Diseases of the Imagination and Imaginary Disease in the Early Modern Period 9782503527963, 2503527965

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D ISEASES OF THE IMAGINATION AND IMAGINARY D ISEASE IN THE E ARLY M ODERN PERIOD

EARLY EUROPEAN RESEARCH 1200–1650 General Editors Andrew Lynch, University of Western Australia Claire McIlroy, University of Western Australia Editorial Board Juanita Feros Ruys, University of Sydney Emilia Jamroziak, University of Leeds Matthias Meyer, University of Vienna Jon Vidar Sigurdsson, University of Oslo Nicholas Terpstra, University of Toronto

Volume 2

D ISEASES OF THE IMAGINATION AND IMAGINARY D ISEASE IN THE E ARLY M ODERN PERIOD

edited by

Yasmin Haskell

H

F

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Diseases of the imagination and imaginary disease in the early modern period. -- (Early English research ; v. 2) 1. Mind and body--Europe--History--16th century. 2. Mind and body--Europe--History--17th century. 3. Mental health--Europe--History--16th century. 4. Mental health--Europe--History--17th century. 5. Mental illness--Europe--History--16th century. 6. Mental illness--Europe--History--17th century. 7. Imagination. 8. Mind and body in literature. 9. Mental illness in literature. I. Series II. Haskell, Yasmin Annabel. 616.8'52'0094'0903-dc23 ISBN-13: 9782503527963

© 2011, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. D/2011/0095/154 ISBN: 978-2-503-52796-3 Printed on acid-free paper

C ONTENTS

Acknowledgements

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Notes on the Contributors

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Preface, by German Berrios

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List of Illustrations Introduction: When is a Disease not a Disease? Seeming and Suffering in Early Modern Europe

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YASMIN HASKELL

Coping with Inner and Outer Demons: Marsilio Ficino’s Theory of the Imagination

19

GUIDO GIGLIONI

Melancholy, Imagination, and Dreaming in Renaissance Learning

53

ANGUS GOWLAND

Witches, the Possessed, and the Diseases of the Imagination

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DONALD BEECHER

The Melancholic Nun in Late Renaissance Italy SHARON T. STROCCHIA

139

Afflicted Children: Supernatural Illness, Fear, and Anxiety in Early Modern England

159

JUDITH BONZOL

Beyond Allegory: The Meanings of Madness in Early Modern Spain

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DALE SHUGER

Tasso’s Melancholy and its Treatment: A Patient’s Uneasy Relationship with Medicine and Physicians

201

MONICA CALABRITTO

Masquerades with the Dead: The Laughing Democritus in an Observatio on Melancholy by Pieter van Foreest

229

THOMAS RÜTTEN

‘Lightning strikes, wherever ire dwells with power’: Johan Wier on Anger as an Illness

259

HANS DE WAARDT

The Anatomy of Hypochondria: Malachias Geiger’s Microcosmus hypochondriacus (Munich, 1652)

275

YASMIN HASKELL

Lycanthropy in Early Modern England: The Case of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi BRETT D. HIRSCH

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Vampires as Creatures of the Imagination: Theories of Body, Soul, and Imagination in Early Modern Vampire Tracts (1659–1755)

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KOEN VERMEIR

‘[W]hat fatigues we fine ladies are fated to endure’: Sociosomatic Hysteria as a Female ‘English Malady’

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HEATHER MEEK

Envoi: The Afterlife of Maladies Imaginaires GEORGE S. ROUSSEAU

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Index

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A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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he editor’s research was supported by a ‘Discovery Projects’ grant from the Australian Research Council (DP0770605). I would like to thank my colleague and fellow Chief Investigator, Sergio Starkstein (Psychiatry, University of Western Australia), for his expert guidance and assistance on matters hypochondriacal. Much of the editorial work was completed during a visiting research fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, in the Hilary and Trinity terms, 2009. I warmly thank the Warden and Fellows for their hospitality and conversation; for loans of books and helpful advice I must single out Noel Malcolm, Ian Maclean, Simon Swain, and Cecilia Trifogli. The Codrington librarian, Norma Aubertin-Potter, gamely fetched rare tomes for me from high and difficult places. That the editing of this book was relatively stress-free, even enjoyable, is a tribute to the quality and efficiency of the contributors. German Berrios and George Rousseau proved gracious, patient, and — as I’m sure the reader will agree — much more than decorative, bookends. It remains for me to thank my research associate, Kate Riley, for many useful discussions about various aspects of this project, for keeping track of a ballooning bibliography, and for her Argus-eyed proofreading.

N OTES ON THE C ONTRIBUTORS

Donald Beecher is Chancellor Professor of English Language and Literature at Carleton University, Canada. He has published on Elizabethan prose fiction, Italian theatre, Renaissance medicine, and the cognitive sciences and literature. Among his many publications are Jacques Ferrand, Traite sur la maladie d’amour (1623), edited with Massimo Ciavolella, with introduction and annotations in French (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008) and Ars reminiscendi: Mind and Memory in Renaissance Culture (Toronto: CRRS Publications, 2008), edited with Grant Williams. German Berrios has taught at University of Cambridge, UK (Departments of Psychiatry and of History and Philosophy of Science) since 1977. He currently holds the Chair of the Epistemology of Psychiatry and is a Consultant Neuropsychiatrist at Addenbrooke’s Hospital (Cambridge, UK). He has published fourteen books and more than four hundred papers on the clinical, historical, and philosophical aspects of neuropsychiatry, mental symptoms, and descriptive psychopathology. Berrios is a Life Fellow of Robinson College, and Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists of the UK, of the British Psychological Society, and of the Academy of Medical Sciences. In 1989, he founded (with the late Roy Porter) the international journal History of Psychiatry, of which he remains the editor. Judith Bonzol has recently completed a Ph.D. in History at the University of Sydney. Her dissertation is entitled ‘“The Other Sort of Witches”: Cunning Folk and Supernatural Illness in Early Modern England’. Her article, ‘The Medical

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Diagnosis of Demonic Possession in an Early Modern English Community’ has appeared in Parergon ( Journal of the Australian and New Zealand Association for Medieval and Early Modern Studies), 26 (2009). Monica Calabritto is Associate Professor of Italian and Comparative Literature at Hunter College and at the Graduate Center (CUNY). Her research focuses on the notion of sixteenth-century madness in Italy as perceived and represented by members of the medical and the legal tradition, and by city chroniclers. She is the author of the introduction of the first modern English translation, by J. Crayton and D. Pastina, of Tomaso Garzoni’s The Hospital of Incurable Madness, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 352 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), and of essays and articles on gendered madness, Italian imprese, melancholy, the relationship between literature and medicine in literary and medical texts, and the structure and function of various medical genres vis-à-vis the illness of early modern melancholy. Presently, she is working on a monograph, based mostly on archival research, which focuses on the analysis and interpretation of the tensions between legal theory and practice, and among legal, medical, and social perspectives vis-à-vis the notion of insanity. Guido Giglioni is Cassamarca Foundation Lecturer in Neo-Latin Cultural and Intellectual History 1400–1700 at the Warburg Institute, London. He specializes in Renaissance philosophy and medicine and is the author of Immaginazione e malattia: Saggio su Jan Baptiste van Helmont (Milan: FrancoAngeli, 2000), and of scholarly articles on, among others, Campanella, Cardano, Bacon, Glisson, and Harvey. Angus Gowland is Lecturer in Intellectual History at University College London, having previously been College Lecturer at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and Research Fellow at Magdalene College, Cambridge. His broad field of interest is early modern European intellectual history, and more particularly sixteenthand seventeenth-century political thought, moral philosophy, and psychology. He has published on the idea of melancholy in early modern Europe, the history of rhetoric, and the methodology of intellectual history, and his book, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2006. Yasmin Haskell is Cassamarca Foundation Chair in Latin Humanism at the University ofWestern Australia, Perth, and a Chief Investigator in the Australian

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Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions: Europe 1100–1800. She is the author of Loyola’s Bees: Ideology and Industry in Jesuit Latin Didactic Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); and editor, with Philip Hardie, of Poets and Teachers: Latin Didactic Poetry and the Didactic Authority of the Latin Poet from the Renaissance to the Present (Bari: Levante Editori, 1999), with Juanita Feros Ruys, of Latinity and Alterity in the Early Modern Period (Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 2009), and with Susan Broomhall of ‘Humanism and Medicine in the Early Modern Era’, special guest issue of Intellectual History Review, 18 (2008). She is currently leading an international project funded by the Australian Research Council, ‘Mapping the Latin Enlightenment’, and is completing a book on the eighteenthcentury Dutch physician and Latin poet, Gerard Nicolaas Heerkens. Brett D. Hirsch is University Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Medieval and Early Modern Studies at the University of Western Australia. He is coordinating editor of the Digital Renaissance Editions, co-editor of the Routledge journal Shakespeare, and vice-president of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association. His research has appeared in The Ben Jonson Journal, Digital Studies, Early Modern Literary Studies, Early Theatre, Literature Compass, and Parergon, in edited collections for Brepols and Palgrave, and in the forthcoming Cambridge World Shakespeare Encyclopedia. He is currently working on a monograph study of animal narratives in early modern England, a critical edition of Fair Em (with Kevin Quarmby), and a series of computational stylistics studies of English Renaissance drama (with Hugh Craig). Heather Meek is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Regina. Her research interests include eighteenth-century women’s writing, mental illness, and the intersections of literature and medicine. Among her most recent publications are ‘Medical Women and Hysterical Doctors: Interpreting Hysteria’s Symptoms in Eighteenth-Century Britain’ (The English Malady: Enabling and Disabling Fictions (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2008)) and ‘Of Wandering Womb and Wrongs of Women: Evolving Conceptions of Hysteria in the Age of Reason’ (English Studies in Canada, 35.2–3, June/September 2009). Currently, she is exploring the relationship between hysteria and creativity in a few women authors. George S. Rousseau is a cultural historian attached to the History Faculty at University of Oxford, UK, where he is Co-Director of the Centre for the History

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of Childhood. He has previously taught at Harvard University of California, Los Angeles, University of Aberdeen (Regius Chair of English), and De Montfort University. Rousseau works at the interface of literature, art, music, and medicine, with a special emphasis on the eighteenth century. He is the author or editor of some twenty-five books, including The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History (with M. Gill, D. Haycock, and M. Herwig)(Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), and Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature Culture and Sensibility (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Thomas Rütten is a licensed physician and holds a Ph.D. in the history of medicine from the University of Münster, where he also successfully completed his Habilitation in the history and theory of medicine. Over the last twenty years he has held posts at the University of Münster, the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Université Paris VII, and Newcastle University, where he is currently Reader in the History of Medicine. He has published widely on ancient, early modern, and modern Western medicine, particularly on the history of Hippocratic texts, the history of melancholy, the representation of medicine in the works of Thomas Mann, and the history of medical history as an academic discipline. Dale Shuger is Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Columbia University in New York. She received her Ph.D. from New York University in 2007. She is interested in early modern Spanish prose, popular history, institutional discourse, and the intersections between these three. She is currently editing a manuscript titled ‘One Thousand and One Quijotes: Madness in Life and Literature in Early Modern Spain’ and researching the Spanish Inquisition’s changing understanding of reason from 1487–1834. She has published in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies and USA Cervantes: 39 Cervantistas en Estados Unidos. Sharon Strocchia is Professor of History at Emory University. Her research revolves around the social and cultural history of Renaissance Italy, with a focus on women and religion in Florence; gender and sexuality in early modern Europe; and the social history of medicine in pre-modern Europe. She is the author of Death and Ritual in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992) and Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009).

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Koen Vermeir is permanent research fellow (CR1) at the CNRS in Paris. He studied theoretical physics, philosophy, and history of science at the Universities of Leuven (Belgium), Utrecht (the Netherlands), and Cambridge (UK). After being awarded a Ph.D. in philosophy, he was a fellow at the Fund for Scientific Research (Flanders), the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (Germany), Cornell University (USA), Harvard University (USA), and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (USA). His interests include the powers of the imagination in the early modern period, the meanings of philosophical instruments, and the interactions of science and religion in the seventeenth century and today. He has published scholarly articles, book chapters, and edited books in Dutch and English. Hans de Waardt is Lecturer in History in the Faculty of Letters at the Free University (VU), Amsterdam, and Co-ordinator of the Master’s programme in the history of medicine at the VU Medisch Centrum. His research interests are the history of magical thought, psychiatry, and early modern humanism and spirituality. He is the author of Mending Minds: A Cultural History of Dutch Academic Psychiatry (Rotterdam: Erasmus, 2005) and editor, with Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra and Hilary Marland, of Illness and Healing Alternatives in Western Europe (New York: Routledge, 1997).

P REFACE

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am grateful to Professor Haskell for asking me to write a Preface for this excellent collection of case studies. Inter alia, they illustrate how difficult it is (even for non-clinical historians) to avoid the occasional anachronistic reading of past, ‘deviant’ experiences and/or behaviours. The common (but groundless) belief that irrespective of historical period terms such as hypochondria, melancholia, lycanthropy, hysteria, possession, or fatigue must refer to more or less the same ‘clinical’ phenomena is difficult to explain and extirpate. Regardless of how often specific research shows that throughout history the same terms have named different behavioural packages, the search for ‘invariants’ continues. Due to the bias imposed by the profession, medics can be forgiven for seeing biological invariants everywhere. But that non-clinical historians often enough fall into the same trap is surprising and worthy of analysis. However, I am pleased to say that on a scale of resistance to anachronistic reading of cultural categories such as hypochondria, melancholia, lycanthropy, hysteria, possession, or fatigue, contributors to this volume have scored very well.

Earlier Convergences and their History One way of defending against the ‘continuity’ mirage is: a) to distinguish between the history of names, concepts, and behaviours; b) to conceive of the construction of mental symptoms, syndromes, or disorders as resulting from the ‘convergence’ of all three historical strands in the work of an author or authors; and c) to consider this event as totally man-made rather than as an aspect of nature breaking through. Hence, in its typical form, a convergence refers to the cultural act whereby a writer brings together: a) a word (new or recycled), b) a concept (acting as a theoretical link with a historical period), and c) a form or forms of

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behaving and/or feeling. Convergences are usually motivated by ‘observations’, that is, the author in question would claim that the cluster of behaviours he has just reported is not random and its stability is due to the fact that it captures a ‘fact of nature’. Thus, ‘convergences’ present themselves both as descriptive and explanatory devices. The former because they are linked to more or less ascertainable historical events: writer so and so has existed, the paper or book in which the said convergence is proposed is placed on my desktop waiting perusal, etc.; the latter because a historical study of the writer’s life and times should provide the beginning of an account as to why he conceived of the convergence in that particular way. Fleeting convergences get lost in history and although they are likely to be informative, very few historians bother to write about them. Historians like successful convergences. Their endurance (or success) invites all manner of accounts but most of all they generate the belief in their ‘natural’ origin: this is why authors of enduring convergences are honoured as ‘discoverers’ rather than as ‘constructors’. Thus considered, convergences become generators of ‘knowledge’ and not uncommonly of ontology. This happens when researchers manage to find correlations between them and proxy variables representing the body from which they like to conclude that convergences (be these hypochondria, melancholia, lycanthropy, hysteria, possession, fatigue, or whatever) can be ‘naturalized’ or ‘reduced’ (often without residuum) to whatever bodily change has been picked up by the correlation. Why some convergences are more successful than others remains a mystery, although plenty of accounts are bandied about. Successful convergences tend to be self-perpetuating because they purvey explanations and often money (via the marketing of ‘treatments’) and also because they satisfy deep emotional and aesthetic yearnings in therapists, carers, and sufferers alike. For socioanthropological reasons not yet identified, in various historical periods convergences that have been linked to the body seem particularly successful; for example, current proposers of the view that chronic fatigue may have a ‘psychological’ origin are having a rough time, for sufferers themselves seem to prefer a ‘viral disease’ explanation. Concatenations of convergences are not uncommon and receive undue attention from researchers. ‘Melancholia’ is a good example. Books of the type ‘melancholia, from Hippocrates to DSM IV’ abound, and although by now it should be obvious that these works cannot but be about the historical usage of the word melancholia, they contribute to the continuity fallacy in that many take

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them to be about the history of a single, unified ‘disease’ or ‘disorder’ (i.e. of a natural kind). Even those aware of the differences separating successive historical uses of the word tend to put them down to ‘scientific progress’. Also worrying is the fact that the continuity fallacy may bias the way in which classic texts are translated, behaviours described, and works of art interpreted. Anachronism has a way of entering through the back window. Lastly, non-clinical historians, aware of these pitfalls, can go the other way and use the term melancholia in a very broad sense to the point that it becomes a portmanteau. Studying current convergences is not sufficient to understand the meaning of hypochondria, melancholia, lycanthropy, hysteria, possession, or fatigue because their very currency tends to officialize them as ‘true’. By showing that earlier ones were constructs, books like this one cast a historical perspective on current convergences; and by highlighting that explanatory narratives such as phantasia, imagination, fancy, etc. are no longer extant in the psychology and psychiatry of today, they make the important point that aetiological accounts are also subject to fashion.

Psychiatry as a Discipline Sui Generis The book also shows that the historical analysis of putative ‘clinical’ categories from a non-medical perspective is illuminating. This is partly due to the narrowness of the current definition of psychiatry that effectively does away with the cultural categories required to contextualize the concept of madness adequately. The fact that ‘culture’ and social variables may be paid lip service to in each and every psychiatric statement is insufficient. To work at all, psychiatry must be redefined beyond the stereotyped branch of medicine — or the ‘neurosciences’ as naturalizers au outrance would have it — that deals with mental diseases. Indeed, analysis shows that psychiatry is a new type of hybrid discipline, exhibiting a complex epistemological structure and philosophical language, located in the terra ignota that stretches between the old social and natural sciences. The social sciences provide psychiatry with criteria whereby certain behaviours are selected out as ‘deviant’, ‘different’, ‘disordered’, ‘in need of management or control’, etc. The natural sciences seek to link such behaviours to specific peculiarities of the body and hence transform deviancy into disease. By themselves, the natural sciences cannot select out any behaviour as diseased, except in trivial cases (e.g. the deviant behaviours putatively caused by brain tumours) which cannot be used as models for the rest of behavioural deviancies. This is the reason why the concept of ‘psychiatric diagnosis’ is different from other forms of ‘medical

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diagnosis’ (e.g. broken leg), which can be implemented even if the sufferer’s subjectivity is bypassed. Psychiatric diagnosis is by definition a dialogical activity (cannot ever be carried out in the comatose patient, for example) whose essence is the ‘evaluating’ of experience and behaviours against a specified cultural context. Thus, it is written in the epistemological structure of psychiatry that ‘mental disorders’ (particularly ‘new ones’) cannot be identified by directly examining the structure of the body and bypassing the dialogue with the sufferer. The reason for this has little to do with the state of progress of the neurosciences. It is, of course, true that for all the claims made about the advanced state of knowledge about the ‘biology’ of mental disorder all that psychiatry really has at the moment is sets of correlations that link proxy variables representing the deviant experiences or behaviours and proxy variables that represent the body. These correlations concern group comparisons and are of the type that cannot be converted into tighter cause-effect relationships. This is why such correlations cannot be used to identify new sufferers in the community. It is likely that some people have behaved in strange, deviant ways, or experienced strange experiences since before any records began. Throughout history these phenomena have been conceptualized in a variety of ways and the outcome of the management routines or techniques of social control that have been inferred from such concepts has followed the law of thirds: one-third of sufferers has improved fully, one-third partially, and one-third has not. Hence it is possible to claim for most treatments in history a 66 per cent success. Interestingly enough, current biological treatments in psychiatry show the same results.

The Medicalization of Madness By the beginning of the nineteenth century, and on account of social, political, and economic factors that have not yet been fully elucidated, medicine (the new anatomo-clinical medicine, that is, not the one in existence before the eighteenth century) was encouraged to take over the explanation and care of madness. What medics thought of this request also needs study, although there is evidence that at least ab initio they were not that keen. In England, for example, legislation had to be enacted for medics to comply. They applied to madness the same conceptual and management paraphernalia that they had used for broken bones, heart murmurs, infections, liver diseases, etc. This process, which took about half a century to be completed, included reconceptualizing madness as a ‘disease’ (and

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later as a collection of diseases) and creating a new breed of doctors (alienists, mad-doctors, experts in psychological medicine, psychiatrists, etc.). In most European countries this process of professionalization included the development of examinations, rites of passage, associations, journals, and specialized venues of work, and was completed by 1900. Now firmed up by scientific, social, ethical, legal, and even literary warrants, the alliance between medicine and madness still goes on. Part of Western folklore, it feels as if the ‘psychiatrist’ may last for ever. However, it does not take much effort to realize that this alliance remains ‘historical’ and contingent. The decision as to who should look after the ‘mentally disordered’ is in the hands of politicians not of ‘scientists’. So far, the medical programmes of care remain affordable but there is no reason to believe that this will always be so. During lean economic periods other professional groups may offer cheaper alternatives and these may be very tempting to politicians as long as they are ethically defensible (with which courtesan philosophers of psychiatry will help) and do not threaten electoral prospects. To adequately understand the chapters included in this book, one needs to take the facts listed above into account, that is, consider the medical approach to madness as a historical construct. Only then their varied themes will start to make sense. Some will in fact be seen as dealing with established convergences and others with interregna where old terms have been released by a dying convergence but not yet been incorporated into a new one. By the same token, the very fact that their explanation is loosely related to a major cultural category, namely, imagination, will help show how dependent convergences are on topical concepts, on fashionable categories of thought.

‘Phantasia’ and ‘Imagination’ Once the queen of mental powers, by the late nineteenth century imagination started its decline and by the first half of the twentieth century it had become extinct as a psychological function, only to survive in the field of aesthetics. This caused a sort of crisis in psychiatry for new accounts were now required for the ‘mental disorders’ for which imagination had earlier on provided an explanation. Although during the period covered by this book imagination was going strong, its definition was changing all the time; indeed, such changes provide a (partial) explanation for the kaleidoscopic ways in which hypochondria, melancholia, lycanthropy, hysteria, possession, and fatigue are depicted in this book. During the period in hand commentators and sufferers sat under the baldachin

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of what is now called Aristotelian ‘psychology’ — by which it is basically meant views on ‘life’ and ‘soul’ as contained in De anima and in Parva naturalia. However, as explained in the Ficino chapter, Plato’s views also played an important role and should not be disregarded. The fact that during this historical period ‘life’ and ‘soul’ are still overlapping concepts makes it difficult to differentiate between ‘biology’ and ‘psychology’. Whatever the semantic field of phantasia and imagination, it is still the case that to say that hypochondria, melancholia, lycanthropy, hysteria, possession, and fatigue are related to a disordered imagination is not to say much. Explanations of behaviour based on a ‘disordered’ phantasia or imagination may refer to involvement of: 1) an ‘unconscious’ faculty or power whose disorder gives rise to a formed ‘symptom’; 2) the active and voluntary imagination which the sufferer uses to configure his experience; or 3) the author of the convergence who uses his own imagination to ‘translate’ reports from sufferers into coherent accounts (to these three options some may want to add a fourth one, constituted by the imagination of the authors of the chapters included in this book!). This multivocalness is made double by the fact that, as Hobbes and others have noticed, the Latin imaginatio is not really a good semantic or conceptual translation of the Greek phantasia, and by the additional problem that neither of these concepts was originally meant to refer to an actual faculty or power of the soul. Without an Aristotelian substance on which to hang actions and properties, there would seem to be no substratum for the imagination or phantasia to cause havoc on. Since their inception, these concepts have also raised epistemological difficulties. Because the ‘pale’ sensations that they retrieve need to be stored somewhere, phantasia and imagination are conceptually parasitical upon perception and memory. Plato considered images to have a very limited epistemological value because they were just degraded sensations, reflections similar to those seen on the liver, whose shining capsule Plato conceived of as a reflective mirror. However, by arguing that phantasia was more than that ‘which appears’ and by considering it as a power of the sensitive soul, Aristotle effectively upgraded its epistemological status. The fact that phantasia was bundled into the sensitive soul, however, allowed for animals to have a degree of phantasia and this once again cast doubt on its status. The Stoics conceived of phantasia less as a faculty of the soul than as an affection, passion, or something that happens to the individual. This is one of the origins of the view that the phantasmata created by phantasia should be considered as a ‘disease’ of the soul. For Augustine phantasia is a vis animae, closer to the sensitive than to the

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intellectual soul, and hence of lowly epistemological status. Aquinas transacted by stating that there was both a sensitive phantasia — related to the sensitive soul, and an intellectual phantasia — close to the intellectual soul. The concept of a sensitive phantasia survived well into the period covered by this book; for example it can be found in Reisch’s Margarita philosophica. The interesting issue also arose that whilst sensations were true (by definition) the representations of phantasia could be true or false, for example, ‘pure’ phantasia could generate images which did not proceed from either sensation or memory. In the event this led to the postulation of a reproductive and a productive phantasia distinction that was to achieve its highest point in Kant and the Romantic movement of the beginning of the nineteenth century. For Kant the imagination is a mental force that unifies the experiential manifold into a synthesis that becomes the beginning of knowledge. The products of imagination can be faulty because of a failure in this unifying mechanism or because of the bad quality of the information. A failing imagination could cause some forms of madness — including hypochondria, which he named Grillenkrankheit (he called the hypochondriac a Grillenfänger or Phantast). Towards the end of the historical period covered by this book, the epistemological structure of imagination was changed by Bacon, Pascal, Descartes, Hobbes, and Locke. An interesting development was the regaining of an idea that had already appeared in the Longinian ‘Treatise on the Sublime’ concerning the relationship between imagination and the passions. In this book its unknown author had stated that in rhetoricians and poets phantasia is under the control of enthusiasm and passion. The change was made possible by the Cartesian differentiation between res cogitans and res extensa which provided an alibi for the study of ‘organic’ soul and the passions associated with it without causing theological offence. The view that phantasia worked best when driven by emotions also indicates that at the time its unifying force was meant to go beyond cognition to include all the functions of the mind. It took only one further step (as did Freud) to state that hypochondria, melancholia, lycanthropy, hysteria, and possession might be conduits for the expression of disordered passions.

Lesson to Learn Retrospective diagnosis is a path where angels fear to tread. The dangers are obvious and nowadays it is only medics who try to find out whether Mohamed or St Teresa had epilepsy, Tasso depressive illness, Mozart Tourette syndrome, or Dr Johnson obsessional disorder. Although non-medical historians know better, the

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temptation is always there. Let us take Tasso’s case. The fact that contemporary ‘medics’ called his madness ‘hypochondriacal melancholia’ is to be accepted provided that his behaviour is understood only in terms of what that ‘diagnosis’ meant at the time. There is historical evidence to suggest that during the sixteenth century the meaning of ‘hypochondriacal melancholia’ was different from what it meant in later centuries. It might always be possible to select out of the descriptions of his madness (which changed over the years!) ‘symptoms’ that might superficially fit a DSM IV diagnosis (whether schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or something else), but it would seriously hinder any attempt to understand his behaviour. Even when the historian is aware of these pitfalls, there is always the danger that anachronistic interpretations creep in. For example, when studying why plant X was prescribed to him, it is tempting to choose, out of the various pharmacological properties that X is known to have, those related to its ‘anti-depressant’ effects — this because in the mind of the historian is still playing the idea that Tasso was ‘depressed’ — for the ‘Depression’ of today must be related to the melancholia of the sixteenth century! During each historical period, convergences dovetail well with the ongoing explanatory and aesthetic discourse on madness. And they offer more than enough material for study and understanding. Therefore, there is little point in over-searching for concatenations of convergences and assuming that they are joined together by some hidden biological invariant. Such invariants may work well for heart murmurs, broken legs, lung tumours, or kidney stones but not for madness. This is due to the fact that: a) the concept of ‘disease’ changes when applied to madness, and b) mental symptoms and disorders are constructs. This means that biological and cultural configurators will interact differently in medicine and psychiatry, that is, in the construction of the concept of kidney stones and of melancholia. Even if for argument’s sake it was to be accepted that, like kidney stones, melancholia also had a ‘genetic’ origin, the manner in which cultural configurators operate in its case would set it apart. The ontological frame of the concept of kidney stones is modulated but not radically changed by the cultural configurators; in the case of melancholia these configurators intervene so early and decisively that the ‘ontological shape’ of the complaint is changed beyond recognition. This because signals issuing out of distressed or malfunctioning brain sites do not carry (as do those of vision, audition, taste, etc.) a preformed, hardwired experience. The rest of neurobiological signals are far less predetermined so that when they irrupt into awareness they suscitate experiences which are pre-linguistic, pre-conceptual, and ineffable. Because often enough the subject has not experienced such experiences before, his first response can be one

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of perplexity, distress, or fear. It would be wrong, however, to infer from these responses that they were hardwired to the distressed brain site! To communicate them, the subject needs to configure these primordial experiences. This he does by means of personal, familiar, and cultural configurators. Apart from radically changing any specificity that the biological signal may carry, the cultural configuration shapes the form and content of each psychiatric complaint in accordance with ongoing cultural representations of disease. So psychiatric disorders may start life as ‘brain signals’ but by the time they are communicated they have undergone a major transformation; hence the complaint can only be understood in cultural terms, and it is wiser to assume that being ‘melancholic’ in the sixteenth and twenty-first century refers to entirely different phenomena. This is why the history of psychiatry is a field of inquiry where awareness of historiography and epistemology is of paramount importance. However, and regardless of these difficulties, the history of psychiatry must be studied for without it no good philosophy of psychiatry can be put together and without historical and conceptual help there can be no understanding of madness. Hence, studies like the ones included in this book are vital. They have enough magnifying power to show the fine-grain of the problem at hand; illustrate the way in which concepts and afflictions interact in the context of madness; and are less threatening to those involved in the construction of current convergences because their focus is on convergences past. And yet, their message is clear, namely, that there is no reason to suppose that current convergences are epistemologically or ontologically superior to earlier ones. If this is understood by current clinical researchers, this book should have achieved one of its objectives. German Berrios Professor of the Epistemology of Psychiatry University of Cambridge January 2010

ILLUSTRATIONS

Diagrams Diagram 1, p. 357. Marigner’s classification of mixed substances.

Figures Figure 1, p. 284. ‘The Cosmos before the Fall’, illustration from Malachias Geiger, Microcosmus hypochondriacus (Munich: Straub, 1752); unnumbered plate between pp. 422–23. Used with permission, Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de médecine et d’ontologie, Paris. Figure 2, p. 285. ‘The Hypochondriac Organs’, illustration from Geiger, Microcosmus hypochondriacus, unnumbered page (additional page 4). Used with permission, Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de médecine et d’ontologie, Paris. Figure 3, p. 328. Edward Topsell, ‘Hyena’, The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents (London, 1658). Image courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries. Figure 4, p. 332. The Lambe Speaketh, London, British Museum. Engraved print dated 1555. Reproduced with permission of the Trustees of the British Museum. Figure 5, p. 334. ‘Loyola Coat of Arms on the Wall of the Santuario de Loyola, Azpeita, Spain’. Photograph by Professor Elizabeth Liebert, San Francisco Theological Seminary. Used with kind permission.

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Illustrations

Figure 6, p. 337. Title page woodcut depicting ‘The English Christia[n]’ and ‘The Irishe Papist’. From John Bale, The Vocacyon of Ioha[n] Bale to the Bishoprick of Ossorie in Irela[n]de (Wesel: J. Lambrecht for H. Singleton, 1553). By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California. Figure 7, p. 342. Photograph of the recently found remains of a female ‘vampire’ from 1576, with a brick forced into her mouth. Copyright: Matteo Borrini, . Figure 8, p. 368. Frontispiece of Michael Ranft, Tractat von dem Kauen und Schmatzen der Todten in Gräbern, worin die wahre Beschaffenheit derer Hungarischen Vampyrs und Blut-Sauger gezeigt, auch alle von dieser Materie bißher zum Vorschein gekommene Schrifften recensiret werden (Leipzig: Teubner, 1734). Reproduction from Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, 8° XV: 23. Courtesy of Klassik Stiftung, Weimar. Figure 9, p. 399. Henri Daumier, Le Malade imaginaire, a lithograph showing a hypochondriac imagining himself being prepared for burial. London. The Wellcome Library, 1833. Reproduced by kind permission of The Wellcome Library.

Tables Table 1, p. 264. Structure of De ira morbo.

INTRODUCTION : W HEN IS A D ISEASE NOT A D ISEASE? S EEMING AND S UFFERING IN E ARLY M ODERN E UROPE Yasmin Haskell

I

n his New-Ancient Philosophy (Milan, 1704), a Latin scientific-cum-satirical poem in six books, Jesuit mathematician Tommaso Ceva (1648–1737) gets stuck into ancient and modern materialism. In a memorable passage in the third book, Ceva imagines the goddess of corpses, Libitina, dashing the minds of the ancient atomists Epicurus and Lucretius into their constituent particles which are then mingled with ‘other seeds’ and spread throughout the world by blind chance. Ceva later interrogates a personified Lucretius about the constitution of his famous ‘honeyed’ song, On the Nature of Things. Lucretius avers, in the face of the Jesuit’s close questioning, that yes, his poem is something, rather than nothing; that it is distinct from the fonts in which it is physically reproduced; that it is, in short, the work of his mind. But now Ceva has him, because the Epicurean poet had famously claimed that the human mind was composed of round particles — thus his poem, too, must consist of particles, and the Jesuit geometer can inquire sarcastically as to their shape. How can that song, moreover, be transmitted to other minds? Do they, asks Ceva, bore through the eyes and enter the brain through little holes? The idea is dismissed as ridiculous, on a par with belief in the mythological witch Circe’s power to transform men into beasts — an idea worthy to be entertained only by sufferers of the disease of the ‘windy spleen’.1

1

For this passage in the context of the broader agenda of Ceva’s poem, see my ‘Sleeping with

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The disease of the windy spleen is ‘hypochondriac melancholy’ — not the risible health anxiety of modern popular culture as personified in the characters of Woody Allen or ‘Melman the giraffe’, but a frightening somatopsychic illness engendered by toxic vapours rising to the head from the organs below the midriff, a condition which was held by many learned physicians of the early modern period to be epidemic.2 The part most spectacularly affected in hypochondriac melancholy was the imagination, and in its extreme form the disease could reduce men — and it was usually men — to the belief that they were cardinals, emperors, or simply irresistibly handsome; less happily, that they were made of clay or glass, that they had animals living in their bodies, or even that they had been transformed into birds or beasts.3 But the notion that men could metamorphose into animals, or at least appear to, was perhaps not so crazy as our Jesuit philosopher-poet implies. Lycanthropy, at least, was a phenomenon discussed in earnest by early modern physicians and demonologists. Melancholic men were believed to be constitutionally hairy, but it was a moot point whether they actually changed into werewolves.4 Did the Devil counterfeit the transformation himself or did he deceive witches and those who observed them into perceiving that they had been so transformed?5 The mechanism, moreover, by which Ceva mischievously accounts for the transmission of Lucretius’s song to other minds looks less absurd when set against contemporary belief, learned as well as lay, in the penetration and manipulation of the imagination by demons.6

the Enemy: Tommaso Ceva’s Use and Abuse of Lucretius in the Philosophia novo-antiqua (Milan, 1704)’, in What Nature Does Not Teach: Didactic Literature in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed. by Juanita Feros Ruys (Turnhout: Brepols, 2009), pp. 497–520. 2

Indeed two of Ceva’s contemporary confrères and fellow didactic poets, Niccolò Giannettasio and Tommaso Strozzi, were self-confessed sufferers. See my ‘Poetry or Pathology? Jesuit Hypochondria in Early Modern Naples’, Early Science and Medicine, 12 (2007), 187–213. 3

In his De’ mali ipocondriaci libri tre (Rome, 1651) papal physician Paolo Zacchia relates the extraordinary history of a noble young man of his acquaintance who became convinced that he was a bird (pp. 425–28). The paradox of happy melancholy is discussed below in Gowland and Rütten. 4

See Brett Hirsch in this collection for the idea that werewolves were hairy on the inside.

5

See Henri Boguet, translated in Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 138–39. 6

See below, Beecher, on Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus maleficarum (1486), which includes a chapter entitled, ‘How Devils May Enter the Human Body and the Head without Doing any Hurt’.

Introduction

3

In short, diseases of the imagination were rarely considered ‘imaginary’ by early modern men and women, at least not in the contemporary OED sense of ‘having no real existence’. To be sure, the classification of these conditions was the site of conceptual contestation and revision in many ways as relentless and unsettling as that which we observe today in successive generations of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. In his Anatomy of Melancholy, under ‘Division of the Diseases of the Head’, Robert Burton lists diseases of the mind, imagination, or injured reason — we ignore for present purposes the conflation of categories — which are said to be ‘three or four in number’: ‘phrensy, madness, melancholy, dotage, and their kinds: as hydrophobia, lycanthropia, Chorus sancti viti, morbi daemoniaci [St Vitus’s dance, demonic diseases]’ (pt I, sect. 1, mem. 1, subs. 3). Burton informs us that ‘dotage’ or ‘delirium’ is generally held to be the overarching category. ‘Phrensy’ or ‘phrenitis’ is distinguished from madness and melancholy proper by the presence of fever or inflammation of the brain. While he tells us that ‘madness’, ‘melancholy’, and ‘phrensy’ are brought together by Celsus, and that a modern writer, Jason Pratensis [= Jason van de Velde], distinguishes madness from melancholy only in degree, Burton resolves to follow ‘most of our neoterics’ in treating them separately. ‘Madness’, he explains, is a more vehement and violent form of melancholy, without fever, excluding altered states induced by psychotropic drugs (henbane, nightshade, wine, etc.) but including ecstasies, revelations, poetical and prophetic furies, demonic obsession and possession, dancing manias, lycanthropy, and hydrophobia (rabies) (subs. 4). Although a handful of moderns (Leonhart Fuchs, Felix Platter, and André du Laurens) here subjoin madness arising from love, religion, and study, Burton will reserve these for his own most catholic category of melancholy, which he will treat ‘as more eminent than the rest, and that through all his kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, cures: as Lonicerus [sc. Adam Lonitzer] hath done de apoplexia, and many other of such particular diseases’ (subs. 3). But what’s in a name? Why should it matter whether mental problems are classified as ‘melancholic’ or ‘mad’, especially if, as Burton’s Anatomy makes clear, the concept of melancholy could be stretched in the Renaissance to accommodate beliefs and behaviours we would now unhesitatingly deem psychotic? Of course names did matter to our troubled ancestors, just as they do to us — they mattered for what they implied about the aetiology of disease (or was it disease?), its prognosis, treatment, and, not least, how sufferers were viewed and judged by their physicians, confessors, and communities. Was the subject’s suffering moral or physical, divinely or demonically inspired? Was their reason affected, or ‘only’

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their imagination, and were they legally capable or culpable? Was a mother who gave birth to a monster, or a child resembling a monkey, guilty of the heinous sin of bestiality, or had the foetus been affected during gestation by her having witnessed a disturbing sight? 7 Were religious visions, raptures, and modern prophecies — or visitations, pacts, sex with the Devil — real, delusional, or factitious?8 Did vampires really chew their shrouds and return from the dead to suck the blood of their relatives? Did witches really fly to the Sabbath, kill babies, and cause crops to fail; or, like the aforementioned lycanthropes, did the Devil merely cause them to believe they did? Perhaps these unfortunate old hags were simply melancholic, that is, feeble-minded, sex-starved, and thus moisture-deprived, more deserving of our compassion than torture and execution? And perhaps younger women on nymphomaniac rampages were also to be pitied rather than judged, and treated medically as victims of furor uterinus.9 While bizarre to modern ears, such issues exercised the leading medical, legal, theological, and philosophical minds of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which, like ours, struggled to sort the mad from the bad, environmental factors from heredity, the human from the inhuman and demonic, and moral responsibility from corporeal and spiritual disease. It is increasingly recognized that the early modern period was an age, perhaps the age, of the imagination.10 The functions and malfunctions of that faculty in receiving and recombining images to represent them to the memory and intellect were very much to the fore in both learned and lay consciousness. Today, to be sure, we live in a world of images (television, cinema, computer games, internet,

7

This was no mere thought experiment. Paolo Zacchia in his Quaestiones medico-legales pronounces on just such a case. See Consilium 22 in the Lyon edition of 1726, pp. 29–32. 8

On simulated piety, see Anne Jacobson Schutte, Aspiring Saints: Pretence of Holiness, Inquisition, and Gender in the Republic of Venice 1618–1750 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 9

See Monica Calabritto, ‘Medicina practica, consilia and the Illnesses of the Head in Girolamo Mercuriale and Giulio Cesare Claudini: Similarities and Differences of the Sexes’, Medicina e Storia, 11 (2006), 63–83. 10

According to Katharine Park in ‘The Imagination in Renaissance Psychology’ (unpublished M.Phil. thesis, University of London, 1974), the new interest in the imagination in this period was partly a result of the eclipse of medieval faculty psychology (where the imagination was only one of five internal senses); cf. Katharine Park, ‘The Concept of Psychology’ (with Eckhard Kessler) and the ‘Organic Soul’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. by Charles Schmitt and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 453–63 and 464–84.

Introduction

5

advertising, propaganda, pornography, virtual reality …) and anxiety about their effects (attention deficit and hyperactivity, decline in literacy, sexualization of children, desensitization, and increased tolerance for violence …), but the means and mechanisms by which those images produce their effects are rarely discussed in popular culture and the media. The early modern learned discourses and their manifestations in literary and artistic works were arguably more sophisticated and probing in this respect. Moreover, the spheres of influence of the imagination were considerably wider than those reserved for it by most modern psychologists, philosophers, and neuroscientists.11 A respectable view, if occasionally challenged, held that a diseased imagination could precipitate bodily disease not just in oneself but in others, even remotely.12 The hate-filled imagination of a deceased person might be strong enough to bring about deaths in this world.13 By the same token, the imagination was thought capable of healing, usually by means of the emission of subtle ‘vapours’.14 The widely acknowledged powers of witches to heal as well as harm inhabited an uneasy space between the natural and the demonic. A strong imagination could infect others with dangerous religious enthusiasms, perhaps even change the weather, but it did so by natural, not supernatural, means. Far from being the ethereal preserve of whimsical poets and artists, then, the imagination in the early modern period was invoked by radical materialists and natural magicians alike. Its ‘power […] became taboo; it was associated with both the staunchest atheism and the most dangerous illicit magic’.15 In short, the early modern imagination was a force to be reckoned with and a medium to be meddled with.

11

See M. R . Bennett and P. M. S. Hacker, Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 180–98, on imagination and mental imagery. There is no entry for ‘imagination’ in their more recent History of Cognitive Neuroscience (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008). 12

Thomas Fienus’s (Feyens) De viribus imaginationis, tractatus (Louvain, 1608) is the classic text. It is available on Google Books. On Fienus, see L. J. Rather, ‘Thomas Fienus’ (1567–1631) Dialectical Investigation of the Imagination as Cause and Cure of Bodily Disease’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 41 (1967), 349–67. 13

See Vermeir, pp. 364–66 below.

14

See Gowland below on Pomponazzi, p. 88; and more generally, Koen Vermeir, ‘The Physical Prophet and the Powers of the Imagination, pt I: A Case-Study on Prophecy, Vapours and the Imagination (1685–1710)’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 35 (2004), 561–91. 15

Vermeir, ‘Physical Prophet’, p. 582.

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For all its putative real-world effects, however, the early modern imagination was first and foremost an image-processing factory. Its healthy function was to receive the species impressae from real objects in the physical world and to generate corresponding species expressae or phantasmata for storage in the memory.16 Hence, perhaps, the slippage of diseases of the imagination, diseases of disordered seeing, into diseases of only seeming, or, as we might say nowadays, ‘imaginary disease’. At first some putative powers, later whole diseases, of the imagination evaporated as so many academic hallucinations (possession by demons; the witches’ sabbath; lycanthropy; vampirism; hypochondriac melancholy). It took centuries for the somatopsychic symptoms of early modern hypochondriac melancholy to complete their transformation into the psychosomatic ones associated with today’s conversion and somatization disorders, although the seeds of this process are present from at least the sixteenth century. In the middle of the seventeenth century, a Bavarian physician, Malachias Geiger, is already reporting as hypochondriacal problems such as apparent mutism and paralysis, and unfounded health fears — phenomena that have only been routinely associated with hysteria and hypochondriasis since the nineteenth century.17 The rogues’ gallery of (largely somatic) delusions described by Geiger in the antepenultimate chapter of his Microcosmus hypochondriacus exemplifies the power of the diseased early modern imagination — and a contemporary fascination with that power — to compel us to perceive things not as they really are.18 Early modern physicians could and did maintain that such spectacularly deluded people were not mad, out of their wits, but still in full possession of their reason. The essays in this collection, from established and emerging scholars in the fields of intellectual, social, cultural, and literary history, represent a generous cross section of contemporary research in this exciting and interdisciplinary area of 16 The most comprehensive account is Leen Spruit, Species intelligibilis: From Perception to Knowledge, 2 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1994–95), I and II. 17

See Edward Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era (New York: Free Press; Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada; New York: Maxwell Macmillan International, 1992). 18

Harvesting from Rondelet, Marcellus Donatus, Lemnius, Sennert, Holler, Tulp, and others, Geiger presents us with a phantom pregnancy, someone who believed he lacked a heart, another who thought he was dead, someone who believed two spirits had entered his body and were continually conversing (a rare reference to auditory hallucinations associated with modern-day schizophrenia), a man who feared to urinate lest he drowned the world, another convinced he had an elephant’s nose, another that he had horns, a painter who believed that his bones had become soft as wax so that they would be folded together should anyone lean on him, and so on.

Introduction

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early modern studies. We have aimed to ensure a measure of class, confessional, temporal, and geographical diversity usually absent from all but the most synoptic monograph studies. It is not that we pretend to construct a comprehensive narrative or definitive conceptual histories of each of the early modern diseases of the imagination; rather, we collate, and permit the individual reader to calibrate, a variety of learned and lay discourses, as well as international, national, local, and personal perspectives. What sorts of information can the various learned, literary, archival, and material sources yield, and where do they conflict? Was ‘psychiatry’ (understood in the broadest sense of soul/mind-doctoring) any more or less responsive to patient experience in the early modern period than it is today? If learned medicine trickled down into mass consciousness via vernacular medical, religious, visual, and dramatic works, did literary and artistic representations in turn influence learned opinion? Are melancholy, hypochondria, hysteria, and the like, truly international concepts in the early modern period — a protoglobal intellectual community certainly existed, exchanging medical letters and scholarly treatises19 — or do they vary, subtly, in their formulation, reception, and manifestation across cultures? Finally, is the past forever another country, or is there a middle path between naïve retrospective diagnosis and hard-nosed historical enquiry? We begin with three substantial chapters on the intellectual background. Guido Giglioni’s ‘Coping with Inner and Outer Demons’ is a much-needed and meticulous investigation into the concept of the imagination in Marsilio Ficino, father of Renaissance genial melancholy (although we do not here retread the well-worn paths of De triplici vita). Giglioni suggests that Renaissance Platonism legitimized inquiry into the sentience of nature, forging a third way between the via philosophorum (Aristotelianism) and via medicorum (Galenism), and opening up new channels of communication between the hitherto ontologically separate spheres of nature and the soul. He underscores the semi-divine role played by demons in Ficino’s theory of the imagination (an important point of difference with so many of the authors examined in subsequent chapters). When it comes to disease, Giglioni highlights Ficino’s treatment of ‘lovesickness’ as a paradigmatic case of the power of the imagination over bodily processes. There is an almost literal impressing or painting of the beloved’s image onto the substance of the spirits, which then circulates through the body in the blood. The lovesick subject ‘resolves external reality into his or her world of imaginary perceptions, 19

See Ian Maclean, ‘The Medical Republic of Letters before the Thirty Years War’, Intellectual History Review, 18 (2008), 15–30.

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while the internal processes of the body are dramatically reshaped by the imaginative power of the soul’. If lovesickness is a limiting case, Giglioni underlines the fact that for Ficino almost all disease depends on the ‘souring’ of the blood due to perturbations of the imagination. In his chapter on ‘Melancholy, Imagination, and Dreaming in Renaissance Learning’ Angus Gowland takes us into the dreams of early modern physicians and natural philosophers, and into the fires of long-standing debates, re-stoked in the sixteenth century, on the boundaries between the natural and supernatural. He begins with a useful outline of the role of the imagination in medical theories of melancholic illness. The materialist consensus there is paralleled in the theorization of dreaming by early modern physicians and natural philosophers — but Aristotle’s views on the marvellous yet not supernatural dreams of the melancholy had the potential to undermine biblical accounts of dream divination. Gowland reviews three types of Renaissance response to this problem, which variously aimed to elide, reconcile, or expose the differences with Christian teaching. Thus Giulio Cesare (Lucilio) Vanini (1585–1619) takes a bold stance in a dialogue on dreams in the fourth book of his De admirandis naturae […] (Lyon, 1616), arguing for the materiality of dreams precisely to cast doubt on the immortality of the soul. But Gowland also shows that the natural-philosophical critique of divinely inspired dreams was appropriated by seventeenth-century English critics of religious ‘enthusiasm’ such as Meric Casaubon and Henry More, who, though their own views were far from materialistic, sought to tar religiouspolitical non-conformists with the black brush of melancholy. The last word goes to Spinoza: in the Theologico-Political Tractate he not only debunked biblical miracles but planted the ‘divine’ dreams of the Jewish prophets firmly in their imaginations — which for Spinoza meant they represented the lowest form of knowledge. The darker side of the imagination is visited in Donald Beecher’s chapter, ‘Witches, the Possessed, and the Diseases of the Imagination’, a useful survey of this large and crucial topic. Beecher confirms the establishment of an uneasy entente between physicians and demonologists when, beginning in the early fifteenth century, theologians began to argue for the bodily presence of the Devil in this world and for the actual performance by witches of evil deeds once deemed illusory. This rapprochement between inquisitorial and medical discourses begged many questions: the difference between demonic and natural disease, between ‘real’ and delusional witches, between sin and sickness, and of the limits of nature and the supernatural. Beecher reviews the usual suspects (Kramer, Del Rio, Guazzo, Bodin), explaining how the Devil gained access to vicious bodies to

Introduction

9

engender disease and deceptions; but he also introduces us to lesser-known authors such as Jean Taxil, who, in his treatise on epilepsy, describes a Satan who corrupts the mind not just by altering our humours but also by changing the climate and creating the conditions for miasmic contagion. There was a change in the wind from the third quarter of the sixteenth century, as physicians, philosophers, and jurists (notably Wier, Cardano, Du Laurens, Scot) took a more compassionate turn with regard to the afflicted. Beecher’s chapter concludes with an overview of that celebrated spate of possession cases in French (female) religious communities between 1610 and 1642, as observed through the eyes of medics, lawyers, sceptics, Catholics, and Huguenots. Where Stuart Clark has argued that by the 1620s and 1630s, jurisprudential and legal analyses of witchcraft held the day, Beecher points out that medical explanations continued to be important in France, and psychosocial factors associated with the confinement of women began to command greater attention.20 Our next clutch of chapters, by Strocchia, Bonzol, and Shuger, shifts the focus from the abstractions of learned discourse to the communities, convents, and courts of early modern Italy, England, and Spain. How was madness perceived and experienced by ordinary people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Were the judgements of learned physicians and clergy ever contested by their patients and flocks? Sharon Strocchia’s chapter on the ‘Melancholic Nun in Renaissance Italy’ proves that they were. University-trained physicians might pronounce on the nosology of nuns’ melancholy (hypochondriac, never genial, supposedly more common in the elderly) and on the susceptibility of cloistered women to the build-up of deranging vapours, but sisters, young and old, were diagnosing for themselves! Strocchia takes us behind convent doors to reveal power struggles between the nuns, their physicians, and confessors over the naming and treatment of mental and spiritual problems. While Florentine nuns by and large favoured naturalistic explanations for sadness, they did not usually invoke humoral terminology. Spiritual consolation — from one’s own sisters, not the clergy — was their therapy of choice. Strocchia shows us communities of empathic and psychologically astute women, distinguishing and managing in one another varying degrees of mental and physical illness, as well as minor moral failings. In the final part of her chapter, Strocchia takes the pulse of a possession outbreak among the nuns of Le Murate, Florence, in 1582 (nearly thirty years earlier than

20

Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 208. Cf. Vermeir, below p. 347, who notes that the debate about the Camisard prophets, still going in 1693, was highly medicalized.

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the French cases reviewed by Beecher). Ironically it is the reforming archbishop, Alessandro de’ Medici, who resists the nuns’ petition for an exorcist to treat one of their sisters — and it is the abbess who flouts his authority and has her exorcized anyway. While Medici strenuously sought to put a medical (melancholy) stopper on this outbreak, the Devil was out of the bottle and an epidemic of possession swept the convents of Italy, France, and Spain in the 1620s and 1630s. Lyndal Roper’s latest book on the witch persecutions of early modern Germany confirms the vulnerability of especially middle-aged women to accusations of maleficium. Perhaps the most disturbing parts of Roper’s disturbing book, however, are the two chilling chapters on the persecution of child witches.21 In our volume, Judith Bonzol’s ‘Afflicted Children’ turns the spotlight not on children accused of witchcraft but on accounts of the supernatural illnesses suffered by them, and adolescents, as a result of alleged bewitchment. Surprisingly, the rich source material from seventeenth-century England has been relatively unexploited by historians of childhood. Bonzol contends, moreover, that the emotions have been underestimated by historians seeking to explain these afflictions, and she suggests that fear should be given at least equal aetiological weight as attention-seeking on the part of the children, or bids for self-empowerment by the marginalized. Children in seventeenth-century England were used as go-betweens in neighbourhood disputes, were shouted at and sometimes physically abused in the streets, did not feel safe in their own homes (into which vagrants regularly intruded), were terrified by stories of hell and witchcraft, and were enveloped at night by an overwhelming darkness punctuated only by the flickering phantasms suggested by candle light. The phantasm dissolved by Shuger in ‘Beyond Allegory: The Meaning of Madness in Early Modern Spain’ is the Foucauldian assumption, still widely accepted by literary if not social historians, of an equivalence between historical artistic preoccupations of madness and contemporary social realities. According to Shuger, in any given literary or artistic work of the early modern period, madness had a fixed allegorical meaning; moreover, for that meaning to be recognizable to an audience, one was either mad or one wasn’t.22 She infers, however, that a social perception of madness preceded that fixed symbolic

21

Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), chaps 8 and 9, pp. 181–221. 22

Compare, though, Brett Hirsch’s chapter, where the madness of Ferdinand and its meaning in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi is open to different interpretations (at least by a learned audience).

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narrative, and a social perception of unreason the fixed diagnosis of madness. In the nearly one hundred and fifty Spanish Inquisition files Shuger has examined she catches glimpses of ‘reactions to, judgements of, and language for unreason among a huge swath of the population who would die without ever having heard of Bosch or Erasmus’. In this chapter she selects for micro-historical analysis the case of Bartolomé Íñiguez, a labourer from Yunquera who loses his sanity — he opines — as a consequence of sunstroke suffered after a stint on the roof of a local house, where he had climbed to get a better view of the running of a bull. The reactions of the community at large, of his wife and relatives, and of the mayor, to Bartolomé’s nakedness, curses, tile-throwing, and blasphemies are revealing of the provisionality and flexibility of contemporary non-literary (and non-learned) understandings of madness. For the man or woman in the street madness wasn’t once and for all but could be temporary; it might or might not be compelling grounds for divorce; and it was not inconsistent with criminal incarceration. This chapter concludes with an envoi on the most famous loco of them all, Cervantes’s Don Quixote, who bucks the general trend Shuger has established for the symbolic representation of madness in Spanish literature. In its ‘polyphony of narrators and interpreters’ Cervantes’s Don Quixote manages to capture something of the popular experience. The madness of Cervantes’s Italian contemporary and fellow trailblazer of the early modern literary imagination is the subject of Monica Calabritto’s chapter, ‘Tasso’s Melancholy and its Treatment’. Though important studies have been devoted to Tasso’s mental breakdown in the light of his literary production, his correspondence, and the medical tradition, Calabritto takes an original tack by setting the letters he wrote to his doctors in dialogue with their consilia on melancholy (viz. medical consultations written by those doctors to advise patients and other doctors). Tasso’s case, admittedly special, provides us with a rare opportunity to observe the way early modern patients interacted with their physicians. Calabritto’s case notes reveal a sick and superstitious man plagued by fears of bewitchment, tormented by auditory and visual hallucinations, unsure whether or not to trust in the consolation of religious visions, and, above all, dangerously well-versed in learned medicine. Between 1583 and 1595 Tasso corresponded with no fewer than five physicians about his mental illness. Tasso was always sensitive to his audience, often downplaying the supernatural in his letters to doctors, but giving full vent to it in his dialogue Il Messaggiero, written when he was imprisoned in the hospital of Sant’Anna: here the poet converses with a spirit who is revealed at the end of the text to be a product of his imagination. But if he craved the respect of learned physicians, Tasso could also

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be cantankerous and haughty with them, and was prone to restless, experimental self-medication.23 In his dealings with doctors Tasso was the typical late Renaissance hypochondriac of the most pathologically reduced Galenic hue, but in his critical writings he exalted the imagination he so mistrusted, and he clearly aspired to the status of the genial Renaissance melancholic. Thomas Rütten’s chapter, ‘Masquerades with the Dead’, showcases another important early modern medical genre, that of collections of observationes (these distilled and transmitted to posterity the accumulated experiential knowledge of distinguished physicians). Rütten exposes the traditional Galenic (as opposed to progressive empirical) underpinnings of an observatio on two melancholy brothers from Alkmaar by the ‘Dutch Hippocrates’, Pieter van Foreest (1521–97). What looks at first like a simple eyewitness report of the aftermath of a suicide is revealed to be fraught with rhetorical oppositions and ideological positions. Rütten demonstrates that van Foreest, in selecting and structuring the elements of this observatio and its accompanying scholia, carefully fits the facts to pre-conceived notions of the melancholy condition, its aetiology, symptomatology, treatment, and heritability. Van Foreest’s almost compulsive construction of antithetical dyads culminates in an intriguing passage on the sorrowful Heraclitus versus the laughing Democritus — but the latter is, for all that, alleged to be melancholic. Rütten summarizes the history of the idea of the sanguine melancholic up to the pseudo-Hippocratic epistolary novel, which, in the Latin translation of Marco Fabio Calvo, famously influenced Robert Burton. It is intriguing, though, that van Foreest, unlike many of his contemporaries, unequivocally labels Democritus a sick melancholic. In his fascinating conclusion, Rütten imputes a religio-political motive to this move, in which the pathologization of Democritus becomes a covert defence of orthodox Calvinism. Another Dutchman, Johan Wier (1515–88), best known as the eloquent defender of witches against charges of maleficium in his De praestigiis daemonum, was the author of a treatise on ‘the disease of anger’ set against the religious wars of the sixteenth century in France and the Low Countries. Hans de Waardt explores Wier’s little-studied De ira morbo in his chapter, ‘Lightning Strikes, Wherever Ire Dwells with Power’. He argues that Wier probably decided to cast this work in the form of a medical treatise under the inspiration of Sebastian Castellio’s Advice to the Desolate France (Conseil à la France désolée). Castellio, a humanist and spiritualist professor in Basel, had defended the Spanish spiritualist, Michel Servetus, in his most famous tract, De haereticis an sint persequendi (On 23

One correspondent not unreasonably suggested that this was the probable cause of his death.

Introduction

13

whether heretics should be persecuted). Castellio was not a physician, but in the Advice describes France as suffering from a metaphorical malady. For Wier, a medical man, anger is almost literally an illness, albeit one to be treated with philosophical (Stoic) and religious as well as corporeal cures. Under the cover of this medical treatise, moreover, Wier finds the opportunity to vent his spleen against the Spanish, in the context of pronouncing on the relative inclinations to anger of different nations. In her chapter on Malachias Geiger’s Microcosmus hypochondriacus (Munich, 1651), Yasmin Haskell addresses a relative blindspot in the history of ‘hypochondria’, reminding us that hypochondriac melancholy was considered epidemic long before the eighteenth century. But while descriptions of that condition were ubiquitous in the learned medical literature, from Italy to Spain, France to Germany, from the sixteenth century on, Haskell reveals the rootedness in its time and place — Catholic Bavaria after the Thirty Years War — of Geiger’s omnium-gatherum of historical consultations and weird and wonderful remedies. Like Wier, Geiger is obsessed with the evils of war and relates hypochondriac melancholy as much to choleric as melancholic temperaments. For Geiger the meaning of hypochondriac disease is both cosmic and local, and Haskell contends that his approach to treatment and his self-conception as a Christian physician is conditioned by his close association with local Jesuits. While the sensational delusions of melancholy hypochondriacs were deemed fit to provoke wonder in those who observed or read about them, the phenomena explored in the chapters of Hirsch and Vermeir, on werewolves and vampires, must always have been more unsettling. If werewolves were real, they implied that God or the Devil could override a person’s will and cut him off from the possibility of heaven.24 In ‘Lycanthropy in Early Modern England’, Brett Hirsch diagnoses the evil Duke Ferdinand’s affliction in John Webster’s play, The Duchess of Malfi (1612–13), challenging the views of those who hold that his lycanthropy is an instance of demonic possession, or at least open to interpretation as supernatural illness. Webster’s considerable medical knowledge points rather to his staging of a natural malady: Ferdinand has a choleric complexion, and the burning of choler produces a pathological melancholy. But why a lycanthrope to manifest Ferdinand’s distemper? Hirsch identifies several cultural and political resonances of the wolf in early modern England, for example its association with the depraved Italians and rebellious Irish. While Webster’s macabre play is not 24

Cf. Dennis Kratz, ‘Fictus Lupus: The Werewolf in Christian Thought’, Classical Folia, 30 (1976), 57–80 (p. 78), cited by Hirsch.

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without its supernatural thrills and spills, its true horror, Hirsch concludes, lies in revealing the beast lurking just under an all-too-human skin. The moral and metaphysical dimensions of another kind of early modern shape-changing are explored in Koen Vermeir’s blood-curdling ‘Vampires as Creatures of the Imagination’. Curious stories of limb-masticating corpses and semi-corporeal ghosts visiting and attempting to suffocate their kin are, as Vermeir points out, easily relegated to the folklorists. They were taken seriously, however, by late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century scholars of medicine and the occult for whom, like the werewolves discussed by Hirsch, they posed awkward philosophical, theological, and epidemiological questions. As a disease of the imagination by all accounts, vampirism is adduced by Vermeir as a barometer of diverse and fluctuating conceptions of that faculty and category in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He charts the intellectual history of the blood-sucking vampire in the West, from its introduction in 1693 (dated here for the first time) through to its burial in the Enlightenment at the hands of Empress Maria Theresa, Voltaire, and even Pope Benedict XIV (who had to pronounce on the troubling issue of how to distinguish the uncorrupted bodies of saints from those of vampires …). Among the theoretical explanations of vampirism, from natural disease to demonic impersonation of the dead to figment of the superstitious imagination, we might single out the startling Paracelsan-cumNeoplatonic edifice constructed around the phenomenon by Mr Marigner in his 1694 tract ‘Sur les stryges de Russie’. In Marigner’s cosmology, vampires are departed souls, bound through the coarseness of their beings to the earthly realm, condemned to wander, assume different forms, and to haunt and suck blood from their debased relatives as a divinely sanctioned warning to repent. This fate was apparently well suited to the coarse and superstitious (!) Polish and Russian peoples. A gentler depletion afflicted the eighteenth-century English ladies of Heather Meek’s chapter, ‘“What Fatigues we Fine Ladies Are Fated to Endure”’. Meek draws on psychiatrist Arthur Kleinman’s concept of the ‘sociosomatic’ dimension of depression,25 and provides an alternative view of eighteenth-century hysteria, exploring the poetry and life-writing of four women literally sickened by their times: Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, and Hester Thrale Piozzi. Economic and political factors disposed English women of this 25 ‘Depression is thus a social affect and disorder: the origins of depression are meanings and relations in the social world, and these in turn are its consequences’: extract of longer quotation by Meek (p. 377) from Kleinman, Social Origins of Distress and Disease: Depression, Neurasthenia, and Pain in Modern China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 1–2.

Introduction

15

period to be or to affect to be victims of nervous disorder. In her famous poem, ‘The Spleen’, Anne Finch alternates between contempt and pity for the ‘weaker sort’ of woman, well appreciating the role of the market in enfeebling their brains and bodies with luxury. In the second half of the eighteenth century things only got worse, as the dominant male culture constructed women as frail, sensual, and hysterical so as to put and keep them in their considerably narrowed place. Lady Mary, Carter, and Piozzi actually did slide into depression and somatization (malingering?) as they chafed at expectations to participate in fashionable frivolity and made their excuses. Meek shows us these women rejecting contemporary medical prescriptions of company and social distractions as a cure for melancholy.26 Their preference for ‘masculine’ remedies (rustication and frugal diet, as recommended by George Cheyne in The English Malady) over needlework and amateur painting figures their resistance to a patriarchal ideology of consuming/ consumable femininity. In her provocative conclusion, Meek suggests that these women managed to forge for themselves, out of their very illness, a female version of eighteenth-century English male ‘civic melancholy’.27 Identifying somatically in their correspondence with the health of the nation and harbouring ‘hysterical’ fears about the end of the world and their obese husbands might seem futile and self-destructive, but Meek reveals that such fantasies could also be liberating. The ‘sociosomatic reticulum’ (Kleinman’s phrase) affords these bright and discontented women an intellectual and creative safety net — and an outlet for civic action, however imaginary. The nexus between diseases of the imagination and social and personal morality has been a ubiquitous theme in this volume, as has that of their modes of transmission. In The magick of Quakerism or, the chief mysteries of Quakerism laid open (London, 1707) self-confessed former cult-member George Keith (1638–1716) warned his readers against ‘catching’ false prophecies.28 He meant this quite literally, suggesting that religious fanatics communicated their pathological ideas via an ‘evil spirit’ issuing from their imaginations: ‘and tho’ it be difficult and very hardly accountable, how effluviums meerly corporeal and material, can convey or transmit the impression or signature of the habit, frame and disposition of the Mind of that Body from which the effluviums come, yet

26

Such advice, of course, goes back to the late sixteenth century in England. See Angus Gowland, ‘The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy’, Past and Present, 191 (2006), 77–120. 27

Eric Gidal, ‘Civic Melancholy: English Gloom and French Enlightenment’, EighteenthCentury Studies, 37 (2003), 23–45. 28

In this paragraph I am summarizing, ‘Physical Prophet’, pp. 584–87.

