Love-Apple in Idleness

Or Comfort me with Apples
A Much Augmented, Altered and Improued tale of Pippens, Pestilence and Pursuite of a most prodigious and diabolic woozle.

Prologue

It was during the final quarter of last year that my partner broke the regrettable news that she had contracted the plague of our times. After briefly considering fleeing the house or, perhaps, banishing the infectious party to the garden shed, I soon saw the merits of isolating alongside her and happily set about cancelling all engagements, obligations, and commitments – it was my duty, after all. Little did I know that this pause in the rhythms of daily life would prove the backdrop of a mighty quest; a quest down winding paths of footnotes and up gnarled trees of knowledge; a quest, dear reader, for truth.

Act I
Tasting probes – the giant peacock of the night – the game is afoot!

But first, in a tale of many quotations, a quotation of a quotation of a quotation. In a review last September of the book Taste and Knowledge in Early Modern England by Elizabeth Swann, the reviewer repeats one of the book’s more disturbing anecdotes: around 1680 some members of the Royal Society learned of the newly exposed grave of the theologian John Colet (died in 1519) and upon visiting it, “did thrust a probe or little stick into a chink of the coffin” and then tasted it. I remember my partner and myself having a brief scholarly debate about this article to the effect of:

“Did you read that thing in the TLS about the stick in the coffin?”
“Oh yeah, that was horrifying.”

Fast forward a few months and we are now a few days into our isolation, my partner still groggily infectious, myself healthy and in a holiday humour. I am merrily washing up, listening to the book Sentient by Jackie Higgins when, in a chapter about the moth known as the giant peacock of the night, I hear an intriguing passage: "Elizabethan ladies allegedly peeled apples to put beneath their armpits, removing them when saturated with sweat and gifting these 'love apples' to their sweethearts. " Upon hearing this, I throw down the ruddy pan and frantically ascend the stairs to my partner resting in bed:

Partner: “There you are, did you bring the paracet...”
Myself: “Not now. Do you remember that stick in the coffin thing; well I’ve just heard something weirder!” [I repeat the information with some dramatic license]
Partner: “Eww that’s gross, how would that even work, but please, I’d really like some paracetamol.”

Now, in normal times this tale may have ended there; I would have likely never brought up love apples again, apart from, perhaps, at some soiree where, feeling the conversation drift to some boorish topic like cars or travel insurance, I might interject with a well-timed, “Did you know…”. But this was plague-time and, as I later lay in bed trying not to think about the viral particles migrating across from my partner’s cells and then entering, replicating, and exploding out of my own, my mind began circling around that love apple practice – how peculiar it was!

Of course, fruits are a common metaphor for love and sexuality from papayas in Kate Bush’s ‘Eat the Music’, to peaches in Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name. Plus, the early modern era (the period roughly between the late fifteenth and late eighteenth centuries) was a very different time and considering that the social order included witch trials, bear baiting, and understanding the plot of Cymbeline, it’s reasonable to expect that the perception of many smells and tastes – the sensory order – was also somewhat different.

And yet, why had I never come across these love apples before? Indeed, I consider myself something of an aficionado on the early modern period and, to this day, resting on my shelf are editions of Marlowe, Behn, Webster, Machiavelli kept in such immaculate condition you’d swear they’d never been opened! Anyway, how interesting, I mused, it would be to actually look upon one of the primary sources describing this practice. My head soon swelled with strange visions of all manner of historic documents – diary entries from 1592, medical records from 1632, a pomologist’s spreadsheet from 1676 – all making reference to these love apples.

With the goal in mind, I leapt from the bed. My partner asked where I was going, I told her the scent of the love apple was calling.

ACT II
The scholar returns – the infinitely complicated dome – how now Woozle?

And so, I put £27,000 of academic training into action and opened Google. Initial research revealed that “love apple” had some botanical meanings at the time and seemed to be linked to both tomatoes and mandrakes (more on this later). Interesting, but irrelevant. The addition of words like ‘sweat’ and ‘armpit’ improved things and soon I was finding the practice mentioned in all manner of sources: anthropologist turned Chief Science Advisor to Match.com Helen Fisher talks about the practice in Anatomy of Love (1992); US author Diane Ackerman mentions it in her A Natural History of the Senses (1990); as does zoologist and biomorph enthusiast Desmond Morris in The Naked Woman (2004) who specified that it was “a whole, peeled apple” that was “placed in the young woman's armpit”. And yet, despite trawling these books’ footnotes, references and further reading, I couldn’t find any original source describing the practice.

