We asked contributors to the current issue of Parergon to give us some additional insights into their research and the inspirations for their articles. In this post, independent scholar Elizabeth Moran discusses ‘Invention’s Mint: The Currency of Fashion and (Fake) News in Early Modern London’. DOI: 10.1353/pgn.2020.0004

I completed my doctorate at the University of Western Australia in 1999. My thesis centred on satirical and moralizing discourses about fashion in early modern England from the late-sixteenth to the early-seventeenth century. While clothing was perhaps the pre-eminent object of fashionable fascination and condemnation at the time, literary modishness too attracted the ire of satirists. Ben Jonson, eager to claim the timeless literary inheritance of classical forefathers, found it useful to essentialize fashion as a feminine (or effeminate) preoccupation and to distinguish himself, not entirely plausibly, from literary faddishness and the ephemera of textual news.

My interest in Jonson’s play,The Staple of News (1626), sparked again when our own world became preoccupied by populists’ expedient claims of “fake news”, the existence of actual disinformation, and the fear that the very notion of reliable and authoritative news sources has been destroyed by social media. To the modern eye, Jonson’s staple is a cross between a newspaper office and a news agency, operated by a group of pseudo-journalists who, like the playwright’s more famous alchemical conmen, make money by telling incredible stories to credulous people.

On re-reading the play, I was particularly struck by Jonson’s use of coins and currency as figures for what we might nowadays call “fake news”, as well as for sartorial fashion. The protagonist, “Pennyboy Junior”, is a stock satirical heir-about-town who rejoices in his father’s death and squanders his inheritance on modish clothes, an expensive pocket watch, and another novelty that has caught his eye: the production of news. The play set me on a path to consider the manifold affinities between news and fashionable attire as forms of information, ephemera, and social credit. The words “current” and “currency” are shot through with such associations as their meanings range from literal coinage, to social acknowledgement, a sense of the present, and the flow of popular opinion, including news. (The latter survives in our modern-day term, “current affairs”.)

In early modern London, I argue, sartorial fashions and topical information were complementary forms of social credit used to craft modish identities and to claim social currency. This is most evident in the urban spaces where gallants and other aspirants flaunted their attire and sated their appetites for news: St Paul’s Cathedral, the Royal Exchange, the New Exchange (a high-end indoor shopping mall) and the playhouses, especially of the indoor variety. A modish suit and some credible news were currency suitable to furnish a dining table, assert one’s status as a person “in the know”, or to propel a marginal figure from the Court’s periphery towards its centre. And if true news was in short supply, an aspirant’s powers of invention might be deployed to create attractive, newsworthy fictions (or so satirists suggest). “Fake news”, like fashion, is no novel phenomenon.

Parergon can be accessed via Project MUSE (from Volume 1 (1983)), Australian Public Affairs – Full Text (from 1994), and Humanities Full Text (from 2008). For more information on the current issue and on submitting manuscripts for consideration, please visit parergon.org