Sacred Seeds - University of Nebraska Press

Introduction

The greatest event since the creation of the world was the “discovery” of the Americas, writes Francisco López de Gómara, the secretary to conquistador Hernán Cortés, in his 1552 dedication to La historia general de las indias.

More than four hundred years later, present-­day writers still use the justifiably hyperbolic adjectives to describe this world-­changing event. Historian Tzvetan Todorov calls the “discovery” of America “the most astonishing encounter of our history.”1 There is no shortage of descriptive terms, and like all historical events of great import, Columbus’s crossing of the Atlantic and the age of exploration that ensued dramatically changed the early modern world. The societies, economies, cultures, arts, and burgeoning sciences of Europe were quickly transformed by this remarkable encounter with the New World. To place this event in a modern-­day perspective, imagine we were to voyage to Mars and encounter a race of aliens whom we could easily conquer, whose strange customs both horrified and awed us, and whose mode of living recalled our own pagan past. Imagine their planet was full of natural resources ready for the taking. Undoubtedly, intrepid space voyagers would assay the newfound world and exploit its natural resources to fortify old markets and develop new ones; likewise, poets and playwrights would forge a literature that reflected what English author Ben Jonson might have labeled “News from the New World Discovered on Mars,” reveling in fantastical new metaphors derived from what many would consider the greatest event in human history.

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Not only was the “discovery” of the New World an imagined event, but it sparked the imagination of early modern writers and explorers. After his third voyage, in 1498, Christopher Columbus wrote, “I believe that earthly paradise is here.” This grandiose statement, grounded in faulty geographical knowledge and wishful thinking, effectively transformed Eden from a scriptural and mythic past to a physical and material present, a trope that would inform writings about and images of the New World for decades, indeed centuries, to come. The Garden of Eden became synonymous with the Americas. In an analysis of Robert Beverley’s The History and Present State of Virginia (1705), Leo Marx identifies the mythic weight of this newly discovered paradise: “When Beverley calls Virginia one of the ‘Gardens of the World,’ he is speaking the language of myth. Here the garden stands for the original unity, the all-­sufficing beauty and abundance of the creation.

Virginia is an Edenic land of primitive splendor inhabited by noble savages.

The garden, in this usage, joins Beverley’s own feelings with that ‘yearning for paradise’ which makes itself felt in virtually all mythology.”2 The noble inhabitants of this mythological “terrestrial Paradise” lived—­so Europeans believed—­in the prelapsarian bliss of Adam and Eve and the uncorrupted innocence of the Golden Age. During the Renaissance, Europeans sought not only to revive classical Greco-­Roman culture but also to restore the original concept of Eden. After Columbus, sailors and explorers became more than just biblical speculators; they became biblical time travelers.

The New World landscape “had one radically different facet,” Annette Kolodny notes; “this paradise really existed.”3 European explorers sallied forth across the Atlantic on quests to see and possess the Eden lands while writers at home celebrated their encounters: “Earth’s only paradise!” the poet Michael Drayton writes in 1606, “To whose the golden age / Still nature’s laws doth give.” Equating the Americas with Ovid’s version of Paradise undoubtedly lingered in George Sandys’s mind when he translated the Metamorphoses while living in Virginia: in harmless ease “their happy daies were spent. / The yet-­free Earth did of her owne accord / (Vntorne with ploughs) all sorts of fruit afford.”4 Like the inhabitants of Ovid’s Golden Age, Native Americans seemingly lived free of human strife (and in some senses they did when compared « 2 · Introduction »

to the materialistic and social trappings of western Europe). Englishman Arthur Barlowe, for instance, writes in his 1584 narrative of the voyage to Virginia: “We found the people most gentle, loving, and faithful, void of guile and treason, and such as live after the manner of the golden age.”5 In the sixteenth century, the Garden of Eden and its blissful inhabitants no longer belonged solely to the world of words, but also to the New World of material reality, and it afforded Europeans much fruit.

