Libellae
Four libellae of the “middle sort”—or “mean” as Moffett prefers to call them—sit just below the running title [Figure One] (note 1). These, he writes, “set forth Natures elegancy beyond the expression of art” (note 2). The first, at the upper left, he reports, “has wings of bright violet colour;” the second, “wings whitish, which are beautified with gray lines drawn quite through them;” the wings of the third “are marked as it were with bloud colour streaks, towards the edges or outmost parts like to a dark purple;” and the fourth libella’s wings are “most accurately wrought with silver colour and black, in the middle shadowed with a dark purple” (note 3). All Moffett’s wordy liming, of course, cannot manifest the black woodcuts. Yet the wings’ spider-work, however simplified, does present, and the wings of one libella are easily distinguished from the wings of the next. Three of the “greater” libellae bleed from the recto (note 4). Their wings, he writes, are “silver coloured,” “silver,” or “like silver” (note 5). Though Moffett describes the wings of the greater libellae only briefly, the woodcutter nevertheless took special care forming their wings’ lattices. These mix ink—and pattern—through the leaf with those of the mean. The seepage yields, that is, a third, composite wing, neither the greater nor the mean libellae’s. The bleeding just above the mean libellae’s wings is unusually heavy [Figures Two, Three, and Four]. Ink comes through the leaf unusually heavily above and within the mean libellae’s wings. Strikingly, the seepage takes the form of the mean libellae’s wings’ own shapes. At first blush, it suggests motion: the wings flap. Thickened bleedings such as these—in the very forms of the bugs they surround—are found nowhere else in this copy of The History, and the effect is difficult to account for. We are limited to speculation. The sheet, with the great libellae already on its recto, would have wetted on its verso before the mean libellae were to be printed. It looks as if the pressman neglected to ink the verso’s type and woodcuts. Text and cuts would have been put, in that case, to the sheet without pigment. Where the cuts and type pressed the moist sheet, the ink from the recto, bleeding already, would have been brought deeper still into the leaf. What results is an unusually pronounced blending. The veining of great libellae’s wings seems fully of a piece with the veining of the mean. The composite patterns that emerge are not nature’s making. Rather, emerge from a fault in the press. They are paper’s creatures.
note 1. Thomas Moffett, trans. John Rowland, The History of Four-Footed Beasts, Serpents, and Insects (London: Ellen Cotes for George Sawbridge, Thomas Williams, and Thomas Johnson, 1658), 942.
note 2. Ibid, 943
note 3. Ibid.
note 4. Ibid, 940.
note 5. Ibid.