Prosthesis and the performance of beginnings in The Woman in the Moon

Abstract

In his seminal study, Prosthesis, David Wills finds 'one type of beginning' for prosthesis in a reference to this term in a marginal gloss that appears in Thomas Wilson's The Art of Rhetorique (1553). 1 At the time of Wills' writing, this 1553 allusion to prosthesis was the first known use of the word in its earliest grammatical sense of 'the addition of a letter or syllable to the beginning of a word' (OED). Wills draws heavily on the 'marginality' of grammatical prosthesis in The Art of Rhetorique, noting that Wilson treats it as a dangerously foreign other that generates 'illicit couplings' between linguistic bodies, or 'the prostitution of language'. 2 In particular, Wills interprets Wilson's disdain for prosthesis as a dislike of artifice that, at root, reflects Reformation fears about idolatry and the difficulty of returning, via the destruction of images, 'to a form of divine presence that preceded figural representation'. 3 In this view, prosthesis is not just a rhetorical term, it is a figure that signifies any act of artificial construction and is thus a source of anxiety in a reformist view. Because Wills focuses so extensively on Wilson, this anxious response to prosthesis comes to stand, in Prosthesis, for sixteenth-century English Protestant thought on this figure more broadly. Moreover, Wilson's anxieties about prosthesis as an artificial barrier to an unknowable divine destination seep into Wills' broader, Derridean account of prosthesis as a 'figure of inconsistency … hobbling uneasily towards some unknown that it knows it will never reach'. 4 Significantly, however, Wilson's concerns about prosthesis are the product of a specific historical context, in that this writer rose to prominence during the reign of Edward VI, a period characterised by 'evangelical' Protestantism and unprecedented levels of iconoclasm. 5What sixteenth-century attitudes to prosthesis might we uncover by focusing on alternative examples from this period? And how might these alternatives shape our