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- [00:01]
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Caroline Dodds Pennock
So good, so good, so good.
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Mia Sorrenti
Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. When we think of Renaissance England, we often picture Shakespeare and the splendor of royal courts. But how much of this so called golden age was shaped by the people, ideas and resources from the Americas? On today's episode, Loren Working, historian and lecturer in Early Modern Literature at the University of York, joins Caroline Dodds Pennock, historian and professor in International history at the University of Sheffield, to discuss Working's book A Golden how the Americas Transformed Renaissance England and the Profound Influence of the New World on the English society, culture and imagination. Let's join our host, Caroline Dodds Pennock, now with more.
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Caroline Dodds Pennock
Welcome to Intelligence Squared. Loren, it's really nice to talk to you. I was privileged to get an advance copy of Loren's book and it is just a really fascinating, rich work which asks us to think differently about a period that I think people often think they know very well, which is the golden age of Renaissance. And people might call it Early Modern England. So maybe we could start by asking what is the story people usually tell about this period and what is it that you think is missing from that story?
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Loren Working
Yeah, thanks, Caroline. I'd love to ask listeners kind of what they what their associations with the Tudors and the Stuarts are. But I think, you know, when we think of this period, it's often dominated by court portraiture, you know, the kind of objects and art that comes down to us. So we might think about the paintings of Hans Holbein, we might think about the Reformation and perhaps things like timber frame houses and this kind of Insular idea, maybe, of a kind of merry old England. Before it got really global and colonial in a later period. So I kind of wanted to play on that idea of the golden age that Elizabethans themselves tried to propound. Age of kind of wit and refinement. A time of high style and linguistic innovation in a lot of ways. But also kind of really ask this question of who was it golden for if it was a kind of golden age, and at what cost? Where is this gold kind of literally sometimes as well as metaphorically kind of coming from? Why are we getting all these metaphors about refinement and metals and coming into this period? This is not a time that England has an empire to speak of. In that kind of later sense. Of the later 17th and 18th centuries. But I think England is thinking imperially at this time. And they're still dependent on a lot of exploitative economies in the Atlantic. So the question I really wanted to ask is kind of, where is plantation? And where are these economies in this history of England? The poet Edmund waller, in the mid 17th century. Has these lines which encapsulates this really well. I think he says, ours is the harvest where the Indians mow, We plow the deep and reap what others sow. And so this idea that the English are aware, even at the time. That as they're trying to build an empire and build these global connections. They rely on the labor and the lives of people in other parts of the world. World. And yet we've kept that labor kind of disconnected from domestic history.
- [04:31]
Caroline Dodds Pennock
Yes, absolutely. You sort of talk about how colonialism is often seen as happening elsewhere. And that's something I really want to get into. Because, of course, I'm super interested in the indigenous histories that are entangled with what you're talking about. And that attempt to decenter kind of imperialism and decenter empire. And have it us see it as present in England. I think is really super interesting. Sticking with the title just for a minute. This Golden World is obviously a really deliberate choice. Carries this sense of wonder and fantasy. But also extraction, as you've just been suggesting. And these are ways that people have often viewed the Americas. But they do also, as you're suggesting, offer us an opportunity to flip the script in the way that you're trying to do. Why is it that gold, then, is this starting point? What is it that gold, I guess, literal and imagined gold means to English people in the 16th and 17th centuries?