Worse still, there appeared a vast superstructure of blogs, webpages, and Tweets built upon these books, meaning I was constantly being referred back to them. This was proving frustrating: what I had envisaged as a pleasant ten-minute diversion was now entering its third day. Plus, I had now tested positive for the blasted virus, simultaneously shattering my view of my immune system, and pushing my Googling to a more frenzied state. Finally, having read all of ‘5 Old-Timey Courtship Rituals That Will Make You Cringe’ and finding no source except another link back to Desmond Morris, I flew into a fit of Othello-esque rage, yelling, “VILLAIN, GIVE ME THE OCULAR PROOF!”

After reassuring my partner that I wasn’t ‘cracking up’ I took my predicament to my historian friend:

“Hmm, sounds like a Woozle.”
“Ahh of course, I knew it! Wait, what’s a Woozle?”

ACT III
A cry for holp – the degrees of Francis Bacon – a fateful blow

Named after the phantom character in Winnie the Pooh, the Woozle effect, according to Wikipedia, is “when frequent citation of publications lacking evidence misleads individuals […] and nonfacts become urban myths”. The term was popularised by Galles and Strauss in 1988 – or was it? To be honest, I’m just repeating conjecture on the Wikipedia page but presenting it as fact – a sure-fire way of creating a Woozle, or, in this case, a Woozle about Woozles… So now the question was: was this love apple thing a Woozle – a mere tissue of citations, a perfect example of Nietzsche’s conception of knowledge as an “infinitely complicated dome of concepts upon an unstable foundation” – or a genuine practice from history which had just assumed a Woozley visage? I was stuck, so I did what any good student would do: I asked my tutor. The only problem was he hadn’t been my tutor for five years, and I hadn’t actually been a student for three, but no matter – I still had his email address. I had fond memories of this tutor’s renaissance seminars and remembered him introducing our class to a website about early modern social networks called the ‘Six Degrees of Francis Bacon’.

Side note: I’ve had some trouble communicating the merits of this website over the years, with conversations going something like:
Me: It’s really cool, it shows you how interrelated and connected everyone was in the early modern period, hence the six degrees of Francis Bacon.
Them: Who?
Me: You know… the famous essayist and founder of the scientific method… Ugh, don’t worry, it’s just a clever riff on the game about Kevin Bacon.
Them: Who?

I received a speedy response from my former tutor; he hadn’t heard of the practice but would pass on the query to his colleagues and I was soon forwarded a response from none other than Dr Elizabeth Swann, the academic whose coffin-stick anecdote had set off this whole chain of events – the celestial orbs were aligning, the fates colliding! Alas, Dr Swann hadn’t heard of the practice either, conceding that it “sounds fairly implausible to me – for a start, keeping an apple under one’s armpit for any length of time doesn’t strike me as easy or comfortable […] BUT I’d be delighted to be proved wrong”.
I took this as an invitation to press on, but then disaster struck: I stopped being able to smell. I can’t recall what it was that alerted me to my changed sensorium, but I was soon running round the house smelling lemons, sun cream, the dog’s ear, their formerly distinct odours yielding nought but emptiness!

“How can I go on,” I bewailed, “researching an article into a sense I no longer possess!?”
“Are you really basing a whole article around that apple thing?”
“Well, not anymore!”

In a fit of melancholy, I took to my chamber.

Act IV
Recoverie – fieldwork – a chicken without a bone

Fortunately, the sense of smell did return, as did, in time, my resolve to continue. Indeed, I’d since heard from another early modern academic (they were intrigued but also doubted the claim) and had contacted one more. While I was waiting, I decided it was time for some field work:

“You’re going to do what?”
“Try peeling an apple and putting it in my armpit.”
“But why? What will that achieve?!”
“Well, a lot of people have questioned the logistics of the practice, so I should investigate this.”
“Isn’t this just like those pointless fillers in TV history documentaries, like when they put an Olympic athlete in chainmail and make them run round a 400m track?”

So, reader, I tied the apple to my armpit. I’ll spare the reader further details but suffice to say, yes, it is possible (with the aid of an apple corer and a piece of string) and, yes, it is uncomfortable, but not excessively. Indeed, if people can get used to wearing high heels, corsets, or Spanx Shapewear, they could probably also get used to love apples. In conclusion, the fieldwork was inconclusive.

“I thought you would be happy, dear – you said it wouldn’t achieve anything and you were right!”
“I’m not happy with what you just did.”
“Why not?”
“Because it was weird – I think you should stop this.”

