Popular characters in the medieval chivalric romances, giants and dwarfs also figured in the legendary accounts which accorded them special powers in the Tyrol. The very idea that the hostile, suspicious, or treasure-guarding creatures predominantly lived out their existence in wild mountain landscapes made the Alpine region their ideal place of residence. The giant Grim or the dwarf king Laurin from the legends surrounding the hero Dietrich von Bern are vivid examples of this. In the course of their adventures, the central hero of the epic (which can be traced back to the ninth century, but certainly goes back to an earlier narrative tradition) and his companions must repeatedly fight supernatural enemies who have settled in the inaccessible and forbidding mountain world of the Alps; thus these legendary beings form the counter-world to that of the humans and to civilization. There was also the mythical giant Haymon, who is said to have lived in the ninth century, and is traditionally considered to be the founder of Wilten Premonstratensian Monastery in Innsbruck. Having killed the dragon who had destroyed the monastery several times, Haymon was later honored with a polychrome wooden statue (ca. 1460–70) erected in the church of the monastery itself. The statue shows Haymon standing on a small platform with an inscription and displaying the snake-like red dragon's tongue in his hand to assert his victory over the monastery's evil foe (figure 5.1).

Early modern art and poetry attest to a widespread and pervasive belief in the existence of giants, not simply as vanquished foes or the villains of myths and fairy tales, but as primordial ancestors. In Northern Europe an imperative to discover origins included the revival and creation of epic poems that featured giants in pivotal roles. Ancestral giants were also visualized in woodcuts and engravings, their physical remains sought and coveted, all toward consolidating “evidence” of their existence. While it may seem odd to locate giants at the heart of nascent national identities, this is precisely what multiple early modern artists and poets sought to do, often with the support of their patrons. These stories of giants were not necessarily obscure or fantastic, or seen in terms of the Other, but in some crucial instances were central to monarchies, their courts, and the politics of place. A cultural history of giants must consider the role of art and poetry in supporting such beliefs and also take discovery accounts of gigantic bones and relics seriously.

This chapter will discuss giants who figure in German, English, and Dutch art and epic poetry as a way of accounting for origins. Contra other traditions where the giant is a malevolent force, it examines how giants were interpreted as vital to blood lines and even wielded as a means to assert the right to rule. In these northern geographical realms, all at a physical remove from Greek and Roman antiquity, imaginings for the distant past were especially important.

As elsewhere in Europe, the popularity of court dwarfs was a widespread phenomenon among German princes of the early modern period. From the late Middle Ages until well into the eighteenth century, princes and nobles from all territories of the Holy Roman Empire surrounded themselves with dwarfs as court wonders, entertainers, and symbols of princely status. Due to the high number of courts, large and small, in the politically fragmented empire of the German nation, it can be estimated that the number of dwarfs reached at least several hundred. Many of these dwarfs can be identified in court accounts and household lists, in financial records and letters; others are represented in literature and portraiture. Among the earliest mentions of dwarfs at German courts are records from the territories of Hesse and Saxony dating from the fourteenth century. In the fifteenth century, court dwarfs began to appear in the records of most of the greater courts as well as several small and middle-sized courts, both secular and ecclesiastic. In Vienna, Prague, Munich, Dresden, and Stuttgart, among others, the so-called “chamber dwarf” became institutionalized as an official position during the sixteenth century. In these courts, dwarfs usually lived and served in close proximity to the family of the ruler, received lodging, food, clothes, and other necessities from the palace administration and were often provided with wages on a regular basis.

During the early modern period, caricature emerged as a genre that made possible the exploration of the comic and the grotesque in draftsmanship. Many caricatures featured dwarfs, and the occasional giant, which served as visual topoi of extreme contrasts to heighten the comic effect of an image. Caricatures were first referred to as ritratti ridicoli (ridiculous portraits) in a manuscript by Giulio Mancini (1559–1630), an art critic and physician in seventeenth-century Rome. Mancini described caricature as a drawing that exaggerated a subject's “natural defects,” flaws that were already present and selectively fine-tuned for comic effect. The biographer Filippo Baldinucci (1624–1696), one of the earliest writers to document the practice of caricature, defined the new genre of caricatura in his Vocabolario toscano dell’arte del disegno (Tuscan Vocabulary of the Art of Drawing, 1681) as a playful portrait that disproportionately increased imperfections. Physical flaws, whether a large nose or a weak chin, were distorted to poke fun at the sitter. The features of non-normative bodies, including hunchbacks, the lame (zoppi), and dwarfs, were appropriated as comic strategy to produce ridiculous portraits. Height, in deficiency or excess, was an easy feature for artists to manipulate to create humorous interpretations of their subjects, a pictorial maneuver that plays into the contemporary societal obsessions with giants and dwarfs.