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frequent experience proves that so it is’ (p. 66). The Deist third Earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) may have appropriated Keith’s language of infection to trope the transmission of religious enthusiasm but, in his ‘Letter concerning enthusiasm to my lord’, he emphasized the role of reflection and moral self-regulation, as well as the application of ridicule and good humour to bring people back to their senses. Meanwhile, on the Catholic continent, the Neapolitan Jesuit, Tommaso Ceva, was attempting to treat another insidious disease of the imagination with satirical laughter. Returning to the poem with which we began this introduction, let us conclude with a poet’s take on the capacity of the imagination to infect and be infected. Ceva writes in the third book of his Philosophia novo-antiqua of the infection of minds by Epicurus’s philosophy as if by a pestilential air — but it seems not literally. On the other hand, a careful reading of his poem reveals another, less material, mechanism by which dangerous modern philosophers such as Descartes and Gassendi have, as it were, ‘caught’ the evil ideas of the ancient atomists and may now communicate them to the unwary. Descartes and Gassendi are portrayed throughout as creators of imaginary worlds and, as it were, perpetrators of prestiges. While not populated with supernatural agents, Ceva’s poem abounds in metaphors for the very practices Stuart Clark has identified as being at the heart of early modern anxieties about deceptive visuality and devilish imposture: street jugglers and conjurors, painting, the theatre.29 The Devil, says Clark, was ‘nothing less than the inventor of virtual worlds. As the supreme and worthy adversary of God, Satan had to come closest to him and wield almost identical powers, while necessarily falling short of complete equality’.30 Unlike Epicurus and Lucretius, the modern philosophers, for whom Ceva professes Christian compassion and even respect, are not overtly demonized in the poem. The Jesuit’s implication is, however, clear: they may not recognize it themselves but these philosophical world-forgers are, in fact, ridiculous little devils, precisely because they have let their imaginations run away with them in attempting to impersonate God.31 By the same token, lesser minds — the moderately educated,

29

Clark, Vanities of the Eye, especially chaps 3 and 4, pp. 76–160. Cf. Haskell, ‘Sleeping with the Enemy’, pp. 512–19. 30 31

Clark, Vanities of the Eye, p. 123.

For example, Ceva charges Descartes’s physics with being a poetic fiction (fabula) and charitably suggests that the philosopher couldn’t really have believed in his theory of the vortices. The idea is parallelled in another Jesuit poem, the Mundus Cartesii (‘World of Descartes’) by Pierre le Coëdic (from the same period as Ceva’s but not published until 1749). The dreaming poet-narrator travels to the Arctic, where he witnesses weird shamanic rituals and is drawn

Introduction

17

bluestockings who neglect their domestic duties … — are in mortal danger of infection by the false modern philosophies because of their love of novelty and their conceit. Ceva helps us to smile at the self-satisfaction and self-ignorance of these wannabe freethinkers but warns us not to be complacent: ‘From here little clouds and shadows are scattered over the immortal soul, the supreme Lord, and man’s free will’ (Hinc animae tandem immortali, ipsique superno | Rectori, hinc hominum arbitrio nubeculae & umbrae | Interdum adspersae).32 We should accept the truth of the Bible and leave the philosophy to the experts (i.e. to Ceva and his colleagues). As a Jesuit, a poet, and an influential literary critic in his day, Ceva will have had a better appreciation than most of the power of the word to seduce the imagination. That is perhaps why he devoted so much energy to forestalling — or so he hoped — an epidemic of Italian curiosity about Lucretius’s materialist poem and the new philosophies from beyond the Alps. This disease of the imagination was potentially much more pernicious than the windy spleen. Its victims didn’t realize they were suffering, and by flirting with imaginary worlds they put their very souls in danger. The danger was not so much in noxious vapours rising to the head as in giving oneself morally and spiritually corrupting airs.

beneath the earth into a strange new anti-world. This Underworld is the creation of Descartes, who admits that it is the product of his imagination, and materialized for him by God out of the pre-existing ‘squalid house of shadows, of eternal horror’. While full of seductive wonders (such as mechanical dogs, the bêtes noirs of Jesuit psychology), Descartes’s world ultimately collapses in a spectacular, apocalyptic finale. For further discussion of this poem, see Yasmin Haskell, Loyola’s Bees: Ideology and Industry in Jesuit Latin Didactic Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 167–75. 32

Tommaso Ceva, Philosophia novo-antiqua (Milan, 1704), pp. 51–52.

C OPING WITH INNER AND O UTER D EMONS: M ARSILIO F ICINO ’S T HEORY OF THE IMAGINATION Guido Giglioni

I

n Marsilio Ficino’s world, human beings are often afflicted by the imagination and all their diseases are, in the end, diseases of the imagination. When presented in such an abrupt and peremptory tone, this statement may sound excessive at first, but it seems less implausible if, at the risk of spoiling the reader’s pleasure in following the various arguments of this essay, I anticipate from the very beginning some of its main lines by quickly reviewing Ficino’s views on the imagination in the form of brief theses. First, reality, as we perceive it, is imaginary, its fabric being made of images and appearances. Second, in the imaginary world in which the soul resides after its descent into the body, the imagination works as the main intermediary between the pseudo-reality of the phenomenal world and the hyper-reality of the intelligible world. Third, not only does the imagination represent the phenomenal world to the soul; it shapes it by moulding the bodily matter (especially the blood and the spirits) in such a way that this matter becomes a partial likeness of the intelligible world. Fourth, imagination has a cosmological dimension, which means that each single imagining soul is not confined to representing its own body, but it also represents other bodies and is represented by the other souls who belong to the domain of the rational natures (soul of the world, the spheres, stars, and demons). In other words, human imagination is subject to interference coming from other levels of imaginative activity in the universe. Fifth, one of these sources of interference is the minds of demons, who, because of their very nature — luminous and spirituous — have a special kinship with the faculty of the imagination. Demons, matter, and imagination are all expressions of the inescapable

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mixture of being and non-being that characterizes the world of the senses. Sixth, illness occurs every time we become too ensnared in the lures of the imaginary world and the imaginative power of our soul reacts accordingly by influencing the basic vital processes, such as digesting food (concoction) and producing blood (sanguification), through distorted images laden with destructive emotions. Seventh, the most effective remedy is ascesis and self-discipline. The starting point is, once again, the imagination. From imaginatio to phantasia, the healing process coincides with the attainment of a higher level of awareness (animadversio), fostered though it may be by a judicious use of material remedies, dietetic prescriptions, and the objects of sensory perception. Ficino’s medicine is unashamedly spiritual, as can be clearly seen in his most medical work, De vita libri tres. In short, the reverse of the old adage mens sana in corpore sana applies to Ficino’s case: corpus sanum in mente sana; or, even better, as will become apparent in the course of this essay, the adage should be rephrased as corpus sanum in imaginatione sana. Ficino’s language of the imagination is complex and rich. This makes it all the more important to introduce some terminological caveats since this essay is devoted to exploring the work of a philosopher who is also known for having been a fine translator and a subtle commentator. In the course of this essay I shall use two adjectives — imaginative and imaginary — to address two different aspects of the Ficinian notion of the imagination. With imaginative I shall indicate those characteristics of the imagination that allow human reason to have a glimpse of intelligible reality (phantasia) and enable the vital power of the soul to impart life and design to the body (imaginatio). By imaginary, in contrast, I shall refer to the most tenuous aspects in the ontology of human experience, namely, the properties of the imagination that are related to the nature of appearances. Roughly speaking, my use of the words imaginative and imaginary is meant to address the dimensions of creativity and illusion of Renaissance imagination, and, as we shall see, this distinction does not entirely overlap with Ficino’s own use of such adjectives as imaginarius and imaginalis. In a nutshell, for Ficino imaginarius does not mean imaginary. (To cover that aspect of the question he relies on the word fictus and its derivatives.) To be sure, the fact remains that the distinction between ‘imaginative’ and ‘imaginary’ is a fine one, especially in the context of Platonic ontology, for, as we shall see in the course of this essay, the very notion of illusory reality is constitutively dialectical and dynamic.1 1

On Ficino’s notion of imaginatio and phantasia, see Marian Heitzman, ‘L’agostinismo avicennizzante e il punto di partenza della filosofia di M. Ficino’, Giornale Critico della Filosofia

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Ficino’s Language of the Imagination Early modern philosophers and physicians investigating the nature of life were confronted, in different ways, with an assumption that held wide currency in both the via philosophorum (Aristotelianism) and the via medicorum (Galenism), that is, the view that the universes of nature and soul represented two different ontological realms and, although the one was somehow mediated with the other through a seamless series of ascending and descending degrees, a veritable quantum leap separated the two — what we might call the leap from vital action (concoction) to animal action (perception).2 Platonism in all its various incarnations strongly advocated the original character of the soul and the fact that the opus naturae was always in the end an opus intelligentiae. While physicians and philosophers of the schools continued to adhere to the fundamental principle that nature was no sentient power, the Renaissance revival of interest in Plato’s philosophy legitimized and fostered investigations into the seemingly contradictory notion of an ‘insentient sentience’, that is, into the possibility of a form of perception

Italiana, 16 (1935), 295–322, 460–80; 17 (1936), 1–11; P. O. Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), pp. 235–42, 367–75; Robert Klein, ‘L’Imagination comme vêtement de l’âme chez Marsile Ficin et Giordano Bruno’, in La Forme et l’intelligible: Écrits sur la Renaissance et l’art moderne, ed. by André Chastel (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), pp. 65–88; Klein, ‘L’Enfer de Ficin’, in La Forme et l’intelligible, ed. by Chastel, pp. 89–124; Eugenio Garin, ‘Phantasia e Imaginatio fra Marsilio Ficino e Pietro Pomponazzi’, in Phantasia Imaginatio, ed. by Marta Fattori and Massimo Bianchi (Rome: Edizioni dell’Ateneo, 1988), pp. 3–20; Michael J. B. Allen, Icastes: Marsilio Ficino’s Interpretation of Plato’s ‘Sophist’ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); J. M. Cocking, Imagination: A Study in the History of Ideas (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 168–94; Stefano Benassi, ‘Marsilio Ficino e il potere dell’immaginazione’, I Castelli di Yale: Quaderni di Filosofia, 2 (1997), 1–18; Nicoletta Tirinnanzi, Umbra naturae: L’immaginazione da Ficino a Bruno (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2000). 2

The reasons why I shall use such obsolete words as ‘concoction’ and ‘sanguification’ in this essay have nothing to do with any pedantic and antiquarian whims on my part. ‘Concoction’ can be replaced with ‘digestion’ as long as we keep in mind that, in a pre-Harveian body, digestion affected the whole body and all its vital processes (from the production of animal spirits down to secretion), and not only the stomach and the intestines. Likewise, ‘sanguification’, before William Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood in the early seventeenth century, meant the manufacturing of the most important vital substance in the body — the blood — in the laboratory of vegetative life, i.e. the liver. Sanguification was a fundamental vital process with important links to other key organs of the hypochondriac region, the parallel production of melancholy and the origin of the passions in the anatomical area of the concupiscible soul. In Ficino’s view of philosophical abstraction, as we shall see, sanguification and contemplation are closely intertwined.

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acting in nature, seen as a vestige of intelligence remotely controlled by the ultimate source of life and knowledge: the intellect. By elaborating a unique synthesis of Platonism, Galenism, Scholasticism, and Christian beliefs, Ficino provided in the early Renaissance a much-needed Platonic rehabilitation of the sentient character of nature. In particular, he followed Plotinus in looking at nature as a form of living art, in which a kind of purposive knowledge could find vital expression in actual transformations of matter. Equating nature to a skilfully (artificiosa) and yet unconsciously productive force opened up a whole field of possible solutions concerning the finer understanding of the passions and their therapy. The key was a coherent and comprehensive interpretation of the imagination, seen as a faculty sufficiently flexible to stretch from the lower reaches of the intellect down to the regions of the vegetative life of the body. One of Ficino’s most notable contributions to the early modern debate on the power of the imagination lies in his recovery and interpretation of the Neoplatonic corpus, Plotinus in the first place, but also Iamblichus, Synesius, Proclus, and Priscianus Lydus, to mention the most relevant authors. Ficino’s magnificent recovery of Neoplatonic thought made available a vast array of notions, words, and interpretative tools dealing with the imagination and its bodily powers. In particular, by drawing attention to the role played by two crucial variables in the picture — matter and demons — he contributed to refining the discussion of the powers and limits of the imagination by pointing to the motif of the ‘other’ (alteritas) and its internalization into the soul of man. The line separating the sphere of imaginary reality (that is, the reality of illusions and delusions) from that of imaginative reality (that is, the reality of productive imagination) is indeed a very thin one, especially when the intervention of demonic intelligences was considered an integral part of the explanatory theory. However, Ficino provided extremely sophisticated means of analysis to apply to a whole range of interpretative situations characterized by elusively interconnected levels of reality. In Ficino’s Neoplatonic framework, matter and demons represented two ineliminable sources of imaginary reality. Matter was the dark and distorting mirror of nature, the unum infimum, the absolute negation of all that is, the otherness par excellence.3 Demons were the proof that the imagination, because of its intermediate nature between corporeal and incorporeal levels of life, was constantly exposed to the tricks and lures of various forms of higher intelligence, and, above all, that in some cases man’s imagination could be the very 3

Marsilio Ficino, Commentarium in Plotinum, in Opera omnia, 2 vols (Basel: Heinrich Petri, 1576, repr. Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1962), II, 1718.

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embodiment of demonic creativity in nature (quod in nobis imaginatur est quodammodo daemon).4 In Ficino’s view, demons were not so much the notorious puppeteers in the theatre of the human mind, dragging the soul down into the abyss of sin through deceitful appearances of things, as the enablers of a collusive partnership in creative imagining. In more than one way, it is fair to say that, as regards the imagination and its relationship with the other faculties of knowledge, Ficino inaugurated the early modern period, albeit in the form of an ambiguous watershed. His work recapitulated centuries of theorizations about the internal senses and set the tone for future discussions on the nature of the soul and the self, but the way he looked at the imagination as a pivotal faculty in creating interactions between different ontological levels — between internal and external reality, between the mind and the body, the will, and the appetites — remained irredeemably premodern. The dichotomy between imaginative and imaginary reality is a perfect example of such a tension in Ficino’s work. While in his case it is still plausible to distinguish between two levels of reality — the imaginative reality of bodily life and conceptual visualizations on the one hand, and the imaginary reality of appearances on the other (although, it should be said that, ontologically speaking, they are all forms of lessened reality when compared with the reality of the intellect) — in such authors as René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, and Thomas Hobbes, the senses of both adjectives — imaginative and imaginary — coalesce into one meaning, the meaning of fanciful, fictive, and unreal situations.5 Even more intriguing for the cultural historian is the fact that one cannot easily settle the question about the difference between imaginative and imaginary by appealing to our by now commonsensical distinction between reality and nonreality, and relegating the imagination and its operations to the domain of the non-real. Indeed, in Ficino’s Platonic view, the reality of the senses is less real than the representations of the imagination (spiritalia exemplaria rerum) conveyed

4 5

Marsilio Ficino, In Platonis Sophistam, English trans. by M. J. B. Allen, in Icastes, p. 270.

See, for instance, René Descartes, Meditationes de prima philosophia, in Oeuvres, ed. by C. Adam and P. Tannery, 11 vols (Paris: Vrin-CNRS, 1964–74), VII (1973), 27: ‘Novi me existere; quaero quis sim ego ille quem novi. Certissimum est hujus sic praecise sumpti notitiam non pendere ab iis quae existere nondum novi; non igitur ab iis ullis, quae imaginatione effingo. Atque hoc verbum, effingo, admonet me erroris mei: nam fingerem revera, si quid me esse imaginarer, quia nihil aliud est imaginari quam rei corporeae figuram, seu imaginem, contemplari.’ B. Pascal, Pensées, 41, ed. by M. Le Guern (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), pp. 76–81. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, in English Works, ed. by W. Molesworth, 11 vols (London: Bohn, 1839–45), III (1839), 4: ‘IMAGINATION therefore is nothing but decaying sense.’

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through images, however much the perception of the senses is purported to be closer to reality than the vision of the intellect (imago vero in sensibus iis spirituque relucens solet pro re vera asseverari).6 For Ficino, the power and the effects of the imagination (both as imaginatio and phantasia) are real, often physically real, in some cases even more real than the visible reality conveyed by the external senses, whereas the dimension of imaginary reality (in the post-Cartesian sense of fictive and unreal) is better expressed by the family of terms belonging to fingere and its derivatives. This is apparent in Ficino’s language, where the adjectives imaginarius and imaginalis refer to the properties of the imagination and the body, while fictus and confictus denote something imaginary as devoid of reality and actual causative power (imaginary, for instance, is the vestis of prime matter).7 A testament to the richness and complexity of the premodern and Renaissance view of the imagination is the presence of a whole cluster of Latin words available to writers of philosophy, medicine, and theology to describe the world of the imagination, a cluster of words that is broader in scope than our present vocabulary. To limit our examples to words used by Ficino, here is a short list of terms organized in descending order of ontological importance: the abstracted representation of things (intentio);8 the principle of bodily life and motion (idolum);9 the image imprinted on the aerial medium of the spirits (character); the likeness of things conveyed by the representations of the imagination (similitudo);10 the image (imago);11 the ‘spirituous’ image of the senses transmitted by a pneumatic carrier

6

Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology, ed. by James Hankins and trans. by Michael J. B. Allen, 6 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001–06), IV (2004), 16, 150. 7

See Ficino, In Platonis Sophistam, in Icastes, p. 219: ‘[Plato] Docet veram quidem essentiam rebus incorporeis convenire, imaginariam vero corporeis.’ 8

Ficino, Platonic Theology, II (2002), 264: ‘Huiusmodi quidam conceptus phantasiae incorporales quodammodo corporum intentiones vocantur’; ibid., V (2005), 122: ‘phantasia intentiones quasdam ex imaginibus haurit et haustas ipsamet recipit.’ 9

In Platonic Theology, Ficino defines idolum (i.e., the ‘simulacrum rationalis animae’) as ‘vim illam vivificam rectricemque corporis, quae alit corpus in corpore, sentit corporalia per corpus, movet corpus per locum regitque in loco’ (IV , 134). 10

Marsilio Ficino, El libro dell’amore, ed. by Sandra Niccoli (Florence: Olschki, 1987), p. 82: ‘Allo animo piace quella spetie sola che da lui è presa; e questa, benché sia similitudine di un corpo extrinseco, nientedimeno nell’animo è incorporale.’ 11

Ficino, In Platonis Sophistam, in Icastes, p. 233: ‘Dum enim dicimus [simulacrum] esse simile vero et esse aliud quiddam praeter illud, interim dicimus esse, ergo et esse aliquid verum, id est, imaginem veram atque vere imaginem esse.’

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(imagines sensibilium spiritales);12 the shadow, in the strictly Platonic sense of an integument both protecting and revealing an ideal reality (umbra); a transient semblance of things (simulacrum or phantasma);13 an apparition, both within and without the imagination (visum, apparitio, or phantastica passio);14 and a product of the imagination lacking referential reality and close to arbitrary inventiveness (imaginamentum).15 An ancillary question — but of a special significance to understand Ficino’s position — concerns the distinction between imaginatio and phantasia. In The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, P. O. Kristeller cautioned the reader about drawing conclusions from Ficino’s not always consistent use of the words phantasia and imaginatio. This caveat has been accepted and has become part of the conventional wisdom on the topic.16 The distinction between imaginatio and phantasia is in fact of decisive importance to understanding Ficino’s position concerning the reality of the imagination. It is my contention that, precisely because of its centrality, Ficino was indeed quite careful and methodical in his linguistic choices. To give an example, in his Explanationes to his translation of Priscianus Lydus’s commentary on Theophrastus’s De phantasia et intellectu, he stressed the Iamblichean view of phantasia as higher in abstraction and awareness than imaginatio, the faculty of common sense. In the faculties of the senses and the imagination (imaginatio) there are innate forms that assimilate the objects of the senses (innatae rationes sensibilium assimilativae). The ones contained in the senses are turned into actuality when the sense organ undergoes a passion, the ones in the imagination (imaginatio) are actualized as a result of the actions of the senses.

The imagination as phantasia, Ficino continues, is ‘a certain middle action between the senses and reason’. And here he reports Iamblichus’s opinion on phantasia:

12

Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV , 16.

13

Ficino, In Platonis Sophistam, in Icastes, p. 229. See Allen, ‘Life as a D ead Platonist’, in Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy, ed. by M. J. B. Allen and V. Rees with M. Davies (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 159–78, and esp. pp. 169–73 on the ‘shade’ (idolum/simulacrum) of Herakles in Plotinus, Enneads, 6.4.16, 1.1.12, and esp. 4.3.27 (I am particularly grateful to Michael Allen for directing my attention to these references). 14

Ficino, In Platonis Sophistam, in Icastes, p. 269.

15

Marsilio Ficino, paraphrasis of Iamblichus, De mysteriis, in Opera omnia, II, 1890.

16

See Kristeller, The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino, p. 235; Garin, ‘Phantasia e Imaginatio’, p. 9.

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Guido Giglioni the imagination (phantasia) is endowed with all the powers of the soul (omnes animae vires), shapes everything within itself (omnia conformat in se), converts forms into each other and imitates the actions of all powers.

What is more, Ficino concludes his account of Iamblichean imagination by saying that ‘the imagination (phantasia) does not receive the forms from the outside, but brings them forth from within itself’.17 While imaginatio represents the emerging of a primordial bodily awareness, phantasia is the very basis from which awareness (animadversio) takes shape.18 Ficino was accurate in his terminological choices also from a historical point of view in that he followed the linguistic tradition underlying the doctrine of the internal senses. The images formed by phantasia are more distant from sensible reality — and therefore more real in an intelligible sense — than the ones formed by imaginatio.19 Using the post-Avicennean and post-Averroean scholastic terminology, in Theologia platonica, Ficino connected the senses to external bodies (sensus circa corpora), imaginatio to the images of the bodies conveyed by the senses (imaginatio circa imagines corporum per sensus acceptas sive conceptas) and phantasia to a partial abstraction of the whole image provided by the imaginatio (universum simulacrum) and to a preliminary act of judgement. Unlike imaginatio, phantasia was deemed to have a perception of substance (sensum aliquem habet iam substantiae and phantasia substantiam saltem auguratur).20 Roughly speaking, we can say that Ficino — as both a thinker and a translator — consistently used the word imaginatio in two principal senses: either as a generic term for the faculty of the imagination as a whole, or, in a narrower, more technical meaning, as the corporeal and vegetative function of representing and developing the ideal reality (its semina) within the vital economy of the body. He then contrasted this second, technical meaning of imaginatio with phantasia, a quasi-rational internal sentient power, capable of catching glimpses of substantial reality and of its universal attributes. Under the category of phantasia, Ficino placed the internal senses that he considered to be very close to the discursive and abstractive activity of reason, while he left the imaginatio to cover the internal

17

Marsilio Ficino, Explanatio in Prisciani Lydi interpretationem super Theophrastum de Phantasia et intellectu, in Opera omnia, II, 1824. 18

Ficino, Platonic Theology, II, 234: ‘Quam animadversionem phantasiam esse volumus.’

19

See Deborah L. Black, ‘Imagination and Estimation: Arabic Paradigms and Western Transformations’, Topoi, 19 (2000), 59–75. 20

Ficino, Platonic Theology, II, 262–64; ibid.: ‘Cernis quantum excellat imaginationi Socratis phantasia.’ Imaginatio collects (colligit), phantasia discerns (discernit).

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operations mediating between sense awareness and vegetative life. In other words, phantasia acted like a catalyst for the formation of concepts, while imaginatio translated life into knowledge and vice versa.21 This is even more evident in the case of dreams, where Ficino thought that phantasia sent to the mind images abstracted from their material carriers, or in prophetic visions, where phantasia was deemed capable of absorbing intelligible knowledge from superior intellects.22

Ficino’s Physiology of the Imagination Ficino’s imagination encapsulates the characteristic traits of an embodied self: the materiality of sense experience, the hidden roots of bodily life and the level of increasing abstraction attainable by the representative faculties of the soul. For such a view of the imagination as a principle of embodiment, Plotinus remains one of the major sources of influence in Ficino’s account. It is important to stress that Plotinus’s Enneads, in the way Porphyry ordered them, open with a discussion of the nature and place of life in the human compound of soul and body. The questions that run through the first treatise are about the extent to which such different natures — the soul and the body — can interact and how the precarious interdependence that results from their interaction can secure a real integral union. The imagination, as one can easily expect, plays a key role in this delicate matter. In his commentary on Plotinus’s Enneads, Ficino appropriates Plotinus’s subtle description of the embodied soul in man as a complex system of mediations and transactions between the intellect and the living body. He considers the Plotinian way to be the best solution, especially when compared with the extreme positions held by Averroes and Alexander of Aphrodisias. ‘It is apparent’, argues Ficino, ‘that Plotinus’s position is intermediate between Alexander and Averroes.’ And here are the reasons: While Alexander admits that the intellectual nature can be the specific life of the body, Averroes maintains that the intellectual nature is not the life of the body, nor does it impart any life to the body. Plotinus, while denying that the intellectual nature is the intimate life of the body, admits that its presence propagates some sort of intimate life to the bodies, and from the union of the intellectual nature with the body the result is not a man, but a human living being (animal humanum).23

21

Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV , 26.

22

Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV , 158.

23

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1550. On the importance of the Plotinian influence

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In Ficino’s view, Plotinus managed to maintain the distinction between the mind and the body; at the same time, unlike Alexander and Averroes, he vindicated the possibility for the life of the intellect to flow into the bodily lives of human beings. What is more, the onus probandi in Plotinus’s arguments weighed heavily on the imagination. To have a better understanding of the way in which Ficino describes and explains the physiological alterations caused by the faculty of the imagination, it will be worthwhile to provide a succinct account of his general views concerning the interdependence of soul and body. In Theologia platonica, Ficino defines the life of the body (vita corporalis) as an image (simulacrum) of the rational soul, that is, as ‘the continuous act of the soul’ transmitted to the temperament of the body ‘without departing from the soul’.24 The body is not only ruled but made by the soul. Indeed, it can be ruled by the soul precisely because it is made by the soul. Ficino explains that the soul, by using natural heat, imparts three forms to the digested food and draws three anatomical structures from it: the bones (forma ossium), flesh and nerves (forma carnis atque nervorum), and the spirits (forma spirituum). It is especially through the form of the spirits that the soul — via the imagination (both imaginatio and phantasia) — masters the vital economy of the body.25 To put it strongly, but clearly, the human body is a creation of the imagination, both as an obiectum (an object of representation) and a subiectum (a subject of material transformations), in that the imagination does not limit itself to representing the life of the body to the rational and intellective faculties of the soul, but it fashions the very anatomical structures, the physiological processes, and the experience of falling ill and recovering. Some decades later, from the argument that the soul needs the body as an obiectum (that is, as an object of representation), Pomponazzi would draw the radical consequence that the soul

in shaping fundamental directions in Ficino’s philosophy, see: Eugenio Garin, ‘La rinascita di Plotino’, in Rinascite e rivoluzioni: Movimenti culturali dal XIV al XVIII secolo (Rome: Laterza, 2007), pp. 89–129; A . M . Wolters, ‘The First Draft of Ficino’s Translation of Plotinus’, in Marsilio Ficino e il ritorno di Platone: Studi e documenti, ed. by Gian Carlo Garfagnini, 2 vols (Florence: Olschki, 1986), I, 305–29; H. D. Saffrey, ‘Florence, 1492: The Reappearance of Plotinus’, Renaissance Quarterly, 49 (1996), 488–508; Christopher S. Celenza, ‘Late Antiquity and Florentine Platonism: The “Post-Plotinian” Ficino’, in Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy, ed. by Allen and Rees with Davies, pp. 71–97. 24 25

Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV , 49.

Ficino, Platonic Theology (2003), III, 146: ‘Forma denique spirituum est animae proxima, quippe cum hi iam imaginationi et phantasiae, excellentioribus animae viribus, modo quodam subserviant.’

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is mortal and corporeal. Ficino, very much on the contrary, used the close link between the imagination and the body to demonstrate that the soul has complete sway over the body. The spirits and the blood are the anatomical parts that are related most immediately to the imagination. The spirit is a vaporous substance originating from the blood (vapor sanguinis).26 The animal spirit, in particular, is the instrument of the senses and has a radiant nature, especially in the eyes (solaris, radiosus).27 The spirit is also a sensor, finely attuned to the changes of the cosmos. Since the blood contains the four humours, the spirit, being the most refined part of the blood, epitomizes all the characteristics of an individual’s temperament. As such, it is an extremely responsive and irritable substance, which, within each human being, records the states of the universe, of the body and the mind. For instance, the spirits are able to feel the coming of the rain since their ‘watery’ component is ‘irritated’ by the phlegm running through the body and present in the very blood from which the spirits were distilled. As a result, the spirit stimulates the vivifying power of the soul and this causes the release of images of rain in the imagination (phantasia).28 In Ficino’s anatomy, the spirit is the carrier of both passions and images.29 There are also deeper ontological reasons why spirits and blood respond to the actions of the imagination. All material forms are ‘images of ideas’. They are not the result of any mechanical mixing up of elementary qualities through natural motions, but they are affectiones produced by the very art of nature. Following Plotinus, Ficino maintains that all corporeal qualities and natural motions depend on ‘an incorporeal form that is not subject to motions, but presides over them’. This incorporeal form is what Plotinus called ‘universal and primary nature’. It is a ‘discursive’ and ‘skilful’ (artificiosa) ratio, which is ‘vital’ and ‘substantial’. In spite of operating within matter, such a ratio acts skilfully (artificiose) ‘by its very nature (suapte natura)’, in the same way in which ‘an artist acts skilfully (artificiose) through making decisions (electione)’. A material form, therefore,

26

On the notion of spirit as vapor sanguinis, see Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV , 148; Ficino, In Timaeum commentarium, in Opera omnia, II, 1482; Ficino, Expositio in interpretationem Prisciani Lydi super Theophrastum, in Opera omnia, II, 1821. 27

Ficino, In Timaeum commentarium, p. 1472.

28

Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV , 148.

29

Ficino, Platonic Theology (2005), V , 101.

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‘rather than a principle of generation, is a certain disposition (affectio) induced on matter from above by a hidden principle generating a species’.30 Being of an extremely tenuous nature when considered from an ontological point of view, material forms are phenomenal entities based on the appearances of the senses (entia non vera).31 The appearance of being (esse videri) that is characteristic of sense representations is a reflection of prime matter, which is an inherently unreliable mirror, clothed with a garment of images (vestis imaginaria) and prone to deception by its very nature. Matter is ‘empty’, a ‘shadow of being’, writes Ficino in his commentary on Plotinus. And he describes how the forms contained in matter are ‘changing images of the ideas of true, original being’: They do not bear any natural resemblance with the ideas, although they seem to have a certain resemblance as a result of representing these ideas. And thus matter, like a mirror, while it receives only the images or maybe not even these, but only seems to receive images, in fact, it does not undergo (pati) any real process, especially because matter cannot be resolved in something other than itself, nor can it undergo any real passion, since matter is the very last effect of the emanative process.32

Since the blood, the spirits, and the resulting anatomical structures of the body are material forms that are vestiges of ideal archetypes and are shaped and controlled by the imagination, Ficino looks at the imagination in two ways: as the general faculty of representing and visualizing either sense data or intelligible concepts, and as a specific anatomical function, that is, the bodily representative function mediating between reason and the vital processes of the body. This is apparent, for instance, in a key passage of the Commentarium in Plotinum. [Man’s rational soul] has something in common with the animals, namely, the imagination (imaginatio), which is the innermost sense of the soul and one independent function that is capable to judge the other senses. The middle power (vis media) of reason, insofar as it is a discursive act of thinking is called cogitation (cogitatio) and deliberation (consilium); insofar as, in its discursive activity, it takes its starting point from the intellect, it is called intelligence, wisdom and science; however, insofar as it starts its course from the imagination (imaginatio), it is called conjecture, belief and opinion.33

30

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1723.

31

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1719.

32

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II. On prime matter and the image of the mirror, see Allen, Icastes, chap. 5, esp. pp. 182–200; and S. Kodera, ‘Narcissus, Divine Gazes and Bloody Mirrors: The Concept of Matter in Ficino’, in Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy, ed. by Allen and Rees with Davies, pp. 285–306. 33

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1549. See Ficino, El libro dell’amore, p. 211: ‘La ragione dell’anima è moltitudine di notitie e d’argomenti, moltitudine dico mobile ma ordinata.

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Human beings share the power of the imagination with animals. Man’s rational soul is a substance endowed with the faculties of decision making, intellectual knowledge, and imagination. It also has the faculty of imparting a certain kind of life (vita quaedam) — the bodily life — to the human self. At the very border dividing reason from imagination, the focus of rational concentration blurs into acts of conjecture, belief, and opinion driven by the imagination. Below that level, the imagination continues its process of gradual embodiment by becoming entrusted with the task of supervising all the organic and sensory functions of the body. This substance, endowed with these three powers, is what the Platonists call soul (anima) in the strict sense, and to the extent that it is affected (affecta est) in such a way that it emanates a certain life throughout the human body, it is also called man. This is what the soul is, and animation (animatio) and enlivening (vivificatio) are how we should properly call the life emanated by the soul (vita effusa). However, relying on common usage, we shall call the former ‘primary soul’ and the latter ‘secondary soul’. The secondary soul and its powers derive from the primary soul and their powers. In the primary soul, reason originates from the intellect and the imagination from reason. Likewise, in the secondary soul there are three principal powers: the imagination (imaginatio), that is, some sort of

L’oppenione, che è sotto la ragione, è una moltitudine d’immagini disordinate e mobili’. See also Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV , 150. On the theory of the internal senses in general, besides the already cited article by Black (‘Imagination and Estimation: Arabic Paradigms and Western Transformations’), see: H. A. Wolfson, ‘The Internal Senses in Latin, Arabic and Hebrew Philosophic Texts’, Harvard Theological Review, 28 (1935), 69–133; Helmut Gätje, ‘Die “inneren Sinne” bei Averroes’, Zeitschrift der Deutchen Morgenländischen Gesellshaft, 115 (1965), 255–93; N. H. Steneck, ‘The Problem of the Internal Senses in the Fourteenth Century’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Wisconsin, 1970); E. R . Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1975); Giorgio Agamben, Stanze: La parola e il fantasma nella cultura occidentale (Turin: Einaudi, 1977, English trans. by Ronald L. Martínez, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993)), chap. 1, ‘The Phantasms of Eros’, pp. 3–29; David Summers, The Judgment of Sense: Renaissance Naturalism and the Rise of Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 216–20; Katherine Park, ‘The Organic Soul’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. by Charles Schmitt and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 464–84; John O’Brien, ‘Reasoning with the Senses: The Humanist Imagination’, South Central Review, 10 (1993), 3–19; Michael Camille, ‘Before the Gaze: The Internal Senses and Late Medieval Practices of Seeing’, in Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw, ed. by R . S. Nelson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 197–223.

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common sense, then the external sense divided into five parts, and finally a power of generation (potentia genitalis), which is also called nature, the source of reproduction, growth, and nutrition.34 A human being is soul in the strict sense (anima prima, that is, reason) and life in a less proper sense (anima secunda as vita effusa). The imagination, which seems to play a certain role in the anima prima anyway (insofar as it contributes to the operations of belief, opinion, and conjecture), has a larger part in the vital economy ruled by the secondary soul. The imagination is a Janus-faced faculty: it is the last of the rational powers (that is, conjecture, belief, and opinion) and the first of the vital operations (that is, common sense). In the Theologia platonica, Ficino called the secondary soul set out above idolum, which he described as ‘the ruling power of the body’ (rectrix potentia corporis), not yet capable of performing ‘the office of the pure soul’ but that of the soul ‘already inclining towards the body’. The idolum contains two ‘irrational perceiving powers’ (vires sentiendi brutae), that is, the confused imagination (phantasia confusa), ‘which follows natural instinct’, and the imagination (imaginatio) which unifies the perceptual material coming from the five senses (quinque sensuum congregatrix).35 By bridging the life of the senses with the life of the body, the idolum can be characterized as the bodily instantiation of vegetative imagination. Both the imagination as phantasia (cogitative power, conjecture, belief, opinion) and the imagination as imaginatio (common sense and lower bodily functions of the senses) serve the function of fostering communication (both vital and cognitive) between the intellect and the body. As such, the imagination blurs the boundary between reason and life and produces shared meaning, representations however partial of the intelligible life, passions, acts of generation, concoction, and sanguification. Ficino summarized the various layers of the imagination as both a cognitive and a bodily faculty by describing a system of representative functions mirroring each other: The imagination represents (repraesentat) the intellect to the primary soul [reason], the external senses represent reason to the imagination, the vegetative nature, finally,

34 35

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1549.

Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV , 140. See Allen, Icastes, pp. 200–04. Allen points out that Ficino uses the term idolum with several senses, including the sense of being ‘the image (simulacrum) of the rational soul cast or reflected onto the aethereal body of the spirit’; it also gives this spirit-vehicle life ‘as upon an eternal mirror’ (p. 201). See also Michael J. B. Allen, The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino: A Study of his ‘Phaedrus’ Commentary, its Sources and Genesis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 220.

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represents the imagination to the senses. Again, the imagination that is the lowest level of the primary soul is called discerning imagination (discreta phantasia), and has a certain ability to judge particulars and follows reason more closely. In contrast, the imagination that occupies the highest level of the secondary soul, the animal soul, is usually called confused imagination (confusa phantasia); it perceives only the accidents of substances and in the great majority of cases is led by natural instinct.36

A notable effect of the life that flows from the upper regions of reason (vita effusa) and is mediated by the power of the imagination is the emergence of passions and appetites. The impressions of the senses cause reactions in the living body. The very act of receiving impressions and reacting to them (pati) is one of the most deep-rooted effects of the vital imagination. The imagination is not struck directly by material impressions, but it feels (animadvertit) by participating in a process of mutual reactivity (compassio) that ties up the living body with the sentient faculties of the soul. In other words, the imagination represents a material process without being touched by the very matter of the process. At the level of the primordial passions, the imagination performs a fundamental empathetic function towards the body: all the senses in this living being refer both to the impressions of the external senses (externa sensibilia) and to the passions caused by the external impressions, which they perceive at a very close proximity and suffer together with the suffering of its body. The faculty of sense, that is, the imagination of the higher soul, turns itself not towards the sense impressions (sensibilia), but towards the senses of the living being (subiectum animale); it does not have a direct perception of the passions of the body, but it feels (animadvertit) in an immediate manner the passions suffered by the senses in their being united to the body (compassiones sensuum). The imagination of the higher soul is all involved with images, actions, passions and lower senses, and it does not receive any destructive passion from them, but very often is touched by a certain fatherly affect towards the living body.37

Ficino subdivides the power of the imagination as a whole (imaginatio) into two specific faculties: discerning imagination (phantasia discreta) and confused imagination (phantasia confusa).38 As already mentioned, the use of the word phantasia

36

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1549.

37

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1549.

38

In addition to the previous locus, see also Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1568, 1718. On phantasia confusa, see also Marsilio Ficino, Argumentum in Platonis Ionem, in Commentaries on Plato, ed. and trans. by Michael J. B. Allen (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 198: ‘Primus [furor] bonum equum, id est rationem opinionemque, a malo equo, id est a phantasia confusa et natura, distinguit’ (the horses refer to the renowned

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reflects Ficino’s reliance on the scholastic model of the internal senses. Referring to Plotinus, he adds a third possible ramification of the imaginative force, a form of vegetative imagination, as it were, which does not proceed by inferring forms through reasoning (discursio per formas), as in the cogitative imagination, neither does it rely on any direct perception of forms (intuitus formae), as in the bodily imagination, but is the outward manifestation of a form that is full of inward energy (forma intus vigens). Ficino characterizes this insentient ‘impression on matter’ as ‘a form of substantial imagination that acts without imagining at all’. Here, explains Ficino, is where we find the ultimate link between life (the vegetative soul), the imagination, and the passions, for the concupiscible and irascible faculties ‘sprout out’ (pullulare) from the vegetative soul and this form of thoroughly unconscious imagination.39 In this way, the life of the body can be regarded as the result of a series of emanative waves of energy descending from the higher levels of the cosmos, in which varying degrees of imagination — from phantasia to imaginatio to vegetalis imaginatio (that is, imaginatio quaedam substantialis agens nequaquam imaginando) — contribute a human being’s knowledge and structure.40 Ficino describes the bodily life informed and ruled by the imagination as characterized by four properties: Insofar as it depends on the soul, as the image depends on substance, it has the faculty of the imagination; insofar as it is something in itself, it is scattered in the multiplicity of the senses; insofar as it governs the body, it exercises a vital force; insofar as it adheres to the body and becomes a part of the living being, it is made subject to the passions.41

To recapitulate, Ficino establishes the existence of two basic kinds of imagination, not to mention a third one in the form of vegetative imagination. The first is ruled by reason, the second rules the world of the senses, and the third pervades the world of nature and generation (organic growth, passions, appetites, concoction, and sanguification). The shift from sentient to insentient activity defines the imagination in its becoming a fully fledged bodily faculty. The life of the soul is embodied, animal power is ruled by the imagination either through natural representation of the soul given by Plato in his Phaedrus); Ficino, El libro dell’amore, p. 215: ‘El primo furore distingue el buono cavallo, cioè la ragione e l’oppenione, dal cavallo cattivo, cioè dalla fantasia confusa e dallo appetito de’ sensi.’ See Allen, Platonism of Marsilio Ficino, p. 220, n. 33. 39

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1718.

40

In Platonic Theology (V , 68–69), Ficino maintains that the soul communicates a certain vital power to the body by way of a vis quaedam imaginaria. 41

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1552.

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instinct (per naturalem suae imaginationis instinctum) or through a form of primordial awareness (superioris imaginationis animadversio).42 And as there are two types of imagination, so there are two types of reason and two types of sentient activity (sensus). Following Plotinus, Ficino distinguishes between a kind of reason that aspires to reach the intellect (surgens ad intellectum) and another one ‘that declines towards the imagination’.43 Likewise, one kind of sensus is a form of obscure perception and searching affect, immersed in the vital operations of the body; the other is the perception of the external qualities of things, accompanied by a certain degree of awareness.44 What I have called the ‘vegetative imagination’ is responsible for the mediation of the innermost appetites with the representative activity of the soul. Through this kind of vegetalis imagination (imaginatio, in this case, and not phantasia), the brute force of the passions emerges to a condition of representability and intentionality, obscure though this condition may be. Through the energy of the passions, in turn, the imagination raises to the status of powerful bodily force. From the blushing of the cheeks to the tingling of the teeth, from the humours of the eyes drenched with poisonous effluvia to the tongue furred with nauseous saliva, evidence of the soul’s interdependence with the body through the representative power of the imagination is plentiful.45 In Theologia platonica, Ficino lists four principal affects connected to the imagination that have the power to alter one’s own body: appetite (appetitus), pleasure (voluptas), fear (metus), and pain (dolor).46 For Ficino this is yet more proof that the body is completely subjected to the power of the soul. The body’s ability to be affected and to react to its affections (affectiones corporis) results from the encounter of the lower ramifications of the soul with the matter of the body. The motions of such bodily components as black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, blood, and spirits are determined by the ‘vivifying power’ of the idolum, that is, the imagination as a vital force. As the object of the senses provide the occasio for the judging faculty of sensus (imagination as common sense) to provide a representation of reality, so the physiological alterations of the body give occasion to the idolum to react to

42

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1556.

43

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1568.

44

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1563.

45

Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV , 110–20.

46

Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV , 110.

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material changes.47 The imagination is the principal engine behind the construction of the body and of reality — imaginary as they may be. However, by constructing such a precarious world of appearances, in which layers of varying degrees of perception represent each other (bodily imagination to sense imagination to rational imagination, and vice versa), the imagination introduces a key element in the development of life and knowledge: the emergence of awareness (animadversio).

The Imagination as Source of Awareness The imagination, particularly in its ability to supervise all the vital operations of the body (idolum), bridges the gap between knowledge and life. Phantasia provides access to the otherwise inscrutable realm of the mind, imaginatio alerts the mind to the tacit life of the body. Although the soul has not always a clear perception of the body and reality, especially in the domains ruled by the vegetative faculties, the light of knowledge flowing from the intellect runs the whole gamut of emanated life (vita effusa), from reason to concoction. In Ficino’s Plotinian view, the ultimate meaning of life coincides with the innermost and unremitting power of self-actualization (actus intimus et perennis sui ipsius), while intelligence is the self-reflective power of life within the very act of being (vitae reflectio in essentiam). In keeping with the principles of Plotinian ontology, Ficino elaborated a dynamic and dialectic view of being in which its innermost part (essentia) represents the root from which life and intellect develop through an act of self-reflection.48 ‘By contemplating itself’, the intellect becomes ‘omniform’ (omniformis) from being ‘uniform’ (uniformis). Self-reflection is therefore the operation that makes intelligence a creative, fecund act.49 However, the ultimate source of fecundity that allows the growth of being, life, and knowledge remains the Bonum, the One.50 The One is above the intellect, therefore is constitutively obscure and opaque to self-knowledge (sibimet ignotum).51

47

Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV , 144.

48

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1726. See Platonic Theology, IV , 58: ‘ubi prima mens est, ibi vita prima, quoniam mens est reflexio vitae in esse unum. Ubi vita prima, ibi et esse primum, quoniam vita est primus et intimus ipsius esse motus’. 49

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1725.

50

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1718. See also Platonic Theology, IV , 38.

51

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1726.

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It is a characteristic predicament of Neoplatonic philosophy in all its historical forms that, while intelligible knowledge remains the principal target of the soul in its effort to return to the One, such an aim remains often unknown because of structural limits in human self-awareness. The highest form of understanding coincides with the intellection of intellection (noesis noeseos), and yet human reason is bound to remain unaware of such a heightened form of awareness. As Giordano Bruno put it in his reinterpretation of Acteon’s myth in Degli eroici furori, once the soul sees the One, it loses knowledge of itself.52 Indeed, it is not just the intellect that escapes the attention of the regenerated soul. Both intellectual and vegetative life lie hidden to reason, despite its numerous ties with the imagination. ‘To live’, states Ficino, ‘is almost the same as to be animated (vegetare)’ and ‘to live is the same as to understand (intelligere).’ In both cases, we can have a glimpse of these two uninterrupted and unknown currents of energy (vegetare and intelligere) every time the imagination — both the lower and the higher kind — captures a fragment of life in an imago.53 Any perception of the intellect or life passes through the operations of the anima imaginaria, from the common sense (imaginatio) to the functions of the cogitative power (phantasia).54 Like the One and the intellect, nature — the very root of the vegetative life — is hidden to human reason. There is in nature a ‘certain seminal nature’, a ‘gaze’ (intuitus), which does not come from outside, but is ‘naturally attached’ to it, which ‘is not in search of something’ (non quaerens aliquid) and does not perceive something within itself (neque animadvertens in se aliquid), but is senseless (stupidus) and stupefied (attonitus) as it were — the kind of sensus that ‘some authors attribute to plants’. Nature, Ficino continues, is this one plant of the universe, which enjoys its life through a kind of quiet and substantial perception (sensus) and conceives natural forms. Orpheus, in his hymn to nature, attributed this tacit perception (sensus sine strepitu) to nature.55

52

Giodano Bruno, Degli eroici furori, ed. by Giovanni Aquilecchia, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1993–), VII (1999), 155–59, 391–95. 53

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1568–69. See also Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV ,

142. 54

Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV , 52: ‘Nihil advertimus nisi quod in medias transit vires.’ The expression anima imaginaria is in Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1558. 55

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1724. On the importance of the Orphic Hymns in the Renaissance, see D. P. Walker, ‘Orpheus the Theologian and Renaissance Platonists’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 16 (1953), 100–20.

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Vision (intueri), action (facere), and being (esse) coincide in the operations of nature. No rift between knowledge and reality splits the unremitting activity of nature. Material forms can be called ‘spectacles’ (spectacula) or even ‘marks’ (spectamina) of nature, as we say of a child when his or her birthmarks are evidence of the power of maternal imagination and desires.56 Like the opaque energy of the One and the intellect’s coincidence of knowing subject and known object, nature’s sensus sine strepitu is sheer uninterrupted activity, unimpeded by the fitful light of the imagination. Both the intellect and reason deal with the already-known — the intellect by always knowing itself in actuality (cognoscere semper actu), reason by resuming and ruminating on what has been known (recolere cognita). Only the imagination has the ability to identify the intrusion of novel information coming from the world of the senses (discernere nova). However, the question arises of whether there can be a real novum in a Platonic universe. The novum represents in fact the disruption of the seamless flow of intelligible knowledge. The imagination signals this break, which corresponds to the perception of the bodily life. In Plotinus’s language, the imagination, by moving away from reason, ‘transforms itself into the nature of the living being (ad animal se convertit)’ and, in so doing, ‘has an immediate perception of what the living being sees and hears’. It is in the very nature of the imagination to go back and forth between the ratio and the animal. Independently of the direction of its focus (whether the mind or the body), the imagination provides the knowing subject with awareness (animadversio). Only in the blessed souls (beati), fully assimilated to the life of the intellect, has ‘the mind (animus) the immediate perception (statim animadvertit) of being fully awake (vigilare)’. Only at this stage does the imagination become an intellective tool, a polished mirror for reflections coming from the intelligible realm. Both the mind and reason have natural forms that are, respectively, eternal and perpetual. The imagination, in contrast, deals with changeable and external forms (adventitiae), that is, ‘images of natural forms’, whereby, ‘the mind (animus), being stunned as if they were new, directs its attention to and becomes aware of what is happening to reason and the mind’. In this sense, the imagination is the mirror of the mind: as the eye is enclosed by the face, so reason is enclosed by the mind (mens). And as the eye does not see the face, nor does it perceive (animadvertit) the motions of the face, unless the direct rays of the face are directed to a mirror positioned at a certain angle in front of

56

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1724. And he continues: ‘Intellectus autem et natura quae a substantiali intellectu dependet naturaliter possident, imo sunt illa ipsa quae intuentur, et faciunt intuendo.’

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us, and from there the mirror displays an image (if the mirror can be said to have an image); in the same way, reason, like the eye, neither sees the mind, nor does it perceive (animadvertit) that the mind is acting (although the mind is always in action), unless its activity causes some change in the imagination.57

As matter is the mirror of nature that reflects the images of things, so the imagination is the mirror of the mind. The imagination has the function of both signalling the discrepancy between representation (images) and reality (intellect) and providing the conditions to bridge this very discrepancy. Good use of the imagination lets the soul know that, in its process of rejoining the source of intelligible life, what it thought was the knowledge of new events is in fact the recognition of an old, pre-existing reality.58 From this point of view, there is even a way of partially rehabilitating Averroes. In his commentary on Plotinus, Ficino acknowledges that Averroes advanced a similar view (etsi non idem, tamen simile aliquid) when he argued that ‘our intellect has two types of intelligence (intelligentiam duplicem in se habere), the one eternal, the other temporal; the one acting through its own being, the other through the images of our imagination’. And while we are never aware (animadvertere) of that intelligence because it does not communicate with our imagination at all, ‘we recognize (agnoscere) the temporal intelligence because its form agrees with the images of our imagination’.59 But in the Ficinian cosmos the intellect of the world is not the only soul to interfere with our imagination. The sphere of the rational natures surrounding the sublunar world is indeed quite crowded and busy, and the various kinds of demons that inhabit it are prone to meddle with human imaginations.

Demonic Imagination In his influential De praestigiis daemonum (first published in 1563), Johan Wier, court physician to Duke Wilhelm V of Jülich-Cleves, undertook a systematic attempt to dismantle the whole system of beliefs based on magic, sorcery, and witchcraft. The pivotal element of such a plan consisted in resolving the great majority of the diseases of the imagination into imaginary diseases. From this

57

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1569.

58

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1569: ‘Tu vero memento: in ipso intellectu sicut idem est vivere atque cognoscere, sic idem esse cognoscere penitus et agnoscere, id est, quod ipse cognoscat animadvertere’. 59

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1569.

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point of view, Wier’s book marked a turning point in the early modern perception of the imagination and of its impact on reality. It comes as no surprise that Sigmund Freud described De praestigiis daemonum as one of the most important books ever written.60 An intriguing aspect of Wier’s treatment of the imagination is the use he made of an author such as Iamblichus, whom Wier called upon as a debunking authority against the alleged transmogrifying powers of the imagination. This is certainly a way of referring to Iamblichus that is very different from Ficino’s. As a student of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim, Wier imbibed the sceptical tendencies of his teacher. He belonged to a generation of natural philosophers who shared a jaded view of magic and a critical attitude towards using Neoplatonic sources as a foundation for natural investigations.61 Wier inserted an important quotation from Ficino’s paraphrasis of Iamblichus’s De mysteriis Aegyptiorum in the chapter in which he discussed the illusions performed by the pharaoh’s sorcerers. His aim was to demonstrate that what had long been interpreted as a sign of a bewitched imagination was in fact only a series of conjuring tricks.62 For Ficino, instead, De mysteriis represented a key text to establish a closer connection between demons and imagination, a connection substantiated by both philosophical arguments and theurgic evidence. In Iamblichus’s work Ficino could find a comprehensive account of the demonic nature of the imagination. What is more, Iamblichus had outlined a sweeping cosmological view in which demons and all sorts of astral intelligences were shown as interacting with human minds through the channel of the imagination. It cannot be denied that demons play a significant role in Ficino’s philosophy. In his many studies on the subjects, Michael Allen has shown how Ficino,

60

Sigmund Freud, Contribution to a Questionnaire on Reading, in Complete Psychological Works, Standard Edition, trans. from German under the general editorship of James Strachey, 15 vols (London: Hogarth Press, 1943–74), IX (1957), 245. See George Mora, ‘Introduction’ to Johan Wier, De praestigiis daemonum, ed. by George Mora, Benjamin Kohl, and John Shea (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1991), p. lxxiii. On Wier, see Sydney Anglo, ‘Melancholia and Witchcraft: The Debate between Wier, Bodin and Scot’, in Folie et déraison à la Renaissance (Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1976), pp. 209–28; H. C. E. Midelfort, A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 196–217; M. Valente, Johann Wier (Florence: Olschki, 2003). 61 62

See, for instance, the very beginning of Wier’s De praestigiis daemonum, p. 3.

Wier, p. 123. See Ficino’s paraphrasis of Iamblichus, De mysteriis, in Opera omnia, II, 1890: ‘Nam quae fascinati imaginamur, praeter imaginamenta, ullam habent actionis et essentiae veritatem. Eiusmodi namque magicae finis est, non facere simpliciter aliquid, sed usque ad apparendum imaginamenta porrigere.’

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following Plotinus, distinguished between a notion of the demon as ‘inner psychological principle’ (as pars animae) and a concept of the demon as an invading force coming from the outside (‘extranei or external personal demons’).63 Ficino saw demons as inhabitants of the region of the air, an area of the universe stretching roughly from the region of the element of water to the sphere of the moon. Their intermediate nature fitted quite well with their alleged dwelling, located between fire and water, further subdivided into three zones occupied by fiery, airy, and vaporous bodies. Depending on the amount of fire or water involved in their bodies, demons could form species of varying vaporous consistency. 64 For Ficino, the demonic body represented the ideal subject of imaginative and imaginary transformations. Demons were made of air and light, and air and light, in producing pliant folds and coruscating shadows, were the very matter of the imagination. Because all kinds of imaginamenta thrived on spirit, air, and light, they entertained a special relationship with demonic bodies.65 The cosmological nature of demonic bodies and imaginations is not the only reason that explains their close proximity with human imaginations. The flow of imaginative currents in the universe also follows hierarchical patterns of causal action. Ficino’s Platonic universe is structured along three orders: providence, fate, and nature. Providence regulates the succession of the minds, fate that of the souls, and nature that of the bodies. The ‘lower level of minds’ is occupied by the rational souls (the soul of the world, of the sphere, of the stars, of the demons, and of men). The domain of the universe that is ruled by fate and that encompasses the succession of rational souls is also characterized by the vis vivifica that rules the body. As already mentioned, Ficino calls this vis the idolum, that is, a semblance of the rational soul (simulacrum rationalis animae) that is still capable of conveying

63

Michael J. B. Allen, ‘Summoning Plotinus: Ficino, Smoke, and the Strangled Chickens’, in Plato’s Third Eye: Studies in Marsilio Ficino’s Metaphysics and its Sources (London: Variorum, 1995), item XIV, p. 64, n. 2 (with important references to loci in Ficino’s Timaeus commentary). The spirituous matter of the soul’s vehicle is a further link between the nature of demons and ours. See Ficino, In Platonis Sophistam, in Icastes, p. 270: ‘Siquando nostram animam introspexeris quasi vestitam spiritu, putabis forte daemonem te videre trinumque daemonem.’ See also Icastes, pp. 172–78, and chap. 5, passim. 64 65

Allen, The Platonism of Marsilio Ficino, pp. 3–22; Allen, Icastes, esp. chaps 3 and 5.

See Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), esp. chap. 4, ‘Glamours: Demons and Virtual Words’, pp. 123–60.

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a certain degree of vital energy.66 We are moved by affects (pulsamur affectibus) descending from the ‘universal natures’ and they force their way into our soul without our knowing it. The higher intelligences (mentes superiores) can affect our mind even more so, especially when our reason is empty. In this case, no obstacle prevents ‘some angelic process of thought (angelica aliqua cogitatio) from stealing into our rational powers, although we cannot see where it is subtly coming from’.67 As pointed out in the previous section, human souls are never fully aware of all the influences at work in their lives. For instance, the idola of the higher souls, including demons, may exercise powerful influences on our idolum without us being aware of their force.68 In the Libri de vita, the cosmological connection of the human soul is articulated by linking imagination, reason, and mind to a whole system of planetary and demonic influences, in a very complicated picture of astrological and symbolical correspondences in which the notion of image as likeness (similitudo) plays a key role in establishing a natural bond between human and demonic imaginations.69 Given such a network of interacting influences, it is not surprising the human soul finds itself entangled in a labyrinthine web of imaginative and imaginary relationships. Ficino writes in Theologia platonica that ‘[t]he world’s disposition, which is totally and simultaneously inscribed in the minds and reasons of the supernal souls, offers itself totally and simultaneously to our mind by way of an endless and continuous succession’.70 However, human beings do not have only their minds at the centre of the universe. Their bodies, too, formed and constantly reformed by the flowing blood, epitomize the physical structure of the cosmos and react accordingly to the least change occurring in them. ‘Since it consists of four elements and is placed in the midst of the world,’ explains Ficino, ‘the human body submits (patitur), via the five organs of its senses, to the shocks of all elements and of all things that whirl around it.’ The most refined faculty of representation (phantasia), then, becomes gradually aware (ipsa

66

Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV , 132–35.

67

Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV , 147. On the question of angelic knowledge and its relevance in the history of philosophy from Augustine to Spinoza, see Emanuella Scribano, Angeli e beati (Rome: Laterza, 2006). 68

Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV , 144.

69

Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life, ed. and trans. by Carol V. Kaske and John R . Clark (Binghamton: Renaissance Society of America, 1989), p. 365. See also Platonic Theology, IV , 144. 70

Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV , 147.

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animali virtute) of the reactions coming from these shocks (impulsi) and fashions them (in seipsa fingit) into images (imagines).71 Internal and privy as they may be to the very life of human souls, demons maintain always a level of detached participation due to their nature as alien presences within the human soul. Since the soul is all that exists (anima cum sit omnia) and is endowed with a motion that is naturally free, it can form by itself and within itself its own likenesses (similitudines) and then fashion to itself bodies of plants and animals. Therefore, if the soul has lived like a plant, after this life it will form the body of a plant, in which only the vegetative power acts, while the power of the senses that is present in the same life superintends like a demon — not as an active participant, but as a beholder (assidens speculator).72

The same structure represents itself at the other levels of nature: the soul that has lived like an animal will have the rational potestas in a state of detached supervision like a demonic beholder. The soul who has lived following reason will be supervised by the eye of the mind acting as a demon. Finally the person who has made the mind the ruler of his or her life will have God himself acting as a supervising demon. Ficino adopts Plotinus’s view of the demon as ‘the best faculty of the soul’ and ‘the guide of man’, and interprets this view as deriving from the account given by Plato in the Timaeus.73 In his commentary on that Platonic dialogue, Ficino characterizes the ‘summit of reason, that is, the mind’, as our demon.74 From the Pythagorean Carmina aurea, he takes the idea that the demon is the divine part of the soul, while from Iamblichus he adopts the thesis that the intellect accompanies reason like a demon.75 Demons and humans share the characteristic of being affected by passions and being exposed to the power of primordial appetites (the primi motus).76 Because of its intermediate nature, the imagination has a privileged relationship with demons, who also are intermediate between divine and human beings. In light there is a certain demonic power. In other words, light is the maker of images and of shadows, just as the demons too are accustomed to reveal certain wondrous sights to

71

Ficino, Platonic Theology, V , 247.

72

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1707. The reference is, of course, to Aristotle’s maxim that the soul, ‘in a sense’, is all existing things (De anima, III, 8, 431b). 73

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1707.

74

Ficino, In Timaeum commentarium, p. 1484.

75

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1707.

76

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1558.

44

Guido Giglioni men not only when they are asleep or bemused but also when they are fully awake. Our imaginations also are possessed in a way of a demonic power (Imaginamenta quoque nostra quodammodo etiam daemonica virtute fiunt). This is both because the demons excite the imaginations in ourselves by way of their own creative imaginations and tricks, and also because what imagines in us is in some respect a demon.77

In his commentary on Plato’s Sophista, Ficino pointed to Plato’s description of imagines and umbrae as opera daemoniaca, in that they bear the resemblances of things (similitudines rerum) as demons follow the prima opera divina. Images are as it were demonic devices (daemonica machinamenta). Expanding on Plato, Ficino postulated a distinctive demonic dimension in the processes of human imagination by attributing the innermost images within one’s soul to what he called a ‘spiritual and demonic animal’ — ‘Imaginamenta quoque nostra quodammodo etiam daemonica virtute fiunt’.78

Imagination that Harms and Imagination that Heals Ficino’s view of the imagination and its powers has an obvious Platonic inspiration and retains the same elusive attitudes towards images and their effects on human life. Images are the farthest removed from the ideas (the ïõóéá üíôùò ïõóá of Platonic memory) and yet Ficino agrees with Plato that they have a degree of dwindled reality (Plato cum suis imagines esse vult aliquid).79 Likewise, the imagination has the power to alter the body because it is in the very nature of images to maintain a special bond with their originals. Ficino reports Proclus’s opinion that magicians were capable of affecting the images and shadows of things (afficere rerum imagines atque umbras) and, ‘by means of these affected images and shadows’, they could affect the things themselves. ‘It is as if the images and shadows had some nature of their own that reached to things and that through this nature a certain mutual sympathy could be achieved.’80 Independently of the magic power of images and imagination, it is the very physiological function of the imagination, as I have argued in the previous

77

Ficino, In Platonis Sophistam, in Icastes, p. 270, with Allen’s commentary, pp. 175–77.

78

Ficino, In Platonis Sophistam, in Icastes, pp. 271, 272.

79

Ficino, In Platonis Sophistam, in Icastes, p. 272. On Plato’s complex position on images and imagination, see Linda M. Napolitano Valditara, Platone e le ‘ragioni’ dell’immagine: Percorsi filosofici e deviazioni tra metafore e miti (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2007). 80

Ficino, In Platonis Sophistam, in Icastes, pp. 274–75, with Allen’s commentary, pp. 191–93.

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sections, that explains why this faculty, understood as idolum — in charge of both the life of the senses and the life of the vegetative processes — fashions the reality of the human body and, through the body, the perceptual world of human experience. As in the case of demonic bodies, therefore, human bodies are constantly shaped and transformed by the imagination. Some parts are more sensitive to its action than others, but given the centrality of the blood, as both a compendium of the basic elements of nature and the primordial anatomical matter, the body as a whole is a structure that is responsive to the operations of the imagination. This, of course, is particularly evident in the case of melancholic affections, in which the nexus between blood, black bile, and imagination is at its strongest. Ficino distinguishes two types of melancholy: natural (which consists in the thicker and drier part of the blood) and adust (which is produced by a process of combustion involving one of the four principal humours). While natural melancholy can improve judgement and wisdom, it can also becloud the imagination and cause madness.81 In both cases, the representations of the imagination, be they aware or not, influence the formation of the humour in question and are in turn influenced by its material quality. The dark colour of the bile is responsible for the production of dark representations of reality. Among the diseases of the imagination, lovesickness represents a paradigmatic case for Ficino that shows the extent to which the imagination may alter the vital processes of the body. Assiduous thinking alters the fundamental processes of concoction in the body, from the digestion of food and sanguification to the growth and maintenance of the organs.82 The unremitting concentration on the object of love by the lover’s imagination (fantasia) wastes the spirits and causes an excess of melancholic blood. The image of the desired object is then impressed

81

Ficino, Three Books on Life, p. 117. See also Platonic Theology, IV , 122. On Ficinian melancholy, see: Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art ([London]: Nelson, [1964]); Noel L. Brann, The Debate over the Origin of Genius during the Italian Renaissance: The Theories of Supernatural Frenzy and Natural Melancholy in Accord and in Conflict on the Threshold of the Scientific Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2002), pp. 82–117. On post-Ficinian melancholy, see Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Jeremy Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy and Madness in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 82

Ficino, El libro dell’amore, p. 135: ‘La intentione dello amante tutta si rivolta nella assidua cogitatione della persona amata, e quivi tutta la forza e la naturale complessione è attenta, e però el cibo nello stomaco male si cuoce.’