- [05:28]
Loren Working
Yeah, I mean, when you start to look for it, gold is really everywhere. One of the epigraphs of the book is a line from George Chapman's poem De Guiana, where he says, gold is our fate, which all our acts do fashion and create. So, as you say, I wanted to kind of come back to that kind of Elizabethan obsession with gold and silver, Just kind of how widespread that really is in this period, in some ways, because I think a lot of national narratives in the US and the UK still tend to focus on kind of mass migration to places that we now call kind of Massachusetts or various areas of New England, where there are that people emigrated for these godly, very pious reasons. And that's really what sparked colonialism. But in travel accounts, this kind of obsessive need to try to find gold is just absolutely everywhere. Part of this is practical that England has a cash problem in this period. There are very costly wars going on in the reigns of the Tudors. They're fairly new dynasty even by the time we get to Henry viii. So there are wars in Ireland and in Europe that are depleting England's stores of wealth. And Henry VIII actually sanctions a drop in gold and silver standards. So coins are being debased and deprec. And so a lot of these hopes for gold and silver is just because England has an economy that in the Elizabethan era is still founded on the idea of the importance of bullion. And I kind of chart a change in economic thinking over the course of the book because that begins to shift through an attention to plantation economies. But that is kind of the starting point for me is just how pervasive gold is in the sense of it being a kind of economic necessity. But also, of course, there's all this association around alchemy and transformation and kind of lore around wealth that comes with it as well. So I kind of like to play with that in the title, as you say, that kind of idea of the Golden Age that we were talking about earlier, but also this sense of idolatry and gold as a thing, and this kind of slipperiness between the Golden Age and how that age is actually funded.
- [07:59]
Caroline Dodds Pennock
And one of the things that comes through really clearly in the book is that in trying to talk about this history, you're not focusing on monarchs and explorers or privateers, but your approach has been like, with gold to follow things, pearls, feathers, tobacco, pigments, beaver for emeralds, Mexican codices, which obviously I was interested in. And as you say in the book, you take object as the starting point, as these tangible imprints, trying to look at this through things Londoners wore or they consumed or they collected. Why is it that objects were the right way into the story for you for this book?
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Loren Working
Yeah, thanks. I thought about this a lot. Obviously, you've written so beautifully about travelers, you know, who make these Atlantic voyages. And in some ways, I wish I could write more about them. And I hope that the number of indigenous peoples that we know come to England in this period will grow over time. But it's a relatively small number of individuals compared to, say, those who travel to, you know, Madrid or Paris at the time. And we can maybe talk about some of those travelers a bit later. The first chapter of my book does mention the four Inuit, for example, you know, who come as the result of Martin Frobisher's voyages. Again, this obsessive search for gold that kind of kickstarts a lot of these colonial projects. There are always humans wrapped up in those stories of migration and transfer. But what struck me, reading a lot of travel literature at the time, is that we really see that English are learning a lot from indigenous peoples and benefiting from their knowledge and expertise in all kinds of ways, as the English spend time in different environments in the Americas. And so, for me, I was kind of trying to think of a way of connecting what's happening in the spaces in the Americas to early modern London and to how all these encounters with thousands of indigenous groups across the Americas that the English have might kind of start to feed into what we think about Tudor and stirrukulture. And so, for me, objects are a really good way in. Not in a way that is in opposition to the human, but to think about how talking about things is a way of talking about people, because it connects us to those divers, the cultivators, the metal workers, the miners, the feather workers who help to kind of create these objects or bring them forth from the ground or locate them in these various places. And I was really struck by the work of the Tupinamba artist Glyceria Tupinamba, who's a kind of artist and activist working in Brazil today. And in an interview, she kind of talked about how we also occupied and reclaimed the Old World. And for her, objects are a really key way that this happened, that material culture is a kind of landmark of indigenous presences in Europe. And so she was actually saying this in relation to her work reconstructing or kind of making a contemporary mantle, feather mantle, based on 16th century techniques that she kind of learned about from visiting featherwork, surviving featherwork from the 16th century that are in European collections. And so that kind of helped me unlock my Methodology, I think, to kind of think about how material culture that comes into Europe, but that is kind of made and cared for and stewarded and produced by Indigenous peoples, becomes a way of thinking about the Tudor and Stuart period in a totally different way. Some of these objects still survive and are still in English museums. And so this is tangible evidence that we can see, we can even hold of Indigenous Peoples expertise and labor residing in English interiors or influencing English style and fashion in all kinds of ways. And maybe the last thing I'll say about this is also that, to me, objects are a great way of also bringing contemporary Native communities in conversation with the Tudor past. Because, of course, as you know all too well as well, and as I'm sure many listeners will know, Indigenous peoples are still kind of fighting against these harmful stereotypes today of, as they've put it, you know, this myth of the vanishing Indian. And of course, they live in these vibrant, flourishing societies. They maintain long standing traditions that exist outside the kind of colonial logic that governments have tried to impose on them. And so elucidating these objects and craft techniques in the book, like things like seal skin or baskets, to do that, I needed to kind of go to Inuit women's preparation of seal skin, the words of Indigenous elders about the importance of seal to their communities, to think more about Algonquin canoe making techniques and things to. I really needed to bring that in conversation with how I was doing my research. And so citing this material in my chapters hopefully shows how the past is kind of continually still in conversation with Indigenous knowledge holders today.