While Europeans such as Robert Beverley projected many of the Edenic and Golden Age myths on American Indians, the transformative process worked in the other direction as well. The meeting of the New and Old Worlds was more than a meeting of disparate civilizations. It was a confluence of exciting and often mind-­boggling associations, continually creating new interstices of materials and knowledge. The Western and Eastern Hemispheres, brought together by sailing ships for the first time on a large scale, fomented the creation of the global landscape we take for granted today. Central actors in this formative moment in global history were New World plants. The agriculture of indigenous peoples mythically and materially shaped English society, and subsequently its literature, in new and startling ways. Sacred Seeds examines New World plants and their indigenous myths as they move across the Atlantic and into English literature and European markets. The term “markets” is used in the broadest sense of the word, from a more abstract “market” of botanical knowledge to a material market of medicinal, ornamental, and fashionable plants.

Importantly, this book seeks to reinstate the contributions of indigenous peoples to European society, charting an alternative cultural history, one that explores the associations and assemblages of transatlantic multiplicity rather than Eurocentric homogeny.

In the last few decades the field of early modern transatlantic studies has become one of the most lively and innovative areas of literary research.

The investigations in this field extend earlier scholarship on Mary Louis Pratt’s notion of “contact zones” and colonial encounters. Recently, scholars have identified the global flow of trade and resources as well as the mobile, contingent, and transitional models of knowledge, as Elizabeth Maddock Dillon argues in New World Drama: The Performative Commons « Introduction · 3 »

in the Atlantic World, 1649–­1849 (2014).6 During these same decades, an ecocritical turn in early modern studies has prompted literary scholars to explore plants and gardens in English literature from a local perspective, notably in Rebecca LaRoche’s Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550–­1650 (2009) and Jennifer Munroe’s Gender and the Garden in Early Modern English Literature (2008).7 Focusing solely on New World plants is still fertile ground within the field of early modern English literary studies. Historians, in particular, have recently explored the scientific knowledge of plants and its relation to the New World. Indeed, some have examined texts partly informed by indigenous peoples, as found in Antonio Barrera-­Osario’s Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the Early Scientific Revolution (2006) and Marcy Norton’s Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures: A History of Tobacco and Chocolate in the Atlantic World (2008).8 These studies focus on historical narratives related to the Spanish New World colonies and pay scant attention to plants in English literature—­understandably so, given England’s rather late arrival to the colonial enterprise in the Americas.

Sacred Seeds grafts these rich scholarly branches into an examination of four particular horticultural participants—­tobacco, amaranth, guaiac, and the prickly pear cactus—­that mediated the space between the New and Old Worlds, operating in a cross-­cultural network of material exchange, not merely as inanimate objects of trade but as active agents—­the “who” and “what” of transformation. This book seeks to unsettle the traditional Eurocentric view of English Renaissance literature as determined by Greco-­Roman myth and culture by linking New World plants to Native American myths: tobacco travels from exotic curative to common commodity; amaranth was integral to Mesoamerican ecology, diet, and rituals of human sacrifice; guaiac, known as the “Tree of Life,” supplants mercury as the “miracle” cure for syphilis; and the prickly pear cactus, or “Fig of the Indies,” through the insect growing on its leaves, supplied a red dye in Europe second in value only to the metals silver and gold.

Only one of these plants—­tobacco—­has received significant attention by early modern scholars of English literature, most notably in Jeffrey Knapp’s historical analysis in An Empire Nowhere (1992). While Knapp’s « 4 · Introduction »

study illuminates some of the material global influences upon English Renaissance literature, European power dominates the critical narrative.

