The Elizabethan lumber room: Networks of timber, constructs of knowledge.

摘要

Despite its designation as a cultural "golden age," reading late Elizabethan England as a "wooden age" tells us more about its constituent "stuff." From the materials of London's playhouses (its "wooden O"s) and buildings, to the processes of charcoal- and brick-making, to oaken ships whose construction spurred pursuits for fresh wood resources on the continent and in the new world, timber supplied the raw materials for an array of commercial ventures. These projects, in turn, occasioned what was perceived to be an acute timber shortage. But timber is a surprisingly more capacious term than this materio-economic history might suggest. It refers to trees as organisms, to the milled lumber of the carpenter's craft, and to young tree limbs shaped to mature into wood requiring little treatment before a carpenter could assemble ships with it. In "The Elizabethan Lumber Room," I detail representations of timber's definitional flexibility to contextualize its materio-economic history, elaborating its rich conceptual work in two key fields of early modern knowledge---genealogy and reproductive anatomy. "The Elizabethan Lumber Room" argues that timber was thus fully exploited as a rhetorical substrate to compensate for (the perception of) a material lack.