Engrave

In contemporary society, the word engrave crops up fairly infrequently. We might engrave initials onto a fountain pen given on a special occasion, a pet’s name on to its collar, or a heartfelt memorial upon the headstone of a loved one. As a teenager, I remember deliberating intensely over whether to get the back of my iPod engraved. In late seventeenth-century England, where engraving was widespread, I might have hardly thought twice.

By the mid-1600s, engraved objects had been treasured among the English royalty and nobility for hundreds of years. Engraving was predominantly an elite practice, and only by the 1660s and 1670s were engravings increasingly popular lower down the social spectrum. Engraved words and lettering adorned all kinds of personal objects from jewellery boxes to snuff boxes, writing boxes, rings and pendants. Engravings appeared throughout the household too, carved into both decorative and practical objects. Such items could range from cupboards to benches and from stools to children’s cribs, and included utensils and tools, such as spoons, drinking beakers, and sewing bodkins. Engravings (as marked elsewhere in this series) were also used on the very fabric of homes in wooden lintels and beams, stone doorframes and fireplaces, and upon stones and lead drainpipes set into a house’s facade.

When used today, engravings often mark important events. They were similarly significant in early modern England, and were widely used in gift-giving and in commemoration of marriage and love. Even where the original owners of surviving objects cannot be traced, the strong connections between engravings and emotions are often evident, as in the apple scoop, below, carved with two sets of initials that likely reference a pair of lovers. Many seventeenth-century engraved objects survive without documents which could help us to understand the motivations of those who first owned and marked them. In the face of this, unpicking the contemporary meaning and wider significance of the word engrave can offer vital insights.

Carved Boxwood Apple Scoop, English. 1740. V&A Museum W.18-1935. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives one definition for engrave as ‘to impress deeply, to fix indelibly’. Seventeenth-century texts reveal similar concepts of permanence that fit closely with this explanation. Simultaneously, however, they also reveal that, in early modern England, engravings were not limited to objects and buildings, but were often conceived as marks upon the body, mind or soul. In a 1656 conduct book titled Pearls of Eloquence, a widow refuses a suitor’s hand with the words ‘you imagine that my love to my former husband was Written in a Table-Book' (sig. E6r). A table-book was a form of early modern notepad, with treated pages that could be written, erased and rewritten countless times. The widow states that, unlike such a book, where her love ‘may be soon wiped out, again’, her feelings for her former husband were instead ‘engraven upon my heart’. In a novel from 1684, Love Victorious, another male suitor competes with a rival for the heart of his beloved, attempting to ‘blot out’ whatever love the other man ‘engraved in her heart’ (sig. C2r).

The image of an engraved heart appears time and time again in early modern English texts, and acts as a byword for devotion and enduring love. Equally importantly, engraving repeatedly features as an active and interpersonal process. As early as 1592, the title character in John Lyly’s play Gallathea professes ‘I will never love any but Phillida, her love is engraven in my hart’ (sig. G4v). Significantly, however, Phillida is also deemed responsible, having engraven her love upon Gallathea ‘with her eyes’. Likewise in Italian novel La Stratonica, translated into English and published in 1651, male lead Libanus hopes that through speaking with the queen he might ‘engrave [his] Love in her’ (sig. K4r). In all of these texts engraving emerges as transactional: performed by one person unto another as a means of creating affection and engendering emotion.

Enamelled Gold Posy Memorial Ring, England. c. 1700. V&A Museum M.78-1960. © Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Engraving comes across as an emotional process interwoven with the materiality of the body. What role, then, did engraved objects play in navigating and communicating emotion between individuals? Posy rings — like the one shown above, which reads ‘a faithfull love none can remove J. W.‘ — were engraved with short dedications, poems or initials. Some were wedding rings, whilst others were given during courtship. A 1674 book laying out the correct etiquette for such gifts, named Cupids Posies, announced their purpose in its title, professing ‘the lover sheweth his intent by gifts that are with posies sent’. In 1599, clergyman Samuel Gardiner described ‘rings which passed to and fro betweene lovers’ and ‘usually were engraven’ (sig. Q8r). He too identified their exact purpose, explaining that ‘such emblemes and poesies, as might seeme to stirre up the affections the better, and continue kindnesse were carved upon them’.

Rather than simply performed upon objects as we might assume today, in seventeenth century England engraving was closely tied to the body. The trope of an engraved human heart regularly recurred in both secular and religious texts, often used in print as a symbol of emotional constancy. While a love ‘engraved’ within went unseen, engraved objects offered a means of rendering it visible. Such objects survive in great numbers and were important material and emotional anchors for a significant proportion of the population. Looking at early modern texts and examining how engrave was used by contemporaries offers a deeper understanding of engraved objects themselves, enabling us to see the continuities between bodies, objects and emotions.

Leonie Price is a PhD Candidate in the Department of History at the University of Sheffield.

Selected Bibliography

Anonymous. Cupids Posies (London, 1674).

Assarino, Luke. La Stratonica, or, The Unfortunate Queen, a New Romance, trans. J. B. (London, 1651).

Elder, William. Pearls of Eloquence, or, The School of Complements (London, 1656).

Gardiner, Samuel. The Portraitur of the Prodigal Sonne Livelie set forth in a three-fold discourse. (London, 1599).

Lyly, John. Gallathea As it was playde before the Queenes Majestie at Greenewiche, on Newyeeres day at night. (London, 1592).

Roberdière, Alexandre de la. Love Victorious, or, The Adventures of Oronces and Eugenia, a Novel, trans. J. E. (London, 1684).

23 April 2021.