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Jenny C. Mann, "The Trials of Orpheus: Poetry, Science, and the Early Modern Sublime" (Princeton UP, 2021)
00:48:04
An interview with Jenny C. Mann
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A
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Welcome to New Books and Literary Studies. I am John Yargo, your host. Today's guest is Ginny Mann, who has a new book titled the Trials of Poetry, Science and the Early Modern Sublime from Princeton University Press. Ginny is professor in both New York University's English Department and the Gallatin School and her work has been supported by the Mellon foundation and the Folger Shakespeare Library. She is the author of the previous monograph Outlaw Rhetoric Figuring Vernacular Eloquence in Shakespeare's England from Cornell University Press and is the co editor with Deborah Priya Sarkar of a special issue of Philological Quarterly on Imagining Scientific Forms. Additionally, Ginny works in collaboration with the Public Shakespeare Initiative at the Public Theater in New York. Welcome to the podcast, Ginny.
- [03:02]
C
Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here.
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B
To begin with, can you talk about how this book came together? What led you to the figure of Orpheus and what did you want to contribute to the pre existing scholarship on early modern poetic theory?
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C
It really emerged out of my first book, Outlaw Rhetoric, which is a study of English attempts to translate the classical art of rhetoric into the vernacular. And in the process of completing that book I had immersed myself in early modern rhetorical and poetic handbooks. And so I had just been surrounded by these assertions that eloquence, verbal eloquence has a world changing power. It can dominate people, make crowds, follow the will of the order, convince people to do things they don't want to do otherwise. It's, it's a kind of power that will make your ideas and your culture irresistible. And so I have been reading these assertions for years and I still wanted to know like how, how on earth does verbal eloquence have this extreme power? Or, and you know, like what, what happens when the force of eloquent speech makes contact with an audience? Or at the very least, like what did early modern writers and thinkers think was happening at that moment of contact which remained elusive to me, even though I felt that I had been immersed in this discourse course for years. And, and it was that question, like what is the force of eloquence and how do I find it in the textual traces of this world that led me to Orpheus? Because anytime I went searching for the moments in these documents that might provide an answer to that question, Orpheus was there, was like the, the, the, the, the myth or the figure manifested at those moments when such an explanation would be required. So you know, in the Greek tradition, Orpheus is the first poet, the er, poet whose song is so powerful that according to legend, animals and trees and stones would follow in order to listen to his music. And so it's this sort of iconic example of the power of, or of eloquence to organize the world. And so my, my suspicion and ultimately my argument was that the Orus myth became a way for the, for the arts of rhetoric and poetics to, to manifest the force of eloquence and turn it into an object of knowledge. And this initially was my, my, my first priority, right? I wanted to connect the really deep and rich scholarship on rhetoric and poetics with sort of parallel and yet disconnected work in the history of science. Like I really early on I really, I was kind of on this mission to argue that the arts of rhetoric and poetics were productive of knowledge in the period and should be taken seriously by intellectual historians in much the same way one might approach, say, the discourses and sciences of alchemy or chemistry or the other sort of natural philosophical disciplines. And so that was sort of my initial motivation in working with the project and working with Orpheus. And then what happened is as I. As I deepened my research into the status of the Orpheus myth in the works of poetry themselves, I started developing this like, parallel and completely oppositional argument to my initial claim. And that is that if you read the. The poetry of the period, what. Instead you get the sense that contact with the Orpheus myth doesn't produce knowledge, but rather sort of dissolves one sense of authority and autonomy and, and. And. And renders inert various epistemological frameworks. So then the book became about finding a way to kind of hold those two ideas of Orpheus in the same place as that culture does.
- [07:36]
B
I found part of the appeal of the Trials of Orpheus is your prose style. Could you read an excerpt from the book?