Scholarship regarding court dwarfs during the Renaissance and early modern periods has traditionally focused on male dwarfs, who feature prominently in contemporary written sources, such as secretaries’ letters and ambassadors’ reports. Male dwarfs also appear frequently in the visual record, as seen, for example, in Agnolo Bronzino's double-sided portrait (pre-1553) of Braccio di Bartolo, nicknamed Morgante, who served as an attendant to Cosimo I de’ Medici (r. 1537–74). Although female dwarfs are recorded within aristocratic women's entourages across Europe, from Isabella d’Este in Mantua to Elizabeth I in England, extant documents provide far less information about their lives, and as part of the “domestic” female sphere they have, until recently, been largely ignored. Furthermore, in comparison to their male dwarf counterparts, very few images of them survive, a notable exception being Andrea Mantegna's portrait of Barbara of Brandenburg's unidentified female dwarf, who appears in the Gonzaga group portrait in the Camera Picta frescoes (1465–74) at the Palazzo Ducale in Mantua (see figure I.10 in the Introduction).

This chapter examines evidence regarding female dwarfs in the sixteenthcentury Medici court in Florence and takes a dual approach. Firstly, it considers the role of these attendants within noblewomen's households by assessing archival material regarding Maria, a female dwarf in the retinue of Cosimo I's consort Eleonora di Toledo (1522–1562).

Mental distress was commonly portrayed as a form of liquid turbulence in early modern English literature. Biblical exegesis helped set this precedent. Take, for example, the interpretation of Abel's murder that the acclaimed evangelical preacher John King offers in his Lectures upon Jonas from 1597. King states that Cain, wracked with guilt, “ranne from place to place, not so much in his bodie, as in his minde, tossed like a wave of the sea, and finding no place for rest, because the mercy of God shone not unto him.” Portraying Cain's agitated “minde” as such neatly parallels how he is described in Genesis 4:12 as a “fugitive and a vagabounde” in possession of a “fearful conscience” that “findeth reste nowhere,” which, in turn, extends the elemental scope of Cain's punishment from the barren earth to the perpetual roiling of the mind's inner “sea.” Marine imagery helped convey the perturbation of thought that distinguishes the vulnerability of the human mind to sin, but this literary convention was not peculiar to morally didactic or theological literature. In this chapter, I contend that poets similarly portrayed the association between cognitive disorder and moral corruption through images of liquid unrest. While the study of the period's imaginative engagement with watery environments tends to concentrate on Shakespeare's oeuvre, I alternatively focus on non-canonical poets to enrich our understanding of the connections established between aquatic and mental environments in sixteenth and early seventeenth-century literary culture.

Recent explorations of oceanic thought have seen the development of methodologies with which to trace the legacies of histories of dispossession, through and with the ocean and its tides. These developments in cultural theory help to complicate the binaries associated with earlier iterations of postcolonial thought. The temporal and geographical delineations affirmed by familiar dichotomies, such as center/periphery, colony/metropole, and even colonizer/colonized, have not been able to account for the irreducible forms of domination, injustice and resistance that continue to impact lived experience across an unequal world. Nor have they necessarily accounted for the complex forms of implicatedness and entanglement in the aftermath of colonialism. A temporal framework that treats the event of colonial conquest as defining of the post-colonial future may seem to authorize the forgetting of histories of violence, paradoxically, through its linearity. Éduoard Glissant disavowed (a version of) postcolonialism for this reason, and insisted that “I am in a history that never stops.” By contrast, decolonial methodologies address the persistence of what Peruvian social theorist Aníbal Quijano first identified as “coloniality,” a phenomenon that goes beyond any historical timeline that tracks the events of colonization, per se. As Walter Mignolo insists: as “the darker side of Western modernity,” coloniality inheres in structures of thought that persist long after the historical events associated with colonization have taken place.

In a 1661 pamphlet titled Fiat Lux, John Vincent Canes asserts that the nonhuman world does not simply exist for human use:

Canes sounds surprisingly like a modern environmentalist. He punctures ideas about human exceptionalism and anticipates a Foucauldian skepticism about origins and knowledge: as he notes, even if one were to “pursue the river of Thames to his first original,” one could never fully tell “how far it creeps under ground before its appearance;

A tiny speck of snow once arrested the famous scientist Johannes Kepler (1571–1630) on his walk through Prague. Staring at the star-shaped patterns that dabbed his coat, his pamphlet The Six-Cornered Snowflake, published the following year (1611), set out to explain their puzzling consistency. The astronomer's thoughts, however, only proliferated: “Why … six points? What is the origin of the number six? Who carved the nucleus, before it fell, into six horns of ice? What cause is it that prescribes in that surface, which is now in the very act of condensing, six points in a circle for six prongs to be welded on to them?” Uncomfortable with the idea of an ordered pattern existing at random, he ultimately decided upon a “formative faculty” (“facultas formatrix”) acting in accordance with “supreme reason” that had “existed from the first in the Creator's design.”