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Caroline Dodds Pennock
Absolutely. And I really want to come back to how we know about these things and how these different forms of knowledge can inform what you're doing. But I wonder if it'd be helpful, first of all, for listeners, just to take one example in a little bit more detail. One of the things you mentioned was pearl divers. And you write about pearls as these dazzling symbols of refinement in Elizabethan England. But in your book, you go beyond pearls as symbols of kind of wealth and glamour and monarchy and trace them back to these indigenous divers off the coasts of places like Venezuela and Panama. What changes for you when we follow the pearl back to its origins?
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Loren Working
I think pearls are a really good one. Right. Because what is more, as you say, kind of quintessentially Elizabethan or Stuart than a pearl earring? And especially because Elizabeth is styling herself as the Virgin Queen. So pearls really lend themselves to the Queen's presentation as this pure kind of virginal figure. And so I really tried to think about all those pearls dangling from courtier's ears often are in portraits that also include seafaring motifs, ships, globes, maps. So it's an aesthetic that draws associations with travel and with the sea, because these are sea gems. At the same time, while pearls have long been sourced in the Indian Ocean, the proliferation, the kind of. I think at one point in the book, I call it pearl mania. But this kind of mania for pearls in the Elizabethan era and the decades that follow are really the result of European colonial projects, because millions of pearls from the Atlantic kind of flood Europe as a result of kind of Columbus and Vespucci's voyages in the late 15th century. And so I did really want to make that point that the proliferation of pearls isn't just about oceanic travel, but it really is an Atlantic association that we should be making, especially in the late Elizabethan period at the height of piracy and competition with Spain. But of course, pearls also are the product of violence, right? They have to be kind of prized, open. Not all oysters have pearls, which means there's a lot of waste involved. There's a lot of collecting and breaking shells to kind of even see if they have anything valuable inside of them. There's a lot of economic stress and disruption that's involved. And of course, every pearl has to be hand picked under extremely dangerous conditions. And travelers at the time know about this. So there's a lot of notes by English authors and also English translations of Spanish writings that talk about the really cold, dangerous depths to which enslaved divers have to go to find these shells, the dangers of drowning, the long term damages to health, the danger of sea creatures. There's a really interesting image of a kind of manta ray chasing an enslaved black diver that survives from the late 16th century. And so, as you say, the Spanish and the Portuguese uproot Lucayan peoples from the Bahamas at first to kind of get this industry started in part because of their own indigenous traditions of kind of diving and working with pearls. And they then begin to supplement this with enslaved Africans from places such as Sierra and Lyon. And I think, you know, tracing a pearl back to its places of origin does multiple things. I guess it encourages us to think about how connections to the Atlantic may have been part of Renaissance self fashioning in a kind of more deliberate way than we might have previously thought. That if we think back to the art historian Panofsky's idea of the period eye and how we can approach a portrait to kind of think about what people at the time were trying to convey, that perhaps there is a little bit more of a sense of. Of Atlantic competition and imperial self fashioning that's kind of coming through in some of the portraits of the time, for example. And I think it really makes us think about the scale of human labor behind the power that's being demonstrated in portraits or in owning these objects as well, which can so often feel obscured.
