sixteenth and early

seventeenth centuries. Key to her argument is the idea that publications of this sort found

currency and relevance not just as text, but also as performance and decoration. “The

broadside ballad was not only a text to be read,” she writes. “It was also, in fact

primarily, a song to be sung, or an image to be pasted on the wall. In these oral and visual

forms, it had the potential to reach a much wider audience than its original buyers and its

‘literate’ readers.”16 Like ballads, many forms of ephemera suggest that part of their

significance was performative as well as textual.17

Taken together, these diversifications of print culture and expansions of the

cultural impact of printed material suggest that literacy was not a threshold to

engagement with print. It is compelling, I think, to consider the various ways people may

have encountered printed ephemera rather than limit considerations of its influence to

those who could read their words. Cheap texts printed on cheap paper have found

currency in examinations of print culture partly because they help shore up this

16 Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1991), 6-7.

17 Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories, 66.

12 foundational principal. The sheer number and relative affordability of cheap prints

suggests broad participation in the culture of print. This in turn means that the

conclusions drawn from an examination of print culture are all the more significant since

they can apply to such a large swath of the historical population. However, the emphasis

scholars of print culture place on the wide and varied presence of printed objects in

people’s lives ignores the associated reality that printed things also regularly disappeared

from people’s lives. People may have held on to some kinds of affordable publications,

but many of the texts impressed on cheap, flimsy paper were made to be discarded. The

fact that they did disappear, both frequently and in great numbers, is vital to

understanding how they were used by those who actually encountered them and how that

use may differ from the treatment of other printed objects. Acknowledging the

expectation that ephemera would be repurposed and destroyed means reconsidering how

to interpret their texts and the historical information they offer. This holds doubly true for

any arguments about emerging national consciousness given the intimate relationship

between print and nation.

In the same way that acknowledging the diversity in early modern paper products

adds texture to the world of early modern print, complicating our understanding of how

printed texts moved through early modern societies adds nuance to our understanding of

the emergence of nations and national identities. The formation of national identities and

the formalization of nation-states in the early modern era is well-trod ground, of course.

The links between print and nationhood in particular are well documented and have been

thoroughly analyzed. Benedict Anderson’s seminal description of the imagined

13 community, bound and shaped by the circulation of print, made room for a raft of more

narrowly focused studies that zero in on a particular kind of print in a particular nation.

The happy result is a rich and detailed argument that nations, as we understand them

now, would not exist if it was not for the printing press. Anderson and others even

suggest that it is the technology that made the modern nation-state possible.18 But

Anderson’s link between print and nation, relying as it does on the fiction of a monolithic

“print culture,” has often been treated too simply. Scholars regularly take the existence of

print as automatically producing national structures. Anderson’s argument relies on the

notion of print-capitalism, a state of affairs he explicitly identifies as developing in the

middle of the eighteenth century and which is connected to the Age of Revolutions.

The newspaper, for Anderson, is the printed object central to the construction,

distribution and maintenance of a national identity and national sympathies. The regular

production and wide distribution of a familiar product which presents a nationally

conceived progression of “empty time” helped people think past their own personal

particularities and the differences those engendered. It created a sense of collective

forward motion that papered over the gulfs of difference in people’s daily, weekly, and

seasonal rhythms.19 However, the distribution of newspapers was not as wide as

Anderson’s argument requires until the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century.20

18 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of

Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006), 38. Kindle edition. 19 Ibid., 26. It is important to point out that Anderson did not develop the notion of empty time but

is himself drawing on Walter Benjamin to make his point about the relationship between print and a shared notion of common time.

20 Kevin Williams, Read All About It!: A History of the British Newspaper (New York: Routledge, 2010), 50. Ebook edition. Other histories that examine the history of newspapers place their origin earlier

14 Anderson himself skips lightly over the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in

Imagined Communities, moving quickly from the expansion of print technologies to the

Atlantic Revolutions, when newspapers came into their own. But if nations, as we

understand them now, are the product of newspapers, what were nations before that

medium emerged? Newspapers did not invent the words “English” or “French” or even

“nation”. They helped establish a widely shared conception of what those things meant

and their significance, but the terms were widely used before that process began. But the

print environment of the period between the expansion of printing capability and the

formalization of national identity through newspapers was more chaotic. There was far

less by way of a shared national reality because the sort of publications that made use of

national labels and appealed to a reader’s sense of national belonging were more

irregular. They targeted different audiences and literacies and they relied on unreliable

systems of distribution. Chapmen, illicit presses, and rampant piracy meant that ideas

committed to cheap paper had the potential to circulate far beyond their press of origin

and intended audience. Consequently, ideas like national character and national identity

could spread to a wide variety of people, whether the author intended it or not. These

works did not present, therefore, the sort of uniform notions of nationhood that an

editorially consistent newspaper fostered. Furthermore, as Mary Spufford points out,

pamphlets, ballads and other cheap publications “…had a secondary function of

supplying the very real social need for lavatory paper.” After commenting on the issues

than Williams, but even these studies draw a distinction between the “newsbooks” of the seventeenth century and publications that fill Anderson’s requirements for a newspaper. See Joad Raymond’s The Invention of the Newspaper (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.)

15 of the day, broadsides, cheap books, ballads, pamphlets and newspapers would usually

find a second purpose as wrapping paper, fire-starter or “bum fodder.”21 This

disposability was an expected part of the life cycle of cheap print, and yet despite that

transience, ephemera is commonly included as a part of the print culture said to produce

the solidity and permanence of national sentiment.

Partly due to the prodigious historiography tying nations to print, the two

concepts exist in a mutually reinforcing feedback loop. Print is credited with giving rise

to nations, and nations act as the foundational organizing category for examining print.

No historian bats an eye when presented with a study of English print culture or Dutch

pamphlets. The reality of publishing in early modern Europe, however, was not nearly so

clean. Texts were printed and reprinted, translated and plagiarized, traded and sold across

mountains, rivers and oceans, to say nothing of ill-defined national boundaries. The book

fair in Wittenberg, for example, attracted buyers from across Europe who bought copies

of texts for resale (or pirating) at home. Publishers undertook printing projects with this

in mind, often printing in the most salable language, not the one native to the location of

publication.22 In places where a strong central authority exerted censorial control, those

interested in spreading seditious ideas looked to less regulated printing markets for a

publisher who would take on the project even without having a stake in the conflict.23 A

21Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories, 49. 22 Pettegree, The Book in the Renaissance., 66-7.

23 This was particularly true between the English and the Dutch. The Northern Provinces were

never subject to the kind of censorship the crown could place on England’s London presses. For more on Dutch print history see Michel Reinders, Printed Pandemonium: Popular Print and Politics in the Netherlands, 1650-72 (Leiden: Brill, 2013) and Craig Harline, Pamphlets, Printing, and Political Culture in the Early Dutch Republic (Dordrecht: M. Nijhoff 1987).

16 few recent studies even rely on the international nature of printing to make arguments

about complexities within Atlantic relations. Marjorie Rubright makes the

interconnectedness of Dutch and English presses central to her argument about the effect

of Dutchness on the idea of Englishness, for example.24 And Benjamin Schmidt exposes

the international nature of printing when he uses an image from a German translation of

Amerigo Vespucci’s description of the Americas (originally in Latin) to demonstrate

Dutch awareness of the Americas. Early modern book publishing was an international

affair. Existing scholarship does not hide how interconnected different printing centers

were, but, for some reason, historians persist in dividing printed objects into tidy,

nationally defined groups.

Accounting for differences in paper and the diversity of the early modern print

universe shakes national categories loose from their entrenched position as the

foundational categories of early modern history and opens them up to interrogation.

Being attentive to the material qualities of a text and considering how they shaped the

lifecycle of a given publication encourages approaching national categories through

Begriffsgeschichte or “conceptual history.” Conceptual history operates under the

assumption that the concepts that shape our world are themselves historical and subject to

change over time. Tracing the genealogy of words that reference important concepts, like

“nation”, backwards to deepen understanding of how they were understood by those who

used them in the past. Begriffsgeschichte is therefore a technique that can radically shift

24Marjorie Rubright, Doppelgänger Dilemmas: Anglo-Dutch Relations in Early Modern English Literature and Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 18-19.

17 interpretations of historical evidence. It is telling that in the massive dictionary of

historical concepts that the master of Begriffsgeschichte Reinhart Koselleck has edited,

the concept of “nation” is closely tied to “volk.”25 It suffices to say here that the early

modern use of “nation” more commonly referred to a group of people than to the

autonomous, coherent political entity that dominates modern use of the term. Reinvesting

seventeenth century use of the word “nation” and its attendant national categories like

“English” or “Spanish” with its more nebulous, people-centric, early modern

connotations relieves them from service as the fundamental, natural categories of

historiography and allows them to be interesting, complex, and contested ideas in the

early modern period. In short, when reading early modern publications that make use of

national categories, Begriffsgeschichte encourages seeing them as conceptual proposals

of how to understand a vast, complicated and changing world, and not as reflections of a

universally accepted underlying reality.

As the reach of European powers expanded around the globe in the seventeenth

and eighteenth centuries, so too did the space to which European state and corporate

interests were extended. An appeal to a shared national identity was a popular and

powerful tool for shaping an image of the world that contained a nationally unified “us”

at its center. No geographic space or natural resource is inherently national, and one place

is often vital to the livelihoods of many peoples. As such, national categories are a

25 Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe;

Historisches Lexikon Zur Politisch-Sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, Vol. 7 (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1972), 281-284. It is worth noting that the analysis of “nation” in this dictionary focuses on its French origins. However, the OED and the closest Dutch equivalent (Van Dale’s Groot Woordenboek der Nederlandse Taal) allude to similar histories as both ‘nation’ in English and the Dutch ‘natie’ stem from the French ‘nation’ and enter Dutch and English vernaculars between the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

18 subject of local interest even in the looser, early modern sense of the term. It is not

surprising, then, that there would be interest and drive to interpret space according to

national interests. Approaching historical evidence that projects national ownership or

knowledge as producing a nationally understood space rather than referencing an existing

one makes possible two useful conceptual moves. First it makes possible an interrogation

of the means and tactics by which colonial, European powers were able to project a

nationalized view of the world. Secondly, particular topographies can be re-

conceptualized as hosting multiple productions of national space simultaneously, to say

nothing of concurrent special constructions that do not reference the nation at all.

Henri Lefebvre’s work on space as a social product is useful here for thinking

about the potential of working within a smooth Atlantic. For Lefebvre, space is produced

by the modes of production that govern it. Lefebvre argues that if we adopt this view,

…we should have to look at history itself in a new light. We should have to study not only the history of space, but also the history of representations, along with that of their relationships—with each other, with practice and with ideology. History would have to take in not only the genesis of these spaces but also, and especially, their interconnections, distortions, displacements, mutual interactions and their links with the spatial practice of the particular society or mode of production under consideration. 26

Perceiving space as something that a society produces for itself raises questions about

who was constructing these national spaces, why they were doing so, and to what

audience were they being pitched. Accounting for the different purposes to which

nationally conceived rhetoric was put makes it very difficult to understand the English

26 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden: Blackwell

Publishing, 1991), 42.

19 Atlantic or the Spanish Atlantic as a unified, coherent or “…a real social phenomenon.”27

It is more useful, I think, to approach historical evidence which nationalizes space as

drawing on a set of well-rehearsed but ill-defined concepts of nationhood that together

make a particular view of the early modern world intelligible to a particular audience.

Each of the four chapters in this dissertation focuses on one type of early modern

publication that was widely available and accessible to the general reading public. In each

chapter, I to integrate an analysis of textual content with an examination of their physical

composition in order to emphasize how the material attributes of a publication flavored

the conditions of their consumption. I draw on the extensive scholarship about early

modern printing and book culture, as well as bibliographic information about the

papermaking world, to provide context for the way affordable printed things circulated

among makers, sellers, and buyers. Being sensitive to the production and lifecycle of

different printed objects suggests different ways of interpreting their historical impact.

The ephemerality of single-sheet broadsides and the intense locality of many almanacs, to

note on two examples found in later chapters, each informed in crucial wasy how their

early modern readers made use of their content.

My attempts to address larger questions about the role that cheap paper played in

the development of a national consciousness are filtered through the lens of Anglo-Dutch

relations in the Atlantic basin between the mid-1600s and 1720. This timeframe covers

numerous changes in relative advantage between England and the Netherlands, changes

27 David Armitage and M. J. Braddick, “Introduction” in The British Atlantic World, 1500-1800,

(London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002); 3

20 that had significant implications for everyday individuals who understood themselves as

English or Dutch. Two wars over Atlantic resources; exchanges of colonial territory;

economic interdependence; and changing religious sympathies at the state level made for

a complex international relationship between these two powers. As such, Anglo-Dutch

history makes for an interesting vantage point from which to consider how popular

publications aimed to shape popular attitudes regarding both personal national identities

and the framing of a national “other”. Examining Anglo-Dutch relations through an

Atlantic history lens, rather than a European history one, also allows me to examine how

national identity formation operated differently in colonial settings. It also makes it

possible for me to explore how colonial ambitions at the level of the State necessitated

novel propositions of nationhood’s reach. As English and Dutch powers fought among

themselves and with the native inhabitants of other continents for dominance and control,

my chapters show what it meant to be part of these nations changed to accommodate

novel experiences. By the mid-seventeenth century, affordable publications of any stripe

made regular use of national categories, but situating their propositions and/or

assumptions about nationhood in the context of their materiality complicates what

modern historians can say about them. By zeroing in on a particular kind of publication in

each chapter, I hope to show how malleable, capacious and incoherent the idea of

nationhood was and why these very qualities are what made nationally flavored rhetoric

so useful.

Chapter 1 of this dissertation focuses on the ephemerality of many cheap

publications and the way their expected disappearance maintained flexible notions about

21 national actors on the global stage. Reams of paper were dedicated to negotiating what it

meant to belong to a nation, often in blunt and satirical terms. The cheapest, roughest,

and easiest to produce publications were single-sheet broadsides and short, one or two

sheet pamphlets. Unlike even short books, which required considerable coordination on

the part of printers, these simple paper objects promised quick turnaround and, hopefully,

enough ready income to keep a precarious businesses afloat. The paper objects that were

sold in bookstalls or out of chapmen’s packs were not durable or precious things. They

were expected to disappear, one way or another, and make room for newer, similar

objects. As such, they were the perfect vehicle to convey novel propositions about what a

nation was or was not, and how members of such-and-such a nation should think and feel

about current events. The fragility and disposability of low-quality paper allowed notions

of nationhood and national belonging to shift in order to accommodate the fluidity of the

early modern geo-political world.

My second chapter examines how localized paper production shaped national

identity formation among individuals far-removed from the traditional boundaries of their

home nation. Pamphlets and broadsides may have the distinction of being the cheapest,

most rapidly produced printed paper objects, but almanacs were the most widely

distributed. People of every social stripe purchased almanacs, many as an annual habit.

They were a reliable source of income for printers and a familiar source of information

for readers throughout the early modern Atlantic world. They were also intensely local

publications. Relying, as they did, on astrological predictions for their weather forecasts,

almanacs were bound to particular regions. The locality of their relevance was reinforced

22 by the locality of their production. The accessibility of almanacs relied on their

affordability, which required that they be printed on the cheaper sorts of paper, the sort of

paper it was not typically worth transporting over any significant distance. European

colonists, hungry for the familiar predictions and assurances of an annual almanac, were

required to make their own. Colonial almanacs sought to keep their readers connected to

the metropole, but their unavoidable links to the location of their production produced

expressions of national identity with a distinctly local, colonial flavor. This chapter

compares two almanac collections. The first, an idiosyncratic collection from Boston that

spans decades, illustrates a variety of strategies employed by colonial almanacs to make

sense of the colonial experience through an English lens. The second, a formal, bound

collection of London-produced almanacs from a single year, provides a stark contrast in

both form and content. Read together, these collections illustrate a dramatic difference in

how people read about Englishness at various points along the Atlantic rim and call into

question the degree to which England, or any nation, can be understood as a coherent

entity in the early modern era.

The “book flood” of the early modern period was probably the first historical

moment in which contemporary commentators expressed anxiety over information

overload.28 Over the course of the seventeenth century, the number of titles available to

28 See Ann Blair, "Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload ca. 1550-

1700." Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (2003): 11-28. DOI:10.2307/3654293; Richard Yeo, "A Solution to the Multitude of Books: Ephraim Chambers's ‘Cyclopaedia’ (1728) as ‘The Best Book in the Universe’." Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (2003): 61-72. DOI:10.2307/3654296; Brian W. Ogilvie. "The Many Books of Nature: Renaissance Naturalists and Information Overload." Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (2003): 29-40. DOI:10.2307/3654294; and Jonathan Sheehan "From Philology to Fossils: The Biblical Encyclopedia in Early Modern Europe." Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (2003): 41-60. DOI:10.2307/3654295.

23 readers exploded. Expanding literacy, an uptick in active printing businesses, and a

growing papermaking industry meant more people had easier access to a wealth of

printed materials. This vibrant publication environment grew alongside expanding settler

colonialism in the New World, each supporting the growth of the other. Nowhere is the

intimate relationship between colonization and print more apparent than in the travel

writing genre. My third chapter examines the travel writing genre as a phenomenon of

proliferation. It argues that the power of travel writing lay in its sheer numbers. Untold

reams of paper were given over to texts that adhered to a formalized script, differing only

enough to encourage collection and repeat business.

One of the more prominent conventions in the travel writing genre was an appeal

to national benefit. Books that sought to make exotic, far-flung locals intelligible to

domestic European audiences could be found at any price point and proved popular

among all sorts of readers. Exemplary instances of the form were produced as pro-

colonial theses and presented to heads of state, while more prosaic members of the genre

clogged bookseller’s stalls and regional fairs. This wide distribution of travel writing had

a two-fold effect. It democratized the colonial imagination and encouraged a broad

section of the reading public to see foreign places as profitably exploitable. It also

reinforced notions of national belonging in ways that deemphasized more salient class

boundaries. It did so by presenting colonial endeavors as benefits to the nation as a

whole. Over time the conventions of the travel writing genre became so familiar and

24 predictable that parody was inevitable. Grub Street satirists adopted the form and format

of travel narratives to lampoon and critique the underlying logic of the genre. In addition

to examining earnest examples of the travel writing genre, this chapter digs into the

parodic travel narratives of Ned Ward. A close reading and material analysis of John

Carter Brown’s copies of Ned Ward’s A Trip to Jamaica and A Trip to New England

highlights how cheaply published books offered an alternative view of nationhood and

nationally justified colonialism to the broader reading public.

My final chapter pivots away from text-heavy publications to examine another

popular, widely dispersed kind of paper object: the graphic satire. From fine engravings

to crude, woodblock prints, allegorical images had the potential to reach beyond the

circle of the literate population. Graphic satires were extremely popular paper products.

Examples can be found that comment on almost any topic. Through an examination of a

strange Dutch text, this chapter focuses on graphic satires concerned with the intertwined

failures of the South Sea and Mississippi Companies in 1720 and the implications of their

collapse.

Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid (The Great Scene of Folly) is an odd book

that has attracted a good deal of scholarly attention from both historians and

bibliographers. The aspect of the book that has drawn the most scrutiny is its last section,

which consists of a handsome collection of prints. Each existing example of Het Groote

Tafereel has a slightly different collection, but all of them are intensely focused on the

new financial mechanisms that allowed the South Sea and Mississippi Companies to graft

their fortunes onto the financial wellbeing of the English and French states respectively.

25 This dissertation tries to build on the existing scholarship surrounding these curious

tomes by focusing on their paper, both the physical paper from which they are composed

and the symbolic paper at the center of many of their critiques. The financial crisis of

1720 wiped out a massive amount of theoretical wealth across the European continent. It

is no surprise, then, that the tone of all the satires collected in Het Groote Tafereel are

critical of the events that led to such a dramatic crash. One of the most prominent

symbols in these images is that of paper sheets either floating through the air or being

trampled into the ground. This chapter argues that the prominence of paper in these prints

points to a fundamental weakness in the novel financial schemes that made the

Mississippi and South Sea Companies possible in the first place; namely, that those

involved overlooked paper’s material fragility when compared to metal coinage. Beyond

being a vehicle for the printed word, paper had myriad uses, everything from lining pie

dishes to starting fires. People habituated to repurposing printed paper objects in ways

that led to the objects destruction found it hard to reimagine paper as a bearer of inherent

and stable value. When the state-backed schemes that hinged on replacing coins with

slips of paper ultimately failed, it only reinforced how ill-suited paper was to the task of

being money.

Replacing the material substrate of information with servers and digital devices

necessarily influences our current expectations regarding how we store and access

information, and how we value the information that we retrieve. The digitization trend is

having a particularly pronounced effect on historical research. Working from electronic

copies of primary source material broadens access to the profession and makes drawing

26 together a vast number of resources far easier. But these benefits come at the expense of

all the historical information embedded in the physical qualities of the text. This

dissertation attempts to hold on to the fact that early modern texts were objects as well as

information, and that each dimension influenced the other. Concepts of what constitutes a

nation and who belongs to it took the historical trajectory they did because paper is what

it is. As our experience with information becomes more and more disconnected from the

world of stuff, that part of history gets easier and easier to forget.

27

Chapter 1 Broadsides and Pamphlets

Figure 1. Detail of Dutch-mens Pedigree…. Image courtesy of the British Library.

No great care was taken with the composition of the page or the execution of The

Dutch-mens Pedigree…’s pressing.1 This is evident even in a digital reproduction. The

margins of the text are inconsistent, irregular lines of ink underscore random words

where the paper was depressed far enough below the relief letter to pick up ink from the

frame or base of the letter blank. The last few lines of text along the bottom of the page

1 The Dutch-mens Pedigree…, broadsheet, (London: Printed 1653 and to be sold at St. Michaels

Church door in Cornhill, 1653), Thomason/669.f.16[81]; Thomason Collection, British Museum, London. Accessed via Early English Books Online.

28 are nearly illegible where not enough ink was applied. These glaring imperfections are

the product of the conventions behind the construction of these sorts of objects. Single

sheet publications were quick, simple affairs for printers that could be undertaken and

completed within a day, allowing printers to fit them in to the workweek around more

complex, expensive projects.2 This made cheap print a nimble medium that could

comment on and frame immediately relevant events. Published in 1653, The Dutch-mens

Pedigree… was likely tossed off quickly in order to comment and capitalize on

immediate hostilities. It is a commentary on war which eschews dates, events and facts in

favor of presenting a vision of inevitable English victory as a result of a moral deficiency

on behalf of the greedy, duplicitous Dutch people. Readers are encouraged to situate

themselves and their interests against those of the all-consuming Dutch who threaten to

squeeze out anyone else who might gain from exploiting Atlantic maritime resources.

This argument is couched within a pseudo-mythical origin of the Dutch people in which

they are described as the product of the union between shit and butter.

Within this derogatory and highly exaggerated narrative are several allusions to a

changing dynamic of power in the Northern Atlantic, but these are never fully explained

to the reader within the text. Habitual consumers of prints at this time would have had the

chance to come into contact with any number of pamphlets, newsbooks, ballads or other

broadsides which addressed ongoing events, many of them in similar terms. The Dutch-

2 Though there were presses that specialized in printing cheap works, especially later into the seventeenth century and beyond as news periodicals gained popularity and were increasingly in demand. See Joad Raymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks 1641-1649 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) in which he draws a very clear genealogy between ballads, broadsides and irregular news sheets of the seventeenth century and the periodical newspapers of the eighteenth

29 mens Pedigree… assumes some familiarity with the broader network of discussions on

behalf of the audience in order for its critique to make any sort of sense. The fact that it

expects some familiarity with the terms it uses, however, does not mean that those terms

are making reference to a coherent exterior referent.

Its crude humor collapses familiar stereotypes of Dutchness with allusions to the

cultural and economic stakes of the military conflict in an associative web that does not

explain the war but does make sense out of it in moral terms. The sheet elevates the

category of Englishness above that of Dutchness and encourages readers to identify

themselves with the former. What is significant is the particular, specific combination of

associations and stereotypes employed here to make sense of an Atlantic scale conflict at

a local level. Here “English” and “Dutch” are not references to stable national

communities with self-evident, distinguishing characteristics. They are rough but familiar

conceptual vessels into which any number of associations can be poured depending on

the needs of the moment. The individual consumer of the broadside is connected with

events taking place elsewhere by being asked to momentarily construct a sense of the

Dutch that clarifies why things are the way they are. Readers are not encouraged to

understand the political or economic ramifications of the conflict outside of their own

moral outrage.

The Dutch-mens Pedigree… proposes to show the how Dutch people were

“…first bred and descended from a horse-turd, which was enclosed in a Butterbox…”3

But not just any horse-turd, the turd of a monstrous aquatic whale-horse hybrid with a

3 Dutch-men’s Pedigree,

30 second human head. After a detailed and pointed description of the monster’s physical

form and behavior, the broadside relates the narrative of the whale-horse’s death by

excessive defecation. The residue of the beast’s demise is then gathered by a German

sorcerer at the Devil’s behest and placed in a gigantic box smeared on the inside with

butter. After a short incubatory period the box is opened and it is discovered that the

contents of the box have transmuted into a new race of people: the Dutch. The description

of the whale-horse-man’s human head is studded with allusions to stereotypes of Dutch

people maintained and rehearsed in other prints and in popular performances like The

Dutch Courtesan and Holland’s Leaguer. 4 The text of Dutch-mens Pedigree says the

human head has a “… chin [that] was bald, and without hair; under his chin he had a

wallup of fat hung half way down his throat; he had a wide mouth, and two tongues in it,

with either of which he could speak, though he was much impedited with the wallup of

fat that hung under his chin, which made his words sound as if he spoke in the throat: he

had two rows of teeth, with which he chewed the food he fed his insatiable and ravenous

paunch.”5 The beast’s girth, double chin, and tendency to speak “in the throat” are all

qualities repeatedly linked to the Dutch in a variety of cultural products. But when

dealing with ephemera the stereotype they draw on is less significant than the use to

which it was put. In this particular print responding to this particular moment, the

stereotype is leveraged to make highly topical critiques about “Dutch” behavior on a

4 Marjorie Rubright, Doppelgänger Dilemmas: Anglo-Dutch Relations in Early Modern English

Literature and Culture (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 38-55. 5 Dutchmen’s Pedigree

31 global scale. The charges it levels were intended to be intelligible to domestic, localized

populations who, nonetheless, were affected by changes in Atlantic maritime power.

The outcome of the First Anglo-Dutch war had the potential to fundamentally

restructure the balance of power in the Atlantic, a notion not lost on the makers and

buyers of popular publications.6 In this particular piece of ephemera, Dutch fatness is

linked to sinful gluttony and a general opportunistic greed as the horse-whale ravenously

consumes all the fish and plants that come within his orbit. This is an allusion to the

grievances the Navigation Act attempted to address without reference to the Act itself.

The description of the beast’s “…two toungues…with either of which he could speak…”

calls up the stereotype of the Dutch as duplicitous and opportunistic, a sentiment echoed

later in the print when the monster is described as having “…held amity with all the Fish

in the Ocean; but his friendship lasted no longer then till he saw a fit opportunity to make

a disagreement more advantagious unto him then his feigned familiarity was…” The

stereotype of duplicity is resurrected here specifically as an allusion to the strained but

intimately intertwined maritime interests of the English and Dutch peoples, but these

references are not explicated in the text. They are there to be caught by an informed

reader, one who might make a habit of thinking with the terms of “English” and “Dutch”

as they revised their view of the larger world.

In describing how the horse came “into such a violent purging condition, that he

never left shitting till he purged life and all out of his body,”7 the broadside also makes a

6 James Rees Jones, The Anglo-Dutch Wars of the Seventeenth Century (New York: Longman,

1996), 107-144. 7 Dutch-mens Pedigree

32 dig at the land of the Netherlands itself. The horse-beast, angry at the ocean itself for not

bowing to its every whim, begins to drink as much ocean water as it can, leaving a space

on the coast of Germany dry that was previously underwater. Poking fun at the Dutch

practice of constructing polders and windmill pumps to reclaim low-lying land was a

popular tactic in English publications that targeted Dutch behavior. In this particular

instance, the Dutch whale “assult[s] these innocent waters in such an outragious manner,

as if it had intended to devour not only that Sea, but also all the Oceans in the world…”8

a humorous rhetorical move that links the physical geography of the Netherlands with a

criticism of the expansion of Dutch interests around the globe in light of the new legal

conditions engendered by the passing and enforcement of the Navigation Act. The Horse-

Whale is not deterred from this until “the British Seas…began to muster up their Forces

to oppose his Tyranical doings…”9 This deftly, illogically, and humorously ties together

a sense of natural English primacy in the Atlantic, a sense of Dutch tyranny, and an

impression of the illegitimacy of Dutch constructions of the Atlantic space; all of which

are linked to stereotypical short comings in Dutch people in order to address ongoing but

distant events of material significance at the local level.

The criticism of the category of “Dutch” is at once impressionistic, historical,

corporal and moralistic. It is not a reasoned argument, but more of a free association of

familiar stereotypes and pieces of common knowledge cobbled together into a humorous

and fantastic narrative aimed at framing a complex conflict in digestible, familiar terms.

