Woolley’s Mouse: Early Modern Recipe Books and the Uses of Nature

Abstract

In “Of Mice and Women,” an article whose findings also appear in her book Speaking for Nature, Sylvia Bowerbank writes about two paradigmatic mice: one belonging to Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, and the other to Robert Boyle, Rich’s brother. Rich’s mouse is brought to her by a servant, having been trapped and killed in the family liquor cabinet. In Rich’s diary, the “domestic mouse caught in a trap with the cheese/evidence still in its mouth” becomes, in Bowerbank’s words, “a sign of God’s just surveillance and punishment of transgression.”1 Boyle’s mouse, on the other hand, is a “laboratory tool,” used to demonstrate the workings of his famous air pump. In each case, the mouse is a physical creature-for Rich, a thief among the cordials, and for Boyle, a breathing organism whose death proves the experiment’s success. The mouse, however, also carries metaphysical meaning for Rich, a symbol of human frailty, and for Boyle, the vehicle for an ideal of experimental proof and of dominion over nature. Rich speaks “for” her mouse, while Boyle hardly thinks of mice and speaking in the same breath. The mouse, halfway between material and metaphor, stands “as a telling index of the gender politics that informed early modern ecologies.”

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