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onto the supple substance of the spirits and transmitted throughout the body by the flowing blood, which incessantly waters and regenerates all the parts of the organism.83 No wonder, says Ficino, that the blood, ‘painted with a certain likeness’ (di certa similitudine dipinto), outlines (disegni) the same image in some parts of the body.84 No other syndrome demonstrates in a more graphic way how the imagination is constantly in the process of moulding the body, altering its anatomy and physiology so that it can adjust to new perceptions of reality.85 In cases of lovesickness, the imaginary and imaginative activities of the soul coalesce unambiguously in one distorted and distorting representation of things, for the lovesick person resolves external reality into his or her world of imaginary perceptions, while the internal processes of the body are dramatically reshaped by the imaginative power of the soul. Lovesickness can certainly be seen as an exceptional case. The fact remains, though, that the majority of diseases depends on what Ficino characterizes as the ‘souring’ (rincerconimento) of the blood due to the perturbed condition of one’s imaginary world.86 Indeed, in De vita, Ficino argues that the relationship between the blood and contemplative abstraction is much closer than one would initially expect: undoubtedly the contemplation is usually as good as the compliance of the sense; the sense is as good as is the spirit; the spirit is as good as is both the blood and those three forces which we mentioned — that is, the natural, vital and animal, by which, through which and in which the spirits themselves are conceived, born and nourished.87

This may sound like a manifesto for a form of psychophysical parallelism, but in fact Ficino’s medicine is asymmetrically tilted towards the mind. Because its premises lie in a fully fledged spiritual view of the cosmos, recovery depends on a careful use of the faculties of the soul. The success of Ficinian therapies rests

83

Ficino, El libro dell’amore, p. 201: ‘E perché tutti e membri del corpo, come tutto el giorno s’appassano, così ribagnandosi a poco a poco per la rugiada del nutrimento rinverdiscono, seguita che di dì in dì el corpo di ciascuno, el quale a poco a poco si disseccò, similmente si rifaccia.’ 84

Ficino, El libro dell’amore, p. 202.

85

Ficino, El libro dell’amore, p. 136. On Agostino Nifo’s criticism of Ficino’s disembodied view of love, see Jill Kraye, ‘Ficino in the Firing Line’, in Marsilio Ficino: His Theology, His Philosophy, His Legacy, ed. by Allen and Rees with Davies, pp. 383–85. 86 87

Ficino, El libro dell’amore, p. 207.

Ficino, Three Books on Life, p. 110: ‘talis plurimum ferme contemplatio est, quale sensus ipsius obsequium; talis autem sensus, qualis et spiritus; spiritus vero talis, qualis et sanguis et tres illae vires quas diximus: naturalis scilicet, vitalis et animalis, a quibus, per quas, in quibus spiritus ipsi concipiuntur, nascuntur atque foventur’.

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largely on appropriating and applying Platonic and Plotinian strategies of abstraction and ascesis. While interpreting Plotinus, who in turn is interpreting a renowned locus in Plato’s Republica, Ficino reiterates that ‘there are two types of separation’, the one through moral philosophy, whereby the soul separates itself from the passions (perturbationes) that comply with the requests of the body, the other through contemplative philosophy, whereby the soul separates itself from the senses and the imagination. Undoubtedly, since it is not a part of the compound, the soul can turn into itself and into the first causes (in seipsam primasque causas converti potest) and duly resolve any compound into its simple parts and these likewise into simple, self-existing forms.88

The training of the soul through the exercise of the virtues (Plato’s political and purgative virtues) leads the imagination to gradually conform to reason and the intellect.89 Human beings live in a condition of distraction, turned towards images that reflect the reality of the senses. A key condition for the attainment of greater awareness (animadversio) is what Ficino calls vacatio animae (or alienatio), and the highest form of alienation is the one that occurs in people with chaste minds.90 They do not reject the imagination completely; rather they protect their intellectual visions under the veils of the imagination (phantasia).91 In the end though, the happiness of human reason consists in converting itself to the life of the intellect, and the imagination cannot be part of this exercise in intellectual conversion because it always finds itself in a state of laborious exertion and constantly depends on external objects.92 To know is to identify with the known thing (‘the faculty of knowledge, in the very act of knowledge, becomes one thing with the object of knowledge’).93 In this fundamental principle of both knowledge and being lies the key for man’s elevation or degeneration. Depending on the

88

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1550.

89

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1557. See also Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV , 18, 130. In his article on Ficino’s supposedly ‘Avicennian Augustinianism’, Marian Heitzman compared Ficino’s theory of mental purification to Avicenna’s theory of abstraction (‘L’agostinismo avicennizzante’, p. 299). 90

Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV , 150–68.

91

Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV , 168: ‘ii omnes, quemadmodum et somniantes, quicquid mente cernebant, phantasiae velaminibus statim operiebant, ita ut visa mentis, phantasiae umbraculis obscurata, interprete indigerent’. 92

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1568.

93

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1725.

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reality with which he wants to identify, he has power to reach the intellect or to degenerate into matter. In his commentary on Plotinus, while reminding his readers that magical spells can cause harm to both the body and the soul, especially to ‘weak’ souls (that is to say, souls that are too prone to the influence of the imagination and not sufficiently shielded by the force of the intellect — imaginationi addictae, nec intellectu velut Palladis clypeo hastaque munitae), Ficino warns the soul in search of both bodily and spiritual balance that the imagination does not have the last therapeutic word. He describes Plotinus’s therapy of the intellect in terms of Christian spirituality. In his opinion, when Plotinus wrote that the foundations of happiness were to be found in the conjunction of man’s mind with the divine good and that such a union made the ascetic soul immune to physical pain, he was in fact following the example of Christian martyrs rather than models of pagan wisdom.94 More than the imagination, then, ‘faith is the life of medicines’, as is explained in De vita.95 In a letter to Bernardo Bembo the point is made unequivocally clear: nowhere is there found a medicine adequate for earthly diseases (morbi terreni), except divine love and worship. Nor is that wrong. For in any illness, where the medicine does not overcome the condition of the evil humour (qualitas mali humoris), it is transformed into the humours, disorders the body, saps the strength and thus increases the burden upon them. Therefore, as all our infirmity and adversity is of the body, and worldly, undoubtedly anyone who tries to help an ill of this sort with bodily and worldly medicines labours in vain. Believe me, the need here is for a far stronger medicine; a medicine, I say, which is spiritual and above the world, whence it may drive out bodily and worldly illnesses.96

Conclusion: The Ontological Status of the ‘imaginary’ As pointed out earlier, Wier used a key passage from Ficino’s paraphrasis of Iamblichus’s De mysteriis to disparage alleged cases of demonic possession: what we imagine under the spell of some enchantment (fascinati) has no real being or activity (actionis et essentiae veritas) apart from the very production of images 94

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1566.

95

Ficino, Three Books on Life, pp. 203, 353.

96

Ficino to Bernardo Bembo, in Letters, translated by members of the Language Department of the School of Economic Science, London, 7 vols (London: Shepheard-Walwyn, 1975–2003), III (1981), 8.

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(imaginamenta), for the end of magic is not to produce reality (facere simpliciter aliquid), but to stretch the products of the imagination to the point of making things appear as if they were real (usque ad apparendum imaginamenta porrigere).97 For Wier, who figures prominently in the history of the gradual transformation of the premodern and early modern notion of ‘imaginative’ being into the modern belief in ‘imaginary’ reality, the imagination is the faculty of empty selfreferentiality and perilous self-delusion, and all the diseases of the imagination — whether bodily alterations due to the imaginative control of vegetative processes (the idolum), corporeal manifestations of inner disorders, or simply passions — are in the end imaginary. For Ficino, the same passage had a very different meaning. Iamblichus’s treatise on theurgy demonstrated that any product of imaginary reality (even completely illusory ones) was simply one of the many levels of reality enacted by the power of the imagination in its ascending and descending movements between the intellect and nature. As stated at the beginning, philosophical frameworks of the Platonic kind are characterized by the thesis that all reality that can be perceived by the senses is in a way imaginary. The being that is real (üíôùò ïí) is by definition unimaginable. All the more reason, then, for the power of the imagination (especially when considered as phantasia) to be invested with vicarious duties of the highest responsibility. In this sense, for a sentient body imaginary reality is reality tout court. Whenever the mind or the imagination (phantasia) ‘vehemently turns to something and decides it is either very harmful or extremely useful and pleasant’, then ‘the body experiences sensation’ (corpus aliquid patitur).98 The symptom may be apparent (because all phenomenal reality is apparent); however, it is perceived as intensely real because man’s reality is made of appearances laden with emotions and expectations. For Ficino, a way out from the all-pervasive nature of imaginary reality (from the pure figments of imaginatio to the half-dematerialized ‘intentions’ of phantasia) lies in forms of heightened consciousness, characterized by the knowledge of the intellect and, beyond that, by a possible union with the One. In his commentary on Plotinus, Ficino contrasts the highest form of intellectual knowledge achievable by the human soul with its rational counterpart. While the first is no ‘imaginary notion’ (imaginaria notio) and is defined in terms of real union and contact with the intellect (indeed ‘wisdom in the divine intellect can be called tactus’), reason can be properly characterized as anima imaginaria, that

97

Ficino, paraphrasis to Iamblichus, De mysteriis, in Opera omnia, II, 1890.

98

Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV , 118–19.

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is, a soul that constitutively relies on images.99 The highest form of good attainable by man is also the most intimate to his soul, that is, the intelligible good. All other goods are more or less external: wealth, honour, exercise of power, and the pleasures of the senses. Below the delights of the imagination (imaginationis oblectamenta) there are the purely imaginary pleasures (imaginaria), every time the imagination is not even considering external reality.100 The truly happy man, writes Ficino in Theologia platonica, is ‘totally united to the good’. He describes this union once again as a form of superintellectual ‘touch’: since the one and the good is desired by an instinct prior to understanding, so is it achieved by a kind of touching superior to understanding, a unifying contact if I may call it such. This comes about through our own unity, which is superior to understanding and which links the soul itself to the universal unity and goodness, not with the image-linked bond of understanding (imaginaria intelligentiae copula), but with the true substantial union itself.101

Likewise, the appetite of the senses is based on images ([a]ppetitus qui sensum sequitur imaginarius est), but the appetite that overcomes even the limits of the intelligible is the closest to the ultimate root of being (substantiae intimus).102 The consequences that such a view of the imagination has on Ficino’s notion of spiritual medicine are momentous. Given the ubiquitous nature of the imaginative and imaginary reality in man’s universe, diseases of the body are ultimately diseases of the soul. As we have seen while exploring Ficino’s physiology of the imagination, nature is a power ruled by the intellect, however recalcitrant matter’s response may be to the action of intelligible reality. The substitute of the intellect in the world of nature and material transformations — its simulacrum — is the imagination. However, the omniform power of the imagination is different from that of the intellect. While this acts independently of lower strata of reality, the adaptable nature of the imagination reacts differently to different ontological levels. In the Plotinian sense of a vegetative, natural imagination, it governs the body and its unremitting processes of growth and restoration of life. As the principle of bodily awareness (imaginatio), it organizes the perceptions of the senses, unifies their appearances and provides an initial platform for abstractions 99

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1558. See also Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV , 28: ‘Platonici omnes probant in rationibus contemplandis divinam rationem tactu quodam mentis substantiali potius quam imaginario tangi.’ 100

Ficino, In Plotinum, in Opera omnia, II, 1567.

101

Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV , 41.

102

Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV , 42.

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of a higher level. Finally, as phantasia, and especially as phantasia discreta, the imagination provides visual reasoning, concepts of particulars, control of the appetites, and principles of deliberative thinking. Therefore, it will not be too much of a stretch or of pedantic fastidiousness if, going back to my original reversal of the old adage (corpus sanum in imaginatione sana), I will rephrase the proverb once again and say that, when it comes to Ficino’s medicine, the following should be the most appropriate version: corpus sanum in phantasia sana.103

103

I would like to thank Michael J. B. Allen and Erin Black for their comments and stylistic suggestions.

M ELANCHOLY , IMAGINATION , AND D REAMING IN R ENAISSANCE L EARNING Angus Gowland

I

n a brief Digressio de somniis supplementing his 1523 commentary on Aristotle’s Parva naturalia, the Italian physician and philosopher Agostino Nifo remarked upon the association between dreams and the seasons of the year. Those occurring in autumn may be related to the melancholic humour, which, he noted, is an ‘agitator of dreams’ and ‘the kindling-wood or nourishment of dreams’.1 Later in the century, in his De morbis melancholicis (1597) the renowned French physician André du Laurens also remarked on the connection between melancholy and dreaming, explaining that both were to be referred to the workings of the imagination.2 Following this lead, I shall here be exploring some of the ways in which the imagination was theorized in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century medicine and natural philosophy — in the first place, as the central explanatory concept in accounts of both melancholy and dreaming; and further, as the key element in discussions of melancholic dreams that illustrates the problematic and potentially controversial relationship, in this area of psychology, between (on the one hand) medicine and natural philosophy, and (on the other) Christian theology. The most important source for learned theories of dreaming in the Renaissance was undoubtedly Aristotle’s Parva naturalia. Alongside the De anima, the 1

Aristotle, Parva naturalia, comm. by Agostino Nifo, 2nd edn (Venice: Hieronymus Scotus, 1551), fol. 105v : ‘An q[uia] his temporibus melancholia movetur, quae est somniorum concitatrix […] Haec enim atrae bilis excessum indicant, quae somniorum, aut fomes, aut pabulum est.’ All translations are my own unless otherwise indicated. 2

André Du Laurens, De morbis Melancholicis, & eorum curatione, chap. 4, in Opera omnia, 2 vols (Paris: Fouët, 1628), II, 67: ‘ad Imaginationem refertur insomnium aeque ac Melancholia’.

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Parva naturalia had a central role in university teaching in medicine and natural philosophy, received a host of new translations, and attracted a large, complex body of commentary literature.3 Without wishing to underestimate the significance of writings on dreaming that were more or less purely Neoplatonist, it is not an overstatement to say that the accounts found in orthodox Renaissance natural philosophy and medicine are predominantly, if not exclusively, Aristotelian in character.4 In this discussion of the relationship between melancholy and dreaming I shall be aiming to show the ways in which Aristotle’s works were interpreted and related to medical and theological doctrine. For the most part, this was an integrative enterprise. Natural philosophers and physicians writing about these topics were not faced with serious disagreements between the principal authorities of their disciplines — Aristotle and Galen respectively — and drew freely upon the writings of both in their discussions. The task of harmonizing the Aristotelian theory of dreaming and the Galenic theory of melancholy with Christian theology, however, was less straightforward, particularly on the issue of divinely inspired dreams. As with other areas of Aristotle’s philosophy, there were a number of ways of interpreting his works on dreams.5 I shall suggest that these are broadly divisible into three categories: those which

3

See Charles H. Lohr, Latin Aristotle Commentaries, II: Renaissance Authors (Florence: Olschki, 1988). 4

For some notable Neoplatonic accounts, analysing dreams and melancholy as forms of vacatio facilitating divine inspiration, see Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology, XIII. 2, ed. by J. Hankins and trans. by M. J. B. Allen, 6 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001–06), IV (2002), 150–69; Symphorien Champier, De triplici disciplina (Lyon: Claude Davost for Simon Vincent, 1508), sig. k iiijr et sqq. The idea of the prophetic dream was frequently sanctioned by appealing to the classificatory scheme of Macrobius, as in Kaspar Peucer, Commentarius, de praecipuis divinationum generibus (Frankfurt: Wechel, 1607), p. 421. For a typically Aristotelian account, see, for example, Jean Fernel, The Physiologia of John Fernel (1567), trans. and comm. by J. Forrester and J. Henry (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2003), bk V , 8, pp. 340–43; bk VI, 11, pp. 480–83, which nevertheless makes no explicit mention of Aristotle. 5

On the varieties of Renaissance Aristotelianism see particularly Charles B. Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983); Schmitt, The Aristotelian Tradition and Renaissance Universities (London: Variorum, 1984). For discussion of the chronology and terminology of ‘Aristotelianism’ in this era see also Edward Grant, ‘Ways to Interpret the Terms “Aristotelian” and “Aristotelianism” in Medieval and Renaissance Natural Philosophy’, History of Science, 25 (1987), 335–58, and J. M. M. H. Thijssen, ‘Some Reflections on Continuity and Transformation of Aristotelianism in Medieval (and Renaissance) Natural Philosophy’, Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale, 2 (1991), 504–28.

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support Aristotle’s psychological explanation of dreaming but reject his key arguments about divine dreams on the basis of scriptural authority; those which confirm both his psychology and his position on divine dreams, interpreting them (often Neoplatonically) to be in line with Christian doctrine; and those which endorsed most or all of the key Aristotelian contentions on these subjects, but used them to construct controversial, subversive, or heterodox arguments that exposed a cleavage between natural knowledge and divine revelation. The early part of this essay outlines the role given to the imagination in orthodox Galenic medical theories of the melancholic disease. This was central to explanations of the principal symptoms of fear, sadness, delusions, and hallucinations, which generally tended to show the determination of such symptoms by black bile in a materialist fashion. Such materialist determinism, as I show a little further on, corresponded with and informed the way in which dreaming was typically theorized by sixteenth-century learned physicians and natural philosophers. The essay then outlines the contours of learned discussions of Aristotle’s views on dream-divination, concentrating particularly on the diverse reception of his ideas about the dreams of melancholics, and the manner in which the potentially unsettling effects of materialistic accounts of psychological phenomena upon Christian teaching were either tamed or exploited. We shall see that such discussions drew and impinged upon a number of issues that had become highly controversial in the course of the sixteenth century: most notably, the questions of the immortality of the soul, and of the possibility of divine inspiration; and most fundamentally — continuing a debate that had been vigorously contested by theologians and natural philosophers throughout the Middle Ages — the relationship between the supernatural and natural domains.6 As such, these discussions had the capacity to disturb an element of the fragile harmonization of religious doctrine and Aristotelian philosophy that had generally prevailed in European universities from the late Middle Ages well into the sixteenth century.7 Perhaps most conspicuously, one interpretation of the Aristotelian theory of melancholic dreaming provided a plank in the radically subversive philosophical programme of Pietro Pomponazzi, which was in turn

6

See particularly Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), pp. 109–33; and Robert Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 7

See Charles H. Lohr, ‘The Sixteenth-Century Transformation of the Aristotelian Natural Philosophy’, in Aristotelismus und Renaissance: In memoriam Charles B. Schmitt, ed. by Eckhard Kessler, Charles Lohr, and Walter Sparn (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1988), pp. 89–99.

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employed by later ‘free-thinkers’ sometimes labelled retrospectively as ‘libertines’.8 But as I shall note briefly in closing, in the seventeenth century this interpretation also parallelled and intertwined with polemical deployments of medical arguments about melancholy in theories of religious enthusiasm, and prefigured an element of the critiques of contemporary forms of religion formulated by Thomas Hobbes and Benedict de Spinoza.

Melancholy and Imagination in Renaissance Medical Theory In the Renaissance, the disease of melancholy was typically considered by Galenic physicians to be a species of the genus delirium (derangement), and its most prominent characteristics were attributed to its internal material origin, that is, the cold and dry black bile.9 It was conventionally differentiated from the other species of delirium, mania, and phrenitis (or frenzy), principally because it was chronic rather than acute, without fever, and accompanied by symptoms of apparently groundless fear and sorrow.10 The core of this account derives from classical and late antique Greek sources. One of the most important of these is the Hippocratic Aphorisms, VI. 23, which states that ‘fear and despondency persevering for a long time means melancholy’, and is probably the most frequently cited locus in learned discussions of melancholic symptomatology in this era.11 Equally, if not more important to early 8 René Pintard, Le Libertinage Érudit dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle, 2 vols (Paris: Boivin, 1943). The connections and similarities between some of these thinkers were often very loose, however; see the reservations about Pintard’s categorization expressed in Craig Martin, ‘Rethinking Renaissance Averroism’, Intellectual History Review, 17 (2007), 3–28 (pp. 5–6). 9

See the discussion in Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. by R . Blair, T. Faulkner, and N. Kiessling, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2000), 1.1.1.4, I (1989), 162. 10

As in Du Laurens, De morbis melancholicis, chap. 4, in Opera omnia, II, 59; Girolamo Capo di Vacca, Practica medicina (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1594), I. 10, p. 94; Eliau Montalto, Archipathologia in qua internarum capitis affectionum essentia, causae, signa, praesagia, & curatio accuratissima indagine edisseruntur (Lyon: Jacquin, 1614), bk IV , 1, pp. 222–23; Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 1.1.1.4, I, 132–33. 11

‘Çí ö âïò ´ äõóèõì ç ðïë×í ÷ñ íïí äéáôåë , ìåëáã÷ïëéêÎí ôÎ ôïéï ôïí ’ (Hippocrates, IV , trans. by W. H. S. Jones (London: Heinemann, 1931), pp. 184–85). See also Galen’s commentary on this Aphorism, translated by Nicolaeus Leonicenus and revised by Martianus Rota and Janus Cornarius, in Galen, Omnia tum quae antehac extabant, tum quae nunc primum inventa sunt, Opera in Latinam conversa, ed. by Conrad Gessner, 4 vols (Lyon: Frellonius, 1550), IV , col. 698.

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modern medical writers were Galen’s De locis affectis, III. 10 and De symptomatum causis, II. 7. 2, which glossed the Hippocratic text and provided an authoritative outline of the melancholic disease from kinds and causes to cures. In the Galenic account, there are three kinds of melancholy according to the bodily site of the accumulation of the cold, dry, dark, and toxic melancholic humour: the head, the whole body, or the hypochondrium. In each kind, the part primarily affected is the brain,12 where the psychic pneuma (or spirit) mediates the functions of the rational (or hegemonic) soul, such as thought, memory, knowledge, imagination, understanding, and sensation.13 The De symptomatum causis refers its most prominent symptoms — the peculiarly irrational fear and despondency — to the darkness of the humour, which, by ‘taking possession of the power of the rational soul’, generates fear in the same manner as external darkness.14 This account is expanded in the De locis affectis, where it is argued that melancholic symptoms are caused by the ascent of humoral evaporations through the body to the brain. Hence, in those suffering from the inflammation of melancholic humours in the hypochondrium, ‘the colour of the black bile, casting shadow over the seat of the mind, creates fear’.15 Melancholic vapours in the brain, however, also induce a variety of hallucinatory derangements.16 These Hippocratic and Galenic texts formed the bedrock of the Renaissance medical symptomatology of melancholy, but another important locus was the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata, XXX, 1, which explains extraordinary achievements in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts, as well as prophetic inspiration and other forms of ecstatic madness, as the effects of heated black bile on the

12

See Galen, Opera, II, cols 232, 886 (= De locis affectis, III, 6. 10: De symptomatum causis, II, 7. 1).

13

Two important loci are De Hippocratis et Platonis placitis, I. 7. 3, 8, and De usu partium, I. 8. 10–14. For Galen’s psychology see R . J. Hankinson, ‘Galen’s Anatomy of the Soul’, Phronesis, 36 (1991), 197–233; R . E. Siegel, Galen on Psychology, Psychopathology, and Function and Diseases of the Nervous System (Basel: Karger, 1973); Siegel, Galen’s System of Physiology and Medicine (Basel: Karger, 1968), pp. 116–35; and Pierluigi Donini, ‘Psychology’, in The Cambridge Companion to Galen, ed. by R . J. Hankinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 184–209. 14 Galen, De symptomatum causis, II, 7. 2, in Galen: On Diseases and Symptoms, ed. and trans. by Ian Johnston (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 264 (translation slightly modified, rendering ‘áñ÷ç ’ as ‘power’). 15

Galen, Opera, II, col. 890: ‘atrae bilis color, mentis sedem tenebris similem reddens, timorem efficit’. 16

Galen, Opera, II, cols 889–90.

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mind.17 This text had been given an influential astrological commentary in 1310 by Pietro d’Abano and a new humanist translation by Theodore Gaza in 1453– 54,18 and when integrated within a Neoplatonic cosmology by the philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), it provided the basis for the famous Renaissance idea of genial melancholy.19 But although Ficino’s doctrine was extremely influential, especially in literary and artistic circles, learned physicians sympathetic to the notion of melancholic genius tended to present it within a Galenic intellectual framework as one of a number of symptoms of the condition; in fact, many treated it with caution, and those who were suspicious of Neoplatonism or occultism typically preferred to present Problemata, XXX, 1 as a materialist explanation without Ficino’s adornments.20 Renaissance medical writers, then, referred frequently to these ancient texts in their descriptions and explanations of melancholy. The doctrine that fear (timor) and despondency or sadness (moestitia, tristitia) are the principal symptoms of the disease was almost universally accepted, as was the Galenic idea that these may be traced to the effects of black bile on the vaporous psychic pneuma (or spiritus animalis) in the brain.21 However, these authors used medieval scholasticAristotelian psychology to settle more precisely posed questions of which functions of soul or cerebral ventricles were affected in melancholy, and by what

17

X X X.

(Ps.-) Aristotle, Problems, trans. by W. S. Hett, 2 vols (London: Heinemann, 1936–37), 1, II, 162–63.

18 See Nancy G. Siraisi, ‘The Expositio Problematum Aristotelis of Peter of Abano’, Isis, 61 (1970), 321–39; Graziella Federici Vescovini, ‘L’Expositio Succincta problematum Aristotelis de Pierre d’Abano’, and John Monfansani, ‘George of Trebizond’s Critique of Theodore Gaza’s Translation of the Aristotelian Problemata’, both in Aristotle’s Problemata in Different Times and Different Tongues, ed. by Pieter de Leemans and Michèle Goyens (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2006), pp. 55–69, 275–93. 19

Marsilio Ficino, De vita libri tres, esp. I. 4–5, III. 2, in Opera, pp. 497–98, 533.

20

See Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (London: Nelson, 1964); and the corrective analysis in Winfried Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius and Utopia in the Renaissance (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1991). The most useful comprehensive study is now Noel L. Brann, The Debate over the Origin of Genius during the Italian Renaissance: The Theories of Supernatural Frenzy and Natural Melancholy in Accord and in Conflict on the Threshold of the Scientific Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2002). 21

For example, see Giambattista da Monte, Consilia medica (Nürnberg: vom Berg and Neuber, 1559), consil. CLXXIII. The same explanation was also available in De Melancholia, ex Galeno, Rufo, & Posidonio, ed. by Aëtius, printed in Galen, Opera, IV , col. 1184.

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means. Three aspects of this psychology are important here: first, the internal senses of the organic soul were often conceived as imagination (sometimes subdivided into common sense/sensus communis, imagination/virtus imaginativa and phantasy/phantasia), reason (sometimes comprised of the virtus cogitativa and virtus aestimativa), and memory (virtus memorativa), and these are often assigned to the anterior, middle, and posterior ventricles respectively.22 Second, the subtle spiritus was typically divided into animal, vital, and natural kinds, with postulations about the ways in which these could affect the functioning of bodily organs and activities of soul — principally through variations in quantity, quality, and expansion or contraction.23 And third, broadly following medieval accounts of the passage of sense-data from external objects to the soul, objects were considered to emit sensible images (or species, conveying sense-data) which can be received by the external sensory organs, where they stimulate physiological movements that are passed on to the ‘internal’ senses. Here, faculties of common sense, imagination, phantasy, estimation, and memory — all operating by means of the animal spirits — were said to analyse and process these movements, produce phantasmata, and store the results. In this procedure, the sensible species are impressed upon the animal spirits, which in turn communicate with the other forms of spiritus and pass on related effects to the bodily organs.24 The adoption of this theoretical apparatus enabled medical writers to construct detailed accounts of melancholic psychology. I shall now illustrate their key features by referring especially to the writings of three prominent and influential learned physicians of this period: two Italian professors of medicine, Girolamo Capo di

22

But the dispute over cerebral localization of faculties is deemed superfluous to the therapeutic concerns of the physician in Giambattista da Monte, Consilia medica, XIX : ‘Neque hic opus est disputare, an facultas illa disursiva habeat sedem suam in medio ventriculo cerebri, vel alibi.’ See, generally, Grazia Tonelli Olivieri, ‘Galen and Francis Bacon: Faculties of the Soul and the Classification of Knowledge’, in The Shapes of Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. by Donald R . Kelley and Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1991), pp. 61–70. 23 For an account of the healthy functioning of animal spirits in the brain see Ercole Sassonia, De melancholia, in Opera practica (Padua: Bolzetta, 1639), pp. 18a–b. 24

On debates concerning species in this period see Leen Spruit, Species intelligibilis: From Perception to Knowledge, II: Renaissance Controversies, Later Scholasticism, and the Elimination of the Intelligible Species in Modern Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 20–351. On visual species in particular, see Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); and David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from AlKindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).

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Vacca (1523–89) and Ercole Sassonia (1551–1607) — both of whom worked within the humanistic Galenic tradition at Padua made famous across Europe particularly by their illustrious predecessor, Giambattista da Monte25 — and the renowned Portuguese Jewish exile Filoteu Eliau Montalto (1567–1616), who studied in Salamanca before travelling to Italy and becoming court physician to the Grand Duke Ferdinand in Florence, and subsequently to the queen consort of France, Marie de’ Medicis.26 The substantial chapters on melancholy in Capo di Vacca’s Practica medicina (1594) and Montalto’s Archipathologia (1614) illustrate how the condition was typically analysed alongside other mental diseases in works of practical medicine. Ercole’s De melancholia tractatus, first published in Venice in 1620 but subsequently included in the editions of his Opera practica issued in 1639 and 1658, was perhaps the most sustained and precisely articulated treatment of the subject by a Galenic medical writer in this era. Taken together, these works suggest that from the later sixteenth century the theory of melancholy was being elaborated in ever finer detail, but they are also broadly representative of the understanding of the disease in Renaissance Galenism, effectively summarising an area of medical pathology that, generally speaking, remained remarkably consistent in the period from the Middle Ages to the later seventeenth century.27 The majority of learned physicians in the Renaissance agreed that the bodily part primarily affected in melancholy was the brain. According to Capo di Vacca, melancholy is properly defined as ‘the principal dysfunction of the anterior [ventricle of the] brain, accompanied by fear and sadness, and deriving from a gloomy disposition’.28 This was uncontentious,29 though Montalto argued that the heart could also be secondarily affected: since blood rises to the brain, and vital spirits partially constitute the animal spirits, Avicenna correctly stated that

25

See Jerome Bylebyl, ‘The School of Padua: Humanistic Medicine in the Sixteenth Century’, in Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century, ed. by Charles Webster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 335–70, esp. pp. 345–49 on Da Monte. 26

For Montalto’s career see Harry Friedenwald, The Jews and Medicine, 2 vols (New York: Ktav, 1967), II, 468–96. 27

See Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, p. 3; Angus Gowland, ‘The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy’, Past and Present, 191 (2006), 77–120 (pp. 86–88). 28

Capo di Vacca, Practica medicina, I. 10, p. 94: ‘delirium melancholicum est functio corrupta principalis, cum timore & moerore, cerebri anterioris, dependens ab affectione tenebricosa’. 29

See for instance Du Laurens, De morbis melancholicis, chap. 4, in Opera omnia, II, 60.

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in melancholy the distempered brain and heart could influence each other sympathetically; and this accords with Galen, for whom the heart was the physiological seat of the principal passionate symptoms of the disease.30 And Galen was undoubtedly the most important authority in Renaissance discussions of the effects of melancholy on the psychic faculties. It was commonly inferred from the description of the ‘false imaginings’ of melancholics in De symptomatum causis, II. 7. 2 that the rational faculty primarily depraved was the imagination,31 and from Galen’s description of the irrational passions and suicidal impulses of melancholics, it was also deduced that reason itself could be damaged.32 Capo di Vacca identified the anterior ventricle of the brain as the affected part, but also stated that reason in the middle ventricle could be simultaneously affected, albeit temporarily.33 Montalto argued that the emotional symptoms of the disease originated in faulty cognition, and observed that melancholics suffered imaginative delusions and hallucinations that would normally be overruled by the rational faculty. His conclusion was that reason and imagination must both be damaged.34 Similarly, according to Ercole, the commonly held view that the imagination is the primarily corrupted faculty in melancholy was incorrect: as the De anima made clear, the monstrous or terrifying images issuing from a depraved

30

Montalto, Archipathologia, IV . 3, pp. 228–29; see also IV . 14, p. 259. For the same conclusion see Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, I, 163–64; Daniel Sennert, Opera omnia, 3 vols (Lyon: Huguetan and Ravaud, 1650), I, 422a–b. Ercole was unusual in refraining from identifying the brain as the primarily affected part, implying this question depended on the somatic location of the preponderance of black bile (brain, whole body, or hypochondrium): Sassonia, De melancholia, p. 26a. 31

See, for instance, the translation and commentary in Galen, Aliquot opera […] De Inaequali intemperie Liber I. De Differentiis & causis morborum, symptomatumque Libri VI. De Iudiciis Libri III. De Curatione per sanguinis missionem Liber I, trans. and comm. by Leonhart Fuchs (Paris: du Pays, 1549[?]–55), pp. 138–39. 32

Giambattista da Monte presented cases of melancholy in which atrabilious vapours damage reasoning (discursus), but also observed that imagination and memory could be affected: Da Monte, Consilia medica, consil. XVI, XIX , XVIII. For cases of melancholy in which the imagination is solely affected, see consil. X X X , C LX X . 33

However, Capo di Vacca’s argument is presented in a form that suggests that the imagination is corrupted because the anterior ventricle is affected: Practica medicina, I. 10, p. 94; see also the discussion at pp. 96–97, 103. 34

Montalto, Archipathologia, IV . 3, pp. 224–30.

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imagination could only be harmful if the mind or intellect was itself damaged and unable to overrule the other faculties.35 The Galenic idea that fear and despondency in melancholy are a by-product of the effects of black bile or its vapours upon the brain is central to these accounts, where it is elaborated with postulations about the effects of the spirits upon the imagination and its phantasms. Capo di Vacca identified the efficient cause of melancholic perturbations as the ‘shadowy disposition’ (affectio tenebricosa), itself the product of ‘shadowy phantasms’ (phantasmata tenebricosa) created by the imagination when influenced externally by the presence of excessively fearful or distressing objects, or internally by corrupt animal spirits.36 Since the intellective faculties relied upon the imagination to process sense-images and present it with phantasms, the reasoning powers in the middle ventricle could be temporarily affected in melancholy, and this was why melancholics sometimes killed themselves.37 In a detailed discussion of the explanation for melancholic symptoms found in the De locis affectis and the De symptomatum causis, Montalto demonstrated that for Galen the operations of the brain were affected not only by the primary qualities (heat, coldness, moisture, dryness) but also by thickness, thinness, softness, hardness, whiteness, and blackness.38 More specifically, Montalto went on to explain that the representation of images in the internal senses — itself the origin of passions in the sensitive soul — depended on the character of the animal spirits, which to function correctly should be clear and brilliant. More than the primary qualities, brightness in the spirits and whiteness in the brain assisted the cheerful presentation of sense-images; conversely, dark and murky spirits conveyed them in a distressing and terrifying light.39 ‘This,’ he concluded, ‘is the most powerful 35

Sassonia, De melancholia, pp. 5a–7b. For arguments in favour of the position that the imagination is primarily affected, with reason only secondarily, see Du Laurens, De morbis melancholicis, chaps 2 and 4, in Opera omnia, II. 50, 56; Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, I, 164–65; Girolamo Mercuriale, Medicina practica (Lyon: Pillehotte, 1617), I. 10, pp. 39, 41, 84. Ercole also argues that if this were true, then brutes and children, who have imagination but not reason, would suffer from melancholy — which, apparently, no one claims (De melancholia, p. 6). 36

Capo di Vacca, Practica medicina, I. 10, pp. 94–95. The corruption of animal spirits may itself have external or internal causes, either when the spirits are composed from impure air or from vital spirit that is itself tenebricosus, or more simply when they are mixed with the immediate material cause of the disease, black bile: pp. 97, 99. 37

Capo di Vacca, Practica medicina, I. 10, p. 94. See also the discussion at pp. 96–97.

38

Montalto, Archipathologia, IV . 6, pp. 241–42.

39

The association of bright spirits with intellectual power was often justified by Renaissance authors by references to the maxim of Heraclitus, ‘Lux sicca, anima sapientissima’. A similar idea

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reason why melancholics are never without fear or despondency, because the black humour, the cause of the disease, infuses the seat of the rational soul with perpetual night.’40 To my knowledge, Ercole was the first Galenist to reject outright the orthodox view that fear and sorrow were the definitive characteristics of the disease.41 For him, some melancholics are neither sad nor fearful, and some do not suffer from depraved imaginations.42 But otherwise the most striking aspect of his account is its detailed analysis of the ways in which the animal spirits may corrupt the imagination.43 When the spirits are cold or hot, we are told, they induce depressive or manic symptoms.44 Their different motions also affect the mental faculties and induce particular kinds of hallucination. When excessively dilated, for example, they exit the inside of the brain for its exterior, which heats the external senses and motive powers in the sensitive soul, weakens the rational faculty of judgement, and strengthens the powers of movement and sensation; the result is that melancholics ‘think themselves to be birds, or light bodies, and the imagination cannot be corrected because spirit is not drawn into the interior parts but diffused through the exterior ones’.45 When excessively contracted, they induce fear, despondency, and hallucinations — for example, thinking oneself to be an

is applied to the melancholic humour in Marsilio Ficino, De vita triplici, I. 3, where black bile is said to ‘shine’ when it is moderately warmed in mixture with other humours (Marsilio Ficino, Opera omnia, 2 vols (Basel: Petri, 1576), I, 498, where the Heraclitean saying is also related). 40

Montalto, Archipathologia, IV . 7, pp. 242–43, quote at p. 243: ‘Haec potissima causa est, quare melancholicos timor, ac moeror nunquam deserant, quia nempe ater humor, passionis materia, animae rationalis domicilio perpetuam offundit noctem.’ 41

Acknowledgements that melancholy had many different forms were commonplace, but I am unaware of any comparable assertion from a Galenist concerning the formal definition of the disease. Ercole was perhaps developing the approach to melancholy suggested in Da Monte, Consilia medica, consil. CLXXVIII. See also consil. C LX X : ‘Ideo rident, & laetantur, nunc irati alios percutiunt, sicut omnia contigerunt in hoc iuvene.’ 42

Sassonia, De melancholia, pp. 7b, 8a–b, 9a–10a, proposing five kinds of melancholy according to principal symptoms. 43

Sassonia, De melancholia, p. 12b.

44

Sassonia, De melancholia, pp. 12b–16a.

45

Sassonia, De melancholia, p. 17a: ‘Itaque ubi haec dilatatio modum excedat, ut partes cerebri interiores quasi deserantur, exterioresque sensus, & motus instrumenta spiritu, & caliditate repleantur, tunc imminuitur facultas aestimativa, & augetur haec motiva, & sentiens, ut isti putent se esse aves, aut corpora levia, & volare, neque imaginationem possunt corrigere, non colligente se spiritu ad interiores partes, sed in exteriores diffuso.’

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artificial or immobile body such as a rock or brick.46 When the spirits are ‘confused’ (that is, have a ‘disordered motion’) the imagination produces phantasmata that are distorted in a manner similar to images reflected in turbulent water, so that they are either misleading or monstrous.47 If this confusion of spirits is extreme, mental images are completely destroyed, but when only moderate, the imagination joins together images that ought to be separate, and separates images that ought to be joined together. This is the cause of melancholic visions of monsters, sphinxes, centaurs, goat-stags, and so on, as well as of delusions such as erroneously thinking that one has performed particular actions, or thinking oneself incapable of carrying out everyday tasks.48 Ercole’s account continues with further consideration of the multitude of roles played by the spirits in the depravation of the melancholic imagination and its production of disturbing phantasms. The motion of the animal spirits may be praeter naturam (against nature), when they deviate from their normal course of circulation in the brain (from the rete mirabile to the cerebellum via the front, middle, and posterior ventricles), disordering the processing of sense-data and hindering the activities of thinking and reasoning.49 The substance of the spirits may also be altered by the humours that predominate in a complexion or disease, which can imprint their own species upon the spirits and compel the melancholic soul to seek a corresponding external or foreign object (‘hence, those who have persistent rumbling in their bellies think that they have frogs inside’).50 Excesses of blood, phlegm, or seed may induce imaginative depravations corresponding to the material qualities of the pathological cause — for example, delusions of being made out of snow, rain, or ice should be referred to phlegm.51 Finally, melancholy can arise from animal spirits that have become gloomy, having been mixed with the vapours emitted by the cold, dark, heavy, and dry black bile or else with another substance of these qualities.52 Apart from fear and sorrow, the signs of

46

Sassonia, De melancholia, p. 17a.

47

Sassonia, De melancholia, pp. 17a–18a. See also p. 28a, on the ‘signa melancholiae ex motu spirituum’: ‘chimaeras fingant varias’, etc. 48

Sassonia, De melancholia, pp. 17a–b.

49

Sassonia, De melancholia, pp. 18a–b.

50

Sassonia, De melancholia, p. 18b: ‘sic qui frequentes habent in ventre rugitus, putant se habere ranas.’ 51

Sassonia, De melancholia, pp. 19b–20a. See pp. 18b–20a generally.

52

Sassonia, De melancholia, p. 22a.

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melancholy arising from this source are love of solitude and obscure places, imaginings of death, the dead, devils, and other ‘dark’ objects.53 Ercole’s account, which as we have seen originated in the Galenic doctrine that melancholic delirium involves a diversity of imaginative delusions but was theorized in the terms of Aristotelian psychology, was unparalleled in its finely articulated consideration of the causes of particular delusions. But it did not depart radically from those of his contemporaries. Montalto, for instance, also emphasized the multiplicity of the corrupt imaginings of melancholics.54 Generally speaking, the broadly materialistic character typical of late Renaissance medical explanations for melancholic symptoms is unsurprising, and reflects the tendency, increasingly pronounced in Italian medical and arts faculties as the sixteenth century progressed, to refer this branch of ‘organic’ psychology to the domain of natural, and especially material, causes.55 My more particular concern here, however, is with the manner in which the Galenic depiction of the diverse effects of the qualities of humours and spirits upon the imagination provided the basis for contemporary discussions of melancholic dreaming in learned medicine and natural philosophy, and how such discussions, by potentially undermining theories of supernaturally inspired dreams, could pose unsettling questions about the relationship between these disciplines and theology.

Dreaming and Melancholy in Medicine and Natural Philosophy I now turn to the medical and natural-philosophical understanding of dreams and their relationship with melancholy. It was (to my knowledge) universally accepted by Renaissance physicians that dreams are a useful diagnostic tool, whose content is at least to some extent determined by the humoral mixture of the body.56 53

Sassonia, De melancholia, pp. 28b–29a.

54

Montalto, Archipathologia, pp. 294–96. See also Sennert, Opera, I, 384b: ‘Sed Melancholicorum deliriorum passim plurima occurrunt exempla, & tot sunt Melancholicorum imaginationes, ut numero facile comprehendi non possint.’ 55

See Katherine Park, ‘The Organic Soul’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. by Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 464–84, (pp. 468, 477–84). On learned medical conceptions of nature in this era see Ian Maclean, Le Monde et les hommes selon les médecins de la Renaissance (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2006), esp. pp. 13–31, 55–78. 56 On the connections between dreams and temperaments in the Middle Ages see Marta Fattori, ‘Sogni e temperamenti’, in I sogni nel medioevo, ed. by Tullio Gregory (Rome: Edizioni dell’Anteneo, 1985), pp. 87–109.

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Materialistic conceptions of dreams of this sort, corresponding with the Galenic tendency to analyse the soul in terms of the mixture of bodily qualities, frequently drew upon the pseudo-Galenic De dignotione ex insomniis.57 According to this brief treatise, ‘dreams indicate a certain disposition of our body’,58 probably because ‘in sleep the soul, having entered the depths of the body, and left external perceptions behind, senses the bodily disposition, and conceives an image of all things that it reaches out to, as if they were already present’.59 Its principal argument is illustrated with the claim — recycled endlessly in Renaissance medicine and natural philosophy — that ‘if someone sees a fire in their dream, he is troubled by yellow bile, but if he dreams of smoke, or mist, or deep darkness, by black bile. A rainstorm indicates that cold moisture is in abundance. Snow, ice, and hail indicate cold phlegm’.60 According to the more detailed account of Aristotle, dreams are special forms of phantasm that originate in sensory impressions that are too weak to be detected

57

This work, which had been available in Latin since the early fourteenth century, was considered genuine and given seven new translations between 1490 and 1562. See Hermann Diels, Die Handschriften der antiken Ärzte: Griechische Abteilung (Berlin: Königlichen Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1906), pp. 77–78; Richard J. Durling, ‘A Chronological Census of Renaissance Editions and Translations of Galen’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 24 (1961), 230–305 (p. 286). 58

Galen, Opera omnia, ed. by C. G. Kühn, 20 vols in 22 (Leipzig: Cnobloch, 1821–33), VI, (1823), 832–33; Galen, Opera, II, col. 1565: ‘Insomnium indicat nobis corporis affectionem’ (trans. by Janus Cornarius). 59

Galen, Opera, II, col. 1566: ‘Verisimile est enim quod anima in somnis ad corporis profunditatem ingressa, & ab externis sensibilibus digressa, affectionem in corpore sentiat, & omnium, quae id appetit, eorum, velut iam praesentium, imaginationem capiat.’ Cf. the similar notion in Hippocratic Regimen, IV , 86 (Hippocrates, IV , 420–21). 60

Galen, Opera, II, col. 1565: ‘Etenim si quis videat per insomnium incendium, a flava bile vexatur. Si verum fumum, aut calidinem, aut profundas tenebras, ab atra bile. Imber autem frigidam humiditatem reddundare indicat. Nix & glacies, & grando, pituitam frigidam.’ See also the physiological interpretations of dream-images in Galen, Opera omnia, ed. by Kühn, VI, 834–45 and XVI, 22. For medieval and Renaissance reworkings of this topos see, for example, Arnau of Villanova, Opera omnia (Basel: Waldkirch, 1585), col. 631; Auger Ferrier, Liber de Somniis (Lyon: de Tournes, 1549), pp. 29–30, 33. The De dignotione does admit, however, that dreams may also originate in our everyday activities and thoughts, and even that ‘some things’, as confirmed by experience, ‘are revealed prophetically’ in sleep — see col. 1565: ‘Quandoquidem vero in somno, non ex corporis solum affectionibus anima imaginatur, sed etiam ex his, quae a nobis quotidie consueto more peraguntur. Aliquando vero ex his, quae curavimus, ac cogitavimus. Et sane quaedam ab anima ipsa vatidice praemonstrantur. Nam & huic rei experientia ipsa testimonium praebet’ [= Galen, Opera omnia, ed. by Kühn, VI, 833].

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by the waking soul, yet remain residually in the sensory organs and are perceived in sleep when external stimuli have ceased.61 This explanation was very frequently employed by natural philosophers and physicians in the Renaissance, and attracted a large corpus of exposition and discussion with localized variations and complexities. It was frequently filtered through Neoplatonist sources, as we shall see, and was sometimes mediated by the paraphrases of the fourth-century Greek philosopher Themistius, which had been translated in 1480 by the Venetian humanist Ermolao Barbaro.62 But here I wish to draw attention to two features of the Aristotelian theory that forge a connection between dreaming and melancholy. First, the concept of the imagination is central to both conditions. Dreams are typically explained as a function of what medieval and Renaissance commentators usually identified as the faculties of sensus communis and phantasia, located in the sensitive soul and deemed responsible for the comparison and sorting of sensory species from the external senses, and the repackaging of these species into phantasms.63 Sleep and dreams — to summarize the orthodox account — are principally affections of the sensus communis, which ceases to function when hot vapours produced by digestion ascend upwards from the stomach, stimulating the inward contraction of bodily heat from the external parts. When this happens the residual sensory impressions, lacking prior ordering, are turned by the phantasy into phantasms or dream-images that no longer correspond to external objects that are really present. It is significant that for Aristotle dreaming is an activity of the imagination, and not of the intellectual faculties. It is apparently sub-rational, and does not substantially involve cognition.64 The imagination also has an important role in Aristotle’s understanding of melancholy. In the De anima and the works on dreams, the imagination is a source of potentially false or unreliable impressions, and of the faulty or distorted 61

Aristotle, De insomniis, III, in Aristotle, On the Soul; Parva naturalia; On Breath, trans. by W. S. Hett (London: Heinemann, 1935), pp. 358–69. A similar notion of residual senseimpressions is found in Plato, Timaeus, 45E–46A. 62

See, for example, Themistius, Paraphrasis in Aristotelis Posteriora et Physica: In libros item De anima, Memoria & reminiscentia, Somno & vigilia, Insomniis, & Divinatione per somnum, trans. by Ermolao Barbaro (Basel: Walder, 1533). On Barbaro’s translation see Paul Oskar Kristeller, Studies in Renaissance Thought and Letters (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1956), pp. 352–53. 63

For example, see Aristotle, Parva quae vocant Naturalia, trans. and comm. by Niccolò Leonico Tomeo (Paris: de Colines, 1530), pp. 148, 169. 64

Aristoteles, De insomniis, De divinatione per somnum, ed. by Philip J. van der Eijk, Aristoteles werke in Deutscher Übersetzung, 14. 3 (Berlin: Akademie, 1994), p. 91.

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perceptions that occur in dreaming, states of passion, and disease.65 In the Nicomachean Ethics, melancholics are described as being temperamentally inclined to follow the guidance of the phantasy (which recommends objects for pursuit or avoidance) without subjecting it to rational scrutiny.66 Aristotle also states that melancholy affects the imagination in such a way as to modify the content of dreams, writing in the De insomniis that melancholics, like the feverish and intoxicated, see confused and monstrous dream-images, because in such ‘spirituous affections’ the sensory stimuli are excessively agitated and so hinder the production of clear phantasms.67 Generally speaking, the Aristotelian theory recognized and supported the medical notion that dreams could be determined by internal material factors: according to the De divinatione per somnum, dreams may be justifiably taken by physicians as signs of somatic events,68 and the pseudoAristotelian Problemata, XXX, 14 states simply that dreams are at least partially the product of the condition of the body.69 In the Renaissance, then, the general compatibility of Aristotelian natural philosophy and Galenic medicine on the subject of dreaming could virtually be taken for granted.70 In the Conciliator litium medicinalium (1303) by the philosopher and professor of medicine at Padua, Pietro d’Abano — a work devoted to the reconciliation of apparent conflicts between natural philosophical and medical doctrine, which became a standard text in Renaissance learned medicine71 — there is discussion of the proximity of the melancholic temperament to 65

Aristotle, De anima, III, 3 (429a5–9), trans. by W. S. Hett (London: Heinemann, 1936), pp. 162–63; De insomniis, I (458b26–8), pp. 350–51, II (460b1–27), pp. 359–61. 66

Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VII, 7 (1150b25–28). I have discussed the Renaissance reception of this locus in ‘The Ethics of Renaissance Melancholy’, Intellectual History Review, 18 (2007), 103–17. 67

Aristotle, De insomniis, III (461a23–5), pp. 362–63.

68

I,

Aristotle, De divinatione per somnum, trans. by W. S. Hett (London: Heinemann, 1936), (463a), pp. 378–79. 69

(Ps.-) Aristotle, Problems, trans. by W. S. Hett (London: Heinemann, 1937), X X X . 14, pp. 180–81. 70 71

See for example Aristotle, Parva quae vocant naturalia, trans. and comm. by Tomeo, p. 187.

For the multiple reprintings of the Conciliator in the Renaissance see Jon Arrizabalaga, The ‘Articella’ in the Early Press, c. 1476–1534 (Cambridge: Cambridge Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine, 1998), p. 276. On Pietro d’Abano more generally see Eugenia Paschetto, Pietro d’Abano: Medico e filosofo (Florence: Nuovedizioni Enrico Vallecchi, 1984); and Luigi Olivieri, Pietro d’Abano e il pensiero neolatino: Filosofia, scienza e ricerca dell’Aristotele Greco tra i secoli XIII e XIV (Padua: Antenore, 1988).

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physiological equilibrium, and of the allegedly curative potential of dreaming, but the materialist interpretations of dreaming found in the works of Aristotle and Galen are deemed to be straightforwardly compatible.72 Later, in an abbreviated version of the Parva naturalia published in 1517, the Parisian scholastic commentator Thomas Bricot (d. 1516) summarized Aristotle’s conclusion that dreams should be carefully scrutinized by physicians because the phantasms derive their strength from the predominant humour. ‘Indeed,’ Bricot continued, ‘phlegmatics believe themselves to be [submerged] in honey, cholerics think they walk through fire, melancholics see black demons, and the sanguine see human blood.’73 Simon Brossier argued to similar effect in his Totius philosophiae epitome … ex universis Physicis Aristotelis (1536), explaining that particular dreams can correlate with particular humoral mixtures when these affect the phantasy.74 General agreement on the humoral determination of dreams can also be found between authors who otherwise share little in common in their natural philosophy. In the De artificiosa somniorum interpraetatione appended by Agostino Nifo to his commentary on the dream treatises of the Parva naturalia, which is presented as a development of Aristotelian oneirocriticism but infused with astrology,75 the typical dream-visions of melancholics are referred both to the

72

Pietro d’Abano, Conciliator differentiarum philosophicarum et precipue medicorum (Venice: Manutius, 1504), X X , fol. 28 v and CLVII, fols 208 r–v, where it is also stated that dreams may be useful to the physician as an indication of health. 73

Thomas Bricot, Textus octo Physicorum Aristotelis, Necnon librorum naturalium, cum sex eiusdem Metaphysices, secundum traditionem seu abbreviationem (Paris, 1523), sig. Sviir: ‘patet quia multi medici dicunt esse diligenter consyderandum ad somnia infirmi ex eo quod fantasmata per que fiunt somnia capiunt fortitudinem ab humorem predominante in corpore. et immo fleumatici credunt se in melle: colerici ambulare per ignem. melencolici videre demones nigros & sanguinei videre humanum sanguinem.’ On Bricot see Hubert Elié, ‘Quelques maîtres de l’Université de Paris vers l’an 1500’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge, 18 (1950–51), 197–200; and Augustin Renaudet, Préréforme et humanisme à Paris pendant les premières guerres d’Italie, 1494–1517 (Paris: Champion, 1916), pp. 96–147. 74 Simon Brosserius, Totius philosophiae epitome, seu Enchiridion, ex universis Physicis Aristotelis (Paris: de Colines, 1536), p. 82. I know nothing of Brossier other than that he was probably French. See also Celso Mancini, Libri III. I. De somniis, ac Synesi per somnia. II. De risu, ac ridiculis. III. De synaugia platonica (Frankfurt, 1598), p. 57. For Mancini’s engagement with Aristotle see esp. pp. 7–46, 124–59, but note also the critical discussion at pp. 92–108. 75

Aristotle, Parva naturalia, comm. Nifo, fol. 110 r. For medieval astrological accounts of oneiromancy see Tullio Gregory, ‘I sogni e gli astri’, in I sogni nel Medioevo, ed. by Gregory, pp. 111–48.

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natural cause of black bile at the same time as the heavenly cause of Saturn.76 Later, within a Counter-Reformation Thomist interpretation of the Parva naturalia, the Jesuit Commentators at the University of Coimbra in Portugal listed the conventional catalogue of humoral dreams, and cited Hippocratic authority in support of Aristotle’s view on the diagnostic utility of naturally caused dreams.77 When it came to the more specific topic of the dreams of melancholics, learned physicians also had little difficulty in showing that Galenic and Aristotelian teachings were generally consonant.78 In medical writings on melancholy it is a commonplace that the disease is often accompanied by vivid or disturbing dreams,79 and although the De dignotione provided the most accessible account of this symptom, many learned physicians articulated its causes in the terms of Aristotelian dream theory. Du Laurens identified the cause of terrifying visions experienced by sleeping melancholics as black bile, and explained further that this was either because the dominant humour produced a corresponding species for the phantasy, which in turn triggered the memory to recall disturbing images; or else because the corrupt and blackened animal spirits, circulating in the brain and elevated to the eyes, presented dark objects to the phantasy.80 Ercole explored the parallel between dreams and the waking hallucinations of melancholics, referring

76

XIII,

Agostino Nifo, De artificiosa somniorum interpraetatione, quae divinatio dicitur artificiosa, in Aristotle, Parva naturalia, comm. Nifo, fol. 111 r.

77 Coimbra Commentators, In Libros Aristotelis, qui Parva naturalia appellantur (Cologne, 1631), col. 42. They also criticized the account of the soul’s journey into the depths of the body offered by the De dignotione as misconceived: ibid., col. 42. For other citations or allusions to the De dignotione, see Gregor Reisch, Margarita philosophia nova (Strassburg: Grüninger, 1508), fol. viiiv ; Peucer, De praecipuis Divinationum, p. 451; Joachim Fortius Ringelbergius, Opera (Lyon, 1556), p. 549. 78

Excepting the point of conflict between Aristotle and Galen on the somatic location of the common sense: see, for example, the discussion in Aristotle, Parva quae vocant naturalia, p. 145; Sebastian Fox-Morcillo, De naturae philosophia, seu de Platonis & Aristotelis consensione (Lyon, 1622), p. 464; Conrad Gessner, Physicarum meditationum, annotationum, & scholiorum libri V (Zurich, 1586), p. 183. 79

See, for example, Da Monte, Consilia medica, consil. XXVII; Tobias Tandler, De melancholia & hujus amolitione, in Dissertationes physicae-medicae (Wittenberg, 1613), pp. 122–23; Sennert, Opera, I, 452a, 517b, and II, 297b, 384a, 385a, 399b–400a. See also Montalto, Archipathologia, pp. 503–04, where cerebral dryness in melancholics and phrenetics is stipulated as a cause of vivid dreams in melancholy, phrenitis, and coma. 80

Du Laurens, De morbis melancholicis, chap. 5, in Opera omnia, II, 65.

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to De insomniis, III to illustrate the ways in which the agitated motion of spirits in melancholy stimulated the imagination to produce confused phantasmata and monstrous visions.81 He also observed that the diversity of derangements associated with the different species of melancholy was comparable to the variety of humorally caused dreams, citing the De somno et vigilia and the De dignotione in support of the idea that melancholic hallucinations involving snow, rain, or ice should be referred to phlegm.82 And in his discussion of the conflict between Galen and Averroes on the subject of the spiritus tenebrosus (shadowy spirit) in melancholy, Ercole rebutted Averroes’s contention in Colliget, III. 40 that the soul does not see colours, with the claim that the dream-images do have perceptible colours that vary in accordance with the predominating humour.83 Many natural philosophers read the Aristotelian explanation of the disturbing dreams experienced by melancholics in the light of Galenic teachings about the condition. According to the Swiss natural philosopher and physician Conrad Gessner, the disturbing motions described by Aristotle are to be understood as not just of spirit, but also of vapours and blood.84 The Coimbra Commentators also incorporated vaporous movements in their explanation of melancholic dreams.85 The German Lutheran Jacob Schegk explained that the account of the relationship between disease and dream-visions given at the beginning of De insomniis III pertained to the affliction of the phantasia and sensus communis, and referred the reader to Galen’s analysis of diseases of the interior senses — particularly of melancholy and phrenitis in the De locis affectis — as well as to the third book of

81 Sassonia, De melancholia, pp. 17b–18a. The same parallel is also referred to the creative capability of the virtus imaginativa and the influence upon it of diseased humours and spirits in Johannes Benedictus, De visionibus et revelationibus naturalibus et divinis (Mainz, 1550), sigs d [vii]v – e ijr . See also Martin Biermann, De magicis actionibus ¦îÝôáóéò , in Tandler, Dissertationes physicae-medicae, pp. 244–45. 82

Sassonia, De melancholia, pp. 19b–20a.

83

This controversy is also covered in Montalto, Archipathologia, IV . 6, pp. 241–42, and Sennert, Opera, I, 423a–b. See also the reference to the dark dream-visions of melancholics in the discussion of the conflict between Galen and Averroes on the subject of the spiritus tenebrosus in Sassonia, De melancholia, p. 20b. 84

Gessner, Physicarum meditationum, p. 183. This reading seems to be supported by the fact that when Aristotle continues he states that the calming of the blood helps to induce clear and healthy dream-images. Gessner also comments on the parallel between dream-visions and diseased hallucinations at p. 181. 85

Coimbra Commentators, Parva naturalia, col. 36.

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the De anima.86 Perhaps most commonly, however, the perceived consonance of natural philosophy and medicine in this territory was underlined by the tendency of Aristotelian commentators simply to refer the terrifying dreams of melancholics to the explanation found in the De dignotione.87

Aristotle on Divination from Dreams Aristotle also gave a significant role to melancholy in his analysis of dreamdivination, which constituted an important resource for those who wished to address the predictive capacities enabled not just by sleep but by other altered psychic states such as ecstatic furor or enthusiasmus.88 In the De divinatione per somnum, he marshals two arguments against the idea that prophetic dreams may issue from a divine origin. First, this cannot be the case because it is absurd to think that they would be sent not to the best and wisest people, but to animals and the vulgar. Second, apparently predictive dreams are for the most part unfulfilled, and those which are should be characterized as coincidental.89 Both arguments flesh out his general claim that dreaming is primarily an imaginative rather than cognitive activity — it involves sense-perception but not thought — and draw upon the idea of the melancholic imagination. That inferior persons experience vivid dreams of the future is supported by his claim that those of a ‘talkative’ and melancholic nature, being receptive to all types of sensory 86 Jacob Schegk, In reliquos naturalium Aristotelis libros commentaria plane philosophica: Item ejusdem in X. libros ethicorum annotationes (Basel, 1550), pp. 277–78. 87

See the annotations to the De insomniis of Josse Clichtove in Philosophiae naturalis paraphrases, ed. by François Vatable (Paris, 1531), fol. 242 v ; and cf. other explications of this passage: Sebastian Fox-Morcillo, De naturae philosophia (Lyon, 1622 [first edn, 1560]), p. 470; Johannes Ludovicus Hawrenreuter, ÓÕÍÏ ØÉÓ ÔÇ ÓÖ ÕÓÉÊÇ Ó ÔÏ Õ ÁÑÉÓÔÏÔÅËÏÕÓ : Compendium librorum Aristotelis (Strassburg, 1600), p. 575, and Aristotle, Opera omnia, trans. by Adrian Turnebus, Isaac Casaubon, and Giulio Pace, ed. and comm. by Guillaume du Val (Paris, 1629), p. 142. Commentaries on Aristotle’s assertion in De somno et vigilia, III (457a) that melancholics are prone to sleeplessness also demonstrate the integration of medical and naturalphilosophical theory here. See, for example: Aristotle, Parva quae vocant naturalia, p. 159. On this topic see also Johannes Baptista Bernardo, Seminarium totius philosophiae Aristotelicae et Platonicae, 3 vols (Lyon, 1599–1605), I, col. 824, referring to Problemata, III, 25a. 88

On the relationship of such states with melancholy see Klibansky, Panofsky, and Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy, esp. pp. 15–42, 241–74; and Brann, The Debate over the Origin of Genius. 89

Aristotle, De divinatione per somnum, II (463b12–17), pp. 378–81; II (463b23–32), pp. 380–81.

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movements, perceive a great variety of dream-images. Hence there is also a noticeable coincidence (but coincidence it is) between their dream-images and real events — exemplifying the saying, ‘If you throw many times, your luck must change’.90 Later, having floated the possibility that predictions may issue naturalistically from the origins of events to the dreams of men with ‘vacant’ minds — via minute, Democritean ‘phantoms and emanations’ — Aristotle explains that those who are susceptible to derangement easily have their own mental movements displaced by movements from external sources, to which they are thereby especially receptive. He then supplements his suggestion concerning the receptivity of melancholics to external stimuli with the claim that because of their natural impetuosity and changeability, they process sense-images with great rapidity and tenacity. Metaphorically, they seem to be experts at shooting from distance.91 In contrast with the consensus concerning dreams in general, the Renaissance reception of Aristotle’s claims concerning the melancholic imagination and divination from dreams was complex and contentious. Fundamentally, this was because they posed the fraught question of the relationship between the supernatural and natural realms. And most conspicuously, it was because they appeared to be in direct conflict with scriptural accounts of dreams inspired by God, thereby containing the potential to render the divinely miraculous (what is beyond nature) merely marvellous (that is, comprehensible as the product of natural laws, belonging the domain of ‘secondary’ causes or what was sometimes designated as the ‘preternatural’).92 But Christian teachings about dreamdivination in the sixteenth century were not straightforward. On the one hand, taking their cue from biblical warnings about false prophecy (especially Deuteronomy 13. 1–5; Matthew 7. 15–23, 24. 11–12; I John 4. 1), Protestant and Catholic theologians were largely united in their hostility towards popular oneiromancy. For example, in 1565, under the direction of Cardinal Carlo Borromeo — and following the Catechism of the Council of Trent, which categorized those ‘who give credit to dreams, divinations, and other

90

Aristotle, De divinatione per somnum, II (463b17–22), pp. 380–81.

91

Aristotle, De divinatione per somnum, II (464a1–464b6), pp. 382–85.

92

On the medieval categories of the miraculous, marvellous, and magical, which generally persisted in the Renaissance, see Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, pp. 109–220; and Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural, esp. pp. 1–26.

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superstitious illusions’ as sinners against the first commandment 93 — the Synod of Milan condemned all magical and divinatory practices, including oneiromancy, as false, diabolical arts.94 Divination was also fiercely denounced by Sixtus V in the bull Coeli et terrae Creator Deus (1585). But here it is notable that predictions based in ‘natural’ observations of regular events — such as were employed in navigation, agriculture, and medicine — were excepted, and that oneiromancy was not included in the long list of prohibited divinatory arts.95 However hostile theologians were to popular superstition, their stance on oneiromancy had to take account of the fact that numerous well-known passages of Scripture stated, apparently unequivocally, that predictive dreams had been sent directly by God.96 Aristotle’s views on dream-divination and melancholy generated so much heterogeneous commentary in the Renaissance that it is possible here to offer only an outline of the positions adopted by some notable authors. Any philosopher or physician sympathetic to the Aristotelian account of dreams had either to reject what appears to be the central contention of the De divinatione per somnum, attempt to explicate the text in a manner that demonstrated its conformity to Christian doctrine, or accept its argument and adopt a materialistic position that risked attracting accusations of heterodoxy. In what follows, I shall therefore present three forms of response to this element of the Aristotelian theory — rejection, modification or re-elaboration, and endorsement or redeployment — and describe the role of the idea of the melancholic imagination in each case.

93

III.

The Catechism of the Council of Trent, trans. by T. A. Buckley (London: Routledge, 1852), 2, p. 363.

