Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Part I Introduction
- Part II Medicinal and Sacred Drugs
- Part III Divine Blood for Sale
- Appendix I ‘Rariteiten te koop’
- Appendix II Family and business network of Joannes Six van Chandelier
- Bibliography
- General index
- Index of poems by Joannes Six van Chandelier
- Plate Section
5 - Drugs as Material and Linguistic Cosmetics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 November 2020
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- Part I Introduction
- Part II Medicinal and Sacred Drugs
- Part III Divine Blood for Sale
- Appendix I ‘Rariteiten te koop’
- Appendix II Family and business network of Joannes Six van Chandelier
- Bibliography
- General index
- Index of poems by Joannes Six van Chandelier
- Plate Section
Summary
Abstract
In many of his poems, Joannes Six van Chandelier discusses the use of cosmetics as both material and literary ornaments. He writes about the use of make-up by Spanish women, and about incense and colours in Renaissance love poetry. In this chapter, I show how, in these texts, he perceives cosmetic drugs as substances that have a transformative effect and that are thus threats to the human body, in both the medical and the religious sense. Through a development of a ‘flawed poetics’, Six demonstrates a distance to the un-Dutch, aristocratic values of expensive dyestuffs. Nevertheless, this does not prevent him – by means of the rhetorical device of praeteritio – from writing colourful poems on the occasion of a wedding and on the landscape of Oostkapelle.
Keywords: Cosmetics, literary ornaments, love poems, civet, incense, praeteritio
And if the outward splendour of the clothing worn by Kings and the greatest Princes of the World is a stain and a sin, how much more dreadful would that splendour be if our Merchants and Shopkeepers, and their Wives and Children were to go about all decked out like so much Royalty, as if they themselves were Kings and Queens?
– Petrus WittewrongelRoosters without combs
In the literary self-presentation of our merchant-poet, colours do not seem to occupy a significant place. In one of the opening poems of Poësy, ‘Afscheid aan myn rymen’ (‘Farewell to My Rhymes’) (J120), which I discussed in Chapter 2, Six describes his poems in this way: ‘Wat haanen zyn dit sonder kammen’ (‘What kinds of roosters are these, without combs’). He presents his verses as misshapen, drab creatures that will generate negative criticism. This identification with drab species of birds also occurs in other places in Poësy, often in comparisons with the texts of the great Poets in the Dutch Republic, whom Six depicts, by contrast, as noble, colourful birds.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Dangerous DrugsThe Self-Presentation of the Merchant-Poet Joannes Six van Chandelier (1620–1695), pp. 167 - 202Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2020