- [18:07]
Caroline Dodds Pennock
It's a challenge, isn't it? Because you have at the same time this incredibly beautiful, glamorous portraiture and objects that are wonderful pieces of art in many ways. And there's a tension there, isn't there, between wanting to write about the beauty and also wanting to acknowledge the exploitation and power structures behind it. One resource I was thinking about was cochineal, this red dye that's derived from beetles who live on cacti in Mexico, or at least originally. And cochineal becomes color and status and beauty in England, but its production depends on indigenous labor in Central America. How is it that you balance writing about kind of this beauty and glamour in a way that is attractive to readers without letting it obscure those issues around power and exploitation?
- [18:57]
Loren Working
Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. And in some ways, I guess I'm interested in probing this question because I think it's one that is very much relevant to us today. It's convenient for us as consumers not to think about the global human environmental consequences of our desire for things. And the scale of it today is absolutely enormous as well. I just think, for example, of that for a long time, piles of discarded clothing from the US and UK sent to the Atacama Desert in Chile could be seen from space, which I think is this harrowing example of waste, colonialism, and such a different picture than we might get from Instagram or places that we go to see how beautiful things can look and be. So part of thinking about commodity chains or the life of an object, I think, was to raise attention to this uneasy but often deliberately obscured relationship between labor and aesthetics. And in some ways, I'm not sure the question can be resolved exactly, but I suppose I wanted to encourage readers to think precisely about this. This difficult connection, about the human hands that lay behind kind of what we put on our bodies. In the book, I quote the Roman author Pliny, who says of Pearls, is it the rule that we get most satisfaction from luxuries that cost human life? I mean, oof, what a devastating question. Now, you know, I'm a historian. I'm not a philosopher of aesthetics. Some people might disagree with me on this, but to me, I think knowing a fuller History of the stories that lay behind all these beautiful objects and Tudor paintings or fashion make things more interesting, like I want to know about them. And it's not going to put me off of thinking about the Tudors and Stuarts. It gives me a more three dimensional understanding of the past that I find really stimulating and really exciting. I'm sure it's clear from the book that I love. You know, in some ways I've kind of called it a love letter to the period. Like I love Renaissance history. Obviously I've devoted my life to kind of studying it. But I think we can widen our scope of how we think about the connections between humans across the world in a way that is important. And one last thing I'll say about beauty is that I hope the book also brings up small moments where different kinds of beauty or different ways of looking are possible. Yes, we want to kind of understand the past in different ways and in a new light. But I think in an ongoing age of human exploitation and the rise, rise of AI and all of that, slowing down and appreciating things, looking at things anew, thinking about the relationship between humans and the natural world, are all really important ways of thinking about value. Towards the end of the book, I quote the indigenous poet and critic Leanne Simpson, who writes really beautifully about everyday care and attention, about thinking about how things are woven, thinking about the seasonal arrival of fruits like strawberries, that all of these, for her, in her words, are little bits of poetry doing the work of the otherwise so kind of opening up spaces that live beyond the kind of colonialist mentality that a lot of us have kind of inherited in various ways. And I kind of love that encouragement to construct different ideas of beauty, to think about how we get towards a place where luxury doesn't exploit life. And this is a desire that people in the Renaissance also had. They were also at times critical of these levels of consumption and are trying to push back against the idea of consumerist desire. So all of that is kind of at play, I think, in the discussion in the books as well.
