Sick Economies. Jonathan Gil Harris

as an invasive disease only to the extent that they recognized its ability to spread rapidly through the body, “devouring” it bit by bit. They located its causes not in foreign bodies, however, but in elemental factors such as extreme cold. What most exercised physicians’ imaginations was gangrene’s blurring of a crucial medical distinction: they characterized it as a form of living death, a confusion of vitality and mortification. Bartholomew Traheron notes in his 1543 translation of Vignon’s work on surgery, for example, that “Cancrena [gangrene] is not taken for flesh deade altogether, but for that whych begynneth to putrefye by lyttle and lyttle.”¹⁹ Gangrene muddles the boundary between what is proper to the body and what is alien to it; thus seen, the affliction is both endogenous and invasive. The confusion of categories that distinguishes early modern understandings of gangrene is even more notable in the sixteenth-century meanings of “infection.” The term had not yet decisively acquired its modern sense, that is, the communication of a determinate, exogenous illness. Although it was increasingly associated with foreign bodies as a result of new explanations of epidemic diseases such as syphilis (as we saw in Chapter 2), the dominant meaning of “infection” was contamination or pathological mixing. The term derives from Latin “inficere,” to stain or taint; for Galenic physicians, it came to mean corruption, including the miasmic putrefaction of water or of air, and hence the transmission of disease. But in the late sixteenth century, “infect” still retained vestiges of its residual meaning, “to dye, tinge, colour, stain” (OED, infect, v., 1.a).

      The gangrenous, infected dragon is thus “coloured” and “colouring,” in both pathological and economic senses. As Malynes says, the dragon has a “compounded body” (56); he is “half a man & halfe a beast” (73). This pathological mixing figures the hybridity of the usurer’s capital, which creates the illusion of an “imaginatiue wealth” even as it “hath transported our treasure into forraine parts” (71). The usurer thus “colours”—or alienates—the nation’s bullion. As this might suggest, the dragon’s infected state entails the fusion and confusion of discrete national identities. “His tridented toung,” Malynes tells us, is “like vnto a Turkish dart”; but his body is “like an Elephant.” Indeed, Malynes repeatedly associates the dragon with Islamic nations: the dragon’s tail, he informs us, “is marked with the new Moon of the Turkes, like vnto the letter C” (57). Malynes is less invested in Islamicizing usury, however, than in simply exoticizing it. The crescent moon that he here retools as the badge of usury conveniently enables him to allegorize the dragon’s tail as “the letter C,” the initial of Cambium or foreign exchange rates, with which he allegorically identifies this part of the body: “with the operation of his taile,” he complains, the dragon has “transported the moneys of our Hand, and within our land altered the nature and valuation of the money, making one hundred pounds, to be one hundred and ten pounds” (62).²⁰

      Yet even as Malynes exoticizes the dragon, he also brands it as a recognizably domestic villain. Its “compounded body” may have an Orientalized tail, but its head is marked with “an F, like a fellon” (57). Malynes’s remark seems calculated to exploit “fellon”‘s linked early modern legal and pathological associations. The term derives from the Latin fel, gall, and was used in early modern medical writing as a synonym for a carbuncle or boil. In law, however, a “felon” was originally anyone who breached the feudal bond of trust between man and lord; he or she was thus understood as a domestic disease, disrupting the internal balance of the body politic.²¹ Interestingly, the OED tells us that a “taint” was a mark applied to anyone convicted of a felony. Hence Malynes’s “fellon”-marked dragon is “tainted” in both pathological and legal senses. A conflation of exotic and domestic ills, the creature embodies Frances E. Dolan’s model of the early modern “proximate other,” a suppositious social threat that was perceived to be simultaneously foreign and domestic.²²

      In focusing explicit attention on the dragon’s “compounded body,” however, Malynes diverts attention from the extent to which the England of his fable is itself already hybrid. Niobla’s beautiful princess is by no means nationally pure; rather, she sports a transnational, Oriental motley. She wears clothes that are “odiferous as the smell of Lebanon” (52); her cheeks are like “a bed of spices” (52); her “admirable body” is “covered with a garment of white silke Damaske” (53); and she is “this Indian Phenix” (55). Yet it is the dragon of usury that is made to bear the burden of transnational mixing and the “coloured” indeterminacy that underwrites it. In the most eerie passage of the fable, Malynes describes the literal impossibility of pinning down the dragon’s precise location:

      albeit he seemeth with the index of the dyall not to moue, when he is continually moouing, and stirred in such sort, that when men begin to perceiue his motion, and pretend to runne from him: he doth so allure them, that the more they runne, the more he seemeth to follow them, as the moone doth to the little children, whereby his motion is the lesse regarded. (57–58)

      The dragon is always in motion, but his most dangerous skill lies in his ability to create the illusion that he occupies a fixed location. This passage captures particularly well the distinctive qualities of the usurer as he is rhetorically produced in mercantilist discourse: for all his seeming fixity, he is a fluid shapeshifter, “continually moouing” across categorical and national boundaries.

      In mercantilist writing about usury, the oscillation between fixity and fluidity is most at work in the seemingly firm attribution of usury to the figure of the Jew. Thomas Milles, for example, follows Malynes in imagining usury as a pratice of “merchandizing exchange” that alienates bullion across national borders; yet despite usury’s global status, Milles insists that merchandizing exchange transforms “our Christian Exchange into Iewish Vsury.”²³ The same strategy is evident at a crucial moment in Bacon’s essay on usury. In his list of “witty invectives” against usury, he reports the view that “Usurers should have orange-tawney bonnets, because they doe judaize” (133). “Judaize” serves here as both a metaphor and an ostensible cure for usury’s undecidability. On the one hand, the Jew was the master trope of national indeterminacy; as James Shapiro has argued, the waves of Jewish and Marrano migration from the Iberian Peninsula in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries facilitated the birth of the legend of the Wandering Jew, a stateless, transnational vagabond.²⁴ But Bacon’s use of the verb “Judaize” also lends a reassuring local name, if not habitation, to a practice that involves a transnational blurring of discrete categories: usurers should wear the orange hats mandated of Jews in the Papal States, not because they are Jewish, but because their practice “colours” them as Jews. “The Jew” thus both figures transnational fluidity and lends it a provisionally stable identity.

      Something similar happens in Saint George for England Allegorically Described. Malynes makes reference to Jews only once; but this reference is rhetorically crucial to his demonization of the transnational Turkish/English dragon. Admonishing the supporters of usury, he asks: “Will not the daunger that the leaguors of this Dragon do runne into, give them warning, when as at one time fiue hundreth Jewes were transported with Carons boate the ferrie man of hell, which were slaine by the Cittizens of Troynouant for feeding him?” (65). It is difficult to know at which historical incident Malynes glances here, but it may well be the York Massacre of the twelfth century, when the citizens of that town conveniently dissolved their debts by murdering the Jewish population.²⁵ In any case, Malynes, like Milles and Bacon, makes “the Jew” the certain material in which to clothe usury’s transnational uncertainty. Yet that very material, like Bacon’s “orange-tawney” bonnet, exacerbates even as it attempts to stabilize the dragon’s hybridity: “the Jew” becomes less a name for the palimpsested identities of transnational commerce than one of the layers in that palimpsest.

      Malynes’s chilling fantasy of retribution against Jews also recalls what was a much more recent phenomenon: the antiforeigner libels of the early 1590s. For many London citizens as for Malynes, Saint George needed to slay no dragon when an English mob could be relied upon to administer wild justice to strangers. One such libel of 1593 warns: “Be it known to all Flemings and Frenchmen, that it is best for them to depart out of the realm of England