Technologies of mettle: The acting self and the early modern English culture of metals.

摘要

"Technologies of Mettle: The Acting Self and the Early Modern English Culture of Metals" takes into account the double meaning of mettle and metal to consider the implications of describing the acting self in terms of the metallic world located outside the self. Drawing from materials as diverse as stage plays, travel narratives, metallurgical manuals, prose treatises, and epic poetry, each chapter shows the ways in which the literary and non-literary uses of metallic technology---all of which comprise, I argue, an English "culture of metals"---figure an emergent sense of English selfhood. Chapter one, "An English Culture of Metals," demonstrates the ways in the metallic arts of mining, metallurgy, alchemy, and chymistry derive their authority from the experience and noble character of the practitioner who conducts them, a relation between metals and selfhood that is inverse to that described in literary satire, which describes alchemists as inherently deceptive. This chapter sets the historical stage for the following chapters, which chart the specific ways in which metallic practices were deployed in defining early modern English selfhood. Chapter two, "Assaying English Metallic Skill in the New World," reads England's constant encounter with base metals in the New World as the backdrop for the emergence of a model of selfhood derived from metallic skill. Chapter three, "The 'Tyrant Custom' of War: The Construction of Military Mettle through the Metallic Arts in Shakespeare's Plays," reads the shift in early modern military practice toward gunpowder and cannons, which implicated the metallic arts into constructions of military courage, as providing a vibrant metaphor for purposeful action both on the battlefield and on stage. Chapter four, "Teaching Ethical Action through the "Corporal Forms" of Metals in Milton's Early Prose and Paradise Lost," argues that Milton draws upon the fallen discourse of metals in his early prose and Paradise Lost to articulate an ethics of reading that encourages readers to understand good through evil and demonstrates, as do the other chapters, a metallic model for the acting self in early modern England.