Wants: life for life?
A fortnightly meditation on something for sale
Aristotle’s Master-Piece: or, the Secrets of Generation… (1695). Available from Peter Harrington (£17,500)
‘Hen-Eggs, Pheasants, Woodcocks…Thrushes, Black-birds, young Pidgeons…Almonds, Pine-nuts, Raysons, Currants, all strong Wines moderately taken, especially those made of the Grapes of Italy’. All useful things for causing better erections, according to Aristotle’s Master-Piece, a once hugely popular compendium on conception, pregnancy and childbirth – with very little to do with Aristotle – first printed in 1685.
It is easy to scoff at the Master-Piece’s tips for ‘venereal embraces’, but this book recalls the real demand for advice when it came to the dangerous and mystifying act of having a family in the seventeenth century. Its huge popularity shows how conscientiously readers sought guidance on issues that remain among the most challenging parts of any human life. The text is candid and pragmatic, with the eye of a family health encyclopedia, attempting sincerely to transmit the wisdom its compilers have gathered.
The provenance of this particular copy gives it a rare and transportive quality. It is inscribed on the the title-page with a conventional ownership formula: ‘Francis Witham of South Normanton his booke, God give him grace of al[l t]his to looke, Anno Dom. 1699’ and, at the back, ‘Whinifrid Witham, her booke, Anno Dom. 1699.’, quite sweetly, ‘Written by me.’ Parish records show that Francis and Whinifrid were married in Pinxton, Derbyshire, in 1697, before moving to South Normanton, where they lived when they owned this book. They had a first son, Francis Jr in 1698 and a second one, Nicholas, in 1700.
Details of Whinifrid’s life after 1700 go unrecorded, but records show that Francis remarried in 1704. The conclusion tempts us that when Francis and Whinifrid acquired the book in 1699, they were searching for answers to a difficult pregnancy – and that Whinifrid may have died in the act of bearing Nicholas.
This copy is a conduit to the lived uncertainties of a real 17th century couple. Various annotations bring it to life as a living container of the hopes and fears of the Withams as Whinifrid underwent the awful risk of trading life for life that was always entailed in a pregnancy – and which oftentimes remains so.
To hold this book – which the Withams may themselves have pored over, searching its chapters for remedies, perhaps rummaging Chapter 18, which contains Instructions for Women with Child, or 19 For Preventing Miscarriage – is to hold an imprint of a now silent act of the will: the memory of a wish. Whinifrid is long gone, but one is still staggered to imagine her.
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The example seen here is currently on display with Peter Harrington at 43 Dover Street, London.