Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: Miriam Jacobson's argument in Barbarous Antiquity is that English trade with the Ottoman Empire in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries recast the relationship between English and classical literatures.Focusing on narrative poetry by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Chapman and poetics by Jonson and Puttenham, Jacobson shows how imported words, metaphors, and concepts "inaugurate[d] a new poetic economy, reconfiguring cultural attitudes toward ancient and modern, East and West, and redefining what it meant to write and publish poetry in English during the Renaissance" (4).Jacobson's account is richly evocative of the sensory and intellectual experiences she documents: the ingenuity and intricacy of sugar confections, the limpid sheen of the orient pearl, the power and heat of the Arabian horse, the exquisite tracery of the fritillary flower, and the people, words, and poetry that brought them from one place to another and back again.Barbarous Antiquity reorients us, in both senses of the word: it causes us to reappraise our location and surroundings, as early modernists, and it turns us (again) towards the East.The first chapter, "Strange Language: Imported Words in Jonson's Ars Poetica [and Poetaster], " focuses on the influx of "inkhorn terms, " or new words, especially those that derive from the early modern Levantine trade network.On the one hand, Jonson overtly resists and rejects inkhorn terms that contaminate the plain and classical style he espouses, but on the other, he finds the manipulation, hybridization, and supplementation of words to be irresistible.In Poetaster, for instance, the "antique" is also the antic, and canonical classical literary values are over-written by the prodigious, scatological, and viscous words that "ooze, froth, and seep out of the body's orifices with […] revolting zest" (46).The second chapter concerns Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie and the introduction of sugar into the European kitchen.When sugar became commonly available, it replaced honey as the metaphor for the "sweetness" of poetry.But sugar is very different from honey, and has extraordinary properties: "sugar was more than a sweetener; it was a spice, a medicine, an artistic medium, and a powerful tool of material transformation and manipulation" (69).As
Source: Renaissance and Reformation
Language: English
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4301804524