Spa Culture and Literature in England, 1500-1800 (Early Modern Literature in History) PDF
Preview Spa Culture and Literature in England, 1500-1800 (Early Modern Literature in History)
EARLY MODERN LITERATURE IN HISTORY Spa Culture and Literature in England, 1500–1800 Edited by Sophie Chiari Samuel Cuisinier-Delorme Early Modern Literature in History Series Editors Cedric C. Brown, Department of English, University of Reading, Reading, UK Andrew Hadfield, School of English, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK Within the period 1520–1740, this large, very well-established series withnotableinternationalrepresentationdiscussesmanykindsofwriting, both within and outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different theoretical perspectives, but they share an historical awareness and an interest in seeing their texts in lively negotiation with their own and successive cultures. This series is approaching a hundred titles on a variety of subjects including early modern women’s writing; domestic politics; drama, performance and playhouses; rhetoric; religious conver- sion; translation; travel and colonial writing; popular culture; the law; authorship;diplomacy;thecourt;materialculture;childhood;piracy;and the environment. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14199 · Sophie Chiari Samuel Cuisinier-Delorme Editors Spa Culture and Literature in England, 1500–1800 Editors Sophie Chiari Samuel Cuisinier-Delorme Clermont-Ferrand, France Vichy, France ISSN 2634-5919 ISSN 2634-5927 (electronic) Early Modern Literature in History ISBN 978-3-030-66567-8 ISBN 978-3-030-66568-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-66568-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval,electronicadaptation,computersoftware,orbysimilarordissimilarmethodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such namesareexemptfromtherelevantprotectivelawsandregulationsandthereforefreefor general use. Thepublisher,theauthorsandtheeditorsaresafetoassumethattheadviceandinforma- tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respecttothematerialcontainedhereinorforanyerrorsoromissionsthatmayhavebeen made.Thepublisherremainsneutralwithregardtojurisdictionalclaimsinpublishedmaps and institutional affiliations. Cover credit: Gibon Art/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Acknowledgements This book finds its origins in an international conference on the ‘Great SpasofEurope’,agroupofelevenspatownsnominatedtoUNESCOfor inscription on the World Heritage List. This event took place in Vichy, one of the eleven towns concerned, in October 2019. We are both grateful to our research team, IHRIM (‘Institut d’His- toire des Représentations et des Idées dans les Modernités’), for its generous support without which our symposium could not have taken place. We would also like to thank the mayor and municipal staff of the city of Vichy—we acknowledge, in particular, our indebtedness to Yves- Jean Bignon—as well as the staff of ‘Vichy Communauté’ and the ‘Pôle Universitaire de Vichy’ for their help and wonderful hospitality. This edited collection is also the product of several helpful conversa- tionswiththeauthorswhocontributedapiecetothisvolume.Wewould liketothankthemfortheirpatience,insightsandencouragements.Need- lesstosay,wearealsogratefultotheanonymousreaderswhoseexpertise and invaluable feedback have allowed us to improve the contents of the present book. OurmostsincerethanksgotoEileenSrebernik,oureditoratPalgrave Macmillan, whose precious guidance and personal commitment have been crucial to the completion of this volume, as well as to Shree- nidhi Natarajan and Jack Heeney, who also took care of the project coordination. v vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Finally, and above all, we would like to extend our gratitude to those amongourfamiliesandfriendswhoseloveandconfidencehavehelpedto sustain us. Introduction […] [T]he bath for my help lies Where Cupid got new fire: my mistress’s eyes. (Shakespeare, Sonnet 153, l. 13–14) Hoping to restore his health in a bubbling bath presumably healing ‘strange maladies’ (l. 8), the poet of Shakespeare’s Sonnets soon real- izes that the only cure for his diseased self turns out to be his mistress’s eyes:love’sfireisnoteasilyquenched.1 Capturingtherichambivalenceof springwaters,ourcollectionexaminestheemergingandcomplexrelation- ship between English spa culture and literature and its societal, spiritual, humoral, medicinal, as well as deep historical contexts, since it is articu- lated in a range of literary texts, movements, and expressions all over the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. ‘Spa’isthusthekeynotionexaminedinthefollowingpages.Ifthedefi- nition of the word is relatively simple—the OED defines it, in its general usage, as ‘[a] medicinal or mineral spring or well’ (2.a)’—its origins seem to be more uncertain. The term possibly ‘derives from the Walloon French espa, ‘waterfountain’, of which the most famous example was the thermal well at Spa (Belgium)’ (Kelly 2008–2009, 99). Yet, as James Kelly acknowledges, ‘the word has also been given a