Aquarium manuals had a huge impact in shaping people’s perception of sea creatures, providing both conceptual frameworks and models for interaction. This chapter considers four kinds of activities performed by Victorian aquarists – watching tank residents, domesticating them, experimenting on them, and eating them – which correspond to alternative ways of construing sea creatures as ornaments, pets, specimens, and food. On the one hand, aquarium authors shared a tendency to humanise marine animals and discuss their behaviour through narratives that reflected current assumptions on gender and class; on the other hand, though, they encouraged readers to treat sea species as objects and perform experiments on them, under the assumption that they could not feel pain. At times, tank residents could also turn into food: while some aquarists adventurously tried to cook animals that were not usually considered edible (like actinias), the possibility to observe the life of species commonly seen as food (such as prawns) stimulated reflections on the distance between the live animal in the tank and the dead one on the plate.

The book concludes by considering the interpretive influence of the images throughout MS Ashmole 61, repeated pictures of fish and flowers. Through this, the book argues that such patterns across the manuscript offer an additional prod to interpretation that requires recognition of agential objects from across the medieval household.

This chapter seeks to rethink the various ways in which a term, ‘intertextuality’, given a specific dialogic meaning in the work of Julia Kristeva, has become domesticated to refer to the formal relation between texts. This domestication has also involved a certain sanitisation of the term, and the argument seeks to expose the limitations of the few critics who have attempted to deploy the term.

Education and children’s literature were connected in this period, both dedicated to assisting parents in bringing about the transformation of the irrational, malevolent child (the ‘child of wrath’ discussed in earlier chapters) into the civilised, Christian adult. This chapter examines the ways in which the emphasis on the child’s moral and intellectual education, which found powerful expression in one of the most popular devotional texts in British history, The Whole Duty of Man, influenced the Irish Protestant campaign to establish networks of schools (charity and Charter schools) to bring the values of Enlightenment Protestantism to Irish Catholic children, and also into the representation of Irish childhood in fiction. The chapter will take the reader through the most influential of these texts, while also examining one of the earliest of Irish novels to deal extensively with regulatory mechanisms including parental influence, devotional texts, catechisms and, in particular, educational establishments. The History of Jack Connor (1752), by William Chaigneau, can be described (loosely) as a novel of education, and has recently been recognised as one of the most important texts in the early history of the Irish novel. This chapter looks at educational influences on Jack, including his absorption of one of the most popular British devotional texts, his experiences in Protestant households and schools, and the negative influence of his Catholic mother, and argues that the novel’s endorsement of catechisms and schools is rather more half-hearted and qualified than previous commentators have claimed. Jack Connor is treated here as a case study where the discourses of enlightenment, education, civilisation and modernisation of both individual children and Ireland (as an allegorical child) converge.

This chapter examines the catechisms used by the Church of Ireland in the eighteenth century, and argues that they should be treated as important sources for understanding how central children were in the maintenance and development of the Irish Anglican community in this period. The foremost historian of catechisms, Ian Green, has provided a very useful survey of the catechetical texts used by Irish Anglicans in his important article, ‘Catechisms and Catechizing in Ireland, c.1560-1800’ (1995), but they have been almost completely neglected by both historians and literary critics since then. This chapter brings these catechisms back into focus, and argues that their interest is in the Anglican self, rather than the Catholic or Presbyterian other. In other words, these catechisms are more about reaffirming and securing the consistency of Anglican identity than militating against other identities, concentrating on self-policing of the Irish Anglican community to achieve internal theological consistency. The chapter treats these catechisms as an example of what the sociologist Basil Bernstein calls a ‘restricted code’, designed to limit and restrict interpretive freedom in the service of identity formation and fortification. The chapter concludes with a brief examination of the children’s bibles that were also published in Ireland in the eighteenth century, focusing on the much reprinted A Curious Hieroglyphick Bible (first published in 1784), and asks whether such bibles can be thought of as analogous to eighteenth-century toys, given the way in which they are sometimes described as ‘entertaining’ by their compilers.

This chapter introduces household affect ecologies and household object ecologies, tracing them from the different theoretical perspectives used throughout MS Ashmole 61. It offers a deep description of Objects of affection’s central object, Ashmole 61, through a consideration of the book’s full materiality. This it considers in relation to other books of its sort – in the process establishing an alternative taxonomy for books produced in the late Middle Ages for, within, and by gentry and merchant households. The chapter surveys current theoretical developments in literary manuscript study and demonstrates what Ashmole 61 has to offer to a book history rooted in new materialist concerns. This it does through investigating features of Ashmole 61’s distinctive materiality, which includes an exceptional and extended campaign of iconic scribal signatures in the form of recurring fish and flower graffiti. The introduction also considers how our cultures of editing have transformed medieval books and ponders what they are currently becoming in the process of mass digitisation of medieval manuscripts – and how this development both challenges and enables ecologically grounded manuscript study.