8 Ibid. 9 Ibid.

33 The purpose behind it is not to inform, like a news-book might, or to offer a nuanced

explanation of an idea or opinion. It is a publication attempting to catch a few pennies

from buyers through a clever recombination of familiar signs in light of new events and

information produced by a new, immediate military conflict. The collapsing of well-

rehearsed Dutch stereotypes and vague allusions to explain distant events offers an

explanation, of sorts, for the Anglo-Dutch hostilities; namely that the conflict was

inevitable and that the English will be victorious given the inborn deficiencies of the

Dutch.

The most arresting part of The Dutch-mens Pedigree… is not the text, but the

crude image centered in the upper half of the sheet. Simple images were a common, even

expected feature of broadsides and ballads.10 More often than not, these central images

were more complex than a literal illustration of a scene described by the text. They were

another space where multiple meanings could collapse into a single symbol or icon

encouraging the reader to bring a different set of pre-established notions to bear on their

interaction with the object. Certainly, the image on this particular broadside does

illustrate the horrific horse creature at the center of the text’s narrative. But it also

compresses the entirety of the text’s narrative into its most salient components. The man-

horse-whale is depicted pooping a stream of pellets which gather into an ill-defined pile

at the base of a cylinder. This cylinder is labeled “The Great Butter Box” and is full of

sketchily rendered heads, suggesting a mob of Dutchmen. Half climbing out of the butter

10 Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1991), 194-214.

34 box are two more detailed figures. Their names, Van Trump and De Witte, are inscribed

on the butter box below their likenesses. In roughly twenty-five hundred words, the text

tells an allegorical story that links the geography of the Netherlands, Dutch shipping

practices in the Atlantic, and a host of negative stereotypes to make the case that the

Dutch are inherently greedy and untrustworthy. The image boils this allegory down to

“Man-whale-horse poops, and Dutchmen are born”, a crude but essentially accurate

distillation of the text.

The image also adds information that cannot be found in the text alone,

specifically the figures of van Trump and de Witte. Van Trump (or van Tromp) was the

commander of the Dutch fleet in several battles of the first Anglo-Dutch war. De Witte

was a Dutch statesman and advocate for Dutch shipping interests. Here, then, are the two

most overt and specific references to the particulars of the naval conflict between

England and the Netherlands. Notably, the human head of the Janus-faced horse-beast

bears a striking resemblance to the head of the figure labeled “Van Trump,” encouraging

the viewer to see in the actions of the mythic animal the more immediate, tangible events

of the ongoing hostilities between Dutch and English ships vying for Atlantic naval

dominance. Nowhere in the text are these particular people mentioned. Their inclusion

and by extension the immediate political relevance of the entire print is the work of the

image, a tactic which makes the central critique of the publication immediately available

to the broadest possible audience. The central image on broadsides is a valuable feature

both for increasing the interested consuming public and as a form of advertising meant to

catch the attention of possible buyers. In this instance, it seems calculated to catch the eye

35 of consumers already familiar with de Witte and van Trump, consumers who will

inevitably bring that awareness to their reading of the broadside. It is advertising not

simply targeted as broadly as possible, but also addressed to a set of readers with the

requisite knowledge to make sense of the allusions and references in a narrative that link

it to current, relevant events.

Constrained by economic pressures, material limitations and a fleeting moment of

topicality, cheap publications like The Dutch-mens Pedigree relied on an audience that

folded interactions with cheap print into their daily routine. This dependence on a regular

cycle of production and consumption highlights the disposable banality of any given print

and undermines any attempt to make meaning of them outside of an understanding of

their participation in a mundane, quotidian, cultural practice. Approaching cheap print as

the material residue of the cultural practice of habitually interacting with topical

publications in a variety of ways and settings turns them into a source which offers some

access to the conceptual tools available to people in England and the Netherlands; tools

with which common citizens could make sense of a complicated, dynamic world. The

appeals to Englishness and Dutchness as they find expression in this broadsheet, and

many other pieces of humorous ephemera are highly associative and topical. They divide

the immediate situation into national categories as a rhetorical short hand to encourage

consumers to find personal stakes in a state-level economic conflict (which may well

encourage repeat business for similar products) and not as a reflection of a world

governed by national actors.

36

The first Anglo-Dutch war was fought entirely at sea. Indeed, it was fought

entirely within the narrow band of the Atlantic that separated the island of Britain and the

west coast of the United Provinces. This limited geography belies the larger Atlantic

implications. The conflict was sparked by the passage of the English Navigation Act of

1651, a bold move on the part of the Commonwealth government to formalize English

maritime dominance in the Atlantic basin. The crux of the act was that all goods entering

English ports, either in England itself or colonial territories it claimed, needed to be

shipped directly in ships with the same provenance as the goods they carried or in

English ships. This was generally understood as a protectionist move aimed at crippling

Dutch shipping interests.11

At the time, the Dutch merchants dominated the shipping around the Atlantic, and

the States General, the political body that governed the United Provinces of the

Netherlands, actively pursued political policies aimed at strengthening the mercantile

economy. Where necessary, it supported a merchant’s participation in moving goods and

people between Europe, Africa, the Caribbean and the Americas through military means.

Restricting the flow of goods among territories that the Commonwealth considered

English can be seen as an attempt to draw an economic boundary around the English

empire, binding colonies to the metropole by extending a notion of national belonging to

economic activities in a novel ways that excluded Dutch interests. Indeed, the few

historians who have examined the Anglo-Dutch wars often characterized the Navigation

Act as an effort in “state-building” made intelligible by grouping the interests of

11 Jones, Anglo-Dutch Wars, 11-12.

37 Parliament, the semi-autonomous joint-stock companies like the East India Company,

and everyday people, under the banner of a shared Englishness that supported policies of

mercantilist protectionism.12 Of course, the real, immediate material effects of this

expanded, protectionist, economic Englishness were ambiguous at best. The Act did

assert an English dominance in north Atlantic trade and shipping, but in so doing it

hamstrung colonial economies by restricting their access to Dutch trading networks.

Regardless of the actual, measurable consequences of the Navigation Act, it sparked a

war in which nationhood and national belonging took center stage as conceptual

divisions. Publishers in England and the Netherlands did not miss a beat. During the

conflict, presses on both sides of the North Sea churned out commentaries and analysis

that presented the English and the Dutch as coherent, unified, and fundamentally

oppositional categories.

Ephemeral Objects and Nationhood

The Dutch-mens Pedigree… represents a single rotation in the perpetual cycle of

cheap publication printing that kept early modern print culture solvent. The constant

churn of affordable, readily salable, and imminently disposable printed objects kept the

metaphorical lights on in many printing houses. But the habit of their production and

their lifecycle in the larger economy is markedly different than the larger, more

significant books that usually find their way into the archive. Focusing on the materiality

12 Ibid, 86.

38 of early modern printed objects fractures the traditional scope of print culture histories.

Generally speaking, historians of print tend to homogenize print’s landscape so that any

text produced on a press enjoys similar status. From this vantage, texts can speak to each

other directly and be treated as members of a common culture of print. In this framework,

ideas can be traced un-problematically across different publications without much

consideration of what kind of individual would have access to (and inclination toward)

the various texts under consideration. As material objects, however, printed works cannot

be separated from the processes of their production, the patterns of their circulation or the

limitations of their physical composition. These qualities had direct bearing on who

encountered a particular object and, I argue, how its content was interpreted. Commonly

lumped together as “ephemera,” this family of printed objects has been credited with

broadening awareness of various issues among the general public who share a linguistic

tradition. However, ephemera’s defining characteristic is not its ability to inform, but its

tendency to disappear. I argue that cheap, ephemeral objects carrying nationally framed

text participated in a construction of national consciousness, but that the notions of

nationhood they built were as ephemeral as the paper they were printed on.

Early modern paper began as fibers. Woolen, flaxen, cotton, silk or some

expedient combination, were matted together and spun into thread. Thread was woven

into bolts of cloth. Cloth was sold by the yard. Yards of cloth were cut and stitched into

useful objects like garments or bedclothes. But useful objects tend to get used. Over time

garments fray, bedclothes stain. When the useful object ceases to be useable, it can be

repurposed, maybe as a rag or drop cloth. But even these secondary purposes are used out

39 of the thing and sooner or later it is destined for the trash heap. As waste, the usefulness

of the object may be spent, but it retains its material composition. A rag, for all its holes

and stains, is still fabric; fabric is still woven thread, and thread is still spun fiber. Those

fibers continue to behave like fibers, they grip each other and intertwine, perhaps not with

the strength they once did, but enough.

For the vast majority of European people across the early modern Atlantic, the

fabric world was dominated by wool and linen. Later, cotton would rise to prominence as

the forced labor of enslaved peoples in the western Atlantic was applied to the fiber plant

most suited to that region. But prior to that, sheep and flax were the bedrock of the

European fabric paradigm. While wool was prized for its insulating and water shedding

properties, linen had the benefit of being fairly absorbent, remarkably light, soft-ish and

relatively cheap.

In the seventeenth-century European household, linen was a material of great

importance and little significance. Available in a variety of grades, it was purchased by

the yard and then shaped into all manner of vital household objects. But linen, especially

the coarser stuff, was not precious. In early modern European societies, where exterior

garments were potent sites of self-fashioning, silk, satin and fine woolen garments

demanded care and attention.13 Linen, on the other hand, was hard used, often serving as

a buffer between valuable exterior garments and the sweating, leaking body that

13 There is an expansive literature on the significance of clothing to self-fashioning and national

identity in early modern Europe. See Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) for an international perspective with an emphasis on England and Roze Hentschell, The Culture of Cloth in Early Modern England (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014) for a more materialistic approach that examines the interdependence of England and the Netherlands’ fabric economies.

40 inhabited them. After meritorious service as swaddling, bedclothes or underwear, soiled

linens were discarded, new linens were obtained and the cycle began anew. After being

retired from their initial, domestic function, scraps of worn-out linen entered a new phase

of the life cycle. Discarded linen rags were rescued from the trash pile by rag pickers, the

poorest of the poor who sifted through garbage in search of human offal that retained

some value. Once “bleached”14, this trashed linen could be sold to papermakers.

After the linen, hempen or woolen (and later cotton) rags were acquired in

sufficient numbers, they were sorted by quality and cleanliness. Cleaner, higher quality

bits of fabric were set aside to be made into rich, white, high-quality paper. Dirtier, lower

quality pieces were destined to become the rough, brown paper often destined for the

cheapest of print jobs: pamphlets, broadsides, ballads and small books.15 After being

cleaned, the rags were moistened and allowed to rot for a few days. Larger rags were then

cut up and placed in a large trough where they were pummeled into a slurry by rough-

headed pestles powered by a water-driven mill. Once sufficiently broken down, the fibers

were mixed into vats of water into which a papermaker would dip a mould—basically a

mesh screen mounted on a wooden frame—along with a deckle—a frame without a

screen. Holding this assembly horizontally and pulling it upward through the slurry

distributed a layer of pulp across the screen of the mould while allowing excess water to

drain back into the vat. The screen-less deckle provided an exterior boundary for the pulp

14 A process that may have involved being thoroughly saturated with urine. Angela Vanhaelen, Comic Print and Theater in Early Modern Amsterdam: Gender, Childhood, and the City (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 11.

15 Dard Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft. (New York, NY: Dover Publications, 1978), 225-228.

41 and defined the edges of the new sheet of paper. The papermaker then shook the mould

and deckle side to side, interlocking the fibers. After removing the deckle, the new sheet

of paper, still wet, was laid out on a block of felt and piled into stacks, or “posts.” A

completed post was then moved to a standing press where additional water was squeezed

out with considerable effort. At this stage, the paper was highly absorbent. To make it

suitable for printing or manuscript writing, it was given a thin, impermeable surface by

dipping each sheet in a vat of thin adhesive called “size” made by boiling pieces of

animal hide in water. The paper was then pressed and dried. Paper intended to be used as

personal stationary was gently hammered smooth to make it suitable for pen and ink,

while the stuff destined for the printer’s shop was ready to be bound and sold.16

In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, paper making was still a craft.

And like any craft, it produced variations in the final product depending on raw materials,

tools, technique and the experience of the craftsperson. Paper makers produced paper for

a wide variety of uses, from wrapping paper to leather-bound tomes. Their product was

graded as “fine”, “second” and “ordinary.”17 Fine, the highest grade, was the whitest,

strongest, and most the free of imperfection. Producing it required beginning with

relatively clean, undyed scraps of linen. The lower grades began with less purified

material and often incorporated scraps of hemp rope or woolen rags. Within these grades

there was another layer of identification, with individual sheets being classified as

“good”, “retree” or “broke” depending on the individual imperfections.

16 Richard Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography: The Classic Manual of Bibliography,

corr. ed. (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 1972), 59.

17 Ibid., 66.

42

Overall, the paper industry produced a spectrum of goods from “Fine, good”

sheets to “ordinary, broke” ones. From this spectrum, printers selected sheets in

accordance with the product they aimed to produce. Each grade and class of paper

offered a slightly different tactile and visual experience. If early modern printers were

alert to anything, it was their profit margin.18 Using expensive fine, good paper to

produce a single-sheet ballad that sold for a penny or two was a recipe for ruin. High

quality paper, then, was committed to the production of high quality, and high priced,

publications that were commissioned at an agreed upon price, or could turn a profit, or at

least shore up the printer’s reputation among the right crowd. Cheap, widely distributed

publications relied on a steady stream of affordable, accessible paper to provide the

steady trickle of income that kept the pressmen and compositors paid and the print shop

running. This economic division produced a sort of material class system in the

publishing world, one which readers could not fail to notice. The feel and look of

ordinary, retree or broke paper communicated to the reader how to approach the object,

how to handle and treat it, and how to position it within the hierarchy of printed objects.

Not all publications carried the same rhetorical weight, and the paper they were printed

on was a material signal of that inequality.

Like today, early modern paper was sold as a ream. The early modern ream

consisted of twenty quires of twenty-four or twenty-five sheets depending on where it

was produced. English and Dutch mills produced twenty-four sheet quires and reams of

18 Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, ed. American Council of Learned Societies (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 91.

43 480 sheets. Each quire was folded in half along the long edge, stacked to make up a ream

and tied round with string. The convention was to place flawed sheets of paper in the top

and bottom quires where they were more likely to be damaged in transport. A printer

purchasing paper from a Dutch or English mill could rely on receiving 432 more-or-less

perfect sheets and 48 that were flawed.19 Paper was expensive enough, and the profit

margins of printing were small enough, that even these imperfect examples of the paper-

maker’s art found their way into circulation. Indeed, they were perfect for the kinds of

publications that were not expected to last.

The bibliographic study of popular, accessible publications is hampered by the

relative anonymity of cheap paper. Fine, white paper was the pride of a mill and bore the

mark of its provenance in the form of an identifying watermark. These designs were

made by weaving thread or thin wire into the paper screen to make a slightly thinner area

on the paper which becomes visible when one looks at a light through the sheet. “Not all

paper was watermarked,” however, “especially during the later hand-press period when

much poor-quality printing paper was made without any marks, but most medium quality

paper, and nearly all fine, had watermarks of some sort.”20 This explains the

bibliographer’s tendency to focus on high-quality examples of print and illustrates the

difficulties of tracing the history of cheaper paper in any but the most general ways.

Richard Hills admits as much when he writes: “Because the next mills in England after

John Tate’s produced brown paper, it is difficult to discover both when they started and

19 Ibid., 59-60. 20 Gaskell, A New Introduction, 61.

44 when they failed…”21 Since bibliography relies on watermarks to reconstruct the story of

both paper and their mills, the absence of such marks dooms the majority of early modern

Atlantic papers to obscurity.

For their part, cheaper examples often bear a different kind of water mark, an

imperfection where an errant drip fell onto the still-wet pulp, shunting some of the fibers

aside and leaving a circular imperfection. Others show holes or lumps where improperly

pulped fibers bunched or where the wet paper was brushed or where the interlocking of

the fibers did not go as planned. Cheaper publications also have many spots where letters,

words or entire paragraphs are obscured because the paper did not take up ink in that

particular area the way it was supposed to, often a result of pulp that was spread too thin

or too thick. Even with the mechanization of the mill, paper making was a hands-on

process. At any point a mistake could compromise the final product. Shine a light through

various sheets of early modern paper and one can see all the ways that the paper is

marked by the process of its creation and the differences in quality that this delicate craft

produced.

It is often noted by historians of print and printing that paper represented the

greatest financial outlay for the printer, setting aside the initial start-up costs of getting a

press and stock of type. This is in large part true, but does not take into consideration the

various price-points different printers (sometimes even the same printer) aimed for. Large

runs of long, high-quality books certainly demanded a significant outlay in terms of their

21 Richard Hills. Papermaking in Britain, 1488-1988: A Short History (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Athlone Press, 1988), 50.

45 paper-cost. Singlesheet ballads printed on ordinary paper, however, may have demanded

more cost in terms of compositor and pressman labor than paper. But these costs were

relatively fixed. A compositor charged the same rate for their labor no matter what the

lead typeface was going to print. The same holds true for pressmen who were paid by the

number of sheets perfectly printed regardless of the quality of the ultimate publication. 22

Since a block of text, once compiled, was finished and each turn of the press could

produce a finished, salable object, lowering paper cost to the bare minimum was required

to make such an enterprise profitable. Early modern print culture therefore existed on

economic and material spectrum as well as a textual one.

Cheap paper sheets made of repurposed underwear were impressed with screeds

and jokes and songs and crude images. After a brief moment of relevance for the printed

content, the paper of these prints found use as wrapping paper, kindling or (almost

poetically) as toilet paper. They were ephemeral pieces of paper whose social use and

function were directly tied to an expectation of destruction and replacement. They were

expected to be used, abused and discarded both physically and conceptually.23 While the

historical reality of how ephemeral objects were used is well known and explored by

scholars of printing and book history, the implications of their lifecycle have been largely

ignored by historians who make use of their textual content. If illustrated Bibles and

learned tomes were the silks and satins of the early modern literary universe, then

ephemeral ballads, broadsides and small-books were the linen underwear: ubiquitous and

22 Gaskell, A New Introduction, 43-49; 129-131. 23 Mary Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in

Seventeenth-Century England (London: Methuen & Co., 1981), 49

46 insignificant, but nonetheless important. They were expected to be used, abused and

discarded.24

Ephemera are marked by hyper-topicality and hyper-fragility. They are objects

that circulate quickly and unevenly through the population and, as such, great care needs

to be taken when considering just what historical information they can be expected to

communicate. To date, surviving examples of affordable print of all sorts have been

treated as a window onto the mind and culture of the general populous through which

they circulated.25 Generalizing print by price point, however, ignores the drastically

different material conditions and habits of use that dictated how and why they circulated

in the first place. Ephemera have typically been understood as a fragment of a greater

whole of printed objects which targeted a popular audience. These cheaper sorts of prints

were typically printed in vernacular languages, made of cheaper materials, and pitched in

less lofty registers of communication. By this definition, popular prints include, but are

not limited to, sheets of playing cards, ballads, board games, devotional images, satirical

pamphlets, decorations for household goods, pilgrimage mementoes, almanacs, broadside

posters, and oracular interpretations of abnormal births. Usually lumped together under

24 Ibid., 49

25 Examinations of early modern popular culture present cheap prints as a reflection of popular attitudes and ideas. See Edmund Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe, rev. ed.(Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 1994), and A.T Deursen, Plain Lives in a Golden Age: Popular Culture, Religion, and Society in Seventeenth Century Holland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) both lean heavily on printed materials to illustrate the attitudes of a general populous, for example. See David McKitterick, Print, Manuscript and the Search for Order, 1450-1830. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) for a welcome critique of this practice which emphasizes a long, uneasy transition from manuscript to print and pointing out that people remade printed objects to suit their own needs and reflect their own, idiosyncratic worldviews.

47 headings like folk, cheap, or popular prints, these various products were encountered and

used in wildly different ways. The express intent of a pilgrim’s printed memento, for

example, is to act as a reminder to the purchaser that they did or saw what they did or

saw. Decks of cards were intended to be cut apart, pasted on some stiffer material and

played with until they wore out. Ditto images printed to be pasted to the surface of plates

or the inside lids of boxes. Indulgences, arguably the first form of cheaply printed

objects, proposed to retain their value even beyond the mortal world. For their part,

ephemera like political ballads were expected to speak to an immediate concern, then

serve some other purpose to which paper was particularly well suited. Their content was

discarded right along with the paper they were printed on. They were integrated into daily

activities as both text and material and are best understood as the stuff, both conceptual

and material, of everyday life.

The production of a print object, from linen cloth to printed page, is a study in

transition from what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call the “striated” to the “smooth”

and back again. Deleuze and Guattari hold up the difference between woven and felted

cloth as a paradigm of the relationship between striated and smooth spaces.26 Woven

stuff, characterized by a logical grid of spun fiber intersecting at ninety-degree angles to

form a homogenous material, represents static striation. Its critical elements are its

beginnings and endings. Edges and finishing knots define its critical qualities, namely

length and width, which are the critical considerations when determining value. The first

26Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 474-478.

48 step in the paper making process is to utterly obliterate these striations, to rot and pummel

and drown the fabric into a thick, lumpy porridge known to paper makers as “stuff”. Stuff

is neither fabric nor paper, it is something in between. In this state it is effectively

useless, valueless and the very definition of a smooth space. It is a heterogeneous slurry

in constant motion. It has no fixed points, no beginning or end, no logic, no shape. What

matters is its movement, its constant agitation by pestles, blades or the paddle of the

laborer tasked with keeping pulp evenly distributed throughout the stuff so that vat men

capture an even distribution of it with their moulds and deckles.

The introduction of another set of striations is what turns stuff to paper. The

screen on the vat man’s mould is, like woven cloth, a grid. In this case, thin wires, evenly

spaced with the help of thicker elements called ‘chains’, arrest the movement of stuff,

drain the water away from the pulp and form a damp sheet. This sheet, paper in its larval

stage, is more similar to felt than the cloth from which it was derived. Its fibers now

interlock, but at irregular angles and without homogeneity. It is a slice of a smooth space,

frozen in time and bounded. If you shine a light though a piece of paper made this way,

you can see the impression of the mould’s grid, faintly visible where a little extra pulp

gathered around the chains. But unless the paper is exceptionally thick, these variations

are all but imperceptible to the touch. The smooth but heterogeneous surface of a piece of

paper is what makes it suitable for writing and printing. The irregular hatching of the

fibers allows the paper to take up ink without channeling it along threads that run its

entire length or width.

49

Sitting uneasily between smoothness and striation is a helpful way to think about

textual information in accessible publications of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries

as well. For Deleuze and Guattari, the distinction between smooth and striated space was

one of many reflections on the nature of thought and knowledge. Striated space is a

reflection of a mindset in which the point is privileged over the journey, and beginnings

and endings are neatly defined. Events and evidence build on one another to illustrate a

logical, predictable progression. In contrast, smooth space is one of association and

mobility. Points are suborned to trajectories and no logical progression is required to see

the resonance between phenomena. While they are careful not to reduce the implications

of either smooth or striated spaces to simple, relative binaries, they do comment on the

parallels that exist between striated space and a global perspective and smooth space and

a local one. In proposing a description of “nomad art”, a smooth space, Deleuze and

Guattari offer a set of qualities that define it from static, sedentary art. “First, ‘close

range’ vision, as distinguished from long-distance vision; second “tactile” or “haptic”

space, as distinguished from optical space.”27 These qualities of smooth artistic spaces are

united by their immediacy, by attention to the complexities of an embodied experience

that incorporates all the sensorial elements of a situated perspective. “Striated space, on

the contrary, is defined by the requirements of long-distance vision: consistency of

orientation, invariance of distance…[and] constitution of a central perspective.”28

27 Ibid., 492 28 Ibid., 494

50

Ephemeral publications of the seventeenth-century Atlantic world make heavy

use of national categories, a fact which has facilitated their incorporation into national

archives and nationally stratified histories. The implicit logic is that because these

publications make use of national categories in their rhetoric, they can be read alongside

other documents that have been identified as belonging to a particular nation by

historians and/or by the archive. This is what allows historians like Simon Schama to

spruce up an otherwise dry historical narrative by peppering it with images and quotes

taken from popular publications.29 Historians of the post-printing press past habitually

use ballads, crude images and salacious pamphlets as a pin-hole through which the

historian can glimpse the mood and awareness of the general population about the

historical issues at hand, proving that, indeed, “the people” were aware and invested in

their own national identity and the activities of the nation to which they belonged.30

Humorous publications and images of a cheap and ephemeral sort are particularly prized

for this kind of work since they add an element of levity and a modicum of comic relief

to the grander, more serious historical narratives. Pay nationally implicated humorous

ephemera a little more mind, however, and they begin to look out of place in histories

which demand a solid and enduring nation.

29 Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1997.)

30 See Gillian E. Brennan, Patriotism, Power, and Print: National Consciousness in Tutor England (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 2003), and Herbert Grabes, Writing the Early Modern English Nation: The Transformation of National Identity in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001) as examples.

51

As a material frozen at a stage between smoothness and striation, paper is the

ideal medium for the production and distribution of proto-modernist notions of

nationhood, national identity or any number of early modern intellectual innovations.

These ideas, at their heart global in scope with aspirations toward constancy and

centrality, were nonetheless ephemeral in their contemporaneity and imperfect in their

realization. They relied on paper for their circulation and to establish a stable,

authoritative core of meaning. But paper, by dint of its materiality, was an imperfect

messenger. Its production and utilization was too bound to the complexities of a local

situation. Different rags, different printers, different markets put an indelible local imprint

on printed objects. Cheap paper in particular, with its water-droplet marks and other

physical imperfections, was a material tied to the locality of its creation. Reading itself is

a localized, haptic, associative experience incorporating the readers situated perspective,

the tactile experience of feeling paper pages and the optical absorption of text. The

limited, idiosyncratic distribution of cheaply printed ephemera mirrors the chaotic,

irregular distribution of pulp across a screen. Shake it as you might, uniform coverage is

impossible. There will always be gaps, places where the ink cannot penetrate enough or

where it will penetrate too deeply.

Ephemera, Humor, and Politics By virtue of their expected disappearance, ephemera, particularly comedic or

hyperbolic ephemera, disturb political and economic versions of the story of the birth and

growth of nations and national consciousness in the early modern world. The nations of

52 popular ephemera were created in one moment and dismissed the next. Indeed, it is this

momentary and immediate notion of nation that was most useful and available to the vast

majority of early modern people with access to printed material. In ephemera of the

seventeenth century, national categories functioned as highly ambiguous concepts upon

which multiple, even contradictory ideas were productively collapsed as people worked

to make sense of their own relation to the larger world. National belonging was a way to

link the local and the global at a time when activities on a global scale increasingly

impinged on the day-to-day lives of even the most domestic and stay-at-home people. In

order to act as a useful conduit of global information to a local population, national

concepts needed to maintain sufficient ambiguity and flexibility to address rapidly

changing and volatile global circumstances. The defining characteristics of what unites a

nation and what sets it apart from others needed to be amorphous enough to account for

the ever-shifting geopolitical landscape that characterized the early modern period,

especially in and around the Atlantic ocean. Ephemeral broadsides and pamphlets,

through their content and rhetoric, sustained the constant renegotiation of global enmities

and alliances; but also through the natural lifecycle of the cheap, disposable paper that

made their publication economically viable. In order to accept new definitions of a

nation’s character and qualities, old notions had to be forgotten or at least discarded.

What better way to do that than to start a fire with them, or wrap them around a wad of

tobacco, or make use of them when nature calls?

As one might expect, the broad audience and wide distribution of ephemeral

publications means examples can be found which address nearly every conceivable

53 concern of seventeenth-century, print-conscious peoples. I am choosing here to examine

articulations of Dutch and English national consciousness as they found expression in the

most ubiquitous and disposable products of the early modern press. My ultimate goal is

to use ephemeral sources that deploy the categories of “English” and “Dutch” as a point

of entry to level a critique at the habit among historians of the early modern Atlantic

world to divide historical narratives primarily along national lines. 31

In histories of the early modern Atlantic world, nationhood in cheap, widely

distributed ephemera are typically treated as evidence of widespread adoption of

prefabricated nationalized identities or as descriptions of the contours of a preexisting

national character, an approach that necessarily positions early-modern people as first and

foremost members of a particular nation. However, the material qualities of these same

sources and the market realities that supported their production and distribution suggest

they can also be understood as everyday constructions built to address a momentary need.

As such, the widespread use of national categories in cheap, disposable publications is

better evidence that the national categories of “English” and “Dutch” were useful ideas in

large part because they were malleable enough to adapt to the needs of the moment and

ephemeral enough to be forgotten when a new situation demanded new understanding.

The flexibility and disposability of a given articulation of nationhood meant national

categories could be reimagined, renegotiated, and repurposed to meet the most pressing,

immediate needs of print producer and procurer alike.