- [07:46]
C
Sure. Happily. Thank you for that question and that compliment. Okay, so I'm going to read just the final paragraph of the introduction to the book. Taken together, the scattered trials of Orpheus gathered in this book materialized a mode of literary transmission characterized by a pleasurable and frightening dependency, passivity, and bondage. Such a model of poetic transmission does not rely on the idea of the single author's career in order to formulate its terms, nor does it presume a sequential paradigm of historical progress and supersession, though such active conceptions of imitation as competitive emulation did constitute one major model of literary production in the Renaissance. Indeed, my articulation of an Orphic Ovidian theory of literary production as a kind of trial maintains that the precipitating cause of. Of literary influence will remain unseen and unknown to those so influenced, because that is the fundamental meaning of action at a distance. That concept links up cause and effect without identifying any discernible site of contact. The connections are there, and they are cosmically potent, but they insist on remaining unknown. To lay hold of such forces, one must first accept the impossibility of ever knowing them in a philosophical sense. As Plato insists in the Ion, the poet and rhapsode have no knowledge of what they do. Ovid's tale of Orpheus depicts literary transmission not as a progressive or productive activity, but rather as an ongoing event characterized by interruption, subjection, and loss. Early modern encounters with the Orpheus myth also suggest that poetic judgment, what we would call literary criticism, is similarly Vulnerable to an unwilled possession by a superior force. This force moves across generations of writers working at great distances from one another. Writers who may find themselves suddenly on trial, struck and quivering like the strings of a plucked lute.
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B
That's wonderful. I love the way you tease out the figurative meanings and the Orphic myth there. How do you go about developing a passage like that? What are your strategies for revising and writing academic prosecutors?
- [10:43]
C
Oh, what a great question. I love revising. I actually find it so much more comforting to sort of open up a document that has a lot of verbiage already there and to start to sift through it and cluster and disperse and find patterns. And that to me is the most fun kind of a writing day. I have sort of having done this kind of writing now for more than 20 years, come to peace with my own writing style, which is nonlinear, as this book might have indicated, and is extremely meandering. I mean, I can't have an argument unless I've drafted and redrafted and puzzled over things in writing. So for me, the thinking process and the writing process are integral to one another. And so what often happens in the early stages of a project is I'm kind of accumulating paragraphs, writing up close readings of various passages, stitching them to other passages, adding in notes for, from critics and scholars I've been reading. And then I sort of return to this kind of mammoth and copious and expanding text and try to see if there's a path through that I can transform into a more claim driven argument, which is, I think, what I still think of often as the obligation of a kind of writing that we do. But I don't draft that way. So for me, revision is really necessary for me to find my arguments if, if that makes sense. And. But they, it begins very much as the, as the, as a kind of documentation of my thinking and my experience and my contact with, with various texts that I can then sort of pull together into one larger argument that wouldn't have been thinkable to me if I hadn't been writing about it for, for many months ahead of time. It's like, it's, it's an extremely frustrating word way to draft, but it's. I think I've just realized it's my, my reality as a writer and I just need to own it.
- [13:07]
B
Yes, that is so important to identify and claim the identity of what kind of writer you are and then develop strategies for reaching the kinds of professional obligations and demands that are placed on you within that identity.
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C
I Mean, I don't know. I constantly. I do this less now because I just have less time. But I remember being in graduate school and just looking left and looking right and saying, oh, you know, that person outlines everything and then they just write their outline. That's so sensible. I should be like that. And then trying really hard to write like that. I'm failing to write like that and feeling like nothing was going my way, and. And now I just sort of accept my process and trust it, you know, Which I guess is just one advantage of age, I suppose.
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B
The structure of this book is unconventional, following from these five words that animate something about the Orphic Ovidian reception in the early modern period. The words are meandering, binding, drawing, softening, scattering, and testing. How did you arrive at those terms? Were there terms that you ended up leaving out?
- [14:25]
C
Oh, what a great question. I. That structure was a really late discovery for me. And, and for many years, I. The. The structure of the book I thought I was writing was in. Entirely synced to Philip Sidney's defense of Poesy. And so I, so I. As I mentioned earlier, I thought I was writing this book that was a. So asserting the epistemological work of rhetoric and poetics in the period. And I thought, well, I'll structure it according to what Sidney lists as the five primary attacks on Poesy in the Renaissance. So in the defense, he says, he. He lists these attacks and then sort of counters each in turn. But they are, you know, the. The attackers of Poesy say it's dangerous because it's. Produces no fruitful knowledge. It's an art of lies. It entices men to wantonness, it softens men, and it distracts men from their obligation to serve the commonwealth. And at the time, I was really interested in softening and had done a lot of thinking and writing already about softening. And so I thought, okay, well, I'll. I'll just have a chapter on each of those attacks, and I'll feature some aspect of Poiesis in the period that embraces the attack as like, fundamental to Poesy. And then what happened? As I kept working with softening, I just kept falling further and further into Ovid's myth of Orpheus. And I finally realized that I could just accept and submit to that and let the myth itself give me a kind of structure to the book and kind of let softening be my guide and find these other terms in the myth that express different aspects of the force of eloquence and that are heavily present in the early modern engagements with the Ovidian myth. And so, and so from there, from that moment, then the kind of binding, drawing, softing, scattering was very evident. And then to bookend them, I added meandering at the outset and testing at the conclusion, which were a little bit more sort of theoretical terms that were coming out of literary critical discourses rather than strictly from within of its myth. But it basically was my sort of concession to the fact that the myth had become my method of thinking and a kind of beautiful way of making that visible at the level of the table of contents. But it was hard. It was hard to let go of the really discursive chapter titles with the colon that make clear what your argument are. But ultimately, I just found it so pleasing to have these simple terms be the kind of entry point into each of the chapters, in a way, because the concepts and the words were so formative for me, but also for these sort of philologically inclined writers who are finding in this poem, the Metamorphoses, a way to think through their experience of literary history. So I thought it was like a way of duplicating that contact in my own critical writing. So that's how I ended up there. But it was a late breaking development, for sure.