George, Duke of Clarence's nightmare premonition of death by drowning in Richard III does more than foreshadow his demise in a butt of Malmsey wine. The dream showcases watery thinking by displaying myriad ways that water supplies both metaphors about and the matter of thought. As a medium of sensory experience, water in Clarence's dream provides a material baseline, with “dreadful noise,” “sights of ugly death,” and the imagined feel of the “slimy bottom of the deep” (1.4.22, 1.4.23, 1.4.32). As a means of chthonic transport, “the envious flood” of the ocean carries Clarence to death's “melancholy flood” beside the “sour ferryman” Charon at the River Styx (1.4.37, 1.4.45–6). Beyond the infernal river, Clarence voyages to hell to meet Warwick, Prince Edward, and a “legion of foul fiends” that “environed” him in torments (1.4.37, 1.4.45–6, 1.4.58–9). Water carries Clarence's imagined body and sweeps away his imagination. As a type and material substance of environment, water in these passages enables and frustrates movement in both the literal and figurative senses. The fluid medium provides the passage of Clarence's ship to nearby Burgundy, connecting him to the wider shipping paths of the growing (and lucrative) global early modern trade.

Watery figures act as metaphors for human cognition throughout Hamlet. For example, after observing Hamlet during the scene in her closet, Gertrude tells Claudius that her son is “Mad as the sea and wind when both contend / Which is the mightier” (4.1.7–8). The comparison captures the agitation that Gertrude just witnessed in her son, who oscillates between reason and passion throughout the previous scene. By telegraphing what she perceives as Hamlet's internal struggle as a storm, Gertrude diagnoses her son according to the standards of early modern humoral theory. The predominant theory of anatomy and physiology from classical antiquity to the rise of empirically controlled medicine in the nineteenth century, humoralism hypothesizes that a person's mental and physical well-being depends on the internal balance of the four humors, and that the four humors, blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm, correspond to the four elements, air, fire, earth, and water. When read as an allegory of Hamlet's cognitive state, the sea of Gertrude's illustration stands for phlegm, or the bodily liquid most associated with both water and self-control or composure. The wind, with which the water in Gertrude's image of her son's madness struggles, represents blood, which is the bodily humor associated with air, and the qualities of not only optimism but also passion and wrath.

Introduction

The idea of “holding space” for hard feelings is a wellness culture cliché in the 2020s. “Holding space” means creating a safe and comfortable zone for someone to express, process and purge negative affects and emotions. The feeling might be anger, grief, shame, fear or a combination of all of them; it might be felt in the self or in relation to others. The space held open could be in home, a park, a clinic, a classroom, a community hall. When done well, holding space allows someone to express hard feelings and continue to live comfortably within the limitations or enabling constraints of their circumstances. Holding space is an act of care that allows for a difficult affective process to unfold.

A tragedy creates a spatial and temporal zone for the representation of a story about the expression of negative human emotions too. These are often big, incorrigible, and negative ones. In addition, because it is a tragedy the space is held badly in the sense that circumstances are intended to go awry. As a queer feminist ecocritic interested in the representation of affect as it relates to environmental questions, I’m not just seeking to point out that things go badly in tragedies, but more specifically in the granular details of how, and how it might be otherwise.

Many readers have paused to reflect upon the image of a man standing in sewage in the penultimate scene of Edward II. The scatological circumstances of the king's incarceration are deeply and stinkingly Marlovian. Christopher Foley, citing the work of Lisa Hopkins and Roger Sales, notes that “despite a relatively small dramatic corpus, Christopher Marlowe shows a persistent interest in waste and waste-waterways as threats to the body and the body politic.” Where human waste is absent from his source material, Marlowe is likely to introduce it. For example, Joseph Tate marks a telling addition to the story of Tamburlaine's fevered end: “his death is heralded by a uroscopic diagnosis,” a physician having reported that his urine is “thick and obscure” (2.5.3.83). In Edward II, Marlowe puts the dung in dungeon, as the guards charged with watching over the deposed king talk about the shitty situation in which Edward now finds himself:

That Richard of Gloucester undergoes some kind of transformation at the conclusion of Shakespeare's Henry VI plays few, if any, critics would dispute. The nature of this metamorphosis, how radical it is, and when it occurs are matters that spark debate. Drawing upon elemental ecocriticism and cognitive theory, in particular the “4E perspective” that sees the mind as embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended, this essay takes a fresh look at Richard's transformation by focusing on the relationship between sovereignty, cognition, and the prodigious flow of water in the first tetralogy. Water can refer to the flood of salty tears that threatens to turn England into a swamp of sorrow, but it can also refer to the rivers, oceans, and rain that ultimately elude the grasp of sovereign control. Far from being merely an external manifestation of an internal, self-enclosed cognitive state, tears merge with the rest of the watery world; indeed, water does not respect boundaries between the subjective and the objective, the interior and the exterior. Water provides an especially challenging test for a cognitive theory approach to reading the first tetralogy: if a 4E perspective grounds the senses in a particular place, the flux and formlessness of water would seem to provide at best a merely transitory orientation, shape, or position in space. By the time we reach Richard III, however, we find that Richard's watery thinking defines a powerful, protean self amid the instability of the struggle for sovereignty.