Agnes Bowker's Cat: Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England - Book Review

By David Cressy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. xi + 351 pp. 9.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk). ISBN 0-19-282530-5

David Cressy has written several well-organised books on well-defined aspects of the religion and culture of early modern England, most recently Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (1997). Here, by contrast, is a book that is hardly organised at all, and its subject almost defies definition. It consists essentially of the bits that did not fit in previous books but were far too interesting to ignore. Fifteen strange stories, from about 1560 to 1650, push at the limits of unusual and transgressive human cultural behaviour. In the process, they help us to reconsider the nature of normality: the margins illuminate the centre.

The main title perhaps nods towards Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre (1984), a noted collection of cultural history essays. The bibliographically minded should note that the book was first issued under the present subtitle alone. "Travesties" in that subtitle is to be construed broadly, to include burlesque, mockery, and cross-dressing, all of which are found in the book, along with more gruesome or simply weird material. Not all the stories can be discussed here, but those that follow are representative. Unlike many purportedly "English" works that actually deal only with a small area, the book ranges throughout the country for its material.

The title story concerns an unmarried woman servant who, in collusion with a midwife, claimed to have had intercourse with a demon and to have given birth to a "monster." This caused much excitement, but turned out on sober investigation to be a dead cat. Poor Agnes Bowker, who might have faced infanticide or witchcraft charges, was let off, but probably not to a happy future, as she had been suicidal during her pregnancy. The issues of trauma and fantasy are raised but not pursued: this is a work of cultural, not psychological, history. Instead, we have a fuller investigation of reports of "monstrous births," showing many linked with evangelical calls to personal or national repentance. In passing, we have valuable contextualising discussion of topics such as servants' sex lives.

Such stories illustrate what was normal in early modern culture by contrasting it with what was abnormal. In fact, they deal less with well-recognised abnormal behaviour, such as adultery, than with the really exotic. In their time, these stories served a similar function to stories in the modern tabloid press. It is no accident that one of Professor Cressy's most important sources is the popular pamphlet press of the day. Fascinating woodcuts from several pamphlets are reproduced, and the quotation of some documents in extenso increases the book's value for teaching.

The popular press is particularly important in the chapter on the Adamites. These were--so the pamphlets alleged--a radical sect during the English Revolution, whose most striking tenet was that the attainment of a sanctified state involved the adoption of the prelapsarian nakedness of humanity's first father. The Adamites are known only from these unreliable and hostile accounts, and Professor Cressy argues persuasively that the sect as such probably never existed (although some religious radicals, including a few early Quakers, did occasionally "go naked for a sign"). They thus form an important test case for the much-discussed recent theory that the Ranters, too, were the creation of a hostile press rather than a real organisation. The debate on the Ranters is reviewed and tends to point towards the conclusion that we have considerably more evidence for real Ranters. If the Adamites were what an invented sect looked like, then the Ranters did exist.

Surprisingly, Professor Cressy seems less interested in what the pamphleteers said the Adamites did at their gatherings once they had stripped off. For they were unanimous in alleging that they indulged in promiscuous sex orgies. This is an important point, which could have helped to connect the pamphleteers to a broader cultural tradition. Norman Cohn showed in his seminal Europe's Inner Demons (1975) that the idea of the promiscuous sex orgy was a long and durable one that took many guises, from accusations against early Christians to medieval heretics, and then to the early modern witchcraft prosecutions. Surely in the anti-Adamite writings we catch an echo of this ancient tradition?

Even more than the popular press, Professor Cressy uses church court records. Such records have been the source for such celebrated works of cultural history as Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou (1978) or Carlo Ginzburg's The Night Battles (1983). One story from church court records concerns Thomas Salmon who, aided by a midwife's daughter, dressed as a woman to gain access to a birth room. On this convenient peg Professor Cressy hangs an extended discussion of cross-dressing, presented by recent literary scholars as a crucial issue of erotic transgression and social flux. His rebuttal of these extravagant notions is convincing and deserves to be influential. Salmon and his accomplice were just having fun.