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Plays, Plague, and Pouches: The Role of the Outside in Early Modern English Plague Remedies

Paper · 2021 · Edward B.M. Rendall and Isabella Rosner

Summary

This is a cultural-history paper, not an NLP study. It asks why a small group of seventeenth-century English needlework pouches were made in the shape of frogs, and what they were for. The authors look at the objects themselves: one in the Ashmolean Museum, one in a University of Alberta embroidered box, and at least four more. They set these beside period plague treatises and plays by Shakespeare, Jonson and others.

From the pouches' size, materials and very narrow openings, they conclude that these were perfumed sweet bags, not coin purses. Under the miasma view of disease, such bags were carried to ward off plague, which was thought to travel through foul air. The authors weigh earlier explanations, such as a link to Elizabeth I's suitor or anti-Dutch satire, and find them weak. They argue instead that the pouches joined two kinds of "outside": costly scents taken from foreign animals, and a frog body that recalled wild, little-known rural places like the strange landscapes of the stage. The study shows how everyday objects can encode attitudes to disease and the unfamiliar.

Key points

  • The Ashmolean "Frog Purse" (WA1947.191.324) measures about 6 × 7.5 × 1.5 cm. It is made of silk and metal threads, wire and glass-bead eyes, with an inner silk bag opening at the mouth.
  • A matching pouch was found in a stumpwork box dated 1645, now in the Anne Lambert Clothing and Textiles Collection at Alberta (1992.15.1d).
  • The pouches are dated to the later 1600s by comparison with bellows-shaped purses of similar size. One such purse sits in Martha Edlin's casket of 1671, now in the V&A.
  • The authors set aside two earlier theories:
    • Royal memento: Elizabeth I nicknamed Francis, Duke of Anjou, "frog", but he died in 1584, too early to explain later pouches.
    • Anti-Dutch satire: Ogilby's Aesop engraving mocks the Dutch as frogs, but the pouches were not limited to court politics.
  • The medical context draws on several period sources:
    • Thayre (1603) and Wirsung (1598) on bad smells corrupting the air.
    • Bradwell (1636) and Harvey (1665) warning that wool, leather and furs carried plague.
    • The Eyam outbreak of 1665–66, which began with an infected bale of cloth delivered to the tailor George Viccars.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. An undocumented object is dated by tying it to a closely similar object with a firm date. Borrowing dates from a well-anchored neighbour works wherever direct evidence is missing.
  • I2. The pouch's function is inferred from its physical affordance: a mouth too small for more than a finger rules out use as a coin purse. Simple physical limits can eliminate whole readings of what a thing is for.
  • I3. Each rival hypothesis is tested against one concrete mismatch, such as wrong timing (a death in 1584) or wrong social reach (court only). This turns rejection into an explicit, checkable step.
  • I4. The argument draws on three independent kinds of evidence: physical objects, medical pamphlets and drama. A claim backed by unrelated sources is stronger than one backed by many sources of the same type.
  • I5. The authors note that the period did not reliably distinguish frogs from toads, so the modern label may be too precise. Category boundaries shift over time.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (world): When a story leaves an event's time unstated, Mova could place it by linking it to a comparable event whose position in the timeline is explicit.
  • I2 (world): Measures and object properties in the compiled knowledge could filter which uses of an entity are plausible before frames are bound.
  • I3 (answer): Answer readers could record for each rejected candidate the specific fact that contradicts it, so every answer is explainable.
  • I4 (learn): Silver data could weight agreement between parsers built on genuinely different principles above agreement between near-identical ones.
  • I5 (tokens): Lemma and sense assignment for older English texts could allow coarser, merged senses instead of forcing modern WordNet distinctions.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓King's College LondonLondon · United Kingdom19 works · 1,454 citations🎓University of BristolBristol · United Kingdom7 works · 658 citations

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 9,296 worksHistory and Philosophy of Science · 18 worksClassics · 67 worksMuseology · 1 work

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 1,373 works

Cite

Cite as Edward B.M. Rendall and Isabella Rosner. 2021. Plays, Plague, and Pouches: The Role of the Outside in Early Modern English Plague Remedies. Journal of Early Modern Studies.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.13128/jems-2279-7149-12741

@article{rendall2021plays,
  title = {{Plays, Plague, and Pouches: The Role of the Outside in Early Modern English Plague Remedies}},
  author = {Edward B.M. Rendall and Isabella Rosner},
  journal = {Journal of Early Modern Studies},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.13128/jems-2279-7149-12741},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.13128/jems-2279-7149-12741}
}

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