Indigenous myth is sidelined. In general, new historical scholarship outlines the power relations between the colonized and colonizer. Sacred Seeds pushes against this narrative and operates under the premise that early modern Europe comprised multiple cultures and identities, none of which was privileged above another. To presume that subjugated and colonized peoples have no voice in the dominant culture reduces multiple racial and cultural identities to a singular homogeneous “other,” thus creating an obstacle for recognizing any positive and constructive participation in cultural formation by alternative societies. To this end, Sacred Seeds examines the indigenization of English literature, which suggests that the colonizer and the colonized mutually constituted the early modern world. The upheaval of cultures occurred on both sides of the Atlantic, and although Europe “won” the conquest, denying the Native American contributions to modernity commits the error of silencing once more a conquered people.

I do not wish to downplay the cultural devastation—­slavery, genocide, societal and environmental destruction, and so forth—­that is a component of the colonial impulse and the subject of much postcolonial literary analysis. Rather, this book illuminates how the indigenous garden and its traditions, myths, arts, and knowledge transformed European civilization in general and English literature in particular. By giving voice to alternative societies across the Atlantic, this study views the Americas, and specifically four things—­plants—­as active and crucial participants in the development of the early modern world. “The single most important new development in the history of early modern things,” writes Paula Findlen, “concerns the geography of objects and its implications for seeing the history of material culture as an essential component of global history.”9 As Findlen suggests, material plants from the Americas shaped global history as much as the intrepid New World explorers. To be sure, these plants actively participated in shaping the diets, sciences, arts, and literary minds (and bodies) of Europeans, transforming the West and forming the global world we know today. « Introduction · 5 »

New Plants, New Actants Tobacco, amaranth, guaiac, and cacti may seem unlikely subjects of literary criticism. These four plants from the Americas cannot be examined with the common character analysis most of us learned in school. A question of what motivates Iago to behave with such conniving cruelty toward Othello, for instance, cannot be asked of tobacco. Or can it? Can tobacco (or any object for that matter) be analyzed as a more traditional character? The answer is yes, at least according to the seventeenth-­century poet Joshua Sylvester, who goes as far as assigning Tobacco a character role: [Tobacco] hath more Subjects than the King: For Don Tobacco hath an ampler Reign, Than Don Philippo, the great King of Spain, (In whose Dominions for the most it grows,) Nay, shall I say, (oh horror to suppose!)

Heathenish Tobacco (almost every where) In Christendom (Christ’s outward Kingdom here) Hath more disciples than Christ hath, I fear, More Suits, More Service (bodies, Souls, and good) Than Christ that brought us with his pretious Bloud: O great Tobacco, greater than great Can, Great Turk, great Tartar, or great Tamerlan!10

Don Tobacco is King in this poem, exerting more influence and power than any other ruler past or present, extending “his” realm beyond the Americas to include all of Christendom. The English may have succeeded in colonizing North America, and the Spanish South America, but Tobacco colonized the entire world. As Sylvester’s poem suggests, plants have, if you will, an agency. It is not the agency one associates with consciousness, but it is a material agency that makes things happen. As Alfred Gell, one of the first scholars to discuss the agency of things, writes: “Social agency can be exercised relative to ‘things’ and social agency can be exercised by ‘things.’”11 True, tobacco is not a character whose psychological motivation can be readily identified or analyzed (“he” doesn’t even have a psyche), but Don « 6 · Introduction »

Tobacco exerts great material power. Just ask a nicotine addict. This study moves beyond an analysis of representation to show how plants provoke new associations among humans. The movement and social agency of plants from the Americas is integral to this book; nonhuman objects employ just as much agency as the humans who interact with them. Erin J. Campbell (following the sociologist Bruno Latour) describes this thing-­based approach succinctly: we need “to recognize that things without intentions comprise our social worlds. Social practices, from the perspective of Latour’s theories ‘are carried forward by things . . . which hold together and stand in for the common understanding of human actors.’ In other words, ‘non-­human actants’ bring ‘intentionalities together.’”12 Although Don Tobacco is not a conscious actant, the tobacco plant brought—­and still brings—­together many intentionalities across the Atlantic and around the globe.

By focusing on the material agency and indigenous origins of these plants, Sacred Seeds tills new ground in early modern literary studies, even though the study of objects is not new to early modern literary criticism.

