Processes of reformation in Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions: Bells, bodies, and the reader's work
April 2021
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Journal article
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English Literary Renaissance
This essay offers a reassessment of the famous bells in Donne’s Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1624) and suggests that we should read these bells as one kind of dissolvable body among many. Donne builds on the established understanding of bells as subjects, with voices and identities; he joins conversations about their tenacious survival as objects, practices, and sounds in the post-Reformation church. In the 1620s, bells were objects that were always potentially on the point of being melted down and reformed: their bodies, like Donne’s own, were vulnerable to dissolution but could also generatively be re-made. Bells help Donne to develop an artisanal poetics, drawing on sculptural metaphors in which matter is continually melted and re-formed, to model the continuous work that the Devotions demands of its readers. I suggest that we might pay more attention in literary study not only to form and matter but also to the processes of formation—these moments of (re-)making—that act as a middle term between the two. [K.H.]
Hearing at the Surface in The Comedy of Errors
June 2020
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Chapter
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Shakespeare / Sense: Contemporary readings on Sensory Culture
The art of changes: Bell- ringing, anagrams, and the culture of combination in seventeenth- century England
May 2018
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Journal article
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Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies
<p>“Suppose we a number of things exposed, different from each other, as a, b, c, d, e, &c.;,” proposed the mathematician and cryptographer John Wallis in 1685. “The Question is; how many ways the order of these may be varied? As, for instance, how many changes may be Rung upon a certain Number of Bells; or, how many ways (by way of Anagram) a certain Number of (different) Letters, may be differently ordered?” Wallis’s question, written in an appendix to his history of algebra, is an appeal to and reflection of the early modern culture of combination. His calculation determines the number of permutations: a subset of combination in which each unit must be present every time. By establishing the number of ways of ordering the units, Wallis describes the limits of the space within which variation can take place. The “Number of Alternations thus calculated,” he continued, “will proceed to a vast Multitude beyond what at first one would expect”: the space is large, but it is also knowable. The proposition that the world was made up of a fixed number of units, which could be recombined and reordered in a finite number of ways, provided the foundation and the structure for many manifestations of the medieval and early modern ars combinatoria, from alchemy to language planning, from the kabbalah and the ars magna of Ramon Llull to the development of a mathesis universalis. The calculation Wallis describes underpins these practices.</p> <br/> <p>This essay explores early modern permutational systems by examining Wallis’s calculation and the examples he uses to explain it: letters and bells. In the century before he was writing, both had been used in England to exemplify rigorous permutation: letters, in the craze for anagrams; bells, in the new and wildly popular practice of change- ringing. Neither was part of the mainstream of the republic of letters but despite, or maybe even because of, their intellectual triviality, both show the pervasiveness of the culture of combination over the course of the seventeenth century. Attend ing to the form of both highlights the strategies of meaning- making in these contemporary arts of variation.</p>
uses of church bells, philosophy and combination, anagrams, change-ringing in early modern England, mathematical permutation
Convenient characters: numerical tables in William Godbid’s printed books
December 2017
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Journal article
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The Journal of the Northern Renaissance
Jangling bells inside and outside the playhouse
January 2017
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Chapter
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Shakespeare, Music and Performance
Of all the man-made sounds that intruded into the aural territory of the outdoor playhouses, church bells were among the loudest and most common. These sonic interlopers sounded alongside the bells that would have been rung on or above the stage, forming a concert of theatrical and extra-theatrical noise that blurred the boundaries of dramatic space. In a book about music and performance, what place can we assign to bells, the sounds of which were almost, but not quite, musical? In fact, around the turn of the seventeenth century, bells were becoming thought of as more musical than ever before; innovations in their ringing meant, too, that bells were now sounded in a kind of performance that competed aurally with those going on within the theatres’ walls. Bells ring through the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, both literally and as metaphor. As well as the bells that ring on the stage in Hamlet, disorderly ringing is invoked by Ophelia to describe Hamlet’s madness: his ‘sovereign reason’ is ‘Like sweet bells jangled out of tune and harsh’ (3.1.159). This essay considers the resonances of ringing bells in this play in particular - beginning with Ophelia’s speech. Her words contain traces of sound and of performance, and the term ‘jangling’ signals the way in which bells straddled the division between musical and non-musical sound. At the same time as Ophelia invokes the newly tuneful sounds of bells, she suggests that they can be misused to become the jangling opposite; the fact that ‘sweet bells’ have been violently misused in this way, out of tune and time, suggests that their proper sound is not horrid noise but harmonious music. Bells provided an unusual aural continuity between the pre- and post-Reformation soundscapes and Ophelia’s speech reflects the new ways in which bells were rung and heard in England around 1600. The jangling she describes also has a confessional aspect. Jangling - as sound and as metaphor - brought together the sounds of disagreement in speech and disorder in bell-ringing; it was a sound that was used metaphorically by people of all confessional dispositions to suggest the chaos and the falsity of their opponents’ opinions.