31 See Alison Games, Migration and the Origins of the English Atlantic World. (Cambridge, MA.:

Harvard University Press, 1999.) and Marcy Norton, Sacred Gifts, Profane, Pleasures : A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008 as prime examples.

54

Distinctions and similarities between ideas of Englishness and Dutchness in the

seventeenth-century Atlantic provide a perfect environment in which to examine the

incoherence of national ideas in the pre-modern world of seventeenth century. The deep

economic, political and cultural connections which bound together populations around

the North Sea meant that distinctions between Dutchness and Englishness were vital

enough to be constantly revisited, revised and reevaluated.32 Interdependent colonial

projects in the Americas; cooperation in the transatlantic slave trade; and competition for

maritime resources blurred the lines marking where English activities ended and Dutch

ones began. Marjorie Rubright even goes so far as to suggest that English and Dutch

populations could not be convincingly divided by their vernacular languages, as many

saw English and Dutch as variations on the same Teutonic ethno-linguistic roots that

presaged most northern European languages.33 This anxious ambiguity produced a

wealth of ephemeral texts dedicated to making sense of the chaos and finding lines of

division between what belonged to Dutchness and what belonged to Englishness.

Approaching these short-lived publications as expressions of an immediate need to find

some valence of difference and not as a reflection of a historical reality of inherent,

perpetual difference challenges historiographic habits of treating the seventeenth-century

Atlantic world as operating as a series of nationalized interactions.

While Anglo-Dutch interactions and antagonisms spanned the globe in the

seventeenth century, focusing on the Atlantic theater is not a purely fabricated spatial

32 Lisa Jardine, Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory, 1st ed. (New York, NY:

HarperCollins, 2008).

33 Rubright, Doppelganger Dilemmas, 56-8.

55 division. People living both in the British Isles and on the north-west coast of Europe

were highly dependent on the Atlantic Ocean for food and trade. This mutual dependence

on a shared proximate environment influenced many aspects of the relationships that

made the categories of “Dutch” and “English” particularly important ones for coming to

grips with profound changes in world-view produced by increasing awareness of and

dependence on west Africa, the Americas and the wider world in general. The influence

of increasing global awareness and the implications of colonization made it a banal

necessity to come to grips with changes in conditions at the global scale.

In the seventeenth century, evoking national categories like “English” or “Dutch”

in popular print was to call up a host of interrelated reference points, including, but not

limited to, recent historical events, vulgar stereotypes, and folklore. Vague enough to

mean everything and nothing, at the same time these categories served as convenient

short-hand that allowed publishers, who often prioritized speed and efficiency over

accuracy or nuance, to collapse multiple meanings simultaneously into a single word or

image. Articulations of what it meant to be English or Dutch could be drastically

different depending on what topical issue a reader was being asked to consider. The

variety and complexity of transatlantic networks meant that a reader of ephemeral

publications in London and Amsterdam could be asked, in different publications

circulating at the same time, to view their national other as a stalwart companion when it

came to defying the Spanish or as a bitter enemy on issues of trade. A reader’s

interpretation of what exactly was meant by the terms “English” or “Dutch” needed to be

able to whipsaw between sympathy and animosity from one moment to the next.

56 Ephemera were tools for meeting this need. The speed with which they were made

allowed them to speak to the immediate conditions surrounding their production. Their

topicality ensured their obsolescence. Their cheapness encouraged a habit of replacing

the old with the new. These material qualities are reflected in the ways those same

publications deployed nations in their text. Nations were momentary answers to

immediate questions about the geopolitical situation, meant to grow stale and be

periodically refreshed.

Conclusion

Conferentie en Samen-spraek Tusschen den Dogg en den Leeuw…(roughly

translated: Meeting and Discussion between the Dog and the Lion (here after The Dog

and the Lion) was published in 1665 in the Netherlands, one year into the second Anglo-

Dutch war.34 Like The Dutch-mens Pedigree…, its goal is to frame a larger Atlantic

maritime conflict over colonial tensions in specific national terms and, in so doing, make

the war relevant and immediate to a domestic Dutch-speaking audience. The pamphlet is

a cut or two above The Dutch-mens Pedigree… in terms of its production quality. It has

sixteen octavo pages, requiring two sheets of paper. It includes marginalia, which adds a

level of complexity to the publication process, and a relief-printed emblem on the title

page. It also shows signs of rapid, incautious production and the pressures of the early

34 Conferentie en Samen-spraek Tusschen den Dogg en den Leeuw…, printed pamphlet, 1665, item

9117, Dutch Pamphlets: The Knuttel Collection-Part II: 1649-1750, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, Netherlands.

57 modern print economy in the Netherlands. Type is out of alignment; some areas are over-

inked; and the marginalia do not always line-up with the body text. In addition to the

titular work, the pamphlet includes two shorter ruminations on the same theme, squeezing

as much text as possible onto its limited number of pages. One an ode of encouragement

to the Dutch navy, the other a single page epigram in Latin. It targets a narrower, more

affluent, and probably more educated audience than Dutch-men’s Pedigree…’s, but

occupies a similar position in the hierarchy of early modern publications. It is a topical,

entertaining publication that does not aim at literary immortality. The language is less

graphic, the humor less scatological, and the imagery less grotesque. But it is not subtle

in its condemnation of the English or measured in its glorification of the Dutch.

Significantly, both publications also implicitly acknowledge a state of relations other than

war. They both allude to a state of being before antagonism and suggest a dynamic state

of affairs between the Lion and the Dog, the English ocean and the Dutch horse monster.

The Dog and the Lion reads like a short, allegorical stage play. The broad,

nationalized figures of the Netherlandish Lion and English Dog speak back and forth in

rhyming couplets. Rather than invent a novel aquatic abomination, more familiar animal

imagery is invoked to characterize national qualities. The noble lion begins the scene

asleep, its power and majesty tamed by innocent slumber. The yapping dog, all irritating

arrogance, worries the lion, daring it to wake through insult and provocation. The lion

valiantly and vainly tries to ignore the dog and warn it against meddling. Nevertheless,

the dog persists and rouses the lion to defend its honor and itself. The narrative presented

through the dialogue between dog and lion is remarkably similar to the general

58 understanding of the causes of the Second Anglo-Dutch war. Even after gaining major

concessions from the States General through the Treaty of Westminster in 1654, English

agents worked to disrupt Dutch interests, particularly along Africa’s west coast. Perhaps

the most brazen provocation, and the event that is most directly linked to the outbreak of

war, was the 1664 capture of New Amsterdam by the Duke of York, who would later

take the English throne as James II. In spring of, 1665 the states of England and the

Netherlands were officially at war as each attempted to defend, and hopefully advance,

their colonial interests across the Atlantic. This time, the Dutch came out on top. The

Treaty of Breda of 1667, set the terms of peace and left New Amsterdam (soon to be

Manhattan) under English control in exchange for colonies on the east coast of South

America and relinquished claims on territories in the East Indies.

Despite the significant implications of this official exchange of territorial control

for all peoples living in North America, the Anglo-Dutch wars of the seventeenth century

have attracted scant attention. There are several possible reasons for this. From the

standpoint of a military historian, the wars were a bit of a bust. Only colonial territory

changed hands (as it did so often), and the wars did not produce any dramatic changes in

tactics or technology, nor did they re-balance the scales of European power. For

American historians, the transition of New Amsterdam to New York was a significant

development, but it was not the result of any major military action on North American

soil, hence its memorialization in song as something of a non-event.35 The Atlantic is, I

would argue, the most appropriate historical framework through which to study these

35 They Might be Giants, “Istanbul not Constantinople” on Flood by They Might Be Giants.

59 wars, but there has been very little interest. From its beginnings, Atlantic History has had

to combat accusations of eurocentrism and, as a result, has focused its attentions away

from the political and military machinations of European powers despite the profound

impact these conflicts had on all Atlantic peoples. The first and second Anglo-Dutch wars

(1652-1654 and 1665-1667 respectively) were in particular conflicts fought in and about

the Atlantic space. They stemmed from competition over Atlantic resources, violence in

and amongst colonial outposts, and assertions of primacy and dominance in Atlantic

maritime matters. Furthermore, and of particular relevance here, they were wars that

shaped expanding notions of national belonging and attempted to stretch concepts of

nationhood beyond traditional geographic conceits to encompass the Atlantic Ocean

itself.

Prior to the first Anglo-Dutch war, England and the Netherlands flirted with a

novel geo-political proposition. Overtures were made to form a “close union” between

the Rump Parliament and the States general.36 At root, the proposal for some sort of

closer union was a way to defuse tensions between the two Northern Atlantic states. The

exact nature of such a union was never codified, but it was intended to be something

more than an international alliance, an arrangement that promised to complicate and

muddy the boundaries of nationhood.37 Then, after the execution of Charles I, the two

northern European powers went to war over the Navigation Act. In 1654, Cromwell and

36 Jonathan Israel. The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477-1806 (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1998), 714.

37 Of course, this national confusion would come to a head in 1689 when the William of Orange, ostensible ruler of the United Provinces, shared the crown of England with Mary II after the Glorious Revolution and the dispossession of James II.

60 representatives of the Dutch States General signed the Treaty of Westminster, after

another failed attempt to unite the two governments under the umbrella of the

Commonwealth. James Stuart, before he became England’s King James II, ordered the

capture of New Amsterdam in a provocative military action to prompt a formal conflict

between the Dutch and English states, this came to pass in 1665. New Amsterdam

formally became New York in 1667, when England and the Netherlands signed the treaty

of Breda, ending hostilities. In 1688, the same James that attacked New Amsterdam was

deposed and the Glorious Revolution united the English monarchy with powerful

political forces in the United Provinces through William, Prince of Orange when he

ascended to the English throne with Mary II. A Dutch person born the day Charles I was

executed would have been thirty-nine years old when William and Mary took the English

throne, and they would have lived through two Atlantic wars, three political revolutions

in England, and two aborted attempts to unite England and the Netherlands politically

and economically. Throughout that person’s life, cheap, accessible publications probing,

analyzing, and lampooning Anglo-Dutch relations would have been a mainstay of their

public life. If this person were the reading sort, they could have whiled away weeks of

their life tracking the hot-and-cold political climate between the two nations. The way

that paper folded itself into people’s broader lives encouraged a constant revision of this

understanding. Stale news of a beneficial Anglo-Dutch friendship found its way under

pies and into latrines as new revelations of perfidy and betrayal justified the ongoing war.

Disposable paper and disposable ideas worked in tandem to perpetually refashion ideas

about what it meant to belong to a nation and how to feel about other nationals.

61

Any scholar who works with the broad category of popular printing laments the

fragmentary, seemingly random collection of evidence that has stood the test of time and

found its way into the modern archive. Dealing with the smaller category of ephemera

specifically calls into question just how useful even the surviving fragments are. In some

ways, those pieces of ephemera that have lasted into the twenty first century are the least

representative of ephemera as a category, since they failed to fulfill their expectation of

disappearance. They are non-ephemeral ephemera. Many of the surviving examples

survive precisely because they were spared the rough handling that comes with being

disseminated, used and repurposed. They exist because they were unsold, unread and

uninfluential. Some survive because an atypical user of print collected them for one

reason or another, a pattern of preservation that necessarily skews the archival holdings to

better represent the quirks of individual collectors to serve as a representative sampling.

Today, scholars who focus their research on this kind of material have valorized those

twists of fate

Scholars of early modern cheap, accessible print are faced with an impossible

situation. They aim to paint a picture of how some aspect of the printing world typically

worked or what early modern people typically thought, but are forced to work with a

body of sources that only exist because of an atypical series of events. Ephemera, by

definition, should not exist in the archive. Examples that do are object failures, disposable

things that someone saved. Their predictable journey from mill to midden got short

circuited, somehow, and now they stand in for the unknowable mass of similar objects

that did what they were supposed to do and politely disappeared, as was expected of

62 them. The paradox is unavoidable, but grounding textual analysis in the material realities

of cheap paper eliminates some potential excesses common to historical examinations of

broadsides and other ephemeral publications.

Treating the historical information available through these hyper-topical printed

objects as though it was every bit as perishable as the objects themselves means no single

example can stand as representative of a whole, either the whole corpus of ephemera as it

existed in the seventeenth century, or the whole of a population’s awareness of a

particular issue. Instead, each surviving ephemeron is a fragment that cannot help but

point to the absences surrounding it. No one can read all the ephemeral publications on a

given topic because they no longer exist, but at the same time it is highly unlikely that

anyone at any point in time ever did. The value to exploring the past through such

fragmentary and fragile evidence is to embrace fragmentation and fragility as an

inescapable historical reality. Ephemera, both pieces that survived and those that did not,

are evidence of a cultural practice where seventeenth-century people constantly revised,

rejected, and reevaluated their ideas about the world and their place in it.

63

Chapter 2 Almanacs

The history of paper’s journey to the Atlantic world is a familiar one. Like

printing, papermaking originally developed in China and moved to the Middle East and

North Africa and eventually to the backward Europeans. Even in the eighteenth-century,

when Europe had developed a robust paper making infrastructure, the finest papers were

still being produced in Asia. There, papermakers produced papers from silk and

indigenous mulberry fibers that far surpassed products anywhere else in the world,

creating a high demand for them globally, although on other continents they were mostly

used for manuscript writing. Printing any number of volumes on such a luxury material

was astronomically expensive. As Asian papermaking know-how moved to the Middle

East, techniques and technologies were adapted to take advantage of regional materials,

notably flax. This led to the production of high-quality papers with a global appeal.

Middle Eastern techniques for producing paper from linen cloth were transmitted to the

burgeoning European papermaking scene as flax was available in both regions while

mulberry trees were not. European paper makers quickly found ways to incorporate other,

more abundant local materials into the process. Atlantic Europeans incorporated worn-

out hempen rope and, where wool clothing was more abundant than linen, woolen scraps

into their paper. Of course, the final quality of a sheet of paper is primarily determined by

the quality of the materials that went into the stuff. Hemp, wool and particularly hard-

64 worn linens necessarily produced a rougher, browner paper, one most suited for

wrapping, wadding and printing cheap publications.1

The proliferation and dispersal of printing after 1450 using a modified version of

Gutenberg’s movable type drove European demand for paper to unprecedented heights.

As the turmoil of the Reformation reordered flows of people and goods, new centers of

paper making arose further north on the continent. Paper making centers in Italy, France

and later the Low Countries developed a regional reputation for producing paper of

exceptional quality in volumes large enough and prices low enough to justify their use in

printing large quantities of books. Papers from these regions were shipped around Europe

to produce remarkable examples of printing and book bindery. The European paper trade

also fed the growth of print in the Atlantic. The earliest colonial presses in the Americas

serviced Spanish colonial administrations,2 but by the middle of the seventeenth-century

imported paper was feeding the growth of distinct colonial print cultures throughout the

Atlantic region. Eventually, colonial papermakers began producing a domestic American

product, but the supply was never enough to entirely eliminate dependence on imported

paper.

1 There are many good histories of paper that offer much more detail about its movement across

the Old world. For more see Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography, corr. ed. (New York, NY: Oak Knoll Press, 1995); Nicholas A. Basbanes, On Paper: The Everything of its Two-thousand-year History (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013) Richard Hills, Paper Making in Britain, 1488-1988: A Short History (Atlantic Highlands: Athlone Press, 1988). Mark Kurlansky even published on of his signature pop-material histories on the subject in 2016.

2 Rafael E. Tarragó, The Pageant of Ibero-American Civilization: An Introduction to Its Cultural History (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1995), 35.

65

At the upper end, the paper trade was an international affair. The finest quality

books demanded the finest quality paper, no matter where they came from. At the lower

end, however, it was much more localized. Unexceptional paper mills drew on local

sources of fibrous scraps to satisfy the demands of the local readership. These regional

enterprises supplied the cheaper, more ephemeral papers that were produced to meet the

wide variety of uses to which paper was put.3 This meant locally produced papers were

more likely to become publications addressing local concerns, and no publication was

more tied to its locale than an almanac. Almanacs’ reliance on astrological calculation

and projection limited their ability to travel, binding them to a particular location. Move

an almanac too far from the geographical point for which it is calculated and its

predictions become useless. The perennial popularity of almanacs made them a popular

genre of publication for printers, since they promised predictable, regular profit. As

presses were set up outside established, European printing centers, almanacs were often

one of their first products, and throughout the early modern period they were critical to

the success of upstart, colonial printing ventures.4

Like the previous chapter, this one argues for a more nuanced understanding of

early modern nationhood through a focus on its relation to ephemeral print. Chapter 1

showed how notions of nationhood communicated through ephemeral publications were

3 The funding of colonial paper mills in North America often involved commitments to deliver a

certain quantity of paper per year to the people who put up the original funds. These contracts illustrated the different kinds of paper being produced and their relative worth. For more see Lyman Horace Weeks, A History of Paper-Manufacturing in the United States, 1690-1916 (New York, NY: Burt Franklin, 1969), 6.

4 A noteworthy example is James Franklin. After relocating to Rhode Island the first publication produced on his press, and the first publication ever produced in Rhode Island, was an almanac printed under the nom de plume ”Poor Robin”. This chapter examines this particular almanac in more detail below.

66 themselves transient products of and for a certain moment. This chapter posits that they

were also products of and for a particular place. Like the paper they were printed on,

these ideas were made of local materials and produced to meet local needs. Through an

analysis of early eighteenth-century almanacs, it shows how different locations produced

different ideas of what it meant to be English. The ubiquity of almanacs in both colonial

and metropolitan homes and their reliance on national categories make them a source

uniquely suited to considering how everyday people encountered concepts of national

belonging.

In this chapter I analyze almanacs at three different levels. First, I look at

almanacs as objects with highly conventionalized structures that tie them to specific,

geographical locations. Then I compare two early eighteenth century almanac collections,

one from Boston and one from London, in terms of their physical composition and the

different ways they deploy concepts of nationhood and national belonging. Finally, I

offer a close, cultural-historical reading of examples of humor from almanacs on each

side of the Atlantic that illustrate the interconnectedness of local experiences, local

printing, and locally-flavored national identities. Taken together, this tripartite analysis of

almanacs shows that early modern concepts of national belonging are better understood

as moments of transition, ideas moving away from an undefined smoothness, but not yet

in a state of rigid striation. These almanacs show that national belonging was a powerful

and cogent valence of many peoples’ identity, but also that there was no core, essential

set of qualities that defined the national character. National categories and conceits may

67 have formed the mould and deckle, but it was invariably passed through a slurry of local

pressures, experiences and needs to create the stuff of nation.

When looking at almanacs, it is important to note that they cannot be read like

other types of books. While an almanac opens right to left, most of it is not read left to

right. The majority of the information in an almanac is incorporated into a calendar

presented as a table of rows and columns, which require some experience and special

knowledge to decode. Sometimes spreading across two pages, sometimes limited to one,

each month has its own space in an almanac. The days of the month are listed in

descending order on the left hand side and various pieces of celestial information are

given in a tabular format so that a reader can slide her finger left to right and find some

astrological or meteorological tid-bit for any given day. Setting aside for a moment the

more self-explanatory elements common to early modern almanacs, like historical

chronologies and short essays on medicine or astrology, the almanac is not an easy book

to interpret. The monthly calendar at the heart of the early modern almanac is an exercise

in the efficient use of space and symbolism to communicate the most information using

the least amount of paper and ink. An almanac’s calendar provides a wealth of

information for any day of a given year. The table format of the daily calendar condenses

information down to a minimum of characters and page-space. It makes speedy, daily

reference easy, but is not conducive to and does not reward cover-to-cover reading.

Almanac calendars encourage brief, repeated interactions to make practical, mundane,

momentary decisions.

68

Depending on the compiler and the target audience, some of the day-to-day

information varied between almanacs, but the format of almanacs throughout the English

reading world remained remarkably consistent. The numerical date is always on the far

right, the day of the week is always in the second column, and the account of significant

(mostly religiously significant) days is always in the third. There is almost always a

column showing what part of the body is effected by the moon that day, and another one

offering the hour and minute of the sun’s rise and set. Without the ability to decipher the

astrological symbols and interpret the abbreviations that head each column, it is

impossible to tell what the lists of numbers are supposed to mean. Some almanacs I

examined offered a key to their interpretation as part of the text, but the majority did not,

relying instead on format conventions, the interpretive abilities of their readers, and an

expectation that buyers were habitual consumers year to year.

At their core, almanacs are tools of time management. More than a calendar in the

modern sense, almanacs were implements for organizing and coordinating the annual,

monthly, weekly and daily rhythms that make up a year’s worth of living. In the religious

realm, almanacs keep track of significant religious anniversaries: Church days, saints

days, and variable religious holidays like Easter. Agriculturally, they suggested times to

engage in particular horticultural activities and offered meteorological forecasts.

Economically, they coordinated trade among individuals and regions by publishing the

dates and places of markets. Medically, they provided guidance on what to eat, when to

eat it, and how to treat ailments. They did all these things together, simultaneously, and

aided in synchronizing these entangled daily activities in a way that did not make hard

69 divisions between religious, dietary, medical and economic life. Indeed, collapsing them

together into a common table drew implicit and explicit connections between them in

ways that naturalized associations between changes in weather and changes in health, and

the circadian rhythms linking religious and economic activity. Almanacs could

coordinate so many different cycles of time largely because they were intensely local

publications, focusing on the local particularities of these various patterns. Their

connection to a specific geographic point was a product of both the market that produced

them and the logic that legitimized their claims to celestial accuracy, a logic that also

anchored the business model of those who printed them.

Alison Chapman offers the best argument for the inherent locality of almanacs by

taking seriously the tenets of astrology that governed much of the almanac’s construction.

She argues that, though the scientific community now considers astrology bunkum, it was

a functional system of meaning making for most early modern people. The astrological

calculations that go into predicting things like the weather and determining the best days

to clear brush depend on reading the movement of the stars from a very particular point

on the surface of the earth. Chapman expands on this necessity of astrological calculation

to make the case that almanacs function as distinctly local publications, ones which are

inherently tied to particular points in terrestrial space and made no bones about that fact.5

Indeed, many of them explicitly touted this feature by saying on the title page that they

were “calculated to the Meridian of X” where X is a specific latitudinal and longitudinal

5 Alison A Chapman, "Marking Time: Astrology, Almanacs, and English Protestantism,"

Renaissance Quarterly 60, no. 4 (2007): 1257-290. https://doi.org/10.1353/ren.2007.0466

70 position that geographically ties the almanac and its information to a specific point of

greatest accuracy. It did not hurt that being somewhat removed from that point would

help explain any inaccuracies in the almanacs prognostications. One’s earthly coordinates

were a crucial element in understanding what the stars had in store. An English almanac

calculated for London is utterly useless to an English person in Port Royal because the

stars relate differently in relation to those particular geographic points, which in turn

yield dramatically different predictions and forecasts. To the degree that people organized

their lives and thoughts around the predictions in almanacs, this geographic specificity

draws a conceptual cosmological connection between fate and place. According to

almanac logic, where one is located has an explicit effect on the trajectory of her

fortunes.

The enforced locality of the logic underpinning the very idea of an almanac found

expression in other, less theoretical and abstract ways as well. Its necessary locality made

it a useful repository for more prosaic local information. On the few pages given over to

things other than its annual calendar, almanacs provided matter-of-fact and useful

information about how to navigate local space and organize local time. This para-

calendrical information varied between almanacs far more than the columns in the central

tables, and it did more to distinguish one almanac from another in crowded print markets.

Of the scores of almanacs I examined, many offered a list of regional market days and

locations to help people plan their economic year. Quite a few provide records of the

distance between landmarks, helping people plan their travel time. Almost all present an

account of when and where court would be held, enabling people to prepare whatever

71 issues they needed to bring before local, regional or imperial authorities.6 Temporal and

spatial information of this kind, along with the geological specificity of the almanac’s

astrological forecasts, produced a spatio-temporal locale. These almanac-defined regions

cut across other more concrete kinds of geographical divisions, combining some smaller

interrelated units, like municipalities or parishes, while dividing some larger ones, like

provinces or empires. These almanac-constructed divisions were practical and functional.

They self-consciously built themselves around a place that could promise a supportive

customer base. The specialist nature of the printing industry also required a supporting

infrastructure, so almanacs tended to be published in urban centers, while also often

providing information about surrounding areas that were commercially and celestially

connected.

As intensely local as early modern almanacs were in terms of content, they were

produced within imperial economic, cultural, and material infrastructure. As European

empires expanded across oceans, these imperial conduits for the transmission of culture

and information bound far flung locales together under a common national banner. Print,

of course, was a vital technology in the spread of national sympathies across great

distances. Anderson’s nationally minded newspaper of the eighteenth and nineteenth

century is, of course, the example par excellence. But between the proliferation of print

through the seventeenth century and the newspaper’s dominance in the latter eighteenth,

the almanac was the cheap, disposable, widely-distributed publication of choice. Unlike

6 Bernard Capp, English Almanacs, 1500-1800: Astrology and the Popular Press (Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press, 1979), 29-30.

72 the newspaper, almanacs did not participate in the construction of what Anderson calls

‘empty time’ or in the construction of an empty national space.7 The time they described

was full to the brim with all sorts of local concerns.

There is no denying that almanacs made heavy use of national categories and

even stereotypes, but they were not participating in the explicit construction and

dissemination of national identities and sympathies in the same way as newspapers

would. The national identities produced by almanacs were locally colored. They

produced local versions of nationalities suited to managing the particular conditions of

their specific locales within the larger nationally conceived empire. Winnowing national

identities down to their local expressions breaks national identities apart into myriad

variations on a broad national theme. Englishness, as expressed in the almanacs of the

early eighteenth century, is a mosaic of identities, each one formed in specific ways to

address the immediate needs of a local population. In a sense, both almanacs and the

identities they fostered are stuck between smoothness and striation. The almanac- is

shaped by grids and conventions operating on a global scale, but it is constructed of local

mixtures of materials and provincial knowledge. Like a newspaper, it fosters notions of

national belonging, but unlike them it colors those notions in distinctly regional ways.

The Englishness of almanacs cannot help but be caught between an imperial ideal and a

local reality.

7 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006), 24-6. Kindle edition.

73

In addition to the indispensable calendar, most almanacs included poems, short

essays, and jokes wedged in and around the columns of the calendar. These flourishes

helped pitch particular almanacs to particular audiences. Like the content of broadsides

and pamphlets, the scant paper real estate of the page left little room for nuance in these

pieces of para-calendrical information. The texts drew on common knowledge to make

their point efficiently. However, due to their highly local nature, the “common

knowledge” they drew upon was itself region-specific. By examining two collections of

almanacs produced on different Atlantic coasts, both of which propose to be “English”,

this chapter shows that there existed many different iterations of the English national

identity, each tailored to meet the daily demands of life in a specific part of the world.

Where the conditions of existence differed, so did the understanding of what it meant to

be English. Like the previous chapter, this one shows that early modern concepts of

nationhood and national identity were effective and useful because they were adaptable,

not because they offered a coherent referent or immutable sense of commonality.

Useful Things: Material Englishness in London and Boston Almanacs

Studies in the history of print and print culture employ and reinforce national

divisions by dividing the world of print into vernacular groups. The logic behind this

system is sound, but it tends to gloss over the importance of regional variation. Of course

mutual intelligibility is a critical aspect of national belonging, and print, writ large,

74 enforced this connection by homogenizing written language within linguistic groups.8

Examining both the material aspects of almanacs and the physical processes surrounding

their production, however, offers up a different way of organizing the history of print,

one that highlight the significance of print culture on the local level.

London and Boston were both significant cities within the English Empire circa

1700, in no small part because each was an important printing hub in their respective

regions. But they operated under very different material conditions that had a direct

impact on what they produced and how they produced it. As Jennifer Mylander points

out, New England was heavily dependent on Old England both for finished publications

and the materials necessary for the production of domestic print. The majority of

publications available in New World English colonies were imports from London and

skewed heavily toward religious and practical publications. 9 More significant from a

materialist perspective, type, paper and ink were all imports to the New World from the

Old. Until 1690, when William Rittenhouse began the first paper mill near Philadelphia,

the region had to depend entirely on paper from Europe to support the creation of locally

focused publications.10 Almanacs played their own little role in the expansion of

domestic New World paper production, serving as a place for paper mill operators to put

8 Paul R. Brass, Ethnicity and Nationalism: Theory and Comparison (Newbury Park, CA: Sage

Publications, 1991), 43-44. See also Homi Bhaba, Nation and Narration (New York, NY: Routledge, 1990.) and John Alexander Armstrong, Nations before Nationalism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.)

