Abstract
This essay reads Hannah Woolley's seventeenth-century cookbook, The Queen-like Closet, for scenes of judgment, with some help from Hannah Arendt. The larger aim is to draw both authors together around questions of shelter, dwelling, action and activity.
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Notes
Early English Books Online (EEBO) lists editions in 1670, 1674, 1681 and 1684. I have used the 1681 edition in this piece.
See also Rietveld (2010) on unreflective skillful action and embodied skills.
In Renaissance studies, see for example Harris (2009), Turner (2008) and Yates (2003). Of related interest are Smith (2010) and Tribble (2011). This set of texts is distinguished by its interests in cognition and phenomenology; there is also of course a strong tradition of cultural-materialist approaches to objects in the Renaissance, such as de Grazia et al (1996).
‘And for the Palsie, whether Dead or Shaking, I am sure none can give better Remedies, nor know better than I do, having brought my Experience at a dear rate; there is none who have been more afflicted with it than my self, and (I humbly bless God for it) there is no Person more freer from it than my self, nor from any other Disease, and that is very much, I being now in my Two and fiftieth year’ (Woolley, 1674, 16).
My thanks to Anna Kłosowska for sharing this proverb (Crowd Review, 2011).
Woolley is likely capitalizing on the recent appearance of The Queens Closet Opened, first published in 1662 and presented to Queen Henrietta Maria. Closet-books that emphasize scientific and medical discoveries include Tymme (1612). Queen Elizabeths closset of physical secrets (1656), which includes within it ‘the Child-bearers Cabinet,’ associates its medical secrets with the intimate space of the queen.
On the Globe Theater as a similar scene of distributed cognition, see Tribble (2005).
Jennifer Summit also places the act of translation at the heart of Woolley's cookery, but it is a one-way street: ‘Such recipes artfully teach processes of refinement and transformation that refashion animals and plants into material forms that will serve the social rituals of class and civility – thus transforming the objects of nature into objects of culture’ (Summit, 2004, 209). Object-oriented ontology, actor-network theory, distributed cognition and affordance theory share an interest in sharing some translating skills with the food stuffs themselves.
9 The father of affordance theory is environmental psychologist James J. Gibson (see Gibson, 1986). For a phenomenologically oriented reading of Gibson, see Heft (2001, 2003). For an anthropological use of affordances, see Ingold (2000). Noë (2004) refers frequently to Gibson in the course of developing his account of enactive perception.
For example, see Pasztory (2005), who argues that the purpose of art is ‘primarily cognitive’ and emphasizes the role of things in organizing systems of thought. Woolley is after something more immediate.
‘There is no feeling at the end of the cane, yet it is with the end of the cane that the blind person makes contact with the world’ (Noë, 2004, 16).
My thanks to D. E. Wittkower for this formulation (Crowd Review, 2011).
This account of Arendt as anti-oikos is arguable; see Lupton (2011).
In David Goldstein's compelling account, ‘Woolley's letters draw open a curtain onto a kind of female experience beset by difficulty and vulnerability, in which women are in desperate need of precisely the serviceable friendship that Woolley offers her readers’ (Goldstein, 2011, unpublished manuscript, 286). On Woolley's letters, see also Summit (2004).
Menu adapted from ‘A Bill of Service for extraordinary Feasts in the Summer’ and banqueting instructions in The Queen-like Closet (Woolley, 1681, 315–316, 348–349).
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Acknowledgements
My thanks to editors Jen Boyle and Martin Foys, and to Valerie Allen, Heather Bamford, Anna Klosowska, Allan Mitchell, Julie Orlemanski, Scott Trudell, and D. E. Wittkower for participating so generously in the open review process. I would also like to thank Susan Fraiman and David Goldstein for sharing their work with me. I presented a version of this essay at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in 2010; my thanks to Rebecca Lemon for hosting me there.
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Lupton, J. Thinking with things: Hannah Woolley to Hannah Arendt. Postmedieval 3, 63–79 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2012.5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/pmed.2012.5