The core feature of toxicological meaning, its exemplary 'plain matter of fact', derived from the results of chemical analysis. This chapter focuses on the relationship between legal and chemical standards of proof and evidence. Poison posed special problems for managing evidence in the courtroom, problems that participants looked to chemical materialism to resolve. By tacking between legal and chemical theory, and between the manipulation of words for things and the manipulation of things as words, the chapter seeks not merely to shed light on the representational strategies underlying toxicological proof, but to suggest ways of reconceptualizing toxicologists' frustration with their 'mistreatment' in the courtroom. Poisoning trials, which provided medico-legal expertise with a stage on which to display its declarative capabilities, were also events in which the foundations of toxicological proof came under close scrutiny.

This chapter examines the interlocking elements out of which Victorian commentators constructed an understanding of poisoning as, in important respects, a specifically modern concern. This identification of poisoning as modern relied upon a conceptual framework forged from an inherited politico-historical narrative; a contemporary examination of the nature of 'civilization'; and the cultural, historical, and material meanings attributable to poison as an instrument of crime. In singling out secret poisoning as 'the crime of civilization', the Illustrated times and others like it were at once providing a diagnosis of contemporary society, and a comparison with specific historical antecedents. Italian political history, encompassing both classical Roman and Renaissance courts, served as an instructive touchstone for Victorian commentary on poison. To counter 'scientific' poisoning, a more rigorous science of detection was required.

This chapter shows how William Palmer's case was enmeshed with a core set of concerns about the social and cultural underpinnings of a selfconsciously 'modern' Britain. The rise of the Palmer family from trade to commercial respectability was confirmed by several of its male offspring entering the ranks of the professions, a clergyman, a solicitor, and a doctor. William attended the local grammar school, and on leaving at seventeen was apprenticed, first to a Liverpool chemist, then to a medical man in Great Haywood. Palmer was committed for trial on a coroner's warrant. His crime was effected with all the subtlety befitting a man trained in the science of medicine, eschewing, as the Pharmaceutical journal put it, 'the clumsy method of poisoning by large doses of arsenic' in favour of poisoning 'as an exact science'. Palmer's case gripped the public imagination as no other poison trial had done before.

Interest in William Palmer as a case outlived Palmer the man, with his verdict and execution causing almost as much ink to be spilled as his trial had done. While the imagery of toxicological infallibility required reconsideration in the wake of the Palmer trial, the Examiner maintained there was nothing that came out of the trial that should significantly diminish public faith in medico-legal evidence at poisoning cases. Despite broad support for the verdict, the Palmer case had raised searching questions about the standing of toxicology as a reliable bulwark against the modern poisoner. Alfred Swaine Taylor's frank admission of error in his search for that most common and ostensibly traceable of all poisons, arsenic, featured prominently in these arguments, representing for them at once a practical and symbolic violation of modern toxicological order.

As recorded in the annotations in this section, and noted in the introduction, Knevet’s language employs a Spenserian vocabulary, making copious allusion to The Faerie Queene, as well as Spenser’s other writings. It is frequently archaic (oftŸen repeating Spenser’s own Chaucerian diction), and also employs a dense lexicon of chivalric, heraldic, and courtly terms. In those annotations, the editors have refrained from glossing every instance of some of Knevet’s more commonly used terms and phrases; instead they are listed in this glossary section.

This chapter contains extensive critical commentary of A Supplement of the Faery Queene, exploring Knevet's complicated and enigmatic meanings, structures and allusions.

This section contains the full text of A Supplement of the Faery Queene, produced and annotated by Christopher Burlinson and Andrew Zurcher. The aim in producing the present edition of the Supplement is to give a wider readership access to a seventeenth-century manuscript poem of considerable interest and importance. In this edition, the editors have not sought to erase or to reform the poem’s presentation in its single textual witness, but to record that appearance in a way that will be legible and intelligible to modern readers.