9 Jennifer Mylander, “Early Modern ‘How-To’ Books: Impractical Manuals and the Construction of Englishness in the Atlantic World.” The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies vol. 9 no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2009), 124, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/263052

10 Lyman H. Weeks, A History of Paper-Manufacturing in the United States, 1690-1916 (New York: Burt Franklin, 1969), 3.

75 out the call for the raw materials of their trade. One such appeal is included in the “Native

of New England” almanac for the year 1729,

This is to give Notice to all Persons who will be at the pains to save or procure Linnen Rags & bring them to Daniel Henchman, Bookseller, at his Shop over against the Old Brick Meeting House in Cornhill, or to Thomas Hancock, Bookseller, at the Bible & Three Crowns in Anne Street; that they shall have paid them 3d for every pound of fine white Linnen Rags and 2d for every pound of blue, speckled & coarse Linnen, and Three half pence per pound for Cotton and Linnen And further, for the Encouragement of any who will be industrious to collect Quantities of the same, and bring them to the persons above mentioned shall beside the price before stated be paid 4s for every 50l. wt. of the finest sort and 2s for every 50l. of the next, and 18d. for the lowest priz’d and so in proportion to larger parcels. This Bounty to continue for Six Months from the date hereof. N.B. Mr. Eleazer Phillips. Bookseller in Charlstown, will take in and pay for Rags at the same prices aforesaid.11

In the 1730 edition of the same title: “N.B. The Paper Mill mentioned in the last Year’s

Almanack has begun to go; any person that will bring Rags to D Henchman &T.

Handcock, shall have from 2d to 6d a Pound, according to their goodness.”12 These

appeals to citizens to save and sell their linen rags were the early rumblings of the

conflicts over paper that feature so prominently in colonial era histories leading up to the

Revolution.

The mill that was to benefit from this collection of garbage was the first one

established in Massachusetts, though mills had been operating elsewhere in New England

11 Bowen, Nathan, The New-England Diary, or, Almanac… (Boston, MA: B. Green, 1729), n.p.,

John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI.

12 Bowen, Nathan, The New-England Diary, or, Almanac… (Boston, MA: B Green, 1730),n.p., John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI.

76 for decades. While Boston had been the center of printing in the English colonies,

Pennsylvania was the leader in papermaking, followed by New York and New Jersey13.

Despite growing paper independence throughout the early eighteenth century, English

colonies in North America still relied on European paper mills to meet demand. This

dependence on Old England for paper would come to a head in 1765 with the imposition

of the Stamp Act, but the reliance on the metropole for paper to conduct the bureaucratic

and cultural business of New England put pressure on the English-language print culture

that was developing on the western coast of the Atlantic from the very beginning.14

Of course, London was far less constrained in its access to the raw materials of

printing. Drawing on well-established paper mills in France and the Netherlands, as well

as the cheaper, rougher domestic products, British printers could rely on a healthier and

more diverse supply of paper to meet their printing needs.15 Additionally, they could rely

on a printing infrastructure that was capable of churning out massive numbers of

publications for a large and economically diverse audience. As in so many things, the

story of difference between the colony and the metropole is a story of the haves and the

have-nots. Simply put, the culture surrounding print in London was relatively rich in

13 Weeks, A History of Paper-Manufacturing 4-10.The disparity may have everything to do with

the composition of the European populations. Philadelphia and the Mid-Atlantic states were home to more Germans and Dutch than Boston. Where these non-English populations went, paper manufacturing expertise followed. Indeed, the first two mills in America were started by people born in north-west Europe, in the low-countries. The connection between “English” paper and Dutch know-how stretches back to the first mill started in England at the end of the sixteenth century. That mill, started by an Englishman with connections to the Netherlands, was designed and operated primarily by non-English labor; most likely Dutch labor. See Hills, Paper Making in Britain, 6

14 Weeks, A History of Paper-Manufacturing, 62-3.

15 Ibid., 63-4.

77 materials, equipment, and know-how and connected to a wider continental system of

printing and publication, while the colonial printing network was far more isolated and

constantly hungry for the paper necessary to supply a growing book trade and print

market.

These differences in the material aspects of New and Old World print cultures had

an especially significant impact on the production of ephemeral publications. The

topicality and fragility that characterize ephemera make them objects best suited to serve

a readership located in the general region of their production. Ephemera shipped across

the Atlantic would necessarily arrive stale and of limited relevance, so the expense was

hard to justify. Naturally, then, people within the orbit of London had far more options

when it came to cheap, topical and disposable reading material than did inhabitants of

Boston and its surround. This inequality in access to a printing infrastructure that

supported ephemeral publications is starkly evident in the content and construction of

almanacs available to English-language readers at different points on the Atlantic rim. To

the degree that almanacs participated in the construction and interpretation of notions of

nationhood and national belonging, these differences led to the construction of very

different notions of what it meant to be English and how to make sense of Englishness in

drastically different environments that necessitated drastically different tactical responses

to everyday realities.

The John Carter Brown library (JCB) hosts two very different but roughly

contemporaneous sets of almanacs. One consists of examples produced in Boston, the

other of almanacs produced in London. Physically, these two collections could not be

78 more different. The Boston collection is a personal and highly annotated collection of

almanacs owned by one Massachusetts household from 1704 to 1765.16 Sometime after

acquiring them, the JCB divided the collection into two small, grey archival boxes and

placed each individual almanac into a protective, single-fold manila envelope. Each

example consists of twelve leaves printed on both sides. Each month of the year is given

one page and the rest of the space is occupied by other pieces of information that might

be useful or interesting to the reader. Things like as a historical chronology, lists of

market days and places and notices of court days in the area. The particular almanacs in

this collection bear the marks of heavy use. Corners are missing or dog-eared, some

pages are practically falling apart, others have been deliberately defaced in the act of

cutting away the ubiquitous woodcut image of the zodiac body. Most tellingly, many of

the pages have been enriched with personal, handwritten observations, commentary and

notations of personally significant dates. These almanacs served as a sort of personal

diary as well as an annual calendar and repository of useful information. The most

common annotations are notes on births and deaths of people in the community, along

with tantalizing glimpses into the interpersonal dramas of the Boston region. The page for

December of 1704, to take one example, includes the annotation “Richard Thayr died” in

the row for the fourth and “Tho. Thayr hanged” on the seventh. Trying times for the

16 I refer here to a single buyer, but that is an inference of my own based on the fact that the

handwritten marginalia is consistent throughout the collection. It could be the work of several similar hands, though my guess that this was a single person’s collection is also somewhat supported by the way these almanacs came to be at the JCB. They were sold en masse as one collection to the library in 1912 according to one of the JCB’s account books. Because the collection is made up of one almanac for each year but regularly changes compilers, I posit that the collection was the result of a first-hand buyer and not the product of a more recent almanac collector.

79 Thayr family by any estimation.17 All of the almanacs in this collection have a series of

small holes along the left-hand side. At the bottom of one of the boxes there is a broad

scrap of leather and a slip of paper bearing the words “Old Times,” both similarly

pockmarked with pin-pricks. These are probably the remnants of an inexpert, perhaps do-

it-yourself binding job, a home sewing project that reorganized a series of individual

objects printed in different years under different titles into a cohesive and intimately

personal memorial object, before it was disassembled and catalogued by the modern

archivist.

The London collection does not wear its functionality on its sleeve so obviously.

The edges of the pages are crisp, trimmed and gilded. Strips of velum have been stitched

into the binding so they extend past the pages’ edge and mark the beginning of each new

almanac for easy navigation by the reader. They are bounded front and back by end

pages of higher quality paper than the almanacs themselves. There are no marks or

annotations to suggest how they were used by the person who owned them. Each

example in this collection consists of twenty-four leaves, twice the length of the Boston

examples. Many of them spread the monthly calendar across two facing pages. Some of

these almanacs include lengthy essays on celestial happenings, and others have in-depth

prognostications for the upcoming year and reference tables on interest rates for loans

and annuities. As printed documents, they are, comparatively, pristine. The dozen

almanacs in this collection are all for a single year, 1722. It is not entirely clear why a

17 These annotations can be found in the JCB’s copy of Samuel Clough’s The New-England almanack of the coelestial motions (Boston: B. Greene and J Allen), 1704, John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI.

80 dozen almanacs from the same year were professionally and sumptuously bound in red

Moroccan leather. The best guess of the librarians at the JCB is that these kinds of

collections were objects made to commemorate a particularly significant year for the

buyer, like saving the New York Times for the day a child is born. If so, this collection

was also an object made to memorialize something, made by or for someone who

enjoyed access to a very different set of material and technical resources. This odd

method of collection made these twelve almanacs far more durable, and this is probably

the reason for their survival. The vast majority of almanacs produced in the early modern

period have not been so lucky. Whatever the reason, these particular objects were not

subject to the same rough handling as those in the Boston collection. Of course, not all

almanacs from Boston were used in the same way as this particular JCB collection, nor

were all almanacs from London preserved with such care. However, the distinct physical

differences between the two collections point to the differences in printing resources and

bookmaking expertise available to people inhabiting different English locales in the

eighteenth century, as well as the different systems and habits that conditioned how print

was produced, disseminated and used in different places within the English Atlantic

world.

There is one common element between the Boston and London almanac

collections: the paper is anonymous. It is unclear if the paper in the Boston almanacs was

produced in Europe or North America, or if the London almanacs are printed on a

domestic or continental product. This absence marks the position of almanacs in the

hierarchy of print. Watermarks were the shop signature of the papermaking craft. They

81 were a brand that identified the makers and spread their reputation. It is telling that as the

fine wire woven into the screen of the mould broke down, those screens would often be

set aside to make the lower grades of bastard paper a mill turned out, paper without an

acknowledged shop-lineage. This was the kind of paper that wound up as almanacs no

matter where they were made.

Out of necessity, curiosity, or novelty, the buyer of the almanacs in the Boston

collection did not stick with one almanac compiler. Rather, they regularly purchased the

offering of one compiler for a few years, then switched alliances, sometimes going back

to the kind they had before. Within the collection there are some one-offs like “The

Loyal American’s Almanac,” and some trusty standbys, like “Clough’s Almanac” or

almanacs compiled by Nathanial Whittemore, that boast a dozen or more contributions to

the collection. In terms of content, the Boston almanacs are remarkably regular, though

not identical, in the information they offer to readers. This might suggest a readership

with more homogeneous requirements among the general readership or the publishers’

need to attract a broad enough audience that too much specificity was not in their best

interests. Almost all of them provide the same basic information: the times of sunrise and

sunset, high tide, and the position of the moon in relation to major constellations. What

distinguishes one from another is their general tone. Packed in around the calendrical

information are all sorts of editorial flourishes. There are usually little quatrain poems

serving as a header to the tabular calendar, for example. In some almanacs these poems

are all overtly religious. They appeal to god, remind the reader to appeal to god, and

chastise people who don’t appeal to god enough. Others are more secular and/or

82 agricultural, advising readers on when to undertake particular tasks, exhorting them to

financial prudence, and commenting on relevant seasonal or meteorological rhythms.

Many fall somewhere in between, intermingling faith, farming and fiscal responsibility.

By contrast, the almanacs in the London collection display a healthy diversity in

both tone and content. Examples from the Old World collection seem to be far more

concerned with targeting a reader’s economic and social identity. There are almanacs

geared for those interested in mathematics, almanacs that target lawyers and merchants,

even an almanac titled Ladies Diary which is full of riddles and mathematical puzzles.

The differences in how New and Old English almanacs identified and targeted their

intended readerships says a lot about the differences between London and Boston, the

degree of urbanization and the intimacy of the relationship between metropole and

hinterland.

The large consumer base and robust printing culture in London meant almanac

makers could tailor their publications to a narrower demographic and still have hope of a

return on their labor. Indeed, distinguishing oneself in a crowded almanac market meant

offering something of particular use to a particular group of people with a particular set

of needs. For example, most of the London almanacs identify the beginning and ending

of the legal/academic terms. However, the Ephemeris: or, a Diary Astronomical… is

unique in including a long list of the judges and their jurisdictions, suggesting it targeted

members of the legal profession.18 Most of these almanacs include information on the

18 Anonymous, Ephemeris: or A Diary Astrommical…(London: Printed by T.W), 1721, John

Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI.

83 hour and minute of the high water mark in London, for purposes of navigating the

Thames. Parker’s Ephemeris…, however, includes the rates for traveling on the water

between notable London landmarks, as well as the rates for moving cargo by tilt-boat

between them, going so far as to break them down by the kind of goods being

transported19. Most almanacs include information on local market days, but Great

Britain’s Diary or the Union Almanac gives over a great deal of its page space to an

alphabetical listing of market towns across England and Wales and an account of how

long it takes letters to move from London to other locations, as well as a table on postage

rates.20

The greater degree of specialization within the London almanacs speaks to the

importance of the social landscape in the creation of notions of Englishness relevant to

daily lived experience. In London, almanacs could fill their non-calendrical pages with

information that drew distinctions between different kinds of Englishness. In this

collection, Englishness is refracted into a spectrum of different kinds of identity, all of

them English and all of them focused on specific subset of English concerns, namely,

how to move through London. The focus of much of the para-calendrical information was

intended to be helpful to people navigating the myriad of social and economic currents

that ran through London’s streets and waterways. The result is that Englishness in

19George Parker, Parker’s Ephemeris…(London: printed by J. Read), 1721, John Carter Brown

Library, Providence, RI.

20 Anonymous, Great Britain’s Diary: or, The Union Almanac (London: printed by J. Roberts), 1721, John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI. It is worth pointing out that this particular almanac makes allusions to a British rather than English identity, but it is still one rooted in the material particulars of London.

84 London almanacs is intimately tied to the experience of being in London, the

geographical, economic and cultural center of the English Empire (and its most vibrant

printing and bookselling hub). Englishness is difficult to distinguish from London-ness in

ways that tie this specific urban locale to the English identity writ large. This local, urban

version of English identity is possible, in large part, because in English language

almanacs in London, Englishness is so ubiquitous that it can be assumed and

particularized. Certainly many of these almanacs make reference to surrounding

European identities and state-entities like Spain or the Netherlands.21 But far more page-

space and attention is given to the particularities of different kinds of social and economic

positions under the umbrella of a broad, London-oriented Englishness.

In New England, by contrast, Englishness found itself constantly brushing up

against a radically different racial identity. New Englishness is far more concerned with

the division between English and Indian because, of course, interactions with Native

Americans were an immediate concern. In her seminal The Name of War, Jill Lepore

argues that King Philip’s War and the publications it yielded fought against an anxiety

that the Englishness of colonial people was under threat through sheer proximity to the

assumed savageness of the indigenous peoples and to the raw, uncultivated quality of the

natural environment.22 Unlike the long historiographic project Lepore presents as a

coherent ongoing project of self-definition, the ephemerality of almanacs allowed for a

21 See the anonymously published Merlinus Angelicus junior… (London: printed by J. Read),

1721; Vox Stellarum… (London: printed by Thomas Wood), 1721; and Great News from the Stars… (London: printed by A. Wilde), 1721, John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI.

22 Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New

York, NY: Vintage, 1999), 5-7. Kindle edition.

85 greater degree of flexibility around the shape and porousness of the boundaries that

separated the English from the Indian.

In many almanacs, the tabular calendar is accompanied by a short header, often

consisting of some general observation about that month, and often in verse form. In most

years, these observations are pious or agrarian in nature. References to Indians are

common and often casual in the header poems of various almanacs in the Boston

collection. “Indian” as a conceptual category seems well integrated into the language of

Boston’s almanac compilers. Indeed, Indian as a conceptual category finds use beyond

distinguishing one group of people from another, as in this couplet from the September

page of the 1722 almanac: “The Indian Harvest now draws on apace/And thus ‘twill be

when we have run our Race.”23 “Indian Harvest” here most likely refers to the harvest of

maize, something in which the colonial English population would have also participated.

This casual application of the category of “Indian” to a regional agricultural practice is an

indication of the operable categories of identification at play in this particular location. Or

this from the September page of a 1711 example: “Indian and English this Month must

agree: If not, they both shall starved be.”24 September, it seems, was understood by the

compilers of regional almanacs as an annual moment of shared interest among the

inhabitants of the Boston region, both colonial and indigenous.

23 Nathanial Whittemore, An Almanack for the Year of our Lord 1722 (Boston: printed by B.

Green), 1721, John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI. 24 Daniel Travis, An almanack of coelestial motions… (Boston: printed by B. Green), 1710, John

Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI.

86

The relationship between people who considered themselves English and those

who did not were not always characterized in almanacs by cooperation. In moments of

conflict, the Boston almanacs work to reinforce an English identity that stands in violent

opposition to an Indian identity. In 1722, the original collector of the Boston almanacs

included a hand written notation in the row dedicated to July 26th. All it said was: “Wars

proclaimed”.25 The wars this annotation referred to have since been dubbed Dummer’s

War, a multi-year conflict between New Englanders and the Abenaki that expanded the

borders of New England, but also earned concessions to the Abenaki from England, the

first time that a European state formally acknowledged its actions in North America

needed to be negotiated with the indigenous population.26 This particular conflict tends

to be overlooked and over shadowed by the larger history of violent conflict between

colonial and indigenous people in north-east North America, but for the owner of the

Boston almanacs, it was significant enough to merit recording in the limited space

available in their annual almanac. The almanac the Boston collector purchased for 1723

includes a significant amount of para-calendrical information about the conflict. “Look

out brave Captains, let your skill be try’d/ Go hunt the Woods where Rebel Indians hide”

was included above the calendar for January. In March: “The Indian Rebels pinch’d for

want of Food, Like hungry Lions lurk within the woods.” October, November and

December of that year included these grim predictions: “Tho’ black-ars’d Indian Rogues

25 These annotations can be found in the JCB’s copy of Whittemore, An Almanack…, 1721, John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI.

26 For a recent, detailed treatment of Dummer’s War see Robert E. Cray, Lovewell’s Fight: War, Death, and Memory in Borderland New England (Boston, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2014).

87 do skulk about,/ We hope our sturdy Lads will find them out”; “Prick up your Ears brave

Soldiers, and advance,/ Destroy those perjur’d Sons of Violence”; “March out, brave

Soldiers, now the Season’s good,/And make your Hatchets drunk with Indian Blood.” 27

Here, Indian as a category had obviously become an antagonistic one, one set against

Englishness. The header poems in 1723 are given over to a new proposition of what

activities the reader should engage in, namely killing Indians. Unlike the historiographic

tradition that forms the core of Lepore’s analysis, the relationship between English and

Indian in almanacs is not dedicated to negotiating an essential, long-term relationship.

Almanacs published after the hostilities of the 1720s return to agricultural or spiritual

commentary, sometimes in ways that allude to collaboration between colonial and

indigenous populations, most notably in the poem from a 1730 almanac discussed in

more length below.

In both their physical composition and their content, the Boston and London

almanacs speak to stark differences in the lived experiences of ostensibly English people.

As publications that drew explicitly on “English” as an important valence of identity,

they participated in fostering a notion of trans-Atlantic community. However, that same

unity was muddied by the explicitly local composition of almanacs and their concern

with local issues. There is no denying that printed works were indispensable to nation-

building projects, but almanacs do not fit so easily into the rehearsed narrative of print

and national belonging. As one of the most popular and widely read printed objects in the

27 Daniel Travis, An Almanack of coelestial motions… (Boston, MA: printed by B. Green), 1722,

John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI.

88 early modern Atlantic, almanacs were significant participants in the development of a

national consciousness. But they could not help but occupy a curious middle ground

between commonality and particularity, between universality and provincialism, between

the global and the local, between the smooth and the striated.

Funny Things: Humor and Locality

Chapter 1 showed the ways in which many broadsides and pamphlets were tied

closely to the moment of their creation, both because they were physically

inconsequential and because the economics of their production demanded brevity and

hyper-topicality. These requirements were often met by employing humorous rhetoric

that could collapse and condense meaning in absurd but effective ways. Something

similar is at play in almanacs that also employ humor. Those that gave over some of

their precious paper real estate to jokes and doggerel enjoyed something of an advantage

over hyper-topical ephemera. While a broadside could travel a significant distance with

the help of a chapman or bookseller, almanac’s sensitivity to space limited their range.

Compilers familiar with the regions for which they were calculating an almanac could

make certain assumptions about the social and cultural environment in which their work

would circulate. They drew on this information in the poems, advice and jokes which

embellished the core calendar. A close read of a few instances of humor from roughly

contemporaneous almanacs illustrates how Englishness is used to make sense of very

different lived experiences. Englishness is, in these sources, an identity that is global in

89 conceit but local in practice, stuck somewhere in the dynamic stuff between striated and

smooth.

Perhaps the most significant difference between Boston and London as printing

centers is the impact indigenous people had on every aspect of producing colonial

publications. Lepore illustrates how the boundary between “Indian” and “English” was a

preoccupation of many early American writers inflecting the publishing world in ways

that hardened racial divisions.28 On the practical side, Philip Round’s Removable Type

examines the role of the press in early proselytizing missions on the part of pious New

Englanders as well as the practical role indigenous people played in the physical

construction of early modern publications. He even touches on material differences

engendered by a cross-cultural printing environment. “The production of the Indian

Library,” he writes “required eighty pounds of new type, including ‘extra Os and Ks to

accommodate Eliot’s transcription of Algonquin phonemes…”29 Lepore and Round’s

seminal works on the relationship between early American print culture and the

interactions between Colonial and Indigenous Americans illustrate a major problem with

traditional analyses which rely on the language of publication as the primary identifier of

the cultural provenance of a publication. A preoccupation with Indians and Indian-ness

on the part of early North American publications separates English-language publications

that originate at different points in the growing English empire. Especially at the level of

“popular,” or accessible, publications, print cultures were local rather than international.

28 Lapore, The Name of War, 8-9. 29 Phillip Round, Removable Type: Histories of the Book in Indian Country, 1663-1880 (Chapel

Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 26.

90 This poem from an almanac compiled by Nathaniel Ames in 1730 illustrates that local

quality to a tee:

Cunkeechah Netop? What News you speak to me?/ Mussy good news; What? You no Stommonee?/ By by, come Elwipes, much as me can wish,/ Me Think nuxt Week den me shan heb it Bish/ Where is Tat prace you speak to me? Me ashk it/ Metink some Pokes he caun his Lame Namaskitt.30

Like most of Ames’ poems that precede the monthly calendar, this one is

aimed at communicating something the reader should be considering in that

particular month. Around Boston, spring was a time when local inhabitants could

begin to take advantage of the annual migrations of fish to the area. This poem is

one side of a conversation. The speaker is using a mix of Algonkin and English

suggesting that the author’s intent was to evoke the speech patterns of a Native

American addressing a colonial New Englander. The opening exclamation is

Algonkin, meaning, roughly, “how do you, friend”, followed by an imperfect

rendition of the common greeting among English speaking colonials “what

news.” 31 The rest of the poem, through a mix of English, Algonkin and a pidgin

hybrid, communicates to the reader that in this month they can expect to see the

alewives (here “elwipes”), a kind of herring, return, followed by other “Bish”.32

30 Nathaniel Ames. An astronomical Diary or an Almanac. (Boston, MA: Various Printers). 1730.

John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI. 31 Ezra Stiles and Franklin Bowditch Dexter, The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles: Edited Under the

Authority of the Corporation of Yale University. (New York, NY: C. Scribner's sons, 1901), 85.

32 Ibid.

91

This doggerel poem attempts to capture, with printed letters, an auditory

experience that may have been familiar enough to people living in Boston and its

surrounds. Yet the same would have been entirely foreign to someone from the

London suburbs. It records a distinctly North American English and embedded

within this poetic exercise is a sense of familiarity with the challenges of cross-

cultural communication among people of different language traditions inhabiting

the same space. For a reader to get the joke, or even to understand the words of

the poem, they must have at least a passing understanding of some Algonkin

(specifically Massachusett) vocabulary and some frame of reference for the accent

patterns of Massachusett speakers using English.

Of course, there is a not-so-subtle ridicule of indigenous peoples’ ”faulty”

English here as well. Like Cotton Mather’s publications in the wake of King

Philips war, it polices the boundary between English and Indian, but does so

through an examination of a uniquely regional experience. The intense locality of

this poem is also evident in the practical knowledge that underlies the

print/linguistic joke. The entire interaction centers on harvesting local food

resources. Alewives and fish are explicitly mentioned in the middle two lines, and

while I have not been able to find a definitive translation of this poem anywhere,

and do not have any facility with Algonkin languages, it is possible that the last

two lines are a discussion of where to go fishing. Along with manipulated syntax,

letter substitutions are the most common marker that the printed stanza is

attempting to invoke a sense of the subject as an Indigenous American speaking

92 English. In bish substitutes a “b” for an “f”, and “elwipes” substitutes a “p” for

the “v” in “alewives” and “Tink” substitutes a “t” for a “th” in “Think”.

Phonetically speaking, all of these are substitutions of a similar sort because they

substitute stops for fricatives. If that same sort of substitution is used in the last

two lines, then, “Pokes” could stand in for “Fo[l]ks” and “Metink in the final line

could either be an error in printing Me Tink like in line four (I think) or be a

derivation of “meeting”. I have not been able to determine what “Lame” is

supposed to mean since I don’t have the auditory reference the publisher was

trying to invoke. Without it I am reluctant to offer a translation for “he caun his

Lame Namaskitt” but it is possible “Namaskitt” is a Wampanoag word for “place

where the fish are.”33

Even without a complete interpretation, this poem is addressing a very

local experience though print: a cross-cultural discussion about the exploitation of

regional foodsources. In a very literal sense, this is not a poem that could have

been printed anywhere else but Massachusetts. Its humor, or at least its

comprehension, relies on the reader interpreting the order of its printed letters as

reflecting a local variation of English and not, as a Londoner might, as simply

incorrect grammar and spelling. A “b” for an “f” is not an inconceivable

compilers error, one which, if found on a proof anywhere else in the English-

printing world, might demand a correction rather than being integral to its

33 David Zeisberger and Eben Norton Horsford, Zeisberger's Indian Dictionary: English, German,

Iroquois--the Onondaga And Algonquin--the Delaware (Cambridge, MA: J. Wilson, 1887), 75.

93 purpose. Here, however, there is good reason to think that everything is correct

and intentional.

Poems that characterize the appropriate activities for a given month are part of the

almanacs primary function as a tool to mark and manage time. The management of time

presented in almanacs is not solely confined to the day-to-day considerations of the

annual calendar or the month-to-month scheduling of various activities. They also serve

as a guide for making sense of the past. Most almanacs, regardless of publication

location, include a one or two page chronology of significant historical dates. In another

display of the almanacs’ intense relationship to their locality, these chronologies usually

present significant historical dates by their temporal distance from the present. The

creation of the world by God is not usually presented as having occurred in year zero, but

rather having happened five-thousand plus years prior to the publication of the given

almanac. Through these chronologies, the Boston and London almanacs produce very

different, very local trajectories of English history.

The limited space given over to the chronology forced compilers to include only

the most significant dates. What is considered a significant date, however, is highly

contingent on the location of publication. On either side of the Atlantic, almanac

chronologies regularly include some common dates significant in Biblical time and

English history. In addition to the formation of the world by God (which is included in

almost every almanac with a chronology), common entries in both London and Boston

almanacs include the first use of guns, when the English first started making use of

printing presses, and the ancient founding of London. However, the majority of the

94 chronologies found in the Boston Almanacs include an entry on the “discovery” of

America by Columbus. Most also include the founding of Boston, and some include

entries on the beginning and ending of conflicts between the English and Indians, most

notably the inception and conclusion of King Phillips War.34 Not a single one of the

almanacs in the London collection include any of these events. Their emphasis is far

more European, with some including entries on recent political developments, including

peace or war declarations with other European powers. The closer the events being

chronicled are to the printing of the almanac, the more localized they become. The result

is the construction of localized versions of history, or at least what constitutes a

significant historical event and, beginning at least in 1492, very different trajectories of

what constitutes English history. For the English on the western extension of the Atlantic

rim, that history is one characterized by interaction and conflict with native peoples. On

the eastern side, English history has nothing to do with the Americas, and is strictly a

European affair. These different constructions of what constitutes Englishness are echoed

in the dramatically different ways the Boston and London almanacs construct the past of

the English people.

As the only publication that could hold a candle to the Bible for a wide presence

in the early modern English household, almanacs necessarily played a significant role in

the textual and intellectual landscape of early modern English readers. In North America,

English almanacs were preoccupied with maintaining distinctions between Englishness

34 For example: Samuel Clough. The New-England almanack of the coelestial motions (Boston: B.

Greene and J Allen), 1704; Samuel Clough’s The New-England almanack of the coelestial motions (Boston: B. Greene and J Allen), 1714, John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI.

95 and Indian-ness. On the other side of the Atlantic, writers and thinkers were busy

particularizing Englishness into socio-economic roles and defining Englishness against

other European nationalisms like Frenchness and Dutchness. One could read this as a

two-fronted conflict defending some essential traits of Englishness from different kinds

of threats. However, that interpretation is only possible when taking a bird’s eye view

looking back on the past from the present. For people using cheap and ubiquitous

almanacs to meet their own daily needs, the Englishness expressed in them was a local

and immediate affair. The English identity of the almanac responded to particular,

localized situations and events, not to philosophical, global ones. “Almanac Englishness”

is a responsive Englishness reproduced annually, one able to change its contours to

address present needs. The expectation that almanacs would be regularly replaced

allowed them to be places where local versions of national identities could be regularly

revised or redirected.

Like the humorous broadsides that drew on national stereotypes, humoral medical

philosophy, and current events to make sense of the Anglo-Dutch relationship, almanacs

drew together a host of different conceits to make sense of local experience.

