Holy Sh*t: A Brief History of Swearing (44 page)

“
if this doctrine should be allowed
”: Brownlow,
Robert Southwell
, 20; Janelle,
Robert Southwell
, 81–82.

“
not without some note and touch
”: William Camden,
The History of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth, Late Queen of England
(1688), 344. For Southwell’s death, see Devlin,
Life of Robert Southwell
, 323; Pilarz,
Robert Southwell
, 278–80; and Hogge,
God’s Secret Agents
, 188–90.

“
they may charge us
”: Christopher Bagshaw,
A Sparing Discoverie of Our English Jesuits
(1601), 11–12.

God is not “bodily
”: Hudson,
The Premature Reformation
, 281.

The
Thirty-Nine Articles
: Gavin Koh, ed.,
The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion
, November 29, 1999,
http://gavvie.tripod.com/39articles/articles.html
, accessed March 19, 2011.

Robert Parsons scoffed:
Robert Parsons,
The Third Part of a Treatise, Intitled of Three Conversions of England
(St. Omer, 1604), 134.

Protestant swearing was thought to rip apart:
William Vaughn,
The Spirit of Detraction, Conjured and Convicted in Seven Circles
(London, 1611), 123.

The sheer number of oaths people were required to take:
For more on the conflicting oaths, see Hill,
Society and Puritanism
, 382–419.

“
they force us to take
”: quoted in Ibid., 411.

“
Supernatural sanctions became less necessary
”: Ibid.,
S
399.

“
it paid a man
”: Ibid., 418.

The scientist Robert Boyle:
Robert Boyle,
A Free Discourse Against Customary Swearing
(London: John Williams, 1695); Michael Hunter,
Robert Boyle 1627–1691: Scrupulosity and Science
(Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2000), 64–68.

She liked to sprinkle her speech with:
Peter Brimacombe,
All the Queen’s Men: The World of Elizabeth I
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 118; Alison Weir,
The Life of Elizabeth I
(New York: Ballantine 1999), 166, 427.

John Harington called it “obscenousnesse
”: John Harington, “An Apologie of Poetrie,” preface to Ludovico Ariosto,
Orlando Furioso
(1591), in
Ancient Critical Essays upon English Poets and Poesy
, ed. Joseph Hasle-wood (London: Robert Triphook, 1815), II:138–39.

He ends his 1598 erotic poem:
John Marston, “The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion’s Image,”
Poems
, ed. Arnold Davenport (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1961).

a much less titillating mock encomium:
Thomas Nashe,
Nashe’s Lenten Stuff
, ed. Charles Hindley (London: Reeves and Turner, 1871), 14.

“
all things that are to be eschewed
”: Thomas Thomas,
Dictionarium linguae Latinae et Anglicanae
(London, 1587).

Huge numbers of dictionaries:
Janet Bately, “Bilingual and Multilingual Dictionaries of the Renaissance and Early Seventeenth Century,” in
The Oxford History of English Lexicography
, ed. Anthony Paul Cowie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2009), 1:41.

“
we shall also bore
”: Desiderius Erasmus,
Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style
, trans. Betty I. Knott, in
Collected Works of Erasmus
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 24:302.

“
a thousand more Latin words
”: Thomas Elyot,
Dictionary
(London, 1538), sig. Aiiir. For Elyot’s ideas of who is a good author, see his 1531
The Boke Named the Governour
, ed. R. C. Alston, English Linguistics 1500–1880, 246 (Menston, England: Scolar Press, 1970), 51.

look for his “many commendable
”: Elyot,
Governour
, 51v.

“
there may hap by evil custom
”: Ibid., 17r.

Elyot broaches this conflict in a Latin epistle:
Elyot,
Dictionary
, “Lectoribus vere doctis.”

“
a womans wycket
”: For more on wickets, see James T. Henke,
Gutter Life and Language in the Early “Street” Literature of England: A Glossary of Terms and Topics Chiefly of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
(West Cornwall, CT: Locust Hill Press, 1988).

Other lexicographers abandoned didactic responsibility:
John Florio,
A Worlde of Wordes
(1598), Anglistica & Americana 114 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1972); Palsgrave,
Lesclarcissement de la Langue Francoyse
.

La Cazzaria:
For more on this work, see Ian Moulton,
Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 147–48.

“
O d fuckin Abbot
”: Edward Wilson, “A ‘Damned F … in Abbot’ in 1528: The Earliest English Example of a Four-Letter Word,”
Notes and Queries
40, no. 1 (1993): 29–34; Jesse Sheidlower,
The F Word
, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 139–40.