The seminal collection Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, edited

by Margreta de Gratzia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (1996), brought object-­study to the forefront of English literary studies. This early foray into what Bill Brown would later label “thing theory” continues the Hegelian dialectic between subject and object by asking a simple question: What if the object is at the center, not the subject? Following Karl Marx, objects are useful as a fetishized and profitable commodity, appearing onstage and in literature, in shops and curiosity cabinets. “Objects from the New World,” the editors write, “circulated in trade networks which placed great value on American artifacts and African slaves as both signs and producers of wealth.”13 Money was made on things from the New World (and people from Africa). Sacred Seeds emphasizes as much, but without erasing the indigenous origins or transforming things/plants into reified objects. “The thing has a history,” writes Elizabeth Grosz; “it is not simply a passive inertia against which we measure our own activity. It has a ‘life’ of its own.”14 The fact that plants “live” is beyond question, but discovering how they live—­especially when transplanted or consumed—­drives this investigation. “When it comes to a plant,” Michael Marder contemplates, « Introduction · 7 »

“it turns out to be not only a ‘what’ but also a ‘who,’ an agent in its milieu, with an intrinsic value.”15 In this manner, we can ask what intentions and associations the character of Don Tobacco creates. He is, in the language of Jane Bennett, an “actant,” but “an actant never really acts alone. Its efficacy or agency always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and forces. A lot happens to the concept of agency once nonhuman things are figured less as social constructions and more as actors, and once humans themselves are assessed not as autonomous but as vital materialities.”16 In Bennett’s view, plants and humans are made of the same vital material and are equally active in creating networks of associations. Bennett derives her “vibrant matter” from the monism of the Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. England’s early modern period had literary adherents to monism also, most notably in the “vital fluid” of Milton’s Paradise Lost—­the essence of God that is contained within every substance: plants, animals, humans, angels, and so forth. According to Milton and Spinoza, everything and everyone is composed of the same basic building blocks of matter-­energy (an idea going back to Lucretius), and according to Bennett, we—­human and nonhuman—­are equally responsible for each and every association made between us. There is no subject/ object dialectic; everything and everyone, to paraphrase Shakespeare, are merely actors upon the stage of the world.

By way of anecdotal evidence, Latour notes that when you ask a puppeteer if he controls the marionette, he will respond that the marionette often “asks” him to do things he had not intended. Further consider the Japanese sculptor Etsuro Sotoo, who has spent forty years working on the facade of Antonio Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. Sotoo says that he listens to the stone. The stone tells him what to do. The stone is the master, not the sculptor. As one of the earliest scholars of the nonhuman, Arjun Appadurai, acknowledges, all things have “lives,” “moving through different hands, contexts, and uses.”17 Examining these “lives” of things is the primary objective of this book. Since the rise of empirical sciences in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most Westerners came to believe in a natural world filled with resources and objects awaiting « 8 · Introduction »

human manipulation. The nonhuman had no effect on the human. The New World plants examined in this book have roots that go deeper than Western ideologies. They contain a premodern characteristic that imbues all nonhuman studies, as the environmental and literary critic Michael Ziser notes: “The natural world maintains a prior and more fundamental authority and agency in human cultural affairs that cannot be stripped away by intercultural transfer . . . [I]t can in fact significantly constrain, resist, deform, and even direct the constitution of basic cultural and scientific facts.”18 With regard to human interaction with the world of plants, Michael Pollan poses this question: “who is really domesticating whom?”19 In this study, the objects and who acts upon them become less important than the chain of associations created by the movement of material from the Americas into Europe. This assemblage formed between humans (writers, botanists, merchants, sailors, Amerindians, etc.) and nonhumans (plants, gardens, ships, texts, etc.) forms a system of cross-­cultural transformation that leads to the creation of new myths and new markets in European culture and literature.