Constructing a notion of national identity tied to the particulars of a local time and space

required drawing connections and parallels between various observable patterns and on-

the-ground experiences. Furthermore, as tools for the management of time and space,

almanacs had to contend with profound changes in how people thought of time and space

themselves. Like the publishers of broadsides and ballads in the seventeenth century,

almanac publishers often turned to humor as a technique for collapsing different regimes

96 of knowledge together to make sense of new realities. Whereas the broadsides and

ballads examined in the previous chapter used humor to make sense of changing realities

of the Anglo-Dutch relationship in the Atlantic, the almanacs examined here use humor

to make sense of changing English identities in the face of changing notions of what

constituted truthful, useful information.

In the Boston collection of almanacs at the JCB, only one year is unrepresented:

1728. There are many possible reasons for this, not the least of which being that early

modern almanacs just have a tendency waste away. Indeed, it is remarkable that the

collection is as complete as it is. By odd coincidence, 1728 also happened to be the year

James Franklin printed the first almanac in Rhode Island, after having been effectively

driven out of the Boston printing community by the suppression of his newspaper, The

New England Courant, in 1727.35 Because James Franklin’s almanac was the first

publication of any kind in Rhode Island, and because he was the brother of Benjamin

Franklin, this publication has received more historical and bibliographic attention than

most.36 Franklin’s “Rhode Island Almanac” is also remarkable because of its

participation in a trans-Atlantic tradition of humorous publications.

35 Lawrence C. The Colonial Printer (Portland, Maine: Southworth-Anthoensen Press, 1938), John

Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI, 21.

36 Indeed, the copy at the JCB is not an original, but a facsimile commissioned by the library to coincide with an exhibition on early American almanacs they put on in 1911. This exhibition, in turn, attracted the attention of a Mrs. Conard, who sold the Boston collection of almanacs at the heart of this chapter to the JCB in 1912 for $20. There is no reason at all to think that the original owner of the Boston collection would ever have seen Franklin’s almanac, but it is nonetheless partially responsible for the preservation of that collection in the here and now.

97

Rhode Island’s first publication by the brother of one of America’s founding

fathers was marketed under the pseudonym Poor Robin. While not as well-known now as

Poor Richard, Benjamin Franklin’s almanac nom de plume, Poor Robin has a longer

history. Satires and humorous writings had been published under this name in London at

least as far back as the 1630s. Attaching the name “Poor Robin” to a publication signaled

that it should be read with a wry eye. James Franklin’s adoption of it indicated the spirit

in which his almanac was to be read. It was also, potentially, a marketing ploy. By the

time Franklin was publishing his Rhode Island almanacs, the almanac market in New

England was fairly robust, if somewhat homogenous. In general, New English almanacs

employed humor sparingly, placing more emphasis on piety and sober responsibility. An

almanac by Poor Robin promised a light and humorous tone throughout, setting it apart

from the standard fare. Looking at roughly contemporaneous almanacs produced by

different people but winkingly published under a common name highlights the

differences in the daily concerns of English people in different parts of the empire and

points up some interesting similarities in how they responded to some sweeping

intellectual changes taking place across the empire.

While James Franklin was introducing Poor Robin to the New World, almanac

compilers in the Old were turning to her/him to set their own almanacs apart from the

throng. Included in the London collection of 1722 almanacs is one claiming to be

produce by Poor Robin. The similarities between these New England and Old England

Poor Robin almanacs go beyond their adoption of a common, fictional compiler. Their

reliance on humor set them apart in the increasingly crowded almanac market, and

98 resulted in a common emphasis on the relationship between location and body, with a

particular emphasis on the typical diets of the regions in which they were produced.

In discussing popular carnival culture and its representation in the work of

Rabelais, Mikhail Bakhtin makes the argument that the body and ridicule of the high and

mighty are intertwined phenomena sitting at the heart of laughter.37 Almanacs drawing

on the Poor Robin humorous tradition are not strictly carnivalesque in the Bakhtinian

sense, but they are texts preoccupied with food and its relationship to the body. They use

that basic relationship to make sense of local material realities. Where Bakhtinian

carnival encourages transcendent bodily excess through consumption, New and Old

World Poor Robin almanacs are concerned with maintaining healthy bodily processes

through careful management of diet and environment. It is not surprising, then, that the

dramatic differences between the material realities of existence between Old England and

New England lead Poor Robin to suggest two very different strategies for English people

interested in leading a healthy life.

The most striking difference between the two Poor Robin almanacs is the degree

to which money acts as a mediating factor between diet and body. The London-published

Poor Robin demonstrates a preoccupation with the price of bread and the challenges of

obtaining food. In addition to a table that sets out how much could legally be charged for

a loaf of bread (a unique feature of this almanac), it includes several digs at the

greediness of victuallers in and around London. The humorous criticisms of the

victualling trade are woven into conventional almanac structures in creative and amusing

37 Mikhail Bakhtin. Rabelais and His World. (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1968.), 34.

99 ways. For example, the chronology page includes the entry “Since victuallers began to

love money…..5722/ Quaere, whether some of them did not love it quite so well they

would not get more of it.”38 The root of the joke is that in the same chronology the

formation of the earth by God is set as having occurred only 5671 years prior, fifty-one

years after victuallers got greedy. This joke plays on a reader’s familiarity with the

chronology common in almanacs, but violates their conventions to offer a commentary

on the realities of food procurement in eighteenth-century London.

In Rhode Island, the Poor Robin almanac displays a similar preoccupation with

food and eating. Many of the pieces of advice for how to maintain one’s health are

suggestions on what to eat and how much of it, as in these two pieces of advice from

September and November respectively: “Eat good Butter with your Tautaug this month”

“The best Physick in this Month is good Exercise, Warmth, and wholesome Meat and

Drink. Kill your Swine in this Month, and after Pork and Pease be sure to Break Wind.”39

Here, unlike in the Old England almanac, the emphasis is not on the acquisition of food

38 William Winstanley. Poor Robin : 1722. An Almanack after the Old and New Fashion: ...

Written by Poor Robin. (London: Printed by W. Bowyer for the Company of Stationers, 1722.), John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI, A4v

39 Poor Robin [pseud. James Franklin], The Rhode-Island almanack for the year, 1728. : Being the

first ever printed in that colony. Carefully reproduced in exact facsimile, by means at that time unknown, without sensible alteration, from the single copy which, it is believed, has survived the permutations of one hundred and eighty-four years; together with a brief account of James Franklin the printer, who was persecuted for the expression of his opinions in Boston, and found a more congenial home at the mouth of Narragansett Bay (Providence, RI: Printed, and the Almanack reprinted, under the oversight of Willm. Chatterton, Exp. Typog., and to be had at the John Carter Brown Library near the southeast corner of the middle campus of the University in Providence, 1911), n.p. Tautaug is the Narragansett name a local species of fish more commonly called blackfish today. It is indigenous to the area and could be caught in the early and mid-fall. This particular piece of advice evokes a thoroughly local dish, one that combines knowledge of native food sources, the employment of imported livestock and technology (for making butter) and linguistic cross-pollination. This is not the kind of advice that would be found in Old English almanacs or useful to their readers.

100 through economic exchange, but on procuring it oneself. Readers are encouraged to make

use of the indigenous fish resources, and they are given advice on how to manage their

own livestock to optimize their physical well-being. These two tactics have the same

goal—a good, healthy diet—but are calculated to speak to very different systems that

condition how that goal can be met.

The different suggestions for the tactical management of day-to-day diet

highlights the contrast between what was required to live healthy lives at various points

within the British Empire of the early eighteenth century. Their shared concern with

bodily health, however, leads them to emphasize some similar considerations,

particularly those regarding the effectiveness of physicians and the appropriate

management of the local climate. It is no coincidence that, during the late seventeenth

and early eighteenth centuries, the ascendance of scientific logic was producing profound

changes in what was considered legitimate knowledge and practice in the field of

medicine and how directly the body was governed by the movement of celestial bodies.

While these changes were revolutionizing the medical field among elite practitioners, the

Poor Robin almanacs suggest that the relationship between everyday people and the field

of medicine was fraught whether they lived in New England or Old. Almanac compilers

in the 1720’s had a long history of ridicule to draw upon in their characterization of

physicians as a social category. Ever since proliferation of vernacular publications in the

late sixteenth century, doctors, surgeons and the purveyors of pills and tonics had found

themselves lambasted in print. The contradiction of being made sicker by seeking

medical attention was a common source of humor in jokebooks, graphic satires,

101 pamphlets and almanacs. The Poor Robin almanacs from New and Old England were no

exception, but their particular take on the tradition of medical mockery displays an

awareness of recent changes in the practice of medicine.

As western medical knowledge changed and grew, it required a greater degree of

specialization on the part of its practitioners.40 It was simply not possible for a single

person to claim expertise in all the available knowledge. This increase in the variety of

medical practitioners comes in for critique in the Rhode Island Poor Robin almanac. One

piece of advice it offers the health conscious is, in February, to ““Now advise with a

learned, honest and able Astrological or Hydrogogihipnotitharneupismanecdochical

Physican; but in cases of Necessity, you may make use of a Seventh Son.”41 The

absurdly long descriptive title for the medical practitioner is a gag playing off the

proliferation of medical titles and specialties attendant to the expansion of medical

specialties. It signals its skepticism that a greater degree of specialization can be equated

to a greater degree of effectiveness by placing the physician in common company with a

seventh son. Seventh sons, according to traditional superstition, were purported to have

exceptional, magical powers. The joke, of course, is that consulting with a physician is

only marginally better than engaging the services of a purported magician. This

commentary on the relationship between medicine and superstition draws on real,

observable trends taking place within the field of medical practice, while retaining a

40 Harold Cook. Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age

(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007.), 135-9.

41 Robin, The Rhode Island Almanac for the year 1728, n.p.

102 healthy skepticism about how much good those changes actually do when it comes to

maintaining one’s health.

On the other side of the Atlantic, London’s Poor Robin was no more convinced of

the benefits of “progress” in medical science. In the London almanac, a short screed,

purportedly about the dangers of visiting brothels, becomes a take-down of the medical

profession’s pretentions:

Saturn is this year in Opposition to Venus; perhaps Men that have by wofull Experience the fatal Consequence of Whoring may learn to be the wiser…” [After visiting a Doxy…]”Away he goes calls for the Doctor…the Doctor consults Albumazur…says he your Distemper is the Gallicus Poxicus : The Symptoms are Gallanticus Stradlingo and you must have some Helpicus Surgero and orders him some Pillule Shitebus, and if two and Twenty Doses of that will not will not do, he orders him to take some Stinkum Salevatibus…After this he comes Home, looking like a dead Haddock, taken out of the Belly of a live Cod Fish; and yet, this is all to be done, without loss of Time, or the Knowledge of the nearest Relations: For which Mr. Doctor is to have an extraordinary Reward. Who would follow the pernicious Practice of Whoring?42

The pseudo-Latin of the diagnosed disease, along with its symptoms and its remedies are

easily identified as unnecessary translations for commonly known terms (Gallicus

Poxicus for “French pox”) or attempts to give value to the worthless (Pillule Shitebus).

Pretentions and a proprietary attitude toward medical knowledge was not a new

development in the eighteenth century, but they were amplified by the intensification of

abstractions and specializations in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In

both Old and New England, Poor Robin almanacs turned to humor to communicate a

42 Winstanley. Poor Robin: 1722, B6v.

103 conservative skepticism that the purported revolutions in scientific medical knowledge

truly resulted in more effective medical treatments.

A unique feature of the humorous almanacs is their reflexive tendency to

acknowledge and play with the fact that they are almanacs. London’s Poor Robin is

particularly aware of the structural conventions of almanacs as well as the social

expectations that shape their construction and their use. It pokes fun at the astrological

assumptions of almanacs in the pages that preface the monthly calendar, saying it was

“…calculated for the meridian of London, where the Baker is elevated 51 Deg. 32 Min.

above the common people, where the Pillory is made the Button-hole, his Head the

Button, and his Bum the Butt for his Customers to fire Volleys of rotten Eggs, Turnips,

&c. at, if he makes his Bread too Light”. Most almanacs, often on their title page, include

information about the global position for which they were calculated since that piece of

information was critical to buyers looking for an almanac that addressed their particular

geographic location. Poor Robin turns that convention into yet another dig at the local

food purveyors, who stand between many almanac readers and the food they need. On the

calendar page for March it includes this example:

Perhaps some of our Landlords, especially the most covetous of them (if they are not all covetous alike) will blame us because we have not put Lady Day among the rest of the saints Days….but let them know that we have set it aside in another place to make way for….Easter Day; because lesser ought to give way to the greater, and also because we question not but that if we give the other Holidays their proper places the Landlords would have found out Lady Day wherever we put it or if we had not put it in at all.43

43 Ibid., A6v.

104 Here the compiler acknowledges one of the almanac’s many functions, namely keeping

track of the rent schedule. In the early eighteenth century, rent was collected quarterly.

Lady Day, the popular name for the Feast of the Annunciation of the Virgin Mary, also

marked the beginning of the legal year, meaning it was the day that year-long contracts

began and ended. It was one of the four annual quarter days and, as such, one of the days

that rent was due. In 1722, Lady Day overlapped Easter. The narrow column dedicated to

identifying feast days could not accommodate both Easter and Lady Day, so the compiler

shifted Lady Day over two columns from its normal position. Not exactly hidden, but not

given pride of place, the dislocation of Lady Day is a visual joke that plays with the

expected composition of a standard almanac calendar. This awareness and willingness to

toy with the material conventions of the form extend to the logic which underpins the

specific information that almanacs offer while simultaneously criticizing the

covetousness of landlords, accusing them of being more interested in profit than piety.

As noted above, Rhode Island Poor Robin pokes fun at the astrological

conventions upon which almanacs are built by placing astrologers in common company

with physicians and seventh sons. It also undercuts one of the most astrologically

dependent aspects of almanacs in a unique way, offering tips on how to predict the

weather based on terrestrial, rather than celestial, phenomena. Residents of Rhode Island

are encouraged to observe the behavior of animals and insects in order to anticipate what

was around the climatological bend. Folk weather prognostications like, “If the Bees fly

far from their Hives, it is a Sign of foul Weather” or “When Oxen bite their Fore Teeth, it

is a manifest Token of foul weather to follow,” can be found on every single calendar

105 page, along with more explicit predictions of the weather. These colloquial,

environmental dictums ask readers to take stock of their immediate surroundings to

supplement the more traditional, astrological weather predictions which, by the early

eighteenth century, were losing some of their authority in the face of changing systems of

knowledge.

Taken together, Poor Robin almanacs in Old and New England illustrate the

tension at the heart of early eighteenth-century Englishness. The almanacs share common

concerns like diet and well-being; they toy with the expectations and conventions of the

almanac genre; and they employ humor as a rhetorical tactic. But they address these

concerns differently and in ways that connect them inextricably to a particular time and

place. Comparing them side by side highlights just how diverse and multifaceted notions

of national belonging were in a time when regional conditions put unique pressures on

day-to-day living, while trans-oceanic empires insisted on commonalities to sustain

colonial projects.

Conclusion

More than any other widely accessible product of early modern presses, almanacs

were local affairs. Their marketability relied on a low overhead which necessitated they

be printed on cheap, locally produced paper. Their reliance on astrological

prognostication tied them to a particular location and made them useful only to those

within their geographical orbit. Their content was calculated to meet the needs of a

106 regional climate, economy and culture. They could not circulate as widely as broadsides

or pamphlets, but they were masters of their own limited domain. The management of

local time at the daily, monthly and seasonal levels was their purview. They were

constant, daily companions to their readers. As almanac readers spread out across the

Atlantic they required almanacs that addressed their local conditions. More so than any

other publication, almanacs were almost required to be locally produced.

Despite their powerful link to the locality of their production, almanacs traded in

the language of empire. No matter where English-speakers resided, their almanacs

identified themselves as belonging to England. This reliance on national rhetoric certainly

fostered a notion of belonging and commonality, but not a coherent one. Englishness, as

reflected in almanacs, was as local as the almanacs themselves. It was an identity that

was constructed to be useful when facing the challenges of day-to-day life. Its boundaries

were locally defined to respond to regional examples of non-Englishness, not global ones.

In many ways, this fragmented Englishness is a more accurate descriptor of the English

colonial project than maps and descriptions that present outposts around the globe that

happen to enrich the English state as equally and commonly English.

107

Chapter 3 Small Books

Thomas Palmer’s 1606 An Essay of the means how to make our travailes into

forraine countries, the more profitable and honourable lays out a system by which

foreign locales could be particularized and described in ways that would facilitate future

adventures into the region. It is quarto in format and over one-hundred pages long. It

includes several tables on full sheets, which complicates the printing and compiling

processes (though the tables have been tipped in rather than printed inter-textually, so it is

not the highest expression of the printer or book-binder’s art). The paper is of good

quality, but not exceptional. The same can be said of the printing. A few broken letters

appear here and there, but nothing that impedes intelligibility. In short, the book itself is

not an example of the cheap publications that make up the largest part of this

dissertation’s body of evidence.

The text is almost entirely dedicated to providing guidance to travelers on what

they should observe when traveling outside England. Furthermore, it is not a unique kind

of publication. The preface makes allusion to the author having read similar texts in other

languages and proposes to offer an English version so that English travelers will not be at

a disadvantage to those of other nations.1 An Essay of the means… lays out a program by

1 Thomas Palmer, and Theodor Zwinger, An Essay of the Meanes Hovv to Make Our Trauailes,

into Forraine Countries, the More Profitable and Honourable. (London: Imprinted by H[umphrey] L[ownes] for Mathew Lownes, 1606), Special Collections, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL, unnumbered i-v.

108 which individual experiences can be stripped of subjectivity to facilitate its absorption by

a domestic audience. By translating personal observations into a set of pre-established

categories, people traveling outside England or Europe could translate their individual

experiences into digestible, collectable, categorize-able facts. As the text explains:

Now that Travailers in particular may discover this amongst the people of a Nation or State, let them consider five things: First, whether they be civill or barbarous. Secondly, whether they be free or servile. Thirdly, whether religious or profane. Fourthly, whetehr warlike or effeminate. And fifthly, of what condition of bodie, and disposition of mind. These contain the maners, nature, and inclination of all people in a generalitie; of which we will discourse in order. And first, therefore, let Travailers consider, wheter the people in general be civill or barbarous; and that whether by discipline (the best Civilian Master) or by natural temperature of bodies. Such are the Grecians, and those of the Iles of Japan and Chois; as on the contrary side, the people of Africa, America, Magellanica and those of Norteast Europe and Asia, by nature barbarists. The use of which observation, for the Commonweale, may appeare by these two rules; First that civill nations, governed by lawes divine and humane written, may either be feared for ememies, or trusted for friends in case they be neighbours, and of the same Religion and of good abilitie. Secondly that barbarous people are never good faithfull friends, but for their profit, being ever wavering and treacherous, nor if enemies other than mortall; yet if their power be not over-great, are easily vanquished.2

The underlying logic is, unsurprisingly, entirely exploitative. It presents itself as

the means by which the English nation can enrich itself through exploration and

conquest. In this book, the state and the nation are held separate. It draws a distinction

between the political entity of England and the collective body of people considered the

English nation, but positions either and both as the beneficiaries of colonization. The

interesting part is the binary system of categorization. The “a or b” and “if x then y” logic

the text uses as a guide for translating the unique adventures of an individual traveler into

2 Ibid., 60-1

109 a set of taxonomized, pre-set options aims to render all “forraine” places directly

comparable and to establish the parameters by which increasing information about the

world’s various locales can be efficiently gathered, organized and contained.

The above passage from An Essay of the means… addresses the qualities and

governance of people in foreign places, but the text extends well beyond those issues. A

significant portion of the book is given over to instructing readers on what is important to

note about geographical spaces. It prompts travelers to note, first, the names of places

because, “…such commonweals as have never altered their names, will hardly be

subdued…whereas those that have been accustomed to change their names, may easily be

by Conquerers be perswaded to suffer a change.”3 Then it asks readers to note how

populous is an area, its geographical situation, “…in regard of the earth and seas, as of

the heavens; namely under what Climate it lieth, and what sign doth patronize the

same…”4 The size and, finally, the resources of the territory are treated: “The fifth

consideration is to bee made of the commodities to be found in the country…The natural

commodities are foure: namely the goodnesse or temperatenesse of the Ayre, the

Fruitfulnesse of the soyle, the plenty of Rivers and Ports…And lastly, the Springs, Lakes,

Baths, Spaws, or Pooles, that have any singular virtue in them.”5 These individual areas

of observation are themselves broken down into sub-considerations. In expanding on how

to categorize the “fruitfulnesse of the soyle”, for example, the text includes this:

3 Ibid., 81

4 Ibid., 81

5 Ibid., 82

110

[For] the Fruitfullnesse of the soyle, there is a triple consideration; either of such as moove and grow upon the superficies of the Land (as Vegetables, and living sensible things) or of such things as are hid in womb and veins of the earth, or of the molde itself. Touching the first of these, let Travaliers observe what store there is found of irrationall Animals, either wilde or domesticke, serving for the use of man; and especially whether the Countrey doe yield a superfluitite; and wereof.6

The systematic approach to describing far-off locals presents a clear hierarchy of

information. At the head is the question of whether a place is conquerable, followed by a

series of considerations geared toward determining whether conquest was worth the

trouble. Indeed, this hierarchy is made explicit in a fold-out table that acts as a flow-chart

for observations, directing the reader from big, important topics down to small, minute

observations.7

It is unclear how influential this particular publication was on the larger genre of

travel writing. As the preface to the document attests, other publications with the same

goals and possibly similar content were already in circulation. However, if one were to

literally follow the instructions it provides, the result would closely resemble many

examples of travel writing produced in the latter seventeenth and early eighteenth

centuries. Anyone familiar with examples of early modern travel writing can speak to

their predictable patterns of including, first, the geographical location in degrees latitude

6 Ibid., 83

7 Ibid., unnumbered page i

111 and longitude and then expounding on the space’s natural riches, often in utopic and/or

hyperbolic terms.

An Essay.. is a physical product of the larger relationship that existed between

European colonial expansion and the dramatic growth of printing. Each practice relied on

the other for its expansion. In the purest, practical sense, the subjugation of indigenous

populations and the administration of colonial empires were greatly facilitated by the

ability to produce large numbers of identical documents with alacrity.8 Increasing

demand for printed objects of this sort encouraged greater participation in the printing

trades, which made more resources available to colonizing agents, and the cycle moved

back and forth ad infinitum. Of course, the relationship between colonialism and print

was not limited to the exercise of military and bureaucratic power. Growing awareness of

the extra-European world fueled the growth of travel writing as a distinct and popular

genre. The appeal of generic publications is apparent. They could rely on predictable

narrative formats and a predictable audience which lowered the back-end risks for

publishers. Working within a genre that had already proven itself profitable was a good

bet. In this way, producing a piece of generic travel writing is akin to David Pye’s

description of a work of certainty, or at least one with a low level of risk.9 Works of

certainty are crafting techniques that are guaranteed to produce reliable, if often

unremarkable, results. Individual examples of a genre are not piracy, but not works of

8 Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization

(Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1995.), 69-120. 9 David Pye, The Nature and Art of Workmanship, rev. ed. (Bethel, CT: Cambium Press, 1995),

20-2.

112 high-risk originality either. Works like An Essay… function as a kind of jig, a set of

guides and stops that eliminate the need for risky, free-form innovation. They were

shaped by tried and true formulae to produce a works of greater certainty.

Our modern information environment has prompted historians like Ann Blair,

Richard Yeo, and Brian Ogilvie to reflect on early modern Europe as a time and place

that, like us, struggled with the phenomenon of “information overload.” A dedicated

edition of the Journal of the History of Ideas from 2003 gathered together a set of articles

dedicated to exploring various strategies early modern peoples employed to manage and

make sense of the proliferation of information that printing presses—and paper mills that

fed them—engendered. Ann Blair sets the stage for the discussion by providing evidence

that early modern people were, in truth, anxions about how to manage and account for an

ever-growing body of knowledge. She points to the emergence of innovative reading

practices (dog-earing, cutting and pasting, annotating) employed by readers to help them

gather and organize relevant data.10 Johnathon Sheehan examines some of the ways early

modern thinkers attempted to resolve the tensions that arose between the proliferation of

new information about the natural world and traditional Biblical truth.11 Richard Yeo’s

contribution examines the emergence of books dedicated to cataloging and organizing the

content of other books, and reader’s attempts to digest the flood of information in the

form of encyclopedias and their ilk.12 Brian Ogilvie shows how the Linnaean system of

10 Ann Blair, "Reading Strategies for Coping with Information Overload Ca. 1550-1700." Journal

of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (2003): 11-28. doi:10.2307/3654293.

11 Jonathon Sheehan, "From Philology to Fossils: The Biblical Encyclopedia in Early Modern Europe." Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (Jan. 2003): 41-60. doi:10.2307/3654295.

113 botanical categorization, along with the emergence of grand encyclopedias, even

catalogues of wunderkammern, all point to a cultural need to contain and manage a

rapidly expanding body of information and to facilitate its rapid retrieval.13

In examining these reading practices, Blair brushes up against a feature of early

modern information overload that most of the others overlook: the material implications

of the early modern book flood. The practices described by Blair illustrate the changing

social position of the book as an object. Annotations were not uncommon in manuscript-

era books, but cutting books apart and destressing their pages for the purposes of rapid

access speak to ways in which books were becoming more mundane, pedestrian objects,

and objects to be used in a variety of ways. Their proliferation and ever-widening

distribution was diminishing their cultural cachet as singular, even sacred, objects to be

meditated upon. The contributors to the Journal of the History of Ideas forum all focus on

the proliferation of scholarly books and the crises within the intellectual community

about how these books and the information they contained could be effectively absorbed

and used by scholars, philosophers, and theologians. But the printing boom was not

restricted to books catering to the intellectual elite. Indeed, the narrow margins of the

printing trade made high-end, scholarly publications risky endeavors that needed to be

offset with more readily salable fare.

12 Richard Yeo, "A Solution to the Multitude of Books: Ephraim Chambers's "Cyclopaedia"

(1728) as "The Best Book in the Universe"." Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (2003): 61-72. doi:10.2307/3654296.

13 Ogilvie, Brian W., "The Many Books of Nature: Renaissance Naturalists and Information

Overload." Journal of the History of Ideas 64, no. 1 (2003): 29-40. doi:10.2307/3654294.

114

The book boom and attendant anxieties over a deluge of new information had

everything to do with the colonial projects of European powers and their representatives.

Explosions of botanical information, for example, were prompted by encounters with

heretofore unidentified flora. The emerging field of ethnography was similarly catalyzed.

Expanding curiosity about the natural and human worlds was fueled by increasing

exposure to new curiosities, particularly those from the New World. In this intellectual

environment, the Anglo-Dutch relationship played an outsized role. Benjamin Schmidt

and Lisa Jardine have both explored the ways that colonial competition and collaboration

between nominally Dutch and English actors contributed to the scientific revolution of

the early modern period.14 Close ties between the printing centers of London and

Amsterdam (as well as Leiden and English scholastic presses in Oxford and Cambridge)

meant that each state’s revelations and conquests were readily absorbed into the

intellectual milieu of the other. At the elite intellectual level, this international exchange

of information spurred a continent-wide project of rethinking traditional systems of

meaning making. However, for the vast majority of Europeans, including state-actors and

much of the economic elite, growing information about the wider world prompted

projects aimed at securing valuable land, resources, and trading opportunities. For those

operating within this conceptual frame, national identity was a potent concept that gave

structure and coherence to the messy, often absurd realities of early modern European

colonialism.

14 See Benjamin Schmidt, Inventing Exoticism: Geography, Globalism, and Europe's Early Modern

World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 25-82; and Lisa Jardine, Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland's Glory. (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2008), 263-90.

115

As Chapters 1 and 2 showed, print, especially the cheap kind, was an active

participant in the negotiation of national concepts and identities, often in ways that

undermine concepts of unity and stability. Nevertheless, it is impossible to deny that

some notion of nationally-conceived shared purpose facilitated the unprecedented rash of

New World colonization by European powers that took place over the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries. Producing a sense of national commonality around colonial projects

was no mean feat. Looking past the narrow aims of joint-stock ventures like the Dutch

West India and Virginia companies to see colonization as a source of broadly-shared,

national prosperity necessitated some widely-shared idea of joint participation, even

among a segment of the population that would never cross the Atlantic. Printed objects

played no small part in nurturing that conceit. Political broadsides and screeds helped

define (and continually redefine) national boundaries both in geo-political and affective

terms. Despite their hyper-locality, almanacs encouraged readers to see themselves as

part of a larger, national whole. The popular travel writing genre, especially low-end

publications with fewer scientific pretentions, nurtured enthusiasm for colonial ventures

among a domestic European audience by providing imaginative access to colonized (or

colonize-able) spaces. Readers were prompted to visualize the potential and bounty of the

New World and to understand it as extractable in ways that would benefit the nation of

which they were part.

