Sins of the Tongue in Early Modern England

Abstract

Representations of the in the early modem period often encode crises of logic, of and of sense.1 O Ambivalent Organ, writes Erasmus in Lingua (1525), lamenting the fact that malevolent and benevolent discursive agencies emerge from one and the same bodily organ.2 Erasmus, like many others, takes his cue from Proverbs (18:21) in noting the way in which the is ambi-valent, good and bad, always seeming to pull in two directions at once.3 Indeed, the organ of speech, imagined in early modem religious, rhetorical, anatomical, and literary texts as the most powerful and the most vulnerable member of man, is consistently coded as a member that seems to resist logical discriminations. Because tongue (like the Latin lingua and the Greek glossa) also means language, the very invocation of the word encodes a relation between word and flesh, tenor and vehicle, matter and meaning.4 This relation, often configured as an intermingling of synecdoche and metony-