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Caroline Dodds Pennock
Yeah, it's incredibly interesting. You're not going to hear any disagreement from me, obviously, about drawing in these indigenous and other marginalized points of view in order to enrich our understanding of the period. And I want to ask a little bit about how we do that because of course, as a historian, I'm interested in sources. And the book covers a huge range of peoples and places and objects, many of which are really tricky to trace. In the surviving sources, you might have the artifact that's remaining, the beautiful fan or picture or whatever it is, but it's disconnected from some of those networks and voices and peoples that created it. How do you recover indigenous knowledge when the surviving English sources so often distort or misname or misunderstand or even deliberately erase the people who produce these things?
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Loren Working
Yeah, as you say, it's a real challenge. And objects can tell us a lot, but they are also very mysterious things. And sometimes they can tell us, sometimes the object can show us things without telling us any more about the object itself, if that makes sense. You know what I mean? We can start to think about various techniques of making that we might read about in sources and things, but we still might know very little about the actual life and trajectory of the thing that survives. So we are kind of really reliant on the evidence we have, which is really piecemeal, and that's difficult. Just to give one example, I suppose one thing I was really fascinated by was coming across an inventory that was drawn up at the time of Walter Raleigh's arrest for trying to escape to France shortly before his execution. So it was 1618, he'd just been on his second voyage to South America, which was a complete disaster. And he kind of. The attempt seems a bit half hearted. He'd already tried a couple times, but he tries to kind of flee to France, he gets caught, and there's an inventory drawn up of everything he's carrying on his person as he goes there. And the first thing on the list is an entry that just says, a Guyana idol of gold and copper. And so we're immediately given this kind of very Protestant religious kind of language. An idol. Right. There's already this kind of assumption that this is a quote unquote, kind of pagan artifact as the English would have seen it. But that really intrigued me, this idea of, like, what is this object from Guyana that Raleigh is carrying with him? And the mix of metals is really the clue, you know, that this is copper as well as gold, because that seems to hint to the fact that this is probably what we now call otumbaga, which is a kind of process of metalworking that was used a lot in South America that used mainly copper, but also some gold to bring out a kind of luster on the surface. And so it kind of led me to think much more about Arawakan and kind of Taino metalworking techniques and to kind of look for other examples of these kinds of figures that were often shaped into frogs and birds and moons that kind of end up in early modern England and also in travel accounts of the Americas and of indigenous practices. So I think that's just kind of one example of how we are given a biased source that can tell us something about English ideas about the Americas and about its peoples. That's about religious ideologies that are at play. This kind of English mistrust of this object because it's made of copper. So not understanding kind of indigenous value systems, there's that side of things. But it does also open up. It gives us just enough detail that we can start to think also about, okay, where can we go? What kind of indigenous sources and things can we then also consult to try to get a bigger picture of what's at play here?
- [27:34]
Caroline Dodds Pennock
Absolutely. And you, you've mentioned some of the contemporary Indigenous commentators who can give us some insight into these perspectives in the present as well as in, in the past. And just kind of in. In the concluding part of our discussion, I wanted to talk a little bit more about why all of this matters. Now, we've hinted at it already, but Empire is something that is still really at the forefront of a lot of our national discussions and myths. A lot of your book is, is about how we have this sort of golden age, but it's not just this self generated flowering of English national genius, but it's kind of made through global contact and unequal exchange. And there is a really live debate, an ongoing debate about how historians should connect early modern empire to present day politics and identities and education. How do you think about that responsibility and where your book sits in that debate?
