essays on topics including scepticism, self-knowledge, and the divine senses.
Swann applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England, and reported the following:
A reader opening my book at page 99 would not encounter a block of text, but rather a full-page image, reproducing an anonymous painting commissioned by the anatomist and surgeon John Banister in the late sixteenth century. The painting shows a dissected dog and pig, skin flayed to reveal the tangle of viscera, alongside a cache of sinister-looking surgical instruments. What interests me, however, is the presence of another animal, one who has evaded the absent anatomist’s knife: an ape, who calmly surveys the scene whilst simultaneously munching on a piece of fruit.Learn more about Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England at the Cambridge University Press website.
The text on the preceding page, which is part of the conclusion to Chapter 2, offers an interpretation of this odd image. “Most obviously,” it acknowledges, “the monkey is present as another potential object for anatomical dissection, or possibly vivisection... So far, however, it has escaped its fate, and – given the absence of a human figure – the proprietorial air with which it surveys the scene suggests that the ape stands in as a temporary substitute for or double of the anatomist himself. What are we to make of this?” I go on to suggest that the ape functions here as a traditional iconographical representative of the sense of taste; as such, it “serves as a reminder of the ways in which anatomy is bound up with gustatory appetites.”
Taken along with the interpretation, page 99 serves as a good indication of some of the concerns of Chapter 2, which argues (amongst other things) that the sense of taste played an important role in early modern surgery and medicine: a physician, for instance, might taste discharge from a wound as part of the diagnostic process. It also demonstrates my commitment to interdisciplinary methods: although my work is rooted in literary scholarship (this particular chapter opens with a discussion of a poem by John Donne, for instance), it also draws on wide range of more unusual historical sources, including Renaissance dietary advice, joke books, and etiquette guides, as well as medical textbooks and the visual arts.
In chapter 1 of my book, however, I quote a couple of anonymous sixteenth- and seventeenth- century poems that complain about readers who flick and skim, rather than giving a work their sustained attention. And on the whole, a reader turning to page 99 of my book and going no further would not get anything like a full or accurate ‘sense’ of the project’s central aim, which is to offer a history of the neglected and denigrated sense of taste in the English Renaissance, with a particular focus on the relationship between physical experiences of eating and ‘taste’ as a metaphorical term associated with discrimination and understanding.
This aim goes well beyond Chapter 2’s focus on anatomical dissection. Thus, Chapter 1 establishes that in early modern period the language of literary and aesthetic ‘good taste’ possessed a literal dimension: literary judgement was closely tied to physical experiences of tasting, in ways that had the potential to democratize critical authority. Chapter 3 explores taste’s problematic moral status, pointing out that in the Christian tradition taste has a role to play both in humankind’s fall from grace (as Adam and Eve tasted the forbidden fruit), and in our redemption (through participation in the Eucharistic ritual). Chapter 4 investigates the work of early experimental scientists, showing how such figures attempted to use taste to develop medicines and technologies that could undo the effects of Adam and Eve’s catastrophic act. And finally, chapter 5 addresses a pervasive association of erotic pleasure with sweetness in Renaissance poetry, arguing that this association forges links between sensuality and non-rational knowledge, reconceptualising sexual desire as a source of understanding, and contributing to an increased acceptance of eroticism in the seventeenth century.
Page 99, then, is pretty inadequate as a test of my book overall. But Banister’s gruesome painting might just, I hope, be intriguing enough to whet readers’ appetites for more…
--Marshal Zeringue
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