Latin etymology, which points to the fact that the therapeutic benefits of mineral water 1On sonnet 153, see also Richard Kerridge’s Coda in this volume. vii viii INTRODUCTION were recognized long before the identification of Spa in the fourteenth century’. For all its apparent simplicity, the definition given above is some- what perplexing when applied to early modern resorts. Indeed, the OED assumes that spas, or ‘spaws’, were not seen as medicinal springs or wells before1626.2 Yet,sixteenth-centuryliteraturealreadymentionsthemand severaltreatisesoftheperioddulyinsistonthemanifoldfunctionsofthese English resorts, which were both spiritual and therapeutic places. Balneology: A Very Brief History Asstatedabove,SpaCultureandLiteratureinEngland,1500–1800 aims at highlighting the various uses of water in sixteenth-, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England, while exploring the tensions between those people who praised the curative virtues of waters and those who rejected them for their supposedly harmful effects. These tensions cannot be correctly grasped without a basic knowl- edge of the history of curative waters, which is in fact a complex one. If bathingwasconsideredashygienicand,therefore,necessaryintheGreek and Roman cultures, James Kelly reminds us that ‘balneotherapy fell into disfavour following the Christianisation of Europe and the decline of the Roman Empire because of the association of bathing with bodily indul- gence and immorality, and the identification of prayer and personal self- denial as the true sources of wellbeing’ (Kelly 2008–2009, 99). Then, during the Middle Ages, steam baths, whose purpose was more recre- ational than regenerative, flourished in many Christian cities. Yet the bad reputation of ‘stews’, i.e. dry or moist heated baths, was rapidly re-established: over time they were increasingly regarded as places that facilitatedprostitutionandpromiscuity.After hisascensiontothethrone, King Henry VIII came to regard public baths as places of debauchery in whichinfectionsandcontaminationseasilyspread.Whenhehimselfdevel- oped syphilis, he ordered the closing down of baths. As a result, in the Tudorera,theybecamesynonymouswithforbiddenpractices.Nowonder that, in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, Duke Vincentio describes 2The first example given is taken from Deane’s Spadacrene Anglica. Or, The English spaw-fovntaine: ‘1626 E. Deane Spadacrene Anglica 9: Doctor Timothy Bright […]firstgavethenameoftheEnglishSpaw vntothisFountaineaboutthirtyyearessince, or more’ (OED, 2.a). INTRODUCTION ix how corruption will ‘boil and bubble / Till it o’errun the stew’ (Shake- speare 2016, 2264; 5.1.307), ‘stew’ being synonymous with ‘brothel’ in such a context. Turkish baths, famed for their exoticism, were also seen as privileged places for ‘illicit sexuality’ (Stanivukovic 2007, 68) and, in particular, for female eroticism and, as is suggested in Thomas Washing- ton’stranslationofThenauigations,peregrinationsandvoyages,madeinto Turkie by Nicholas Nicholay Daulphinois, Lord of Arfeuile, chamberlaine and geographer ordinarie to the King of Fraunce (1585). Theearlymodernperiodmarkedadecisiveshiftinspaactivities.Sofar, healingwatershadbeenregardeddifferentlyaccordingtofaith:Catholics understood them ritualistically and superstitiously, Protestants pragmat- ically. Towards the end of the sixteenth century, however, the various treatises published on the issue of spas no longer systematically described water as a sacred or sacramental element, examining instead its cura- tive properties. Dr William Turner, a pioneer of spamedicine in England, drafted the first English-language treatise on hot springs, namely A Book of the natures and properties of the baths in England and other baths in Germany and Italy. Published in 1562, the volume recorded the healing propertiesofspawatersfornearlyahundreddiseases,comparedBathwith spa towns on the continent, and pleaded for improvements to be under- taken in the English city. As part of the ‘generall rules to be obserued of all them that will entre into anye bath or drinke the water of anye bath’, Turner made clear that ‘no man’ should ‘enter into any bath before his bodye be purged […] [f]or if any man go on prepared and unpurged to thebath,hemayefortuneneuercomehomeagayneorifhecomehome, hecommethhomemostcommonlywithaworsediseasethenhebrought to the bath with him’ (Turner 1562, 15). A few decades later, in 1626, Elizabeth Farrow discovered a spring in Scarborough. The publication in 1660 of Scarbrough Spaw, or, A descrip- tionofthenatureandvertuesofthespawatScarbroughinYorkshire,byDr Robert Wittie, made Scarborough one of the most important spa resorts of the time. Wittie’s observations were extended in the second edition of the book (Scarbrough–Spaw: or a description of the nature and vertues of the spaw at Scarbrough Yorkshire, 1667)3 in which he provided a descrip- tion of the benefits of water on nerves and lungs as well as on mental 3The book was then translated into Latin under the title Fons scarburgensis, published in 1678.
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