From Myth to Market Sacred Seeds explores the role of New World plants in the full range of literary production, from the private to the public, from texts read by courtiers and merchant investors to theater consumed by the masses, from the high art of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and courtly masques read and performed by an elite class, to the low art of anonymous ballads and pamphlets read by ragamuffin commoners. New World plants create a multitude of entangled literary associations—­some enduring, some fleeting—­linked to countries and cultures on both sides of the Atlantic.

This book purposefully crosses through multiple geographies and genres as it maps out some of the assemblages created by four New World plants that take root in the myths and markets of Europe.

Chapter 1, “New Seeds, Strange Countries: Herbals,” elaborates on the substantial role of the Native Americans and Spanish in developing botanical knowledge in Europe, as historians like Jorge Cañizares-­Esguerra, Antonio Barrera-­Osario, and Marcy Norton have expressed. The rise of « Introduction · 9 »

botanical studies and the medicinal garden in Europe coincides with the discovery of the New World, not only because of the arrival of new, exotic plants (pineapples, coconuts, tomatoes, avocados, etc.) but also because of indigenous knowledge of what plants do to the human body.

This chapter first examines important herbal texts (known as “herbals”)

by Nicolas Monardes and Francisco Hernández, ultimately outlining the movement from myth to market through a single herbal: Rembert Dodoens’s Cruydeboeck (Book of plants). This botanical book, which went through four more editions over the years, was one of the most popular and informative herbals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These pre-­Linnaean productions categorized plants by various “tribes” and “virtues” (suggestive of an early modern concept of human “agency” related to the natural world). Dodoens’s herbal evolves over the years from a mythological text to a more proto-­scientific and marketable guidebook, a trajectory English literature likewise follows in the works of Francis Bacon.

Chapter 2, “People of the Figs: Travel Writing,” examines predominant authors and publishers of travel writing in England: Thomas Gage, Thomas Harriot, Theodor de Bry, and the prolific Richard Hakluyt. The chapter focuses on the prickly pear cactus of Mexico and its valuable extract: cochineal. One of the major (though lesser known) commodities to circulate throughout Europe, the red dye cochineal is derived from a tiny insect that grows solely upon the Mexican nopal cactus. Like many items from the New World, the origin of cochineal is full of confusion. The dye is made from the dried bodies of the cochineal insect, but European texts variously refer to a plant-­related object: a berry, a seed, a fruit, and a bark. The Spanish, who controlled cochineal production in New Spain, were content to keep the source of the remarkable dye a mystery. Following only silver and gold, cochineal was highly prized in England. In 1577, Sir Francis Drake hoped to come across great quantities of “cochinillo” during his voyage around the world, and when the Earl of Essex brought three captured ships into Plymouth with more than twenty-­seven tons of cochineal, the queen proclaimed it was enough “to serve the realm for many years.” Like the Mexicans, Europeans applied cochineal to their faces, thus using a native product in a Native fashion. “Our English Ladies,” John Bulwer criticizes « 10 · I n t r o d u c t i o n »

in 1652, “seeme to have borrowed some of their Cosmeticall conceits from Barbarous Nations.”20 The dye clearly made things happen among aristocrats. Indeed, it would return to the Americas in the following century in the form of the red coats of the British colonial army. Through examining travel writing, this chapter explores the mythic and material network that developed around this precious dyestuff, suggesting that cochineal operates not merely as a marketable object but as an active agent that transformed and altered English culture.

Chapter 3, “King Tobacco,” is a study of one plant and multiple literary genres: masque, drama, poetry, and ballads. This chapter traces tobacco’s journey through English literature from exotic curative to common commodity, from the private herbal gardens of physicians to the public tobacco shops of London streets. In the masques examined in this book, there is a juxtaposition of the new English state against the old Roman Empire.