A coherent national body, one which is fed by the profits of colonial, expansion

and Atlantic trade is a common theme in both early modern, pro-colonial publications

and in modern Atlantic history scholarship. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century notions

116 of national belonging were useful constructions that encouraged people to see themselves

as part of a grand adventure, even if they would never actively participate in colonization

or exploitation of Atlantic peoples and goods. Even those that were directly involved in

expanding European interests in West Africa and the New World, but who were more

likely to earn themselves a coffin than a fortune, could take solace in knowing that they

were part of a larger whole. But these notions of identity-based national unity were not

without their critics, and the contours of the identities themselves were never universally

agreed upon. Global exploration and exploitation, driven by state and pseudo-state

interests, required notions of shared national identity to sustain their projects with capital

and personnel. The publication of descriptive accounts of new (and often fantastically

wondrous) places that could enrich the nation at large were one popular tactic for

encouraging a broad, national unity.15

Spurred by an explosion in printing capacity and a flood of new books,

publications of this sort became a genre unto themselves, complete with rhetorical

conventions and common, familiar formulations. At the same time that descriptive travel

writings were constructing parameters of identity that could stretch across oceans, the

material realities of colonizing the Atlantic rim were putting pressure on these very same

identities, illuminating fissures and stoking debate over what it meant to belong to a

trans-Atlantic nation. These debates were not limited to rarified, philosophical spheres.

They also took place in the popular publications of the day. In England, satirists and

15 Mary Pratt. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. (London: Routledge, 1992.), 1-

13. .

117 Grubstreet hacks weighed in on where Englishness began and ended, making their

arguments in small, humorous books sold at no great expense to as many people as

possible. One popular tactic for challenging the coherence of Englishness was to directly

parody the colonially minded descriptions of far-off places in ways that exposed salient

differences papered over by publications that invoked an uncomplicated English identity.

My argument here is that cheap, small books that parody the conventions of descriptive

travel writing illuminate the contested nature of early modern national identities and

expose the pressures Atlantic colonization placed on notions of national belonging.

“Dunghill of the Universe”: Trans-Atlantic National Identity in Ned Ward’s “Trip” publications

A boom in the production of books, an explosion in colonial endeavors, and a sea-

change in the production and organization of knowledge intersect in early modern travel

writing. The proliferation of texts that describe far-off, exploitable places in regular,

predicable terms established a genre. A diverse genre, to be sure, but one with clear,

identifiable conventions and patterns. And where there is the formalization of a genre,

parody is never far behind. By the earliest years of the seventeenth century, the form had

become recognizable enough that its tropes and expectations were being coopted for

other purposes than describing and analyzing foreign places.16 For some irreverent

16 Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, "Introduction." In The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing,

edited by Hulme, Peter and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.), 1-14.

118 authors, the conventions governing how exotic locals could be dissected and anatomized

could be ironically inverted to highlight the absurdities of what is most familiar and

common: one’s own countrymen.

In London, the beating heart of the early modern Anglophone printing universe,

the cheapest and most disreputable eddies of the book flood, earned the label “Grub

Street.” Named after the street where hack writers congregated, Grub Street became

shorthand for unlovely, speedily printed objects made with worn typeface on groaning

presses.17 Eventually, Grub Street evolved into a generally dismissive term, one Swift

uses to skewer Alexander Pope in “Advice to the Grub Street Verse Writers”.18 Ned

Ward was one of the many contributors to the torrent of publications that sustained the

Grub Street style.19 He was more successful than most. His A Trip to Jamaica was

reprinted several times and attracted readers to his other works. By and large, he wrote

critical satires that painted grotesque pictures of English institutions such as coffee

houses, ale houses, and even marriage. Travel writing parodies were a recurring theme in

his oeuvre, and I will to focus on the two that address English populations living

elsewhere in the Atlantic: A Trip to Jamaica and A Trip to New England. Each presents a

17 Grub Street was a particularly English term but grub-street-like publications were not a particularly English phenomenon. Underground or disreputable publications were part of robust printing cultures and sprouted up elsewhere in Europe around the same time. Amsterdam hosted a very similar branch of its print culture with its own colorful nomenclature: Duivelshoek or Devil’s Corner. See Jeroen Salman. "Grub Street in Amsterdam? Jacobus I, Van Egmont, the Devil's Corner and the Literary Underground in the Eighteenth Century." Quaerendo 42, no. 2 (2012): 134-57.

18 Jonathan Swift, “Advice to the Grub Street Verse Writers,” Poetry Foundation Website, The Poetry Foundation, accessed Jan. 12, 2021, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45264/advice-to-the-grub-street-verse-writers.

19 Howard William Troyer, Ned Ward of Grubstreet; a Study of Sub-literary London in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1946).

119 description of environments whose people have changed their habits and demeanors into

something Londoner’s would be hard pressed to see as properly English.

Each of Ward’s Trip stories begins with a tongue-in-cheek account of the voyage

from England to their New World locations. Once the narrator/protagonist arrives in the

titular English Atlantic colony, the narrative transitions into a more descriptive mode.

However, the primary subjects of analysis are English transplants rather than native

species. Ward’s Atlantic narratives invert the conventions of travel writing by

emphasizing the differences between English people in the Old and New Worlds rather

than focusing on European/Indigenous divides. He paints his grotesque portraits with

language and conventions readily familiar to readers of more serious travel writing. Ward

touches on the kind of ethnographic details that so often accompany more serious

renderings of indigenous societies. His Trip publications fracture the projection of trans-

Atlantic, unified Englishness that so many pieces of travel writing—indeed the entire

English colonial project—relied on and fostered. In both cases, Ward’s depictions of the

English diaspora highlight their excesses in ways that echo the sensationalism common to

so many descriptions of indigenous peoples, “…all Colonels, Majors, Captains,

Lieutenants, and Ensigns; the two last being held in such disdain, that they are look’d

upon as a Bungling Diver amongst a Gang of Expert Pick-Pockets; Pride being their

Greatness, and Impudence their Virtue. They regard nothing but Money, and value not

how they get it…”20 Compare that description of English people in Jamaica to Father

20 Edward Ward, A Trip to Jamaica: with a true character of the people and the island. By the

author of Sot’s paradise, (London: printed and sold by J. How, in the Ram-Head-Inn-Yard, in Fanchurch Street, 1700), John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI.

120 Hennipin’s serious-minded description of the Illinois tribe as “…Lazy, Vagabonds,

Timerous, Pettish, Theives, and so fond of their Liberty that they have no respect for their

Chiefs.”21 Incidentally, Hennepin’s narrative account of his time in North America

enjoyed an English translation in 1699, the same year Ward published A Trip to New

England and a year after A Trip to Jamaica.

Ward’s account of Jamaica and its English inhabitants is a direct inversion of the

utopia commonly invoked by other narrative accounts of Atlantic adventures. Where

writers like Richard Blome exaggerate the favorability of Jamaica’s climate and the ease

by which a fortune could be coaxed from the rich soil,22 Ward presents Jamaica as “the

Dunghill of the Universe”23 and “The Receptacle of Vagabonds, the Sanctuary of

Bankrupts, and a Close-stool for the Purges of our Prisons.”24 The text adopts a pseudo-

ethnographic tone and presents descriptions of the English in Jamaica as greedy (see

above), impious (“They have so great a veneration for Religion, That Bibles and

Common Prayer-Books are as good a Commodity amongst them, as Muffs and Warming-

Pans”25) and incompetent (“A Broken Apothecary will make a Topping Physician; a

21 Louis Hennipin, A New Discovery of a Vast Country in America (Chicago, IL: A.C. McClurg & Co., 1699, reis. 1903), John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI, 132.

22 Richard Blome, A Description of the island of Jamaica; with other isles and territories in America… (London: Printed by Joseph Bennet for Dorman Newman at the Kings-Arms in the Poultrey, 1678), John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI, 3.

23 Ward, A Trip to Jamaica, 13

24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 16.

121 Barber’s Prentice, a good Surgeon…and an English Knave a very Honest Fellow”26).

English women fare little better as “…they may vie Wickedness with the Devil: An

Impudent Air being the only Charms of their Countenance.”27 These descriptions, and

more like them encourage seeing those who made the move from England to Jamaica as a

cultural other. According to Ward, they even look different than England’s English: “…I

took a Survey round me and saw more variety of Scare-Crows than ever was seen at the

Feast of Ugly-Faces.”28 Ward never denies that those in Jamaica are from England, but

they have been made strange and unfamiliar by virtue of their own shortcomings and the

corroding influence of Jamaica’s hot climate. A Trip to Jamaica confronts its reader with

an account of a savage and ugly people driven by greed, hardly a portrait that encourages

readers in England to see colonists or their activities as a part of a broad, trans-Atlantic

Englishness.

A Trip to New England directly reflects many of the suspect traits associated with

Grub Street publications. There is no evidence that Ward ever set foot in North America.

Instead, his account of a journey to Boston plagiarizes John Josselyn’s New England’s

Rarities Discovered for its descriptions of the eastern seaboard, its animals, and its

people.29 Appended to the pirated passages are bits of Ward’s own humorous

26Ibid.,

27 Ibid.,

28 Ibid., 15. 29 John Josselyn, New England’s Rarities Discovered: In birds, beasts, fishes, serpents, and plants

of that country…,(London: Printed for G Widdowes at the Green Dragon in St. Paul’s Church-yard,, 1675), John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI. The copies of A Trip to New England and New England’s Rarities Discovered I examined were rebound as part of their inclusion in the JCB. Interestingly, both were rebound by John Hayday’s workshop, a well-known 19th century binder. The difference in the bindings

122 commentary.30 It was not uncommon for European authors to write authoritatively about

places and people they never saw, especially among writers of popular, accessible

accounts of foreign travel. They drew on (and/or pirated) the work of other writers, some

of whom had actually been to the places they described. In Ward’s case, the passages he

lifts from Josselyn are mixed together with jests and stereotyped anecdotes about New

Englanders that present them as haughty, lazy hypocrites and zealots. This unflattering

image is set in contrast to a glowing depiction of the local indigenous population, a

portrait which credits them with qualities proper to English people. The direct

comparison between the local Native American and English populations splits the notion

of English identity into two, unequal pieces.

“They are Saints without Religion, Traders without Honesty, Christians without

Charity, Magistrates without Mercy, Subjects without Loyalty, Neighbors without Amity,

Faithless Friends, Implacable Enemys, and Rich Men without Money.”31 This

description of the paradoxical character of Boston’s inhabitants summarizes Ward’s

general account of the English in North America. Here, and throughout both New

between the two says a great deal about how these two, roughly contemporaneous works were seen by those active in the development of John Carter Brown’s collection of early modern texts. The Josselyn work is elevated by its binding. An unexceptional octavo printing job on unremarkable paper, it nonetheless received royal binding treatment. Its pages, trimmed and gilded, are stitched into a green, embossed, partially gilded, full leather cover. Its status as an early, if not the first, natural history of New England likely secured its reputation as a significant publication for 19th century collectors. The Ward publications, though folio in format, are bound in 1/8th leather covers and are not afforded gilt of any kind. The differences in their binding speak to the attitudes of those tasked with creating the JCB’s core collection in the 19th century and their choices cannot help but influence the attitudes of modern researchers. 30 I was able to do a side-by-side comparison between Josselyn and Ward’s work at the JCB. Josselyn’s text is a very straight-forward description of New England with a heavy emphasis on the abundance of game and the fertility of the soil. Ward selects pieces of Josselyn’s descriptions and adds humorous comments, but does not indicate which pieces are his own and which he stole.

31 Edward Ward, A Trip to New England. With a Character of the Country and People, both English and Indians (London: [s.n.], 1699), John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI, 11.

123 England and Jamaica, Ward employs the pronouns “them” and “they”, not “we”. His

satirical ethnographic lens creates a division, one which shatters the expectation

generated by so much travel literature that the author and his subject share a common

identity. For example, contrast that description with his assessment of the indigenous

population: “Loyal to their Kings, Constant to their Wives, Indulgent to their Children,

and Faithful to their Trust.” The indigenous Americans are still “they,” but the London-

centered audience for Ward’s writings are prompted to identify with their characteristics

and disdain the unnatural, contradictory character of New England’s English.32 While

people actually living in New England were actively defining their Englishness against

Indian-ness,33 Ward was setting boundaries around those traits that define the English

character by rejecting New Englanders through an appeal to Indian-ness instead.

The Trip narratives consciously emphasize climate and food as root causes of the

less-than-English character of English people living outside of England. In doing so, they

echo the exaggerated emphasis of many earnestly written descriptions of New World

locales whose aim it was to justify colonization. For Ward, Jamaica’s heat and New

England’s extremes of both hot and cold distinguish these locations from England in

ways that have a direct effect on the body and temperament of those that inhabit them.

Similarly, Ward parodies the genre’s preoccupation with foreign flora and fauna in order

32 It is worth noting that Ward was an avowed loyalist and much of his critique of the English in America is as much a call for solidarity with England’s monarchical rulers as it was a condemnation of colonial English people themselves. For more see Poet of Grubstreet.

33 Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity, (New York, NY: Alfred A Knopf Inc, 1998), 5-13. Kindle edition.

124 to emphasize the dramatically different diets of English people outside of England. In

Jamaica, Ward describes the local reliance on sea turtle meat: “The chiefest of their

Provisions is Sea Turtle, or Toad in a shell, stewed in its own Gravy; its Lean is as White

as a Green-sickness Girl, its Fat of a Calves-turd Color; and is exceptionally good to put a

stranger into a Flux…”34. New England’s food he describes as more wholesome

(following Josselyn) but repeatedly comments on New Englander’s excesses of diet (and

laziness), “It being no rarity there to see a Man eat until he Sweats and Work until he

Freezes.”35

While books that took stock of the diversity of plants and animals unknown to

Europeans were fueling a move toward rationalism and a flood of new natural history

publications, Ward is playing off of lingering humoral attitudes that draw connections

between climate, diet, and character. Like the satirical broadsides that employed humoral

logic to justify the inherent inferiority of their regional neighbors, Ward puts satire to use

to make distinctions within the diverse body of people with claims on Englishness. The

dispersal of people from England into the wider Atlantic brought them into contact with

novel environmental elements, and Ward’s Trip narratives insist that these encounters

had a corrosive effect on their characters. These texts police the bounds of what is

appropriate to Englishness and find those who have abandoned their homeland—to

pursue fortune, redemption, zealotry, or all three at once—less than deserving of full

membership in the English national identity.

34Ward, A Trip to Jamaica, 14

35 Ward, A Trip to New England, 10.

125

Unlike many other satirical publications that adopt the language and structure of

travel writing, Ward’s travel narratives are intentionally parodic. They self-consciously

imitate the norms of travel writing to invert the expected subject of analysis. This sets

them apart from travel narrative that are more broadly satirical or humorous. A Brief

Character of the Low-Countries, A Character of England, and A Perfect Description…of

Scotland are all examples of satirical travel writing. They cadge onto a broad interest in

descriptions of foreign places to present unflattering caricatures of national types. In this

they are very similar to the ephemeral political broadsides examined in Chapter 1. They

rehearse and re-inscribe national stereotypes; thereby reaffirming the natural-ness of

national characters and elevating the preferred national self above others. They use the

conventions of descriptive travel narratives to present a humorous image of the other.

They lampoon other nations, not the genre itself. Parodic travel writing, on the other

hand, does just that, lampooning travel-writing in general by challenging the underlying

assumptions and conventions of the genre. In this way, travel writing becomes a way to

critique the self. Where colonially minded descriptive travel writing relied on a notion of

broadly-shared Englishness, parodies of the genre highlight the influence Atlantic

exploration placed on the English national identity. Far from assuming a coherent, trans-

Atlantic English identity, these texts highlight the contested nature of Englishness and

anxiety over its expression in Atlantic colonial contexts.

Travel Writing and the Material Diversity of the Early Modern Press

126

None-too-subtle critiques of the English that draw on travel writing genre

conventions rely on reader’s familiarity with the conventions of this genre. Ward and

other parodists explicitly evoke generic conventions in order to upend them and invert the

assumed subject. Rather than providing a detailed account of the foreign and exotic

elements of far-off places, Ward gives a damning account of the, supposedly, familiar

and mundane. This humorous rhetorical maneuver is only possible because of the

ubiquity and variety of travel writing in the universe of early modern publications.

Ward was able to target the broadest possible readership with his short, cheap,

and scatological publications because travel writing, as a genre, was a remarkably diverse

cohort of early modern publications. Its members included everything from lavishly

illustrated, full folio tomes of significant scientific and historical import to tiny, rough,

duodecimo publications that were more a vehicle for rehashing old jokes and stereotypes

than accounts or descriptions of new and foreign places. Its subjects range from the novel

flora and fauna of remote, New World locales to the taverns and highways of a

neighboring county. Conducting a search for travel writing in an early modern archive

will churn up a corpus of objects so dissimilar from one another it is difficult to conceive

that they have all become grouped under one common heading. The material diversity of

objects considered examples of travel writing speak to the broad popularity of the genre.

With this in mind, it is worth taking a moment to consider the physical properties of the

extreme ends of the travel writing spectrum, especially as they pertain to the concept of

authority and the different set of demands they placed on the printing cycle, from

production to consumption.

127

Unsurprisingly, the majority of scholarly attention has been directed at the most

physically and intellectually impressive specimens. Those few studies that examine the

genre as a whole tend to flatten the differences between various publications in order to

make a point about the general philosophy or historical circumstances underlying their

production.36 Paying more attention to their material properties illuminates how different

aspects of colonial imaginaries were emphasized in publications targeting various

elements of the larger reading public, and how the physical properties of publications

actively communicated information about how their contents were to be understood.

The copies of Jamaica and New England in the John Carter Brown collection

demonstrate both the physical diversity of early modern printed objects and the thrifty

resourcefulness of early modern printers. Unlike most of the cheap publications I

examined, the JCB’s copies of the texts are in folio format, affording them much more

room per page and allowing their title pages to boast much larger typeface. As mentioned

earlier, Ned Ward was a successful and prolific writer, and A Trip to Jamaica, as well as

some other works, enjoyed several reprints. Indeed, the copy at the JCB is from the

seventh edition. The particular copies I looked at had been bound for inclusion in the

JCB, though the originals were likely sold without any covers, allowing the large title

page to announce itself. Cost was still an issue, though, especially for publications that

sold for no more than six pence37. The paper in these larger-format publications is

36 For example, see Pratt, Imperial Eyes.

37 On the verso of the title page is an advertisement for other works by Ward that are being “sold

by J. How, in the Ram-Head-Inn-Yard in Fanchurch Street; by J. Weld at the Crown between the Temple Gates in Fleet-Street; and Mrs. Fabian, at Mercers-Chappel in Cheapside.”. According to this material both

128 exceptionally poor. In both, the paper is marred by large flecks of detritus, impurities

from the pulping process that prevented the paper from taking up ink in places. Some

sheets show the marks of hiccups in the process of forming the sheets on the screen: areas

where the stuff shifted before it could dry, leaving thick, soft bands in some places and

holes in others. These sheets were probably the broken or retree sheets bound around the

ream when it was sold. For the cost-conscious printer and profit driven bookseller,

turning flawed paper into salable, eye-catching things was good business. Waste not,

want not was their motto.

The John Carter Brown and Newberry Libraries both boast impressive collections

of notable examples of travel writing. Publications like Joannes van der Laet’s

Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien represent the upper echelons of Dutch printing acumen

which, in the 1620’s and 30’s when this tome was produced, were at or near the pinnacle

of European printing mastery. It proudly proclaims its scholarly credentials and shows

that the information it provides is drawn from vetted sources like the work of Jose de

Acosta as well as first-hand accounts like the “…various journals and recollections of

sailors, commissioners and navigators that have beheld these lands through the charge of

the Commissioned West-India Company.”38 Organizationally, the tome offers a rational

walk-through of known New World territories. Each of its sixteen books offers a

description of a New World region. Book one takes on the West-Indian Islands, book

four details Florida, book fourteen takes on Brazil, and so on. Each of these books is

A Trip to Jamaica and A Trip to New England were being sold for 6 pence, more expensive than the average almanac or ballad, but hardly a princely sum.

38 Johannes de Laet, Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien, (Leiden: printed by de Elzeviers, 1630), John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI, unnumbered introduction, ii.

129 itself broken into chapters that comment on the sub-regions contained within the larger

territories. Chapter four on Virginia, for example, includes information on Virginia, New

England and New Netherland. This highly-regulated organizational scheme is

contradicted, somewhat, by the sort of information provided for each of the territories and

their component regions. The descriptions of these New World places are somewhat

eclectic, jumping from geographic description to an account of the available resources to

some snippets about the region’s history and then back again to geography. Notably

absent is much information about the inhabitants, indigenous or colonial. By and large, its

emphasis is on climate, geography, and bounty. This makes sense given that the work is

both dedicated and addressed to the States General, and was likely intended to serve as a

reliable document upon which government-level decisions about colonization and

exploitation of the New World could be based.

The authority of Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien is more immediately

communicated through its non-textual elements. Its creamy, elegant vellum cover;

brilliant, folio-size paper; intricate, engraved title pages and map plates; and the crisp,

defined edges of its printed characters all speak to the care and attention given to its

creation. Care like this cost money, both for the material and the specialized labor

necessary to produce such a fine book. The obvious expense is also a marker of economic

power and authority. It is remarkably light for its size, but a hefty tome none-the-less. As

an object, it places demands on its reader. It is not a text that can be easily or comfortably

held and read at the same time. It demands additional support and forces the reader to

arrange her or his body specifically for effective reading. It is a tome that is consulted,

130 not perused. Its physical and textual composition encourage the curious to identify the

topic of their interest and locate the relevant passages, not browse its offerings. It was

designed to be read at a library table, not lounging in a chair, and certainly not in a

tavern. It communicates its authority on the topics it addresses by being imposing,

physically and textually. It is no surprise that texts like these dominate our understanding

of the early modern European colonial imagination and strategy. It is a book that

demands attention, one which draws the gaze of others in the archival reading rooms. The

object itself is seductive.

Compare this grandiose tome with another piece of printed travel writing: A Brief

Character of the Low Countries under the States. Being Three Weeks Observation of the

Vices and Vertues of the Inhabitants.39 This tract, published some thirty years after

Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien, could not be more different. First off, it is tiny. It is, at

most, four inches top to bottom and is a mere two and half inches wide. The paper is

unremarkable. It is thin-ish and browning, but largely free of obvious imperfections or

noticeable debris. The printing itself is less than impressive. There are many places where

over-inked typeface produced blotches and just as many where under-inked letters left no

mark whatsoever. Here and there, incautious pressing shifted the paper, leaving some

words blurry and intelligible only through context.

Perhaps this underwhelming execution of the printer’s craft is responsible for its

current state in the archive. The text is not honored with its own binding, but rather

39 Owen Felltham, A Brief Character of the Low Countries under the States: Being three weeks

observation of the vices and vertues of the inhabitants (London: printed for H.S and are to be sold by Rich. Lowndes, at the White Lion in St. Pauls Churchyard, near the little North door, 1660), John Carter Brown Library, Providence, RI.

131 stitched together with two other, contemporaneous texts of similar composition and

content: A Character of England: as it was lately presented in a letter, to a nobleman of

France. With reflections on Gallus Castratus and A Perfect Description of the People and

Country of Scotland. When these three publications were bound together is unclear, but

was probably the work of a librarian rather than the original buyer. They were all

published in either 1659 or 1660, so they may have been stitched up around that time.

However, their binding is not contemporary to their publication, so they may have been

grafted together significantly later. In either case, their current binding makes some

attempts at aggrandizing them. Their trimmed and gilded edges and leather cover are

almost certainly the result of a later intervention, though the effect is somewhat

undermined by a typo in the gold, embossed lettering on the spine. The collection is titled

A Characte [sic] of England and does not mention the other tracts. Perhaps even their age

was not sufficient reason for a nineteenth or twentieth century archivist to pay the binder

for exceptional attention or effort. Indeed, it is only the effort of modern historians that

made A Brief Character of the Low Countries or A Perfect Description of…Scotland

discoverable by any but the lucky.

As an object, the publications collected within A Characte of England do not

demand the kind of physical concessions Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien requires. The

book could be easily held in one hand and the pages turned with the other. It could even

be placed easily in a pocket or bag and transported without any special consideration.

These qualities would be even more salient for readers who encountered these

publications before the interventions of those who bound them for archival storage. The

132 markings of their historical authority were grafted onto them after they had stood the test

of time and were found worthy of their incorporation into the modern archive.

Tonally, A Brief Character of the Low Countries and its companion texts are as

dissimilar from Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien as their material qualities. Where the

magisterial Dutch-language tome presents its authority through dispassionate description,

the grubby, English tract is comedic, judgmental, and overtly hyperbolic. Where

Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien steps systematically through the geographic, botanical,

and proto-ethnographic information it compiled, A Brief Character… skips lightly

between these topics. At first, it presents a highly critical picture of the Netherlands: “The

soyle is all fat, though wanting the colour to show it so; for indeed it is the buttock of the

World, full of veins & bloud, but no bones in’t.”40 Then it offers some begrudging praise

for the ingenuity and perseverance of Dutch peoples: “For Providence they are

Pismires….The remoter angles of the world do by their pains deliver them their sweets;

and being of themselves in want, their diligence hath made them both Indies neerer

home.41

The material differences of these books and the different demands they place on

the bodies of the people who read them are not incidental. They communicate their

authority and suggest an interpretive approach to the reader. While both Beschrijvinghe

van West-Indien and A Brief Character of the Low Countries aim to describe and explain

features of foreign places, they do so with an eye to the wants, needs, and abilities of their

40 Felltham, A Brief Character, Pg. 5

41 Ibid., Pg. 61-2

133 readers. The print market produced examples of travel writing to suit almost any

conceivable taste and price point. The scientific tone and thrust of

Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien was common across other high-end publications. Some

of these publications, such as New England’s Rarites Discovered, found traction amongst

a wider, less-affluent readership by being republished in smaller formats with less

luxuriant paper and without the expensive engravings that complicated the printing

process and drove up cost. Others were produced to appeal to a middling readership with

interest in systematic description but lacking the resources to buy and host a dramatic,

full-folio tome. Some descriptions were couched in autobiographical narratives (real or

fabricated) offered by the people who did the traveling themselves, like A Description of

the Province of Maryland. Others, like the texts accompanying A Brief Character of the

Low Countries and A Trip to New England were primarily aimed at entertainment, but

incorporated description of foreign locales in ways that shed light on the physical,

cultural and behavioral differences of the people inhabiting these different spaces42.

Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien and A Brief Character of the Low Countries

represent two appeals to nationality and nationhood. Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien

addresses itself to the States General, the republican governing body of the United

Provinces of the Netherlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Its stated

purpose is to serve as a comprehensive and authoritative reference work on West Indian

(in reality, New World) spaces and resources for use by government officials and colonial

42 In this way, many of these satirical or melodramatic publications resemble the broadsides

discussed in Chapter 1, though with less of a topical and/or political bent. Their greater allowance of page space allowed them to more thoroughly explore and/or lampoon the sympathies between peoples and places without making a specific, explicit political point.

134 elites. Its appeal to the States General and the Stadtholders that comprised its

representative members makes it an explicitly national text. It lays bare the New World

for the perusal of state agents. It encourages and facilitates a fantasy of exploration and

exploitation on the part of the national government. For its part, A Brief Character of the

Low Countries contributes to the ongoing process of national differentiation among

European states by drawing distinctions between the geology and topography of England

and the Netherlands and appealing to those differences to paint contrasting pictures of

Englishness and Dutchness.

I have chosen these particular texts to set against one another because they

illustrate the extremes of the craft of printing in mid-seventeenth-century Europe and the

extremes of the genre that has been lumped under the heading “travel writing.” The

dramatic differences between these two examples of travel writing illustrate just how

broad the genre was and also points to the breadth of readers interested in information

about places they might never see themselves. Increasing printing capacity, in no small

part the product of increasingly mercantile approaches to production, and a broadly

shared appetite for descriptions of foreign lands resulted in a massive proliferation of

publications that sought to make distant spaces available and intelligible for domestic

European readers.

Conclusion: Travel Writing for Imaginary Places

135

While Ward was abnormally successful for a Grub Street hack, he was hardly

original in parodying the tropes of travel writing. Decades of “discoveries” in the Atlantic

space and subsequent publications detailing their qualities provided a useful framework

for parodic narratives aiming for allegorical critique. Jonathan Swift’s 1726 Gulliver’s

Travels is probably the best known example, but it had plenty of predecessors including

1712’s A Long Ramble, or, Several years travels in the much talk’d of But never before

discovered wandering island of O-Brazil. At its heart it is a political satire and a critique

of Whigs and their policies, especially regarding the promotion of Atlantic trade and the

violent, costly conflict it engendered.43 Its rhetorical strategy is to describe a non-existent

island that, according to folklore, wandered around the ocean west of Ireland and only

appeared occasionally, the Brigadoon of the Atlantic Ocean. Its fauna and inhabitants are

send-ups of Whig values and policies presented in a wry lampoon of natural historical

descriptive prose. It paints them as belonging to another nation entirely, one divorced

from English (read: Tory) rationality and propriety. It uses Englishness as a wedge to

divide the competing strategies toward the Atlantic into the categories familiar to the

travel writing genre: civilized and savage

The author of A Long Ramble… is anonymous, as is often the case with short,

satirical works. The representative copy in the Newberry Library has been rebound

though it was certainly sold without a cover and may not have been bound until someone

determined it was worth archival preservation. It is octavo in format and exactly forty

43 Trevor Burnard, “Making a Whig Empire Work: Transatlantic Politics and the Imperial

Economy in Britain and British America.” The William and Mary Quarterly, 69, no. 1 (2012): 51–56, DOI:10.5309/willmaryquar.69.1.0051.