94 Constitutiones et decreta condita in provinciali synodo Mediolanensi sub illustrissimo et reverendissimo d.d. Carolo Borrhomæo […]archiepiscopo Mediolani (Milan, 1565), pp. 19–20. One wonders quite what Borromeo had made of Girolamo Cardano’s Somniorum synesiorum libri IV (Basel, 1562), which had been dedicated to him, and which presented an astrologically grounded theory of prophetic dreaming: Cardano, Opera omnia, ed. by Charles Spon, 10 vols (Lyon: Huguetan and Ravaud, 1663), V , 593–95, 598–99. 95

Bullarum diplomatum et privilegiorum sanctorum romanorum pontificum Taurinensis editio, 24 vols (Turin: Seb. Franco et Henrico Dalmazzo editoribus, 1857–72), VIII (1863), 646–50, esp. at pp. 648b, 649b. 96

As listed, for example, in Peucer, De praecipuis divinationum, p. 455.

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Rejecting Aristotle Although Aristotle was the principal authority in natural philosophy in this period, conflicts between Aristotelian philosophy and Christian theology were not necessarily deeply problematic. In learned medicine, where the authority of Aristotle remained very substantial and in some areas of inquiry came to rival that of Galen,97 it was still possible simply to ignore Aristotle’s position on divination and follow other authorities. Du Laurens, for example, cited Aristotle’s views about the deliberative incapacities of melancholics, and attributed the disturbing dreams of melancholics to black bile, but referred to Galen and Hippocrates to classify dreams into natural, animal, and supernatural kinds.98 Indeed, he effectively contradicted the Aristotelian contention about melancholic divination, stating that when the phantasies of melancholics are disturbed by diabolical forces, they are often led to imagine terrifying apparitions and predict the future.99 Here we may detect not only a commonplace belief in the agency of malign demons — often thought to interfere with the imaginations of dreaming melancholics because of the darkness and ‘earthiness’ of black bile100 — but perhaps also the continued influence of Ficino’s account of melancholic inspiration.101 When it was not feasible to pass over Aristotle’s views in silence — for instance when commenting directly on the De divinatione per somnum — the conflict with Christianity could be resolved almost as easily by implementing the solution that had been common in medieval universities, often associated with the teaching of Albert the Great: that where reason and faith appear to be in conflict, the latter

97 See Jerome Bylebyl, ‘Disputation and Description in the Renaissance Pulse Controversy’, and Charles B. Schmitt, ‘Aristotle among the Physicians’, both in The Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century, ed. by Andrew Wear, R . K. French, and I. M. Lonie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 1–15, 223–45 (pp. 9–10, 223, 227–28, 231, 243, 245). 98 Du Laurens, De morbis melancholicis, chaps 3 and 6, in Opera omnia, II, 58, 67. See, similarly, Jacques Ferrand, A Treatise of Lovesickness, ed. and trans. by D onald A. Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), p. 299. 99

Du Laurens, De morbis melancholicis, chap. 6, in Opera omnia, II, 67.

100

See, for instance, Thomas Nashe, The Terrors of the Night or, A Discourse of Apparitions (London, 1594), sig. Cijv , asserting that the ‘spirits of the earth and the water, feeding on foggiebraind melancholly, engender thereof many uncouth terrible monsters’, and later that ‘melancholy is the mother of dreames, and of all the terrours of the night whatsoever’ (sig. C[iiij] v). 101

See Du Laurens, De morbis melancholicis, chap. 3, in Opera omnia, II, 58–59, suggesting that melancholics could experience a kind of furor divinus or enthusiasm, and become capable of prophecy.

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always prevails. This is because truth is a function of divine revelation, whereas philosophy, a lower form of discourse, can assert only probable arguments.102 Whilst not referred to explicitly, this traditional disciplinary hierarchy was assumed by natural-philosophical commentators who expressed explicit dissatisfaction with Aristotle’s view of oneiromancy and subordinated the texts of the philosopher to Scripture. The Compendium librorum Aristotelis (1600) by the physician and natural philosopher Johann Ludwig Hawenreuter contradicts Aristotle’s argument that dreams cannot be of supernatural origin because the lowly rather than the excellent experience them on the basis of holy writ. This is also allegedly confirmed by everyday experience: the Anabaptists constitute proof that demons send dreams to the impious by divine permission.103 The Coimbra Commentators also had no qualms about rejecting Aristotle’s position, shunning the popular practice of inspecting demonic dreams, but arguing that ‘it is impossible to deny that some dreams have been sent by God, whether directly, or by the assistance of angels’ — since Holy Scripture is full of divinely sent dreams, and moreover many that were sent to the wise and the distinguished.104 Although they agreed with Aristotle that in sleep the senses could perceive small signs of future movements in the body or the heavens,105 his opinion about divinely sent dreams was invalidated by Scripture, and rejected with the views of other pagan sceptics such as Epicurus, Metrodorus, Xenophanes, and Cicero.106 However, the sceptical implications of

102

See Bruno Nardi, Saggi sull’aristotelismo padovano dal secolo XIV al XVI (Florence: Sansoni, 1958), pp. 95–96; and Ian Maclean, ‘Heterodoxy in Natural Philosophy and Medicine: Pietro Pomponazzi, Guglielmo Gratarolo, Girolamo Cardano’, in Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion, ed. by John Hedley Brooke and Ian Maclean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 6–8. 103

Johann Ludwig Hawenreuter, Compendium librorum physicorum Aristotelis (Strasbourg, 1600), pp. 582–83. On Hawenreuter see Sachiko Kusukawa, ‘Mediations of Zabarella in Northern Europe: The Preface of Johann Ludwig Hawenreuter’, in La presenza dell’Aristotelismo Padovano nella filosofia della prima modernità, ed. by G. Piaia (Rome: Antenore, 2002), pp. 199–213. 104

Coimbra Commentators, Parva naturalia, cols 51–52: ‘Negari non potest, aliqua somnia immitti a Deo, sive immediate, sive interventu Angelorum. Hujusce pronunciati veritas patet ex sacris literis, quae multa somnia divinitus inhecta commemorant; quorum nonnulla superius retulimus’, etc. 105 106

Coimbra Commentators, Parva naturalia, col. 52.

Coimbra Commentators, Parva naturalia, col. 47. Cf. Ferrand, A Treatise of Lovesickness, p. 298, where Aristotle’s view is rejected on the basis that his authority ‘carries less weight and value than that of Moses and Hippocrates’.

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Aristotle’s analysis of the predictive capabilities of melancholics were tamed by a different strategy. According to their interpretation of the De divinatione, melancholics ‘sometimes grasp the truth in dreams’ not because of their excitable imaginations, but because they are ‘by their nature thoughtful (cogitabundi); thus they dream more frequently, and experience visions of many things’, just as ‘he who throws for the whole day, sometimes shoots skilfully’.107 This reading apparently emphasizes the cognitive dimension of true dreams and reduces the role of chance in their production.108 If dreams are indeed frequently sent by God, then it would seem that melancholics may periodically receive such dreams because of their complexionally determined thoughtfulness.109

Interpreting Aristotle A far more common response to Aristotle’s teaching on dream-divination and melancholy was to interpret or re-elaborate it in a manner that made it less obviously contradictory to Scripture. Here there were two principal models, both of which rested on complex claims about the categories of the natural and the supernatural (or the divine). For the first, which is essentially and often explicitly Neoplatonist, the crucial passage was Aristotle’s admission in De divinatione, II — immediately preceding his observation concerning the multitude of phantasms seen by melancholics — that although dreams cannot be sent by God because inferior animals dream, they may nevertheless be said to have a ‘divine’ aspect, ‘for nature is divinely ordained, though not itself divine’.110 This permitted an 107

Coimbra Commentators, Parva naturalia, col. 54: ‘Quia ij qui atra bili abundant, ut suopte ingenio cogitabundi sunt; ita frequentius somniant, ac multiplicium rerum visiones experiuntur. Unde quemadmodum is, qui totum diem jaculatur, aliquando collimat: sic illi somniando nonnunquam vera apprehendunt, & eo saepius, quo frequentiora habent insomnia.’ 108 For a reformulation of Aristotelian dream-theory by Julius Caesar Scaliger that is similar in this respect, see Kristine Louise Haugen, ‘Aristotle My Beloved: Poetry, Diagnosis, and the Dreams of Julius Caesar Scaliger’, Renaissance Quarterly, 60 (2007), 819–51. 109

It is unclear whether this reflects the persisting influence of Ficino, for whom black bile was also a predisposing cause of prophetic capability. There is no mention of Ficino, but some lateantique Neoplatonic writings on dream-inspiration are critically discussed: see Coimbra Commentators, Parva naturalia, col. 54. 110

Aristotle, De divinatione per somnum, II (463b12–15), pp. 378–79: ‘ëùò ä’ ¦ðå êá ô í

–ëëùí ææùí Ïíåéñ ôôåé ôéí , èå ðåìðôá ì¥í ïÛê —í åÇç ô ¦í ðíéá, ïÛä¥ ã ãïíå ôï ôïõ ÷ ñéí, äáéì íéá ì íôïé. º ãñ ö óéò äáéìïí á, •ëë’ ï× èå á .’

This passage was in obvious tension with the medieval saying ‘Natura, id est Deus’: see Bartlett, The Natural and the Supernatural, p. 27.

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interpretation according to which Aristotle recognizes that divine dreams may be conveyed to the dreamer by forces that mediate the celestial and sublunary spheres.111 Perhaps the most substantial example of such a Neoplatonic interpretation of the Parva naturalia can be found in the Latin translation and commentary by Niccolò Leonico Tomeo, a professor at Padua who throughout his career sought to demonstrate the fundamental compatibility of Aristotelian and Platonic philosophy.112 In Tomeo’s version, the divine characteristics of dreams and nature conceded by Aristotle are rendered by terms derived from the word daemon, a choice that has some justification but also carried Neoplatonic associations.113 According to Tomeo, because Aristotle identifies a ‘daemonic’ aspect to the natural dream, this means that the philosopher does recognize that some dreams fall into a ‘divine’ category from which divination of the future is possible. These, Tomeo writes, may be rightly considered to be ‘natural premonstrations’, originating in a domain of nature that exists above that of physical causes. This domain is called ‘daemonic’ by the ancients either because it is a divine instrument, or because it seems to preside over anything in its vicinity as nature does over natural bodies, or else because it produces extraordinary events above humanity.114 In Tomeo’s presentation, there is no fundamental incompatibility 111

On the relationship between Neoplatonism and Aristotelianism in the Renaissance, see E. P. Mahoney, ‘Neoplatonism, the Greek Commentators and Renaissance Aristotelianism’, in Neoplatonism and Christian Thought, ed. by D. J. O’Meara (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), pp. 169–77, 264–83; and for the suggestion of the ‘Platonic transformation’ of Aristotle in this era, see Eckhard Kessler, ‘The Transformation of Aristotelianism during the Renaissance’, in New Perspectives on Renaissance Thought: Essays in the History of Science, Education and Philosophy in Memory of Charles B. Schmitt, ed. by John Henry and Sarah Hutton (London: Duckworth, 1990), pp. 137–47 (pp. 142–44). 112 See Deno J. Geanakoplos, ‘The Career of the Little-Known Renaissance Greek Scholar Nicholas Leonicus Tomaeus and the Ascendancy of Greco-Byzantine Aristotelianism at Padua University (1497)’, Byzantina, 13 (1985), 365–72; Daniela de Bellis, ‘La vita e l’ambiente di Niccolò Leonico Tomeo’, Quaderna per la storia dell’Università di Padova, 13 (1980), 37–75; and de Bellis, ‘Niccolò Leonico Tomeo, interprete di Aristotele naturalista’, Physis, 17 (1975), 71–93. 113

Aristotle, Parva quae vocant naturalia, p. 189. On Tomeo’s Neoplatonism see particularly Daniela De Bellis, ‘I Veicoli dell’Anima nell’analisi di Niccolò Leonico Tomeo’, Annali dell’Istituto di Filosofia, Università di Firenze, 3 (1981), 1–21. 114 Aristotle, Parva quae vocant naturalia, pp. 189–90: ‘Nocturna igitur visa hanc ob causam minime quidem a deo missa esse existimandum est. Demonias autem esse, id est naturales praemonstrationes, credendum, cum natura ipsa a qua sane isthaec proveniunt somnia, daemonia existimetur, & non divina’, etc. Elsewhere, Tomeo refers such daemonic forces both to the

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between the Aristotelian text and the Platonist understanding of daemonic nature: this possesses an incorporeal essence inseparable from the corporeal substances, whose universal principles it contains, as well as the productive or artistic power characteristic of the chief kinds of daemon.115 For Tomeo, then, Aristotle agrees with Plato that some dreams do have a divine character. Because nature is ‘daemonic’, the sceptical force of Aristotle’s naturalistic explanation for the frequency with which melancholics predict the future in their dreams — Tomeo refers conventionally to the vehement motions of spiritus in the body, and includes the gloss given by Cicero in the second book of the De divinatione — is effectively undercut. In this presentation, the Aristotelian text does not discredit the notion of divine emission but in fact supports and explains divination from melancholic dreams.116 The doctrine that some dreams may be sent by God is associated first with the Platonic proof for the immortality of the soul: true prediction is possible when the soul is no longer distracted by the bodily senses. It is then supported by the authority of the Aristotelians Dicaearchus and Cratippus of Pergamon, who according to Cicero rejected ‘artificial’ divination but approved divination from dreams and furor divinus.117 When divine inspiration happens in sleep, by some process that is beyond human understanding, the soul is liberated from the body, stirred up, and united with divine beings, and thereby endowed with the capacity to reveal future

naturalistic explanation proposed by Alexander of Aphrodisias and their various Neoplatonic conceptions — for example as intermediary custodians of human souls — in the writings of Porphyry, Plutarch, and Michael Psellus: pp. 191–93, commenting on De divinatione per somnum, II (464a1–24). 115

Aristotle, Parva quae vocant naturalia, p. 190.

116

Aristotle, Parva quae vocant naturalia, p. 190. Hence, Tomeo’s survey of the views of different philosophers on the subject of oneiromancy conflates the views of the Platonists and Peripatetics on natural and divine dreams, and locates them together at the truthful mid-point between the sceptical and credulous excesses of the Epicureans and Stoics respectively: ibid., pp. 189–90. 117

Aristotle, Parva quae vocant naturalia, pp. 183–84. Tomeo also discussed prophetic furor in his dialogue Trophonius, which also measures Aristotelian against Neoplatonic and Stoic views on oneiromancy (Trophonius: sive de divinatione, esp. pp. 12–17, also printed in Aristotle, Parva quae vocant naturalia, trans. and comm. Tomeo); cf. Cicero, De divinatione, I. 5, in De senectute; De amicitia; De divinatione, trans. by William Armistead Falconer (London: Heinemann, 1923), p. 229. On Dicaearchus’s views about dreams see R. W. Sharples, ‘Dicaearchus on the Soul and on Divination’, in Dicaearchus of Messana: Text, Translation, and Discussion, ed. by William W. Fortenbaugh and Eckhart Schütrumpf (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 2001), pp. 163–73.

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events.118 Tomeo also transformed Aristotle’s statement that the vulgar rather than the wise dream predictively more frequently into a proof for the divine emission of dreams. Scripture testifies, it is pointed out, that those of a more ‘simple’ nature are closer to God and more suited to receive divine revelations. This is because, following St Paul, ‘human wisdom, if it is turned towards God, ought rather to be called foolishness than intelligence’, and because the souls of those who neglect worldly affairs in the manner of madmen and fools are less tightly bound to their corporeal natures.119 In sum, this part of Aristotelian dream theory in Tomeo’s presentation is both Platonized — truth is apprehended by the soul when it is freed from its corporeal concerns and able to receive heavenly images120 — and Christianized, in accordance with the Pauline precept that the foolishness of this shadowy world is the wisdom of the luminous world beyond.121 Such sustained, detailed, and explicitly Neoplatonist philosophical interpretations of this part of the Aristotelian corpus were relatively unusual, but the influence of Neoplatonism upon other readings of the De divinatione per somnum, whilst often diffuse, was nevertheless substantial, and not only in natural philosophy. In medical circles, where Neoplatonism was frequently combined with astrology, the Aristotelian understanding of melancholic divination sometimes appears to have been deliberately reconceptualized along these lines. In the prefatory discourse to the Liber de somniis (1530) by the French physician Auger Ferrier, a proponent of astral medicine and of the idea of divine inspiration in waking as well as sleep, we are told that Aristotle considers melancholics to be suited to divination because they are persistently agitated by visions.122 Thomas Bricot’s abbreviation of the De divinatione confirms the idea that melancholics are susceptible to celestial influence, and presents the Aristotelian text as concluding

118

Aristotle, Parva quae vocant naturalia, p. 165, and pp. 185–86, commenting on the opening of De divinatione per somnum, I (462b1–27). 119

Aristotle, Parva quae vocant naturalia, p. 186.

120

See the approval of a variety of Platonic and Neoplatonic doctrines in Aristotle, Parva quae vocant naturalia, pp. 8–9, 191–93. Cf. Plato, Phaedrus, 65C–67D, Republic, 571C–572B; and Ficino, Platonic Theology, XIII. 2. 31, IV , 158–61. 121

See especially I Corinthians 1. 18–31. Cf. Ficino, Platonic Theology, XIII. 2. 29, IV , 156–57, referring to Timaeus, 71E–72B. 122 Ferrier, Liber de somniis, p. 59: ‘quod melancholicis magis accidere solet visa non solum nocturna, sed et diurnas ipsas cogitationes pertinaciter secum agitantibus, totiensque mente volutantibus, donec inexpectatum quendam, nec aspernandum sensum inde collegerint. Unde & hos divinationibus maxime commodos putavit Aristoteles’.

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that some dreams are caused by heavenly influences on the body, which — either directly or by some mediating power — enable the sensus communis to grasp future events.123 Such readings did not explicitly identify Aristotle’s conception of nature as ‘daemonic’, but integrated the Aristotelian interpretation of predictive dreams within a loosely Neoplatonic vision of the cosmos, as structured by occult correspondences between supernatural entities and bodily humours which enable the possibility of dreams either directly or indirectly inspired by God.124 A second way of bringing the Aristotelian position on prophetic dreams into line with Scripture, though perhaps only superficially, was to follow the astral naturalism of Averroes, whose theory of the unicity of the intellect was highly controversial and had long been taken to imply the mortality of the soul,125 but whose reading of Aristotle was sometimes interpreted favourably by natural philosophers, particularly in Padua, as being in line with that of the early Greek commentators.126 In his Epitome of the Parva naturalia, Averroes asserts that knowledge may be acquired in sleep by means of truly predictive dreams, which are special forms of spiritual perception that testify to the ‘full solicitude’ of celestial nature for human beings.127 Such naturally predictive dreams, he explains, are products of the active intellect, the power which normally enables man to 123

Bricot, Textus octo Physicorum Aristotelis, sig. Sviir-v .

124

Bricot, Textus octo Physicorum Aristotelis, sig. Sviiv . A variation of this strategy, frequently employed by Protestant writers, can be seen in works that admit that the divinely inspired prophetic dreams recorded in Scripture truly occurred, but that since the age of miracles had now passed, claims to have experienced such dreams were now likely to be fraudulent or mistaken interpretations of humoral or diabolical dreams. See, for example, Nashe, Terrors of the Night, sig. Fijr-v . 125

According to Averroes’s doctrine of the unicity of the intellect, both active and passive intellects are aspects of the material intellect, which is the embodiment in individuals of the eternal, immaterial, and unified intellect, shared by all men. For Renaissance controversies on the intellect, including Averroistic doctrine on the subject, see Eckhard Kessler, ‘The Intellective Soul’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. by Schmitt and Skinner, pp. 485–534. 126 Bruno Nardi, Sigieri di Brabante nel pensiero del Rinascimento italiano (Rome: Edizioni Italiane, 1945). For a useful overview of the complex and problematic status of Averroes in this era see Martin, ‘Rethinking Renaissance Averroism’, pp. 3–19. 127

Averroes (Ibn Rushd), Epitome of Parva naturalia, trans. by Harry Blumenberg (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1961), p. 49. On Averroes’s shifting conception of the relationship between celestial and sublunar bodies see Gad Freudenthal, ‘The Medieval Astrologization of Aristotle’s Biology: Averroes on the Role of the Celestial Bodies in the Generation of Animate Beings’, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, 12 (2002), 111–37.

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grasp ‘universal principles in theoretical things’128 but which in sleep, when the internal senses of cogitation and memory are not functioning,129 communicates a kind of spiritual perception of particular things to the imagination, giving ‘a foreknowledge of future occurrences such as are peculiar to his body, his soul, his relatives, the people of his city or nation, or in general to those with whom he is already acquainted’.130 Averroes also asserts that melancholics, due to the ‘superiority’ of their imaginations, are more likely to experience prophetic dreams. This is because in sleep, the cold and dry humoral mixture enables the imaginative faculty to retard and retain the otherwise rapidly dissolving procession of sensory images experienced in the dream.131 Most of the Averroistic interpretations of the Parva naturalia in this era were produced by natural philosophers in Italian universities. Aside from local factors which established particular intellectual traditions within individual institutions — for instance in Padua, where interest in Averroes had been well established since the time of Paul of Venice (d. 1429)132 — the largely Italian character of the

128

Averroes, Epitome, p. 42. The active intellect is an inorganic, celestial power whose function is normally to abstract, universalize, and actualize the imaginative representations of material forms that have been received by the passive intellect. See Herbert A. Davidson, Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on Intellect: Their Cosmologies, Theories of the Active Intellect and Theories of Human Intellect (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 315–56. Avicenna had explained truly predictive dreams as forms of imaginative prophecy in a similarly naturalistic fashion: see ibid., pp. 117–22; and E. Ruth Harvey, The Inward Wits: Psychological Theory in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1975), pp. 49–50, citing Avicenna, De anima, IV . 2. 129

Averroes, Epitome, p. 41.

130

Averroes, Epitome, pp. 43–44, here following Aristotle’s suggestion that predictive dreams can only relate to matters or persons known to the dreamer — there must be some form of ‘preparatory knowledge’ for such spiritual perception to occur (pp. 46–47). He explains the manner in which the imagination receives particular forms from the active intellect ‘by virtue of the fact that it [sc. the imagination] is in matter’, at pp. 44–46. 131 132

Averroes, Epitome, pp. 50–51.

However, the commentary by the medieval Parisian Averroist John of Jandun also continued to attract interest into the later decades of the sixteenth century: see, for example, John of Jandun, Quaestiones, super Parvis naturalibus, cum Marci Antonii Zimarae De movente et moto, Ad Aristotelis et Averrois intentionem (Venice, 1589). The peculiar assertion that Averroes’s Epitome ‘had rarely been used’ in the Renaissance in Peter Holland, ‘The Interpretation of Dreams in the Renaissance’, in Reading Dreams: The Interpretation of Dreams from Chaucer to Shakespeare, ed. by Peter Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 142, can apply only to writings in the English vernacular.

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efflorescence of Averroism in Italian universities is partially attributable to the relative freedom that characterized the teaching of natural philosophy there. Whereas the lower arts faculties in the universities of northern Europe had long been subject to pressures from the higher faculties of theology and frequent Church interference,133 in Italy there were no separate theology faculties to exert effective control over discussion of Averroes. But this was a precarious situation, and in 1513, the Fifth Lateran Council in Rome condemned the Averroist position on the intellective soul along with all arguments that denied its immortality, and required theologians and philosophers actively to ‘devote their every effort’ to uphold the correct Christian teaching in this matter.134 The majority of Averroist interpretations of the dream treatises in the Parva naturalia avoided any trouble by being principally pedagogical, confined to the task of paraphrasing and explaining the position of the Commentator and often drawing extensively upon Arabic astrology. They glossed over the problematic implications of the fact that although Averroes had admitted the possibility of truly predictive dreams, and indeed discussed the oneirocriticism of Joseph,135 his account does not permit directly inspired dreams unmediated by natural causes.136 The laborious task of reconciling philosophical doctrine with Christian revelation on this issue was therefore largely eschewed. Discussions of this type can be seen in the lectures on the Parva naturalia delivered in Bologna (probably in the early years of the sixteenth century) by Tiberio Baccilieri, which offer a brief summary of the De divinatione per somnum with Averroes’s explanation of truly predictive dreams.137 Similar treatments were presented in the works of the eminent natural 133 Martin L. Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi: Radical Philosopher of the Renaissance (Padua: Editrice Antenore, 1986), p. 41; James Hankins, ‘Humanism, Scholasticism, and Renaissance Philosophy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, ed. by James Hankins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 38–39. 134 Paul Richard Blum, ‘The Immortality of the Soul’, in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, pp. 211–33, (p. 219). I am quoting the translation of the Lateran decree in Paul F. Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), pp. 289–90. 135

Averroes, Epitome, p. 49.

136

See the implication of the falsity of popular beliefs about dreams in Averroes, Epitome, p. 40.

137

Tiberio Baccilieri, Lectura in tres libros de anima & parva naturalia: Et in tractatum Averrois de substantia orbis. Necnon & in duo de generatione & corruptione volumina (Pavia, 1508), fol. 87 r: ‘Averrois vult multa somnia pervenire immediate a deo: omnis enim cognitio & sensitiva & intellectiva humana immediate causatur a deo: ob hoc tamen non est somnium passio intellectus: licet in somnio contingat vere intelligere.’ Baccilieri concludes by noting that he

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philosopher and famous ‘Averroist’138 Marcantonio Zimara, who had studied under Nifo and Pietro Pomponazzi at Padua and had academic expertise in both natural philosophy and medical theory — for instance in his summary of doctrines about the imagination in the widely used Tabula, & dilucidationes in dicta Aristotelis, & Averrois (1537), and more substantially in his discussion of the intellect in the expanded second edition of the Theoremata (1539).139 Nifo’s commentary on the De divinatione also refers to Averroes to support his explanation of the receptivity of the melancholic imagination to phantasms.140 Italian Averroist interpretations persisted into the following century, from the Seminarium totius philosophiae Aristotelicae et Platonicae (1599–1605) by the Venetian natural philosopher Giovanni Batista Bernardo, which reproduces Averroes’s account of the melancholic imagination in its summary of Aristotle’s teachings about melancholy,141 to the Expositio paraphrasis Averrois in librum Aristotelis de somniis (1646) by the Veronese physician and philosopher Girolamo Franzosi. The latter is a rarely noted instance of late Renaissance Averroism and, as its title suggests, is a supercommentary on Averroes’s Epitome. Its explicitly

discusses this topic at greater length in his ordinary lectures on philosophy and medical theoria, which I have not yet consulted; but see also his earlier summary of the De divinatione per somnum in Repertorium dicotrum: Aristotelis, Averroys, aliorum philosophorum (Bologna, 1491), at sig e[3]v. On Baccilieri [1461(?)–1511(?)], who taught philosophy at Pavia, Padua, and Bologna between 1500 and 1511, see Nardi, Sigieri di Brabante, pp. 132–51. 138

I use this term simply to indicate Zimara’s recognized status as a commentator on (or employing) Averroes. On the neutrally descriptive usage of the term ‘Averroista’ in the sixteenth century see Martin, ‘Rethinking Renaissance Averroism’, pp. 14–15. 139

Marcantonio Zimara, Tabula, & dilucidationes in dicta Aristotelis, & Averrois (Venice, 1565), p. 72; Zimara, Theoremata, seu memorabilium propositionum limitationes (Venice, 1564), p. 127: ‘Et isto modo innotescere etiam potest tibi. unde contingat divinatio, quae est secundum quietem, de qua multa laboravit Aristo. & etiam Averro. in libro de divinatione’, etc. The first edition of the Theoremata was published in Naples in 1523. Averroes’s influence in this territory is also evident in Zimara, Dicta notabilia Aristotelis, & aliorum quam plurimum (Venice, 1536), fols 53 v –54 r. On Zimara (1487–1535), who was professor of natural philosophy at Padua (1505–09), professor of natural philosophy and theoretical medicine at Salerno (1518/19–22), lectured on metaphysics at Naples (1522–23), and was subsequently professor of philosophy at Padua (1525–28), see Nardi, Saggi sull’Aristotelismo, pp. 321–63. 140

Aristotle, Parva naturalia, comm. Nifo, fol. 108 v. Nifo elsewhere justified his interest in Averroes by noting the latter’s similarity to the Greek commentaries on Aristotle: Martin, ‘Rethinking Renaissance Averroism’, pp. 18–19. 141

Giovanni Baptista Bernardo, Seminarium totius philosophiae Aristotelicae et Platonicae (Geneva, 1599–1605), col. 824.

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naturalistic preoccupations, and the ends to which it employs Averroistic psychology, however, indicate that it should be located in a different category of interpretations of Aristotelian dream theory, namely those sceptical or so-called ‘libertine’ works which go beyond the essentially pedagogical task of textual exposition by exploring and more or less openly endorsing the materialist and potentially unsettling implications of the Aristotelian account.

Harnessing Aristotle We now come, then, to works that redeploy Aristotle’s materialistic explanation for melancholic dream-divination for subversive, sceptical, or heterodox purposes. The first notable Renaissance author to do so, the Mantuan natural philosopher Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525), did this in a manner which made clear the connections between dream theory and areas of psychology that were theologically highly sensitive. At the university of Padua, Pomponazzi had exposed the fault line between Aristotelian philosophy and theology in apparent defiance of the Lateran Council on the doctrine of the soul in his notorious Tractatus de immortalitate animae (1516); and in the De naturalium effectuum causis sive de incantationibus (1520) he set out to discredit traditional Christian beliefs in miracles by applying philosophy to religious phenomena to explain them as part of the order of nature. As Pomponazzi had received his doctorate in medicine at Padua in 1495, it is perhaps unsurprising that both works drew upon the idea of melancholy when addressing the nature of predictive dreams. In the ninth chapter of the De immortalitate animae, Pomponazzi followed Alexander of Aphrodisias, who had taken Aristotle’s view of the soul in the De anima as the entelechy of the organic body to mean that it is the product of the mixture of the bodily elements. Here Pomponazzi’s interpretation of Aristotle’s position is that even if the human intellect is incorporeal, and can be said to perform immaterial operations when it reflects upon itself, nevertheless it always depends upon the data provided by material bodily senses (their phantasms) for its operations.142 As it is dependent upon the body, the human soul is therefore a material form — albeit one of the highest order — and to be distinguished from immaterial forms (or celestial ‘Intelligences’, the divine guardians of the lower

142

57–61.

Pietro Pomponazzi, Tractatus de immortalitate animae (Basel, 1534), chap. IX , esp. pp.

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realm) which are entirely independent of corporeal substances.143 Pomponazzi’s conclusion, that the question of whether intellect survives the death of the body — and so the immortality of the soul — is technically a ‘neutral’ one that cannot be proved by reason and is extraneous to Christian faith, was widely taken to be a denial of the doctrine of immortality. It was also seen to revive the heretical idea — the proscription of which had been the underlying aim of the Lateran Council’s decree — of the duplex veritas (two-fold truth), the notion that a doctrine may be true in philosophy but false in theology.144 The controversy provoked by Pomponazzi’s interpretation of the De anima focused principally on the question of immortality.145 But the effects of his radically naturalistic interpretations of Aristotelian psychology spilled into his discussion of dream-divination, which was the source of one of the traditional arguments for immortality (which the De immortalitate also sought to combat) derived from the experience of strange or seemingly wondrous events.146 All such events, according to Pomponazzi, are natural phenomena emanating from planetary conjunctions guided by the divine Intelligences, which have intuitive knowledge of universal truths and are the source of revelation.147 More particularly, foreknowledge and prophecy, like demonic possession, are caused by such astral motions in combination with bodily dispositions, especially melancholic ones.148 Prophetic dreams, especially involving images of the dead, may occur,149 but are not an experiential proof of immortality. Rather, they prove only, as Averroes 143

Pomponazzi, De immortalitate animae, chap. IX , p. 55.

144

On the medieval background to this issue see J. F. Wippel, ‘The Condemnations of 1270 and 1277 at Paris’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 7 (1977), 169–201; Alain Boureau, ‘La Censure dans les universités médiévales (note critique)’, Annales: Histoire, sciences sociales, 55 (2000), 313–23; Nach der Verurteilung von 1277: Philosophie und Theologie an der Universität von Paris im letzen Viertel des 13. Jahrhunderts: Studien und Texte, ed. by Jan. A. Aertsen, Kent Emery, Jr, and Andreas Speer (New York: de Gruyter, 2001). For its relevance to Pomponazzi see Martin Pine, ‘Pomponazzi and the Problem of “Double Truth”’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 29 (1968), 163–76. 145

Étienne Gilson, ‘L’Affaire de l’immortalité de l’âme à Venise au début du XVIe siècle’, in Umanesimo europeo e umanesimo Veneziano, ed. by Vittore Branca (Florence: Sansoni, 1963), pp. 31–61; Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi , pp. 124–234. 146 See E. R . Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), p. 135. 147

Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi, p. 259.

148

Pomponazzi, De immortalitate animae, chap. XIV , pp. 133–34.

149

Pomponazzi, De immortalitate animae, chap. XIII, pp. 101–02.

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showed in his commentary on the Parva naturalia, ‘that the Gods’ (that is, the divine Intelligences) ‘concern themselves with things below’, and thereby ‘teach many things and exercise providence over human affairs’.150 In an earlier lecture at Padua, Pomponazzi had noted the potentially subversive effects of Averroes’s theory of sense-perception and dreaming when applied to scriptural revelation. In the Epitome, Averroes had noted that the imagination produces images of objects that are not present in external reality not only during sleep, but also in waking life when a person is afflicted by disease or fear.151 He had also discredited the popular view that ‘dreams come from angels, divination from demons and prophecy from God’.152 If Averroes were correct, Pomponazzi observed, and his explanation were applied to the Virgin Mary’s vision of the archangel Gabriel or the appearance of the resurrected Christ to the apostles, ‘our entire religion would have passed away’ (sic periret tota lex nostra).153 Drawing on a range of classical and Arabic sources in the De incantationibus, Pomponazzi gave sustained consideration to the apparently miraculous or magical phenomena commonly attributed to demons or angels, opposing the Neoplatonist

150 Pomponazzi, De immortalitate animae, chap. XIII, p. 134: ‘Ad tertium vero dicitur quod Peripatetici dicerent illas esse illusiones, sicut multi faciunt per alterationem aut medij, aut oculi, aut si fuit verum, non sumus in terminis, quia secludimus miracula: Quod autem ulterius adiungebatur de somniis, nos illa maiora concedimus, Averroes enim uqi non ponit animas multiplicari in capite de divinatione somniorum illud abunde concedit, & Galenus qui animam putavit mortalem, imo multa in medicina habita sunt per somnia, verum haec non arguunt animam immortalem simpliciter, sed Deos curare inferiora; quare & per signa in vigilia, & per somnia multa docent & provident rebus humanis, sicut abunde ibi dicit Averroes’ (translation taken from ‘On the Immortality of the Soul’, trans. by W. H. Hay II and rev. by J. H. Randall, in The Renaissance Philosophy of Man, ed. by Ernst Cassirer, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), pp. 371–72). I am taking ‘Deos’ here to refer to the divine ‘Intelligentia’, as elsewhere Pomponazzi attributes prodigious powers, including prophecy, to astral causes and ultimately to the Intelligences: see Pietro Pomponazzi, De naturalium effectuum admirandorum causis, Seu de Incantationibus Liber. Item de Fato: Libero arbitrio. Praedestinatione. Providentia Dei, Libri V (Basel, 1567), chap. XII, pp. 283–84, and Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi, pp. 68–71. 151

Averroes, Epitome, p. 41.

152

Averroes, Epitome, p. 40, implying the falsity of the popular belief ‘that dreams come from angels, divination from demons and prophecy from God […] either without any intermediary or through a special intermediary’. 153

Quoted from Nardi, Studi su Pietro Pomponazzi, p. 39. Despite some important areas of agreement, Pomponazzi departed from Averroes on many issues, notably in the De immortalitate: see Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi, pp. 72, 77, 87–97.

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view according to which natural laws were constantly interrupted by supernatural beings, and argued that God only ever acted in the order of nature through the divine Intelligences, which achieved their effects by controlling planetary motions.154 Here an important role was given to the faculty of the imagination. Its power, Pomponazzi argued, is such that it may cause or cure disease not only internally by altering the bodily disposition, but also externally, by transmitting subtle vapours to others.155 The extraordinary natural force of the imagination, and its capacity to effect physical changes outside the body, could therefore provide the basis for explanations of many supposed miracles — such as the vision of St Celestine experienced by the entire population of Aquila, which Pomponazzi suggested may have been collectively projected in the air by the imaginations of the crowd in the manner of a dream-image.156 The De incantationibus also addressed the issue of oneiromancy, first in a consideration of admonitory dreams. Like waking visions, it is claimed, these occur frequently and must be heeded; but rather than being directly sent by God or intermediary spirits, they must be understood to originate in sense-images detected in the air and represented by the soul in sleep (perhaps a version of the Democritean ‘phantoms and emanations’ considered by Aristotle), and ultimately, therefore, in the divinely guided movements of celestial bodies.157 Later on, we are told, in accordance with the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata, XXX, 1, that nearly all prophets are melancholics, that their divinatory capabilities are attributable to a conjunction of the material cause of black bile and astral influences mediating the divine intelligences. This conjunction is based on an intimate relationship of ‘knowledge and similitude’ (cognitio & similitudo) between the celestial bodies

154

Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi, p. 266.

155

Pomponazzi, De incantationibus, chap. III, pp. 31–36, chap. IV , pp. 48–49. Pomponazzi was here drawing substantially upon the theory of phantasia elaborated in Marsilio Ficino, Theologia Platonica, XIII. 1 (= Platonic Theology, ed. by Hankins, trans. by Allen, IV , 110–21), and the Commentarium in convivium Platonis de amore, VII. 4 (= Commentary on Plato’s Symposium on Love, trans. by Sears R . Jayne (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1944), pp. 159–60). 156

Pomponazzi, De incantationibus, chap. X , pp. 159–60; this explanation also appears to have been influenced by the idea that the imagination has the power to effect physical changes outside of the body, as formulated by Avicenna and Ficino: see Dag Nikolaus Hasse, ‘Arabic Philosophy and Averroism’, in The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Philosophy, pp. 113–36 (pp. 122–24). Pomponazzi also considered other natural explanations for this event in a later chapter: XII, pp. 239–40, 288. 157

Pomponazzi, De incantationibus, chap. X , pp. 129–30.

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and the prophetic bodily disposition. Such prophecy often occurs in sleep, as dreaming and prophesying are activities with very similar causes.158 One notable refutation of Pomponazzi’s mortalism, which similarly drew upon the Problemata and Averroes’s Epitome but which was also grounded in the dream treatises in the Parva naturalia themselves, came in the Liber de immortalitate animorum (1545) by the celebrated polymathic physician Girolamo Cardano (1501–76). Despite his opposition to Pomponazzi, Cardano’s account of dreaming generally accorded with his astrological naturalism, citing Aristotle’s De divinatione per somnum in its discussion of prophetic visions,159 and moving from conventional medical observations about melancholic nightmares to a supportive account of Averroes’s explanation for the celestially induced prophetic dreams that occur when the soul is separated from the body.160 Subsequently, however, Cardano’s views on divination were themselves attacked with the

158

Pomponazzi, De incantationibus, chap. X , p. 140. Pietro d’Abano seems to have thought similarly: see Conciliator, CLVII, fol. 208v , which rejects Aristotle’s argument in the De divinatione per somnum on the grounds that the wise do experience divinely sent dreams, counterpoising the authorities of Galen, Avicenna, the Stoics, and (peculiarly) the Epicureans. In Gregor Horst, Conciliator enucleatus seu differentiarum et medicarum Petri Apponensis compendium (Giessen, 1621), p. 210, it is commented that the Conciliator’s explanation of dreams as naturally caused by bodily factors does not apply to celestial or divine dreams sent immediately by God, unless, as the Hippocratic De insomniis relates, there are natural or non-natural impediments. In his Expositio problematum Aristotelis (Mantua, 1475), Pietro was generally sceptical about celestial dreams (X X X . 12), but accepted the notion of astrally determined melancholic prophecy (X X X . 1). On his astrological naturalism see Danielle Jacquart, ‘L’Influence des astres sur le corps humain chez Pietro d’Abano’, in Le Corps et ses énigmes au Moyen Âge, ed. by Bernard Ribémont (Caen: Paradigme, 1993), pp. 73–86; Graziella Federici Vescovini, ‘Peter of Abano and Astrology’, in Astrology, Science and Society: Historical Essays, ed. by Patrick Curry (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1987), pp. 19–41. 159 160

Cardano, Opera omnia, II, 464.

Cardano, Opera omnia, II, 512–14, 515–16. See also the theological parallel between sleep and death (cf. Tertullian, De anima, XLII, p. 461), the noting of Galen’s acceptance of oracular dreams at p. 466, and also the discussion in De subtilitate, XVIII of dreams and melancholic hallucinations, relating them to Averroes’s theory of the imagination in the Collectanea (ibid., III, 651b–652b; I am very grateful to Guido Giglioni for this reference). Cardano’s most extensive treatment of dreaming came later in the Somniorum synesiorum libri quatuor of 1562; space does not permit discussion of this work here, but see Alison Browne, ‘Girolamo Cardano’s Somniorum synesiorum libri IIII’, Bibliothèque de l’Humanisme et Renaissance, 40 (1979), 123–35; and JeanYves Boriaud, ‘La Place du Traité des songes dans la tradition onirocritique: Le Problème de l’image onirique. L’Idolum et la Uisio’, in Girolamo Cardano: Le opere, le fonte, la vita, ed. by Guido Canziani and Marialuisa Baldi (Milan: Angeli, 1999), pp. 215–25.

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assistance of Aristotelian dream theory, in the De divinatione per somnum ad Aristotelem by Francisco Sanches.161 Sanches, the Portuguese Catholic physician, professor of philosophy (and from 1612 professor of medicine) at the University of Toulouse, had earlier authored the sceptical treatise Quod nihil scitur (1581), a rigorous critique of the Aristotelian conception of science. His De divinatione was first published in 1636 as part of his Opera medica, but probably originates in lectures on Aristotle delivered in or around 1585 as the newly instituted professor of philosophy.162 Despite its title, Sanches’s treatise is mostly given over to an extensive rebuttal and ridicule of Cardano, and the classical authority used most frequently for this purpose is not Aristotle but Cicero.163 However, Sanches illustrated the key contention for the coincidental character of the truly predictive dreams of the insane and the drunken with Aristotle’s metaphor of shooting all day and occasionally hitting the target.164 Surprisingly, given his Pyrrhonian credentials, he did not deny the possibility of divination altogether. Rather, he sought to reformulate its character as foresight, a special form of knowledge produced by the human mind. His primary concern was to discredit the idea of daemonic agencies mediating the natural and supernatural spheres and communicating divine knowledge to human recipients, which had been crucial to Cardano’s understanding of supernatural inspiration and many learned contemporaries, Neoplatonist or not.165 Accordingly, Sanches aligned himself with the views of both Aristotle and Cicero as he interpreted them. For him, these authors acknowledged that divination was possible as a form of ‘presentiment’, which was to be properly understood as a kind of ‘internal vision’, a product of the mind’s apprehension of sensory information relating to ‘hidden things’, and which was

161

The work singled out by Sanches was Cardano’s De rerum varietate (1557), which had also discussed the extraordinary aspects of sleeping and dreaming: Opera omnia, III, 161–67. 162

Francisco Sanches, De divinatione per somnum ad Aristotelem, in Tractatus philosophici (Rotterdam, 1649), pp. 183–293. 163

The sceptical arguments of the second book of Cicero’s De divinatione were well known to Renaissance writers on dreams, but Cicero’s case — as Sanches undoubtedly knew — is itself partly based upon the Aristotelian physiology of dreaming. See especially Cicero, De divinatione, II. 128; though cf. I. 81, where the Aristotelian Problemata, X X X , 1 is cited by Quintus in support of the opposing case for the truly supernatural character of melancholic divination. 164 165

Cicero, De divinatione, II. 121.

See, generally, Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

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distinct from the ‘internal vision’ of conventional knowledge insofar as it was not the product of rational discourse.166 If there is a fideistic-sceptical element to this interpretation of divination, the conceptual space it inhabits is barricaded by the materialist medical conception of melancholy and dreams that I have been discussing.167 At the end of his treatise, in order to undermine the idea that dream-images may be sent to us from a supernatural origin, Sanches simply noted that in sleep the soul senses things that are internal to the body, and that these result in dream-images which are humorally determined: ‘when the melancholic humour dominates,’ for instance, ‘one dreams of corpses, murder, wounds, snakes, crosses, grief, and all sorts of sorrowful things.’168 Hence, ‘in its nocturnal visions the soul recognizes nothing other than the present condition of the body, not quite clearly and openly, but by dreams and as if through a veil’.169 Dreams therefore had predictive value not for the purpose of divination, but for medicine, because when they are subjected to reason, induction, and conjecture they could produce probable knowledge about future events in the body.170 Since proper divination — as opposed to the false art that trades on coincidences — was to be explained naturalistically as a product of the mind, Aristotle was wrong to suggest that men of a ‘lowly’ nature experience divinatory dreams more frequently than the prudent: divination is properly a product of the mind. However, he was correct to argue that melancholics (who according to Sanches’s reading of Problemata, XXX, 1 are for the most part prudent and wise) could have the power of foresight for the same reason. This capability is due to the impetuosity of the melancholic imagination when it is 166

Sanches, De divinatione, p. 197.

167

For the place of medical empiricism within Sanches’s scepticism see Damian Caluori, ‘The Scepticism of Francisco Sanchez’, Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 89 (2007), 30–46. 168 Sanches, De divinatione, p. 288: ‘Cum dominatur melancholicus humor, somniat cadavera, neces, vulnera, serpentes, cruces, luctus, & omnia maesta.’ Sanches also suggests that other types of dream-image may have different physiological origins, for example, erotic dreams produced by seed: pp. 290–91; see Galen, Opera, II, cols 960–61, 970; and Ferrand, A Treatise of Lovesickness, p. 248. 169

Sanches, De divinatione, p. 290: ‘His ergo nocturnis visionibus nihil aliud cognoscit anima, quam corporis praesentem statum, neque id satis manifeste & explicite, sed per somnia & quasi per nubem’. 170 Sanches, De divinatione, p. 291. It is not clear whether Sanches considers this type of prediction to be a form of the ‘presentiment’ he has earlier theorized, though one assumes this to be the case. Note also his reservations about the astrological theory of the Hippocratic Regimen, IV , 291–92.

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coupled with understanding and mental ‘speed’: the result is that even when the melancholic metaphorically ‘throws from a long distance’, he ‘often hits the target’.171 Sanches thereby combined materialistic medical scepticism with regard to the origin of dream-images with a naturalistic conception of divination based on the pseudo-Aristotelian idea of the genial melancholic.172 A more aggressive sceptical redeployment of the Aristotelian conception of the melancholic dream can be found in the De admirandis naturae (1616) by the notorious Italian heretic Giulio Cesare Vanini.173 The De admirandis, which was presented as a defence of the Christian doctrine of providence but whose sardonic and heterodox content led to its immediate condemnation by the Sorbonne and inclusion on the Index of Prohibited Books in 1623,174 appears to have been inspired at least in part by Pomponazzi. The Mantuan philosopher is quoted extensively throughout, and described by Vanini as his ‘divine preceptor’ and ‘the prince of the philosophers of our century’, so it is no surprise to find that his

171

Sanches, De divinatione, p. 293: ‘Tota ergo conficta est, commenticia, fallax, & deceptoria ea quae de divinatione quomodocumque instituta est ars: & si quid eorum quae ratione non colliguntur, contingat; id totum fortuitum est & pure contingens. Quare neque verum est, quod ait Aristoteles (sit hoc cum venia dictum tanti viri) infimae conditionis homines divinare in somniis, quia eorum mens quasi deserta & curis vacua, imagines & idola de quibus supra, facile admittunt: minus vero sapientes, ob contrariam rationem. Contra enim omnino prudentes multo plura, & certius idiotis divinant, rationis adminiculo, ut superius dicebamus. Unde melius dixit idem Aristoteles circa finem ejus opusculi, melancholicos (sunt autem hi majori ex parte prudentes & sapientes eidem Aristoteli 30. Problem. 1.) & propter vehementiam (imaginationis scilicet, quamvis satius fuisset dicere, propter jugem cogitationem), ut qui a longinquo jaculantur, saepe collimant; & propter celeritatem mentis, plurimum divinant.’ 172

For the similarly sceptical medical employment of the De divinatione per somnum in the discussion of melancholy by the Spanish Galenic physician Alonso de Freylas (1550[?]–1624), see Antonio Bravo Garcìa, ‘Los Parva naturalia en el Aristotelismo Español: Alonso de Freylas y sus opiniones sobre la adivinación por medio de los sueños’, in Los Humanistas Españoles y el Humanismo Europeo (Murcia: Universidad de Murcia, 1990), pp. 51–77. 173 On Vanini see Francesco Paolo Raimondi, Giulio Cesare Vanini nell’Europa del Seicento (Rome: Istituti editoriali e politgrafici internazionali, 2005); and Didier Foucault, Un philosophe libertin dans l’Europe baroque: Giulio Cesare Vanini (1585–1619) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2003). 174 See Foucault, Un philosophe libertin, pp. 350–73, 412–40, 522–645; Nicholas Davidson, ‘Le Plus Beau et le plus meschant esprit que ie aye cogneu: Science and Religion in the Writings of Giulio Cesare Vanini, 1585–1619’, in Heterodoxy in Early Modern Science and Religion, ed. by Brooke and Maclean, pp. 59–79, esp. pp. 68–75.

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analysis of dreams restates and in fact develops Pomponazzi’s critique of supernatural agency.175 The fourth book of the De admirandis, devoted to the subject of pagan religion, closes with a dialogue on dreams conducted by the characters of Alexander and Julius Caesar, the latter evidently representing the views of Vanini in a fairly straightforward fashion.176 Here Vanini constructed a rigorously materialistic-Aristotelian conception of dreams, according to which dream-images originate in the heart, and which leaves no room whatsoever for supernatural influence.177 In response to Alexander’s question about the origins of dream-images, Julius states simply that they are to be traced to ‘the variety of foodstuffs’, and when pressed by his interlocutor, goes on to explain. Listen: the images of things are preserved in the soul, and the spirits carry these images by a light movement to the imagination, or when they are there, they excite and envelop them. Hence the variety and imperfection of the images we perceive in dreams, on account of the variety and speed of spirits, but because spirits are generated from foodstuffs, therefore from the variety of foodstuffs arises the variety of dreams. For this reason turbulent images appear to those who eat broad beans, kidney beans, lentils, peas, chickpeas, onions, and many other foods. They are turbulent, because these kinds of food are dry and so generate black bile, and consequently dreadful funeral pyres, scary sepulchres, and demonic phantoms appear in dreams. Indeed there are many of these, because the black bile agitates vapours, as Aristotle says.178

175

Giulio Cesare Vanini, De admirandis naturae reginae deaeque mortalium arcanis libri quatuor (Lyon, 1616), IV . 51, p. 373: ‘Pomponatio nostri seculi Philosophorum Principe’ and IV . 52, p. 374: ‘Divinus Praeceptor in aureo opusculo de incantationibus.’ Vanini had studied at Padua when still a Carmelite, and his extensive use of the Aristotelian commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias is often attributed to the influence of Pomponazzi: see Pintard, Le Libertinage érudit, I, p. 62; and Foucault, Un philosophe libertin, pp. 236–52. 176

Vanini, De admirandis naturae, IV . 60, pp. 480–95. Vanini’s views on dreams are also analysed in Didier Foucault, ‘L’Argument du songe dans la critique libertine de la religion: la position de Vanini’, in Songes et songeurs (XIIIe– XVIIIe siècle), ed. by Nathalie Dauvois and JeanPhilippe Grosperrin (Saint-Nicholas: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2003). 177 178

Vanini, De admirandis naturae, IV . 60, pp. 482–83.

Vanini, De admirandis naturae, IV . 60, pp. 484–85: ‘ALEX . Perdocte, sed unde tot variae reurm formae nobis dormientibus obviae fiunt? I. C. E ciborum varietate. ALEX . Quid ais? I. C. Audi. in anima servantur rerum species: has levi motu comprehensas, ad imaginationem spiritus deferunt, vel ibi existentes excitant, atque obvoluunt. Varia igitur & imperfecta simulacra in somnis conspicimus; ob spirituum varietatem, atque celeritatem, at spiritus e cibis generantur, ergo e ciborum varietate insomniorum varietas accidit: quapropter fabas, phaseolos, lentes, pisas, ciceres, cepullas, allia [sic] comedenti complurimae, ipsaeque turbulentae species apparent: Turbulentae quidem, nam ista ciborum genera propter siccitatem atram bilem congenerant, ideo

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All such disturbing and repulsive phantasms are not of demonic origin, as popular superstition suggests, but arise naturally from the actions of the dark, vaporous emanations of ‘melancholic’ vegetables on the spirits.179 In other dialogues in the De admirandis, Vanini delighted similarly in expounding the pseudo-Aristotelian reduction of the power of prophecy to the effects of black bile, and ridiculing the credulity of those who mistake moody melancholics for the demonically possessed.180 When Alexander turns to the inevitable question of divination from dreams, the discussion take its cue from Pomponazzi, but its materialist scepticism runs deeper. Julius Caesar initially refers to Averroes on the matter, as Pomponazzi had before him, but his companion is unconvinced by the attribution of predictive dreams to celestial Intelligences. It is then revealed that for Julius Caesar, dreams can only be the domain of ‘lies, nonsense, frivolities, and impossible and chimerical fables’.181 Alexander cannot accept that dreams do not ‘sometimes give us an understanding of future events’, but his interlocutor is adamant that under the diverse influences of food, affections, and spirits, dreams can only communicate ‘imperfect and darkened knowledge’. Vanini then went on to expose the larger issue at stake, once again following in the footsteps of Pomponazzi, by commenting on Cardano’s belief in the mutually supportive character of beliefs in the celestial origins of dreams and souls: I do not say this to prove that our souls are mortal, but to show that it is impossible to disprove this by means of an argument deduced from dreams. Nor do I think that I deserve the reprimand of our Theologians, who being inspired by higher celestial principles commemorate the divine dreams of the Hebrew prophets in Holy Scripture, and command us to show faith in dreams, but think it can be used as an argument to prove the immortality of the soul.

Alexander’s request for a clear statement of Julius Caesar’s views on this issue is met with an obscure joke — perhaps alluding to Cornelius Agrippa, whose views on the limitations of human knowledge Vanini claimed to share — as the latter

bustorum formidamina, sepultorum terriculamenta, daemonum spectra in somnis occursant: plurimae vero, quia atra bilis flatus ciet, ut inquit Philosophus.’ 179

Vanini, De admirandis naturae, IV . 60, p. 485.

180

Vanini, De admirandis naturae, IV . 52–53, pp. 379–409. See also the humoral account of dreams of incubi at IV . 60, pp. 487–89. 181

Vanini, De admirandis naturae, IV . 60, pp. 490–91 (p. 491): ‘mendacia, deliria, nugas, impossibiles denique Chimericas fabellas insomnis confingat & contempletur.’ On Vanini’s use of Averroes see Martin, ‘Rethinking Renaissance Averroism’, p. 16.

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begs to be excused from answering on the basis that he has promised God not to discuss the issue before he is old, rich, and German.182 By casting doubt on the soul’s immortality, Vanini’s discussion of dreams provides a fitting conclusion to a radically subversive work that openly flouts Christian orthodoxy by identifying God with nature, denying the existence of a spiritual world, spiritual beings, and spiritual conditions distinct from those which are perceptible to the senses, and which ridicules religion as a human invention devised to maintain order.183 Vanini was executed for blasphemy, atheism, and impiety in 1619.184 His unusually forceful articulation of Aristotelian materialist arguments for openly heterodox ends attracted the interest of sceptically inclined anti-dogmatists in France such as Gabriel Naudé and François La Mothe le Vayer, as well as

182

Vanini, De admirandae naturae, IV . 60, pp. 491–92: ‘ALEX . Negare non potes, veram aliquando de futuris eventibus ratiocinationem in somnis a nobis institui. I. C. Quid inter mendaciorum centies centena millia unica perpusilla veritatis imago, compluribus adhuc falsitatis nebulis obumbrata. Ego, cui somnia ex Astronomorum regulis veriora accidere deberent, Luna enim, quae nocti praeest, divinationisque patens credita est a Ptolomaeo, mei ortus apheta est, vix quinquies tamen futurm eventum in somnis praevidisse memini, qui deinde vix e semisse verus contigit; insomnium quoque praecesserant nonnullae diurnae cogitationes fere consimiles. idcirco ex praecognitione saltem imperfecta ac transpositione & visarum rerum intermistione tanquam e materiali causa, & ex vario, pro ciborum & affectuum ratione, spirituum motu, tanquam ab efficienti, constare omnia insomnia arbitror. Quapropter si infantes primis ab ortu diebus somniare Cardano probasset aliquis, animae nostrae e beatis sedibus descensum se non negaturum pollicetur; Est enim (inquit ille) omne insomnium recordatio, infantulis autem recens natis nulla rerum potest esse memoria, haec enim cognitionem supponit, qua cum illi careant, vel nulla habebunt insomnia; vel si habere quis asserat, quod vix tamen probabit, coelitus ei advenire cognitionem fatebimur. Non haec assero, ut animi nostri interitum comprobem, sed ut patefaciam ab eo vindicari non posse ob rationem ab insomnijs deductam. Nec mihi refragaturos puto nostrates Theologos, qui sacrosancta insomnia, quae sanctissimis hebraeorum vatibus accidisse sacra pagina commemorat, altioribus coelestibusque principijs adscribentes, nobis interdicunt, ne fidem praestemus in somnijs, nequaquam hoc facturi, si ex insomnijs petito argumento animae immortalitatem comprobare posse considerent. ALEX. Quaeso, mi Iuli, tuam mihi de Animae immortalitate sententiam explices. IUL. CAES. Excusatum me habeas rogo. ALEX. Cur ita? I. C. Vovi Deo meo quaestionem hanc me non pertractaturum, antequam senex, dives, & Germanus evasero?’ On Vanini’s valuation of Agrippa’s claims about the limits of human knowledge in the De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium (1526), see Foucault, Un philosophe libertin, p. 641. 183

I am paraphrasing the useful summary in Davidson, ‘Le Plus Beau et le plus meschant esprit’, pp. 71–72. 184

See Cesare Vasoli, ‘Vanini e il suo processo per ateismo’, in Atheismus in Mittelalter und in der Renaissance, ed. by Friedrich Niewöhner and Olaf Pluta (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1999), pp. 129–44; Foucault, Un philosophe libertin, pp. 441–90.

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predictably fierce criticism from Catholic critics of libertinism, who placed him in a lineage of atheistic naturalists beginning with Machiavelli, and proceeding with Pomponazzi, Bruno, Cardano, and Bodin.185 The anti-supernaturalist concerns of seventeenth-century ‘free-thinkers’ were wide-ranging and eclectic, but the sceptical-Averroistic discourse focusing particularly on dreams was continued in Franzosi’s Expositio paraphrasis Averrois in librum Aristotelis de somniis. Franzosi, who had perhaps also been influenced by Vanini and Pomponazzi,186 began provocatively with a discussion of Averroes’s explanation of predictive dreams as the basis for a natural form of divination, contrasting his approach to prophecy approvingly with the accounts of theologians, and noting that whereas the Commentator rightly identified natural causes, popular opinion saw dreams sent by angels, demonic divination, and divinely inspired prophecy.187 A later chapter develops Franzosi’s argument with an analysis of Averroes’s explanation of why melancholics are more capable of divination in sleep than others.188 Here, the possibility of oneiromancy is defended in terms that integrate divine, astral, and material causes,189 explicating and supporting Averroes by

185

Tullio Gregory, ‘“Libertinisme Érudit” in Seventeenth-Century France and Italy: The Critique of Ethics and Religion’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 6 (1998), 323–49, (pp. 331–32, 334–40); Pintard, Le Libertinage érudit, I, 39–44, 106–09; Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle, rev. edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 80–98. 186

On the influence of Vanini (and indirectly therefore of Pomponazzi) on Franzosi, see Andrzej Nowicki, ‘Le Idee Vaniniane nel De mutationibus religionum (1632) di Girolamo Franzosi, filosofo e medico veronese’, Atti dell’Accademia di Scienze Morali e Politiche, 86 (1975), 399–412. Naudé included Franzosi’s commentary on Aristotle’s De divinatione in a list of audacious works inspired by Pomponazzi (Pintard, Le Libertinage Érudit, I, 263). 187

Girolamo Franzosi, Expositio paraphrasis Averrois in librum Aristotelis de somniis (Verona, 1646), chap. I, p. 12. 188

Franzosi, Expositio, chap. IX , pp. 71–77. Franzosi authored an earlier treatise De divinatione per somnum et de prophetia (Frankfurt, 1632), which mentions the role of the melancholic imagination in dream-divination, and which foreshadows his Averroistic interests in its discussion of Cardano; its contents are summarized in Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1923–58), VI (1953), 511–14. He also used Averroes in his defence of Aristotle against Galen in his Tractatus apologeticus de semine pro Aristotele adversus Galenum (Verona, 1645). 189 See, for instance, Franzosi, Expositio, chap. IX , p. 75: ‘Non etiam negandum est, homines huius temperamenti posse nasci sub aliquibus syderum coniunctionibus, per quas divina vis simul cum causis secundis singulari quodam modo in res sublunares diffundatur, in cuius virtute fiunt omni opera possibilia in hoc mundo.’

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relating his position to the pseudo-Aristotelian argument that extraordinary mental abilities can arise from black bile when it is in its adust form.190 To explain the manner in which melancholics are affected by celestial movements, however, he turned not to Neoplatonic sources, but to Alexander of Aphrodisias,191 which suggests a materialistic recasting of the astrological theory of genial melancholy under the influence, perhaps, of Pomponazzi.192 In fact, Franzosi’s work shows virtually no interest in reconciling philosophical doctrine with Scripture. Only once does it mention biblical instances of divinely inspired dreams, in a rare deviation from his two philosophical authorities and with a suspicious submission to the certainty of ‘divine truth’.193 It concludes on a suggestive note of Lucretian contempt for those timid souls who are struck with wonder at natural phenomena.194

Seventeenth-Century Applications If there was a broad consensus between Galenic physicians and Aristotelian natural philosophers on the subjects of melancholic psychology and dreaming in the Renaissance — that is to say, agreement that dream-images were often 190

Franzosi, Expositio, chap. IX , pp. 73–74.

191

Franzosi, Expositio, chap. IX , p. 75, referring to the discussion of the influence of incorruptible heavenly bodies upon mortal physical bodies, by means of their ‘blending’, in Alexander’s Quaestiones, II. 3. See Alexander of Aphrodisias, Quaestiones 1. 1–2. 15, ed. and trans. by R . W. Sharples (London: Duckworth, 1992), pp. 93–98. 192

See also the use of Alexander at chap. V, pp. 37–39, chap. VI, p. 49, and chap. IX , p. 74, but note the reservation about Alexander’s explanation for magical phenomena at chap. IX , p. 77. 193

Franzosi, Expositio, chap. X , pp. 83–84: ‘Tertium genus [divinationis], etiamsi non admittatur ab Averroe nec ab ullo peripatetico, continet illos, qui videntur posse scientias speculativas in somno & sine medio acquirere. Isti homines, quemadmodum ille dixit, sunt potius angeli & equinoce homines, quam homines, Inter hos ipse puto praecipue esse enumerandos illos viros, qui in religione nostra sanctitate & vita praepollent, quibus Deus Optimus Maximus, vel ipsa Caeli secreta quandoque non abscondit. Ad hoc genus possunt reduci somnia & somniorum interpraetationes Ioseph, & Danielis: similiterque potest dici de Eliseo, qui ut habetur lib. 4. Regum ad cantum psaltis coepit prophetare, & de missione, sortium, quae in 16. Proverb. Referuntur temperatae a Deo. Istud est supernaturale donum & certissimum divinae veritatis argumentum. Propterea istis hominibus debet tribui in humanitate principatus.’ 194

Franzosi, Expositio, chap. XI, p. 88: ‘unde anima admiratur & veluti timida excitatur ab illo insomnio in eum fere modum, qui assignatur a Lucretio ijs, qui admiratione oppressi non audent de rerum arcanis philsophari. Caetera, quae fieri in terris Caeloque tuentur / Mortales, pavidis cum pendent mentibus’. Cf. the interpretation of Pomponazzi’ s submissions to the Church in Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi, pp. 121–23, 259–66.

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determined or influenced by material humours, and that black bile in particular could be responsible for disturbing or apparently predictive visions in sleep — we have seen that it was nevertheless possible to draw a range of wider conclusions from this consensus, conclusions that hinged fundamentally upon conceptions of the relationship between the natural and supernatural domains — or, in disciplinary terms, of the relationship between philosophy and theology. Although strongly materialist tendencies are detectable in some Paduan Galenists — Da Monte had followed Pomponazzi in distinguishing sharply between philosophy and theology, and had implied that the Galenic identification of the soul with the temperament was correct ‘according to the principles of philosophy’195 — most learned physicians writing about melancholy in the Renaissance saw little difficulty in presenting accounts that juxtaposed material and spiritual or diabolical causes, and most did not wish to address the contentious question of whether God regularly intervened in the order of nature.196 Ercole, for example, treated claims to prophetic ability as a sign of the imaginative derangement of melancholics, and recognized the role of daemonic forces in both false prophecy and ‘real’ melancholic inspiration.197 Montalto was unusually bold in this respect, arguing forcefully that mental alienation, intellectual achievement, and the ability to presage the future, especially in dreams, were not caused by ‘cacodaemons’ (evil

195

‘Si velim esse philosophus, et in principiis philosophiae consistere, non in fide nostra, non possum non Hippocrati et Galeno assentire[…]sed quia nunc in scholis profitemur nos esse philosophos et medicos, ex principiis philosophiae defendimus opinionem Galeni et Hippocratis, quia nihil est deterius est arbitror, quam miscere philophiam theologiae.’ Giambattista da Monte, Medicina universa, ed. by M. Weindrich (Frankfurt, 1587), pp. 124–25, cited and discussed in Ian Maclean, ‘Naturalisme et Croyance Personnelle dans le Discours Médical à la fin de la Renaissance’, Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies, 6 (1998), 177–91 (pp. 185–86). 196

Exceptions can be cited: for example, the Paduan professor of philosophy (and subsequently of medical theory) Fortunio Liceti held that God never intervenes in the natural domain of ‘secondary causes’ without an imperative of extreme urgency, thereby rendering popular beliefs in divinely caused wonders ridiculous; see Maclean, Le Monde et les hommes, pp. 58–59. 197

Sassonia, De melancholia, p. 7b, but see also p. 9a and esp. 30a, where he makes the concession necessary to remain on the side of Christian orthodoxy: ‘Inter Melancholicos reponuntur illi, qui nulla arte, aut studio futura vaticinantur, non loquor de prophetis, quos impium esset melancholicos vocare sint beati, & divino spiritu afflati, sed de viris, & mulieribus a cultu Dei seiunctis, quos vaticino donatos antiquitas semper inter melancholicos reposuit. Hinc Cic. 2. de divinatione insanos vocant.’