- [18:33]
B
Well, I believe the Trials of Morpheus can claim a victory in the struggle against the colon title. Much to its credit, the first chapter, Meandering, fittingly encompasses a broad range of sources. You look at Attic pottery from the 5th century BCE, mosaics from the 4th century CE, and poetic theory from the early modern period. I was struck by the argument of that chapter that the Orphic theory of poetry relies on the convergence of past and future and the indefinite distinction between domination and submission.
- [19:12]
C
Yeah, you know, this was my most challenging chapter. It really gave me fits trying to hold everything in the same place in the same argument. And it's. It's oriented around this figure or this motion of the meander. And that, that figure is ultimately what enabled me to hold this broad range of material together and then. And then also to assert something about nonlinear historical connections. So the meander takes its name from a river in Asia Minor that is notoriously sinuous and winding. So if you were to, like, Google images of the mid of the river, you'd see that it's a kind of takes a chaotic, backwards, churning path, and it became a term that was used first metaphorically and then ultimately sort of detached from its initial association with the river, and it just became a term for any, any line or path that follows an intricate or convoluted course. So. And in the visual arts, meanders, which I think are now are more commonly known as a Greek key pattern, a meander is a line that regularly travels backwards in order to move forwards. And so for me, this became a figure for extended connections among historically discontinuous writers that are nevertheless sort of glancing back at one another and carrying forward into an unknown future. The other interesting thing about the ways in which the figure of the meander is used sort of abstractly or metaphorically is that it can be a way of expressing the difficulty of distinguishing between cause and effect. So if you see its uptake in early modern discussions, the figure, it. It is a way of talking about being. Being in a situation in which you can't tell where you came from, and you're not sure if you're moving forwards or backwards, and you're not sure what is the cause and what is the effect of our particular logical relationship. And so I really loved that because part of the challenge of this project was to sort of make evident that I'm not really talking about how Ovid's Orpheus is like a source of Renaissance poetry, that it's not this sort of linear. First comes this, and then that sort of source fathers its descendants or inheritors. Right. It's, it's. I'm. I'm rather trying to capture this nonlinear, participatory strain of literary production, like within this system where sort of ahistorical time traveling contact can happen. And I feel. I feel like that's how the Orpheus story functions not only for Renaissance poets, but also for. For me, like, it scrambles historical relations in a way that is really poetically productive. So that's, that's. That kind of non causal, non logical set of relations among writers who are. Who are separated in time and space. Like the meander became my way of figuring those relations.
- [23:07]
B
That's excellent. The second chapter binding is also packed with wonderful details, such as this insight from Montaigne that poetry cannot be discerned empirically but is experienced as a form of ravishment and overwhelm. Another line from Montaigne that I underlined in your book roughly translates as the splendor of the lightning bolt, which is poetry. How did this sense of poetry as resisting empirical observation, as a chain of eloquence that is hard to identify, operate in the early modern period?