“
He clappit fast, he kist and chukkit
”: William Dunbar, “In Secreit Place This Hyndir Nycht,” in
The Makars: The Poems of Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas
, ed. Jacqueline Tasioulas (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 1999), 569.

“
Non sunt in cœli
”: Thomas Wright and James Orchard Halliwell, eds.,
Reliquiae Antiquae: Scraps from Ancient Manuscripts
(London: John Russell Smith, 1845), 1:91; Sheidlower,
The F Word
, 83.

Naff,
for example, is not:
Michael Quinion, “Naff,” World Wide Words, January 26, 2008 (online), accessed July 27, 2012.

If it’s not an acronym:
Sheidlower,
The F Word
, viii–xii.

In the sixteenth century, the insults:
These examples are from Bridget Cusack, ed.,
Everyday English 1500–1700
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 12, 22, 26, as well as from Colette Moore, “Reporting Direct Speech in Early Modern Slander Depositions,” in
Studies in the History of the English Language: A Millennial Perspective
, ed. Donna Minkova and Robert Stockwell (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2002).

For more great real-life Renaissance insults, see B. S. Capp,
When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighborhood in Early Modern England
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 189.

“
Skaldit skaitbird
”: “The Flyting of Dumbar and Kennedie,” in
The Makars: The Poems of Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas
, ed. Jacqueline Tasioulas (Edinburgh: Canongate Books, 1999), 338–51.

“
advance in the frontiers of shame
”: Norbert Elias,
The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations
, ed. Eric Dunning et al., trans. Edmund Jephcott, rev. ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 118.

Even confession, the most secret
: Duffy,
The Stripping of the Altars
, 288, 570; see also Mary C. Mansfield,
The Humiliation of Sinners: Public Penance in Thirteenth-Century France
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995).

Reading too was very often not private:
Heidi Brayman Hackel,
Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 46.

Historian Victor Skipp
: Skipp’s analysis quoted in Lena Cowen Orlin,
Elizabethan Households: An Anthology
(Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1995), 81–82.

Around 1330, fireplaces:
Bill Bryson,
At Home: A Short History of Private Life
(New York: Doubleday, 2010), 58–59.

Privies were also spaces
: Girouard,
Life in the English Country House
, 56–57; John Harington,
The Metamorphosis of Ajax
, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 57, 82, 85, 89, and most of the book, really; Tony Rivers, Dan Cruickshank, Gillian Darley, and Martin Pawley,
The Name of the Room: A History of the British House and Home
(London: BBC Books, 1992), 93–95; Lucinda Lambton,
Temples of Convenience and Chambers of Delight
(London: Pavilion Books, 1995), 6–14.

“
His head, and his necke
”: “Sirreverence,”
OED
(online).

the family at Chilthorne Domer
: Lambton,
Temples of Convenience
, 38.

For true privacy, a wealthy person:
Girouard,
Life in the English Country House
, 56.

People of the middling and lower sorts
: Orlin,
Elizabethan Households
, 3.

“
evolving civility showed itself
”: Nicholas Cooper, “Rank, Manners and Display: The Gentlemanly House, 1500–1750,”
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
, sixth series, 12 (2002): 297.

others reverse the causation
: See Orlin,
Locating Privacy
, 66–111 for a great summary of scholarly views of architecture as the cause of the new desire for privacy and for qualifications of it.

As we can see from the multiseat privies, however, shame had not advanced to quite to the levels of today. Privacy, and the shame it engendered, was in many cases more notional than actual. Especially for the middling and lower sorts, accommodations in London were often crowded, with nothing but paper walls or a few boards creating the new rooms of the Great Rebuilding. Court records still contain numerous eyewitness accounts of adultery or fornication, such as that of John Morris, whose elderly neighbor was able to observe him in flagrante with a girl (not his wife) by peeping through the apparently sizable gap between the door frame and his front door, or Sara Bonivall and John Crosbie (also fornicators), who were seen through a hole in the wall that separated Crosbie’s house from his adjoining neighbor’s. In cases like these, it seems that early modern people in London might have even had
less
privacy than in the Middle Ages, when London itself was not as crowded with people looking for work, and when people remaining in the country could have sought out a bush more private than urban bedrooms. See Orlin,
Locating Privacy
, 152–55,

“
one should not sit
”: quoted in Elias,
The Civilizing Process
, 117.

In life, she liked to show her breasts
: For Hurault and Elizabeth, see Valerie Traub,
The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 139.

There was a hierarchy of chambers:
Rivers et al.,
The Name of the Room
, 73–74.

John Harington relates:
Harington,
Metamorphosis
, 91, 98.