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spirits) as many thought, but should be referred exclusively to the effects of the melancholic humour as (pseudo-)Aristotle had understood them.198 Although there was also a range of conciliatory strategies employed in relating medical and philosophical theories of melancholy and dreaming to Scripture, we have seen that there were some conspicuous cases where the issue of divinely inspired dreams proved to be both problematic and controversial. The Galenic attribution of melancholic emotions and hallucinations to the effects of black bile upon the animal spirits and the faculties of imagination, when joined with the Aristotelian theory of dreams and critique of divination, provided a powerful explanatory tool for abnormal psychological phenomena that could assign extreme passions and disturbing or predictive dreams to the order of nature, and discredit their interpretation as supernaturally caused. As such, the naturalistic conceptions of melancholic dreams in the writings of Pomponazzi, Sanches, Vanini, and Franzosi, which had emerged from engagement with Aristotle’s De divinatione per somnum (or Averroes’s reading of it) and the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata, indicate a medically inflected, materialist, and in some cases sceptical strand of Aristotelianism in the late Renaissance that was exploited by a number of learned ‘free-thinkers’ seeking to discredit traditional religious values. This was not the only critical use to which the natural-philosophical critique of divinely inspired dreams was put. In seventeenth-century England, Aristotelian scepticism about dream-divination was also closely related to, and was indeed occasionally appropriated by, polemical analysis of religious ‘enthusiasm’. Here, theorists of enthusiasm targeted various forms of religious-political nonconformism, and drew substantially upon medical theories of melancholy — though they were mostly at odds with the radical naturalism of Pomponazzi and his followers.199 The association between melancholy and enthusiasm for such purposes is evident in Robert Burton’s eclectic Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), 198

Montalto, Archipathologia, IV . 21, pp. 297–99. More popular discussions of oneirocriticism exhibiting sceptical tendencies can also be cited: for example, see Montaigne, Les Essais de Michel de Montaigne, ed. by Pierre Villey and V.-L. Saulnier, 2 vols (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1978), I. 11, pp. 41–43; Nashe, Terrors of the Night, sigs Ciijv -D[i]v ; Ferrand, A Treatise of Lovesickness, p. 299; and Thomas Browne, Letter to a Friend, XIX , in The Prose of Sir Thomas Browne, ed. by Norman Endicott (New York: New York University Press, 1968), p. 358. 199 See Michael Heyd, ‘Be Sober and Reasonable’: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden: Brill, 1995); Janine Rivière, ‘“Visions of the Night”: The Reform of Popular Dream Beliefs in Seventeenth-Century England’, Parergon, 20 (2003), 109–38.

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which lumps together ‘Prophets’, ‘dreamers’, and ‘Enthusiasts’ as melancholics suffering from atrabilious (and perhaps diabolical) delusions.200 It can be seen in Meric Casaubon’s Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme (1655), which draws on Aristotle’s view of ‘emanations’ as ‘the natural cause of Divination by Dreams, when and where there was a disposition in the subject for reception or impression’, approves the philosopher’s point that divination from divine dreams cannot be possible because ‘not Ignorant only, but Wicked men also were observed to have a greater share in such’, and relates Du Laurens’s discussion of melancholic delusions to Aristotle’s observation in the De insomniis that children sometimes continue to see dream-images after they have woken from sleep.201 And it is also present in Henry More’s Enthusiasmus triumphatus (1656), which follows medical theory and the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata to attribute experiences of divine inspiration to the ‘strength of Imagination in a Melancholy Spirit’, and ridicules enthusiastic visions as melancholic hallucinations ‘of which there can be no certainty at all, no more then a dream’.202 The potential of naturalistic psychology to unsettle prevailing conceptions of supernaturally inspired dreaming was harnessed to most powerful effect, however, in the more thoroughly radical political philosophies of Hobbes and Spinoza, both of which were also constructed, in part, as responses to problems posed by contemporary religious conflict. In the first part of The Elements of Law on ‘Human Nature’ (written in 1640), Hobbes offered a broadly Aristotelian account of dreaming as the effect of inner physiological movements upon mental images, which are often distorted in the same way as reflections in disturbed water,203 an approach that became uncompromisingly naturalistic in the Leviathan

200

Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 1.3.3.1, I, 427–28; 3.4.1.2, III, 360–62; 3.4.1.5, III, 395.

201

Meric Casaubon, A Treatise Concerning Enthusiasme, as it is an Effect of Nature, but Mistaken by Many for either Divine Inspiration, or Diabolicall Posesssion (London, 1655), chap. II, pp. 42–43, 47; chap. III, pp. 62–63, 109–10. 202

Henry More, Enthusiasmus triumphatus, or, A Discourse on the Nature, Causes, Kinds and Cure, of Enthusiasme (London, 1656), pp. 26–29. See also the observations on dreams at pp. 3, 7, 29 (citing Plutarch, On the Cessation of Oracles, L on lucky melancholic prophets who ‘shoot oft’ and ‘sometimes hit the mark’). However, in The Immortality of the Soul, So farre forth as it is demonstrable from the Knowledge of Nature and the Light of Reason (London, 1659), More opposed Hobbes’s argument that immaterial substances are the figment of the dreams of the melancholic and superstitious (pp. 65–66), stated that departed souls communicate with the living in dreams (pp. 286–88), and employed the classical argument that the ascent of the soul out of the body in ecstasies and dreams can prove the soul’s immortality (p. 309). 203

Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, ed. by Ferdinand Tönnies

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(1651), which states that ‘there can happen in sleep no imagination, and therefore no dream, but what proceeds from the agitation of the inward parts of man’s body’.204 The main point of this discussion, however, was to support his more general assault on belief in immaterial ‘spirits’ and ‘ghosts’. For Hobbes, the ‘timorous and superstitious’ (both qualities he associated with melancholy),205 even when awake, were prone to confuse their ‘fancies’ with reality ‘and believe they see spirits and dead men’s ghosts walking in churchyards’,206 and in ‘this ignorance of how to distinguish dreams and other strong fancies from vision and sense’ lay the origins of popular beliefs in ‘fairies, ghosts […] goblins, and of the power of witches’.207 As a rigorous materialist, Hobbes’s real targets here were the scholastic Aristotelians in the universities, who (he believed) had perniciously nourished beliefs in such incorporeal substances and supported them with nonsensical theories such as that ‘good thoughts are blown (inspired) into a man by God, and evil thoughts by the devil’. Hobbes famously contended that such teachings had served principally to buttress the power of the priesthood and undermine subjects’ obedience to the legitimate authority of the civil sovereign: If this superstitious fear of spirits were taken away, and with it prognostics from dreams, false prophecies, and many other things depending thereon, by which crafty ambitious persons abuse the simple people, men would be much more fitted than they are for civil obedience.208

Spinoza was even less circumspect. The Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670), which explained biblical miracles in purely naturalistic terms, ridiculed the belief

(London: Simpkin Marshall, 1889), I. 3.2–4, 8–10, pp. 8–12. Note the cautious formulation ‘if they be natural’, however. For Hobbes’s relationship with late Renaissance Aristotelianism see Karl Schuhmann, ‘Hobbes and Renaissance Philosophy’, in Hobbes oggi, ed. by Andrea Napoli (Milan: Angeli, 1990), pp. 331–49; and Cees Leijenhorst, The Mechanization of Aristotelianism: The Late Aristotelian Setting of Thomas Hobbes’ Natural Philosophy (Leiden: Brill, 2002). 204

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. by Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), I. 2, p. 17. 205

Hobbes, Leviathan, I. 8, p. 54. See generally Mauro Simonazzi, ‘Thomas Hobbes on Melancholy’, Hobbes Studies, 19 (2006), 31–57. 206 Cf. the similar observations in Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Philosophy the First Section, Concerning Body (London, 1656), chap. XXV , p. 300. In this part of the De corpore Hobbes deals with a number of issues concerning the mechanisms at work in the production of dream-images, in a manner less obviously Aristotelian than in the Elements of Law. 207

Hobbes, Leviathan, I. 2, p. 18.

208

Hobbes, Leviathan, I. 2, p. 19.

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that the ‘delirious wanderings of the imagination’ and ‘dreams’ could be ‘divine replies’ to superstitious requests for God’s assistance,209 and argued that prophetic dreams recorded in Scripture could only have been ‘imaginary’. That is to say, they were products of the prophet’s imagination, which for Spinoza meant that they pertained to the lowest form of knowledge — that which derived from the senses and was mediated by the imagination.210 Supposedly ‘inspired’ prophecy, therefore, was intrinsically fragile and imperfect, dependent upon a power that was ‘capricious and changeable’,211 and varying with the ‘[bodily] temperament of each individual prophet’ as well as with ‘the beliefs in which he was brought up’.212 Although Spinoza inhabited an intellectual world that was almost completely different from that of Pomponazzi, the explicitly stated purpose of the Tractatus theologico-politicus, ‘to separate philosophy from theology’, would have been music to the ears of the radical Aristotelian.213 Spinoza’s interpretation of Scripture was of course part of a highly original subversion of orthodox Christianity. But as we can now see, his account of religious psychology tapped into a matrix of associations between melancholy, imagination, and dreaming that had been formulated in classical antiquity, and was elaborated and disputed in Renaissance medicine and natural philosophy.

209

Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, ed. by Jonathan Israel, trans. by Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 4. 210

See Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, ed. and trans. by Edwin Curley (London: Penguin, 1996),

II, props 13–29, 40, pp. 39–52, 55–57, esp. prop. 26, p. 50. See also the discussion of the ‘debility’

of the imagination of Daniel at pp. 32–33. Spinoza does not mention melancholy here, except in a revealing discussion of the ‘melancholy’ of Saul as an instance not of spiritual but ‘natural melancholy’ (p. 22). 211

Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, p. 26.

212

Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, pp. 28, 30–31. See also the metaphorical interpretation of biblical phrases associated with ‘inspiration’ at pp. 24–25. 213

Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, p. 42. For early modern interpretations — which should be treated with extreme caution — of the trajectory from the Aristotelian naturalism of Pomponazzi via libertinism to the pantheistic naturalism of Spinoza in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, see Jonathan I. Israel, R adical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 120, 300, 397–98, 500, 544. But see also the caveat at p. 688.

W ITCHES, THE P OSSESSED, AND THE D ISEASES OF THE IMAGINATION Donald Beecher

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edical and theological investigations concerning the nature of the imagination in the late medieval period were conducted in a new climate of urgency where the questions of witchcraft, demonic possession, and heresy were concerned, because it was recognized as the principal faculty of the soul in which the mind negotiates the critical distinction between things pertaining to the world of extension and to the world of confabulation. As the image-making faculty, its creations were or were not provisional by nature in blending from memory and the senses things that must, might, or never could exist. For that very reason it was understood that such creations must be subjected to the ‘estimative’ faculties in relation to beliefs, moral hierarchies, volition, and to reality itself. These investigators recognized, too, that the imagination was not an entirely autonomous faculty, for it was deemed vulnerable both to disease and to ideological corruption through diabolical voices. For members of the Christian world order, it was inadmissible to deny the imminent and active roles of demonic agents, yet dangerous to imagine or indulge them, for the imagination was the instrument within which they first moved and assumed their being and influence. The ontological status of those agents within this faculty became crucial and gave rise to vigorous assertions on all sides of the question, for demons were ambiguously both real and phantasms of the real, while acquiescence to their blandishments, even prior to act or deed, was ambiguously hypothetical or actual. At the same time, it was acknowledged within both discourses, medical and theological, that the faculty was material and hence subject to the accidents of the body — conditions both provoking and conceivably extenuating the moral significance of ‘demonic’ phantasms. Given the professional orientations of the disputants, the tribunal, and the clinic, there could be no ultimate agreement

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upon the precise extent to which mental diseases and ensuing hallucinations incited by the culture of the demonic could be categorically harmonized with or removed from the resolve to root out heresy instigated by Satan. We may call the positions taken a ‘debate’, given the tension that eventuated between medical and theological stances, but it is important not to underestimate the degree to which medical philosophers were good Christians and theologians were men of science. The focus of this study is upon the sundry descriptions of the imaginative faculty that arose in the philosophical enquiries of that era, directly or indirectly as a result of the intense and semi-public management of demonic heresy and its attendant practices through the inquisitorial tribunals. This has necessitated a rather selective rereading of a vast body of literature well known to specialists, with the purpose here merely to single out those passages most germane to a profiling of the ‘idea’ of the imaginative faculty and its potential for confounding demonic phantasms in relation to pathology and the diseases of the brain. It is an overview of the history of that idea that I seek to bring together in the following paragraphs. In the early fifteenth century, theologians and inquisitors increasingly abandoned arguments formerly endorsed by the Church concerning the phantasmal origins of night flights and sexual intercourse with incubi reported by witches in favour of a view of the natural world that included the corporeal imminence of demons and devils and the very real performance of such acts.1 Their challenge was to demonstrate the phenomenology of witchcraft in ways apparent to the senses as

1

Nicolas Kiessling is one of the many historians of witchcraft who confirm that the position of the Church from the ninth to the twelfth centuries concerning the night rides and sexual intercourse with devils was that such claims were entirely fanciful and not to be credited as fact. The canon Episcopi — written in 915 by Regino of Prüm and held as the authoritative teaching of the Church on matters of witchcraft for several centuries — described demonic attacks as dreams or visions stirred up by devils in the imagination. In the second part, all such activity is denounced as delusions imposed by demons, but as delusions nevertheless entertained as real. Edward Peters, ‘The Medieval Church and State on Superstition, Magic and Witchcraft: From Augustine to the Sixteenth Century’, in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, III: The Middle Ages, ed. by Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), pp. 202–04. Burchard of Worms in the Corrector, 152 (1020 A D ) attributed all such things to folklore. Kiessling, The Incubus in English Literature: Provenance and Progeny (Seattle: Washington State University Press, 1977), p. 22. One of the most succinct summaries of the rise and fall of witchcraft theory in general, without attention to the medical component, is E. William Monter’s Witchcraft in France and Switzerland: The Borderlands during the Reformation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), pp. 17–41. His study is of particular interest in the distinctions between Protestant and Catholic persecutions on a region-by-region basis.

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a preliminary criterion to prosecution, whether for the heresy implicit in making pacts with the Devil and attending his person, or for practicing maleficia through demonic power and agency.2 Nevertheless, the medical discourses concerning the diseases of the imagination based on the authority of Galen and Avicenna, in that same period undergoing nosological refinements, offered an alternative explanation to acts and events otherwise difficult to explain in relation to the laws of nature. It was doctrine among physicians that melancholy humours burnt in the hypochondrium, or seed corrupted in the genitals, could spread vapours capable of generating the most tenacious and incredible of phantasms, including encounters with demons — phantasms entertained as real on the part of patients.3 This prospect of the hallucinating mind presented a challenge to demonologists bent upon ‘empiricizing’ the demonic, a challenge that could only be met by assimilating the vocabulary of the medical treatises into their assessment of the natural world. At the same time, many within the medical establishment reciprocated by integrating the Devil more systematically into their theories of pathology by confirming his access to all the physiological systems of the body. It might even be said that once the theologians had enlisted medical explanations of demonic causality in their inquisitorial manuals, the medical profession had no choice but to conform — as most medical philosophers did throughout the

2 There are many studies on the scholastic rationalization of demonology in relation to Christian theology and the description of sorcery and maleficia in material and phenomenological terms in relation to the witch trials. Among them, see: Jeffrey Burton Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972); Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300–1500 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); Michael Bailey, Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy, and Reform in the Late Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003); Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); and A. C. Kors and Edward Peters, Witchcraft in Europe, 400–1700: A Documentary History (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001). 3 Many historians of medicine have dealt with the faculty of the imagination in relation to a rich heritage of medical texts on the soul, its parts, and their diseases, and particularly those arising from melancholy humours. Among the most recent is the chapter entitled ‘Fantasies: Seeing Without what Was Within’, in Stuart Clark’s Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 37–77. My own orientation in the subject is presented in the introduction to Jacques Ferrand’s De la maladie d’amour ou melancolie erotique, trans. as A Treatise on Lovesickness, ed. by Donald Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990), pp. 62–97. This treatise is now available in French as De la maladie d’amour ou mélancolie érotique, ed. by Donald Beecher and Massimo Ciavolella (Paris: Garnier Classiques, 2010).

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sixteenth century — in light of the powers attributed to Satan and his followers according to official Church theology. Given this reasoned superimposition of causalities, the relationship between demonological logic and medical logic throughout the following two centuries disallows any modernist sense of opposing camps, the scientific progressives pitted against the religious reactionaries.4 Medical analysis for most physicians, at least to some degree, included the means whereby devils could make their assault upon the material causes of diseases, and, through the activation of combustion and vapours, create the mental depravities whereby the demonic will might seek to afflict the soul.5 This assessment served to make natural diseases indistinguishable from demonic ones and demonic delusions identical to the phantasms of melancholy or mania. Nevertheless, the entente was unstable from its inception and became increasingly so as physicians sought to regain the clinical autonomy of their profession in the treatment of the diseases of the soul.6 4

Jean Céard also warns that the history of engagement between medicine and demonology has too often been misrepresented as ‘une vision héroïque de l’histoire’ in which a few physicians rose up against backward superstition. ‘Médecine et démonologie: les enjeux d’un débat’, in La Possession, ed. by J. Pigeaud, Littérature, Médecine, Société, 9 (Nantes: Université de Nantes, 1988), pp. 167–68. ‘There is no reason to assume that in the legal domain doctors entertained greater doubts about the existence of diabolism than did other experts; indeed, physicians’ testimony was often accusatory and ended in executions.’ G. S. Rousseau, ‘A Strange Pathology: Hysteria in the Early Modern World, 1500–1800’, in Hysteria Beyond Freud, ed. by Sander L. Gilman and others (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 99. Or, in the words of Bruce Gordon, ‘the interest of the medical profession in the demonic was as great, if not greater, than among theologians’: ‘God Killed Saul: Heinrich Bullinger and Jacob Ruef on the Power of the Devil’, in Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits: Traditional Belief and Folklore in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Katherine A. Edwards (Kirkville: Truman State University Press, 2002), p. 155. Opposing stances nevertheless emerged with regard to the origins of the diseased states and the moral responsibility of the afflicted. 5

The result was a massive production of literature seeking to investigate every conceivable form of influence or contact between humans and devils. See Sophie Houdard, Les Sciences du diable: Quatre discours sur la sorcellerie (Paris: Cerf, 1992), p. 217. 6

Among the physicians who asserted forthrightly a demonological component in the diseases of the imagination are: Agostino Nifo, Andrea Cesalpino in his Daemonum investigation peripatetica (Florence, 1580); Giovanni Battista Codronchi, Wilhelm Schreiber, Jacques Fontaine, Paolo Grillando, Francesco Maria Guazzo in Compendium maleficarum (Milan, 1608); Jason van de Velde in his De cerebri morbis (Basel: Petri, 1549); Johann Bokel, Francesco Valles, Martin Del Río, Jourdain Guibelet, and Georg Gödelmann in Tractatus de magis, veneficis et lamiis (Frankfurt, 1601). As late as 1663, William Drage would publish Daimonomageia or A Small Treatise of Sicknesses and Diseases from Witchcraft, and Supernatural Causes (London: Dover).

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This employment of humoral medicine in the description of the demonic mind became one of the incentives that placed the imagination at the forefront of philosophical debate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for it was the instrument within nature where spiritual and material realities met. The principal question was its reliability as a representational instrument in relation to the worlds of nature and spirit. There was widespread belief that this faculty was particularly unreliable in discriminating between the perceptual and the imagined — a notion of fallibility that was Aristotelian in origin and that prevailed throughout the age.7 That bias towards the delusional called for explanation, the causal agency invariably pertaining to the influence of the burnt biles. The ultimate effect was the extension of the range of demonic influence upon the natural world through the processes of mental disease. For those who would oppose, there were only two courses of escape from this idée force: either to limit the powers of Satan in the material world, as Reginald Scot proposed; or to redefine the faculty of the imagination in wholly natural terms, as in such treatises as Thomas Fienus’s De viribus imaginationis and Hieronymus Nymann’s Oratio de imaginatione.8 Those forms of opposition were slow in coming. Meanwhile, supernatural pathogenesis became an added dimension to the diagnostics of diseases in general, altering the notions of occult causation as it was

7

Stuart Clark examines the range of philosophical opinions on the reliability of the imagination from Aristotle to Bacon, passing through Pico della Mirandola and La Primaudaye in Vanities of the Eye, pp. 45–50. See also his essay, ‘Demons and Disease: The Disenchantment of the Sick (1500–1700)’, in Illness and Healing Alternatives in Western Europe, ed. by Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Hilary Marland, and Hans de Waardt (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 38–58. 8

De viribus imaginationibus tractatus (Leiden, 1635; London: Roger Daniels, 1657); Oratio de imaginatione (Wittenburg, 1593). Such specialized works as these arose from the vast commentaries and scholia that were appended to Aristotle’s On Memory and Recollection, the Problemata of the Hippocratic school, Avicenna’s Canon, and related texts concerning phantasms and their influence upon the volitional mind. Firmianus Lactantius in his Book on Divine Institutions discussed how malign spirits influenced the emotions, corrupted images, and manipulated instincts. Ficino approached the same question through his notion of enchantment or the bewitching of the imagination. François Valleriola in his Observationum medicinalium libri sex (1588) writes at length about the bewitchment or enchantment of the imagination as an extension of the position taken by Avicenna concerning the humoral conditioning of mental operations. One finds the entire phenomenon summarized by Richard Burton in The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. by Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (New York: Tudor, 1927), pt IV , sect. 2, memb. 2, subs. 2, p. 681. Galen is, of course, omnipresent; his theories on the humours provided the entire enabling discourse.

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discussed in Renaissance treatises on medicine. Thereafter, with the imagination so prominently featured among the considerations of demonologists and physicians, the question concerning sabbats, night flights, Satanic pacts, orgies, hexes and spells, incubi and succubae devils, demonic possession, and all such related claims raised new philosophical questions, whether such phenomena were corporeal and perceptual or merely beliefs and experiences brought on by melancholy vapours attributable to demonic provocation or to natural causes. The arguments were complex and subtle, but the fundamental positions can be reduced to the following: that satanic events were real in the natural world; that satanic events were real only to the deranged imagination as caused by the Devil himself playing to the internal or external senses; or that they seemed real as the result of a natural disease of the brain. In a related way, where demonic possession was concerned, either the Devil was present and indwelling, the victim was seized by melancholy delusions, or the subject was an impostor. The debate mattered, because in accordance with interpretation, the beliefs of witches might or might not be subject to prosecution by the ecclesiastical tribunals and civil courts. The initial conflation and ultimate separation of these two analytical systems, the one based on scriptural authority and scholastic rationale in relation to a Christian mythological order, the other upon the systems of the body and the faculties of the soul as defined by medical philosophy, pertained to larger questions about the nature of man in a spiritual and phenomenological universe and the ‘rules’, divinely imposed, whereby supernatural agency was regulated. All parties in the debate were sceptics, according to their best judgements, in defining those areas of causation and action forbidden to malign spirits, but the only mode of reasoning was a priori and conditioned by non-negotiable theological premises. Milton wrestled with the question in Paradise Lost in defending the freedom of the will in a world entirely compatible with God’s foreknowledge. The Devil must have access, but not unlimited access, for how, otherwise, could men live meaningfully in the world? The only solution entailed checks and balances among the faculties of the soul. Satan might be granted efficient powers to corrupt the instrument of provisional reflection, yet be held powerless to afflict the higher cognitive faculties of reason, even though the diseases of melancholy might produce states of complete alienation. It was a difficult line to draw.9 If

9 For Stuart Clark, this factor is critical to any historically valid study of the demonological world order as a chapter in the history of ideas. Heinrich Kramer the inquisitor allowed for wonders not caused by demons and Francis Bacon acknowledged the access of devils to the imagination. ‘The Scientific Status of Demonology’, in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the

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devils had access to the humoral systems of the body, they had pathological access to the mental faculties and could thereby induce temptation through corruption, but if the soul of man was divine, then devils could not have access to those components of the brain already occupied by the divine. The contest was over the prioritization of causes and the degree to which perturbations of the brain explicable in terms of natural diseases obviated the need for occult explanations. Matters turned to the veritable presence of devils within the faculty as opposed to mere access to causes pertaining to pathology. For the purposes of the present study, the Malleus maleficarum (1486) of Heinrich Kramer (Istitoris) and Johann Sprenger — but mostly Kramer — may be said to represent the apex of the movement towards demonizing the imagination by subordinating the standard medical analyses of melancholy delusion to the larger supposition of massive demonic agency in the natural world order.10 The treatise contains such chapters as ‘How Devils may Enter the Human Body and the Head without Doing any Hurt, when they Cause such Metamorphosis by Means of Prestidigitation’.11 The Malleus is a paradoxical work, for it is scholarly in its intent and sceptical in its habits of discourse. But despite its procedural ‘sic et non’, its ultimate purpose was as a manual for inquisitors committed to rooting out all forms of heresy, sorcery, and black magic on empirical and scientific grounds. It is both an assessment of the natural world in light of the received teachings of the Church and an evaluation of human nature in relation to the spiritual combat that defines Christian history. In keeping with the fourth dialogue of St Gregory, Kramer envisions a world administered by angels in which all visible things may be disposed by invisible

Renaissance, ed. by Brian Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 358. A related question pertains to the ability of witches to inflict diseases upon others through spells and charms. Must the Devil, as pathogenic agent, always respond to such ritual commands and afflict the specified parties? It is one thing for demons to invade the witch’s own imagination, but quite another to convey real diseases to other bodies according to the laws of nature. Clark, ‘Demons and Disease’, p. 38. 10 Edward Peters reviews this work as foundationally misogynist in belief and practice and a rationale after the fact for the many irregular inquisitorial practices in which Kramer participated in opposition to growing scepticism and criticism. ‘The Medieval Church and State on Superstition, Magic and Witchcraft’, pp. 238–42. See also Kors and Peters, Witchcraft in Europe, pp. 176–229. Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (London: HarperCollins, 1996), pp. 257–86. 11

Heinrich Kramer and Johann Sprenger, Malleus maleficarum (1486), ed. by Christopher S. Mackay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pt II, qn. 1, chap. 9.

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creatures. These are not only the powers that move stars, but the souls that move bodies in accordance with the teachings of St Thomas. Within this order, demons have power over images, which they may manipulate, prolong, intensify, retrieve from the memory, and present to the mind as real perceptions rather than as mere hallucinations.12 In this, Kramer does little more than formulate the common belief that temptation arises in the provisional imaginings of the mind, but he does so in terms of the species or phantasms representing the biological properties of thought. Nothing yet entails the alteration of the organs or the constitution. This is a declaration of demonic instrumentality of a mundane kind in the operations of the healthy brain. By extension, however, if the Devil can generate images, he can also generate experience deemed real by simulating bodies which he presents to the external senses. For the empirically grounded mind, this is one of the most audacious of all the proposals made by the demonologists, and one in which they may have outdone themselves, for Kramer raises the ante to a frightening level of indeterminacy concerning the human capacity to discern the vital distinction between the perceived and the imagined. In this phantasmagorial world, the incubus devil is both real and unreal, whether as a real spirit in an assumed body, or as a hallucination of an embodied spirit seeming real. If the subject thereby acquiesces to the sexual attentions of this simulacrum, invisible to all other observers, then the heretical intent of consorting sexually with such demons must be as heinous and culpable as if they had real bodies.13 To make the system inclusive, he argues that just such effects brought on by demonic influence are replicated in victims of frenzy and mania incited by natural causes. Kramer thereby creates a liaison between demonic and natural pathology with only proforma distinctions. He allows that some diseases of the brain are entirely natural and fit for treatment in the traditional ways by diet, pharmaceuticals, and phlebotomy. But he insists that devils have unlimited access to all the disease12

Kramer and Sprenger, Malleus, pt I, qn. 9. For a remarkable modern enquiry into this critical distinction of mind where humans make nearly infallible judgements between ‘percepts’ and the imagined — barring disease, drugs, or category confusion — as a leading adaptive trait of the species, see Colin McGinn, Mindsight: Image, Dream and Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 13

The heretical feature was also new, and an umbrella concept under which all forms of maleficia and demonic practices could be grouped for purposes of prosecution. The concept had been emerging throughout the century from Pope Alexander V’s announcement of all such phenomena as the ‘new heresy’ in 1409. See Peters, ‘The Medieval Church and State on Superstition’, pp. 231–32.

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generating mechanisms of the body and can torment both body and mind through the sicknesses of their choice.14 Thus, through the corruption of the humours, witches can be made delusional in order to experience apparitions as real. One may ask why the Devil needed to resort to the subterfuge of disease, and the answer may well lie in the need to colonize the whole of medical discourse to demonological ends. By extension, just as witches can call up devils to inflict hallucinations and madness in others by casting spells, they can, through these same agents, cause leprosy or epilepsy, which are also indistinguishable from natural diseases. Inversely, anyone suffering from such an affliction might justifiably look for its origins in the acts of persons delusionally professing to witchcraft; the system becomes complete and circular. On the authority of Nider in his Formicarius, witches can evoke diseases in humans and animals through their magic powers, and on the authority of St Isidore of Seville, they can raise storms by the help of devils, deprave minds, and even kill men outright by the virulence of their incantations (citing his Etymologiæ, Book VIII, Chapter 9). By the logic of medical discourse, the treatise allows malign spirits to penetrate the most intimate recesses of the mind. The only questions to be resolved are whether the Devil can assault the mind through the corruption of the body alone, and whether demonic diseases differ in kind from the natural. Certainly for Kramer, the diseases of the imagination provoked by the Devil are themselves demonic and subject to investigation and prosecution. As long as Satan could not touch the freedom of the will, the soul was accountable for its phantasms, making what witches imagined synonymous with what witches believed as sinners. In this influential and widely read treatise, the idea was confirmed that medical and demonological discourses could share a common analysis and purpose. But for the inquisitors, the madness pertaining to witchcraft was the very essence of their diabolical practices. They had invoked the pathological mechanisms of contemporary medicine to reveal the witch’s brain, but at the risk of having to explain how the events of the hallucinating imagination pertained to the ‘real’ world of broomsticks, sabbats, orgies, and ointments which they were simultaneously intent upon confirming. The result was a double discourse making real what witches performed and equally real what they only thought they experienced through demonic hallucinations. To the extent this approach came to epitomize an age, it could be said, in the words of James Cassedy, that ‘the supernatural cause of disease was gospel truth. Doubters had to conform to this in all the debates on witchcraft and demonic possession’ during the whole of the 14

Kramer and Sprenger, Malleus, pt II, qn. 1, chap. 11.

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following century.15 Ulrike Krampl describes this new ethos, once ‘the devil managed to penetrate the imagination, that dubious space between the soul and the body’ as a diseased civilization, now that the ‘diabolical action, which in the Middle Ages was thought of as a type of illusion, materialized and became “real”’, basing her ideas on those of Michel Foucault.16 Nevertheless, physicians would grapple with these questions. In principle, diseases caused by devils were inflicted to demonic ends, yet were not different in kind from those brought on through the adustion of black bile. Were demonic diseases then identical to natural diseases? Did those patients deemed witches because of their demonic obsessions experience such phantasms as real events and therefore report them as such? Can those suffering from mental aberrations caused by corrupting vapours express those delusions in real and actual events according to the templates for the conduct of witches and sorcerers? Should demonic insanity be subject to the same legal accountability as practicing witches? Can pathologically afflicted witches be cured in the usual manner for treating the diseases of melancholy? Finally, on rigorously empirical grounds, can the behaviour of such persons, in any of its registers of reported experience, be considered commensurate with the laws of nature? These were the questions that would perplex the ‘doctrine’ of satanic access to pathological systems, but not displace it as a standard feature of medical diagnostics during the two centuries to follow. Jean Fernel, one of the leading physicians of his age, is an exemplar of this conflation of systems in De abditis rerum causis (1548). The Devil was not to be denied; the imagination was an acknowledged theatre of his operations — a site both for disease and temptation. Thus it followed, in his chapter ‘Et morbus et remedia quaedam trans naturam esse’,17 that he granted to devils full power to simulate all things in the natural world, for they were gifted in their 15

James Cassedy, ‘Medicine and the Rise of Statistics’, in Medicine in Seventeenth Century England, ed. by Allen G. Debus (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), p. 256. 16

Ulrike Krampl, ‘When Witches became False’, in Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits, ed. by Edwards, p. 142. See Michel Foucault, ‘Les Déviations religieuses et le savoir médical’ (1968), in Foucault, Dits et écrits, 4 vols (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), I, 624–35. Krampl’s assessment of that age was not in terms of folklore, hysteria, apostasy, or diseases of the imagination, but simply of ‘credulité’ — deceived beliefs about the world and the absence of critical acumen. 17

Jean Fernel, De abditis rerum causis (Paris: Wechel, 1567), pp. 270–79; see also Jean Fernel’s On the Hidden Causes of Things: Forms, Souls, and Occult Diseases in Renaissance Medicine, ed. by John Forester and John Henry (Leiden: Brill, 2005).

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understanding of the forces of causation, many of them still occult to human understanding. This ability included the production of all diseases according to the laws of nature. But the status of those diseases remained in question in relation to the overall human condition, for despite their entirely natural disposition, Fernel deemed those which were demonic in origin to be demonic in essence and thus incurable through medical procedures. Such an argument provided a welcome escape for physicians accused of failure in the treatment of recalcitrant diseases. Those not responding to their ministrations might simply be attributed to the Devil (an argument still employed a hundred years later), with the potential effect that those suffering from real but elusive diseases might be referred to exorcists. By extension, such arguments gave back to the Church autonomous management over the diseases of the soul bearing demonic appearances, while physicians were excused from participating even in the preparation of the humours that might make the exorcism of the Devil more efficient. The only issue to be resolved pertained to diagnostics and the semiotics of disease in determining whether the wayward wits under investigation were natural or demonic. That decision, in turn, depended upon the psychological intuition of the investigator. But for the most part, the contents of the obsessions themselves determined the origins. Any pretension to an ability to predict the future, to speak in unstudied foreign languages, to perform magic spells, or to divine the thoughts of others were sure signs of a demented imagination not solely attributable to natural causes. Only the Devil, it was reasoned, could perform such ventriloquistic endeavours through the possessed imagination. Hence, those absorbed by the delusions of witchcraft were, by Fernel’s reasoning, deemed to be beyond medical care. Subsequent physicians would demur. Demonic pathology was a matter to be addressed by virtually every published physician concerned with the diseases of the brain. Among them Martin Del Río, in his Disquisitionum magicarum, provided one of the most sustained rationales for the demonic origins of disease by refining and extending the Devil’s seizure upon the vulnerability of those with melancholy dispositions.18 The salient point 18

Martin Del Río, Les Controversies et recherches magiques, trans. by André du Chesne (Paris: Chaudière, 1611), pp. 564–65. This work has been partially translated by P. G. Maxwell-Stuart in Investigations into Magic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000). Del Río provides a detailed analysis of the Devil’s operations through the disturbance of the biles. The debate was no longer whether Satan could interfere, but the range and scope of his influence within the body. Stuart Clark points out that ‘well before the era of Del Río, these seemingly paradoxical ideas about demonic deception and semblances of reality had entered the intellectual mainstream’, Vanities of the Eye, p. 125.

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was the Devil’s involvement, not merely in tormenting the mind, but in corrupting the will and so perverting the spiritual life. In each case there is the physician’s ministration to the body confronted by the patient’s moral engagement with temptation in light of the uncompromised freedom of the will. For him, melancholy madness could not excuse the sufferer from maintaining the moral rectitude of the soul, no matter how aggravating and unmanageable, frightening or confusing the phantasms. The Devil, even through the debilitation implicit in mental disease, must be reckoned with as a moral force. The semiotics of melancholy was all of a piece, that the black sludge purged by the liver was the material part of fixations pertaining to blackness, cemeteries, night, and devils. Del Río endorsed entirely the idea of demonic pathology, the effects of which resulted from satanic agency in the natural world. With him, the association of systems became so narrow that few manifesting such mental aberrations could escape an association with heresy or blasphemy. Francesco Valles speaks for a generation of physicians in his De iis quae scripta sunt physice in libris sacris, for by implication he acknowledges the requirements of the inquisitors in teaching that devils may simply produce diseases in wholesale fashion or provoke them in more remote pathological ways by conditioning matter within the body, by exciting the production of biles, altering their constituencies and quantities, and transporting them to the appropriate areas where infection or corruption follows.19 The Devil is confirmed as a subtle material cause and a supreme physician, given his vast knowledge of all occult causes and his mastery over them. Within the capacities of demons are the obstruction of evacuations, the provocation of combustion in the hypochondrium, and the production of vapours. These were the disease-state equivalents of witchcraft, for what the Devil causes he does in pursuit of his own ends, which is the damnation of the soul and the diminution of God’s created kingdom. The melancholy reprobate was a Renaissance commonplace for which Valles merely provided the medical rationale. Jean Taxil, in his Traicté de l’epilepsie (1602), given the aetiology of that particular disease, extended the analysis of satanic influence in terms of contagion. The demonic will in the universe was further thought to materialize itself through contact or ‘touch’ insofar as demons might also infect the wind or miasmas that directly assault the brain and arouse delusions. In conjunction with such causal forces, Taxil spoke of wraiths, tempests, obstructed organs, and alterations to the 19

Francesco Valles, De iis quae scripta sunt physice in libris sacris, sive de sacro philosophia (Lyon: LeFebre, 1595 [1587]).

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meninges, nerves, and arteries leading to palpitations, convulsions, and fainting fits.20 Through more inclusive medical analyses, the pathological powers of the demonic kingdom continued to grow. Satan could not only invade and pervert through cognitive disruptions and the material alteration of the humours, but through the environmental conditions conducive to the spread of madness and religious hysteria.21 The principle was, in fact, not a new one. Epilepsy had long been a touchstone condition, for it was one of the diseases that evaded humoral analysis and treatment and hence suggested supernatural causes through the mechanisms of contagion, whether demonic or divine in origin.22 Theories of contagion, both pathological and metaphorical, would assume particular importance in later years in explaining the spread of religious frenzy or possession within religious communities. Jourdain Guibelet, in his Trois discours philosophiques, reasoned in chorus that epilepsy was a mysterious disease of the brain that manifested itself in seizures which were indeterminately a form of divine frenzy or demonic possession brought on as a sacred disease by God or as a form of possession by devils — he could not decide. There was hence an uncertainty on the part of those sitting in judgement whether the patient should be respected, burned, or exorcized, for the medical profession had largely given up on finding a cure in relation to natural causes.23 Many of the demonographers of that same era, in the tradition of Kramer and the Malleus, expanded upon the demonizing of the soul through the satanic production of diseases by endorsing the principles of pathological witchcraft, as long as the subject remained under the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical and secular tribunals and did not revert to medical care. That jurisdiction was constantly asserted against the pretensions of physicians to care for those accused of, or confessing to, maleficia, transvection, pacts, any form of heresy or blasphemy, 20

Jean Taxil, Traicté de l’epilepsie (Lyon, 1602), p. 157.

21

Hysteria as a physical and mental condition emerged in the seventeenth century as the ‘disease’ of choice for explaining away the demonic, but worked more particularly in relation to the possessed rather than to those practicing maleficia on neighbours or flying to sabbats, although it was a means for explaining their delusions as well. Behaviour attributed to possession might be reduced to clinical causes, but manifested itself as the actual presence of a demon within the body which the exorcists were bent upon controlling in public displays, thereby placing the physician and the priest in direct professional opposition. 22

Daniel Sennert agreed that devils could cause not only madness, irrational hatred, even abortions, but also epilepsy, paralysis, impotence, and possession-like convulsions. Practicae medicinae, in Opera omnia, 3 vols (Paris: Societatem, 1641), III, 1140. 23

Jourdain Guibelet, Trois discours philosophiques (Évreux: Le Marié, 1603), p. 267.

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supernatural intercourse, and related matters disruptive to society and counter to the hegemony of the Church. Francesco Maria Guazzo, in his Compendium maleficarum (1608), was in clear agreement that the mind could be rendered melancholy through the demonic stirring of black bile.24 But Guazzo went on to affirm that the Devil remained active in resisting all efforts at purgation. Thus the cause persisted in the faculty rather than in the effects of the faculty, making the ministrations of physicians futile in the treatment of the disease, much as Fernel had formerly conceded. This was support for the demonologists in the turf war that, by the turn of the century, had arisen among professionals over the treatment of the diseases of the soul. Guazzo likewise insisted upon the absolute scope of devils in their capacity to stop ducts, block ventricles and nerves, and provoke either epilepsy or paralysis. In corrupting the blood or biles, malign forces had complete control over the fancy and the corruption of the emotions. André Valladier, in La saincte philosophie de l’âme (1614), concurred in his account of the Devil’s power over the bodily spirits and humours, whether to transport, incite, weaken, or disable them to diabolical ends. In this assessment, he included, as well, the passions of the heart and the venereal cravings associated with the genitals as participants in arousing the illusions of witches, concurring entirely that the Devil could produce any disease whatsoever and through those diseases corrupt the soul.25 These are but representative views of the many who, in their comprehensive approach to nosology, classified the diseases of the soul as both natural and demonic, slipping over the awkward ambiguities created by the simple proposition of granting moral intentionality to pathological agents, or of granting to supernatural creatures a theatre of operations within that corner of nature constituted by the material brain and its vulnerability to disease. The prevailing intellectual frame of mind in the age of the tribunals was disinclined to accept a more ‘naturalized’ approach. There was general recognition that not all diseases were demonic in origin and could be treated in conventional ways. But Henri Boguet, in his Discours des sorciers (1608), insisted that the Devil could imitate and surpass all

24

Francesco Maria Guazzo, Compendium maleficarum (1608), trans. by E. A. Ashwin and ed. by Montague Summers (London: Rodker, 1929), p. 106. 25 André Valladier, La Saincte philosophie de l’âme (Paris: Chevalier, 1614). Other physicians who wrote about demonic pathology included Giovanni Battista Codronchi, De morbis veneficis, ad veneficiis (Venice, 1595); and Andrea Cesalpino, Daemonum investigatio peripatetica (Florence: Juntas, 1580), esp. bk VI, pp. 325–28, where he conjoins medical reasoning with theology.

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natural causes.26 Satan could likewise heal by copying the methods used by physicians. Nevertheless, from the third quarter of the sixteenth century there was also growing opposition, not to the phenomenology of witchcraft itself, or to the idea that those who avowed their heresy or openly practised the black arts deserved severe punishment, but rather to the idea that those suffering from the natural diseases of melancholy, deluded as they might have been by demonic thoughts, were witches — even if they thought so. This opposition emerged in several quarters, not only among physicians, but philosophers, free thinkers, and jurists concerned with evidence and the burden of proof.27 New ideas concerning mental illness, delusion, and dementia, whatever the boasts or confessions of the patients, suggested that clinical care rather than exorcism or torture was the more appropriate response. Such thinking de-emphasized the competence of devils to simulate or generate diseases, placing a new emphasis upon the mental incompetence of the afflicted and the need for compassion. Analysis returned to the nature of the phantasms themselves and the construction of multiple realities in those faculties of the mind that interpret the world of perceptions. The delusional imagination may be inspired by the culture of the satanic, yet the disease itself pertains to the body, so that by altering the humours through regimen and purgation there remained hope for correcting the afflicted faculties. Philosophically, the line separating the demonic from the natural was barely displaced, but attitudes were more clinically oriented, in combination with a

26

Henri Boguet, Discours des sorciers (Lyon: Rigaud, 1608), trans. as An Examen of Witches, by E. A. Ashwin, ed. by Montague Summers (London, 1929), p. 15. 27

The tortured question of the intellectual, social, juridical, medical, political, and theological influences that brought the trials to an end falls outside the scope of the present study, despite an implicit bias that medical practitioners, in claiming their territory in the name of natural pathology and natural law, made a contribution to the ‘modernism’ that resisted the logic of the demonologists. Those who withstood in part on the grounds of medical philosophy are profiled here, but their ‘progress’ was compromised from within by reticence, and contained by the constant evolution of subversive social conduct that demanded the attention of the local courts, and that did not always pertain to overt states of madness or inflicted disease. Neighbours accusing neighbours of hexing cattle or invoking hail because of political tensions in villages and rural areas of a kind analysed by Robin Briggs in Witches and Neighbours would continue throughout this period, involving causal circumstances remote from the discourses of contemporary physicians. On the medieval origins of the folk practices, including magic, that were incorporated into a ‘demonologized’ Christian culture, see Karen Jolly, ‘Medieval Magic: Definitions, Beliefs, Practices’, in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe, III: The Middle Ages, ed. by Ankarloo and Clark.

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growing doubt that those deemed witches exercised real material powers in the phenomenological world. The most celebrated of the sixteenth-century physicians to advance such arguments was Johan Wier in his Cinq livres de l’imposture et tromperie des diables (1567).28 Wier made little progress in redefining the demonic access to the operations of the body through which malign forces perverted the imagination. The basic tenets of the Christian world order necessitated belief in the demonic, in satanic agency, and in the spiritual psychomachia of the Christian life that transpired within the material brain. Equally incumbent upon the Christian was a belief in the reality of heresy, black magic, and maleficia, and the punishment such practices merited according to the reigning spirit of the age. As a conscientious physician, Wier was not prepared to renounce demonic pathogenesis and its causal role in the production of delusions concerning acts performed in the name of Satan. But as productions of the fancy alone, he could no longer deem transvection, miscegenation with devils, and the invocation of storms — his list grew as his argument advanced — to be verifiable acts in a phenomenological world. His contribution was simply in dwelling upon the innocence of the mentally deranged, through whatever causes, combined with an appeal for the place of the clinic in their treatment. His purpose was to decriminalize the demonic forms of mental insanity by redefining witches as patients. Wier’s lengthy work is not easily summarized, for it lacks the consistency associated with scientific treatises, but his many qualifications and assertions tend clearly towards a more material sense of the world and a more critical sense of the procedures employed by tribunals whereby innocent and deceived defendants were unfairly brought to confession and condemnation. Increasingly, Wier concentrated on the sufficiency of natural pathology and confined his diagnostics whenever possible to purely physiological systems, giving rise to a clinical environment in which patients were examined with regard to their respective social and material conditions. Often, he found senile, old, or feeble-minded persons, typically women, suffering from solitude — the victims of communal

28

Johannes Wier, Cinq livres de l’imposture et tromperie des diables, trans. by Jacques Grévin (Paris: n. pub., 1567), the contemporary French edition of his De praestigiis daemonum et incantationibus ac veneficiis libri sex (Basel: ex officina Oporiniana, 1564). Page references are to Histoires, disputes et discours des illusions et impostures des diables, 2 vols (Paris: Bureau de Progrès Médicale, 1885); the work received partial translation into English in Witches, Devils and Doctors in the Renaissance, ed. and trans. by George Mora and Benjamin Kohl (Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1991).

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jealousy, superstition, or fear. In terms of beliefs about the world, Wier’s differed little from Kramer’s, but in practice he reversed the stance of the demonologists by redefining the witch as neurotic, even psychopathic — thus delusional and powerless in the real world. By the time he reached his fifth book, he found himself declaring that even pacts with the Devil were by nature frivolous and unreal.29 His purpose was to declassify nearly all mental states associated with the diseased imagination as deliberate acts of heresy. As might be expected, Wier cites a host of ancient and modern witnesses in his scientific and methodological defence. He repeats the case studies of Galen and Athaneus on the diverse mind states brought on by unrequited love, delusions of grandeur, guilt, or simple eccentricity.30 Such studies, unconcerned with demonic influence, profile the melancholy disorders caused exclusively by the adustion of humours. Wier extends this analysis to include the phantasms involving demons and devils as the products of black vapours and burnt choler. For that reason, the afflicted may with complete conviction believe they are donkeys, have joined Diana and her nymphs on the night rides, or have danced at the sabbats. Melancholy persons simply dream awake.31 This remains in perfect keeping with the work of the scholastics, confirmed by Wier’s quotation of St Thomas’s Second Book of Sentences on the power of devils to simulate the experiences of the senses.32 His constant deference to theological principles confuses the modern reader in search of a comprehensive dissociation of the physiological from the metaphysical, and particularly with regard to the imagination because of its multiple roles in projecting forbidden realities. Nevertheless, the book arrives at a position sufficiently sceptical to ask for pardon for the accused, now deemed undeserving of trial and punishment. They are simply too unreliable in their testimonies and should be granted medical care. Even more aggravating to the inquisitorial mind was that Wier, while acknowledging that ‘witches’ might be malefic and demonic as well as merely demented or senile, asserted that both were within the competence of physicians to treat. He allowed that those possessed by spirits were not curable by herbal remedies, but unless they had committed material and demonstrable crimes pertaining to property, physicians might treat them with ‘methodical’ cures, such

29

Wier, Histoires, disputes et discours, I, 286.

30

Wier, Histoires, disputes et discours, I, 304.

31

Wier, Histoires, disputes et discours, I, 313.

32

Wier, Histoires, disputes et discours, I, 314.

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as amulets, counter spells, sacred objects, names and prayers, or rites of exorcism apt for expelling devils. Wier describes them in detail.33 At that juncture his treatise takes up the well-established procedures for the curing of the diseases of melancholy through phlebotomy and psychopharmacology. The patient’s response to these procedures was a sure means for determining the nature of the mental condition. But for Wier as practitioner it mattered less and less, for in imposing stricter evaluations upon the acts for which these persons were accused, and in declassifying the reality of their phantasms, the concept of mental alienation extended to greater numbers. Even when the Devil exerts himself through the melancholy humours, he can be evacuated in the normal ways through purges.34 Wier’s purpose was to draw nearly the totality of the expressions of witchcraft within the ambit of medical analysis and treatment through shelter, counsel, surgery, drugs, and regimen. But he was powerless to remove the demonic factor from the operations of the imagination by explaining its preoccupations entirely in terms of social pressures, folklore, and the dynamics of interpersonal relationships in communities. Wier cited case studies, such as that of Galgarand, the famous physician of Mantua, who cured the garment-maker’s wife possessed of a devil, even though her ability to speak in foreign languages was a sure sign of demonic possession.35 Other studies followed of patients responding equally to exorcism and to comforting and fortifying medications. At the least, once the body had been purged, the labours of the clergy were greatly reduced. But the most far-sighted aspect of his practice was the degree to which he insisted upon taking into consideration the life, habits, beliefs, and social conditions of the patient. He speaks of childhood rebellion and other explanatory causes for subversive behaviour, and the provocations in life that might lead the accused to the rejection of Christian teachings. He showed how blame might be placed upon bad influences, citing the proverb of ‘the bad crow and the bad egg’. To proceed otherwise, as the defenders of religion do, through ‘diligent inquisition and artificial conjecture’, will by such means discover nothing about the ‘cause of the

33

Wier, Histoires, disputes et discours, II, 109–18.

34

Wier, Histoires, disputes et discours, II, 152.

35

Even this sign of demonic possession had raised scepticism. Levinus Lemnius (Levin Lemne), Les Secrets miracles de nature (1561) points out that persons suffering from frenzy entirely natural in its origins can sometimes speak in languages they have never studied. Trans. by Antoine Du Pinet (Pinel), 2 vols (Lyon: Frellon, 1566), II, 2, p. 259.

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disease’.36 Rather, it was through the correction of dissolute lives that the wayward might be brought back to the fold. Wier’s vision and compassion are remarkable, yet as a philosopher, he remained powerless to resolve the nature of the natural world in which devils retained causal powers, or to define the properties of the delusional imagination in purely medical terms. Even so, in pragmatic terms he created a gap between medical and demonological readings of the imagination that would only widen in subsequent years.

36

Wier, Histoires, disputes et discours, II, 154. At this juncture, Wier expresses intimations of causal understanding in social and psychological terms that remain at the centre of recent attempts to explain the witch phenomenon. In a sense, Robin Briggs’s assessment of the witch personality in terms of the ‘narcissistic’ and repressed which characterizes those who are accused, maltreated, and marginalized by their neighbours is a more sophisticated version of Wier’s arguments concerning the isolated, lonely, and fearful state of the women accused of maleficia. Briggs seeks to reconstruct the ethos of village life in Lorraine, for example, in order to account in quite ‘normal’ and procedural terms the precise circumstances that led to distrust, hostility, and accusation. Key to his investigation are the received mentalities and beliefs pertaining to folklore coupled with ‘the hostile and mysterious nocturnal world’ that battered their imaginations, which eventuated in accusations of maleficia to account for the catastrophes and misfortunes that befell family members, cattle, or crops. Such were the causes of the narratives spun to the detriment of perceived enemies that led to the entire malaise of witchcraft and the curious fulfilment of roles projected upon these unfortunate members of the community. The Witches of Lorraine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), esp. ‘Dreams and Fantasy’, pp. 148–54. For Briggs, the world of the diabolical and the narcissistic ‘are in fact versions of the same thing, rooted in the same psychological materials’ (p. 151). The imagination is involved, to be sure, in critical ways, but there is no need to define natural fear expressed in accordance with superstitious beliefs in terms of a diseased faculty. Were such an analysis to be pursued even further, one might turn to a cognitive evaluation of the narratives created to relieve states of anxiety concerning inexplicable dangers. It is a fundamental drive of the human brain to resolve contradictions of a phenomenological kind through ‘metarepresentation’, which is that unique human ability to create rudimentary internal narratives in order to account causally for contradictory facts. This ability is a function of the imagination through which we create provisional drafts of reality in accordance with our beliefs and interests. If we believe in and fear maleficia, those narratives will invariably factor in devils, damage, and agents, leading to accusations out of danger evasion and self-interest of those most likely deemed the cause. On the epistemic drive to eliminate anxiety through internal narrative, see Michael Austin, ‘The Influence of Anxiety and Literature’s Panglossian Nose’, Philosophy and Literature, 31 (2007), 215–32; and Donald Beecher, ‘Suspense’, Philosophy and Literature, 31 (2007), 255–79. But such matters as these fall outside the terms of the present study of the early modern approaches to the imagination and its diseases as an instrument of the Devil, or as the basis for an emerging rationale whereby the accused might escape criminal or heretical prosecution.

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In spite of his lengthy efforts, Wier’s thesis was vulnerable in critical ways. He sought to diagnose witches as demented or feeble-minded old women in need of care and protection, and many may have fit that description, but the Renaissance witch was by no means necessarily so. Jeffrey Burton Russell underscores the point that ‘it will not do to assume that the witches were on the whole mentally ill’.37 Thomas Erastus in his Deux dialogues touchant le pouvoir des sorcières (1579) attacked Wier in precisely those terms.38 He pointed out that the practices constituting witchcraft, whether real or imagined, were not the ramblings of demented old ladies, for there was altogether too much consistency in their modes of representation over long periods and extended areas: sabbats, copulation with devils, black masses, desecration of the host, ointments made of cannibalized children, and the entire vocabulary of maleficia touching diseases in humans and cattle, divination, and the alteration of the weather. Too many witches had testified at the trials with coherence and self-composure to be described as the victims of hallucinations,39 and Wier had merely an inkling of the tales and traditions, the sermons and leading questioning, whereby these profiles of activity

37

Burton Russell, Witchcraft in the Middle Ages, p. 273. A similar problem arises in modern approaches to the witch mania under the heading of hysteria. G. S. Rousseau (‘A Strange Pathology’, p. 96) seeks to broaden the definition to a disease of civilization, as opposed to a strictly pathological condition, diabolical or otherwise, faulting those who have restricted the term to historical definitions arising in ancient medicine. Thus witchcraft, even in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, might be assessed in terms of ‘female hysteria in disguise’. But the same objection may be said to prevail: that the minds of those who accused their neighbours of practising maleficia were not deranged in clinical terms, and those accused were not necessarily so even if they actually sought to cast spells or resort to other forms of folk magic for harnessing the spiritual powers deemed to be in their environment — no more so than those who believed in the imminence and agency of demons in order to prosecute them. Nevertheless, it might be argued that the same general demonological world order that produced a reasonable fear of incubi or maleficia likewise contributed to the psychic phenomena that resulted in the behaviours and mind states associated with hysteria. Rousseau passes over the likes of Jean Bodin, yet blames Wier for failing to see the social nature of hysteria in the manner he attributes to a true modern like Sydenham. He then conducts an historical tally from Timothy Bright to Edward Jorden (who employed the term ‘suffocation of the mother’ in the Mary Glover case), blaming them all for missing the point (pp. 116–17). 38

This work was likewise translated from the Latin and included in the second volume of Wier’s Histoires, disputes et discours des illusions et impostures des diables in 1579. 39

Pierre Le Loyer, Sieur de la Brosse made this same argument years later in 1605, that the testimonials were based on a reliable use of the senses by minds in full control of their intellectual powers. Discours et histoires des spectres (Paris: Buon, 1605), pp. 49–61.

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were transmitted.40 Erastus, meanwhile, proceeded from opposite premises, for he disallowed dreams and phantasms while pointing to heresy, volitional acts, conspiracy, and wilful deviancy based upon the testimony of self-avowed participants. His distinctions were more categorical. Melancholiacs may speak of things impossible, but witches boast of deeds possible through demonic agency and speak of similar activities in places widely dispersed. Witches do not wander in delirium, but strategize their powers to kill cattle and poison wells. Wier aligns mental diseases with helpless possession whereas Erastus and Bodin align such mental states with deliberate criminal activity as reported by witnesses during the trials.41 Demoniacs speak in tongues, but witches do not. Demoniacs do not consent to do evil; witches do. One of the earliest among the non-medical writers to assault the logic of the demonographers on the basis of secular and material thinking was Reginald Scot in his Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584). His tack was different, given his willingness to declare that every aspect of the conventional expressions of witchcraft from orgies and the slaughter of children to incubi and succubae and all manner of maleficia were by definition trickery and jugglery. There were travelling magicians who performed illusions for sheer entertainment that would have led witches to the stake. Scot’s principal targets were the rigorous views of Jean Bodin as expressed in his De la démonomanie des sorciers (1580), a work which knew twenty-three editions as well as translations into German, Italian, and Latin, and which became the most influential trial manual of that age. Bodin might argue that the Devil can transform himself into a goat, but nature would never tolerate such a metamorphosis.42 If a demon in the form of a wolf kills a twelve-year-old girl, the proximity of real wolves in the vicinity should be considered first. Witches are not delusional — the control their wills — but allowing even for selfdeception, they are merely tricksters. In Book I, Chapter 3, he begins to incorporate the perspective of Wier that so-called witches were ‘poore, sullen, superstitious, and papists; or such as knowe no religion’, having ‘drousie minds’ in which the idea of the Devil had taken hold to the point that they believe in the reality of their deeds. They show ‘melancolie in their faces’, and they are scolds

40

Wier, Histoires, disputes et discours, II, 549.

41

Jean Bodin, On the Demon-Mania of Witches, trans. by Randy Scott and intro. by Jonathan Pearl (Toronto: CRRS Publications, 2001), pp. 181–89. This is a partial translation of Bodin’s De la démonomanie des sorciers (1580). 42

Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), ed. by Montague Summers (1930), repr. (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1972), p. 51.

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and angry old women.43 Their neighbours hate them, and so by degrees a mutual animosity grows up leading to vain threats of evil and destruction by magic far beyond their powers to perform. Scot considered glory, fame, gain, madness, and desperation as motives behind the boasting of the accused regarding their claims to predict the future, cure diseases, and work miracles. Scot, too, became a student of human nature in explaining the social origins of the confessions that led to sentencing. His contribution was to remove the Devil entirely from all theatres of natural causation, often by arguing hypothetically from the Devil’s perspective, questioning why he would cause humans to perform in such silly and boastful ways to ends he could achieve more efficiently on his own. To the language of ‘evil humours’ he added social mimicry, which gained in influence with those who witnessed spectacles of group possession. He likewise reconsidered the testimonies from the trials and the irrelevant prating of defendants professing to impossible deeds, because ‘the will of a sound mind is the desire of a possible thing’.44 Citing St Augustine’s De spiritu et anima, he accuses those willing to entertain the truth of transvection or other miraculous events as themselves suffering from depraved imaginations. Scot’s foremost strategy was to call all serious-minded persons to reason clearly about the probable and the possible. Behind his assault upon Bodin was the sceptical voice of Girolamo Cardano who, in his De varietate rerum, provided a full investigation of occult causes.45 Cardano became a professor of medicine in Pavia in 1547. He travelled to England, Scotland, and France and was arrested in Bologna for heresy in 1570. Concerning witches, he was persuaded that they are self-deceived, profess nothing real, and suffer from melancholy imaginations.46 The suicidal impulses expressed through their confessions are due to the despair brought on by the disease.47 The imagination is a powerful faculty which, on its own, is capable of hallucinating all that pertains to witchcraft, just as famous patients have imagined themselves

43

Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, p. 4.

44

Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, pp. 45–53.

45

Girolamo Cardano, De rerum varietate, or De varietate rerum (Basel: Petri, 1559, although the work may date to 1557 or 1558), esp. bk XV , chap. 80, in which Cardano explains not only that the melancholy imagination is the cause of self-deception, but that the trial judges gave incentive to false testimony against the accused through the distribution of the confiscated goods of the convicted. 46

Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, p. 12.

47

Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, p. 19.

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beasts, pots, and princes, or have heard voices and music which do not exist — to which he appends his many medical sources. Scot asserts Wier’s position in more absolute terms, attributing all demonic imaginings to the conventional diseases of the mental faculties originating in natural causes, while tracing the confabulations and delusions of the accused to the suggestive influences of the culture of witchcraft endemic to the age. He then relates the case of Ade Davis of Selling, Kent, who for a long time believed herself damned, having made a pact with the Devil that led to the bewitching of her own husband. The family closed ranks to protect her by seeking medical treatment. When the projected day of her damnation arrived, the family sat with her, themselves alarmed by thumping in the basement that turned out to be the sound of a sheep carcass beating against the wall while being eaten by dogs. In due course, Ade was cured of her delusions, prompting Scot to say that had Bodin been presiding she would have been consigned to the flames.48 Yet even for Scot, medical arguments stalled when the accusations were of heresy. Pragmatically, practitioners were best to avow their belief in the doctrines of the Church while challenging their applicability on a case-by-case basis in the courts and tribunals on grounds of ‘natural’ insanity. Jacques Ferrand in his Treatise on Love Melancholy (1623) followed this contradictory course in his profession of loyalty to the faith, while asserting in practice the autonomy of the medical profession in the treatment of the diseases of the soul.49 That same double stance would be adopted by many physicians, even the most sceptical, including Sir Thomas Browne in his Religio medici.50 Nevertheless, mentalities were changing as the place of occult causes in the natural world order came under more rigorous investigation. In De augmentis scientiarum, Bacon privileged the study of witchcraft, but now on the grounds that it presented the most challenging

48

Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, pp. 43–44.

49

Ferrand, A Treatise on Lovesickness, p. 290.

50

Sir Thomas Browne, Religio medici, intro. by Frank Huntley (New York: Dutton, 1951), pp. 35–37. Regarding the diseases of the imagination and their causes, he was strikingly inclusive: ‘I hold that the Devil doth really possess some men, the spirit of Melancholly others, the spirit of Delusion others; that, as the Devil is concealed and denyed by some, so God and good Angels are pretended by others, whereof the late defection of the Maid of Germany hath left a pregnant example’ (p. 35). These are the words of a practising man of science with a philosophical bent of mind in seventeenth-century England. Despite his careful stance, however, Stuart Clark (‘Demons and Disease’, p. 40) places him among the credulous physicians, for upon Browne’s testimony certain prosecutions were carried forward.

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phenomena still to be reduced to hard scientific explanation.51 Witchcraft was no longer a necessary phenomenon based on theological truths, but the object of controlled experimentation in the quest for rational explanations according to scientific standards of proof. Such curiosity kept the philosophical inquest alive long after witchcraft ceased to be a matter of public concern. Oskar Diethelm confirms the ongoing investigation in citing the number of medical dissertations on the question of the malefic imagination, with Balthus of Rostock denying all demonological causation in medical matters as early as 1605, while Friedrich Hoffmann, a professor in Halle, was still affirming them as late as 1721 in his Medicina consultatoria.52 Hence, the immediacy of the tribunals was an impetus to what Clark calls the ‘“new” natural philosophers’ who participated in the larger debate over the occult in the natural world order.53 Standing at the divide was Paracelsus who accepted witches as real, yet attributed their deeds not to demonic pacts but to congenitally acquired constitutions and the sheer force of their imaginations.54 The faculty remained at the crux, its nature still to be defined in relation to the natural world order. Many cases involving defendants purportedly suffering from mental disorders were heard by the courts throughout the first half of the seventeenth century, particularly in France. 55 Occasionally those making outrageous claims, such as to lycanthropy, were consigned to asylums and clinics, and in the process the position of the medical profession became more clearly defined. Even though there were few new perspectives in their argumentation, there was a clearer sense of the material and physiological properties of pathology and a firmer sense of the

51

See Clark, ‘Scientific Status of Demonology’, p. 355.

52

Friedrich Hoffmann, Medicina consultatoria (Halle: Magdeburgischen Renger, 1721). See Oskar Diethelm, Medical Dissertations of Psychiatric Interest Printed before 1750 (Basel: Karger, 1971), p. 135. 53

Clark, ‘Demons and Disease’, p. 44.

54

Charles Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 80–85. 55

The refinement of legal practices, courtroom procedures, and matters of proof pertain equally to the study of witchcraft and its prosecution. ‘Meticulous courtroom procedures were developed throughout Europe to winnow true demoniacs and witches from those erroneously or falsely accused’ allowing for acquittal from time to time on the basis of insanity. Rousseau, ‘A Strange Pathology’, p. 98. Physicians were routinely called in and confronted with the difficult task of separating clinical causes from demonic causes. See Alfred Soman, Sorcellerie et justice criminelle 16e–18 e siècles (Aldershot: Variorum, 1992).