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C
I love that passage you've alluded to. So that montane passage comes from his adoption of an image from Plato's ion. And this is a Dialogue in which Socrates infamously denigrates poetry as a form of bondage and possession. So, like the title character, Ion, is a rhapsode. He's a professional performer of epic poetry, and he claims to have knowledge of Homer. This really irritates Socrates. And Socrates is like, it's not by art and knowledge that you say what you say about Homer, but by a kind of divine possession. And in order to make clear what he means, he just. Socrates describes the transmission of poetry from the muse to the poet to the rhapsode to the audience as the passage of a magnetic force through a chain of iron rings. And each ring is linked to the next by the irresistible power of poetry. And so Socrates's point is, I am. You don't know anything about what's happening. You're just the mediator of this force that's passing through you from elsewhere. And it's meant as, you know, it acknowledges, kind of. It acknowledges the divine force of poetry, but it's also, you know, a degrading and insulting way of talking about. Talking about this art. But I also find it really profound and beautiful. And many other poets and writers did as well, including, famously, Percy Shelley. But Montaigne quotes this image in one of his essays. But he changes it from a chain of rings. He says it's a chain of iron needles that are connected by this force. And he. He says that this process of unwilled possession is ravishing. It goads and it strikes and it penetrates. And he says, you can't look at it from the outside. Right? That's the sort of splendor of the lightning flash. It just has to happen to you. And he says that's why it's so hard to judge poetry. And I really think of that, you know, as a literary critic, where sometimes, you know, it's. It's. Sometimes I just want to let the thing happen to me rather than have to account for it in a critical language. And Montaigne, again, is pointing to the fundamental difficulty facing anyone then and. Or now who wants to talk about the force of eloquence. Is there something about it that resists. Certainly resists empirical observation, but perhaps also resists formal analysis. And so you can sort of allude to its power, but perhaps never fully understand that. Understand it. So. So I'm. I'm glad you've alluded to that passage, because I, too, find it a very powerful way of talking about, you know, predicament I think we all still face as scholars of this period.
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Visit rei.com well, this has certainly happened to me in my classes before. I read a line of poetry out loud and I'm completely bowled over, amazed. And, and then I look around the. The room and the students just have not had that same. They've not been struck by the lightning of poetry in exactly the same word, in exactly the same way. And it's hard to intellectually lead them into that state of astonishment.
- [30:05]
C
Happen to you. You can't explain it. I mean, it sounds sort of mystical or mystifying, and it's not as if they've gotten it wrong exactly. It's just. There's something elusive about this experience, this enrapturing experience that it just resists transcription, I think. And that mystery is very compelling to me as a teacher and writer like you.
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B
In your third chapter on drawing, you look at Christopher Marlowe's hero in Leander and George Chapman's continuation of Marlowe's poem. Schimon says in his introduction to his Continuation, I present your ladyship with the last affections of the first two lovers that ever muse shrined in the temple of memory, being drawn by strange instigation to employ some of my serious time in so trifling a subject which yet made the first author divine, Musa eternal. How do you make sense of this strange instigation that Chapman suggests has led him to continue Marlow's poem?
- [31:13]
C
I love this, this passage from, from Chapman. He, in part, you know, I. I finally at a certain point realized I was writing a book about poets who were. Who were compelled to acknowledge that they were also readers of poetry and were kind of coping with the fact that in order to write you have to read and in order to make something happen, you have to let something happen to you. Verse, you know, And Chapman is. Is prefacing this continuation of Marlowe's hero. And Leander, that is, he's. He's. He's penning a preface to something that he wrote. But the way he articulates the. The act of writing the poem is to subject himself to a force that has strangely instigated the composition of his poem. And it's as if the poet himself, himself has become the object of the poem. And that's a very Orphic Ovidian insight, like this idea that literary transmission is a kind of penetrative urging or goading that draws audiences for sure, but is also drawing the poets themselves. Right. The poet isn't the source of the force, but rather is subject to that force and that. That so, and also the language of drawing is everywhere in the poetic manuals and in the rhetorical manuals and in the transcriptions and retranscriptions of the Orpheus myth. I mean, Orpheus's power is to draw animals and trees and so called savage men to follow him. And it's a kind of, it's a word for the compulsion that follows from eloquent language as expressed in Orphic song. So I think it's so incredible that Chapman prefaces his continuation of Marlow's poem by declaring that he's been pierced. And instigate comes from stigare, which is to pierce or prick. So he's been pierced and now he's been drawn forward by basically literary history, literary transmission that goes from Museus to Marlowe to Chapman and beyond. So it's just kind of, you know, every so often you get, just get like an incredible piece of evidence that draws together connections you found elsewhere. And so for me, that was one such moment where he says, he says, actually what I'm arguing, he just says it. It's beautiful.