Alas, I was inclined to agree: by this point, the final academic I was waiting on conceded that she had no source for the practice; meanwhile, I was going down blind alleys looking at apple-based folk songs, including one recorded in Sherbourne in 1907 that went:
“I gave my love an apple without e’er a core;
I will give my love a house without e’er a door
[…]
My head is the apple without e'er a core”.

Its words rang with that immortal truth that only time-worn lyrics can; my head did feel like an apple without e’er a core.
I was spent.

Act V
Search for something achieved – lessons learned – some reflection on the sensory hierarchy and the utility of knowledge

So it seemed I had been on a Woozle hunt all along. That being said, my quest did yield a number of pieces of knowledge which I think may show how this Woozle could have got going in the first place. Because we’re running out of space and patience, I have enumerated this evidence as follows.

1) ‘Love-apple’ was a term in early modern England: The Ladies Dictionary of 1694 refers to it as a “Spanish root of a Colour near Violet”, while a humorous book (or at least I think it’s humorous) from 1682 called The Ten Pleasures of Marriage talks of a doctor who is so sick with love that he is only concerned with looking for a “Love-apple, or Nightshadow, for the cure of his own burning distemper”. Both these pieces of evidence seem to point to love apples being another word for mandrakes (a member of the nightshade family) and the latter source hints at the plant being some kind of love drug, or at least associated with love. Indeed, the historic use of mandrakes as an aphrodisiac is mentioned in other secondary literature.

2) There existed in the medieval and early modern periods small portable balls of perfume worn by people, called pomanders, which could refer either to the ball itself or to its container. In addition to the etymological link, many of the containers were designed to look like apples. They seemed to have had both plague-preventing and romantic connotations and, as noted by Holly Dugan in The Ephemeral History of Perfume, in a poem by Robert Herrick (b. 1591) he appears to talk favourably of his beloved’s own natural scent that “did perfume the pomander.”

3) ‘The Song of Solomon’. This is a lyrical and, at times, rather steamy section of the Bible about two lovers pining for one another. As we’re dealing with the early modern period, I’m looking at the 1611 King James Bible, though there were other translations of the song circulating before then. There are many fruit/body metaphors in this poem but the one about “the apple tree” whose “fruit was sweet to eat” stands out, as do the olfactory details about the “smell of thine ointments” and “the smell of thy garments”. Finally, even mandrakes “give a smell” in this poem, though in this version they’re called ‘mandrakes’ not ‘love apples’. In other words, just about all the parts of the ‘love apple’ legend are in this poem – just not connected, or in the right order.

4) Lastly, there are numerous mentions of a similar practice occurring in rural Austria in the nineteenth century, albeit with a slice of apple, and many of my initial love apple books included this fact alongside. Finding an original source for this was something of a side project and there may be something in these tales but, reader, I’m afraid you will have to wait for the website version of this article for that.*

So, I think these cumulatively show how the love apple myth might have arisen. However, they do not answer the question of why it has, and continues to, spread. As the social scientist Bruno Latour says, “an idea […] never moves of its own accord. It requires a force to fetch it, seize upon it for its own motives”. So what exactly about this particular story has meant that it has been seized upon and passed on by our own culture? Perhaps it’s because the story is so effective at shocking us into rethinking our own sensory order, where smell is often relegated to the bottom of the sense hierarchy. Indeed, our sense of smell seems more likely to be a source of anxiety and shame than something from which we can derive pleasure and knowledge. Our culture's narrow view of smell can be seen particularly well in a Guardian article from January about post-Covid chronic smell loss where, rather than discussing how smell is one of the key ways we might recognise friends and family, or how olfactory memories are arguably the most emotionally vivid, the article instead mostly dwells on how having an impaired sense of smell might lead to one putting on weight. Moreover, the idea that Elizabethans amorously exchanged apples soaked in their own body odour stands as a clear challenge against a hyper-visual culture where we're constantly encouraged to scrub our bodies of anything that might remind us that we're living biological entities; it opposes those forces that seem to be pushing our bodies towards becoming those flat, odourless representations that we scroll through every day. So perhaps the Elizabethan love apple practice has cultural value today, even if it never really happened back then – although, who knows, someone more qualified out there may yet find some evidence. For now, though, I can take comfort in knowing with complete certainty that the practice has been performed at least once in history, even if my sweetheart did not appreciate it.

* [Editors note: If you, reader, have come from print to screen for closure, ye shall find none here. The search continues - stay tuned for possible revelations.]

Fred Warren is a writer and filmmaker. He spent university immersed in the new field of post-humanities, though some think he should have spent more time thinking about post-uni life than post-human life.