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cures apt for dealing with humoral disorders. The great rector of the medical school in Montpellier, André Du Laurens, a modernist in spirit, is surprisingly conciliatory with regard to demonic causes in cases of melancholy. He is traditional in his assertion that demons use melancholy to torment their victims.56 Yet in the celebrated case of Marthe Brossier, which preoccupied the Parlement de Paris in 1599, Du Laurens joined with the physician Jean Riolan, along with several others from the faculty of medicine, in diagnosing her acts of possession, against the pretensions of the clergy, to be ‘ficta et simulata’.57 During the trial of Elizabeth Jackson in London in 1602, physicians John Argent and Edward Jorden made a full representation to the court to convince them that the fits of this fourteen-year-old girl were entirely natural in origin, but they failed to prevail against other physicians from the Royal College of Physicians, who sided with the prosecution.58 The medical profession was by no means united in its position concerning demonic causes, possession, and the diseases of melancholy.59 Jourdain Guibelet, in his Trois discours philosophiques, allowed for both kinds of melancholy, natural and demonic, while the physician J. de Nynauld, in De la lycanthropie, defined the disease as entirely fanciful. In the process he attacked the credulity of Jean Bodin while denying reality to all manifestations of sorcery.60 The debate was perpetuated among medical philosophers who were increasingly called in as expert witnesses in the cases of demonic melancholia, possession, and collective hysteria. There were signs that the mood of the medical profession was

56

André Du Laurens, Second discours, auquel est traicté des maladies melancholiques, et du moyen de les guarir, in Toutes les œuvres, trans. by T. Gelée (Paris: Mettayer, 1613). 57

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale français (BnF), MS 17324, fol. 103 r. In this they were lending support to Michel Marescot, who, in his Discours véritable sur le fait de Marthe Brossier, de Romorantin, prétendue démoniaque (Paris, 1599), p. 14, denied completely the validity of her performance, while pro forma manifesting his belief in the doctrines of the Church concerning demons. 58

The treatise resulting from this experience was entitled A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (London: Windet, 1603), which bears early witness to a new line of investigation in which the medical condition of hysteria is foregrounded in the explanation of possession and witchcraft. See Michael MacDonald, Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover Case (New York: Routledge, 1991). 59

Richard Hunter and Ida Macalpine, Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry 1535–1860 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 70–75. 60

J. de Nynauld, De la lycanthropie (Paris, 1615). The modern critical edition was edited by Maxime Préaud and Nicole Jacques-Chaquin, De la lycanthropie, transformation et extase des sorciers 1615 (Paris: Frénésie Éditions, 1990).

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changing. Jean Céard dates that breakdown between demonology and medical diagnostics in France to the end of the sixteenth century when Marescot argued from natural causes in the affair of Marthe Brossier.61 Decisive new philosophical positions were clearly in sight. Yet in arguing that in Brossier’s case there was nothing above the laws of nature, Marescot merely set the bar higher for those to follow in demonstrating the supernatural, such as speaking in tongues, marathon sessions of uncontrollable behaviour, contortions, levitation, and vile speech.62 In particular, the three much-publicized cases of possession within religious communities in Aix-en-Provence (1610), Loudun in the Poitevin (1632), and Louviers in Normandy (1642) provoked even greater scepticism on the part of several of the examining physicians concerning the demonic occupation of the imaginative faculties, largely because the young women were now acting out their states of possession simultaneously, and because the presentation of their ‘seizures’ failed to follow diagnostic profiles.63 These outbreaks of anti-social conduct were witnessed by the highest Church officials, as well as by members of the court. The women were not only the objects of public spectacle and long séances of attempted

61

Jean Céard, ‘Folie et démonlogie au XVIe siècle’, in Folie et déraison à la Renaissance (Brussels: Éditions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1976), pp. 131–50. 62

Michel Marescot, A True Discourse upon the Matter of Marthe Brossier, Pretended to be Possessed by a Devill, trans. by A. Hartwel (London: Wolfe, 1599). The Marthe Brossier case was critical, for it brought exorcism under attack even from within the Church. The conflicting reports on the nature of her alleged possession divided down political rather than scientific lines. Among the many accounts of the case is that by Sarah Ferber, ‘The D emonic Possession of Marthe Brossier, France 1598–1600’, in No Gods Except Me: Orthodoxy and Religious Practice in Europe, 1200–1600, ed. by Charles Zika (Melbourne: Melbourne University Department of History, 1991), pp. 59–83. Marescot scored many points in his detection of fraud, and wondered in print at the credulity of the elite in espousing the practices of the exorcists. The point is not to be lost, however, that exorcism was a valuable means whereby the Counter-Reformation Church sought to re-establish the potency of its powers over the spirit world as a means for conversion as supported by the League. Ferber, ‘Reformed or Recycled? Possession and Exorcism in the Sacramental Life of Early Modern France’, in Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits, ed. by Edwards, pp. 60–62. See also Daniel P. Walker, Unclean Spirits: Possession and Exorcism in France and England in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (London: Scolar, 1981). 63

This is not to claim that these were the earliest examples of collective demonic possession placed on public display. Bodin (On the Demons-Mani of Witches, p. 168) tells the story of the nuns in the convent of Kentorp, Germany in 1552, and how they were ‘raised into the air every day, and sometimes every hour, and fell back down without injury’, laughed endlessly, sometimes struck each other, and had stinking breaths. The symptoms changed over the years, but the general phenomenon was well known.

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exorcism, to which they all made lengthy resistance, but they were examined by a substantial number of physicians called in to offer their professional assessments. All three outbreaks have received extensive and minute modern historical analysis, profiling the ethos of convent life, the role of charismatic and influential confessors, the obsession with biblical eschatology, the psychology of social contagion, charlatanism, and professional rivalries. Moreover, there were numerous contemporary accounts. François de Rousset wrote about the nuns of Aix in his Histoires tragiques de nostre temps (1615, 2nd edition), La Mesnardière contributed his Traitté de la melancholie, sçavoir si elle est la cause des effets que l’on remarque dans les posédées de Loudun (1635), while Jean le Breton wrote of the events in Normandy in De la défense de la vérité touchante la possession des religieuses de Louviers (1643). In all of these enquiries, the leading question pertained to the authenticity of the women’s acts and the reality of their possession. There is, in fact, a surfeit of documentation ranging from the opinions of the local physicians to the views of the great libertine writer Gabriel Naudé who joined in the discussion, writing to the physician Guy Patin to whom he described the entire business as ‘hystéromanie’, a melancholy delirium.64 Naudé’s position was echoed in more measured terms by many of the more cosmopolitan and influential of the examining physicians. Marc Duncan, the Huguenot practitioner called in to investigate the proceedings at Loudun, wrote a treatise describing all the events he witnessed as falling well within explanation according to natural causes. In medical terms, he was not disallowing demonic obsessions and corrupted states of mind, but he was denying that what the women performed by way of contortions, foreign languages (mostly imperfect Latin), theological babbling, blasphemy, and divination required active demonic agency. He noted how their convulsions would suddenly stop when physicians were called in to examine them, and that unlike patients in seizures, these women did not bite the fingers of the examiners. When little cuts appeared on the left side of Jeanne des Anges without damaging her clothes after rolling about on the ground, Duncan knew it was trickery.65 For the physicians, the question was no longer

64 Robert Mandrou, Magistrats et sorcières en France au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Plon, 1968), p. 281. This book provides an excellent historical overview and analysis of these events. Naudé elaborates at greater length on the impossible foolishness of such things as riding through the air and attending sabbats, all of it the result of madness, the victims of which should be sent to care homes. Gabriel Naudé, Mascurat (Paris: n. pub., 1649(?)), p. 310. 65

Mandrou, Magistrats et sorcières, p. 282; Marc Duncan, Discours de la possession des religieuses Ursulines de Loudun (n.p..: n. pub., 1634).

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whether devils had caused the deranged imagination through pathological means, but whether the women were suffering from an insanity of any natural kind whatsoever. In 1643, the physician Pierre Yvelin was sent by the Queen Mother to investigate the antics of Magdaleine Bavent in Louviers, despite the opposition and hostility of those whose vested interest was in upholding the reality of her possession by the Devil and the legitimacy of public exorcism. In his Examen de la possession des religieuses de Louviers, he too concluded that it was all trickery, but that some of their minds were decidedly in a state of disorder and their imaginations affected, all of which they could blame on the Devil.66 Moreover, he too resorts to explanations in terms of hysteria and the vapours from seed rotting in the womb.67 To protect themselves from accusations of fraud, the women had to give credible performances of demonic possession, including contortions and ventriloquism, as though devils were speaking black sermons, foreign languages, or divinations through their mouths; it must have been exhausting work. Some in the audiences were so caught up by the spectacle as to attempt to join in the performance. Many more were convinced of their legitimacy by the seemingly inhuman qualities of their words and contortions. But for Yvelin, it was a matter of professional competence in diagnosing the diseases of young women, of which he was a specialist. He stated that theologians knew nothing of the causes of such behaviour because they were ignorant of the workings of the melancholy humours or the rotting of seed trapped in the body. It was the vapours and winds arising in various parts of the body that produced the deleterious states of mind. Yvelin, too, professed his orthodoxy in matters of religious belief, but refused to attribute to miraculous causes things falling within the realm of natural explanation.68 His evocation of the diseases of women and the emerging vocabulary of hysteria and vapours was important. But there was as yet no sure means to distinguish between victims of demonic possession and patients

66

Pierre Yvelin, Examen de la possession des religieuses de Louviers (Paris: n. pub., 1643), pp. 13–14. This treatise appears in Les Possédées de Louviers, ed. by R . Dubois (Condé-sur-Noireau: Corlet, 1990). 67

See Marianne Closson, ‘The Devil’s Curses: The Demonic Origin of Disease in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Claire Carlin (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 63–76. 68

Pierre Yvelin, Apologie pour l’auteur de l’examen de la possession des religieuses de Louviers (Paris, 1643), esp. pp. 16–17.

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suffering from atrabilious vapours or hypochondriacal melancholy, because the symptoms were essentially identical.69 These medical opinions were written concurrently with the publication of a mass of pamphlets defending possession and the rights of the Church in treating such cases through exorcism. Indeed, the public debate over these rather spectacular proceedings lasted throughout the first four decades of the seventeenth century in France and preoccupied many members of the intelligentsia. Michel de Certeau has aptly demonstrated how the events in Loudun created an urgent need to re-examine the entire question of the imagination and its role in the production of witchcraft and demonic possession.70 At stake in the exchange of treatises between Marc 69

Because of the actual presence of demons in the body, possession assumed an ontological status of its own. That status conditioned the reactions on the part of the Church, the courts, and the medical establishment. Because maleficia and property damage were not involved, the phenomenon did not require legal definition, enabling exorcism and hysteria to come to the forefront. As Roy Porter points out, there are several ways to pursue the history of a disease such as hysteria: to explain it in terms of pathogens, micro-organisms, or toxins; as a history of medical theory; or finally as a history of the behaviour defined as hysterical. Our purpose here involves the second, for it was the diagnostics laid out by the ancients that provided the seventeenth-century dimensions of hysteria. Hippocrates (or those who wrote in his name on the diseases of young women) was entirely cognizant of the social provocations, yet pursued the physiological determinants of the condition within the body, and particularly the female sex organs. That paradigm may annoy moderns, but it informed the working medical precepts whereby early modern physicians sought to explain the ‘case studies’ presented by spectacles of group possession. Roy Porter, ‘The Body and the Mind, the Doctor and the Patient’, in Hysteria Beyond Freud, ed. by Gilman and others, p. 226. Porter contributes to a collection of essays, the general agenda of which is to redefine hysteria as the by-product of the patient’s socio-psycho-sexual and religious ethos; it is an attempt to resuscitate a term and its historical applicability while escaping the limitations of its earlier definitions. Hysteria is everything that contributes to the manifestation of the condition, a disease of civilization, or perhaps no disease at all. This recent corrective approach surpasses the understanding of the early modern physician. See also Étienne Trillat, Histoire de l’Hystérie (Paris: Seghers, 1986). Moreover, as Sarah Ferber demonstrates, the attempt to ‘modernize’ hysteria has been over a century in the making insofar as Jean-Martin Charcot late in the nineteenth century sought to define the four phases of the hysterical fit and then to reread the records concerning the Ursulines of Loudun to confirm and universalize his theories by interpreting all things once deemed miraculous as natural phenomena. His purpose was likewise to read hysteria in terms of the anxieties of the respective social eras, as well as to celebrate the ‘secular’ spirit of Marc Duncan, Pierre Yvelin, and Claude Quillet (associated with the outbreak in Chinon). ‘Charcot’s Demons: Retrospective Medicine and Historical Diagnosis in the Writings of the Salpêtrière School’, in Illness and Healing Alternatives in Western Europe, ed. by Gijswijt-Hofstra and others, pp. 120–40. 70

Michel de Certeau, The Possession at Loudun, trans. by Michael B. Smith (Chicago:

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Duncan, the Huguenot physician from Saumur, and Hippolyte-Jules Pilet de la Mésnardière, professor at the medical school in Nantes, was the moral responsibility of the ‘possessed’. For the latter, the argument from hysteria or the diseased imagination could not excuse the rational faculty from accountability for its errors and credulity. Once again, professionals were called upon to establish the scope of demonic influence in terms of the mental faculties. Considerations of hysteria had subtly shifted matters to the extent the antics of the ‘possessed’ nuns were deemed to belong to the same diseases of young women defined by Hippocrates, making their frenzy a mere by-product of the ethos and substance of convent life.71 Meanwhile, large numbers from the community at large were allowed in to witness the sessions of exorcism and to judge for themselves the legitimacy of the claims of the exorcists. The document that perhaps best summarizes the medical position in a period still invested in Galenic approaches to the diseases of the imagination, and still dealing strategically and diplomatically with a clerical world dominated by demonological thinking, was a letter by an unidentified physician solicited by Philibert de la Marre, Conseiller to the Parlement de Dijon (1647).72 It appeared in the wake of the controversy ignited by the events in Louviers which had once more pitted the libertines and ‘naturalists’ against the Church, and the physicians against the exorcists. Cool reason was claimed by both sides, but the matter was not settled in the public mind whether demons had made a veritable communal invasion and prompted such extraordinary behaviour, whether the women were performing a massive hoax for pecuniary or political reasons, or whether they were afflicted by a humoral disorder conditioned by contagious moods and ideas. The challenge for the examining physicians was to determine the origins of their behaviour and to describe a medical condition that would account for such collective mania and obsession. Stuart Clark has argued that after the turn of the University of Chicago Press, 2000), esp. pp. 130–40. See also Robert Rapley, A Case of Witchcraft: The Trial of Urban Grandier (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1998), esp. p. 75. 71

Sarah Ferber (‘Reformed or Recycled?’, p. 65) has pointed out, that inaugural circumstances in Loudun included the apparition of the ghost of Father Moussaut, their recently deceased spiritual director. This popular belief concerning the dead was part of the collective illusion, and the reaction to this was communicated among the girls by imitation. Similar circumstances prevailed in Louviers in 1643, with sexual overtones, concerning the sensed presence of the soul of Mathurin Picard. See Nicole Greenspan, ‘Religious Contagion in Mid-Seventeenth Century England’, in Imagining Contagion, ed. by Carlin, pp. 212–27. 72

Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, MS 2890, transcribed by Robert Mandrou in Possession et sorcellerie au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1979).

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century, the medical analyses of witchcraft had been displaced by legal considerations, that Wier’s construction of the phenomenon as a disease of the imagination no longer commanded attention.73 But while legal and social considerations became more prominent, the medical debate remained, and particularly in France where demonic possession ‘performed’ in groups evaded all other causal explanation.74 Even where mere trickery and fraud were suspected, the very fact of participating in such shows of extreme frenzy week after week requires a psychosocial explanation. Just as Wier began to consider the poverty, solitude, and social antagonisms of those accused of witchcraft, there was now the austerity, privation, and discipline of convent life, together with an intellectual climate steeped in teachings concerning devils, reprobation, and damnation, to be taken into consideration. Moreover, as young women, these nuns were subject to all the transitional physiological vulnerabilities described initially by Hippocrates in his book On the Diseases of Young Women.75 In the letter to Philibert de la Marre, the analysis begins with questions of temperament, imbalances, and the poisoning of vital vapours. The writer harkens back to Galen on rotting biles and frenzy and the development of brain disorders without fever. There are those who, for lack of medical knowledge, attribute such classical conditions to devils, as with many things having unknown causes. Even the Arabs called these diseases ‘daemonium’.76 But these are merely cases of chronic delusion brought about by uterine fury or the suffocation of the matrix, as well as by the traditional adustion of melancholy bile.

73

Clark, Thinking with Demons, p. 208.

74

Although similar events and similar reactions pertained on a smaller scale throughout Europe. In Augsburg, the Fugger family was addicted to exorcism as a means for advancing Catholic proselytizing. Such spectacles provoked a Protestant backlash as the ‘moderns’ in opposition to Papist ‘superstition’ in the person of Achilles Gasser. This physician also turned to the diagnosis of the illnesses of maidens, disorders of the womb, and erotomania to define the hyperemotional states of the subjects exposed to exorcism, discussing these young women as slaves to their sexuality in ways that compromised reason and discretion. See Lyndal Roper, ‘Magic and the Theology of the Body: Exorcism in Sixteenth-Century Augsburg’, in No Gods Except Me, ed. by Zika, pp. 104–05. 75

Most readily found in volume VIII of his Oeuvres complètes, ed. by E. Littré (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1978). For an appraisal of Littré’s biases in his work, as well as for a comprehensive analysis of the emergence of hysteria as the defining condition of women in Hippocratic medicine, see Helen King, Hippocrates’ Women: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece (London: Routledge, 1998), passim; on Émile Littré, pp. 208–15. 76

Mandrou, Possession et sorcellerie, p. 206.

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Such patients may rave and babble of demons, preach strange doctrines, and talk of love and war, but they make no professions to magic and sorcery. It was the thickness of the melancholy vapours that caused the victims to believe in the reality of their hallucinations. The author then turns to dream theory to explain how their depraved ramblings also reflect the things they had read or heard in sermons, for these modes of transmission were becoming more apparent to close observers. That was a beginning, but what would provoke them to such frenzy and contortions, and how, if they were afflicted with seizures, could these manifestations be under so much volitional control? It is the old question of Erastus in new guise. The medical diagnostic still required a considerable amount of fine tuning. This observer was too thoughtful to merely impose the stock explanations based on melancholy. He knew the story from Jacques Houllier in which a colleague was tricked into talking of demons by feeding him windy or melancholy meats. He also recognized that while the nuns of Louviers raved in hyperbolical ways, they, nevertheless, employed a familiar and common vocabulary. They merely jumbled together the topics of convent life, while their scatological talk originated in melancholy flatulence. Still convinced of the validity of a pathological explanation, he needed to locate the origin of the rotting humours and determine how so many subjects could be similarly afflicted at once. He spoke of menstruation and the accumulation of blood, lack of exercise, temperament, and adustion. But ultimately, he traced the material cause to the matrix consumed by excessive heat by which the vapours were generated that mounted to the brain by the spinal column. Reasons of hysteria, advanced a half century earlier by Edward Jorden, continued to make inroads as the preferred medical explanation, because the condition was an established component of pathological diagnosis; it resulted in violent and irrational behaviour, and was subject to contagious communication within groups uniformly vulnerable.77 For French observers, the diagnosis was in reference to the work of Santa Cruz, a learned physician and philosopher in attendance upon young women who had fallen prey to fantasies and thought themselves possessed. At the same time, he emphasized the changing seasons and conditions of the air, and at last came to the role of miasmas as a vehicle of contagion. At that juncture he enters into the eternal problem of the transmission not only of diseases, but of moods, beliefs, and behaviours.78 77 78

See MacDonald, Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London.

The matter of contagion by proximity, through touch, polluting environmental conditions, airs, miasmas, or waters is a notion going back to antiquity which, before the age of microbiology,

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The prototype for this analysis derives from Plutarch’s account of the young women of Milesia who had fallen into a state of collective melancholy and were hanging themselves in numbers before the authorities stepped in to stay the contagion by threatening to expose their naked bodies in public.79 The story had been appropriated by Girolamo Mercuriale to explain a contemporary case of mass hysterical drowning in Lyons. Hippocrates related how his patients saw spectres and visions, while others were suicidal. In such cases, melancholy dispositions were only a part, for the behaviour was also clearly ‘contagious’ through the example set by others. Proximity became a new factor, for in Louviers it had been observed that witnesses of the exorcism became affected. Another imagined herself pregnant by a devil and feigned possession for some fifteen days before losing interest.80 The medium now invoked to account for the contagion was contaminated air afflicting entire groups temperamentally subject to its malign influence. The mechanism had been described since antiquity, but it was the best that could be offered under the circumstances in explaining the transmission of common symptoms to a community characterized by its common susceptibility. The author, although still open to arguments concerning demonic pathology, ventured to conclude that while God may grant permission to devils to operate upon humans through the natural world, yet He would never grant them the power to occupy the same channels involved in the creation of natural diseases. This was a further attempt to accommodate Church teachings while pushing back the line of demarcation within the body that separates natural from supernatural pathogens. For him, God is obliged to abide by the laws that He had defined in the creation of the natural universe. Devils, he reasoned, must be confined to the spirit world, thereby denying the logic of the Malleus maleficarum that such creatures had access to the body and mind through pathogenesis. Rather, ‘it is this provided the discourse and terms for understanding not only the spread of diseases, but the spread of social and collective hysteria. Further to this topic, see S. Jarcho, The Concept of Contagion in Medicine, Literature, and Religion (Malabar: Krieger, 2000); and Donald Beecher, ‘An Afterword on Contagion’, in Imagining Contagion, ed. by Carlin, pp. 241–60. 79

For the original story, see ‘The Bravery of Women’, Moralia, trans. by Frank Cole Babbitt, 15 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962–76), III (1968), 509. The story had been often retold by physicians concerned with the diseases of young women, hysteria, and the suffocation of the matrix, such as Girolamo Mercuriale, in De morbis muliebribus libri IV (Venice: Felicem Valgrisium, 1587), bk IV , chap. 10, pp. 153–54; and by Jacques Ferrand in A Treatise on Lovesickness, p. 264. 80

Mandrou, Possession et sorcellerie, pp. 211–12.

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infallible order of nature that is one of the most powerful motifs in inspiring men to recognize God’.81 He goes on to deny the reasoning of Fernel that demonic possession may be treated in the same way as epilepsy, for the symptoms are not the same. Such possession may perhaps occur, but never in a way that allows it to be confused with a natural disease: the Devil simply lacks the power to simulate natural disorders. Certain of himself in terms of diagnostics, and certain that the ‘possession’ he had witnessed was due to natural pathological causes, demonic possession was no longer a factor. It was a best attempt, in the spirit of scientific rationalism in a material world, to seal off categories in hermetic containers. In a final salvo, he challenged that if a devil was involved, it would let us know, for in being treated medically, it would not stand to be so slighted. Hence, in his view, the spectators should be sent home, the exorcists dismissed, and the women separated, after which everything would gradually return to normal. Nevertheless, physicians could not extend the profile of the diseases of melancholy sufficiently to account for all the delusional, obsessive, hallucinatory, psychopathic, and criminal dimensions of sorcery, witchcraft, and demonic possession. They remained, despite their efforts to reclaim for the medical profession the care of the diseases of the soul, still powerless to redefine in wholly material terms the nature of the mental faculties, much less exempt from torture and conviction those accused of actionable stances concerning heresy or crime in the name of the Devil. Reginald Scot might well attempt to assert universal agreement among physicians that the cause of all witchcraft was melancholy, but that was not the only issue, and the debate would persist for another one hundred and fifty years.82 At stake was whether the Devil had pathological agency, and whether the imagination so afflicted by the assault of melancholy vapours was demonic by dint of the cause of the disease, or by dint of the beliefs and acts associated with the dementia. Regarding the natural world itself, medical philosophers were confronted by the dogma pertaining to the supernatural in the natural world and by their own intimations concerning natural law and scientific causation. The imagination, in sickness or in health, remained at the critical centre of the debate. It was not the only faculty that existed on the frontier between the material body — subject as it was to a complex of efficient pathogens, both natural and spiritual — and the soul, with its higher intellect and spiritual autonomy, but it was the faculty that created the internal perceptions, altering

81

Mandrou, Possession et sorcellerie, p. 216.

82

Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft, p. 45.

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them according to fancy and desire in an ambience of temptation and provisional experience. It was the Devil’s faculty of choice in corrupting the soul — temptation could mean little else — and thus it was not easy to build a medical firewall between the imagination with its many natural diseases to which it was clearly subject and the organ of fancy assaulted by the Devil. Hysteria, with its noxious vapours from the suppressed menses or the accumulation of seed, became the natural medical construction to place upon the ecstatic behaviour of entire communities of young women in the thrall of demonic possession, no longer in an attempt to provide the natural channels for supernatural invasion of the body, but in an attempt to provide natural explanations for ostensibly supernatural conditions. That construction of a mental disorder achieved an authority of its own in the seventeenth century that served not only to cast doubt upon the claims of the Church, but to promote hysteria, for better or worse, as the paramount condition afflicting women in eighteenth-century medical thought.83 These issues remained at the centre of academic debate throughout the seventeenth century, even though the trials diminished and eventually came to a halt. Theories abound concerning what brought the inquisitorial drive to an end, for the underlying issues pertaining to the Christian and natural world orders remained unresolved. The advances in scientific rationalism and preenlightenment philosophy no doubt altered the intellectual milieu.84 The Reformation and the rise of secular nation states had broken the age of Church 83

Ilza Veith was among the earliest to trace the ancient origins of this condition, revealing the manner in which it became the leading disease of women in the eighteenth century. In effect, these early attributions of demon possession to hysteria were a part of the disease’s history that brought it to prominence in the seventeenth century. Hysteria: The History of a Disease (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965). More recent and comprehensive is Mark Micale’s Approaching Hysteria: Disease and its Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), and those mentioned in preceding notes. It has become fashionable, in fact, to take Veith to task for her decidedly historical approach, failing, as those in the seventeenth century had failed, to redefine the behavioural phenomena of hysteria in post-Freudian psycho-social terms. 84

Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), pp. 769–74. For further assessment of the final breakdown between philosophy and witchcraft in the Age of Enlightenment, see Jonathan Israel, R adical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 355–87. Nevertheless, the chapter entitled ‘A Witch in the Age of Enlightenment’, the case of Catharina Schmid, presents a strange juxtaposition of the times in 1745 with this final outbreak of torture and execution in Germany. See Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 222–46.

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hegemony. Notions of jurisprudence in some sectors had necessitated the abandonment of torture and the application of more rigorous principles in the handling of evidence and witnesses.85 There was a new commonsense approach on the part of scientific-minded men such as Francis Bacon concerning the place of supernatural causation in the material world in general. Each has been credited with instigating the critical metamorphosis in mentality that led to the decline in prosecutions. But fundamentally, the trials ended when citizens ceased to accuse fellow citizens in the name of witchcraft and the Church ceased to impose a radical demonological construction upon the social dynamics of a populace in search of release from anxiety concerning the conditions of daily life. Medical philosophers had played their part in defining the clinical properties of natural diseases and qualifying the extent to which the depraved imagination might simulate the stances of witches and the possessed. But medical reasoning was caught in a logical vortex of its own, for as long as there were demonic forces active in the spiritual universe, as necessitated by Christian theology, and as long as the material brain was a locale of moral temptation as well as of disease, there remained in place a systemic set of analogies whereby the language of the Great Physician and the sin-sick soul coincided with the most credited of pathological analyses. Physicians thus, by predilection and the rigours of their science, became participants in the application of an idée force concerning demonic pathology central to the age of the witch tribunals, as well as participants in one of the great debates concerning the interface between the natural and spiritual worlds that used for its laboratory the mysterious intentionalities of those accused of being, or professing to be, witches.

85

Barbara J. Shapiro, ‘Witchcraft’, in Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Study of the Relationships between Natural Science, Religion, History, Law, and Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 194–226.

T HE M ELANCHOLIC N UN IN L ATE R ENAISSANCE ITALY Sharon T. Strocchia

F

or several weeks in the winter of 1511, the Florentine nun Fede Rosselli lay delirious with fever in the convent infirmary. Throughout her ordeal, this twenty-eight-year-old religious woman experienced not only intense physical anguish but torment of a different kind. Her sisters in religion observed that Sister Fede was battered by ‘the sharpest melancholic pains’ (acutissimi dolori malinconici) that assaulted both body and soul. Although she eventually rallied from fever, this young nun languished in a profound melancholic state that compromised her participation in communal life and threatened her salvific role as a bride of Christ. The physician who treated her malaise failed to remedy her condition. Only the therapeutic spiritual counsel of the revered convent prioress, ‘who encouraged her by whispering various devout sentiments in her ear’ (incoraggendola e sibillandole all’orecchie diversi sentimenti divoti), restored Sister Fede to reason as if awakened from a deep sleep.1 The case of Sister Fede Rosselli was not an isolated incident in the annals of Italian Renaissance convents, which reported ever-growing numbers of melancholic nuns. Traditionally, religious celibates, both male and female, were thought to be particularly prone to melancholy, since they were denied the health-giving purgative effects of sexual intercourse.2 Yet in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when convent populations in Catholic Italy were also skyrocketing, the

1 2

Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, Florence (BNCF), MS Landau Finlay, 72, fols 172 v–173 r.

Noel L. Brann, ‘Is Acedia Melancholy? A Re-examination of this Question in Light of Fra Battista da Crema’s Della cognitione et vittoria di se stesso (1531)’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 34 (1979), 180–99.

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‘monk’s disease’ was seen as extending well beyond the walls of religious institutions. Europeans shared a common perception that cases of melancholy were on the rise, leading one modern scholar to call the Renaissance ‘the age of melancholy’.3 Despite the perceived spread of this malady, however, it is not entirely clear what Renaissance Europeans meant when they described others as melancholic, owing in part to the tremendous conceptual plasticity of the term and the varied social uses to which it could be put. By the sixteenth century, melancholy simultaneously denoted a humoral temperament, a physical illness, and a dangerous spiritual condition arising from a diseased or disordered imagination. When it assumed pathological forms, melancholy ran the gamut from bouts of sadness and eating disorders to mad frenzies and suicidal despair. As universitytrained physicians grappled with the perceived upsurge in cases of melancholy, they also remarked on its gendered nature. The eminent sixteenth-century Italian physician Girolamo Mercuriale, for instance, who authored numerous consilia on the subject, considered melancholy to be more prevalent among men but more acute among women. Nuns suffered especially but not exclusively from the type of melancholy caused by poor functioning in the hypochondrium, the region of the abdomen beneath the soft ribs that produced black bile — the root cause of melancholy in the Galenic medical scheme. Writing in 1597, Mercuriale concluded that the growing number of nuns gravely afflicted with melancholy was hardly surprising, since religious women spent ‘the greater part of their life in quiet and meditation’ (trascorrendo la maggior parte della loro vita nella quiete e nella meditazione). Such conditions were conducive to the production of noxious vapours that rose to the brain and corrupted it.4 Fifty years later, the papal physician Paolo Zacchia, best known for his work on medico-legal questions, concluded that hypochondriac illnesses such as ‘asthma’, headaches, and melancholy were more frequent in his day than in past times. Even though there was a pronounced upsurge in cases of hypochondriac melancholy in the sixteenth and early seven3

On the perception that melancholy was growing in this period, see Angus Gowland, ‘The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy’, Past and Present, 191 (2006), 77–120. H. C. Erik Midelfort has termed the sixteenth century ‘the age of melancholy’ in A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 4

Some of Mercuriale’s treatises are excerpted in Il medico e la follia: Cinquanta casi di malattia mentale nella letteratura medica italiana del Seicento, ed. by Alessandro Dini (Florence: Le Lettere, 1997), pp. 39–55 (p. 46). For a fuller discussion of Mercuriale’s views, see Monica Calabritto, ‘Medicina practica, consilia and the Illnesses of the Head in Girolamo Mercuriale and Giulio Cesare Claudini: Similarities and Differences of the Sexes’, Medicina e storia, 6 (2006), 63–83.

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teenth centuries, the term did not carry the pejorative connotations of anxiety, malingering, and attention seeking that it acquired later in the eighteenth century.5 Although the prevalence of melancholy in the convent will never be known with any degree of precision, the malady impacted female religious communities in important ways. Learned medical opinion held that melancholy affected primarily the elderly; yet this ‘illness of the head’ showed few signs of social differentiation in a convent context. Melancholy struck religious women at all stages of life, irrespective of their social class, the rigour of their religious lifestyle, or the size and wealth of their institution; indeed, this disorder affected rich and poor houses, Observant and conventual orders, young and old, servant nuns as well as those from aristocratic backgrounds. Groups of religious women also experienced the full range of melancholic symptoms, from relatively mild expressions such as prolonged sadness to more extreme forms marked by delusions and despair. Regardless of its specific manifestation, melancholy interfered with the harmonious functioning of communal life. Monastic officials and reformers recognized that despondency distracted nuns from normal work duties and from the proper performance of the divine office — the very reason for monastic reclusion. In addition, the malady affected the close-knit, interpersonal dynamics of convent life. The Spanish reformer Teresa of Avila, whose Discalced Carmelite order had made rapid headway in Spain and Italy by 1600, claimed that dealing with a melancholic nun as if she were a rational person created ‘an unbearable burden’ for other nuns and convent leaders alike.6 More severe forms of mania demanded constant oversight to prevent frenzied nuns from harming themselves or others. Moreover, if it became a protracted psychological state, melancholy could undercut the performance of convent officers responsible for managing institutional resources and complex external relations. Besides imposing heavy burdens of illness on individual communities, melancholy threatened to destabilize an entire social and spiritual system — one in which Italians had invested more heavily than any other Europeans, including those in Catholic Spain. Female monasticism was a defining feature of late Renaissance Italy, reaching its numerical peak between 1550 and 1650. One in

5

Paolo Zacchia, De’ mali hipochondriaci libri tre (Rome: Vitale Mascardi, 1644), p. 3. For further examinations of hypochondriac illnesses, see the essays by Monica Calabritto and Yasmin Haskell in this volume. 6

Quoted in The Nature of Melancholy: From Aristotle to Kristeva, ed. by Jennifer Radden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 109.

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eight Florentine women lived in a religious community in 1552; by the 1580s, close to 54 per cent of Venetian patrician women were nuns, with their numbers rising over the next half-century. Local variants of this pattern took root in Milan, Bologna, Naples, and other Italian cities during this time.7 The many thousands of women sequestered behind convent walls not only functioned as key spiritual intercessors but also as social linchpins supporting elite marriage strategies and civic honour. When melancholy induced despondence or loss of self-control within groups of sacred virgins — conditions that many contemporaries viewed as contagious — it jeopardized the social order as well as the very salvation of society. This essay maps some of the social constructions and lived experiences of melancholy in Italian Renaissance convents, and situates them within new sets of power relations transforming convent life in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. My analysis rests on an in-depth archival study of four Florentine religious houses — San Jacopo di Ripoli (Dominican nuns), Santa Caterina da Siena (Dominican tertiaries), San Pier Maggiore (Conventual Benedictines), and Le Murate (Observant Benedictines) — supplemented by episcopal records, ambassadorial correspondence, and printed tracts. I focus in particular on the spectrum of melancholic states described by Florentine nuns themselves in their unpublished letters, chronicles, account books, and necrologies, which provide rare insight into how premodern women understood their own mental health. At times these sources approximate the status of patient narratives, owing to the high degree of intimacy among female companions who shared exceptionally long lives within close confines.8 Most Renaissance convents employed a salaried physician who undoubtedly helped nuns frame their diagnostic interpretations and therapeutic expectations to some degree. It would be unwise to assume, however, that Italian religious women passively accepted medical judgements, especially in view of abundant evidence that they adapted or contested these evaluations as occasion warranted. Aside from their intrinsic interest for the history of mental health, convent narratives also expose conflicts in the construction of melancholy as a psychological disorder, throwing tensions between spiritual and naturalistic medicine into sharp

7

Sharon T. Strocchia, Nuns and Nunneries in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), pp. 1–2; Jutta G. Sperling, Convents and the Body Politic in Late Renaissance Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 18. 8

On nuns’ longevity, see Judith C. Brown, ‘Monache a Firenze all’inizio dell’età moderna: Un’analisi demografica’, Quaderni storici, 85 (1994), 117–52.

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relief. Was melancholy the result of a humoral imbalance requiring medical intervention, or was it better understood as the ‘devil’s work’, demanding spiritual curatives? Under what circumstances might medicalized notions of melancholy help to reinforce a normative social code that defined acceptable female behaviours? Throughout the Catholic Reformation, the question of whether or not to label a nun melancholic became a hotly contested issue that had important implications for medical and theological authority as well as for nuns’ agency. One important point about melancholy in the convent is worth establishing at the outset. The idea of melancholic genius that figured so prominently in Renaissance discourse was a thoroughly masculinized notion that was never applied to melancholic nuns, whatever their creative output. In the late fifteenth century, the Florentine Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino advanced the idea that brilliance frequently accompanied melancholic states, thereby transforming an affliction into a positive virtue for men of letters and visual artists. To be melancholic operated as a sign of men’s exceptionality and ‘the inscription of genius within them’.9 Religious women were excluded from being counted among the melancholic geniuses of the Renaissance simply by virtue of their sex. None of the gifted nuns whose remarkable cultural production is just coming to light — painters such as Plautilla Nelli, convent chroniclers such as Fiammetta Frescobaldi and Giustina Niccolini, playwrights such as Maria Clemente Ruoti, musical talents like the nun-composers Lucrezia Vizzana and Chiara Cozzolani — was linked with melancholy.10 Indeed, the sixteenth-century art critic Giorgio Vasari explicitly distanced nuns’ melancholic states from their creativity by contrasting the life and work of Sister Plautilla Nelli with that of the lovesick Bolognese sculptor Properzia de’ Rossi, who suffered from an eroticized form of

9

Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 6–7. The classic study of the link between Renaissance melancholy and artistic genius is Raymond Klibansky, Ernst Panofsky, and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (New York: Basic Books, 1964). Useful excerpts from Ficino are published in The Nature of Melancholy, ed. by Radden, pp. 87–88. 10

Key works documenting Renaissance nuns’ creativity include Craig A. Monson, Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Robert Kendrick, Celestial Sirens: Nuns and their Music in Early Modern Milan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Elissa Weaver, Convent Theatre in Early Modern Italy: Spiritual Fun and Learning for Women (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Suor Plautilla Nelli (1523–1588): The First Woman Painter of Florence, ed. by Jonathan Nelson (Florence: Cadmo, 2000).

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melancholy.11 Nuns who surpassed ordinary intellectual or artistic expectations were considered instead to be ‘marvels’ or ‘prodigies’ who transcended the limitations of nature, even according to other religious women.12 Instead of explaining genius, melancholy in the convent described a plethora of unwelcome conditions. Mercuriale opined that from this single malady issue so many symptoms, as if from a Trojan horse: lack of appetite, stomach ache, continuous belching, rumblings in the entire lower abdomen, whistling in the ears, dizziness, trembling in the head, palpitations, fear and sadness. (da un’unica malattia escano fuori come dal cavallo di Troia tanti sintomi, cioè la mancanza di appetito, il dolore di stomaco, continui rutti, rumori in tutta la zona del basso ventre, fischi agli orecchi, vertigine, tremolio del capo, palpitazioni, paura e tristezza)13

As Mercuriale noted, one of the most common melancholic states nuns experienced was lingering sadness, which was linked in convent records to the bewildering array of fevers that struck them with regularity. Galenic medicine held that feverish heat generated an excess of melancholic humours that in turn aggravated a normal sense of tristitia. Causal relationships between physical and mental health, however, were far more blurred in practice, reflecting contemporary notions that mind and body were inextricably linked. One Florentine convent necrology reported in 1529 that forty-three-year-old Sister Francesca Rucellai died of a recurrent fever that had precipitated melancholic episodes; conversely, a few years later an elderly servant nun in the same convent was gripped by melancholy that in turn ushered in a fatal fever.14 In the first case, a physical complaint led to disordered moods, while in the second, melancholy itself opened the door to debility and ultimately death. By and large, Florentine nuns favoured naturalistic causal explanations for melancholy, although their understandings were not always couched in traditional Galenic terms. The Dominican nuns of San Jacopo di Ripoli attributed the frequent melancholic states of Sister Raffaella del Maestro to the fact that she suffered from severe dropsy — a painful condition that impeded movement — for

11

Frederika H. Jacobs, ‘The Construction of a Life: Madonna Prosperzia De’ Rossi “Schultrice” Bolognese’, Word and Image, 9 (1993), 122–32. 12

BNCF, MS Landau Finlay, 72, fols 68 r–69 v , which refer to several nuns as ‘prodigio della natura’; Archivio di Stato, Florence (ASF), San Jacopo di Ripoli, vol. 23, fols 150v –151 r. 13

Il medico e la follia, ed. by Dini, p. 46.

14

BNCF, MS Landau Finlay, 72, fols 198r, 202 r.

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fifty of her seventy years.15 Her sisters in religion explained her resulting despondence less in complex humoral terms than in empathetic psychological ones as an understandable reaction to chronic pain and physical limitations that precluded full participation in communal life. Nowhere in the formal remembrance of her life was melancholy cast as a personal moral failing, perhaps because so many other nuns suffered from similar complaints. Other convent narratives, however, likened the descent of melancholy to a powerful external force that battered, seized, gripped, and flailed nuns’ bodies as if possessed. What dispelled these maladies in the majority of cases was a fruitful combination of prayer, work, spiritual activity, and wise counsel by other nuns. For instance, throughout her forty-year span in the Savonarolan stronghold of Santa Caterina, Sister Nera Rinuccini (d. 1548), a choir director gifted with ‘an angelic voice’ (una voce angelica) was beset from time to time ‘by an indisposition of melancholic humours that fiercely seized her whole body’ (restò grandemente offesa per tutto il suo corpo da una indisposizione di umori malinconici, i quali fieramente la pigliavano). Yet after each episode, she regained her normal footing by leading the choir in the performance of religious songs.16 Among the key remedies for mild melancholy was spiritual consolation in the form of encouraging words. As seen in the opening example of Sister Fede Rosselli, who was healed by her charismatic prioress, this powerful psychological therapy both soothed and strengthened the soul. Convent records abound with stories of spiritually gifted nuns ministering to other members of the community, especially during or after illness. Their blend of personal charisma and spiritual eloquence drawn from common sources such as the psalms, sermons, saints’ lives, and biblical narratives helped restore a sense of well-being and assuage individual doubts. Importantly, the main agents of such solace in the teeming religious communities of Renaissance Italy were one’s own sisters in religion, rather than clergy. Although Florentine nuns looked to their confessors for sacramental services as well as practical advice, convent records stressed the therapeutic value of spiritual consolation rendered by peers. This kind of spiritual tonic was distinct from both naturalistic medical remedies and the spiritual physic formally administered by clergy, mainly via the sacraments.17 The goal of such 15

ASF, San Jacopo di Ripoli, vol. 23, fol. 129v .

16

BNCF, MS Landau Finlay, 72, fols 62 v–63 r.

17

According to David Lederer, Madness, Religion and the State in Early Modern Europe: A Bavarian Beacon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 11–13, the basic methods of spiritual physic were the sacraments coupled with sacramentals such as pilgrimage, invoking the saints, and using relics or pious charms to alleviate suffering.

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spiritual consolation was not absolution from sin but rather a cathartic rebuilding of spiritual and psychological confidence — an issue that must have loomed large in an era of forced professions, when it was widely recognized that most Italian nuns lacked vocations. In these historical circumstances, care of the psyche did not rest solely on the shoulders of clergy and medical practitioners; in practice, it devolved largely onto other members of a community. The often-idealized narratives found in convent necrologies, chronicles, and even business records, which were intended primarily for an internal audience, represented melancholy as a test of spiritual resolve, similar to other trials afflicting nuns such as oozing sores and gnawing pain.18 Some melancholic nuns, such as the choir director Nera Rinuccini, met these challenges with an unshakable fortitude that transformed them into communal role models. Less spiritually stalwart nuns never achieved the same level of admiration; yet their shortcomings nevertheless opened opportunities to celebrate the therapeutic powers of the gifted women in their midst who healed all manner of infirmity. Still other instances of melancholy, such as that of the chronically ill nun Raffaella del Maestro, gave nuns discursive scope to express a heightened sense of Christian charity when recalling a life that fell short of transcendence. In other words, rather than casting melancholy either as a purely physical illness or a relentless state of religious despair, Florentine nuns integrated this disorder into a redemptive discourse that reflected well on individual houses and their inhabitants. This triumphant spiritualization of mental affliction helped mark out larger confessional differences distinguishing Catholic interpretations of the malady from Protestant ones emphasizing melancholy as a dark night of the soul.19 While the causes of melancholy stimulated relatively little discussion in convent records, its therapeutic care by contrast generated considerable controversy. Standard naturalistic remedies for mild instances of melancholy included bloodletting coupled with moderation in diet, work, and prayer that gradually restored an ailing nun to health. This regimen made sense from a medical standpoint, but it was at odds with more austere religious ideals designed to maintain strict monastic discipline.

18

On nuns’ spiritualization of illness, see Sharon T. Strocchia, ‘Savonarolan Witnesses: The Nuns of San Jacopo and the Piagnone Movement in Sixteenth-Century Florence’, SixteenthCentury Journal, 38 (2007), 393–418. 19 Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Jeremy Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy and Madness in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).

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Tensions between these divergent systems of authority took on added weight in the embattled climate of Catholic reform, which tried to eradicate any convent practice perceived as lax. Teresa of Avila — herself no stranger to melancholy — espoused a fundamentally theological understanding of melancholy as caused by demonic influence, prompting her to deviate from more moderate medical prescriptions for its cure. In her influential treatise The Foundations (1573–82), Teresa advocated harsh penitential measures for mildly melancholic nuns. Dedicating an entire chapter to ‘how one must deal with the nuns who have melancholy’, Teresa made clear that she viewed these women as wilful attentionseekers hoping to get their own way. Hence she maintained that it is necessary that the prioress make use of the penances of the order and strive to bring these persons into submission in such a way as to make them understand they will obtain neither all nor part of what they want.

By imposing various deprivations and additional prayers on even mildly melancholic nuns, Teresa simultaneously sought to steer them towards holy obedience and impose external order on a disordered mind. She gave prioresses great latitude in treating this affliction, since ‘one such person is enough to disrupt the quiet of a monastery’. Her therapeutic advice to Discalced Carmelite prioresses candidly put spiritual welfare ahead of physical health: ‘if words do not suffice, use punishment; if light punishment is not enough, try heavy; if one month in the convent prison is not enough, try four months; no greater good can be done for their souls.’20 Given these conflicting conceptual frameworks, navigating the best therapeutic course between medical advice, spiritual discipline, and the quirks of individual psyches often proved tricky in practice. Take the case of the Dominican nun Maria Benigna del Corso (d. 1583), who contracted a fever while still young that left her bedridden. ‘From that point on’, recalled another sister, ‘she began to suffer from melancholic humours to such a degree that the other nuns decided not to burden her with any convent office for her own peace of mind’ (cominciò di poi a patir di umor malinconici in forma tale che guidicorono per la sua quiete di non farla esercitar in ofizio alcuno). Despite its good intentions, this strategy backfired. Instead of alleviating her condition, ‘this deprivation greatly worsened her illness because it distressed her terribly not to be involved in convent business

20

Jennifer Radden, ‘Melancholia in the Writing of a Sixteenth-Century Spanish Nun’, Harvard Review of Psychiatry, 12 (2004), 293–97. Excerpts from Teresa’s writings are published in The Nature of Melancholy, ed. by Radden, pp. 109–17 (pp. 109–10).

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and [to do] chores, since she would have worked willingly’ (questa privazione maggiormente caricava il suo male, dolendosi ella fieramente perché volontariamente operare di non esser impiegata negli affari e faccende del monastero). Recognizing that social marginalization aggravated her fragile mental state, convent officers tasked this amiable young nun with assisting the doorkeeper in her duties, but her melancholy only deepened in this role. Soon Sister Maria Benigna experienced a full-blown psychological crisis ‘because she was extremely timid and was concerned about appearing to discharge her office well’ to the other nuns (andava peggiorando dei suoi umor ipocondrici, e questi derivavano perché era timidissima di non parergli di essersi portata bene nel suo ufizio). The crux of the problem, according to her peers, was her personal fastidiousness; ‘by thinking too much about herself and every one of her actions, she nourished her illness in this way’ (esser troppo cogitatonda (sic) in se stessa, di ogni su’ azione, alimentava in tal forma i suoi malori). Her pricks of conscience were centred less on eternal salvation than on winning the good opinion of her convent sisters; their narratives constructed her melancholy more as excessive concern for reputation and a desire to please than as religious despair or physical pathology. The community found a happy compromise for this ‘innocent imperfection’ (sua innocente imperfezione) by charging her under holy obedience with staying in the choir as long as she wished and sweeping the convent whenever she felt her dark moods gathering strength. Although this plan seemed like a perfect solution, it was predicated on the fundamental contradiction that Sister Maria Benigna could rationally gauge her own irrational moods and act in a self-regulating manner to counteract them.21 More than likely, other nuns monitored her behaviour, as they did in most other aspects of communal life. Whatever the preferred treatment, melancholy proved to be a useful explanatory tool when applied to convent settings, in part because the pliability of the medical term helped to mask some of the new power relations creating emotional distress among nuns. When contemporaries labelled unhappy girls forced into convents as melancholic or explained the thwarted ambitions of women seeking a public religious voice as instances of melancholy, they not only extended the reach of this illness but also deflected attention away from external developments that contributed to it, such as the astronomical rise in forced professions and the growing standardization of female religious life. To take one example: the charismatic Savonarolan adherent Dorotea da Lanciuole — renowned for her awe-inspiring fasts and alleged ability to survive on the consecrated host alone — 21

BNCF, MS Landau Finlay, 72, fols 240v –241 r.

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fell into an irreversible melancholic decline after being forced to live a more regularized monastic life in 1509, despite interventions by the convent doctor.22 Diagnosing a discontented nun as melancholic offered a convenient way to refocus the question of who possessed the power to assign celibacy or mandate certain forms of religious expression in the first place. Certainly not all cases of melancholy in the convent should be ascribed to familial coercion or to the erosion of female religious pluralism, but neither were these factors insignificant in the perceived spread of the condition among nuns. The spectacular case of the young Modenese princess Caterina d’Este, daughter of Duke Alfonso III, illuminates some of the new dynamics conditioning nuns’ mental health in the late Renaissance. Because of her aristocratic heritage, eight-year-old Caterina was granted the privilege of entering the royal convent of the Descalzes Reales in Madrid, home to her Hapsburg relatives. Arriving there in 1621, Caterina spent the first years of her novitiate trouble-free but began experiencing worrisome bouts of melancholy shortly after her mother’s death six years later.23 Grief was considered a common precipitating factor in the onset of melancholy, but persistent sorrow over her mother’s death seems to have played little role in causing her malady. On the contrary, her mother’s demise, however distressing, also opened up the possibility of leaving the cloister before taking final vows. Caterina wrote several poignant letters to her aristocratic kin in Modena imploring them to let her go home, ‘saying that she had only come there out of obedience by which she was no longer bound’ after her mother’s death (dicendo che era venuta qua per sua obbedienza alla quale non era più tenuta doppo la sua morte).24 Caterina’s relatives were not persuaded by her pleas, and their obstinacy plunged her into a deep melancholic state. The Tuscan ambassador in Spain reported to the Medici Grand Duke in March 1627 that initially exorcists had been called in to treat the fifteen-year-old novice, to no avail. Summoning exorcists was often the first step rather than a last resort in Spanish religious houses, where the emphasis on melancholy as a demonic illness contrasted with the more naturalistic bent characterizing Italian convents.25 Following these failed exorcisms, the teenaged Caterina withdrew to 22

Lorenzo Polizzotto, The Elect Nation: The Savonarolan Movement in Florence, 1494–1545 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 192. 23

ASF, Mediceo del Principato (MdP), vol. 4949, fols 811 r–v, dated 15 March 1621, records preparations to receive Caterina upon arrival in Madrid. 24

ASF, MdP, vol. 4955, unpaginated, dated 10 March 1627.

25

National differences in the understanding and treatment of mental afflictions, even within

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her cell, where she soon alternated between delusions of grandeur and selfimposed acts of humility. The situation deteriorated over the following months until the novice had to be continuously restrained by two nuns, who were often injured when she lashed out in fury.26 By January 1628 — seven years after her arrival — the tenacity and spread of her ‘melancholic humours’ placed the girl at death’s door. The Tuscan ambassador reported once again that as Caterina neared ‘the end of her life, she was given to say that she was a daughter of St Clare and did not wish to sleep in her bed but on the ground’ (ultimamente diede in dire che era figliuola di Santa Chiara et a non volere stare nel letto, ma in terra). Her fellow nuns solved this problem by keeping her tied up — a standard treatment for those deemed mad. ‘Then she determined not to eat, for which situation no remedy was ever found, either for love or by force’ (si fissò ancora a non voler mangiare et a questo non si è mai trovato rimedio, nè per amore, nè per forza).27 Another account furnished to the Este court related that ‘melancholy had conquered her in such a way that for thirteen straight days she refused to eat food of any sort’ (la melanconia la guadagnò di modo che per tredici giorni continui non volse ricevere cibo di veruna sorte). Through a combination of force and guile, however, ‘some liquid sustenance was administered through her mouth with a syringe’ (gli somministrava qualche liquida sustanza con siringa per la bocca). Although these measures proved insufficient to save her life, Caterina made a good death, which carried considerable redemptive and polemical value for all concerned; eyewitnesses reported that she briefly regained her faculties of reason, confessed, received the sacraments, and even took a bit of food before dying.28 In this wrenching case, the discourse of melancholy was stretched by royal physicians, diplomats, courtiers, and even Caterina’s aristocratic nun-relatives as a way to explain the unexpected wilfulness of a young noble girl who, suddenly released from familial pressures, attempted to renegotiate her destiny. In contrast to repeated assertions that ‘bad humours’ had caused her rebelliousness, Caterina’s

the same religious tradition, warrant further exploration. Teresa of Avila distinguished spiritual ecstasies from the ‘devil’s work’ of melancholy this way: the ‘delightful pain’ caused by proximity to God was transient, left one’s senses unaffected, and was marked by spiritual quiet. Melancholics displayed none of these traits; The Nature of Melancholy, ed. by Radden, p. 108. 26

ASF, MdP, vol. 4955, unpaginated, dated 10 March 1627.

27

ASF, MdP, vol. 4956, fols 37 r–v, dated 26 January 1628.

28

Archivio di Stato, Modena, Archivio Segreto Estense, Sezione casa e stato, Busta 24, #1641/1, p. 1.

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letters seeking release from the convent present a high degree of rationality — the very antithesis of a disordered melancholic mind. Only when she failed to gain her objective did she begin to show signs of this malady, whose destructive features escalated with each unsuccessful move and counter-move. It is not clear whether she initially feigned illness as a tactic to leverage her situation; if so, she was playing a deadly high-stakes game. Unlike the staged melancholic spells that won a greater voice in policy decisions at the Spanish court for her older relative Empress Maria, Caterina’s illness proved to be an ineffective bargaining tool.29 Her continued presence in the Descalzas Reales was simply too important for cementing political alliances to be reversed. In this case the diagnosis of melancholy not only explained ‘unreasonable’ behaviours but also delegitimized youthful female desires that conflicted with adult expectations. Although they were few in number, nuns like Caterina d’Este who showed signs of melancholy-induced madness posed serious challenges to themselves, their communities, and to society at large. Ravings of nuns suffering from mania (pazzia furiosa) brought venerable convents into disrepute, threatened the lifeblood of lay patronage, and imperilled the souls of other religious women forced to endure their often blasphemous outbursts. Once again, disagreements surfaced over the optimal treatment of these women. Most often, nuns who had lost their faculties of reason, especially if they displayed suicidal tendencies, were confined to their cells and bound to their beds. Teresa of Avila agreed with this policy of confinement, yet advocated great compassion towards these women. ‘Those who are totally afflicted with this illness are to be pitied’, she argued, claiming that ‘insane people are not at fault for the foolish things they do’.30 Absent a cure for madness, the only alternative was charitable care. Several of these issues were interwoven in the story of Sister Sibilla della Rena, an otherwise healthy, middle-aged nun living in San Pier Maggiore — the oldest, most prestigious Florentine convent — who precipitously descended into madness in the early 1560s. Convent records reported that, after nearly a halfcentury of religious life during which she had held various leadership roles, Sister Sibilla suddenly went ‘totally out of her mind’ (tutto fuor di cervello).31 She

29 Magdalena S. Sánchez, The Empress, the Queen, and the Nun: Women and Power at the Court of Philip III of Spain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 156–71. 30 31

Quoted in The Nature of Melancholy, ed. by Radden, p. 110.

Ginevra della Rena, daughter of an old, prominent Florentine family, entered San Pier Maggiore in 1519, probably by age ten. Among her various convent duties was that of wardrobe mistress, an office she held as late as 1559; ASF, San Pier Maggiore, vol. 139, fol. 187 r.

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alternately cast off her habit or refused to change it, slept outside of her cell wherever she wished, and ate alone covered in filth. Voicing wild flights of fancy, she obstinately claimed to be one of several saints; at other times she insisted that she was the Virgin Mary or God. Neither medical interventions nor spiritual counsel administered over five-plus years returned her to reason; only death brought release from what her companions perceived to be a living hell. When Sister Sibilla died in 1567, her sisters in religion candidly confessed that ‘it was no small grace of God that she had been liberated from the state into which her life had fallen’. Her death brought a sigh of relief to the whole community, since it ‘freed the convent from her presence as well as from the fear that she might do something prejudicial to her soul and dishonourable to the house’ (non è stata piccola grazia di Dio haver liberato lei dallo stato che facea della sua vita et il monasterio dalla presenza sua et dal timore che facesse qualcosa a pregiudizio della sua anima et disonore del luogo). Nevertheless, the convent record ended rather predictably on a redemptive note. The last day of her life, Sister Sibilla miraculously returned to her senses and requested the sacraments with complete clarity; ‘it was the only time she gave any sign of some awareness and knowledge of God’ (fu la sola volta che diede segno di qualche sentimento e conoscenza di Dio).32 Having endured this gruelling ordeal, the nuns still could take comfort from the fact that their long-time companion had made a good death. Perhaps the greatest interpretive challenge that melancholy presented for Renaissance nuns and their contemporaries was how to distinguish it from demonic possession. There was long-standing conceptual overlap between the two maladies in both medical and theological discourses, and it was often difficult to differentiate some of their symptoms in practice. Moreover, both melancholy and enchantment were thought to be highly contagious among nuns. Not only did their contemplative lifestyle produce an excess of melancholic humours, according to influential physicians such as Mercuriale; their supposedly weak judgement and overactive imaginations also left them wide open to the power of suggestion. Part of the reason that Teresa of Avila was so adamant about eliminating even mild cases of melancholy in convents was to avoid its spread; as she put it, ‘our nature is so miserable that each one will think that she herself is melancholic and that thus others must bear with her’.33

32

Quoted in Enrica Viviani della Robbia, Nei monasteri fiorentini (Florence: Sansoni, 1946), pp. 297–98, who mistakenly calls her Isabella. 33

Quoted in The Nature of Melancholy, ed. by Radden, p. 110.

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As attempts to systematize the theology of demonic possession accelerated in post-Tridentine Italy — through, for instance, the influential treatises on spirit discernment penned by the famed exorcist Girolamo Menghi (d. 1609) — conflicts surfaced in philosophical and ecclesiastical circles, repeatedly catching religious women in the crossfire.34 Was possession better determined on naturalistic medical grounds or on theological ones that warranted the cure of exorcism? Distinctions between spiritual and medical healing were never absolute; learned Italian physicians, for instance, acknowledged that demonic possession might cause melancholy. Yet professional competencies as well as competing systems of knowledge were at stake in both the diagnosis and treatment of demoniacs.35 The rite of exorcism — the invocation and control of demons through prayer and exhortations — gained new ground in the late sixteenth century partly because its performance by male clergy strengthened church authority; still, some prelates within the Italian church voiced significant doubts about its probative value even as the rite itself became more codified.36 The growing attention accorded to questions of real or feigned sanctity in the aftermath of Trent only further blurred the boundaries between melancholy and possession. Whether to label a nun melancholic or possessed rapidly became a weapon in the internal struggles gripping early modern Catholicism.

34

Menghi, an Observant Minorite friar, authored the standard exorcist manuals of the period, Compendio dell’arte essorcistica (1576) and Flagellum daemonum (1577). By 1600, roughly nine out of ten monasteries as well as individual prelates possessing exorcism manuals had at least one of Menghi’s books; David Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch: The System of the Sacred in Early Modern Terra d’Otranto (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), pp. 94–95, 108–09. Despite their popularity, Menghi’s books remained controversial and unofficial; see Mary R . O’Neil, ‘Sacerdote ovvero strione: Ecclesiastical and Superstitious Remedies in Sixteenth-Century Italy’, in Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Steven L. Kaplan (Berlin: Mouton, 1984), pp. 53–83. 35

Monica Calabritto, ‘Medical and Moral Dimensions of Feminine Madness: Representing Madwomen in the Renaissance’, Forum Italicum, 36 (2002), 26–52; Stuart Clark, ‘Demons and Disease: The Disenchantment of the Sick (1500–1700)’, in Illness and Healing Alternatives in Western Europe, ed. by Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Hilary Marland, and Hans de Waardt (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 38–58. 36

Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 81. The Rituale Romanum of 1614 codified the symptoms of demonic possession as repulsion towards holy objects, the ability to speak in previously unknown languages, superhuman strength, and knowledge of hidden or secret facts; Lederer, Madness, Religion and the State, p. 175. After 1614, only licensed exorcists could perform the rite, with the bishop’s approval; Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch, pp. 108–09.

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The basic contours of the problem can be illustrated by the following controversy seizing post-Tridentine Florence. In February 1582, a few years after the staunch reformer Alessandro de’ Medici was appointed archbishop, the nuns of Le Murate — the city’s largest convent housing almost two-hundred women — asked to have one of their members exorcized. The rapid exchange of letters between the nuns and archbishop reveals stark disagreement about the woman’s condition, but their respective points of view disrupt conventional expectations: the nuns insisted that she was possessed and in need of spiritual cure, whereas the Archbishop maintained instead that she suffered from melancholy. Medici wrote to Abbess Agostina Rinuccini regarding ‘that possessed nun’: ‘I do not wish in any way whatsoever to grant permission that she be exorcized by anyone [ … ] I do not believe that this nun is possessed, but instead I think these are melancholic humours’ (io non voglio in modo nessuno dar libera licenza che sia esorcizata da ogniuno […] non credo che cotesta monaca sia spiritata, ma credo sieno homori malinconici). The Archbishop then proceeded to chide the nuns for what he called their collective ‘fantasies’. ‘Since I’ve been archbishop,’ Medici asserted, ‘I’ve intervened in similar cases in other convents. And if diligence is not used swiftly to determine if there are spirits or not, this fantasy [of being possessed] comes upon dozens of nuns’ (poi che io sono arcivescovo me intervenuto in altri monasteri simili casi; et perché non si è usata diligenza presto in vedere se sono spiriti o no, è entrata questa fantasia alle dozzine delle monache). For this prelate, keeping melancholy squarely within the naturalistic realm was pivotal to keeping the Devil out of the convent. Still, the Archbishop pledged that he would write about it to his vicar who, ‘after seeing the nun for himself, will judge if she’s possessed and will decide who should exorcize her and how many times’ (poi che l’haverà vista, giudicherà che la sia indemoniata, ordinerà chi la debba esorcizare, et quante volte).37 Four months later, the Abbess wrote to the Archbishop again on the same subject. In the interval, the nuns had overcome his objections and the ill nun had been duly exorcized. She had vomited up some kind of enchantment that a spirit claimed had been lodged there for five or six years; afterwards she was fully cured. Thumbing her nose at the Archbishop’s diagnosis, the Abbess insisted that the convent’s discernment of demonic possession had indeed proved correct. Her ardent defence of the nuns’ superior judgement in spiritual matters takes on

37

ASF, Corporazioni Religiose Soppresse dal Governo Francese (CRSGF) 81, vol. 100, fols 107 –108 r. See also K. J. P. Lowe, Nuns’ Chronicles and Convent Culture in Renaissance and Counter-Reformation Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 168–69. r

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added weight when read in conjunction with other conflicts between the nuns and Archbishop over the implementation of Tridentine reforms. Prior to the exorcism there had been scandal, said the Abbess; now there was a good example of God’s grace, thanks to the nuns’ tenacity. Here the self-diagnosis of possession helped these elite Florentine nuns to invert customary power relations with their superior. Besides claiming that her convent was gifted at spirit discernment, the Abbess signalled as well that the community occupied a special place in the grand cosmological battle raging between God and the Devil. In this case, claims of possession offered the nuns a limited form of empowerment, although it should be added that demoniacs experienced possession in many different ways and were exorcized for many different reasons.38 In this same letter, the Murate Abbess informed Medici that another nun was now possessed and needed exorcism. Taking a pre-emptive approach, she explained that the community first thought the nun suffered from a stomach ailment, but they were informed otherwise by a spirit bent on making a spectacle of the convent. They had already exhausted the usual naturalistic remedies for melancholy, had consulted several physicians, and had bled the nun extensively. Now their only hope was exorcism. Archbishop Medici shot back: ‘if we open the door to things like these, they will need doing every day’ (se noi apriamo la porta a queste simili cose ci sarà ogni giorno da fare). He instructed his vicar to tell the nuns not to entertain such thoughts.39 The Archbishop became outright exasperated when he received several requests to exorcize a sick nun in another convent a few months later, which he refused on the same grounds.40 Unfortunately, Medici never explained his rationale in any detail. He may have been concerned about endangering nuns’ physical health if the rite was performed incorrectly, since exorcism used powerful emetics to induce vomiting; Menghi himself acknowledged that there were unlearned or fraudulent exorcists at work who nevertheless gained widespread reputations as healers.41 Since the Murate nuns had already identified a highly skilled practitioner, it seems more likely that,

38

Sarah Ferber, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern France (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 4–13. 39 Archivio Arcivescovile, Florence (AAF), Religiosi e religiose, Professioni di monache, Filza I, 1577–82, unfoliated, dated 11 June 1582. 40

AAF, Religiosi e religiose, Professioni di monache, Filza I, 1577–82, unfoliated, letters dated 30 and 31 October 1582 from the Florentine convent of Monticelli, replies dated 20 November 1582. 41

O’Neil, Sacerdote ovvero strione, p. 61.

