Introduction: writing metamorphosis

This is a study of the English writing of metamorphosis from the Reformation to the late seventeenth century. It asks what work is done by the imagining of transformation in this period and explores events and creatures which may seem to us fantastic: animated stones, werewolves, wild children. Looking at a range of writing in English from literary texts to court records, Writing Metamorphosis argues that the seventeenth century is marked by concentration on the potential of the human, and indeed the very matter of the world, to change or be changed. Versions of the idea of metamorphosis were widely available and therefore the writing of metamorphosis discloses vernacular epistemologies as well as elite modes of knowledge. The project began as a study of how the animal–human border was understood and written about in the English Renaissance. However, as I began to research the movement between beasts and humans the question of metamorphosis rapidly emerged as a possibility which fascinated and troubled the writers I was looking at. As I read texts not usually placed together within disciplines, metamorphosis emerged increasingly clearly as a topic of cultural significance for Protestants, poultry-keepers, physicians, philosophers. It became evident that the idea of metamorphosis was pervasive in sixteenthand seventeenth-century England and that it did significant cultural work in a range of texts which, under modern disciplinary dispensation, are rarely considered together. In using the concept or concepts, writers’ unease was balanced by a sense that metamorphic stories expressed things that needed to be articulated – they were ‘good to think with’. The term ‘metamorphosis’ entered English very early, being among the earliest fifteen per cent of words in the Oxford English Dictionary with a citation as a noun by Geoffrey Chaucer in 1390. Coming from Greek and registered in France and Italy too, the term apparently derived simply from the name of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The basic meaning that readers put to