136 pages long. Throughout, the author uses the text to level some barbs at the publishing

industry and, in so doing, reveals something of an explanation for the small book’s size

and length:

I am oblig’d to break of [Sic] abruptly, the Printer telling me he can afford no more for Six Pence, nor will he venture to make it up a Shilling. This is a great Disappointment, and I fear may prove Prejudicial, for my next Article was an Account of the Women, and that Sex may perhaps be offended that no Notice has been taken of them. It is in their own Power to right themselves, let them Buy this, and in the next they shall have the first Place, which cannot but be acceptable, they are fond of Precedence, and it shal be there allow’d them. In short, both Sexes may do as they please, if they like and encourage this, the second Part shall soon follow, and is much more Entertaining, for all Men are not bound to write the best at first. If they Damn this, they shall have no more, and it will be Revenge enough to deprive them of that which could not fail of Pleasing.44

This little coda situates the text firmly within that band of early modern publication that

was produced for the express purpose of turning a quick penny. In addition to being an

advertisement for a potential sequel, this passage illuminates the particular difficulties

that surrounded the production of small books. The financial concerns of the publisher, in

tension with the informational or artistic impulses of the author, set the limit of resources

a printing house would be willing to dedicate to its production. Small books of this sort

walked a finer line than cheap, single sheet broadsides or reliable almanacs. Their

production was more of a gamble requiring, as they did, a greater initial outlay and

providing no guarantees of purchase. Early in the text, the author alludes to the fate of

many poor-selling publications that ended up as weighing on printer’s balance sheets:

44 A Long Ramble: or several years travels, in the much talk’d of, but never before discover’d,

wandering island of O-Brazil, (London: s.n., 1712), General Collection, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL, 40.

137

…what he [the author] writes should sell to Gentleman and other well-dispos’d Persons for their reading and diversion, to be preserved in their Studies and Libraries, and so transmitted to Posterity and not to wicked Pastry-Cooks and Tabacconists, those mortal Enemies to unfortunate Authors, who’s Labors they unmerciful Destroy; the first cruelly thrusting them into hot Ovens, under Tarts and Pies, to be inhumanly bak’d and scorch’d to Death; the others, making Wrappers of them for their filthy Weed, which naturally conveys them to be apply’d to light Pipes, and thus they have a most deplorable End, being not only burnt, but stunk out of the World, like Kittens cast into a Jakes.45

Like almanacs and broadsides, small books were ephemeral objects. The fact that they

commanded a greater volume of paper and demanded more labor in their production did

not automatically vault them into a higher tier of printed objects where their preservation

could be assured.

The dubious utility of much of the information conveyed through travel narratives

is a rich target for the author of A Long Ramble. The genre’s preoccupation with foreign

flora comes in for special ridicule. “It is a great Misfortune I am not an able Botanist, for

had I been so, I might have made as many Volumes of O-Brazilian Plants as Ogilby has

done of all Parts of the World, and to as little Purpose; and yet it is to some Purpose to

publish such mighty Works, for the Stationers sell their Paper, the Printers and Engravers

are employ’d, and the Publick is supply’d with waste Paper at reasonable Rates, and all at

the expense of a few unfortunate Booksellers”. The Ogilby referred to in this passage is

John Ogilby, an English writer most famous for his detailed and systematic description of

England’s highways and byways. Ogilby also wrote America: Being an Accurate

45 Ibid., 4-5

138 Description of the New World, a translation of a Dutch very much in the vein of

Beschrijvinghe van West-Indien.

The JCB copies of both the Dutch publication and its English translation are

lavishly illustrated texts that systematically step through various regions of the New

World and detail their riches in grandiose, and often hyperbolic, terms.46 A Long

Ramble’s treatment of Ogibly’s work echoes the author’s concerns that their own work

might well find more use as tobacco wrappings and pastry shells. It undercuts the

material authority of “mighty works” by reminding readers of their shared material

elements and the industry they have in common. In the first instance, it begs readers to

save the less grandiose publication from an ignominious fate, and then in the second it

suggests that wastepaper may be the most appropriate destiny for all books, even for a

publication with America’s pedigree. In an informational environment characterized by a

flood of printed paper, drawing distinctions between various sorts of publications became

a skill all its own. A Long Ramble makes the case for questioning the material markers of

authority by applying a different criterion: usefulness. The implication is that the detailed

and expansive description of New World plants is of little “purpose”. Buried in this

assertion is the reality that most English people would never see much benefit from the

‘discoveries’ touted in publications like Ogilby’s, a reality that strikes at the heart of the

assertions of national unity and enrichment that frame so much of the travel writing

genre.

46 John Ogilby and Arnoldus Montanus, America: being an accurate description of the new world;

containing the original inhaitants; and the remarkable voyages thither…, (London: printed by Tho. Johnson for the author and are to be had at his House in White Fryers, 1670), Special Collections, Newberry Library, Chicago, IL.

139 From the first paragraph, A Long Ramble toys with genre expectations. Indeed the

very purpose, of descriptive travel writing. An Essay is clear in its instructions that

travelers should take note of a foreign region’s global location, size and the qualities of

its “commodities” or geographic features. A Long Ramble notes all these things in a way

that renders them entirely useless:

It’s (sic) Latitude is exactly the same with that of any other Place lying at the like Distance from the Pole, or upon the same Parallel, and its Longitude equal to all others on that Meridian. The Length and Breadth of it are the same, tho’ it is neither Square, Round or Triangual, but exactly of any Shape that does not differ from it; and the Compass is so great, that a Man cannot Ride round it in less Time than his Horse will carry him. The Hills and Mountains are not at all low and level, nor the Plains and Vales steep and craggy. The Soil produces every Thing that will grow upon it, and there is such Plenty of all Necessaries, that no Man need ever want any Thing he has no Occasion for.47

This passage subverts the intent of An Essay’s instructions, making the land impossible to

locate and impossible to describe in any real sense. It also parodies the utopic qualities of

so many earnest descriptions of Atlantic spaces. It provides all the requisite information

while saying exactly nothing at all. Of course, since O-Brazil is a fictional island, this

makes its own illogical sense. The purpose of the joke here is to illuminate the

conventions of the genre and highlight the functionality of the place being described. It

also signals the reader that the purpose of the publication is not to actually provide

functional information about an Atlantic island, but to use this particular set of

conventions to some other purpose, namely a challenge to the benefits of travel writing,

and the colonial expansionism that is both its subject and its purpose.

47 A Long Ramble, 3.

140 The carefully described nowhere of O-Brazil in A Long Ramble offers a clean

slate for the author’s project of critiquing English expansionism and those aspects of the

English national character that drive toward growth and adventurism. In publications like

America and Beschrijvinghe van West-Indian, descriptions of animals are only somewhat

less prominent than those of plant life. Often, the descriptions of them are as hyperbolic,

outlandish and fantastical as those of the soil’s fecundity. A Long Ramble includes a

pointed description of the “what-shall-I-call-it,” a beast native to the elusive, floating

island.

“[It]…resembles a Man in all outward Form…[and]…for several Years it devour’d no less than the Value of 6000 l. per Ann. In Bread alone, and this at the public Cost…It would have been a mighty Destruction of Cattel, if one Mouth must have been supply’d with Flesh proportionable to that Bread, and the Nature of the What-shall-I-call-it was such, that it chiefly delighted in Man’s Flesh, and therefore having no Opportunity of Feeding on that openly at home, it every Year took a Progress abroad, carrying over vast Numbers of the Islanders, whom it set upon the Neighboring Nations, that they might slaughter one another, and thus scarce a Year past, but it feasted upon the Carcasses of 20 or 30000 Men.”48

The “what-shall-I-call-it” is further described as having no “…Complacency for their

Fellow Creatures, their selfish Vanity makes them dispise all others; no People so Brave,

none so Wise, none so Learned, none son Ingenious as themselves in their own Opinions;

all others are Fools and Cowards, Brutes and Barbarians, when in Reality it is a most

infallible Maxime, and every verify’d by Experience that there are none so worthless, as

those that put the greatest Value on themselves.”49

48 Ibid., 15-16 49 Ibid., 17

141

The descriptions of the what-shall-I-call-it’s rapaciousness and self-regard are

overt condemnations of Whig policies regarding English military activity in service to

global trade. While the what-shall-I-call-it is presented as a member of O-Brazil’s fauna,

the description the author provides resonates with many conventions in how descriptions

of the New World treat indigenous peoples. In publications describing the New World,

salacious descriptions of violence and savagery on the part of the indigenous peoples

were particularly prominent. A Long Ramble alluded to this convention to draw a

distinction between Tory and Whig views. It also works to situate the Tory position as

proper to civilized Englishness. By adopting the conventions of the form, A Long Ramble

recasts the very project of the travel writing genre writ large. It transforms the utopic,

nationalist project of colonialist expansionism as a product of a default in the notion of

Englishness.

Politics was not the only division within Atlantic Englishness. The behaviors and

habits proper to Englishness were also the subject of no little debate. The previous

chapter emphasized the local nature of national identities in the Atlantic, but these locales

were not entirely foreign to one another. Linked by imperial infrastructure and personal

networks, travel between nominally English places throughout the Atlantic was not

uncommon. Authors like Ned Ward, who himself traveled within the English empire,

observed and commented on the stark differences that existed between English people

throughout the Atlantic. These distinctions, often attributed to differences in climate

between England and various New World environments, expose fissures in Englishness

produced by the dispersal of people from the Isle of Britain to the larger Atlantic. Viewed

142 within their material print context, they further complicate the notions of early modern

national homogeneity.

143

Chapter 4 Graphic Satires

Paper is a central actor in the story of the financial crises of 1720. The

replacement of gold and silver with specially marked slips of paper was an explicit goal

of the novel financial system that the infamous John Law attempted to establish in

France.1 Elsewhere, increasingly complicated financial arrangements and a chronic

shortage of currency required the ad hoc replacement of coin with paper and produced de

facto paper currencies even if they fell short of functioning as true paper money.2 When

the South Sea and Mississippi companies—both organizations with deep financial ties to

their respective national governments—collapsed, they shattered the growing stock

market. Paper stocks that, only yesterday, could command great sums of money or

extraordinary services were suddenly placed on par with yesterday’s stale newssheet.

This dramatic turnaround undermined the notion that paper could do anything more than

record and represent a quantity of weighty, precious metal that existed elsewhere.

Unsurprisingly, the bursting bubbles of 1720 prompted a host of commentators to

take to the presses in order to deride and condemn stock trading and speculation. The fact

that they were using paper to disseminate their screeds on the foolishness of replacing

coin money with paper money was not lost on them. The material differences between

paper and metal played a large part in critics’ assessments of why the financial

1 John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1960), 82.

2 Eric Helleiner, The Making of National Money: Territorial Currencies in Historical Perspective

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2018), 28-9.

144 experiments of the early eighteenth century failed. A piece of paper’s negligible weight

and the relative heft of precious metals made a perfect contrast through which to explore

the more theoretical implications of early modern attempts to supplant traditional ideas of

value with new ideas about the nature of wealth.

Figure 2. Des waerelds doen en doolen/Is maar een mallemoolen. Image courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.

Des waerelds doen en doolen,/Is maar een mallemoolen, translated as “The

World’s Doings and Ways Are But a Merry-Go-Round,” is only one flake in the blizzard

of anti-stock market prints to cascade off early modern European presses.3 The center of

3 Translation from The Great Mirror of Folly, Muller 38. As discussed later in this chapter, Het

Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid does not conform to the conventions of published material. Each physical

145 the print is dominated by a contraption that looks nothing like a modern-day merry-go-

round, but accomplishes the same thing. Riders circulate around a central pivot, always

moving and going nowhere. Unlike the familiar playground equipment, this merry-go-

round has small gondolas suspended by rope from cantilevered booms. In this print, a

devil on horseback drives the machine’s circular motion as foolish gondola riders try to

snatch bits of paper out of the air. A supportive super structure of vertical beams, each

crowned with an allegorical human figure, keeps the contraption upright. Each of the

human figures stands with one arm outstretched, leaves of paper spilling from its hands.

The figure furthest left is dressed as a Dutch laborer with a shovel referencing the

explosion of canal digging projects that had sprung up in the early eighteenth century

with promises of great returns when inland cities became Atlantic maritime ports.4 The

next figure, with a skirt made of netting adorned with fish, lets fly a few papers with the

word zuid, Dutch for “south.” It and represents the South Sea company. The next figure,

wearing a headdress, looses some pages with the abbreviation “Missi” and represents the

Mississippi Company. The final visible figure, portrayed with darker skin, holding a bow,

and smoking tobacco, drops a few leaves with the word “west” for the Dutch West India

Company (WIC). Most of the paper pieces drifting through the air do not have words

copy has a slightly different collection of prints in a slightly different order. Rather than cite the prints as they occur in the John Carter Brown copy from which I worked, I will use the Muller numbering system favored by Arthur Cole and most subsequent historians.

4 Again, this is a symbol that would be primarily directed toward a Dutch audience. Interestingly, Muller 6 is a map proposing the route for a ship bearing canal connecting Utrecht to the sea. A massive undertaking.

146 inscribed on them; however the majority are inscribed with numbers. Some have a “100”

or a “1000”, but most have just a “0”.

The allegorical carnival ride is enclosed by a fence with a small drawbridge-like

gate. A well-appointed man and woman wait to accept the bags of coins from would-be

merry-go-round riders. Extending around the fence is a large throng, tussling and fighting

amongst each other over pieces of paper and brandishing their own numbered paper

scraps. In the background of the print a steady stream of wagons lumbers toward a far-

distant town identified as “Viaanen” (Vianen in modern Dutch). A town in the

Netherlands that maintained independence from the larger Republic, Vianen became a

popular refuge for Dutch debtors.5 A fool’s ship, ineffectually powered by fans and the

blowing of trumpets, declares by means of a banner that it is bound for “Pepperland” or

the East Indies, another refuge for debtors.6 In the background, better manned ships sail

toward the horizon, reminding viewers that the madness of the merry-go-round is

underpinned by the realities of early modern global trade.

The dense, overlapping symbols of the print work in tandem to mock and deride a

growing trend in early modern European finance. The early eighteenth century saw an

explosion in the creation of companies to exploit trade opportunities and/or undertake

massive infrastructure projects. After the catastrophic collapse of two of the largest—the

English South Sea and French Mississippi companies—critics took to the presses to

register their smug I-told-you-so’s about the dangers of trading stock. By reimagining the

5 Lodewijk Petram, The World’s First Stock Exchange (Columbia University Press, 2014), 82.

Ebook edition.

6 Muller 38.

147 issuance and trade in stock as a demon-powered carnival ride, the anonymous artist

behind Des waerelds doen en doolen savages the notion that speculative trade in stock is

a viable path to prosperity.

The merry-go-round also evokes Fortune’s ever-turning wheel coupled with the

frivolous excess of carnival or festival days. The frenzied mob and escaping debtors tell a

short, clear story about the consequences of irrational exuberance for untested fiscal

innovations. The allegorical figures atop the structural posts drive home the new realities

of an increasingly globalized economic world, one which few petty investors could truly

claim to understand. The gondola-riding stock traders themselves are presented as

greedy, foolish rubes too willing to part with cold, hard cash for the slim chance of

snagging a paper fortune out of thin air. This last point—the greed and stupidity of the

average stock speculator—relies on a trope common to many critiques of stock jobber

behavior, namely the absurd notion that paper could be valuable. The leaves of paper,

carelessly littered onto the heads of grasping punters, stand in stark contrast to the heavy

sacks of gold coins being collected at the merry-go-round entrance. That the portrayal of

paper in this print presents its worthlessness is self-evident. It is variously torn, trampled

and blown by the wind; it is fragile, abundant, and, above all, light.

In the early eighteenth century, a consumer of engraved prints might have found

Des waerelds doen en doolen in the window of a print shop that catered to the desires of

the moderately-well-heeled with a taste for political satire. Or perhaps it was viewed on

the wall of a coffee shop that attracted people hungry for news, analysis, and a caffeine

fix. It was common for individual collectors to gather their purchases into idiosyncratic,

148 personalized books of sorts by having a binder stitch them together and cover them.7 It

was less common for a printer, print seller, or bindery to undertake the expense of

binding a collection of prints in the hopes of selling them all together, but that is roughly

the story of the volume in which I found Des waerelds doen en doolen. It is one of

roughly three score prints that were selected and collected into a large book whose entire

purpose was to gather together a host of materials, most of them Dutch in origin,

condemning the practice of stock speculation. 8 The book, titled Het Groote Tafereel der

Dwaasheid (The Great Scene of Folly) is an assemblage of poems, short plays, and prints

all touching on a central theme: the disastrous bursting of stock market bubbles in and

around 1720.

The inherent lightness of paper is a central theme of many of the satires and

lampoons in Het Groote Tafereel, especially in the rich collection of graphic prints. The

portrayal of floating paper in Des waerelds doen en doolen is a common trope throughout

Het Groote Tafereel’s various satires. Looking through the prints in the John Carter

Brown Library’s version of Het Groote Tafereel, a clear majority of them include some

depiction of paper.9 In many instances, these pieces of paper are convenient blank spaces

7 Marjorie Swann, Curiosities and Texts: The Culture of Collecting in Early Modern England

(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 153-6.

8 I say there are roughly sixty prints because different versions of Het Groote Tafereel contain different print collections. Some early examples of the book have fewer, some produced later have more.

9 Forty of the seventy two prints in the John Carter Brown’s copy of Het Groote Tafereel represent

pieces of paper in some way. In coming to this number I included only prints that show pieces of paper being held in the hand, falling through the air or laying on the ground. My focus was on representations of paper as a worldly material and something figures in these prints were actually handling. I did not include representations of paper or paper-like materials that existed outside the action of the print like those adorning emblems or cartouches or serving as a title card that identified a particular person, event, or allusion.

149 within the world of the print where the creator could explicitly identify the target of the

lampoon. Just as often, the pieces of paper bare only numbers, representing the monetary

value attached to those particular scraps. By far the most common number to be seen is

“0”. Looking across these seventy two prints, it is clear that paper plays a central role in

the drama of 1720, and that a fundamental misunderstanding of paper’s value and

limitations lies at the heart of the foolish, manic speculation leading up to the disastrous

crash.

Of the forty-odd engravings that portray paper, roughly half of them depict paper

being dropped from on high and floating, willy-nilly, down to the ground or to crowds of

eagerly waiting individuals trying to capture them. The means by which the scraps are

disbursed varies. Sometimes they appear out of thin air. Sometimes they erupt from the

mouth or anus of a person or animal, a pattern I address below. Most often, they are

thrown or dropped from on high by human figures. These figures represent everything

from a stereotypical stock-jobber or clown to allegories that encompass entire continents

as in Des Waerelds Doen en Doolen. In almost every instance, there is a scrum of heads

and hands reaching eagerly to snatch the scraps of paper out of the air. These images

evoke the “frenzy” or “mania” of speculation so often credited with the inflation of the

South Sea and Mississippi bubbles. By and large, the crowds are composed of

anonymous characters rather than notable individuals. They are a foolish and frantic mob

of everymen swept up in a collective fever. Duped by the devil or actionists (an early

modern Dutch word for stock trader) they make fools of themselves fighting over scraps

of paper. The papers’ lack of economic weight is made explicit by big zeros in the middle

150 of the blank sheets or through the emblazoned name of a recently defunct venture. Their

physical lightness is emphasized by curling corners and folds made as the wind then

scatters them among the gullible.

The failures of the South Sea and Mississippi Companies left an enduring mark

on the economic imagination of those who lived through it. The Het Groote Tafereel

codices are artifacts that attest to both of these facts. As reflections of a unique historical

moment, the various Het Groote Tafereel publications gather a body of materials that

address the rise of novel, untested, and risky financial innovations and the effects of their

sudden, dramatic failure. Many of the prints that constitute the core of the Het Groote

collection use images of paper floating in the air, pushed by breezes (or farts), and/or set

in visual contrast to weighty metal coinage. These commentaries make much of paper’s

material lightness, using it to underscore an argument about the foolishness of replacing

silver and gold with dried linen pulp. These images emphasize the fragility of wealth

built on speculation by evoking the material fragility of paper and, by extension, call into

question the stability of financial theories that seek to divorce wealth from its traditional

foundation of precious metals.

Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid: An Authoritative Collection

Physically, Het Groote Tafereel screams authority and significance. The book

communicates its status as an authoritative source on the events of 1720 through the

richness of its materials. The book is a large folio, thinner than some, and remarkably

light for its size. The cover is contemporaneous with its brown, calf hide binding. Gold

151 tooling on the front cover makes a handsome pattern of three detailed frames surrounding

an intricate diamond shape in the center. On the spine gold lettering spells out “Tafereel

der Dwaasheid Ao. 1720”. Unless you are exceptionally tall, the best way to view the

book’s contents is by standing up so you can look down on its pages. Even if you were to

view the book outside the protective bubble of the archive, and be allowed to handle it at

will, it is not a book that would fit easily into a hand. Like the more dramatic examples of

travel writing discussed in Chapter 3, this is a book that forces one’s body to meet the

obligations of its size.

The first section of the tome is given over to double columned pages of text which

set out, in some detail, the financial structures of a host of projects throughout the United

Provinces. The projects described are diverse. There are insurance schemes,

infrastructure improvements, and proposals to establish trading companies. The uniting

factor among all these projects is their reliance on the issuing of stock to raise the funds

needed to undertake the proposed goals. The next section is a substantial collection of

satirical plays, doggerel poems, an extended description of a deck of cards, and a

correspondence between an “N.N” and an “A.Z” (probably the only text printed

originally and exclusively for copies of Het Groote). These pages are thick, a little stiff,

creamy white in color, and printed with precision in rich, black ink. The final section is a

goodly collection of graphic, mostly satirical engravings printed on the kind of thin,

flexible, but also durable paper formulated for use in a high-pressure rolling press. The

images may have been printed especially for this volume, but if so they were pulled from

152 existing plates that had originally been engraved to produce single-sheet publications. 10

Unlike publications of the highest quality, whose intaglio images were stitched together

with text-only pages, all of these prints have been tipped in, which is to say they were

printed individually then pasted onto stumpy, tag-ends of paper that could be more easily

bound. This is a publication technique that saved a great deal of time and expense since it

required significantly less by way of printing-house coordination.

The engravings, having been collected and tipped into a fully bound volume, are

far removed from the conventions surrounding the production and sale of single sheet,

engraved prints. That new context confers a sense of authority, but it also robs the

engravings that depict single sheets of floating or drifting paper of a significant resonance

that might have informed their interpretation. Encountering an image in a book is very

different experience from encountering a standalone engraving. I believe that some of

these engravings consciously invoke the experience of holding or seeing a single sheet of

paper to emphasize the absurdity of thinking that such a trivial object could be the same

thing as a large sum of money. Certainly some engravings were valuable even at the

moment of their production, but not to the tune of thousands of pounds, guilders, or livres

as these engravings depict. The tactile experience of holding a single sheet of paper that

depicts a single sheet of paper produces a consonance between the two that highlights the

material difference between paper and heavy, precious metals. Now, of course, we are

quite used to seeing paper as money, but that notion is clearly mocked throughout these

10 Arthur H. Cole, The Great Mirror of Folly (Kress Library Publication; No. 6. Boston, MA:

Baker Library, Harvard Graduate School of Buisness Administration, 1949), 17. Cole suggests that some of the prints may have been unsold stock repackaged into a different format to attract a different audience.

153 engravings. Encountering these individual engravings in codex form gives them a

different weight quite literally. They cannot be held and manipulated as a single sheet,

forcing the reader of Het Groote to bear the weight of the entire volume in order to

engage with the print. This erases the parallel one might draw between the tactile

experience of holding paper and the representation of paper’s fickle fragility, the latter

being a theme that many of these prints rely on to make their point about the dangers of

speculation.

Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid is not a rare book in the grand scheme of

eighteenth-century publications. WorldCat includes seventy entries for the title held at

libraries from Honolulu, HI to Providence, RI and from Amsterdam to Sydney.

Researchers in the Anglophone world and Western Europe do not need to travel far to

find a copy. What they will find as they leaf through the pages is another question. By

dint of its atypical construction, Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid fundamentally

challenges most of the expectations of what a book is. A reader examining the copy at the

Bell Library in Minnesota is not faced with the same content as a researcher in Bremen,

or even St. Louis. Arthur Cole and Kuniko Forrer have conducted the most wide ranging

bibliographic investigations of Het Groote Tafereel. Through their comparisons of

individual codices held by a goodly number of research libraries, they both individually

show that books bearing that title vary dramatically in both contents and organization.11

Despite being identified as 1720 publications, there is good evidence that some were

11 Kuniko Forrer, “Het groote tafereel der dwaasheid: A Bibliographical Interpretation,” in The

Great Scene of Folly: Finance, Culture and the Crash of 1720, ed. William Goetzman et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 35-52; and Cole, The Great Mirror of Folly, 14-15.

154 actually printed well after 1720 and that subsequent editions were revised to include

developing historical events.12

Kuniko Forrer, Het Groote’s foremost active bibliographer, suggests that the

various book-objects possessing the title Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid were most

likely printed, assembled, and bound to order rather than being offered to the general

public as a stack of unbound pages. Forrer’s painstaking analysis extends across many

research libraries that possess a book with the title in question, and her conclusion is that:

“In practice…purchasers were free to organize the volume as they chose,” tailoring it to

their own needs and whims.13 Perhaps, then, it is more useful to think of each individual

Het Groote Tafereel as a collection rather than a publication. Yet if the book is a form of

collection, it is far from unique. While each one is distinct and unique in some ways, they

do share many common elements. While acknowledging the variability of books with the

title, Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid, Forrer suggests that the contents of any Het

Groote were organized to evoke the progression of a stage play, beginning with an

introduction of characters and ending with an ironic downfall. She sees this pattern play

out across the book as a whole and echoed in the arrangement of the prints.14 If the book

is a play, then readers of different copies see different performances, sometimes featuring

understudies or extraneous characters.15 The JCB’s copy differs from the baseline order

12 Ibid., 16-17.

13 Forrer, Het groote tafereel, 35. 14 Ibid., 42-3.

155 of prints in established by Friedrich Muller in several significant ways, as detailed in the

JCB’s catalogue. It includes a lengthy account of the ways in which their Het

Groote…differs from the order proposed by Muller: “…copy plate 27 wanting; plates 28

and 29 reversed; plate no. 46 has reset title and is bound before plate 30; plates 47 and 48

reversed; plate no. 49 before plate 2; plate 54 is wanting…” All in all, the JCB version

includes two prints not in Muller’s baseline, and it lacks three that are. It also orders the

plates they have in common in a significantly different way. It also contains a unique if

unoriginal collection of commentaries on 1720 and the early modern financial

innovations.

Seeing Het Groote Tafereel... l as a collection rather than a book means

acknowledging the logic behind the selection and framing of the individual objects that

comprise it. The content of Het Groote was carefully selected, its components

consciously organized, and its pages purposefully bound to stand as an authoritative

rebuke of changes in European financial philosophy. From its initial catalogue of Dutch

stock schemes to its obsession with the Scottish/Dutch/French figure of John Law, the

book proclaims itself a European text addressing a European problem. By and large,

bibliographers and historians have accepted the European premise of the collection and

examined the book and the bubbles of 1720 as a distinctly European phenomena. But the

various plays, poems, playing cards, and prints that make up Het Groote had a life

15 The irregularities between different copies of Het Groote Tafereel... pose a challenge for

bibliographers and historians who work from multiple iterations of the text. In order to ensure everyone is on the same page—as it were—when referring to particular prints, scholars typically identify them by their “Muller number.” Muller numbers are drawn from Friedrich Muller’s De Nederlandsche geschiedenis en platen, a four volume catalogue of historical Dutch prints. See Cole, The Great Mirror of Folly, 11 and 25.

156 outside their preservation as leaves in a tome. A collector/binder with a different agenda

could conceive of an organization that would highlight the extra-European factors that

contributed to a reevaluation of State finance and the nature of money and wealth.