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as a senior figure interested in clerical reform, Medici was concerned about controlling what were often renegade clerics operating without official ecclesiastical approval. In addition, the Archbishop may have had particular intellectual objections to exorcism, although he does not seem to figure among those ‘elevated intellects’ decried by Menghi who flatly denied the utility of exorcism or even the reality of demonic possession.42 Whatever the Archbishop’s motivations, he staunchly resisted the unauthorized interpretations of demonic agency by religious women with whom he often had a contentious relationship. These pastoral experiences proved foundational to Medici’s unpublished treatise on the governance of female convents written in 1601, four years before he was elevated to the papal throne as Leo XI.43 This little tract united practical advice for bishops with new theological understandings of discerning spirits. Medici cautioned other prelates that, when dealing with religious women, ‘many extraordinary, unexpected things can happen, such as [encountering] mad or possessed nuns. There is no remedy for the mad ones other than to keep them bound or in prison’ (possono accadere molte cose straordinarie et impensate, come se vi fossero monache pazze o spiritate. Alle pazze non vi è altro rimedio che tenerle legate o in prigione). ‘The possessed ones’, he continued, ‘are first to be treated medically’ (le spiritate prima sieno medicate); if these interventions did not work, the Archbishop advised prelates to visit convents personally to determine if the nuns were truly possessed. ‘But don’t let yourself be fooled’, he warned, ‘because most of the time these are melancholic humours or another infirmity, such as falling sickness or mania’ (non vi lasciate ingannare, perché il più delle volte sono umori malinconici o altra infirmità, come di mal caduco o pazzia furiosa). Occasionally, the new prelate might run headlong into pretence and cunning, ‘because enclosed women are desirous of novelties and being entertained by a variety of things’ (perché le donne chiuse sono desiderose di novità e di esser trattenute con varietà di cose). Nonetheless, he strenuously advised against exorcism since it only invited trouble. First, aim diligently to relieve them of that opinion […] saying that it’s an illness, as it will be in most cases. I’m not saying by this that there aren’t possessed nuns, only that I believe they are few in number

42

O’Neil, Sacerdote ovvero strione, p. 54.

43

BNCF, Codice Panciatichi 119, II, 107–08.

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(Cercate prima con ogni diligenza di levarle da quella opinione […] dicendo ch’è una infirmità, come il più delle volte sarà. Non dico per questo che non possino essere indemoniate, ma credo che ne siano poche)

Medici echoed current demonological views when he asserted that genuinely possessed nuns ‘will give signs that, if not supernatural, then at least will be extraordinary things such as speaking other languages, knowing what’s happening in distant places, revealing secret actions of others and so forth’ (queste danno segni se non sopranaturali, almeno tali, che ordinariamente non si possono dare, come parlar bene di altre lingue, scoprir quello che si fa in quel tempo in paesi lontani, rivelare azioni segrete di diversi, e simili). This future pope concluded that caution was needed to avoid creating infinite disorder. ‘Sometimes it may appear that a whole convent is possessed owing to the impressionable nature of those women serving in the virginal life, because their retained, corrupted blood frequently goes to their head and disturbs it’ (talvolta pare che sia spiritato tutto un monastero per l’impressione che entra facilmente in quelle che servano vita verginale, perché quei sangui ritenuti e corrotti vanno spesse volte al cervello e l’offendono). Medici’s worst fears were realized in the 1620s and 1630s, when multiple outbreaks of collective possession erupted in convents across Italy, Spain, and France.44 To conclude, the melancholic nun in Renaissance Italy wore many faces, although melancholic genius was not among them. Melancholy functioned as a useful diagnostic category owing to its conceptual plasticity, which simultaneously allowed nuns to celebrate their own spiritual triumphs and explore the psychological labyrinths of those around them. Religious women accepted collective responsibility in everyday life for addressing what might otherwise be the most solitary of afflictions; they both subscribed to and renegotiated a normative social code that defined certain behaviours as unreasonable, capricious, or simply mad. In advancing diagnoses and making therapeutic decisions, Florentine religious women not only collaborated with priests and physicians but sometimes challenged their views, relying instead on their own experience as authoritative. Disputes over causes and cures surfaced most dramatically when distinguishing melancholy from demonic possession, making convents a primary site of contestation between and among medical and theological systems of

44

For a recent study of a bewitched convent, through which earlier bibliography may be approached, see Jeffrey R . Watt, The Scourge of Demons: Possession, Lust, and Witchcraft in a Seventeenth-Century Italian Convent (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2009).

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knowledge and authority. These conflicts remind us that conceptions of illness only become fully intelligible when linked to larger constellations of power. Finally, while melancholy in Italian convents clearly described forms of emotional distress, it rarely characterized the kind of spiritual despair commonly associated with Protestant mental afflictions — confessional differences in the construction and interpretation of melancholy that warrant further examination.45

45

Portions of this essay were written while I was a participant in a 2009 summer seminar funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, held at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine. I wish to thank the NEH for supporting this research; the Wellcome Trust for allowing access to its incomparable resources; the seminar co-directors, Drs Monica Green and Walton Schalick, for creating a stimulating and congenial environment; and other seminar members for helpful comments on a previous draft.

A FFLICTED C HILDREN : S UPERNATURAL ILLNESS, F EAR , AND A NXIETY IN E ARLY M ODERN E NGLAND Judith Bonzol Feare makes our Imagination conceave what it list, it invit’s the Divel to come to us.1

I

n January 1622 thirteen-year-old Elizabeth Jennings, the daughter of Lady Jennings of Thistleworth in Middlesex, ‘was frighted w[i]th the sight of an old woman who suddainly appeared to her att the dore and demanded a pin of her’.2 Beginning with an ‘infirmitie in her throat’, which prevented her from eating solid food, her resulting illness progressed over several months. She lost the use of her legs and suffered from aches and pains in various parts of her body, which caused her to sigh, groan, and weep for many hours in the day. The pain settled particularly in her head and heart, and she began to suffer convulsions, memory loss, and an absence of feeling in her right side. Her right arm became completely numb and lost all motion, ‘as if it had bin taken w[i]th a dead palsie’. Physicians were consulted but their medicines produced only ‘contrarie effects’: her fits grew more severe and her speech became slurred and garbled, eventually disappearing altogether for days at a time. The physicians concluded that it was necessary to try more extreme procedures and Elizabeth was given a purge to make her vomit and then bled. They ignored the protests of a visitor to the house,

1

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford: Lichfield and Short, 1621), ‘Feare’, pt I, sect. 2, memb. 3, subs. 5. 2 This account of Elizabeth Jennings’s bewitchment is paraphrased and quoted from a manuscript in the collections of Elias Ashmole: ‘Papers Relating to Alleged Witchcraft Practised upon Elizabeth Jenyns’, London, British Library, MSS Additional 36674, fols 13 r–37 r.

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Margaret Russell, who claimed that by ‘letting blood’ the doctors would surely kill the girl. After the physicians had let blood from Elizabeth, she interrupted her four-day silence with a series of rambling statements, suggesting that her torments were caused by witchcraft, and lamenting that ‘all […] [her] mothers children’ had been bewitched. She named Russell as one of the witches responsible and said she would not recover until the woman was imprisoned. Consequently, Russell was examined and locked up in Newgate, pending investigation. Shortly afterwards Elizabeth fully recovered her health, ‘her speeche returned and her palsie arm recov[er]ed motion and sense’, she regained her understanding and memory, and ‘eateth her meate as well as ev[er] she did before she fell sick’. Historians have noted the high numbers of children and adolescents who were perceived to be victims of witchcraft in early modern England.3 A significant proportion of formal witchcraft accusations ensued when young people, or their families, attributed their strange afflictions to evil spirits acting under the instigation of witchcraft.4 In addition to the evidence that can be gleaned from extant court records, numerous pamphlets were published vividly describing the suffering of afflicted children: their bodily contortions, writhing, convulsions, 3 See especially James Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550–1750 (London: Hamilton, 1996), pp. 196–97. For the importance of ‘age hierarchy’ in witchcraft accusations, with some statistics and ratios, see James Sharpe, ‘Disruption in the Well-Ordered Household: Age, Authority, and Possessed Young People’, in The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England, ed. by Paul Griffiths and others (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996), pp. 190–91. In accounts of bewitchment and demonic possession young sufferers were frequently referred to as children, even when they were in their twenties. The term ‘adolescent’ was not commonly used at this time, but contemporaries acknowledged a period of transition between dependent childhood and autonomous adulthood: see Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 78–79. 4 In English witchcraft narratives the terms ‘demonic possession’ and ‘bewitchment’ were close to synonymous — from around 1570 the majority of demonic possession cases were thought to be caused by witches conveying malicious spirits into the bodies of their victims. Lyndal Roper has recently drawn attention to some cases in Germany where seriously disturbed children were accused of committing acts of malefice, but in England this was unusual. Children were rarely perceived as perpetrators of witchcraft and were far more likely to appear in court records and witchcraft-possession narratives as victims or accusers of witches: see Lyndal Roper, ‘“Evil Imaginings and Fantasies”: Child-Witches and the End of the Witch Craze’, Past and Present, 167 (2000), 107–39; Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), esp. chaps 8 and 9, ‘Family Revenge’ and ‘Godless Children’, pp. 181–221. The sexual nature of children’s assertions of diabolical interference that Roper describes is decidedly absent from the English cases.

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delirium, blindness, paralysis, vomiting, inability to eat, and loss of speech were depicted in harrowing detail. These unusual, distressing symptoms were frequently accompanied by an accusation of witchcraft.5 Court records, documented manuscripts, and numerous published witchcraft-possession narratives reveal that the bewitchment of children and adolescents was a recurring phenomenon that attracted a great deal of attention and publicity. The prevailing historical explanation for this high representation of children and adolescents interprets supernatural illness as a form of attention seeking.6 The argument most commonly presented is that the manifestations of demonic possession allowed the marginalized and powerless in society to behave in ways that would not normally be tolerated.7 James Sharpe, in particular, has interpreted the bizarre manifestations of demonic possession and bewitchment in children and adolescents as an opportunity for licensed misbehaviour and an outlet for suppressed desires in an oppressive environment, especially amongst children living in godly households.8 This explanation seems to make sense, particularly since the phenomenon occurred mostly in women, children, adolescents, household servants, and apprentices.9

5

Philip C. Almond found references in the contemporary literature to over one hundred possessed people in England between 1550 and 1700: see Almond, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern England: Contemporary Texts and their Cultural Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 1. My own reading suggests that around 85 per cent of the subjects in these accounts were under the age of twenty-five years. 6 While some natural philosophy deemed all illness to be ‘supernatural’ in the sense that it came from God, I am using the term here to refer to illnesses perceived to be caused by evil spirits and the malice of witches. 7 See especially Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner, 1971), pp. 340–41; Michael MacDonald’s introduction to Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover Case, ed. by Michael MacDonald (London: Tavistock; New York: Routledge, 1991); p. xxxviii; Brian P. Levack, ‘Possession, Witchcraft, and the Law in Jacobean England’, Washington and Lee Law Review, 52 (1995), 1613–40 (p. 1620). 8 Sharpe, ‘Disruption’, pp. 187–212; see also Sharpe’s chapter on possession in Instruments of Darkness, pp. 190–210, and Rebecca Mullins, ‘Children of Disobedience: Aspects of Possession in Early Modern England’ (unpublished master’s dissertation, University of York, 1997). 9 The argument that the manifestations of demonic possession allowed the marginalized and powerless in society to behave in ways that would not normally be tolerated has not always been argued convincingly. Kirsteen Bardell, for instance, has exaggerated the connection by suggesting that the over-representation of children and servants in cases of bewitchment and possession was a symptom of ‘the desire for power by people in a marginalized position in society’, ‘“Death by Divelishe Demonstration”: Witchcraft Beliefs, Gender and Popular Religion in the Early Modern Midlands and North of England’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, Nottingham Trent University, 1999), p. 353.

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Yet Elizabeth Jennings’s case shows that emotional disturbance was a powerful contributing factor in many cases of bewitchment in early modern England. The susceptibility of children to witchcraft fears was certainly recognized at the time. While physicians and theologians certainly believed that witches or demons could cause illness, they did not doubt that mind-disturbing conditions, such as ‘the falling sickness’, ‘suffocation of the mother’, and ‘melancholia’, frequently manifested symptoms in common with bewitchment and demonic possession.10 When Richard Napier, the astrological physician who practised medicine in Buckinghamshire from 1590 to 1634, was consulted about Elizabeth Jennings, he declared that the claims of bewitchment were ‘all false’ and named Epilepsia matricis and Morbus matricis as the cause of her affliction.11 There was a general acceptance that emotional disturbances altered the humoral balance, causing physical blockages in the body and disturbances of the mind. This could result in a variety of strange side effects and disturbing fantasies.12 An aggravated or disturbed imagination was clearly seen as a potent contributing force.13 Robert

10

Physicians and clerical writers, in accordance with a long tradition, frequently referred to emotional disturbances, such as fear and anxiety, as both a symptom and a cause of illness and as something to be avoided if the patient was to recover; in this volume, see the essays by Angus Gowland and Donald Beecher in this volume; see also David Gentilcore, ‘The Fear of Disease and the Disease of Fear’, in Fear in Early Modern Society, ed. by William G. Naphy and Penny Roberts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), pp. 184–208. ‘Suffocation of the mother’ was thought to be caused by the suffocation, displacement, or inflammation of the womb, and today the term is usually, although not necessarily accurately, translated as ‘hysteria’ because of its association with hysterika from the Hippocratic corpus: see Helen King, ‘Once upon a Text: Hysteria from Hippocrates’, in Hysteria beyond Freud, ed. by Sander L. Gilman and others (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 3–90. 11 MSS Add. 36674, fol. 137r. 12 Women and children were thought to be particularly disposed to emotional excess because of their ‘wet and spongy’ constitution — their cold, moist, phlegmatic nature made them more prone to emotional disturbance than adult males. Medical and religious writing often coupled women and children when referring to emotional instability, although the emotional excesses of youth were thought to be due to an abundance of heat and moisture rather than the coldness normally associated with women; see, for example, Helkiah Crooke, Mikrokosmographia ([London], Jaggard, 1615), p. 276; see also Ulinka Rublack, ‘Fluxes: The Early Modern Body and the Emotions’, trans. by Pamela Selwyn, History Workshop Journal, 53 (2002), 1–16; Gail Kern Paster, ‘The Unbearable Coldness of Female Being: Women’s Imperfection and the Humoral Economy’, English Literary Renaissance, 28 (1998), 416–40; Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 55–58. It should be noted that the early modern senses of ‘passion’ and ‘emotion’ are different to current usage. 13 Considerable power was attributed to the imagination in this period. Pregnant women’s

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Burton was convinced that the imagination raged in melancholy people to the extent that it caused actual maladies. For girls, in particular, ‘those vicious vapours which come from menstruous blood’ caused symptoms that troubled the ‘Braine, heart and minde’, so that ‘stupefied and distracted they think themselves bewitched’.14 There was a proliferation of writing on the topic and many writers noted that children were particularly susceptible to ‘fearefulnesse’.15 Early modern medical and religious writing attests to the strong connection between imagined demonic possession and emotional disturbance, and corroborates our supposition that children were regarded as being particularly susceptible to fears and anxieties about witchcraft. Moreover, early modern England was a frightening place, especially for children. Civil unrest, plague, famine, religious upheaval, and brief periods of unrestrained witch hunting aggravated stress and anxiety in English families and communities.16 Napier determined that hundreds of his younger patients were suffering from emotional anguish, which he attributed to religious anxiety, grief, fear of witchcraft, and worry over neighbourhood disputes.17 The contribution of neighbourhood

fears and imaginings, for instance, were thought capable of causing deformities in the foetus: see Marianne Closson, ‘The Devil’s Curses: The Demonic Origin of Disease in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, in Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Claire L. Carlin (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 66; Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 41–42. 14 Burton, ‘Symptomes of Maides, Nunnes, and Widowes Melancholy’, pt. I, sect. 3, memb. 2, subs. 4. Jeremy Schmidt has recently drawn attention to a whole range of ‘moral philosophical techniques and approaches’ in seventeenth-century texts on melancholy that offered comfort and ‘psychological’ healing for emotionally disturbed patients in post-Reformation England; there was, at this time, an intensification of concern over the dangers that the emotions or passions posed to the health of body and soul, with a proliferation of works on melancholy that dealt extensively with the ‘affliction of conscience and the consolation of sorrow’: Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy and Madness in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 4. 15 See, for example, Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Minde in Generall (London: Simmes, 1604), pp. 4, 7; Thomas Rogers, A Paterne of a Passionate Mind (London: East, 1580), A [7]; Edward Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions (London: R . H[earne and John Norton], 1640), p. 282. 16 Sharpe (Instruments of Darkness, pp. 132–33) has particularly noted the high proportion of children and household servants who were victims of witchcraft in East Anglia from 1645 to 1647 during the Hopkins period. 17 Michael MacDonald’s insightful and detailed study of the case notes of the early seventeenth-century astrological physician, Richard Napier, focuses on the symptoms and ‘stress

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disputes and village tensions to witchcraft accusations has been convincingly argued by historians.18 As Malcolm Gaskill says, ‘witchcraft demonstrates the hostility early modern people could feel for others, how they interpreted ill-will, and how many pursued grudges with a degree of ruthlessness shocking to modern sensibilities’.19 Children were often involved in these disputes; Elizabeth Foyster has documented numerous instances where children were used as messengers between quarrelling neighbours and bore the brunt of the abuse over paternity disputes and marriage breakdowns.20 Children were shouted at in the streets, threatened, cursed, and sometimes physically abused by neighbours, some of whom already had established reputations as witches.21 Vagrants and beggars were commonplace and seem to have been able to enter people’s houses with alacrity, at a time when there was little privacy or protection. Children then were growing up in uncertain and anxious times in the fearful and claustrophobic atmosphere of English village communities. Thus while Sharpe’s argument is compelling, it tends to obscure the intensity of the emotional vulnerability of children and adolescents that was noticeably apparent in many of these cases. This essay, therefore, seeks to probe more thoroughly the part that witchcraft fears and emotional disturbance played in contributing to cases of presumed demonic possession and accusations of witchcraft amongst young people in early modern England. Exploring some well-known cases from the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the essay, in the first instance, examines the complexities of witchcraft fears and anxieties that children encountered in their day-to-day lives. Next I consider some facets of anxiety and tension amongst household servants and apprentices that factors’ of Napier’s several hundred patients suffering from spiritual afflictions in early modern England: Mystical Bedlam: Madness, Anxiety, and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). For the disproportionately high percentage of young adults amongst Napier’s disturbed and troubled patients, see p. 41. 18 See especially Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbours: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft, 2nd edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), chap. 6, ‘Love and Hatred: Spouses and Kin’, pp. 191–223. 19 Malcolm Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 65–66. 20 Elizabeth A. Foyster, ‘Silent Witnesses? Children and the Breakdown of Domestic and Social Order in Early Modern England’, in Childhood in Question: Children, Parents and the State, ed. by Anthony Fletcher and Stephen Hussey (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 57–73. 21 Surprisingly few historians of childhood have made use of accounts of supernatural illnesses that abound with references to disturbed children and adolescents.

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contributed to their strong representation in these cases. Finally, recovery from supernatural illness clearly involved emotional catharsis and the exorcism of fear, both real and imaginary. Taken together, the evidence in these case studies shows that fear, anxiety, and emotional disturbance played a powerful role in witchcraft afflictions and accusations. Elizabeth Jennings’s was one of several cases of supernatural illness to begin with a frightening incident involving a suspected witch. Thirteen-year-old Thomas Darling’s strange and disconcerting illness, which developed into a prominent case of demonic possession, began in 1596 after he had been disrespectful to an elderly woman; she cursed him and told him he would go to hell.22 A young apprentice, William Sommers, in the following year reputedly became afflicted by a strange malady after he refused alms to an ‘old woman’, who threatened to throw him into a pit and break his neck.23 In another controversial case in 1620, twelve-yearold William Perry languished for several days, and then developed extreme fits, after a woman cursed him and called him ‘a foul thing’: ‘At which words the boy felt a thing to prick him to the very heart.’24 As Michael MacDonald says, ‘most Elizabethans believed that curses could kill’ and curses perpetuated witchcraft fears.25 In 1660 Faith Corbett and her sister became anxious when Alice Huson, a woman with a reputation for witchcraft, asked for an item of their clothing in lieu of payment for her services about the household. She specifically asked for ‘some piece of old Linen, which […] [the] Children wore next to their Skin’.26 The woman’s request was refused, but when her gloves went missing Faith became increasingly terrified, believing, in keeping with witchcraft beliefs of the time, that 22 J[ohn] D[arrell], The Most Wonderfull and True Storie of a Certaine Witch (London: printed for I. O., 1597). 23 There are thirteen accounts revolving around this controversial case which divided Nottingham into factions. This particular incident was narrated by the exorcist John Darrel, who had a personal interest in authenticating Sommers’s possession, in A True Narration of the Strange and Grevous Vexation of the Devil ([England]: [English Secret Press?], 1600), p. 15; see also Almond, Demonic Possession and Exorcism, pp. 240–43. 24 Richard Baddeley, The Boy of Bilson (London: K[ingston], 1622), p. 46. 25 MacDonald, Witchcraft and Hysteria, p. xi. For similar cases in Germany, see Roper, Witch Craze, chap. 8, ‘Family Revenge’, pp. 181–203; for France, see Robin Briggs, The Witches of Lorraine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 268, 295, 322, and Briggs, Witches and Neighbours, pp. 64, 73–74. 26 Matthew Hale, ‘A Relation of the Grievous Affliction of Faith Corbett’, in A Collection of Modern Relations of Matter of Fact (London: printed for John Harris, 1693), p. 52, taken from an account that began in 1660, given by Henry Corbett, the bewitched girl’s father.

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Alice would use the gloves to cast a spell over her. She began to suffer from extremely violent fits ‘so that two or three could hardly hold her’; she scratched and bit, screamed and cried out ‘vehemently’, sometimes lying still ‘as in a Swoon’, other times ‘all of a sudden, she became unusually Merry’.27 Her illness continued in a similar vein for four years, but she apparently recovered completely after Huson had been incarcerated. Children’s imaginations could have been stimulated and seriously disturbed by sermons conjuring vivid and frightening images of hell. As one cleric advised, it was necessary to teach ‘whither good children go when they die, and whither naughty children go; what a place Heaven is, and Hell’.28 This may have been a significant factor in a case of multiple demonic possessions that occurred in the Fairfax family of Yorkshire in 1621. In the diary in which he recorded the bewitchment of his daughters, Edward Fairfax wrote down his daughter Helen’s first words when she came round from her initial ‘deadly trance’: she had imagined she was ‘at church at Leeds, hearing a sermon from Mr Cooke’.29 Alexander Cooke was a fierce, zealous preacher, notorious for his fiery sermons in which he denounced from the pulpit those who had ‘failed to live up to his godly standards’.30 From this point Helen and her younger sister had frequent visions and trances, all carefully recorded by their father, featuring chaotic apparitions of horned devils, monsters dripping blood, and strange animals. Historians have recognized that preaching disseminated witchcraft beliefs in the community, explaining, to some extent, the influence that sermons had on the way children constructed their terrifying visions.31 More consideration needs to be given to the effect that these dreadful evocations of devils and witches had on the imaginations of children and the possibility that zealous, didactic preaching may have actually perpetuated witchcraft fears and accusations.

27

Hale, ‘Faith Corbett’, p. 53. James Kirkwood, The True Interest of Families (London: printed for J. Taylor and J. Everingham, 1692), p. 8. 29 William Grainge, Daemonologia: A Discourse on Witchcraft as it was Acted in the Family of Mr Edward Fairfax of Fuyston, in the County of York, in the Year 1621, facsimile reprint (London: Muller, 1971), p. 37. 30 William Joseph Sheils, ‘Cooke, Alexander (bap. 1564, d. 1632)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (hereafter ODNB), online edn ed. by Lawrence Goldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press) [accessed 29 March 2011]. 31 See, for instance, Sharpe, Instruments, pp. 200–01. 28

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Witchcraft stories were widely known and circulated in the community and children were both horrified and fascinated by them.32 Robert Burton suggested that children’s susceptibility to witchcraft fears was partly due to the fact that their imaginations were stimulated by parents threatening them with ‘beggars, bugbears, and hobgoblins if they cry, or be otherwise unruly’.33 Indeed, the Fairfax family appears to have been embroiled in a labyrinth of witchcraft fears and suspicions: Edward Fairfax explained that there were many suspected witches living in their parish, and ‘the inhabitants complain much of great losses sustained in their goods’.34 His disturbing descriptions of his daughters’ visions are full of references to witch lore, including image magic, witches’ familiars, covens, and contracts with Satan, indicating that such tales were dreadfully familiar to them. Witchcraft suspicions must have varied in intensity as rumours spread from neighbouring regions. The Fairfax’s village of Fewston is not far from Pendle-Hill, the scene of the famous witch trials in 1612. Edward Fairfax noted that one of his neighbours had lost his first wife to maleficium at this time.35 Many of these wellknown witchcraft rumours and narratives frequently featured witches bringing sickness and death upon children by intruding into their homes and subjecting them to ‘polluted’ contact and food — a fantasy that is common in fairy tales from a later era, and deeply imbedded in European folk tradition.36 In her rambling and confused statements Elizabeth Jennings mentioned Jane Flower, who had been executed for bewitching the Earl of Rutland’s son to death a few years earlier. A sensationalized and exaggerated account of this case, together with a broadside ballad, was widely disseminated in the community and abounds with references to witches doing harm to children.37 Elizabeth’s comment during her illness that ‘a hundred more have bin hanged in the west Country’ is particularly poignant in this context.38

32

Robin Briggs has suggested that witchcraft stories ‘flourished luxuriantly’ amongst early modern children, as their culture was saturated in such beliefs, Witches of Lorraine, p. 134. 33 Burton, ‘Education as a Cause of Melancholy’, pt I, sect. 2, memb. 4, subs. 2. 34 Grainge, Daemonologia, p. 35. 35 See Sharpe, Instruments of Darkness, pp. 201–02. 36 See Roper, Witch Craze, pp. 247–52. 37 Anonymous, The Wonderful Discoverie of the Witchcrafts of Margaret and Phillip Flower (London: Eld, 1619); Ronald McFarland, ‘“The Hag is Astride”: Witches in SeventeenthCentury Literature’, Journal of Popular Culture, 11 (1977), 88–97 (pp. 94–95). 38 MSS Add. 36674, fol. 134v ; Elizabeth Jennings’s agitated statements were recorded and verified by numerous witnesses.

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Children at this time were terrified of the dark — a much more relentless and horrifying darkness than we are familiar with today. A child awakening from a bad dream would have been confronted by utter blackness or perhaps flickering candle or fire light, casting eerie shadows and conjuring terrible phantasms. As one seventeenth-century writer put it: ‘Children hide their heads within their bedcloths, though they see nothing, when they have affrighted themselves with the shapes of Devils pourtray’d only in their Phancies.’39 Many supernatural illnesses were, in fact, initiated at night when the child was in bed. In what appears to have been a terrible nightmare, Sara Rodes, according to her mother’s testimony, thought that a woman named Mary Sikes had come into the room where she slept and taken her by the throat and tried to choke her. She was unable to speak or cry out. For several days she fell into fits, suffered from pains, numbness, lost the use of her joints, ‘her hart leapeing the use of her tongue being taken away and her whole Body nigh unto death’.40 The association between sleep, nightmares, and supernatural incursion was commonplace in European medical literature. The English physician Philip Barrough, in particular, wrote about sleep paralysis, which he called ‘dead sleep’, and of nightmare or ‘the Mare’, which, he said, induced a feeling of being strangled or of ‘some thing, that doth violently invade’ the victim.41 But occult philosophers did not rule out the possibility that evil spirits could cause bad dreams, and such beliefs were firmly implanted in the popular imagination.42 A common factor in many of these cases of supernatural illness, resulting from fear and anxiety, is that the symptoms often began in the throat. The inability to swallow or a rising sensation in the throat is frequently associated with fear and 39

Nathaniel Ingelo, Bentivolio and Urania, The Second Part, in Two Books in Bentivolio and Urania in Four Books (London: Grismond, 1660; 1664), bk VI, p. 308. 40 Kew, The National Archives, Assizes, Northern and North-eastern circuits: Criminal depositions and case papers, ASSI 45/3/2/129, 130, information of Dorothy Rodes and Anne Pollard in 1650. 41 Philip Barrough, The Methode of Phisicke Conteyning the Causes, Signes, and Cures of Inward Diseases in Mans Body from the Head to the Foote (London: Vautroullier, 1583), pp. 24, 34; see also two other popular medical texts that went into numerous editions: Thomas Cogan, The Haven of Health (London: Griffin, 1636), p. 274; Aristotle [attributed], The Problemes of Aristotle (Edinburgh: Waldgraue, 1595), D5v . 42 See, for instance, Paracelsus of the Supreme Mysteries of Nature, trans. by John Turner (London: printed by J. C. for N. Brook and J. Harison, 1655), p. 59; see also Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Print Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 300–28; Owen Davies, ‘The Nightmare Experience, Sleep Paralysis, and Witchcraft Accusations’, Folklore, 114 (2003), 181–203.

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panic in early modern (and modern) medical discourse and literary metaphor.43 Elizabeth Jennings’s initial symptom of ‘infirmitie’ in the throat can also be seen in numerous other cases. Fourteen-year-old Mary Glover became seriously ill in 1602 after an altercation with an elderly neighbour, Elizabeth Jackson. The nature of the altercation was indeed quite frightening: according to the physician Stephen Bradwell, the woman ‘rayled at her, with many threats and cursings, wishing an evill death to light on her’.44 Later Jackson visited the Glover household and glared at Mary while she was drinking a posset. Mary immediately experienced difficulty in swallowing, ‘her throat seeminge unto her (as she called it) locked up’.45 Over the next few days she had a series of fits where she was unable or unwilling to eat, had periods of blindness, and lost the power of speech; and ‘her neck and throat did swell extremely, and very deformedly’.46 The first doctor to be consulted, Dr Shereman of the London College of Physicians, at first treated her for ‘the squinacy’, and then, after discounting the possibility of ‘the Mother’, he suspected a supernatural cause.47 Bradwell went to considerable lengths to discount fear as a factor in Mary’s illness to support his argument that it was supernatural in origin, caused by Jackson and not by emotional disturbance.48

43

David Lederer found that troubled and frightened pilgrims in search of healing from holy shrines in early modern Bavaria were sometimes thought to be in the early stages of demonic possession. They ‘complained of a shooting sensation in the head and throat, a heavy heart with the weight of a stone, or the sensation of a living creature in the heart that climbed into the throat’: Madness, Religion and the State in Early Modern Europe: A Bavarian Beacon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 169. For an example of a current perspective, see Russell Noyes and others, ‘Specific Phobia of Illness: Search for a New Subtype’, Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 18 (2004), 531–45 (p. 534): ‘Individuals with fears of this kind are alert to signals of danger such as shortness of breath, fullness in the throat, etc.’ 44 Stephen Bradwell, ‘Mary Glovers Late Woeful Case, Together with her Joyfull Deliverance’, in Witchcraft and Hysteria, p. 3 (separately paginated). 45 Bradwell, ‘Mary Glover’, pp. 3–4. 46 Bradwell, ‘Mary Glover’, p. 4. 47 Bradwell, ‘Mary Glover’, pp. 4–5. The ‘squinacie’, also known as angina, was thought to be caused by an abundance of hot blood flowing into the throat and neck. The symptoms were swelling and inflammation of the throat, pain, fever, and difficulty in swallowing, see Barrough, Methode of Phisicke, pp. 61–63. 48 Bradwell, ‘Mary Glover’, pp. 64–68. Bradwell wrote his polemical account of the Mary Glover case in 1603 to dispute Edward Jorden’s diagnosis of ‘suffocation of the mother’ and to vindicate Mary Glover’s dispossession by the godly community.

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Fear of witchcraft was particularly prevalent in families where children had recently died. In these cases grief and distress over the loss of brothers and sisters could have contributed to emotional disorders.49 Elizabeth Jennings had lost two siblings prior to her illness and she believed that they were also bewitched. In Helen Fairfax’s trances she ‘supposed she talked to her brothers and sisters, who were dead long before’; the possession of the Fairfax children also coincided with the mysterious affliction and death of their baby sister.50 In 1670 when Mary Earnley ‘fell into a violent and sicke fitt’ not long after the death of her two sisters, she claimed that Anne Wilkinson was pricking her with pins and ‘cruelly tormenting her’. 51 When Wilkinson was sent for, Mary Earnley shouted out and ‘cryed burne her, burne her, shee tormented two of my sisters’.52 One deponent explained that two of Mary’s sisters had ‘dyed since Candlemasse last and one of them upon the nineteenth day of March last, dyed and a little before her death there was taken out her mouth a blacke ribbon with a crooked pinne’.53 Early modern medical discourse frequently associated bereavement with madness and despair. Grief and fear surpassed other passions as a cause of physical disorder and were thought far more likely to prove lethal: ‘Grief is a Reall evill, which sets upon the soul, and body both at once, and makes two wounds at one blow.’54 In medical terms grief and fear drew black bile from the spleen and compelled it towards the heart. This deprived the heart of vital heat and moisture and so more black bile was produced which spread throughout the body, causing a variety of strange side

49

Modern studies show that bereaved children are more likely to become seriously ill and experience accidents than their non-bereaved counterparts. After the loss of a family member, they are particularly prone to feelings of guilt, anger, and anxiety. Bereaved girls are more likely than boys to experience fear that they, or other family members, will also die. The need for blame or scapegoating is more apparent when the death is sudden or violent: see J. William Worden, Children and Grief (New York: Guilford Press, 1996), pp. 55–67, 118–19. Edward Bever considers some modern explorations into the emotional causation of illness in ‘Witchcraft Fears and Psychological Factors in Disease’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 30 (2000), 573–90. 50 Grainge, Daemonologia, p. 37. 51 ASSI 45/9/3/94, information of George Wrightson. 52 ASSI 45/9/3/96, information of Anne Mattson. 53 ASSI 45/9/3/96. 54 Jean-François Senault, The Use of Passions, trans. by Henry, Earl of Monmouth (London: printed for J. L. and Humphrey Moseley, 1649), p. 477. See also Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul, pp. 30–31; Michael Schoenfeldt, ‘Aesthetics and Anesthetics: The Art of Pain Management in Early Modern England’, in The Sense of Suffering: Constructions of Physical Pain in Early Modern Culture, ed. by Jan Franz van Dijkhuizen and Karl A. E. Enenkel (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 29–30.

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effects and frightening fantasies.55 Many of Napier’s patients became mentally disturbed after the death of a family member and were ‘full of melancholy and ill thought’.56 Such ill thoughts may well have led to an accusation of witchcraft as Mary Earnley associated her grief, fear, and anxieties with a woman in the community who already had a reputation for witchcraft.57 The transition stage between childhood and adult independence in the early modern era is recognized by historians of childhood and adolescence as a particularly vulnerable time.58 Boys, in particular, experienced difficulty at school. Keith Thomas says they were terrified by the severe discipline at some schools and ‘bullying and initiation rites were universal’.59 This was acknowledged at the time by writers such as Robert Burton, who referred to his own miserable experiences at school when he suggested that the brutality of the schoolroom was an important cause of melancholy: Tyrannical, impatient, harebraine Schoolmasters […] are in this kinde as bad as hangmen and executioners, they make many children endure a martyrdome all the while they are at Schoole, with bad diet […] too much severity and ill usage, they quite pervert their temperature of body and mind: still chiding, railing, frowning, lashing, tasking, keeping that they are fracti animis, moped many times, and weary of their lives, and thinke no slavery in the world (as once I did myselfe) like to that of a grammar Scholler.60

Significantly, one of the more famous cases of multiple demonic possession concerning the Starkie family in Lancashire in 1595 began when ten-year-old

55

See Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 49; Rublack, ‘Fluxes: The Early Modern Body and the Emotions’, pp. 2–3. 56 MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, p. 160. 57 Several witnesses attested to Mary Earnley’s accusations and there were other witchcraft accusations against Anne Wilkinson on unrelated matters. 58 Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experience in England 1560–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), esp. pp. 34–40. 59 Keith Thomas, ‘Children in Early Modern England’, in Children and their Books, ed. by Gillian Avery and Julia Briggs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 68. For a more recent and considered treatment of the habitual beatings in early modern education as both a pedagogical tool and an initiation into adult manhood, see Anita Traninger, ‘Whipping Boys: Erasmus’ Rhetoric of Corporal Punishment and its Discontents’, in Sense of Suffering, ed. by van Dijkhuizen and Enenkel, pp. 39–57. 60 Burton ‘Education as a Cause of Melancholy’, pt I, sect. 2, memb. 4, subs. 2. Burton’s depiction of the schoolroom is reminiscent of Erasmus’s evocation of a ‘torture chamber’, with brutal teachers, and the schoolchild ‘likened to a slave’; see Traninger, ‘Whipping Boys’, pp. 47–49.

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John Starkie ‘was take[n] as he was going to schole, & was compelled to showte vehemently, not being able to stay him selfe’.61 Thomas Darling’s repossession occurred shortly after he had returned to school after an absence of several months. He lost the use of his legs in the ‘Schoole Porch’ and had to be carried home, where he fell to groaning and shouting, claiming to see terrifying visions of witches and devils.62 William Perry, the infamous ‘Boy of Bilson’, was also anxious to avoid school for ‘fear of whipping’.63 It was suggested at the time that some boys may have feigned possession in order to avoid going to school, but little consideration was given to their motivation for taking such drastic action.64 Fear and distress generated by a brutal school environment could well have been a significant, and heretofore neglected, factor in some of these cases of demonic possession. Terence Murphy attributes the high level of young suicides in early modern England to the practice of sending young people away from their family homes into apprenticeships and household service.65 This, he suggests, frequently led to anxiety, exacerbated by isolation and loneliness.66 While many of the supernatural illnesses recounted in this essay occurred in the family home, there were also a significant number that manifested in apprentices and household servants. The nineteen-year-old William Sommers was unhappily apprenticed to a musician in Nottingham when he became ill, and had tried to run away from his master on several occasions.67 Observers interpreted the strange torments of his body as a sign that he was ‘possessed by meanes of a witch’. 68 To test the legitimacy of the

61

George More, A True Discourse Concerning the Certain Possession and Dispossession of 7 Persons in One Familie in Lancashire (Middelburg: Schilders, 1600), p. 12. 62 J[ohn] D[arrel], Most Wonderfull and True Storie, p. 39. 63 R[ichard B[addeley], Boy of Bilson, pp. 61–62. 64 See for instance, Samuel Harsnett, A Discovery of the Fraudulent Practises of John Darrel (London: [John Windet for] John Wolfe, 1599), p. 68. 65 Terence R . Murphy, ‘“Woful Childe of Parents Rage”: Suicide of Children and Adolescents in Early Modern England, 1507–1710’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 17 (1986), 259–70. 66 According to MacDonald, young people in service remained at the periphery of their masters’ families and were more likely to be physically and verbally abused than children living with their parents: Mystical Bedlam, pp. 85–88; see also Michael MacDonald and Terence R . Murphy, Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 254–55, 260–61. 67 Harsnett, A Discovery, p. 14. 68 G. Co., A Briefe Narration of the Possession, Dispossession, and Repossession of William Sommers ([Amsterdam?]: n. pub., 1598), Aii.

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possession, he was subjected to physical duress and had ‘pins thrust deepe into his hand, and leg, to trie if he did counterfeyt’.69 While he was imprisoned, he beat his head against the floor and threw himself at the walls; at one stage, he attempted suicide. He received no family support during this ordeal. In the numerous accounts of this case, whether they present him as fraudulent or genuinely possessed, there is an overriding sense of his isolation and vulnerability. Household servants were particularly vulnerable and fearful of coming into contact with witches in the course of their duties. In the famous Throckmorton case, for instance, involving five girls aged between nine and fifteen years, suffering from violent, bizarre fits which they blamed on witchcraft, several household servants were also ‘infected’. They recovered as soon as they were sent away from the house, but their replacements soon became ‘afflicted in the same sort and manner’.70 It must have been a terrifying and stressful experience for them to be living in a household with five ‘grievously tormented’ children: ‘when they first fell into their fits, they all cried out of mother Samuel, as the children did, saying, take her away Mistris, for Gods sake take her away and burne her, for she will kill us all if you let her alone’.71 People feared that supernatural illness was ‘contagious’, and, as Burton said, once again evoking the power of the imagination, ‘their apprehension and fear is so strong in this kind, that they will have the same Disease’.72 Servants were usually the first point of contact when suppliants visited the home in search of alms or provisions. In 1652 Elizabeth Johnson, the servant of Hester Spivy in Yorkshire, became seriously ill and could not speak or stand after she had been threatened by a reputed witch. The woman had allegedly entered the house and threatened to sear Elizabeth’s lips together with a red hot poker.73 In another case around the same time, Isabell Anderson touched the hand of a reputed witch who came to the door for alms: ‘w[i]thin an houre after she [ … ] fell sicke & was p[er]plexed w[i]th divers tormentinge fitts like pinnes pricked her to the hart’.74 Both these cases occurred while the householders were away from 69

G. Co., A Briefe Narration, B v . Anonymous, The Most Strange and Admirable Discoverie of the Three Witches of Warboys (London: printed by the Widdowe Orwin, for Thomas Man and John Winington, 1593), A4v . 71 Anonymous, Most Strange and Admirable Discoverie, A4 v . There seems to have been a popular perception (as there is now) that convicted witches in England were burnt rather than hung. 72 Burton, ‘Of the Force of Imagination’, pt I, sect. 2, memb. 3, subs. 2. 73 ASSI 45/4/2/13–14, information of Hester Spivy. 74 ASSI 45/4/1/111, information of Mary Allanson in 1651. 70

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home, and just after civil war when levels of fear and anxiety in the community were high for everybody, let alone vulnerable and isolated servant girls. The number of adolescents working in the community as servants was very high. Nearly all households, with the exception of very poor people, employed young servants. The general practice of late marriage at this time further prolonged the ‘dark and dangerous age’ preceding adult independence.75 A disproportionately high percentage of Richard Napier’s disturbed and troubled patients came from this vulnerable age group.76 While fear and anxiety were clearly perpetuating many of these cases, another reason for the high representation of young people could be the fascination that adults had with possessed children. Adults took these cases very seriously, with enormous concern, and kept careful watch over the afflicted. Family and neighbours from the surrounding community wrote long and detailed descriptions of the ordeals, noting each word that children spoke, as well as recording the various stages of their illnesses and behaviour throughout. When the twelve-year-old Martha Hatfield was suffering from a dramatic supernatural illness against the disturbing backdrop of the English Civil War, it was interpreted as both divine and demonic. Vigilant observers recorded her every word, gesture, and ‘posture’ in scrupulous detail.77 There was a tendency in godly prescriptive literature to represent affliction as a ‘divine gift’ and an indication of God’s special concern; the Devil, after all, could only infiltrate the human body with God’s permission.78 Despite the concept of original sin, children were associated with innocence and virginity, and were traditionally seen as being closer to the divine than adults. Consequently they were thought more likely to be gifted with powers of prophecy and divination.79 This, to some extent, explains adult fascination with possessed children and their tendency to monitor them carefully during supernatural afflictions and to record their every utterance.

75

Griffiths, Youth and Authority, p. 34; see also Briggs, Witches and Neighbours, p. 200. MacDonald, Mystical Bedlam, p. 41. 77 James Fisher, The Wise Virgin (London: printed for John Rothwell, 1653), esp. pp. 16–17. 78 Jenny Mayhew, ‘Godly Beds of Pain: Pain in English Protestant Manuals (c. 1550–1650)’, in Sense of Suffering, ed. by van Dijkhuizen and Enenkel, p. 313. 79 See especially the case of twelve-year-old William Withers who was said to have preached as though he was a learned divine: John Phillips, The Wonderfull Worke of God Shewed Upon a Chylde whose Name Is William Withers (London: Waldgraue, 1581); see also Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 209–18. 76

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Although the notion that empowerment was a factor in these illnesses is clearly apparent during the recovery process, there was far more going on than mere attention seeking. Elizabeth Jennings focused on Margaret Russell, also known as ‘Countesse’, as the cause of her affliction. Russell had visited the house and argued with the physicians about their treatment, possibly in Elizabeth’s hearing: once Margaret Russell discovered ‘the intention of letting blood’ from Elizabeth Jennings, she argued against it ‘w[i]th much earnestness […] saying the doctors wold kill her thereby as they had done Exeters Child’.80 Elizabeth then had to endure the invasive, painful treatment of the physicians, after which her condition deteriorated. In her delirium she presented herself as resilient, with the power to withstand malevolent forces: Put Countesse in prison this Child will be well […] I have sent this Child to speake to them all these wi[t]ches […] They had power ov[er] all them to bewitch them to death but me […] No bodie knows what ayles me within […] When she is in prison then I shalbee well.81

But it is not so much that Elizabeth was desperate for attention; rather, the adults around her were willing to give substantial credence to her stories. If adults were prepared to accept that Elizabeth had been bewitched, someone must have been responsible. Russell, who had visited the house regularly to inquire after Elizabeth’s health and challenged the physicians over her treatment, was the most likely candidate.82 In witchcraft trials, neighbours inquiring after the health of ailing children were frequently regarded with suspicion.83 The frightened and bereaved child imagined that Russell was responsible for her suffering. When the woman was taken away and questioned at Elizabeth’s instigation, it must have been a great relief and comfort to her.

80

MS Add. 36674, fol. 134 r. This could be a reference to Georgi-Anna Cecil, daughter of the first earl of Exeter, who died at the age of five in 1621; see Alastair Bellany, ‘Cecil, Frances, countess of Exeter (1580–1663)’, in ODNB [29 March 2011]. Some physicians certainly disapproved of the procedure being carried out on children before the age of fourteen, see Nicholas Gyer, The English Phlebotomy (London: [Hoskins and Danter], 1592), p. 72; see also Patricia Crawford, Blood, Bodies and Families in Early Modern England (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2004), p. 157. 81 MS Add. 36674, fol. 134v . 82 The tendency for children to accuse people who had been kind to them has also been noted by Lyndal Roper in Witch Craze, p. 193. 83 See for instance, ASSI 45/1/5/38 v; ASSI 45/4/1/110; ASSI 45/4/1/131; see also Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 106–08; Briggs, Witches and Neighbours, p. 66.

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It was generally believed that a confrontation between the accused witch and her supposed victim could initiate healing. Faith Corbett recovered after a meeting was arranged with Alice Huson, who she believed was the cause of her suffering. Faith attributed her recovery to this meeting and even disagreed with the physicians about the efficacy of their remedies. She started eating again and continued in good health, but relapsed a few days later when Alice Huson passed by her house and looked up at her window. Then the process began again until Huson and another implicated woman, Dol Bilby, were locked up. Faith recovered for a time, but relapsed shortly afterwards, complaining that ‘Bilby had got Pins and Needles, wherewith she Tormented her, and had too much Liberty’.84 Sure enough this was confirmed to be the case, and Faith recovered completely when these imagined sources of power were removed from the witch. The tendency for historians to cite this case as an example of children ‘using their possession as an ideal occasion for inverting normality’ 85 negates the intensity of Faith’s fear and anxiety. She was clearly terrified of these women and resolutely believed they had power over her, but it had taken her four years to convince her parents of the danger, during which time her condition steadily deteriorated. Once her stories were accepted by those in authority and acted upon, her recovery was secure. Prosecuting the witch in the civil courts was a favoured method of therapy, especially if the witch was executed — according to James I: ‘punishment to the death will be a salutarie sacrifice for the patient.’86 After Mary Sikes was taken into custody, for example, witnesses attested that Sara Rodes recovered and ‘hath not beene troubled with any fitts’.87 While witchcraft was regarded as a crime like any other, it was difficult to prove and so, unlike other crimes, afflicted children were sometimes called as witnesses in witch trials.88 Although from a modern perspective such occasions may appear intimidating and frightening, they may have allowed witchcraft fears and anxieties to be focused on a figure of blame, alleviating them to some degree.

84

Hale, ‘Faith Corbett’, p. 57. Sharpe, Instruments, pp. 206–07. 86 James I and VI, Daemonologie (Edinburgh: Robert Walde-grave, printer to the Kings Majestie, 1597), p. 49. 87 ASSI 45/3/2/131, information of Anne Pollard. 88 See Christina Larner, Witchcraft and Religion: The Politics of Popular Belief (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984), p. 44. 85

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Many people bypassed the legal process and took matters into their own hands. Cunning folk were frequently successful in treating supernatural illnesses and people often consulted them when they had failed to gain satisfaction from physicians.89 In early modern England cunning folk were often expected to identify a culprit and prescribe counter-magic to cure or neutralize the witch’s malevolence. These countermeasures included a combination of herbal remedies, protective charms, and magic. In some cases the herbal treatments may have had genuine therapeutic benefits, but more likely there were what we would now call placebo or psychological factors involved. Burton thought the ‘force of Imagination’ was a contributing factor. While he said there was no virtue in the ‘Charmes’ of cunning folk, he thought they worked because people believed in them — ‘the patient puts his co[n]fidence’ in such remedies. This was due, he said, to ‘opinion alone, faith’; hence cunning folk ‘doth more strange cures then a rationall Physition’.90 The healing powers of cunning folk were widely acknowledged by numerous clerics even though they disapproved of their practices. George Gifford, for instance, related the tale of a man whose ten-year-old daughter was ‘taken lame’ with severe back pain. The man consulted a local cunning woman with an excellent reputation for healing, who told him that he had a bad neighbour and that the child was ‘forspoken’. She gave him a remedy and the girl recovered completely.91 Given the inefficacy of physicians, parents were more inclined to take their sick and disturbed children to cunning folk to receive magical assistance. Scratching the witch and drawing blood was a common counter measure sometimes instigated by cunning folk. It was widely practised and unofficially sanctioned, to some extent, by clergy and magistrates, which partly explains its popularity.92 Physicians such as Napier also recommended it on occasion, and

89

MacDonald says that most people did not bother to consult physicians when their children were ill. The treatment was costly and their remedies were ‘either useless or harmful and often both’, Mystical Bedlam, p. 42. 90 Burton, ‘Of the Force of Imagination’, pt I, sect. 2, memb. 3, subs. 2. 91 George Gifford, A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcrafts (London: Windet, 1593), B1; see also William Perkins, A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (Cambridge: Cantrel Legge, 1608), pp. 174–76; for some similar cases see Richard Bernard, A Guide to Grand-Jurymen (London: Kingston, 1627), pp. 129, 184–87. 92 See Clive Holmes, ‘Popular Culture? Witches, Magistrates, and Divines in Early Modern England’, in Understanding Popular Culture: Europe from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, ed. by Steven L. Kaplan (Berlin: Mouton, 1984), p. 96.

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according to the apothecary William Drage, ‘to scratch and fetch blood’ from the witch was a general panacea for supernatural disorders.93 There were also opposing voices: many clerical writers found the practice reprehensible and evil. Richard Bernard thought the remedial powers of scratching to be spurious. Most people, he said, relapsed after only a brief respite, and any ‘ease’ it offered came from the morally dubious satisfaction of inflicting revenge.94 George Gifford, in his condemnation of cunning folk, evoked fear and the imagination in a very clear conception of how they achieved remedial results: A man feareth hee is bewitched, it troubeleth al the powers of his mind, and that distempereth his bodie, maketh great alterations in it, and bringeth sundrie griefes. Now, when his mind is freéd from such imaginations, his bodily griefe which grew from the same is eased. And a multitude of Satans cures are but such.95

The imagination was clearly a factor here; Robert Burton was certain that the power of the imagination could both cause and cure illness in certain circumstances.96 The feminist literary critic Diane Purkiss suggests that scratching offered people the ability to gain control of the situation in the face of the malevolent power which they believed had caused their affliction. She suggests such acts of violence arose not only from ‘fear of a perfectly real hazard to family and self, but also a terror of losing the self altogether to the malign and unseen power of another. […] Grappling with a real and tangible body that could be assailed may have been a relief’.97 Certainly, despite Bernard’s claims to the contrary, many adults and children did appear to recover after drawing blood from the witch.98 The practice

93

Richard Napier, ‘How to discov[er] a witch’, MS Add. 36674, fol. 148r; William Drage, Daimonomageia: A Small Treatise of Sicknesses and Diseases from Witchcraft, and Supernatural Causes (London: Dover, 1665), pp. 10, 21. 94 Bernard, A Guide to Grand-Jurymen, p. 192. 95 Gifford, A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcrafts, G4. 96 Burton, ‘Of the Force of the Imagination’, pt I, sect. 2, memb. 3, subs. 2. For other English medical writers to elucidate the link between the imagination, illness, and witchcraft, see especially John Cotta, The Triall of Witch-craft: Shewing the True and Right Methode of Discovery (London: Purslow, 1616); A Short Discoverie of the Unobserved Dangers of Severall Sorts of Ignorant and Unconsiderate Practicers of Physicke in England (London: [Field], 1612), chap. 8, ‘The Explication of the True Discoverie of Witchcraft in the Sicke, Together with Many and Wondered Instances of that Kind’, pp. 51–71. 97 Purkiss, The Witch in History, p. 130. 98 ASSI 45/6/1/69; ASSI 45/3/2/130–35; ASSI 45/4/2/13–14; ASSI 45/16/3/54–56 are just a few of the cases which mentioned recovery after scratching.

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came to be considered by some as an infallible cure and continued well into the nineteenth century.99 Emotional disturbances, such as fear, anxiety, and grief, were important contributing factors to the development of ‘supernatural’ afflictions and the making of witchcraft accusations in early modern England. The pattern was so prevalent that it was transferred to the New World where children and adolescents were also predominant as victims of bewitchment in Salem at the end of the seventeenth century. The emotions were clearly significant, yet they have been underestimated by historians as an explanation for witchcraft accusations. Not only did early modern physicians of body and soul think that ‘passions’ and the ‘imagination’ contributed to illnesses of the body and mind, they also acknowledged that the resulting humoral imbalances manifested symptoms difficult to distinguish from those of supernatural incursion. Historical studies of bewitchment and demonic possession have tended to focus on reactions to religious and social repression in marginalized and powerless sections of the community. The application of microhistorical approaches to the complexities of the phenomenon, however, provides insight into a less well charted but arguably more universal aspect of the expression and experience of illness in this period: the contribution of the emotions.100 The emotional distress and vulnerability of young people in relation to illness, witchcraft fears, and anxieties in early modern England certainly warrants further consideration.101

99

Holmes, ‘Popular Culture? Witches, Magistrates, and Divines’, p. 96. Gentilcore also advocates microhistorical methodology: ‘The Fear of Disease and the Disease of Fear’, pp. 185–86. 101 I gratefully acknowledge Michael McDonnell, Yasmin Haskell, and the reader from Brepols for guidance and assistance with the various drafts of this essay. 100

B EYOND A LLEGORY: T HE M EANINGS OF M ADNESS IN E ARLY M ODERN S PAIN Dale Shuger

T

he experience of disease for early modern Europeans is by necessity an imaginary one, in the sense that the modern historian, drawing on limited textual sources and his/her own ideas about the relations between experience and text, must imagine what that experience was for the majority of individuals who would never write about their own struggles with physical disability. The historian of ‘diseases of the imagination’ is doubly disadvantaged: not only must he imagine a largely unwritten experience, but, as Michel Foucault argued in his 1965 Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, he must imagine his entire object of study, since early modern Europeans related reason and disease in ways and in a language that we do not share, or even know, today.1 Perhaps Foucault’s most important contribution to the study of madness was to highlight the dialectic nature of the discourses about madness and the object of those discourses, thus unmasking the Enlightenment myth of a stable a priori object of study (madness) and a series of progressively improving discourses through which to speak of and deal with it. By showing the interdependence of discourses and institutions, Foucault broke down disciplinary walls between literature, theology, sociology, and medicine (to name a few), instead considering each as privileged discourses of a given period for defining, understanding, and treating madness. My own work straddles (or questions) the lines between literature and history, and thus I would be the last to endorse a return to disciplinary exclusivity. Still,

1

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. by Richard Howard (New York: Random House, 1965).

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I will argue that Foucault’s work, while it shows the necessity of interdisciplinary, transnational thinking, also suggests some of the dangers of its overzealous application. We may and must examine how concepts such as madness enter into a range of discourses during the early modern period, but we must also be sensitive to the differences between those discourses. My main interest is not in critiquing Foucault — if I choose to focus briefly on his work in particular it is because it dominates work on madness in early modern Spanish literature — but in first pointing out how literary representations of madness have been assumed to be historical, and then by proposing, based on my study of over one hundred and fifty insanity defences before the Spanish Inquisition, a historical madness that looks very different from its literary analogue. Foucault’s main interest is the eighteenth century, the ‘age of reason’, and in the chapters of the book dedicated to this period, which he marks as beginning with the founding of l’hôpital général in Paris in 1656, he relies primarily on archival material from hospitals in France and England and the writings of social reformers and physicians. In the opening, however, he discusses the prehistory to his story, and it is telling that his starting point here corresponds not to an event with archival sources, but to an event — the launching of a Ship of Fools — whose only sources are and whose only sources can be painting and poetry, given that the ‘event’ existed only in the artistic imagination.2 From here, he notes several stages in the ‘evolution’ of madness in the late medieval period and the Renaissance and he associates each stage with a symbolic representation of madness: madness excluded (the Ship of Fools: Sebastian Brant’s allegory, and Juan Bosch’s painting), a madness that is coterminous with the world itself (Erasmus, Bosch), the allegoric systematization of madness (Garzoni, Beys). Yet

2

The historicity of the Ship of Fools has been the subject of much debate since the publication of Foucault’s book. In his essay ‘Madness and Civilization in Early Modern Europe: A Reappraisal of Michel Foucault’, in After the Reformation: Essays in Honour of J. H. Hexter, ed. by Barbara C. Malament (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1980), H. C. Erik Midelfort took Foucault to task for what he saw as various historical inaccuracies, beginning with the reality of the Ships of Fools: ‘There is only one known instance of a madman’s having been set adrift on a boat, and it is quite possible that the intention was to drown him’ (p. 254). In his essay in the volume Rewriting the History of Madness: Studies in Foucault’s ‘Histoire de la folie’, ed. by Arthur Still and Irving Velody (London: Routledge, 1992), Allen Megill argues that Foucault himself is ambiguous (or, a less generous reader might say, contradictory) regarding the existence of the Ship of Fools. The point remains that Narrenschiffe existed in the symbolic but not the historic realm, confirming that the artistic interpretation of madness was not necessarily representative of society’s experience of madness in the period.

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his project is not simply a study of symbolic representations of madness; rather, he equates these symbolic representations with a social ‘experience’ of madness which exceeds or is distinct from paintings and poems. Nowhere is this equation clearer than in the juxtaposition of the following two observations about madness in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: ‘Let us not be surprised to come upon it [madness] so often in the fictions of the novel and the theatre. Let us not be surprised to find it actually prowling through the streets.’3 Foucault’s argument depends on an unstated assumption that literature and street correspond, that an artistic preoccupation connotes a social reality, and that the symbolic meaning we perceive in the artistic representation of madness is a verisimilar representation of how society diagnosed and interpreted madness. There is no doubt that the artistic representation of a given theme, or the choice of a theme to represent, is revealing in the study of a given period. However, exactly what it reveals would seem to change as ideas about the role of literature and art in society change over time. We must ask ourselves if Foucault’s assumption of equivalence stems from a true equivalence or from the absence of documentation of any other type that might give evidence to the contrary. H. C. Erik Midelfort posed the problem of accessing non-literary madness in his Introduction to A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany, acknowledging that once one ‘moves beyond’ Erasmus and Bosch ‘it is not immediately obvious where one can find evidence of how madness was ordinarily defined and how the mad were actually treated’.4 Midelfort’s attempt to theorize the relation between artistic image and lived experience is generally lacking in Spanish scholarship on madness.5 In this article I will not only attempt to extend his methods of analysis to Spain, but also to offer a source which German archives cannot. Midelfort seeks answers about early modern German madness in the archives of ‘legal, medical, religious and social history’. Of these four, it is the ‘social’ which remains most elusive: jurists, physicians, and theologians all write theoretical tracts, but these

3

Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 36. H. C. Erik Midelfort, A History of Madness in Sixteenth Century Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 18. 5 There are certainly excellent historical studies of institutions and discourses regarding madness in Spain, but none addresses convincingly the relation between literary and archival evidence. Among literary scholars, Foucault reigns supreme (and in many cases, this reading is quite productive: as I argue, my problem with Foucault is not in his reading of literature so much as his equivalence of literature with history). For an example of a historical text which unquestioningly uses Foucault to make arguments about historical madness, see Enrique González Duro, Historia de la locura en España, I (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 1994). 4

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are still only approximations to the lived experience of the majority of early moderns. The archives of the Spanish Inquisition, however, may provide a window — a window of course warped by the Inquisition’s purpose and methods — into this experience. The centralized nature of the Inquisition, which required the transcription of court proceedings as well as copious correspondence between levels of authority, its fairly ‘egalitarian’ incursions into all strata of the Spanish population, and its particular focus on interior states, make it a particularly rich resource for scholars of early modern mentalities. To date the majority of scholars have focused on the same early modern mentalities the Inquisitors were worried about: claims of demonic and divine possession, witchcraft, and heresy.6 However, the Inquisition also recognized a purely somatic insanity and, furthermore, they considered it a valid and complete defence.7 It is no surprise, then, that the insanity defence (whether legitimate or faked) was not uncommon.8 Before turning to these sources, I should place them in the context of the other sources of ‘legal, medical, religious and social history’ about madness in Spain. In addition to literature, scholars have turned to sermons and theological treatises,

6

The scholarship on the Inquisition’s prosecution of heterodox religious practices is immense. For bibliography and general starting reference on the Spanish Inquisition, see Historia de la Inquisición en España y América, ed. by Joaquín Pérez Villanueva and Bartolomé Escandell Bonet, 3 vols (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos: Centro de Estudios Inquisitoriales, 1984); and Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition: A Historical Revision (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). 7 See Francisco Tomás y Valiente, El derecho penal de la monarquía absoluta (Madrid: Editorial Tecnos, 1969) and Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition of Spain (New York: Macmillan, 1907) for discussions of the history of, respectively, Spanish secular and Inquisitorial legal treatments of madness. Other useful sources are Midelfort, A History of Madness, chap. 4, ‘Witchcraft and the Melancholy Interpretation of the Insanity Defense’, pp. 182–227; and Nigel Walker, Crime and Insanity in England, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1968–73), I. 8 The only complete study of a single Inquisition insanity case is Sara Nalle’s excellent microhistory Mad for God: Bartolomé Sánchez. The Secret Messiah of Cardenete (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001). The testimonies of friends, family, and officials in that case have strong echoes with Íñiguez’s (and with the other cases I studied). Carlo Ginzburg’s Formaggio e i vermi (in English, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. by John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980)) also provides many parallels, although importantly the Roman Inquisition does not seriously consider an insanity defence and Menocchio is burned as a heretic. María Cristina Sacristán’s excellent study of madness and the Inquisition in the New World, Locura e inquisición en Nueva España, 1571–1760 (México: Colegio de Michoacán, 1992), uncovers fascinating material about early modern popular madness.

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popular theatre, medical manuals, and hospital archives, and what they have found would initially seem to confirm the fundamentally allegorical interpretation of madness that Foucault finds in early modern literature and painting.9 What madness symbolizes in a given work may change across the genres, but within each particular text, madness holds an unequivocal moral message. I should note here that the majority of what we might today consider madness does not ever in the early modern period fall into this category because it is explained in terms of the allegorical narrative of the early modern period: the Christian battle between good and evil, made human theatre via possession and witchcraft. The relative scepticism of the Spanish Inquisition towards witchcraft and demonic possession meant that Spain did not see the witchcraft craze on the same scale as its European neighbours, nor were there public exorcisms such as the famous events at Loudon.10 Local priests and doctors did, however, treat their spiritually afflicted patients with exorcisms, and there were periodic outbreaks of massive epidemics of possession in convents.11 Female unreason in particular is consistently treated as a spiritual affliction with divine/demonic sources.12 Yet Spanish literature, medical manuals, hospital archives, legal codes, and Inquisition transcripts all agree on the existence of a madness not directly connected with the Devil. Even when madness is represented as having a natural cause, it can still be endowed with allegorical, exemplary meaning. The moral message may not be immediately apparent, or may be masked by satirical sarcasm, but even in a work such as In Praise of Folly, which at first seems to insist on the ambiguity of madness, we are presented at the end with the key that deciphers that ambiguity in the voice of an omniscient narrator who clarifies the difference between earthly apparent rationality and true rationality: the love of Christ. This logic of inversion

9

Given the prominence of the theatre in Baroque Spain, this area is particularly dominant among Spanish historians. See Augustín Redondo, Otra manera de leer el Quijote (Madrid: Castalia, 1997); and Fernando Bouza, Locos, enanos y hombres de placer (Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 1991). 10 See Gustav Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition (1609–1614) (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1980) for a fascinating account of the shift in Inquisition policy towards witchcraft. 11 See Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 12 Again, the literature is immense. A good starting point is Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World, ed. by Mary E. Giles (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); and Adelina Sarrión Mora, Beatas y endemoniadas: Mujeres heterodoxas ante la Inquisición (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2003).