- [34:03]
B
But energia also has slackening effects, right? In your chapter on softening, you look at the complex interformations of sexual impotence, martial activity and tender poetic force. How does this unsettle the category of effeminacy in relation to the cultural understanding of masculine poetics?
- [34:28]
C
Yeah, soft, you know, softness, softening, as I mentioned earlier, was always the heart or the starting point of this project and just simply because there was this kind of peculiar persistence of allusions to softening in articulations of orphic power. So, so the way in which eloquence triumphs over the crowd is by softening hard hearted people and making them vulnerable to a remade form. And so softening in this, in, in, in one sense was kind of the sign of the power of the poet to imprint others with his and assumed to be his desires. Right. But at the same time, softening has this really complicated virtue in classical and also early modern discourses, not only of verbal, verbal art, but also sex, the sex and gender system of this period, right? Softening is antithetical to codes of masculine behavior and identity. And, and indeed the, the people most often being softened by eloquence are the boys populating the grammar school classroom and reading Ovid. Right? And being softened by, by this, you know, compelling propulsive poetry. And so, so there's this, this really, you know, troubling for, certainly for many moralists and opponents of classical literature in this period, this troubling affiliation of Ovidian eloquence with a kind of culturally noxious softening of masculine identity. And, and so one of the things I try to show in this chapter is how certain poets sort of tune in to the peculiar virtue and power of softening, which is expressing a sort of alternate idea of masculine poetics, one that is not virile and martial, but is it in fact about the, the power that comes from passivity and being vulnerable to outside impressions? Right. And. And you have to sort of concentrate seed to that subject position in order to have access to the world changing power of the Orphic voice. Certainly it's not the only model of masculine poetic production, not even the dominant model, but it is one that's persistently there in the writing of the period and I felt hadn't really been fully articulated or documented by studies of early modern poesis.
- [37:29]
B
I'm interested in how you would bring this study of the early modern sublime to bear on contemporary art and aesthetics. How would you apply this model of a poetics that meanders, binds, draws, solvents and scatters to Art in 2022, whether that's a television show or fiction or a movie?
- [37:49]
C
That's such a great question. That's a really great question. I mean, I think where I feel it the most present in my contemporary life, I've noticed, isn't so much in my fiction reading or my television watching, which I do plenty of, but is actually in moments of, or encounters with the visual arts. And I'm not sure, I'm not sure why that is, but I think there's something about the iconicity of painting and sculpture that will often sort of remind me of my sense of non linear contact with the past, if that makes any sense. So the example I was thinking of in reflecting on this question is a Chilean poet and sculptor named Cecilia Vicuna, whose work I've taught a little bit in the classroom in recent years and who recently got her first solo show, I believe, at the Guggenheim, and so has gotten a lot of renewed attention. But she's a Chilean artist, but she's lived in New York city since the 1980s, actually not so far from where I teach at NYU. And she's best known for these sculptures called, that she calls Khipus. So this is a sculpture series that reimagines this lost and day in writing system that was suppressed by Spanish colonizing forces. And the writing system operated through knots applied to long cords of string. And the Inca people would use them to collect data and keep records and so the cords sort of stored values and meaning encoded as knots. And Vicinia has created these like monumental quipus that descend from high ceilings and they're often like blood red and they're sort of hanging down. And of course, the, this sort of manifestation of ligatures and language as image is so resonant for me. But also because she's a poet, but the way she talks about the connection between lost systems of thinking and writing and, you know, vast historical forces of violence and erasure. She's really interested in ecological catastrophe and the possibility of re. Encountering and preserving those insights and ideas across vast spaces of time, I think is really incredible. But in any way she recently had. There was a feature on her in the New York Times Magazine and, and in this interview with the reporter who was writing the feature, they walked to the. The Hudson river on the west side of Manhattan, which is a place I walk almost every day. And Vicinia told the reporter, asked the reporter to look at the river and tell her which way the river was flowing. And the reporter couldn't. It was impossible to discern. And Vicunia told her that the Lenape people, who were the original inhabitants of the island of Manhattan, called it the river that runs both ways because of the misleading currents. And then she talked about how.
- [41:30]
B
You.