The authority of a book and the authority of a collection are derived from

different things. Historians of early modern print culture often point to the importance of

“fixity” (for Elizabeth Eisenstein), “exact reproducibility” (for William Ivins), or similar

ideas about how mass production fundamentally changed how knowledge was produced

and shared. The power of the printed book is premised on the expectation that everyone

who reads a copy is reading the same text. When that book is discussed, then, discussants

can be confident that they are sharing a common knowledge of what the book says, even

if they disagree on its interpretation or veracity. A printed book is a portal of access, a

physical thing that serves as an individual window upon a common text. Anyone with

another copy has an identical window to the same ideas. A collection, on the other hand,

earns its authority by virtue of its size, variety, and completeness. The more individual

objects gathered together under a common theme, the more impressive and authoritative

that collection is. Of course, the very act of identifying a unifying “theme” necessarily

emphasizes the relationship between the individual object and the logic of the collection,

even at the expense of the relationships the object has to other ideas. Objects in

collections cease to be unique and become representatives of their shared qualities.

Part of what makes Het Groote Tafereel such a curious and compelling object is

that its content is at odds with its composition. The words and ideas in the book are

almost entirely drawn from less-lofty realms. The vast majority of the text and images in

157 this book existed independently and prior to the production of this book. Many began as

flimsy, light, single-sheet publications. The plays and poems bound together within Het

Groote Tafereel circulated first in very different formats and addressed audiences that

approached them with a very different set of expectations. A satirical farce looks very

different printed on rich sheet of white paper than it does from the cheap-seats at a

playhouse. So, too, does a doggerel poem printed on rough, disposable paper. One

significant difference is that both the play and the poem are far more ephemeral in their

original form than they are within the hardy covers of Het Groote Tafereel.. For a few of

the works it provided the convincing camouflage of the folio codex and ensured the

survival of ephemera beyond their own time. Several of the works in it do not exist

elsewhere in any twenty-first century archive. The dissonance between Het Groote

Tafereel’s content and its material composition echoes the same problem early eighteenth

century financial innovators faced as they tried to swap precious metal for pedestrian

paper. By collecting them and, in places, reprinting them on heavier paper stock, the book

itself echoes the endeavors of early modern financial innovators. As a tome, the book

tries to reframe its diverse set of largely inconsequential (often scatological) publications

and make them seem significant and authoritative. It attempts to give weight to the

weightless and heft to the trivial.

Paper and Globalizing Economies

There is no denying that the prints selected for the various Het Groote

compilations are heavily focused on Europe in their analysis of the early-eighteenth

158 century economic landscape. But even these hand-picked representatives gesture toward

the ways that European finances were shaped by the rest of the world, especially the

Atlantic sphere. A significant number of the prints in the JCB’s version of the Het Groote

collection nod toward the influence of the Atlantic in the events of 1720. Often

represented symbolically or allegorically, the places, resources and people of Africa and

the Americas play an important role in the critique of European behavior regarding

money and wealth. The influence of the Atlantic space (imaginary and material) peers

through the cracks of Het Groote Tafereel’s Eurocentric critique. Economic histories of

the early modern finance have been similarly Eurocentric in their analysis of the

proliferation of novel financial instruments and theories that challenged long-held notions

about the nature of wealth and the secrets of its accumulation. It is true that institutions

and individuals traditionally credited with ushering in a new economic era are, by and

large, European. However, much of the economic experimentation that characterized this

moment was engineered to address the realities of a global system of trade, a system in

which the Atlantic was of particular significance.

Efficiently and effectively exploiting the Atlantic basin required an unprecedented

amount of capital, much more than could be readily accumulated in the form of precious

metal coinage. The European financial system suffered from a persistent and debilitating

lack of circulating money. To overcome this, economic innovators turned to paper. At the

root of many early modern financial innovations is a material revolution, an attempt to

shift notions of wealth and value away from coins made of (usually alloyed) precious

159 metals and place it on the authority of governments and corporations represented by

specially printed slips of paper.

Paper and trade have a long history. Paper and paper-like materials, such as

papyrus and vellum, have been employed to facilitate and account for the movement of

goods as long for as they have been in existence.16 Paper’s successful transition from a

rare, precious commodity to a material of everyday life has a great deal to do with its

relationship to financial innovations. Paper’s utility to pre-modern economies stemmed,

in large part, from its lightness. Since its earliest days, people saw the potential of paper

to stand, temporarily, for the value of metal, easing transportation and providing a degree

of security. Some of the oldest surviving pieces of paper are bills of exchange or records

of financial transactions. Later, as financial networks became more complex and

dispersed, paper stepped in to avoid the risky transportation of gold and silver.17 Song

Dynasty merchants were the first to freely exchange government-backed, paper notes,

making them the first adopters of a paper currency, a move that gave them an advantage

in regional and global trade.18 Paper money circulation was restricted to the upper-

echelons of the financial system, however, as it was only available in large

fdenominations. Later, the Medici banking system printed notes to facilitate the

16 Niall Ferguson. The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (New York, NY:

Penguin Press, 2008.), 28-31.

17 Jack Weatherford. The History of Money: From Sandstone to Cyberspace (New York, NY: Three Rivers Press, 1997), 66-7.;

18 Niv Horesh, “’Cannot be Fed on when Starving: An Analysis of Economic Thought Surrounding China’s Earlier Use of Paper Money”, Journal of the History of Economic Thought 35, no. 3 (2013): 373-5. doi:10.1017/S1053837213000229.

160 movement of vast sums around the Mediterranean, although these exchange notes never

gained the degree of free-circulation enjoyed by Song-era jiaozi. 19 The exchange of large

amounts of metal money across any significant distance was difficult, costly and

dangerous, be it on the east cost of eleventh century Asia or the west coast of Europe. But

even if paper could ease this load, its airy paper’s lightness also played a role in the

difficulty eighteenth century European people had with seeing it as actual money.

The tight relationship between the availability of paper and financial innovation

continued through the late seventeenth century. On one hand, early modern printers were

increasingly reliant on the financial industry and its demand for blank forms.20 On the

other, paper was required to feed the emerging economy of information. Early modern

governments were chronically short of coin, a reality that necessitated the growth of a

system of credit and debt. Paper ledgers made possible the development of double-entry

bookkeeping, which made possible increasingly complex systems of credit and markets

in debt. Being able to conduct business without the actual exchange of physical money

kept economies running. By the latter half of the seventeenth century, keeping track of

who owed what to whom was a task primarily conducted through the medium of paper.

Ledger books were essential pieces of financial equipment, of course, but the circulation

of pieces of paper between individuals on a daily basis was the life-blood of the

economic circulatory system.

19 Weatherford, The History of Money, 80-4.

20 William N. Goetzmann et al., “Introduction” in The Great Mirror of Folly: Finance, Culture,

and the Crash of 1720, ed. William N. Goetzmann et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 8.

161

But as common as these financial practices were, paper was not money. For most,

money was another word for weight-in-precious-metal. Pieces of paper simply

represented a number of coins existing elsewhere. If necessary, that piece of paper could

be exchanged for a specified number of coins if presented to the appropriate authority, be

it a bank, an individual or the government. In these cases, however, paper only ever

represented a quantity of precious metal. The growth of a global trade network and

intensifying European engagement in the Atlantic basin forced early modern financial

thinkers to reconsider the nature of wealth and the secrets of its accumulation. By

upending long-standing economic ideas and traditions, early modern innovators

attempted to redefine how governments and individuals thought of money and, as a

result, the relationship that existed between a State, its people, and its economy.21

Across the scholarship on finance in seventeenth-century Europe, there is a

confusion in terminology stemming from conflicts about how to understand the debt

incurred by a government. The term “national debt” is often used, but without further

explanation the term “national debt” evokes an image of governmental debt as it is

conceived of and managed in the twenty-first century. As the previous chapters have

shown, the nation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not the same animal as

the one we know today. Nor were nations and states yet married to one another as they

would be later. Notions of what constituted national debt and how to manage it were also

different from ours. John Carswell argues, “We can only begin speaking of a National

21 Eric Helleiner. “National Currencies and National Identities.” American Behavioral Scientist 41,

no. 10 (1998), 1411. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764298041010004.”

162 Debt in 1693, when the borrowings of the government were first guaranteed by

Parliament.”22 Carswell’s origination point only applies to England and the particular

relationship that existed there between Parliament and the Crown.23 Other European

powers operated under very different structures of governance. The Dutch States General,

as a prime example, functioned as a federation and operated under very different rules

when it came to financing the government and its endeavors. 24 Prior to 1693 in England,

and after it in many other places, including in France for instance, funding the

government involved sovereigns borrowing money directly from wealthy individuals,

either through coercion, the extension of privileges, or based on the personal credit of the

sovereign. In an age when global-scale conflicts were becoming more and more

expensive, the crown was increasingly prone to bankruptcy and increasingly seen as an

unsafe investment.

Even after 1693 in England, the credit of Parliament did not produce a

nationalized system of debt as we understand it today. The credit of the state was not

underwritten by a fully nationalized economy, though Keith Wrightson points out that

increasing regional specialization was already pushing England in that direction.25 But

even when talking about late seventeenth-/early eighteenth-century England, it is worth

22Carswell, The South Sea Bubble, 23.

23 Though later it was extended to Britain when England and Scotland officially unified their

governments. 24 Jonathan Israel. The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness and Fall, 1477-1806 (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1998), 703-713. 25 Keith Wrightson, Earthly Necessities: Economic Lives in Early Modern Britain. (New Haven,

CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 231-248.

163 drawing a line of distinction between national debt, meaning debt underwritten by the

performance of the national economy, and government debt, meaning debt incurred by a

State or Sovereign underwritten by that entity’s reputation and potential to generate

future wealth through territorial expansion and colonial exploitation.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then many of the financial inventions of

the early modern period are best understood as the children of government (if not

necessarily national) debt. Lottery loans, government-assured annuities, and various

forms of government bonds were dreamt up and put out into the world as a way to raise

the money necessary to keep governments solvent. Each of these fund raising activities

increased the debt obligation of the government that issued them, eventually requiring the

State to take action to manage and restructure its debt, often in the form of new financial

intuitions dedicated to that purpose.

The prime example is the establishment of The Bank of England in 1694. Largely

modeled after Amsterdam’s Wisslebank, it was a centralized bank established to manage

government debt in exchange for remarkable and profitable privileges. The founding

arrangement, in broad strokes was that a group of wealthy subscribers cobbled together a

great deal of capital (£1.2 million) by offering shares in the bank.26 That money was

loaned to the government to retire outstanding debts. The government distributed bills to

its creditors that they could exchange at the bank for hard currency, though they primarily

circulated as a promissory currency. In exchange for extending a large loan to the

26 Carswell, The South Sea Bubble, 26-30.

164 government, the Bank of England was granted a monopoly on issuing bank notes and was

assured an 8% annual return on its loan, guaranteeing its liquidity. In 1716 a similar

endeavor was undertaken in France, the Banque General. In both cases, these “national”

banks became the only institutions in their respective countries or province that could

issue pieces of paper that stood in for the precious metals they controlled. By extension,

therefor, they became the bank of banks and their notes became ubiquitous. Despite their

titles, however, the Bank of England and the Banque General were private endeavors and

not national or central banks in the way we currently understand them. And they made

their owners and operators obscenely rich.

The formation of these almost-central banks was also a bold stroke in redefining

the financial relationship between the government and the governed. The power of these

proto-central banks was derived from their monopolies on issuing bank notes. They

became the gravitational center of finance in their respective countries and a potent

national/economic symbol. The South Sea and Mississippi companies attempted to

achieve similar success through the formation of corporate entities that sought to leverage

governmental good will and a broad base of capital into lucrative adventures in Atlantic

trade. The expansion of European governments into the Atlantic required the

accumulation of wealth in as-yet unheard of amounts. Launching colonial ventures and

mobilizing militaries to secure their continuation required vast sums of money. Gathering

the required amount of capital needed to wage protectionist wars and/or exploit the

resources of other continents yielded novel fiscal arrangements between individuals and

between governments and private interests.

165

The proliferation of chartered, joint-stock companies is probably the most well-

known development. These entities, and others like them, occupied a liminal position

between being corporations and dependent governments. Their existence represented a

significant change in financial philosophy. Sovereign governments had long financed

themselves by granting charters and monopolies to individuals in exchange for large

loans or contributions. These individuals, often politically involved, stood to gain a great

deal by leveraging their political and financial clout to advance their longer-term business

interests in the market and the halls of power. For the wealthy individual, it was an

investment that promised a healthy return. Large joint-stock companies were speculative

ventures as well, but ones that pooled resources of a group of influential individuals and

promised continuing returns for the chartering government. As such, they could

command the support and intervention of the government to protect their shared interests.

They were, in essence, public/private partnerships, but ones that enjoyed the reputation of

being in the national interest. The South Sea and Mississippi companies took that

relationship one step further. They gained their charters by proposing a scheme to

manage governmental debt.

Conducting war was, by far, the largest generator of government debt among

European powers. The prosecution of wars aimed at expanding and defending colonial

holdings, as well as those traditional intracontinental conflicts that characterized Europe

for centuries, drove sovereign governments to borrow heavily from wealthy individuals,

particularly merchants whose wealth was measured more in coin than land. The latter

years of the seventeenth century and the early decades of the eighteenth saw the

166 proliferation of financial schemes whose goal was raising the money European

governments needed to maintain their militaries and fund their conflicts. Governments

that could ensure their own liquidity had a significant advantage on the global stage. The

“Dutch Golden Age” of the seventeenth century was funded by the region’s dominance in

global trade and protected by a military that could more consistently rely on a steady flow

of funds.27 The VOC and WIC trading companies, empowered and defended by the

States General, reaped great rewards and enriched a growing middle class in the United

Provinces, despite regular conflicts with competing European powers.28 The Netherlands

maintained its advantage throughout the 1600’s due, in large part, to the creative Dutch

financial institutions and products that allowed ambitious projects to be undertaken and

for effective management of government finances. Its reputation as a hotbed of economic

thought prompted scholars Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude to dub the Netherlands

the “first modern economy,” given its sensitivity to the importance of timely, accurate

information and the introduction of financial theories and instruments that still dominate

economic practice today.29 While some of the ideas de Vries identifies as modern were

27 The funding of the military and is a major focus of Jonathon Israel’s The Dutch Empire: Its Rise

its Greatness and its Fall.. His minute analysis of the ways the States General funded its army and navy exposes the inter-provincial conflicts and power struggles that made Holland and its major city Amsterdam so powerful and home and around the world. The dominance of Holland in Netherlandish politics produced a persistent equivalence between the two so that even today people outside of the Netherlands often use them interchangeably.

28 Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age. (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1997), 323-326.

29 Jan de Vries and An Van Der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and

Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500-1815 (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 147-150. The authors’ argument rests on the development of now-familiar economic structures, but also the fact that trade in the Netherlands was particularly sensitive to the timely circulation of information.

167 first put into practice by the States General, the development of novel economic theory in

early modern Europe was a continent-wide affair. Economic and intellectual elites shared

ideas and schemes freely across geopolitical borders. After 1688, for example, many

financial mechanisms pioneered in the Netherlands were imported wholesale to help the

government of England manage its own finances.

The Mississippi and South Sea companies were established on novel, theoretical

principals in an attempt to ensure the solvency of European governments by leveraging

the potential of Atlantic trade and colonization. Effective exploitation of the profit

potential represented by colonizing the New World, however, required amassing

historically large amounts of capital. Securing the resources required to embark on risky

voyages necessitated the development of new kinds of economic collaborations, such as

the joint-stock and insurance companies. Protecting the interests of these profit engines

required heretofore unheard of military spending which led to the development of new

loan schemes to keep armies in the fields and navies on the seas. In 1720, the catastrophic

failure of the Mississippi and South Sea ventures disrupted a growing market in

speculative stock trading and cast a pall over schemes that capitalized themselves through

the issuance of stock. It also undermined efforts to facilitate the easy flow of money

throughout by replacing metal coins with paper backed by governmental authority. In the

short term, the failure of these government-adjacent companies placed boundaries around

the economic imaginations of those affected, encouraging a return to traditional notions

of wealth and placing an outer limit on the perceived benefits of Atlantic ventures. In the

168 long term, their collapse and its far-reaching consequences shaped the growth of modern

economic systems in the Old World and the New.

By giving large loans to the governments of their respective countries, the South

Sea and Mississippi companies earned the right to exploit valuable resources. Control of

the Asiento, the governmental contract to sell slaves to Spanish colonials in South

America, was ceded to the English government in the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, which

ended the War of Spanish Succession. Its execution placed the Government of England in

a position where it needed a novel solution to manage its mountain of debt. 30 The South

Sea company was given exclusive rights to exploit the Asiento in exchange for taking on

England’s war debt and returning the government to solvency. The Mississippi scheme in

France was similar to the South Sea scheme in most respects. It, too, was a proposition to

retire the governmental debt of France through the formation of a joint-stock company.

The Mississippi Company gained, from the French government, exclusive rights to

colonize and exploit the resources of the Mississippi valley as well as other colonial

holdings.31 As managers of governmental debt, the South Sea and Mississippi companies

had the right to convert the bonds and other IOUs distributed by their respective

governments into company stock. Individuals who held government debt were

encouraged to swap it out for partial ownership of companies that could, potentially, reap

great profits in the New World as others had done before.

30 Carswell, The South Sea Bubble, 48-49. 31 Ibid., 92.

169

The Mississippi and South Sea schemes introduced a fiscal relationship that is

now so ubiquitous that it fades into the background. They sought to tie the success of

government finances to the wellbeing of a corporation; a corporation to which many

individuals were exposed. Now, of course, movements in major stock markets across the

globe are taken as information about the health of national economies. In the early

eighteenth century, the idea of nationhood was taking on a more robust economic

valence. In England, the South Sea Company and the Bank of England were in direct

competition as to which financial entity would serve as the central pillar of the

burgeoning national economy. In France, the Banque Royal and the Mississippi Company

were conceptually and practically bound together, functioning as the double nucleus of

the coalescing French economy. As mentioned in previous chapters, exploration and

exploitation of the Atlantic rim’s resources demanded an expansion of the idea of

national belonging to bind colonial residents to the larger empire. Promises of broadly

shared, nationally distributed prosperity fueled the formation of companies and the

recruitment of personnel to extract wealth from the New World. The primary role of

governments in the equation was to exercise military force in order to gain territory and

protect it from encroachment by other powers. The execution of expensive, global scale

conflict was funded through taxes, the extension of privileges for money, and by

borrowing.

Discussions of the financial crises of 1720 tend to characterize the event as a

product of innovative theorization about money doomed by the unscrupulous or naïve

actions of human agents. This portrait tends to gloss over the conditions that led the likes

170 of Law and the directors of the Bank of England to start tinkering with the philosophy of

money and the financial relationships between States, corporations, and individuals. It is

no coincidence that the companies at the heart of the first stock market crash were both

formed with the nominal intent of profiting from engaging in Atlantic trade and

colonization. The high-risk/high-reward proposition of engaging with the Atlantic was a

critical element in fostering the enthusiasm necessary for the wide circulation of stock the

South Sea and Mississippi schemes relied on to fuel their more ambitious financial

inventions.

The financial innovations of the early eighteenth century were, in part,

experiments in replacing the public’s faith in precious metals with faith in the state and a

nationalized economy. Increasingly centralized, government driven economies

strengthened notions of national belonging through the circulation of paper imbued with

the authority of the state. These experiments reached their pinnacle with John Law’s

“system,” in which he attempted to tie together the Mississippi Company, the Banque

Royale, and credit of the State. Taking advantage of France’s absolutist government, the

French crown also made it mandatory that taxes be paid in Banque General notes and

that government business in remote areas be conducted with them, ensuring that the

bank’s paper would remain in demand and in wide circulation even far from the seat of

government. It was a move that sought to identify and bind together a nation within a

common economic frame.

Eric Helleiner argues that national currencies foster notions of national belonging

by disseminating national imagery, but also by binding nationals together into a

171 “common economic language”, grounded in an economic “community of shared fate.”

This gives credence to the notion of popular sovereignty, while also stoking nationalist

passions.32 Helleiner sees the late nineteenth century as the earliest moment these

qualities of currency can be observed all together. Seventeenth and eighteenth century

experiments with banknotes produced pieces of paper that, if they do not meet all of

Helleiner’s criteria for national currency, certainly meet some of them. At the very least

they established a grammar for a common economic language by introducing a widely

circulated, authoritative currency that gave credence to a notion that the people of

England were economically bound together. They also inserted a new kind of authority

encouraging confidence in economic activity that was increasingly conducted on paper

rather than through the exchange of metal.

Christopher Tomlins, reflecting on Helleiner’s work through a rumination on Ian

Fleming’s 1959 Goldfinger notes the inherent anationalism of gold. “The meaning of

gold is riskily cosmopolitan,” he writes. “It is a vital resource, it is soft and seductive, but

its national identity is utterly superficial and easily erased, its loyalties skin deep”.33

There was much interest in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries in

transitioning wealth and value away from gold. Chronic shortages of hard currency

restrained flows of trade, and had for centuries.34

32 Helleiner, “National Currencies”, 1414-5.

33Christopher Tomlins "Loose Change." The American Behavioral Scientist 41, no. 10 (1998):

1453. https://doi-org.ezp3.lib.umn.edu/10.1177/0002764298041010006 34 Wrightson, Earthly Necessities, 118-20.

172

At the heart of the various financial entities that sought to nationalize government

debt was a scheme to consolidate and direct a national economy. Each sought advantage

by controlling the circulation of pieces of paper that carried a unique authority by virtue

of their connection to the State. These pieces of paper produced a new national bond,

sewing people together under a conceit of a shared, government-supported economic

system. As these light paper bits moved more and more and heavy, metallic coins moved

less and less, the material landscape of the Atlantic economy changed. The measured

weight of gold and silver facilitated fewer transactions and was replaced by the weight of

governmental authority. The more money moved from metal to paper, the more

nationally contingent it became. Both the Mississippi and South Sea schemes were

concocted as ways to push the reset button on the debts incurred fighting the War of

Spanish Succession. This was done by converting the debt of the government’s creditors

into shares of newly chartered companies. Economic historians agree that both the South

Sea and Mississippi companies quickly became over-valued and expectations of their

success outstripped the kind of profits that could be turned through the trade in the

enslaved in South America or the colonization of the Mississippi basin. Historians debate

whether their overvaluation was the result of a collective speculative mania, unscrupulous

behavior on the part of major stock owners, or natural economic cycles, but the end result

is the same. When the South Sea and Mississippi bubbles burst in 1720, the

disappearance of a massive amount of wealth sent shockwaves throughout the Atlantic

basin.

173 Conclusion

There are two recurring tropes in the representation of paper across the Het

Groote prints that emphasize particulars of paper’s material qualities and leverage them

into a damning critique. They are images of paper floating through the air and images that

draw a connection between paper and excrement. Each of these treatments are reminders

to those who encounter the prints that paper is paper and not wealth in and of itself. In

showing paper floating through the air engravers emphasized its physical lightness and

the high surface-area to width ratio that make it useful, but also susceptible to any passing

breeze. In showing paper spewing from mouths and anuses or being used as a barrier

between hand and fecal matter, they reinforced paper’s conceptual lightness and social

role as a material that can be readily produced and dispensed of without concern. In either

case, the message is clear: Paper is not and cannot be real money. It is just not weighty

enough.

The close association between paper and human or animal effluence is evident in

at least ten of the engravings in the JCB’s Het Groote.35 The real connection between the

lower bodily stratum and many of paper’s day-to-day, utilitarian functions is marshalled

as a way to ridicule the notion that paper could be anything more than a fragile, abundant,

and commonplace material. Many prints show people using paper to clean up after

defecating. In one telling example, Arlequyn actionist (Harlequin Share Trader)36, a large

35 Muller 4; 9; 11; 12; 20; 24; 31; 43; 47; 60. 36 Muller 12. See also Thea Vignau-Wilberg, “Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid: Remarks on

the Style and Artistic Quality of the Prints” in The Great Mirror of Folly: Finance, Culture, and the Crash of 1720, ed. William N. Goetzmann et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 208

174 man is having coins poured into his mouth while out of his anus spills a torrent of paper

scraps. Eager speculators reach for the man’s bare butt hoping to be the first to grab the

stock papers that emanate from it.

Figure 3. Detail from Arlequyn actionist. Image courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.

In another, De kermis-kraam, van de actie-knaapen…(The Fair-Booth of the Share

Boys…)37, a devil stuffs a bellows into the mouth of a stock jobber, forcing papers to fly

from his rear end and down to a poorly-distinguished but eager sea of faces.

37 Muller 11.

175

Figure 4. Detail from De kermis-kraam, van de actie-knaapen….Image courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.

Something similar takes place in De ridder van het gilde kalf…(The Knight of the Golden

Calf…)38, with an unfortunate cow serving as the processing organ that transforms wind

into wealth.

Figure 5. Detail from De ridder van het gilde kalf…. Image courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.

38 Muller 40.

176

The ready association of paper with the expulsion of waste identifies and enforces a

notion about the social position of paper. Earlier chapters in this dissertation have pointed

to the material and symbolic association of paper with waste, so I will not repeat that

analysis here. In this case evoking the notion of paper as “bumfodder”, or in some cases

“bum-product”, puts paper representing the ownership of stock at the same level as that

used in the political broadsides and other cheap products of the popular press, which is to

say as waste paper.

Figure 6. Law als een tweede Don Quichot, op Sanches Graauwtje zit ten spot. Image courtesy of the John Carter Brown Library.

The physical and conceptual lightness of paper, and its association with

excrement, are exemplified in Law als een tweede Don Quichot, op Sanches Graauwtje

177 zit ten spot (Law, Like Another Don Quixote, Sits on Sancho’s Ass for the Purpose of

Ridicule.)39 Here, a representation of John Law sits astride a donkey laden with chests of

gold and bags of, presumably, coin money. One devil flies in front of the beast using a

bellows to blow air into its mouth. Behind the figure of Law another devil raises the ass’

tail so that a torrent of paper sheets can be freely expelled into a crowd of men who are

trying to grab them out of the air. Above the crowd floats a third demonic figure wearing

a fool’s cap and holding a multi-thong flail, perhaps whipping the crowd into a frenzy. As

in many other prints, the sheets of paper cascading from the ass’s ass are printed with

numbers (lots of zeros) and/or the names of stock companies including “missisip” and

“zuyt”, as well as “west” and the names of various Dutch towns that proposed canal

digging projects.

In addition to the group frantically trying to capture the ass’ effluence, there is

another group of people trying to drag Law/Sancho’s donkey into a building with the

word “Quinquempoix” above the doorway, a reference to the street in Paris that became

the de facto stock exchange of early modern France. In the background, ships sail toward

the horizon on a sea labeled “zuid zee”. This conglomeration of familiar symbols

communicates a familiar message about the foolishness, even madness, of investing in

speculative, trans-Atlantic schemes. The physical relationship that exists between air and

paper, namely that the latter is easily moved by the former, is at the literal center of this

print. The wind from the devil’s bellows and the paper it forces from the hind-end of the

39 Muller 24.

178 donkey are echoed in the puffed-out sails of the ships in the background. It is hard to miss

the fact that, in an engraving, a sheet of paper and a ship’s sail are rendered in almost the

exact same way. This print takes pains to show that ships and stocks are at the whim of

the wind, that they are moved by the most fickle of the elements.

In Law als een tweede Don Quichote, paper’s lightness is set against the grounded

heaviness of coin money and material goods. The heads of the fanatical crowd describe a

line that divides the composition of the print neatly in half horizontally. The upper half is

emptier, more open. The sails of ships and a flag rise above the tumult of the stock-

obsessed mob. The lower half is crowded with bodies, bags of coins, and a jumble of

material goods in the lower left-hand corner. The crowd, Law’s donkey, and the bags of

money (ie. the figures in the lower half of the print) are all moving right to left. The flag,

sails and sheets of paper exploding from the ass all move left to right. The ground moves,

one way, the wind moves the other. The contradictory motions of, on the one hand,

people, material goods and coin money, and on the other the wind-blown paper on the

other draws a distinct contrast between grounded, tangible wealth and paper-promises.

Paper’s literal and metaphorical lightness are collapsed into the image of a sheet of paper

being propelled by, essentially, a fart. Its contrary movement in the composition of the

print joins together its tenuousness as a thing of value and its material capriciousness.

The massive sums of money required to embark on risky, trans-Atlantic or global

colonial endeavors required new mechanisms for accumulating venture capital and

facilitating the flow of money. A chronic shortage of hard, coin currency and the logistic

difficulties of conducting business in heavy precious metals demanded that some other,

179 more convenient material be imbued with the power to represent wealth. Paper had long

been used to track the complex networks of credit and debt that made it possible to

conduct business. The Bank of England and the Mississippi and South Sea companies all

endeavored to take this established norm one step further. Each transformed paper from a

tracker of money to the very substance of money itself. The crises of 1720 undermined

that effort. The seemingly magical evaporation of wealth in the wake of bursting stock-

market bubbles shook the faith of ordinary Europeans in the idea that wealth could be

represented by anything but hard, heavy, metal currency. The various satires, allegories

and farces collected into Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid get a great deal of mileage

out of the connections between the physical fragility of paper and the financial fragility of

speculative stock trading. The circulation of government backed paper was, in part, an

attempt to bind individuals together into a new kind of shared, economically-based

nationhood, but one which was undermined by the very material quality of paper that

made it attractive as a form of currency: its physical and metaphorical lightness.

180

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