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Loren Working
Yeah, I mean, positionality was, you know, is something I think about a lot. And I, and I took a long time trying to kind of work out when writing the book. I make really clear at the start, you know, I'm not Indigenous myself and this is not a, this is not a book that is giving an Indigenous perspective on Tudor and Stewart history. But that, and while I don't want to speak for Indigenous peoples, I will widely quote them and allow them space to kind of be speaking them, you know, in their own words. You'll know this, but it's. You can pick up any number of books on the Tudors and Stuarts and not find a single reference to Indigenous Peoples knowledge, ways of thinking, no citation of Indigenous scholars, even books about colonial histories and colonial encounters. So in some ways, if all my book does is kind of show how we can bring Indigenous studies in conversation with the tutors and stewards, I'll be happy. It's tricky because as a scholar who studies this period. I see a lot of resonances between what we study in the past and issues that are going on today. And I don't want to do history a disservice by drawing easy lines between things that happened 400 years ago and politics today, because the English are part of the history of colonialism in the U.S. but that history is also ongoing and has branched out in all kinds of different ways. The continual marginalization and displacement of Indigenous peoples is the result of hundreds of years of harmful federal policy that's kind of developed outside the period I'm looking at. But saying that a recent review of my book in History Today called the book political. And I was happy about that. I was happy to see that, because I do explore in the book how Indigenous peoples, and especially women, have been written out of various histories, including English history. And so if my Feather Work chapter can encourage conversation about why cultural appropriation is harmful and stretches back to assumptions made in the 16th and 17th centuries, then that's great. And I think, as we've been talking about, there's ongoing issues around inequality and injustice that are the result of this long grip of colonial ideologies on various disciplines and institutions that we work within. And so there are processes of repair that need to be made and conversations need to be opened up. Something I also try to make clear in the book, I think, is the element of kind of possibility and of missed opportunity as well, that if you look back to the early modern era, and especially before the kind of rapid escalation of the slave trade and the rapid explosion of plantation industries, there are all these little hints of different kinds of relationships that could have been possible and were never really actualized possibilities for kind of learning from each other for coexistence. And the 16th century, as I hope readers really get from the book, is a time when Indigenous peoples are very present in English writing and culture. When you look for them, it's not ahistorical to write of the Tudors and Stuarts in a history that's also about Andean silver mining or Algonquin plant healers and cultivators, you know, who are showing the English how to produce the tobacco that they kind of turn into this mass plantation economy. They're right there in the record. And so if anything, what's kind of ahistorical or unhistorical is to kind of ignore that. And even at the time, there were always voices of dissent and voices I think we can look to and kind of learn from, who were warning against giving in to the acquisitive desires of those who sought a life that relied on the labor and lives of others without proper kind of compensation and care.
- [32:48]
Caroline Dodds Pennock
And it just sort of is really clear in your book that this is really deeply historically rooted, that this is about showing this period in all its complexity and that long shadow, but also the light that it sheds afterwards is really, really clear on our understanding of what comes next. And I don't think it's ahistorical to suggest that there are connections implying, and you certainly don't, that these are necessarily the same kind of thing. I hope will be really interesting for people to hear a few more of these kind of points of view and to get a richer sense of that period, which certainly comes out in your book. So just concluding, just one final question. What is the main thing that you would like readers to take away from the book? A big question. I know.
- [33:33]
Loren Working
Yeah. No, I mean, it's a big question. But I think it does kind of go back to this idea that for so long settler colonial scholars have talked about the kind of logic of elimination or erasure of multiple stories and perspectives that is so integrated in the colonial project and that has played such a big role in then how we think about history today. And so just coming out, having a sense that the Renaissance is a place, is a time, is a world, that's so many different peoples and languages and knowledge systems contributed to then I think that will be that will be the most important thing for them to get from that, that the history of the Tudors and of, you know, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I is also a history of silver miners and pearl divers. Yeah.
- [34:34]
Caroline Dodds Pennock
And that's certainly something that comes through in the book. And thank you so much for joining me on Intelligence Squared to talk about your wonderful new book, which I' is out now in all good bookshops.
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Loren Working
Thank you, Caroline.
- [34:47]
Caroline Dodds Pennock
Thank you.
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Mia Sorrenti
Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by me, Nia Sorrenti, and it was edited by Mark Roberts. If you'd like to join us at future live events, you can find our full program or buy tickets over@intelligencesquared.com attend. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared.
- [35:07]
Loren Working
Thanks for joining us, Sam.