- [41:31]
C
Know, these kind of lost, hidden traces or words can be re encountered. Right. As a way of making contact to lost people in lost spaces. And you know, I read this and I just thought that it was like a completely new set of terms and histories that we're kind of getting at a similar sort of fact of being an artist in the world and the possibility of making a kind of unpredicted connection with the past. So that was a kind of meandering answer. But I think there are these ways in which, you know, you. I feel like in any moment I might have an encounter with an artwork that like sends me on this time, time bending experience. And, and so the Orpheus book was sort of my attempt to, to document how that was happening in early modern poetry.
- [42:40]
B
Yeah, I'd like to talk a little bit about teaching. When you've taught this material, are there texts that reliably simulate the Orphic encounter in your experience?
- [42:57]
C
Yeah, I have taught, I teach, I. I sneak some of it into a lot of my courses and I teach a lot of courses on early modern science and literature where I try to pose some of the epistemological and the theoretical, theoretical questions I was alluding to earlier. You know, how can we think of the early Modern art and science as homologous in their investment in producing inventions, for example, and then reading a whole variety of texts in a class from Philip Sidney to Francis Bacon and onwards, as a way of tracing through that problem. In recent years, my favorite class to teach has been what is a fiction in the pre modern world? And I start with like Hesiod and Plato and go all the way to Aphrobene's Orinoco. But along the way, we read Ovid's myth of Pygmalion, which is one of the tales sung by orpheus in book 10 of the Metamorphoses, and talk about how that Ovid's treatment of the myth of Pygmalion describes the moment where the sculptor creates a statue that is then brought to life by the goddess. And that moment of enlivening as being a kind of fantasy for the power of poetry, poetic invention, to alter the world and the kind of gendered assumptions that play into that and how that figures the work of the artist. And it teaches incredibly well. And students sort of. So contemporary students immediately make the connections, of course, to a kind of sci fi reading of like artificial intelligence and the inanimate being brought to life. But they're also just really caught up in the question of whether or not Pygmalion is sort of delusional when he falls in love with the artwork that he's created, or if that's a kind of idealistic vision for the desire that motivates artistic creation. And both are equally arguable, I believe, both at different moments. So in that sense, it's a kind of ideal text for a seminar room to sort of wrestle through the way in which poetry can provoke serious philosophical questions. And those are the moments I love in the classroom where we're engaging with literature, right? And we're thinking about form and meaning at the level of a kind of fictive invention or poetic creation, but also at the same time getting at really challenging and significant philosophical questions, like what's the difference between something alive and not alive? Like who gets. Who gets to decide what that difference is? And how do you know when you've crossed that line? Like, that's a significant question. And Ovid's poem gives us a way of working with that question. And those to me are like the best moments because I think of all my classes as like stealth defenses of the. Of literature, as like a profound way of thinking and making one's way through life. So that's just my immediate answer. I certainly encourage everybody to throw a bunch of Ovid into their classes. It always goes well.
- [46:58]
B
And lastly, now that the trials of Orpheus is out in the world, what are you turning your attention to? What's the next project or scholarly interest that you're pursuing?
- [47:10]
C
Right now I'm at the very beginning of a new project and I'm sort of abashed to say that I'm working on infinity. I'm exploring Renaissance attempts to represent infinity through acts of enclosure. I realize it sounds extremely and is extremely abstract and esoteric, but my project is informally titled something like Infinity, Labyrinth and Paradox since the Renaissance. And the project is coming out of a class I've taught for years and years and years, first at Cornell and now at NYU titled Utopia From Thomas More to Science Fiction. And my. My sense that utopia creates its artificial world by deploying certain forms of paradox, most most prominently an ancient paradox called the liars paradox, which asks if I lie, and I say that I am lying, am I lying or telling the truth? And that paradox creates this sort of inescapable enclosure where the answer is yes, no, yes, no, yes, no, yes, no. And I think those kind of self referential attempts to model or represent infinite, infinite problems or infinite questions is, is a kind of particularly Renaissance technique for thinking through big problems. So I'm, I'm here in London right now actually reading mathematical treatises on affinity and looking at early modern gardening manuals that, you know, tell you how to plant a flower bed in the shape of a labyrinth and just sort of trying to make sense of how 16th and 17th century thinkers were trying to represent the unrepresentable or the unthinkable. So it's very messy, but I'm very excited about it. And maybe in a decade I'll have an argument about infinity in the Renaissance.
- [49:25]
B
Okay, we'll keep our eyes out for those projects. This has been a really enjoyable conversation. Thank you so much, Jenny, for coming on the podcast.
- [49:37]
C
Well, thank you so much. Much appreciated.
- [49:55]
A
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