First catch your flying rhinoceros
That particular beast, of which I’d previously been unaware, was, I learnt this afternoon, one of the highlights of the cabinet of curiosities of Sir Walter Cope, an associate of William Cecil, who built Cope Castle, later Holland House Kensington. (Some taxidermist must really have been taxed to construct that one.)
He also boasted some fine porcelain, which was the subject of an IHR seminar this afternoon, by Susan Bracken (University of Sussex), “Collecting Chyna in Jacobean London”. She argued that while the traditional view is that interest in porcelain only grew with the spread of “hot liquors”, ie. coffee and chocolate, in fact interest started much earlier.
Indeed in Italy in the 16th-century there were widespread if unsuccessful attempts to imitate the imported Chinese product. The Medicis were the most successful, but the hard paste recipe was not understood in west; many believed you could just dig it up. They had a powerful incentive to try to make it – it was thought that it would break on contact with poison, so its use was particularly suited to court life.
The earliest evidence for its presence in Europe is records from Topkapi palace in 1331. It was traded through India, as well as via the silk route, but Hindus would not use it for eating and drinking. An inventory of Henry VIII’s possession has him in possession of four pieces, three of which had gold fittings around them, reflecting their rarity value.
The word porcelain first appears in English in this context in 1530, and in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure it is referred to without explanation, so must by then have been widely available. There are references in Ben Johnson’s Epicene, or the Silent Woman to “china houses” and a china woman (presumably a seller of such, and there are other reports of women being china merchants – be nice to know more!)
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[...] We have come far, over two centuries. But there is much more history yet to be explored: we therefore make certain adjustments to the time mechanism, so as to accelerate the rate of our travel. And so on to England! We indulge in the rowdy revelries of London’s May Days before examining the significance of 1688. We also discern, around the turn of the 17th century, some of the political theologies which perhaps played a part in eventually bringing the Glorious Revolution about. The flow of time confines us to England, for the moment. We note how the transition was made between medieval plays and their early modern successors (such as Shakespeare’s Coriolanus), and the introduction of finest china into England. And from on high we observe where Henry VIII’s six wives lived. But here is an anomaly—Chaucer suggesting pickup lines for medieval historians in the 21st-century (some of which, it may be suggested, could have broader appeal—Baroness Thatcher might warm to the line “Art thou a disastrous poll tax? Bycause I feele a risynge comynge on.”) A 14th-century chrononaut, perhaps? [...]
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