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

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, Andrea Maraschi at the University of Bari, Italy, discusses ‘Taboo or Magic Practice? Cannibalism as Identity Marker for Giants and Human Heroes in Medieval Iceland’. DOI: 10.1353/pgn.2020.0056

My name is Andrea, and I am currently teaching Medieval History at the University of Bari, in Italy. My research career started at the University of Bologna with studies on food habits in medieval times, but I soon realized that I did not want to commit to one field of studies only. My passion for medieval society was growing fast, and when in 2014 I won a postdoctoral fellowship from the University of Iceland, I began to examine connections between food and magic practice in the medieval North. This article represents one of the first results of the wonderful working experience I had in Reykjavík, and it is focused on the role of cannibalism in Old Norse literature. Now, cannibalism had long intrigued me as an extreme response to hunger and famine in the Middle Ages, and – as such – I used to associate it with desperation and survival instinct. Reading the Old Norse legendary sagas, however, it struck me that cannibalism was described as a marker of Otherness and as a response to survival instinct only in the case of certain peculiar creatures: trolls, that is, caricatured representations of the uncivilized. However, the human protagonists of the sagas practice cannibalism not for the sake of survival, but to absorb magical powers from the eaten: to them, anthropophagy is a prestigious form of knowledge which is handed down from father to son.

Not all scholars agree as to the usefulness of legendary sagas as sources to understand the mentality and culture of saga writers: after all, fornaldarsögur abound with strange creatures and supernatural elements. This nonetheless, in my article I argue that scenes of cannibalism suggest that there is more than mere fantasy at the heart of such stories. Giants symbolized the idea of “barbarian”: they were huge, awkward, they lived in caves or small huts, they did not know politics, they ate human beings. In other words, they were the antithesis of civilization, but of a historically reliable idea of civilization. Indeed, the Old Norse trolls ate horses as well. Horsemeat was a critical bone of contention at the time of the conversion of Iceland, and the Church often associated its consumption with pagan rituals. The Old Norse trolls may be, then, caricatured representations of the pagan “uncivilized” past, from the perspective of the Christian saga authors. However, there also emerges a “civilized” and dignified version of cannibalism which was practiced by the human élite of the sagas, according to the very ancient principles of “sympathetic magic”. This form of anthropophagy is no less interesting in historical and cultural terms: many historical sources from the late medieval North (handbooks of magic, leechbooks, etc.) show that the notions of sympathy (“like produces like”) were applied in the real world, and not only in the fictional world of the sagas.

This analysis of magical and non-magical cannibalism in fornaldarsögur was one of the triggers that induced me to write a book on the application and circulation of the laws of sympathy in the Middle Ages, between magic, religion and science, which is currently in course of publication: Similia similibus curantur. Cannibalismo, grafofagia, e “magia” simpatetica nel Medioevo (500-1500), Spoleto: Cisam, 2020.

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 https://parergon.org/