These performance spectacles were produced for a king and his court in privileged enclosed spaces with the participation of royalty, and included music, dance, singing and acting. Surprisingly, it is Indian tobacco that lifts England above Rome. What better salute to national supremacy than King Tobacco, ruler of the world! The dramas of Ben Jonson, particularly Every Man in His Humour and Every Man out of His Humour, depict tobacco on the stage in virtually every scene, and with a shocking demonstration of English gallants imitating American Indian ritual use of the sacred herb. In the elite poetry of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, the use of “divine Tobacco” by the character of Belphoebe suggests an element of the Native American huntress in that her “shadowing” of Queen Elizabeth, as Spenser states in his “Letter to Raleigh,” is analogous to the way Virginia shadows the Virgin Queen. Finally, Spenser’s mythic world of the Americas finds tobacco’s commodified counterpart in many anonymous ballads where American myth is subsumed by English trade, and divine Indian ritual succumbs to profane English consumerism.

Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and focus on two New World plants: guaiac and amaranth. Guaiac, also known as heben-­g uaiac, carried a strong Judeo-­Christian mythos in its alternative names, “Tree of Life” and lignum sanctum (holy wood). Indigenous to the « I n t r o d u c t i o n · 11 »

Americas, this New World tree supplanted mercury as the “miracle” cure for syphilis (a disease that also originated in the New World). By illustrating the American wood as a source of holiness and salvation in the works of Spenser, and a marketable commodity in the works of Jonson, chapter 4 illuminates how the Americas literally brought the biblical Garden of Eden to real life. Chapter 5 explores the intersection of Old World herbalists with New World herbs by tracing the material movement of amaranth from Mesoamerica to Europe. I contend that Mexican amaranth, which was integral to Mesoamerican ecology, diet, and rituals of human sacrifice, finds literary life in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Ultimately, this chapter gives voice to the lesser-­known and culturally induced modern ignorance of the newfound flower, amaranth, offering a counterintuitive notion of early modern transculturation: rather than view the Latin American New World through the eyes of Greco-­Roman culture, I will view European gardens—­and Spenser’s Faery Land—­through the cultural and botanical template of Mexican society.

By concentrating on New World plants in English literature, Sacred Seeds foregrounds the global reach of ecological systems that stretch across national boundaries, revealing a world of multiplicities and the complex relationships between the human and nonhuman. Latour states that “the dualism in which [the anthropologist] lives—­humans on one side, nonhumans on the other, signs over here, things over there—­is intolerable” to Indigenous peoples.21 American Indians, given Latour’s estimation of their worldview, were always already posthumanists. With the rise of empirical sciences, Westerners largely discounted posthumanist ideas of vital materialism (despite the efforts of seventeenth-­century writers and philosophers such as Milton and Spinoza). Suggesting that all elements contain the same “vital fluid” was anathema to the burgeoning capitalist pursuits of early modern merchants. Indeed, vital materialism can be associated with Native American tribes and the pagans of Europe’s remote past, as Carolyn Merchant notes in The Death of Nature: “The removal of animistic, organic assumptions about the cosmos constituted the death of nature—­the most far-­reaching effect of the Scientific Revolutions. Because nature was now « 12 · I n t r o d u c t i o n »

viewed as a system of dead, inert particles moved by external, rather than inherent forces, the mechanical framework itself could legitimate the manipulation of nature. Moreover, as a conceptual framework, the mechanical order had associated with it a framework of values based on power, fully compatible with the directions taken by commercial capitalism.”22 The aim of Sacred Seeds is to reveal how capitalistic exploitation and consumption unexpectedly revives the vital materialism of plants: Nature is not dead or inert; rather, it is full of active life. Nature lives through the encounter and entanglement with Native American cultures. In English literature, indigenous cultures not only count, but also help determine textual narratives. “Indigenous cultures, epistemes, and practices have survived to this day despite the brutality of European colonialism,” write Silver Moon and Michael Ennis about the resilience of conquered cultures in their study of the altepetl, the Nahua city-­state.23 The operative word in this sentence is “despite”: despite the efforts of colonialism to erase cultural practices of the Americas from historical memory, despite the overwhelming process of exploitation of natural resources, we can still identify vestiges of these cultural markers in the texts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The task for scholars is to listen for their voices.

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