Reveals the profusion of boxes in early modern England, valued for practical and aesthetic reasons. While boxes are often very mundane, they might also be associated with events such as marriage, and are frequently bequeathed as items of intrinsic value. Wills and inventories demonstrate the ready slippage between boxes as furnishings for rooms, and furnishings for the mind – one author stores up his faith in ‘my Breste, the Cheste of my mynde’. His words illustrate the blurring of the material and the metaphorical that can happen inside boxes. Considering Elizabeth I’s bedchamber, hiding places in The Merry Wives of Windsor, and moments of enclosure in John Donne, this chapter interweaves close readings of wills and prayer manuals with objects such as velvet boxes and parish chests. It establishes a key quality of the box: although it is one of the most physically solid and constraining kinds of object, it offers flexible imaginative possibilities.

In the remarkable story of the chance discovery of the Elizabethan astrologer John Dee’s papers in 1672, a humble household chest belonging to a married couple plays a starring role. The seventeenth-century antiquary Elias Ashmole recounts how one day the chest was moved, and in a secret hidden drawer the chest’s owners came across Dee’s papers alongside a little box, some books, and prayer beads. In Ashmole’s account, this chest, a seemingly ordinary piece of household furniture, turns out to be a miraculous repository of other boxes, whose contents open onto England’s Elizabethan and Catholic pasts. The Introduction considers this extraordinary episode in the light of an essay by Primo Levi, who proposes that ‘building receptacles’ is a distinctively human activity. In the literary and material cultures of early modern England, the box is one of the most ordinary and necessary of human-made objects. As Boxes and Books in Early Modern England will explore, the box is also an evocative meeting point between matter and metaphor, influencing the material and mental environments of early modern writing in numerous ways.

Turns to the metaphorical usefulness of the box, which may be troubling because its contents are unknown, unexpected or dangerous, as epitomised by Portia’s caskets in The Merchant of Venice. Bassanio is the only suitor to realise that ‘the outward shows be least themselves’. These familiar theatrical boxes signal Hamlet’s anxiety that people, things, and words might have ‘that within which passes show’.

Two such boxes are pervasive in early modern writing: Plato’s Silenus, and the proverbial apothecary’s painted box. Repeatedly invoked from Erasmus to the King James Bible, these are favourite images for the challenges of interpretation. The Silenus requires the reader to get beyond its outside to locate hidden truths. The painted box necessitates a more cautious negotiation of its exterior. Both illustrate how the crisis of hermeneutics inherent in a box – the processes required to open it, and how to discern what might be inside – materialises assumptions about the superiority of hidden things. The chapter reveals how, in its renaissance as a persistent and versatile image in early modern writing, the box itself becomes as significant as what it might or might not contain.

Books and boxes were found in close proximity; before bookshelves, chests were the most obvious place to store books, and the physical features of a bound book often made it visually analogous to a box. The material and tactile connections between book and box play into common metaphors of the book as a receptacle for textual riches, and the chapter brings together responses to the book as box-like object from Erasmus to early seventeenth-century English Protestants, from humanist treatises to portraits. In considering literary and visual encounters with the codex, discussion focuses on the significance of external surfaces, such as gold, blackness, and embroidery, in the fashioning of these inherently box-like objects. While reformers insisted on the Word of God as the only vehicle of truth, they could not escape the fact that it had to be contained in books, unavoidably material receptacles with insides and outsides that could shape and inscribe each other. Protestants remained sensitive to the metaphorical potential of an object with insides and outsides, and this chapter demonstrates that the identity of the ‘book’ was more complex than 'sola scriptura' suggested.

Looks forwards to the shipping container, a universally recognisable box crucial to the networks and infrastructures of contemporary capitalism. This ubiquitous object, a box with a standardised form, has transformed the global movement of stuff. The box of all boxes, this icon of modernity is a reminder that the way we live continues to be constrained by material things. Summarises how the book as a whole has told the story of the early modern precursors to this object, a dynamic range of boxes that enfranchised ways of being, thinking, and writing.

Focuses on the reliquary: an enclosing, revealing structure, which engages intensely with its contents. The apparently idolatrous worshipping of ‘Gods bodye in the box’ was a persistent complaint among reformers, and the murky box of the reliquary epitomised the falseness of the Roman Catholic faith. The chapter starts with sixteenth-century encounters with relics, beginning with Erasmus, whose attitude is characterised by ambiguities about the spiritual significance of material things. Comparing satirical and polemical responses to relics from both sides of the religious divide, the chapter considers how these boxes operated as contested sites. It then turns to the afterlife of the reliquary once it had been removed from the religious sphere, and locates its survival in the vocabulary of post-Reformation libraries as new kinds of shrine, and in seventeenth-century printed reliquiae, as safer kinds of receptacle. Even after the reliquary appeared to be emptied of its dangerous significance, the very idea of the relic and the possibilities offered by this controversial box endured as ways of thinking about the interweaving of physical and intellectual apprehension demanded by books.

Explores imaginative connections between boxes and selves, especially bodies. In George Herbert’s poem ‘Ungratefulness’, humanity’s relationship with God is figured by some of the many bodily boxes that strew The Temple, with their associations of intimacy, and interrogation of openness and closure. Herbert hints at the material similarities between the boxes of the household and those ‘of bone’. The noun ‘chest’ can refer to both, and as early modern poets recognised, there is a striking physical resemblance between the anatomy of a human chest with its enclosing ribcage, and that of a wooden chest framed by iron bars. The chapter offers close readings of sermons by John Donne, poems by George Herbert, and Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Drawing together the pervasive material and imaginative interactions between boxes and bodies, these texts show how thinking inside the box is rooted in the materiality of bodily experience. Boxes of all kinds become transformative objects to think with, but writers reveal that although boxes point towards order, and the neatness of containment, they also constantly push at their own boundaries.