This chapter takes as its major premiss that Shakespeare persistently returned to his own earlier works, and reformulated them. It begins with Shakespeare’s role in Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour in which the figure of the jealous merchant Thorello appears. The recurrence of this meme is traced through exemplary comedies, tragedies and tragicomedies, exploring the ways in which the Jonsonian figure and his predicament were diffused throughout the Shakespeare oeuvre.

The chapter will then detail one of the most influential models of children in the early seventeenth century: the child as an expression of natural depravity. That the child was considered a threatening and morally debased figure in post-Reformation Europe has been established by many historians of the field. For example, the eminent historian of childhood, Hugh Cunningham, quotes a German sermon of the 1520s which explains that ‘infant humans are inclined in their hearts to adultery, fornication, impure desires, lewdness, idol worship, belief in magic, hostility, quarrelling, passion, anger, strife, dissension, factiousness, hatred, murder, drunkenness, gluttony, and more’, a rather heady brew with which the responsible parent had to contend. Cunningham explains that this understanding of the child as naturally inclined to evil was not unusual in the early modern period, and many seventeenth-century thinkers, when they devoted any attention to childhood at all, made much more of analogies between the child and Satan than a prelapsarian Adam. English Puritans read the child as a fount of sin and looked back at childhood, not with nostalgia or a desire to relive their youthful glories, but with horror and relief at having survived that physically and morally precarious age.

Chapter 2 turns from loud and brash sounds to the more tenuous, complex and even uncanny noises used increasingly after the turn of the seventeenth century, in parallel with the more regular use of indoor theatre space. With a focus on dark or ‘nocturnal’ scenes, this chapter is interested in the sounds of the supernatural, a study which might be traced as far back as Thomas De Quincey’s influential ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth’ (1890), or more recently Frances Shirley’s Shakespeare’s Use of Off-Stage Sounds (1963). This chapter expands the focus of such works (which are solely interested in Shakespeare) and offers new arguments which draw on sensory studies and explore a particularly Jacobean scepticism towards the sense of hearing as evidence of the world around us. It also acknowledges recent performance-as-research as a method of engaging with the spatial element of sound. Tracing sourceless sounds heard from offstage, or ascribed multiple, contradictory sources by those onstage, this chapter examines the ‘nocturnal’ soundscapes of Macbeth (1606), The Duchess of Malfi (1613) and The Night-walker (1615, revised 1633). It concludes that the ‘spatial characteristics’ of sounds are integral to their capacity to unsettle an audience’s sense of what is true – even what is real – in a playhouse full of questionable noises.

This section contains the lists that form the basis of the discussion in J.B. Lethbridge's chapter, 'The bondage of Rhyme in The Faerie Queene'

This chapter attends to a series of narratives in the second quarter of MS Ashmole 61 whose affective purpose is fulfilled by an object, or array of objects, affirming the mercy offered through Christ and appropriately honoured through human forgiveness. In Knight Who Forgave his Father’s Slayer, the crucifix responds to a human kiss of forgiveness by physically embracing the generous party and thereby revealing the reunited community it has produced. Two other exempla (Jealous Wife and Incestuous Daughter) materialise the effects of spiritual filth in the fiends and chains, and the triumphant power of divine mercy in the form of human tears, with the sinful female protagonists spared their deserved eternal exile through human devotion and dedication. Two romances in this section of the manuscript address forgiveness from a less narrowly religious perspective: the hero of Lybeaus Desconus is confirmed in his knightly identity, and thus confirmed as a member of the community, by various non-human members of that community; The Erle of Tolous reveals the agency of non-human members through objects bearing and producing dedication where it did not previously exist, modelling an ethics supporting the whole community.

Beginning with a moment of hollow sound heard in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, this conclusion brings together the different methodologies offered by each chapter and underscores the connection between sound effects and the bodies which hear them. Together, these methodologies demonstrate the complexity of the use of sound onstage and offer ways of distinguishing between different kinds of sound effect. The conclusion also, crucially, frames those sounds in terms of the bodies which receive it: sound is treated not in the abstract but rather as an affective experience. In this book, sound is not an abstract idea, not a phenomenon formed of vibrations in the air: it is an experience within the body, a relationship between instrument and ear, actor and audience, page and imagination. Using the early modern fictional invention of the ‘otacousticon’ as a symbol for a widespread desire to hear beyond the limits of the human ear, this conclusion insists that sound is experimental, polysemic and affective.