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— the Baroque trope of the world upside down — also characterizes madness in most popular theatre and festival. When presented with the spectacle of the rey loco (mad king), the audience does not require an omniscient narrator to inform them that a madman cannot really be king because the ‘rules’ of the Carnival a priori delineate a space where everything is upside down.13 In order to function in an allegory, madness must be clearly identified; we cannot very well draw the proper conclusions about mad characters if we are not sure who they are. Thus another feature of early modern literary works is that madness is clearly identified: one is or one is not mad. In the most purely allegorical works, the characters are their madnesses — they lack any individual properties beyond the particular form of irrationality that defines them. Thus there is no true examination of the process of diagnosis; if an individual character misjudges another character’s sanity, or comes to the realization that another character is mad, this ignorance or discernment is treated symbolically as well. Diagnosis, like sanity itself, is reversible, but never ambiguous. While in literary texts diagnosis is given a priori, the other main source cited by historians of early modern madness would seem to be concerned precisely with the process of diagnosis. Starting in the sixteenth century, there proliferated a series of scientific treatises about madness, and particularly melancholy; years before Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Spanish readers could already consult multiple Iberian texts on the subject, the most important being Juan Huarte de San Juan’s Examen de ingenios para las ciencias (1575).14 These works generally combined humoral theories that had changed little since Galen with anecdotes taken from history, literature, and the authors’ personal observations. Huarte de San Juan, for example, has a whole chapter full of anecdotes of simple men who, when suffering from mania, speak with the elegance of Cicero and in Latin, despite never having learned it. Huarte explains this as stemming from overheating of the brain, citing as evidence Aristotle’s explanation of the Sybils’ prophetic powers and the Renaissance belief that Latin was the ‘natural’ language of the ánima racional (rational spirit). Clearly the humanist Huarte is

13

See Julio Caro Baroja, El Carnaval, análisis histórico-cultural (Madrid: Taurus, 1965); and Redondo, Otra manera de leer el Quijote, for a discussion of the various permutations of this inverted king in the Carnival pageant. 14 Melancholy as it was understood in the period did not merely refer to a sense of ennui, but could in its more extreme forms include delusions, deliria, and intermittent periods of mania. Juan Huarte de San Juan, Examen de ingenios para las ciencias, ed. by Esteban Torre (Barcelona: Promociones y Publicaciones Universitarias, 1988).

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incorporating madness into a larger narrative about the superior value of classical culture. One of the most oft-noted pieces of evidence used to connect literary and historical madness at the time is the appearance of the man who believes he is made of glass, initially as a first-hand clinical example in Spanish physician Afonso de Santa Cruz’s Diagnotio et cura affectum melancholicorum (c. 1569)15 and then among literary characters, most famously the titular character in Miguel de Cervantes’s El licenciado Vidriera.16 In both Santa Cruz and Cervantes, the cause and symptoms of the locura are unequivocal, affirmed by an omniscient author/narrator, and the diagnosis explains all of the observed behaviour. If we imagine the patient’s psyche as a map, both authors can clearly mark the frontiers which separate madness from sanity. Santa Cruz is concerned solely with the areas within that frontier, while Cervantes focuses on the territory without — the joke of El licenciado Vidriera is that our protagonist, at the same time that he falls prey to this error, also assumes the other allegorical identity of madness and becomes an Erasmian oracle of truth and insight into Spanish society. Santa Cruz uses the anecdote to show how, via an ingenious inversion of the original error, the physician can immediately and completely cure the patient’s madness, while Cervantes uses Vidriera’s ‘wise madness’ to offer a satirical take on all the familiar types of Spanish society.17 El licenciado Vidriera’s symptom may have a historical precedent, but the historical referent is not a human being whose madness is perceived and responded to by different social figures according to individual interactions and prejudices, producing a variety of emotions and changed relationships. The glass-man’s madness that appears on Santa Cruz’s pages has already been filtered through a symbolic discourse, a moral lesson about the reversible relation between error and reason and the power of the physician to flip the switch. Santa Cruz is no more interested in his patient as a specific individual embedded in a specific culture than Erasmus is concerned with the feelings or families of Dame Folly. If, as Gill Speak notes in his history of this ‘odd kind of melancholy’, ‘the distinction between medical account and its literary version was

15

Alonso de Santa Cruz, Sobre la melancolía: Diagnóstico y curación de los afectos melancólicos, trans. by Raúl Lavalle (Pamplona: Ediciones Universidad de Navarra, 2005). 16 Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, La española inglesa: El licenciado Vidriera. La fuerza de la sangre, obra completa, ed. by Florencio Sevilla Arroyo and Antonio Rey Hazas (Madrid: Alianza, 1996). 17 See Yasmin Haskell’s article in this volume for further discussion of the curative method depicted by Santa Cruz.

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particularly diffuse’ in the early seventeenth century, it may be more because medical accounts of the period belonged to the rhetorical-literary genre than because Cervantes and his literary contemporaries aspired to represent or incorporate a ‘realist’ perspective.18 The Inquisition testimonies suggest that there was a social perception of madness which preceded a fixed symbolic narrative, and a social perception of unreason which preceded a fixed diagnosis of madness. The Inquisitors, just like judges today, were extremely preoccupied with the possibility of feigned madness, and in order to confirm an insanity defence, they almost always initiated a series of interviews with a wide range of social actors who had come in contact with the accused, from strangers who observed the denounced heretical act to friends and family who had known the accused since birth. They were concerned both with confirming the accused’s claims of a history of unreason, and ensuring a general social agreement that the accused was mad and therefore that any heresy he/she might commit in the future was not to be taken seriously. In pursuit of this certainty, they asked questions about the biography and symptoms of the accused — the answers to which reveal a great deal about the treatment of the mad in a wide variety of social contexts — and about the criteria of judgement of madness — the answers to which reveal a great deal about public perception of that space between unreason and madness, of errant behaviour before it is assigned an allegorical narrative. Because of the importance of establishing a continued pattern of madness and a generalized perception of such, the Inquisitors interviewed figures from all sectors of society — fellow prisoners, destitute relatives, local secular and religious authorities, as well as the Inquisition’s own hierarchical network of familiares, jail wardens, consultores, physicians, and jurists. In their responses we get a glimpse at reactions to, judgements of, and language for unreason among a huge swath of the population who would die without ever having heard of Bosch or Erasmus. Obviously one must proceed with great scepticism when using Inquisition testimony as evidence of historical reality. What are the possible biases and lacunae of Inquisition testimonies of madness? There is no question that many suspects before the Inquisition lied to escape prosecution. A witness might lie about the mental state of a third party, depending on whether or not he/she wished to help or hinder the accused’s case. Yet for my purposes the veracity of a single testimony is less important than the language with which the witnesses and 18

Gill Speak, ‘An Odd Kind of Melancholy: Reflections on the Glass Delusion in Europe (1440–1680)’, History of Psychology, 1 (1990), 191–206 (p. 193).

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the accused speak of madness; the language used to feign madness or to convince the tribunal of a diagnosis would still be indicative of general societal attitudes and understanding of madness in the period. The repetition of certain dynamics and arguments from case to case and tribunal to tribunal suggests that regardless of whether individual witnesses were telling the truth about their interventions, we are getting a somewhat reliable picture of the way early modern Spaniards dealt with unreasonable individuals.19 Precisely because I am interested in a social response to madness, it will be useful to look at a single case to see the way that individuals with different relationships to a possibly mad individual formed their own narratives about aberrant behaviour, and also to see if/how these individuals adjusted their interpretations and reactions. I have chosen the case of Bartolomé Íñiguez because the proceso is complete and in the unfolding of events we are given a great deal of information both about Íñiguez’s current situation and his past, as well as the opinions of a wide range of social actors.20 I will focus on two aspects of the case which stand in marked contrast with two elements of literary madness I have discussed: the certainty of diagnosis and the assignment of a symbolic narrative to unreason. According to Bartolomé Íñiguez, an illiterate labourer in the city of Yunquera, one day in 1562 he decided to climb the roof of a local house in order to get a better view of the running of a bull. However, he somehow got stuck on the roof and the exposure to the sun ‘damaged his head’ (le hizo mal a la cabeza).21 From his point of view, then, the cause of his madness was clear and the transition from 19 It is worth mentioning that in only one of the approximately one hundred and fifty cases I looked at was torture employed to judge the validity of an insanity defence (and because torture was a legally sanctioned part of the Inquisitorial process, its use would have been recorded in the expedient). And while testifying to a familiar or comisario must have been a harrowing experience, the ‘character witnesses’ and eyewitnesses called upon to testify were not on trial and, unless they spontaneously confessed to an obvious crime, they were not at risk of being arrested. Outside of the prosecution of rings of Judaizers and Muslims (and none of the madmen I cite were arrested on these charges), witnesses were not tricked into self-incrimination. The familiares and Inquisitors who conducted the interviews had a set list of straightforward questions regarding only the defendant — they never asked more than the name, age, and profession of the witness, and in no case did I find a witness being prosecuted for anything to which he testified. The best evidence that outside witnesses did not feel pressured by the Inquisition to give any particular narrative is the frequency with which witnesses in the same case disagreed in their accounts of events and their interpretations of the accused’s mental state. 20 Archivo Histórico Nacional, Inq. Leg. 38, Exp. 35. 21 I have modernized the spelling but made no other changes to the original.

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sanity to insanity immediate. While he did not assign it a moral cause, he could, like the narrator of El licenciado Vidriera or Don Quijote, say exactly when he went mad and why. Íñiguez’s version of the story continues along Foucauldian lines. Although he noted that the sun caused him to lose his mind and perhaps say some things he could not remember, he claimed that it was his crime of property infringement which set in motion a series of acts of public discipline, punishment, and progressively restrictive confinements. As he remembered it: he climbed atop a roof and was exposed to a lot of sunlight and it damaged his head and once the bull-running was over the owner of the roof tried to throw him off and other people showed up and they brought him down and they tried to take him to jail. (se subió en un tejado y le dio mucho sol y le hizo mal a la cabeza y acabado de correr el toro el dueño del dicho tejado le quiso echar de allí abajo y sobrevinieron otras personas y le abajaron y le querrían llevar a la cárcel.)

While he managed to talk his way out of jail for a night, they took him to an inn and locked him in a room, taking the key with them. Again easily charting the cause and effect of his madness (although omitting any symptoms), Íñiguez said that after his sleepless night, along with the sun from the day before, ‘his head was disturbed’ (tenía la cabeza alterada). He managed to knock down the door of the room and once in the street, he bumped into an in-law, who ordered ‘that they take the loco to jail and toss him in a cell’ (que le llevasen a la cárcel al loco y le echasse en el cepo). A mob gathered, ‘he was punched in the cheek making his mouth fill up with blood, and people arrived and they took hold of him to take him to jail’ (le dio con el puño cerrado en el carrillo que le hinchó la boca de sangre y se llegó gente y le tomaron para llevarle a la cárcel). Once in the jail, he was left exposed to the elements for two days and nights and he recognized that he definitively lost his mind: ‘he was like a madman and they say he said many things against God and against the people who had come to see him’ (estuvo como loco y dicen que dijo muchas cosas contra dios22 y contra las gentes que estavan a le ver). Pressed as to what he might have said, he insisted that he did not remember, only that: among the other people there were young boys and women who said ‘have at the madman’ and some of them said to the others ‘come in and see the madman’ and the door to the corral and the house where they were holding him were open and anyone who wanted could enter.

22

These ‘cosas contra dios’ were what put his case before the Inquisition.

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(entre las otras personas estaban muchachos y mujeres que le decían ‘al loco’ y unos a otros decían ‘entra y veréis al loco’ y que estaba abierta la puerta del corral y de la casa donde le tenía y podían entrar todos los que querrían.)

Speculating a bit about what Íñiguez might have said ‘against God and the townspeople’ (contra dios y contra las gentes), we might read Íñiguez as a madeto-order Foucauldian paradigm. Just like Vidriera, Íñiguez suffers a traumatic event which causes him to lose what society calls ‘reason’ but which we might read as a liberation from a social pact of hypocrisy and dogma. ‘Mad’, he gains and proclaims his insights into the hypocrisies of a town and a religion. The town, recognizing the truth at the heart of Íñiguez’s madness, neutralizes the threat he presents via physical confinement and punishment, then converts him into a figure of laughter, with the Inquisition’s entry on the scene cementing the disciplinary ‘complicity between the government and Church’.23 However, unlike in El licenciado Vidriera or In Praise of Folly, Íñiguez’s is not the only narrative we have to consider. The polyphony of depositions and accounts given by the other participants in the story forces us to reconsider much of Íñiguez’s account of events; we are forced to remember that in contrast with literary allegory, which depends on a stable omniscient narrator, our narrator has been the (ambiguously) mad man himself. In In Praise of Folly, El licenciado Vidriera, and the other literary works which situate madness ‘at the very heart of reason and truth’, the allegory depends on the confirmation by an omniscient narrator that the madman does speak truth.24 In Íñiguez’s case, all the eyewitness accounts of the rooftop episode suggest that Íñiguez was mostly incoherent and, furthermore, that his ‘unreason’ — in contrast to all of the literary madnesses we have cited — manifested itself in a range of physical and verbal symptoms with no apparent connection. The mayor reported that he was called to the scene because Íñiguez was naked on the roof and throwing tiles indiscriminately at the crowd gathering below. Another local said that typically Íñiguez would, without apparent motive, ‘cry like a child and in the next moment he would turn around and start laughing’ (llorar como niño y dentro de un credo tornaba a reír). Nor do his verbal outbursts seem to indicate any coherent critique. He mixed common anti-Catholic denunciations of saints and scepticism about the Virgin birth with

23 24

Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 43. Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 14.

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declarations of adherence to the laws of Mohammed, Moses, and Satan.25 In evidence of the latter, he claimed: that at night he saw a black dog who said he was the devil or devils and that he [Íñiguez] had to go with them and that while he was eating two raw eggs he [the dog?] told him that Barrabás and Satan and Berzebu had entered into the broken one and he drank up the raw egg just as it was and that he had drunken with it three devils and he now had them inside his body. (que de noche veía un perro negro que decía que era el diablo o diablos y que se había de ir con ellos y que estando comiendo dos huevos crudos decía que en el uno quebrado que se habían entrado en él barrabás y satanás e bierzebul y se sorbió el huevo crudo como estaba y que se había sorbido con el tres diablos e que los tenía en el cuerpo.)

He also repeatedly returned to a narrative about having ‘ridden a mule under Saint Nicholas Rock’ (cabalgado una borrica debajo la peña de san nicolás), threatened that he would ‘rise to the pulpit on the feast of St John wearing the ornament that the archbishop of the village had donated to the church’ (subir en el púlpito el día de San Juan vestido con el ornamento que dio el arzobispo de esa villa a la iglesia), and claimed to be sometimes ‘half by half’ (medio por medio), sometimes one fourth ‘indio’ (although when he gave his genealogy to the Inquisitors, he could name cristianos viejos on both sides). Nor did his criticisms of locals seem to go beyond calling men ‘sons-of-bitches’ (bellacos) and women ‘whores and go-betweens’ (putas y alcahuetas). We are a far cry from the witty repartee of a Licenciado Vidriera; it seems a stretch to find in these outpourings the loco who ‘reminds each man of his truth’.26 Not only does Íñiguez not seem to be a literary madman, but many in the town were unsure that he was a madman at all, and among those who agreed he was mad, there was no agreement as to its cause; while they acknowledged that Íñiguez had been exposed to the sun on the roof and in jail, most saw these episodes as part of a long history of madness rather than the immediate cause, and no one was willing to pinpoint a single cause for the day’s behaviour. One witness, after listening to Íñiguez in jail, said that ‘he feels that when [Íñiguez] said these things he said them out of pure roguishness and blasphemy […] he considers Bartolomé 25

Albeit not expressed in exactly the standard way. According to one account, Íñiguez declared ‘he didn’t believe in God or in his relatives or his saints or in his cherubim or his seraphim or his angels or his archangels or his prophets’ (que no creía en dios ni en sus parientes ni en sus santos ni en sus cherubines ni serafines ni en sus ángeles y arcángeles ni en sus profetas) and said that ‘Saint Mary gave birth as a virgin, well I swear to God then she gave birth through her ass’ (santa maria parió virgen voto a dios que parió por cabo el culo). 26 Foucault, Madness and Civilization, p. 14.

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Íñiguez to be a man who when he wants to talk sense does so and responds reasonably to what he is asked’ (lo tiene que cuando decía estas cosas lo decía de puro bellaco y blasfemio […] lo tiene al dicho Bartolomé Yñiguez por hombre que cuando quiere hablar en seso habla y da buena razón de lo que se le pregunta). Others affirmed that Íñiguez was ‘a man with no sense and mad and without reason in their opinion’ (hombre sin seso y loco y sin juicio a su parecer) and numerous witnesses could not confirm if he was ‘mad or possessed’ (loco o endiablado). It is remarkable how few of the witnesses explained Íñiguez’s unreason as even possibly stemming from possession, given Íñiguez’s own account of conversations with devils. In case after case, men’s ‘bizarre’ behaviours, including physical fits, heretical outbursts, and claims of supernatural powers, were ascribed by witnesses to physical disease, insanity, drunkenness, and fraud rather than demonic possession.27 Many witnesses made a distinction between the madness of what Íñiguez said and did during these days in question and their judgement of his sanity in general. They clearly entertain the possibility of partial or temporary madnesses, a conceptual flexibility which precludes an allegorical association of the symbol (el loco) with the quality symbolized (locura). The town mayor expressed his uncertainty about Íñiguez’s mental state — ‘sometimes he is without reason and that it seems to him that the rest of the time he speaks with reason and at other times it seems he is out of his mind based on the things he says and does’ (algunas veces es falto de juicio y que le parece que además veces habla en su juizio y otras

27

See for example: AHN Inq. Leg. 101, Exp. 3 (Francisco del Vado), AHN Inq. Leg. 40, Exp. 27 (Andrés Martínez), AHN Inq. Leg. 206, Exp. 43 (Antonia Núñez), AHN Inq. Leg. 31, Exp. 5 (Blas de Aguilar), AHN Inq. Leg. 14, Exp. 7 ( Juan García), AHN Inq. Leg. 3.713 8ª pieza (the infamous case of Alonso de Mendoza, see also Richard Kagan, Lucrecia’s Dreams: Politics and Prophesy in Sixteenth Century Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), AHN Inq. Leg. 213, Exp. 5 ( Juan Arias Dávila), AHN Inq. Leg. 114, Exp. 9 ( Juana Bautista), AHN Inq. Leg. 47, Exp. 60 ( Juan de Trillo), AHN Inq. Leg. 100, Exp. 9 ( Juan López), AHN Inq. Leg. 99, Exp. 6 ( Juan de Egujo), Archivo Diocesano de Cuenca Leg. Inq. 547, no. 6880–1 (Sor Antonia Joseph), ADC Inq. Leg. 141, no. 130 ( Juan de Herreria de Valhermoso), ADC Inq. Leg. 473, no. 6458 (Catalina Saiz), ADC Inq. Leg. 362, no. 5141 (Alonso Ximénez), ADC Inq. Leg. 301, no. 4343 (Diego de Vindel), ADC Inq. Leg. 303, no. 4359 (‘la mujer de Francisco Rodríguez’), ADC Inq. Leg. 296, no. 4219 (Diego Hidalgo), ADC Inq. Leg. 267, no. 3673A (Francisco Benítez), ADC Inq. Leg. 708, no. 651 (Miguel de Pasqual), ADC Inq. Leg. 400, no. 5675 (Pedro de Salinas), ADC Inq. Leg. 218, no. 2664 (Mari Díaz). All of these files are complete or nearly complete procesos with depositions from witnesses not affiliated with the Inquisition. The Inquisition personnel were almost uniformly incredulous of claims of demonic possession (or divine revelation).

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veces parece que no lo está en su juicio por las cosas que dice e hace) — even despite his knowledge that ‘the said Bartolomé Íñiguez is dispossessed of his wife and the administration of his estate due to his lack of reason’ (está el dicho Bartolomé Íñiguez quitado de su mujer y que no administra su hacienda por falta de juicio). It would seem that even legal stigmatization was not a definitive diagnosis which defined a man as loco and then channelled him into a symbolic narrative, but rather was seen as a response employed in reaction to a given situation, and which was to be considered, but not blindly followed, in other circumstances.28 Does the annulment and privation of economic autonomy reveal a communal repression similar to that which Foucault cites in ‘classical’ France and England: the (re-)formulation of madness by civic authorities in order to protect material interests?29 Again, outside witnesses’ testimonies force us to reconsider our judgement of the town’s repressive response. First of all, while most witnesses confirmed that Íñiguez had been legally dispossessed of his wife and estate, one witness chalked up the divorce to Íñiguez’s madness while another said ‘the said divorce was effected because he mistreated his wife and wasted his estate’ (el dicho divorcio se hizo porque trataba mal a la dicha su mujer y desperdiciaba su hacienda). Madness might seem to have been a convenient social excuse used to protect material interests, but at least in the view of this second witness, wastefulness and violence were enough to justify the divorce; there was no need to refer to the stigma of madness. And when we look more carefully at the postdivorce arrangements, we see that motives of charity and love and physical protection were mixed in with a desire for economic benefit. Far from being confined in a hospital or prison, Íñiguez was allowed to remain in his house and his wife moved to an inn in which she worked. She also continued to serve Íñiguez his meals, and at least on the night after the bull incident, she prepared him a room at the inn and allowed him to stay there. The negotiations through which Íñiguez ended up at the inn after his day on the roof reveal a much more complex negotiation of interests than our earlier 28

Perhaps the most striking example of local townspeople’s belief in partial insanity is that of Alonso Hernández Marín. Despite periodically going into a prolonged furious state such that four or five men were required to keep him from attacking his family and he had to be fed by force, he continued (during his periods of sanity) to operate a successful surgery practice (Sacristán, Locura e inquisición en Nueva España, 1571–1760, pp. 39–49, 70–76). 29 Although, according to Foucault, in the later seventeenth century and the eighteenth, this stigmatization invariably led to a confinement and an insistence on work rather than its prohibition.

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Foucauldian narrative would suggest. Íñiguez said that don Alonso ‘a gentleman of the area’ (señor del lugar) initially wanted to take him to jail, but he talked his way into having this socially prominent figure escort him home. This is the same don Alonso, we learn from another witness, who had called up to Íñiguez on the roof and asked him if he recognized him, to which Íñiguez had replied ‘I recognize you as a great son-of-a-bitch’ (os conozco por un gran bellaco). If this don Alonso had decided that Íñiguez was mad, why did he initially try to place him in jail? Yet if he did not have suspicions as to Íñiguez’s sanity, why did he finally allow him to go home, leaving such a public affront to his honour unanswered? The only possibility seems to be that don Alonso did not make a fixed diagnosis, or, if he did, the designation he assigned did not channel into any fixed narrative, for any moral interpretation of Íñiguez’s behaviour could not have been compatible with both a return home and a night in jail. We must conclude then not only that for don Alonso and his fellow townspeople, Íñiguez’s unreasonable behaviour did not seem to represent either an apocalyptic forbidden knowledge or a risible moral satire (the two conceptions which for Foucault define the Renaissance attitude towards madness), but that these men were not inclined to form any coherent symbolic narrative at all. In general, the primary goal of the town officials was civic peace, and as the circumstances indicated that one or another course of action was more conducive to that end, they seemed willing to sacrifice coherent narratives, be they of transgression and punishment or pity and charity. When they supposed that Íñiguez could best be quieted in the jail, they were willing to treat him as if he were a criminal; when he made the case convincingly enough that he would be more likely to calm down in his home, they treated him as if he were ill. When, in the mayor’s words, it seemed likely that ‘alone in the house he lived in he would do something crazy or set fire to the house’ (estando solo en la casa en que él vivía haría alguna desatino o pegaría fuego a la casa) they agreed on a compromise measure — bringing him to his wife’s inn and ordering his wife to serve him, but at the same time keeping the key — and when Íñiguez broke down the door with sticks and rocks and re-emerged in the street, they reverted to their initial plan. The change in behaviour did not correspond to a change in their judgement of his mental state (the mayor said that ‘in everything he saw Íñiguez do in this instance he took him to be mad and entirely out of his mind based on the things he did and said to one and all’ (en todo lo que a la sazon le vido hazer lo tuvo por loco y por fuera de todo juizio según las cosas que hazia y dezia de unos y otros)) — they simply did not equate madness with a set narrative of punishment or pathos.

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This flexibility of reactions and interpretations characterizes the majority of the interactions in this case and in all those I studied.30 In many cases individuals seemed unconcerned with diagnosing the irrational, or interacting with them beyond what was absolutely necessary to restore calm. Where we do find the symbolic narratives Foucault identifies — the identification of unreason with animality, with Christ, with sin — individuals seemed able to switch from one narrative to another, or different individuals approached the same situation with very different concepts of madness. Thus we see Íñiguez’s wife both using the legal system to stigmatize her husband and ceding him his house and continuing to monitor his well-being. Nowhere is the variety of motives and responses to Íñiguez clearer than in the accounts of those who came to see Íñiguez in jail once word of his blasphemies had travelled through town. The town sacristán confirmed that ‘everyone who wanted to went there to see him, due to which this witness believes that they made him speak nonsense […] provoking him to this’ (le iban allí a ver todos los que querían, a cuya causa cree este testigo que le hacían decir desatinos […] provocándole a ello). Clearly some locals, particularly the gangs of young boys who taunted and threw things at Íñiguez, found in his unreason a source of entertainment and theatre, but for others, the reaction seemed more akin to the tragic conception of unreason. One man told the Inquisitors that he visited the prisoner only once, as once he heard his extreme blasphemies, ‘he didn’t wait any longer but rather crossed himself and left in order not to hear more blasphemy […] and he never went back in order not to hear him’ (no quiso más esperar sino santiguarse y salirse por no oírle mas blasfemias […] que no tornó más a verle por no oírle). Even here we must distinguish between the terrible madness which Foucault sees as waning but still present in the early modern period, and the witness’s terrified reaction to heresy which precludes him from making any judgement at all as to the mental state of the speaker.31 In general, among the many locals who visited Íñiguez, the concern was to change his behaviour — his verbal and physical violence — with very little concern for the causes of that behaviour. Many neighbours took it upon themselves to visit him, either verbally or physically reprehending him for his blasphemy, or trying to reason him back to proper belief. One witness reported that he told the chained Íñiguez, ‘punishment

30

See n. 27 for further examples. Midelfort criticizes Foucault for his omission of heresy, possession, and the blurred lines between natural and supernatural causes of unreason, ‘Madness and Civilization in Early Modern Europe’, pp. 254–55. 31

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makes the crazy sane’ (los locos por la pena son cuerdos), a gloating recitation of a popular refrain which indicated little sympathy for Íñiguez or belief in his lack of control over his own speech and behaviour. Several witnesses changed their approach after experiencing Íñiguez’s symptoms firsthand, again indicating a flexible response to unreason rather than an allegorical narrative. Horrified by Íñiguez’s reference to ‘God shacked up’ (Dios amancebado), one witness ‘hit him with a rope or a punch for saying those blasphemies against God’ (le dio con una soga o un boxicón porque decía aquellas blasfemias contra Dios), but when this only seemed to incite Íñiguez further, his interlocutor switched to a gentler tack. In general, admonishment and reasoned argument was the preferred response. The visitors, according to their accounts, spent a fair amount of time trying to make him see his mistakes, and when this seemed hopeless, they sought to warn him to at least keep his heresies to himself. The motive was not to inspire fear but rather, as one neighbour who ‘seeing him out of his wits […] went to visit and talk to him many times’ (viéndole desatinado […] le iba a ver y hablar muchas veces) put it, ‘to see if he could somehow be of use to him’ (para ver si le aprovechara en algo). That algo was flexible — it could entail punishment, persuasion, and/or charity. In fact, as this witness was arguing and reasoning with Íñiguez, his wife served the prisoner food. Even when Íñiguez threw the pitcher and plates of food they had brought him to the ground and smashed them, he and his wife persisted and ‘with pleas and flattery they made him eat’ (por ruegos y halagos se lo hicieron comer). This diversity of reactions between husband and wife, between local officials and muchachos, or neighbours who knew Íñiguez previously and those who did not, suggests that it is impossible to speak of one social experience of madness: that gender, age, profession, relationship networks, and individual temperament all shaped an early modern Spaniard’s reaction to unreason. Perhaps the most un-literary reaction to Íñiguez is that of a neighbour to the jailhouse, who could offer no information to the Inquisitors because ‘he did not want to drop by and see even though he was close’ (no lo quiso pasar a ver aunque estaba cerca). If the actions and feelings of illiterate early modern Spaniards are hard to know, it is doubly difficult to learn of their inaction and apathy. Yet this witness’s reply must make us at least recognize the double bias in literary and artistic works, and the possibility that the symbolic power — be it to terrify or fascinate — of madness in literature and painting is in part an inherent function of their status as symbolic mediums. In general, the literality and pragmatism of the popular reactions to unreason in the archival accounts show us that common folks did not experience unreason as a symbol. A naked guy throwing tiles from the roof was neither a terrible warning of human sin nor a risible lesson about the

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ephemerality of truth; he was first and foremost a guy who needed to be taken off the roof. It would be a mistake to chalk this up to a simple irreconcilability between literature and ‘reality’, or between elite and popular experiences. In fact, there are historical accounts which mirror much more closely an Erasmian enunciation of madness. Hélène Tropé, in her study of the hospital for the insane in Valencia, details the Holy Week rituals which, from the hospital’s foundation in the fifteenth century and continuing into the seventeenth, inscribed the patients into a narrative of holy innocence, ‘Christ’s madness’ (la locura de Cristo).32 In the archives of the Seville hospital, Carmen López Alonso confirms that the sermons of el loco Don Amaro — a compendium of satiric, carnivalesque tirades against what he perceived as the hypocrisies and vices of his day — do correspond to an actual patient of the hospital who was regularly allowed out (in the company of the Franciscan brothers in charge of daily patient care) and, in an age of censorship and economic misery, his public rants garnered significant funds for the hospital as well as the patronage of Seville’s most prominent figures.33 López Alonso concludes from this that the madness ‘found in many of the literary works of the period is in no way separated from day-to-day speech’ (que se encuentra en muchas de las obras literarias de la época no está en modo alguno alejado del hablar cotidiano).34 However, she goes on to note that the reason for this overlap most likely lies in the specific patterns of contact between madmen and the public: an interaction mediated by an institution (the asylum) and a religious order (the Franciscan brothers). This is not an unmarked, undefined convivencia social (social coexistence) of the public and the unreasonable, but rather the (re)presentation of an already-marked-as-mad man selected for such contact because his speech could be framed and interpreted by the Franciscans according to an allegorical narrative that served their purposes. And in fact, all of the examples we find of historical accounts of allegorical madnesses show this specific intervention of an institution. This brings us back to the natural affinity between authors of literary allegory and institutional discourses: both seek to fix meaning,

32

Hélène Tropé, Locura y sociedad en la Valencia de los siglos XV al XVII (Valencia: Diputación de Valencia, 1994), pp. 372–75. 33 Carmen López Alonso, Locura y sociedad en Sevilla: Historia del Hospital de los Inocentes (1436?-1840) (Sevilla: Diputación Provincial de Sevilla, 1988), pp. 188–90. Don Amaro’s sermons are collected in Sermones predicables del loco Don Amaro, ed. by Luís Estepa (Madrid: Mayo de Oro, 1987). 34 López Alonso, Locura y sociedad en Sevilla, p. 190.

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to create a narrative that admits a single interpretation. The Inquisition’s own intervention in these cases represents a similar desire — to fix a narrative of heresy or madness — but the witness testimonies in the files, unlike the accusations of the fiscal or the sentence read at the auto de fe, represent a previous stage in this process: the secret gathering of primary material which would be then shaped into the public narrative. Of course individual institutions may seek to project different narratives, and there is no implicit reason why literary allegory should coincide in its specific moral interpretation with legal or medical discourse. However, as José Antonio Maravall argues in his canonical work La cultura del barroco, the Baroque period in general and particularly in Spain was characterized by the ‘directed’ use of theatre, sermon, and other forms of symbolic representation by the absolutist monarchy.35 To an unprecedented degree, the monarchy and the Church controlled (via patronage and censorship) the narratives which were presented in pulpits, theatres, and popular festivals. With respect to madness, no example could be more telling than Felipe II’s decree in 1587 that granted control over all theatrical representations in the city to the administrators of the Hospital of Santa Creu (the city’s hospital for the insane), along with the right to take a percentage of fees from both the companies and the audience. Increasingly throughout the Baroque seventeenth century, this extension of institutional discourses from their elite authors through popular culture meant that the popular and literary ‘experiences’ of madness began to converge. However, despite the monarchy’s best efforts to extend these narratives to the largest swath of the public, for the most part these representations were urban phenomena. Rural and small-town residents were much less likely to be exposed to such narratives, and as a result, their perceptions of madness (or witchcraft, or any other subject) were much less likely to coincide with an institutional discourse. Thus it should not surprise us to find in 1562 Yunquera a view of madness which was much more open to ambiguity, contradiction, and complexity. If on the one hand we can point to the increasing ‘allegoricity’ of popular perceptions of madness in the seventeenth century, we can also find an inverse shift in the concept of literature. The reader will probably have wondered by now how, in an essay on early modern Spanish locos, I have refrained from any extended discussion of Don Quijote. If I have withheld seventeenth-century Spanish literature’s most famous loco, it is because he does not fit the allegorical 35

José Antonio Maravall, La cultura del Barroco: Análisis de una estructura histórica (Barcelona: Ariel, 1980).

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pattern and Don Quijote is not an allegory.36 In all likelihood, the Quijote began as a satiric short story in the same vein as El licenciado Vidriera and with a similarly satiric presentation of madness; in the first chapters, we are told by an omniscient narrator precisely why Don Quijote went mad, and the precise contours of his madness.37 However, this satiric, symbolic madness soon gives way to something much more complex and ambiguous. The omniscient narrator very literally disappears, and from Chapter VIII onward, we are left with a much more contested polyphony of narrators and interpreters. Furthermore, until the arrival at the ducal palace, Don Quijote is travelling through the small towns and countryside of Spain, interacting with precisely those subjects who would not yet have been fully exposed to official, urban narratives, and he elicits similar responses to those we see in Íñiguez’s file. Cervantes saw (or created) a new direction for literature as a genre which sought to represent popular experience. However, in 1615 Spain, popular experience was at the same time being increasingly shaped by the allegorizing, moralizing sphere of the monarchy. The two discourses of madness may have simply passed like ships (of fools) in the night.

36

Of course various readers throughout the centuries have tried to find an allegorical meaning for the novel. But the sheer diversity of allegorical interpretations (Foucault vs Miguel de Unamuno, for example) proves that Don Quijote is either not an allegory or is a very poorly written one. The relation between Don Quijote and literary and lived experiences of madness is the subject of my dissertation, Don Quixote in the Archives: Madness and Literature in Early Modern Spain (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2011). 37 Ramón Menéndez Pidal traces the origins of Don Quijote in ‘Un aspecto en la elaboración de El Quijote: Discurso leído en el Ateneo de Madrid’, published as ‘The Genesis of Don Quixote’, in The Anatomy of Don Quixote: A Symposium (New York: Dragon Press, 1932).

T ASSO ’S M ELANCHOLY AND ITS T REATMENT : A P ATIENT ’S U NEASY R ELATIONSHIP WITH M EDICINE AND P HYSICIANS Monica Calabritto

It has been abundantly proven that all melancholic individuals are deranged, because they imagine what they should not. However, it has been examined neither through practice, nor through reasoning what they decide deep from their mind and reason. (Delirare omnes melancholicos, quod ea quae non deberent imaginenentur, exploratissimum est; sed quod penitus e mente, e ratione decidant, neque usu, neque ratione probatum est.)1

I

n the last decades several insightful interpretations of Tasso’s melancholy have been written, with particular attention to the poet’s literary production and the early medical tradition. Bruno Basile in the early 1980s and Amedeo Quondam in 2001 wrote on Tasso’s melancholy and its relationship with the medical tradition based on an accurate reading of the poet’s massive epistolary collection.2 More recently, in 2007 Marion Wells devoted a chapter of her book

1

Girolamo Mercuriale, Responsorum et consultationum medicinalium in duo volumina digesta,

II (Venice: Giolito, 1589), p. 27, consultatio 9. Mercuriale’s consilia were printed in four tomes, by

various printers, in several editions. For the third tome I consulted the 1620 edition (Venice, apud Iacobum de Franciscis) and for the fourth the 1604 edition (Venice: Giolito, 1578–1604). 2

Bruno Basile, Poeta melancholicus: Tradizione classica e follia nell’ultimo Tasso (Pisa: Pacini, 1984), pp. 11–64; Amedeo Quondam, ‘Il gentiluomo malinconico’, in Arcipelago malinconia: Scenari e parole dell’interiorità, ed. by Alfonso Berardinelli and Biancamaria Farabotta (Rome: Donzelli, 2001), pp. 93–123. For the complete edition of Tasso’s letters, see Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Cesare Guasti, 5 vols (Florence: le Monnier, 1854–57). For other readings of Tasso’s

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The Secret Wound: Love Melancholy and Early Modern Romance to Tancredi, a character of the Gerusalemme liberata. With the help of a careful evaluation of the classical, medieval, and early modern medical texts on the subject Wells persuasively argues that Tancredi appears to suffer from love melancholy.3 With this essay I intend to tackle an aspect of Tasso’s melancholy that has not been considered in these studies. I will place the letters that Tasso wrote about his melancholy, its symptoms and the remedies to treat it in dialogue with the medical consilia that doctors wrote in the same period to advise other doctors and patients about this illness. Girolamo Mercuriale, one of the doctors with whom Tasso corresponded, a famous physician who taught at the universities of Padua, Bologna, and Pisa, composed more than four hundred consilia between 1563 and 1604, many of which were devoted to patients affected by melancholy whose symptoms and treatment were similar to those that Tasso described in his letters. Sixteenth-century consilia were written texts in which a doctor, or at times a patient, requested help about an individual case from another doctor. The doctor who received the request for help identified the illness, gave a possible prognosis, and prescribed a cure tailored to the patient. In other words, the consilium dealt with a specific illness of a specific patient on a specific occasion.4 I also intend to show that both Tasso’s letters to doctors requesting help and medications in which he describes and analyses his melancholic condition and its symptoms and Mercuriale’s consilia give a cross section of the way early modern patients and doctors interacted. As far as I know, there is no trace of Mercuriale’s melancholy, see P. Barucco, ‘Figures de la folie du Tasse’, Revue des études italiennes, 33 (1987), 60–73; Giovanna Scianatico, Il dubbio della ragione: Forme dell’irrazionalita nella letteratura del Cinquecento (Venice: Marsilio, 1989), pp. 101–56; Pasquale Guaragnella, Le maschere di Democrito e di Eraclito: Scritture e malinconie tra Cinque e Seicento (Fasano: Schena, 1990); Luba Freedman, ‘Melancholy in Tasso’s Poetry’, Neophilologus, 75 (1991), 94–101; Juliana Schiesari, ‘The Gendering of Melancholia: Torquato Tasso and Isabella di Morra’, in Refiguring Woman: Perspectives on Gender and the Italian Renaissance, ed. by Marilyn Migiel and Juliana Schiesari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 233–62; Juliana Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Lynn Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholy and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 39–83. 3

Marion Wells, The Secret Wound: Love Melancholy and Early Modern Romance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), pp. 139–78. 4 For a definition of the genre of the consilium, see Dean Putnam Lockwood, Ugo Benzi: Medieval Philosopher and Physician (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 47; and Joël Agrimi and Chiara Crisciani, Les consilia médicaux, trans. by Carole Viola (Turnhout: Brepols, 1994), p. 19.

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responses to Tasso. However, parts of it, specifically those concerning Tasso’s cure, can be drawn from letters that the poet wrote to other people in which he reports Mercuriale’s advice. With this essay I intend to place Tasso’s relationship to his illness and his dealings with doctors and medications within the context of the sixteenth-century medical treatment of melancholy as seen from the patient and the doctor’s points of view. These letters show a person deeply troubled by an obsessive fear of having been poisoned and bewitched. The obsessive fear of being bewitched, besides expressing Tasso’s deep and well-documented interest in magic, demonic presences, and witchcraft, can be read as the individual expression of a symptom that doctors described about other melancholic people medically treated in the early modern period, that is, the deeply rooted conviction that they were in danger.5 I will also consider Tasso’s attitude towards his physical disturbances as indicative of the plurality of choices early modern patients had in dealing with their illness and its treatment, as Gianna Pomata and Katharine Park argue in their works respectively on early modern Bologna and Florence.6 Tasso’s letters to physicians reveal an individual who at times intimated to doctors which medications they should give him and how they should treat him. They reveal a patient who was not averse to alternative forms of treatment that involved astrology and objects endowed with a supposedly magical power. Finally, if it is true that Tasso’s letters offer a partial, highly subjective and, at times, unreliable view of the poet’s illness, they can also provide the modern reader with an opening into a very educated and well-read patient’s evaluation of his own illness. The comparative analysis of Tasso’s letters and of sixteenth-century medical consilia on melancholy underscores how the view of certain physicians such as Mercuriale centred on the illness’s physiological understanding, contrasted with Tasso’s view,

5

Mercuriale states that melancholic people are deranged because they imagine what they should not. Mercuriale, Responsa et consultationes medicinales, II, p. 27, consultatio 9. Mercuriale was also involved in the diagnosis of a man, Paolo Barbieri, who killed his wife in a fit of madness, and who was affected by melancholic humours. After he killed his wife, Barbieri thought that someone was following him and wanted to kill him. Mercuriale thought that these were signs of madness and extreme frenzy produced by the melancholic humours which created ‘diabolical and wild images and thoughts’ in the man’s mind. See Monica Calabritto, ‘A Case of Melancholic Humours and Dilucida Intervalla’, Intellectual History Review, 18 (2008), 139–54 (pp. 147–48). 6 Gianna Pomata, Contracting a Cure: Patients, Healers, and the Law in Early Modern Bologna (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Katharine Park, ‘Medicine and Magic: The Healing Arts’, in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. by Judith Brown and Robert C. Davis (London: Longman, 1998), pp. 129–49.

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which combined a materialistic attitude towards the illness with philosophical and religious perspectives about the power of imagination and supernatural entities. ‘I thought that he was going to fall in Tasso’s condition’ (Feci giudizio che fosse per cadere ne’ termini del Tasso) is the colourful expression that Guido Coccapani, a bailiff of the Duke Alfonso II d’Este, used to describe Battista Guarini’s sudden departure from Ferrara in 1588. As Angelo Solerti suggests in his biography of the poet, stating in 1588 that one fell ‘in Tasso’s condition’ was somehow equivalent to saying that the person acted in a strange and bizarre way.7 By that date Tasso had already left the hospital of Sant’Anna, where the Duke Alfonso had him spend more than seven years of his life. Tasso’s forced seclusion began in March 1579, after the poet, back from more than a year of self-imposed exile from Ferrara, had gone to the ducal palace and hurled injurious words towards the Duke and, perhaps, his new wife Margherita Gonzaga. The official explanation that the Duke and his officials gave of Tasso’s imprisonment was that the poet had become too unbalanced because of the melancholic humours affecting his brain. Indeed, even before this disastrous outburst, Tasso was medically treated for his melancholy. In May 1577 reports to the Duke stated that Tasso ‘allowed himself to be bled and purged’ with selfmade concoctions (‘con preparativi propri’) and that he was taking medications — syrups and pills — prescribed by a doctor Josefo from Romagna that were supposed to help evacuate his burned melancholic humours.8 On 17 June 1577, Tasso attacked one of the servants of the court with a knife while with the Duchess of Urbino, Lucrezia D’Este, the sister of Duke Alfonso. The Venetian nobleman Maffeo Veniero wrote to the Duke of Ferrara, who was then away from the court, that Tasso ‘believes he has sinned of heresy and fears to be poisoned’. Veniero

7 8

Angelo Solerti, Vita di Torquato Tasso, 3 vols (Turin: Loescher, 1895), I, 836.

‘Egli ebbe principio di purgazione principalmente con preparativi proprî, e poi con due salassi, l’uno alla vena del fegato, e l’altro a quella della testa, di sangue malinconico ed adusto; poi con altri sciroppi, e con pillole di lapislazzoli, che per questo mi dice Messer Josefo, medico romagnolo, che l’ha curato, fecero ottimo effetto.’ Letter of Francesco Maria Novello to Alfonso II, in Solerti, Vita di Torquato Tasso, II, 118. In the same letter doctor Josefo suggests that leeches be applied to Tasso, ‘following in this treatment the order that Mainardo gives for a similar case in one of his epistole, which is also Sir Antonio Maria Canani’s opinion’ (p. 119). Giovanni Mainardi or Manardi (1462–1536) taught at the university and practised medicine in Ferrara. Antonio Maria Canani (end of fifteenth century–1578) also taught at the university in Ferrara from 1530 to 1578.

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thought that these obsessions and fears were caused by ‘melancholic blood obstructing the heart and exhaling fumes to the brain’.9 Veniero’s opinion corresponds to the medical description of melancholia hypochondriaca, which physicians thought was caused by burned juices formed in the hypochondria — the portion of the body between the ribs and the innards — creating obstructions in the intestines and affecting first the stomach and the liver, and then ascending to the brain.10 A few days after this accident, the record book of the ducal apothecary began reporting the expenses for medications prepared specifically for Tasso, which appear with regular frequency until June of the following year.11 Around this period Tasso left Ferrara and started wandering throughout several cities — Mantua, Padua, Venice — until February 1579, when his return to Ferrara led to the fateful accident that brought him to the hospital of Sant’Anna. If at the beginning of his imprisonment in Sant’Anna, Tasso was kept in shackles as a furiosus, after more or less a month he was permitted to write letters.12 They reveal the conditions in which Tasso was kept in the first year of his imprisonment were far from ideal in terms of cleanliness and food.13 In a letter to Giacomo Buoncompagni written on 17 May 1580, Tasso stated that after more than fourteen months of reclusion in the hospital, he still did not have ‘any of the comforts that common men usually receive’. In the same letter Tasso lamented

9

‘[Tasso] ha un umor particolare, sì di credenza d’aver peccato d’eresia, come di timor d’essere avvelenato, che nasce (cred’io) da un sangue melanconico costretto al cuore, e fumante al cervello’. Solerti, Vita di Torquato Tasso, I, 221. 10

The word hypochondria literally refers to the organs below the soft cartilage of the ribs. On this subject, see also Yasmin Haskell’s article in this volume. 11

Solerti, Vita di Torquato Tasso, III, 38–45.

12

On the treatment of Tasso as furiosus, see Fabio Pittorru, Torquato Tasso: L’uomo, il poeta, il cortigiano (Milan: Bompiani, 1982), p. 221, where a passage of a letter that Camillo Ariosto wrote to the Ferrarese ambassador in Venice is reproduced in which Ariosto states that after his imprisonment Tasso ‘is ill treated and pitied by all’. 13

Pittorru, Torquato Tasso: L’uomo, il poeta, il cortigiano, pp. 225–30. In a letter to Scipione Gonzaga written in May 1579, Tasso complains that he is constantly thirsty (‘Assai felice d’esser mi parrebbe se senza sospetto potessi trarmi la sete da la quale continuamente son travagliato, e se, com’uno di questi uomini ordinari, potessi in qualche povero albergo menar la mia vita in libertà’) and that the terrible conditions of his life increase his sadness (‘E ‘l timor di continua prigionia molto accresce la mia mestizia; e l’accresce l’indegnità che mi conviene usare; e lo squallore de la barba e de le chiome e de gli abiti, e la sordidezza e ‘l succidume fieramente m’annoiano’). Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, II, 60–61, letter 124.

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that the hospital chaplain had not once gone to comfort him with the sacraments of confession or communion, probably because Tasso was still considered pazzo furioso.14 As far as we know, the later years of Tasso’s forced seclusion became more bearable: he was provided with an additional room in the hospital, and both the hygienic conditions of the space where he lived and the food he was assigned improved. In the last period he spent in Sant’Anna, Tasso was even given permission to go out, although he needed a chaperon. Whatever the reason for his imprisonment, Tasso’s melancholic temperament appears to have manifested itself before he was placed in the hospital of Sant’Anna and to have continued after he was released in the summer of 1586 under the supervision of Vincenzo Gonzaga, then Prince of Mantua. In the numerous letters he addressed to physicians, Tasso showed how insistently he sought them out and, at the same time, how deeply he distrusted them. If at first, and especially before his imprisonment, Tasso’s recourse to doctors could have been prompted by a desire to appease the duke’s requests that he be purged and medicated, later in his life the poet actively tried to enlist the help of various Italian physicians by writing to them for help, discussing with them his illness and its symptoms, requesting medications, or reflecting on the relationship between medicine and philosophy. Tasso considered himself affected by a ‘fierce melancholy’, which he defined as both a manifestation of his natural temperament and pathogenic, that is, caused by other agents, such as bad diet.15 Tasso asserted that this illness influenced his body and his soul.16 The distinction between ‘constitutional’ and pathological melancholy, which can already be found in Problemata, XXX, 1 attributed to Aristotle, was commonly used by sixteenth-century doctors in their explanation of the disease. The link between soul and body was also a staple of the Hippocratic-Galenic theory, and in their consilia doctors such as Mercuriale treated patients with remedies meant to address both body and soul. According 14

Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, II, 89, letter 133. On Giacomo Boncompagni, bastard son of Pope Gregory XIII (1572–85), see Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (DBI) [accessed 7 April 2009]. 15

Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, II, 6, letter 122 to Maurizio Cataneo (1579); 129, letter 164 to Maurizio Cataneo (11 June 1581), (‘Ed io, che sono malinconico per natura e per accidente’). 16

‘Essendo io infermo d’infermità più tosto noiosa che grave, la quale non è meno fastidiosa a l’animo c’al corpo’. Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, II, 224, letter 230 to Giovanni Angelo Papio (1583).

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to early modern doctors, the main cause for insanity was physiological. However, in several of his consilia Mercuriale underlined that disturbances of the mind (perturbationes animi), such as falling in love or witnessing a traumatic event, could also induce the imbalance of the humours, producing insanity.17 The relationship that Mercuriale drew between mind and physical illness accorded with Plato’s assertion in the Charmis, quoted by Mercuriale in a consilium he wrote for a young melancholic man, that ‘all the misfortunes from the mind overflow into the body’.18 Melancholy was often caused by a reckless lifestyle, especially when it came to food, which was never entirely digested, and therefore produced noxious vapours that ascended to the heart and the brain, creating fear, sadness, and perturbationes animi in those who were either naturally inclined to it or were brought to such misfortunes by external circumstances.19 Between 1583 and 1595 Tasso corresponded with various Italian physicians: the already mentioned Girolamo Mercuriale; Vincenzo Laureo, a dear friend of Tasso’s father Bernardo, who studied medicine, philosophy, and theology at the university of Padua and became a cardinal in 1583; Giovan Battista Cavallara, the court doctor of the Gonzaga family who had the task of treating Tasso’s melancholy when Tasso resided in the city after his release from Sant’Anna; Giovanni Antonio Pisano, the personal doctor of Cardinal Paolo Burali of Naples and protomedico of the kingdom of Naples; and Ottavio Egizio, another Neapolitan doctor.20 Judging solely from the list above, it seems that Tasso was

17 Mercuriale, Responsa et consultationes medicinales, II, p. 56, consultatio 23 (‘De melancholia, diuturno capitis dolore, et lue gallica, pro nobili iuvene ariminensi’); III, fol. 42v (‘Pro illustri iuvene melancholia laborante’), fol. 122r (‘pro illustri equite senensi melancholia laborante’); IV , p. 6 (‘Pro illustri iuvene Adamo Polono, melancholia laborante’). 18

‘Ut dicebat Plato in charmide, cuncta pene mala ab animo in corpus redundant’. Mercuriale, Responsa et consultationes medicinales, II, p. 56, consultatio 23. 19

Mercuriale, Responsa et consultationes medicinales, III, fols 72 r–73 r, consultatio 108.

20 On Vincenzo Laureo (1523–92), see DBI [accessed 8 April 2009]. Tasso mentions Laureo as an excellent example of ‘umano ambasciatore’ in the dialogue Il Messaggiero (1582), which will be discussed later in the essay. Torquato Tasso, Il Messaggiero (1582), in Dialoghi, ed. by Bruno Basile (Milan: Mursia, 1991), p. 89. Cavallara (15??–87) studied medicine in Padua. In 1578 he became the court physician of the Gonzaga family in Mantua. He wrote several works on the nature and function of bloodletting and on pharmaceutical medications. See for instance Discorsi […] sopra le compositioni degli antidoti, & medicamenti, che piu si costumano di dar per bocca: Di nuovo dal medesimo in questa seconda

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very keen on contacting reputable doctors of high social stature and influence. In his letters, Tasso insisted on requesting their help; when unhappy, he did not have any qualms about showing his displeasure either to the doctor or to friends. While we know that a doctor Josefo from Romagna treated Tasso between 1577 and 1578,21 we can only assume that physicians — perhaps those appointed by the court — visited or were consulted about the poet’s health in the first years of his imprisonment in Ferrara. The first extant letter that Tasso wrote to a physician was written in June 1583 to Mercuriale, a doctor with an international reputation in medical and erudite circles. Mercuriale was a very famous physician, and for good reasons. He had taught at Padua, Bologna, and Pisa, and he had authored many medical, antiquarian, and historical treatises.22 During Mercuriale’s tenure in Padua from 1569 to 1587 he did not meet Tasso, who lived as a student between Padua and Bologna in the early 1560s. However, after Tasso left Padua, he kept in contact with some members of the Paduan intellectual milieu, among them the erudite humanist Giovan Vincenzo Pinelli, who might have suggested Mercuriale to Tasso as an expert in treating all sorts of diseases, including melancholy.23 Tasso wrote to Mercuriale that he had been sick for a few

impressione ricorretti, & ampliati (Mantova: Osanna, 1585). See also Solerti, Vita di Torquato Tasso, I, 506. Giovanni Antonio Pisano taught medicina practica at the University of Naples from 1557 to 1585, and was in contact with Giovan Battista Della Porta. See Francesco Torraca and others, Storia dell’Università di Napoli (Naples: Ricciardi, 1924), p. 331; Paolo Piccari, Giovan Battista Della Porta: Il filosofo, il retore, lo scienziato (Milan: Angeli, 2007), p. 20. I have not been able to find any information about Ottavio Egizio, except that he was considered a doctor of ‘grande fama’ (Solerti, Vita di Torquato Tasso, I, 609). 21

See p. 204 of this essay.

22

On Girolamo Mercuriale, see the following works by Nancy Siraisi: ‘Anatomizing the Past: Physicians and History in Renaissance Culture’, Renaissance Quarterly, 53 (2000), 1–30; ‘History, Antiquarianism, and Medicine: The Case of Girolamo Mercuriale’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 64 (2003), 231–51; ‘Historiae, Natural History, Roman Antiquity, and some Roman Physicians’, in Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Gianna Pomata and Nancy Siraisi (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 325–54; History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007), pp. 42–55. See also the proceedings of the conference organized for the four-hundredth anniversary of Mercuriale’s death, Girolamo Mercuriale: Medicina e Cultura nell’Europa del Cinquencento. Atti del Convegno ‘Girolamo Mercuriale e lo spazio scientifico e culturale del Cinquecento’, Forlì, 8–11 Novembre 2006, ed. by Alessandro Arcangeli and Vivian Nutton (Florence: Olschki, 2008), and issue 11 of Medicina e Storia (2006), entirely dedicated to Girolamo Mercuriale. 23

Between February of 1564 and October 1565 Tasso ‘frequented with regularity the home and library of Gian Vincenzo Pinelli’. See Theodore J. Cachey, Jr, ‘Tasso’s “Navigazione del

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years with an illness that he could not identify.24 However, he firmly believed that he had been bewitched: ‘Nondimeno io ho certa opinione di essere stato ammaliato’. Notwithstanding the doubts surrounding the original cause of his sickness (‘Ma qualunque sia stata la cagione del mio male’), Tasso continued the letter by listing the physiological symptoms that plagued him. It is worth quoting in its entirety this section of the letter, as the symptoms that Tasso listed are a mixture of physiological and psychological signs that could either be attributed to a humoral intemperies in the poet’s body or to his supposed bewitchment: Gnawing in the stomach, with a bit of blood flow; ringing in the ears and the head, which sometimes is so strong that I feel as if I had in my head one of those winding watches; a constant imagination of various things, all unpleasant, which upsets me in such a way that I cannot apply my mind to my studies for more than a few minutes. The more I try to keep my mind concentrated, the more I am distracted by various imaginations, and sometimes by great anger, which moves within me according to my imaginations. Furthermore, after eating my head always fumes exceedingly and it gets very warm. In everything I hear, I, so to speak, imagine some human voice, so that very often it seems to me that inanimate things speak, and at night numerous dreams upset me.25 (Rodimento d’intestino, con un poco di flusso di sangue: tintinni ne gli orecchi e ne la testa, alcuna volta sì forti che mi pare di averci un di questi orioli da corda: imaginazione continua di varie cose, e tutte spiacevoli; la qual mi perturba in modo, ch’io non posso applicar la mente a gli studi pur un sestodecimo d’ora; e quanto più mi sforzo di tenervela intenta, tanto più sono distratto da varie imaginazioni, e qualche volta da sdegni grandissimi, i quali si muovono in me secondo le varie fantasie che mi nascono. Oltra ciò, sempre dopo il mangiare la testa mi fuma fuor di modo, e si riscalda grandemente; ed in tutto ciò ch’io odo, vo, per così dire, fingendo con la fantasia alcuna voce umana, di maniera che mi pare assai spesso che parlino le cose inanimate; e la notte sono perturbato da vari sogni.)

Tasso alluded to conversations that he had had by letter and probably also in person with the Capuchin friar Marco da Ferrara, who might have also visited him

Mondo Nuovo” and the Origins of the “Columbus Encomium” (GL, XV , 31–32)’, Italica, 63 (1992), 326–44 (pp. 329–30). Among the other intellectuals who visited Pinelli’s home it is worth mentioning the names of Galileo Galilei, Justus Lipsius, Sperone Speroni, Fulvio Orsini, and Jacques Auguste de Thou. On Pinelli’s life, see Paolo Gualdo, Vita Joannis Vincentii Pinelli (Augsburg: Mangus, 1607); and Marcella Grendler, ‘A Greek Collection in Padua: The Library of Giovan Vincenzo Pinelli (1535–1601)’, Renaissance Quarterly, 33 (1980), 386–416. 24

‘I have been sick for some years, and I do not know [the nature of] my sickness’ (Sono alcuni anni ch’io sono infermo, e l’infermità mia non è conosciuta da me). Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, II, 237, letter 244. 25

Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, II, 237, letter 244.

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in prison once, and other religious and lay individuals about the nature of his illness and about ‘certain’ things he believed he had heard while being enchanted by his imagination.26 One can speculate that the tenor of the conversation with Marco da Ferrara was about bewitchment, since in a letter sent to the friar a year and half earlier Tasso talked about the nature of miracles, God, and the devils.27 Tasso ended the letter by stating that he was willing to accept both divine and human remedies, and that if Mercuriale could not send him medications, he would readily accept the doctor’s opinion about his condition. He even suggested that Mercuriale ask his colleague Melchior Wieland what he thought about his condition.28 From the allusions that Tasso made in letters addressed to friends at different times, it appears that Mercuriale did respond with a letter in which he must have suggested a treatment. His advice seems to have focused on the physiological aspect of the illness, leaving out the more problematic part of the bewitchment. For the time being, suffice it to say that both in his treatise of medicina practica and in his consilia, Mercuriale exhibited scepticism about supernatural phenomena linked to melancholy. In a letter to Pinelli, Tasso mentioned that Mercuriale suggested to him a medication for the memory, which, Tasso constantly lamented, was decreasing, and for the burning fumes ascending to his head.29 In another letter, to the doctor and erudite Biagio Bernardi, written on 1 October 1583, Tasso wrote that Mercuriale had 26

‘And sometimes I have been so enchanted by [my] imagination, that I seem to have heard (though I do not want to say that I heard for sure) certain things, which I conferred with the Capuchin friar Father Marco, who is bringing this letter to you, and with other priests and lay people with whom I spoke of my sickness’ (E talora sono stato rapito da l’ imaginazione in modo, che mi pare d’avere udito (se pure non voglio dire d’avere udito certo) alcune cose, le quali io ho conferito co’ l padre fra Marco cappuccino apportator della presente, e con altri padri e laici con i quali ho parlato del mio male). Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, II, 237, letter 244. In 1581 Tasso wrote several letters on religious matters to the Capuchin friar Father Marco, who appears to have resided in Mantua. Ibid., II, 156, letter 188; p. 158, letter 189; p. 192, letter 191. In letter 191, dated 3 December 1581, Tasso welcomed the news that Father Marco would come to Ferrara. 27

Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, II, 158, letter 189, 11 October 1581.

28

Known also by his Latinized name Guilandino, the Prussian Melchior Wieland was a famous botanist who became the second director of Padua’s botanical garden, from 1561 to 1590. 29

‘[I beg you] to ask Sir Mercuriale to send me the recipe for the medication, which I wish it could be very beneficial and good for my memory and could cure the fumes in my head’ (Che preghi il signor Mercuriale a mandarmi la ricetta de la conservativa; la qual vorrei che fosse giovevolissima e buona per la memoria, e rimediare a’ fumi de la testa). Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, II, 240, letter 247.

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recommended that he be bled, have cauteries applied to his arm and to his leg, completely avoid wine, and drink broth.30 Tasso was discriminating in accepting Mercuriale’s suggestions: he wanted to be bled and have a cautery, but only to his arm, and he would not give up wine — it seems that Tasso drank large quantities of wine during his lifetime, so abstaining from drinking would have seemed to him an excessive sacrifice.31 Several years later, in a letter written in 1587 to Scipione Gonzaga, Tasso modified his original report of Mercuriale’s advice, stating that the physician told him to ‘improve’ the quality of the wine he drank; after all, Tasso wrote, he would not like to attempt anything that would harm him and without the blessing of a physician.32 From the content of these letters, it is quite safe to assume that Mercuriale diagnosed Tasso’s illness as a combination of melancholy caused by natural humoral imbalance, bad diet, and bad lifestyle, all of which caused Tasso to suffer from melancholia hypocondriaca, as defined earlier. Melancholia hypocondriaca was the disease that seems to have plagued the Italian elite in the second half of the sixteenth century. Mercuriale stated that people throughout Italy suffered from this disease and asked his advice every day, defined it as a ‘protean’ illness, and

30

Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, II, 248, letter 258. Biagio Bernardi, a native of Forlì, taught medicine at Cesena, Ferrara, and Bologna, and became the chief physician of the Grand Duke Cosimo I de’ Medici. Among his scholarly works, Bernardi wrote De Laudibus vitae rusticae ad secundam odem Horatii (Florence: Giunti, 1613). In 1585 Bernardi edited a book of Tasso’s poems ‘according to the Author’s authority’ (secondo la mente dell’Autore) and dedicated it to Cardinal Giulio Canani. He died in Forlì in 1613. Vania de Maldé, ‘Il postillato Bernardi delle “Rime” tassiane’, Studi Tassiani, 29–31 (1981–83), 19–62 (pp. 19–21). 31

‘E s’ella crede che l’arte del signor Mercuriale possa o ritornarmi la memoria perduta, o conservarmi questo poco che m’è rimaso, n’avrò grand’obligo a l’Eccellenza sua ed a Vostra Signoria. Vidi il suo parere, che mi mandò per iscritto; e volentieri mi caverei sangue, e mi farei fare un altro cauterio nel braccio, come egli consiglia. Ma quello de la gamba, e l’astinenza del vino ch’egli mi comanda, sono rimedi troppo fastidiosi. Dico l’astenersene in tutto, ed il bere brodo di continuo; perché nel ber poco vino e temperato, l’ubbidirei senza difficoltà.’ Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, II, 248, letter 258. 32

‘As I already wrote to you, I am frenetic and forgetful. My sight is very weak, and I have many other ills, which should need many cures. However, improving the quality of the wine, having three or four bloodlettings and two cauteries in my arms will not harm him. Indeed, this was what Mercuriale advised me to do, and I would not like to try anything that could hurt me’ (Sono frenetico, com’io le scrissi, e sono smemorato. Ho la vista debolissima, e molti altri mali, a cui sarebbero necessari molti rimedi. Ma il migliorar vino, e ‘l trarmi tre o quattro volte sangue, e farmi due cauteri ne le braccia, non potrà nuocermi. E fu consiglio di Mercuriale; né io vorrei tentar cosa, che mi nocesse). Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, III, 159, letter 770.

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compared it to a Trojan horse from which all the symptoms arose.33 In a consilium for a young man who Mercuriale thought was affected by melancholia hypochondriaca, the constant fevers afflicting the patient were caused by the inflammation of the mouth of the lower stomach and were a symptom of the disease, as Galen and other ancient authorities had proven. The inflammation was caused by obstructions in the hypochondrium, producing ‘most frequent vapours both watery and melancholic’ (vapores creberrimi tam pituitosi quam melancholici). These fumes spread throughout the body and ascended to the head. The cure for melancholy, which varied little from one melancholic individual to another, regardless of gender, consisted in not committing mistakes in the res non naturales, that is, air, food, drink, sleep, sex, and weather, as well as in avoiding worries and excessive intellectual exertion.34 One surgical remedy was bloodletting in the arms, knees, and the haemorrhoids. Another surgical remedy consisted in applying cauteries to the back of both knees in order to divert the ascension of the poisonous fumes produced in the lower stomach to the heart and the brain. Finally, the pharmacological remedies were made of herbs such as the buglossa (anchusa), sena, and veratrum nigrum, a type of hellebore, all of which force the body to evacuate the humoral dregs causing the disease. Other

33

‘Iam vero quicunque varios melancholiae mores expendere diligenter vult, absque labore cognoscit, eum instar Prothei cuiusdammille formas habere, milleque admirandos effectus in humanis corporibus producere.’ Mercuriale, Responsa et consultationes medicinales, II, p. 247, consultatio 101. ‘Qui fiat ut hac nostra tempestate videantur tot qui hypocondriaca melancolia exercentur, diu ac multum mecum cogitavi, cui ex plurimis qui quotidie, & in hac urbe, & in alijs regionibus ad me confluunt, maiorem partem huiusmodi contumacissima aegritudine detentos conspicare accidit.’ Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, III, 139, letter 86. The urbs to which Mercuriale alludes in this passage is not Bologna, but Pisa, since the consilia included in Book III of the collection were written between 1593 and 1597 at the time he was teaching at that city’s university. See also Mercuriale, Responsa et consultationes medicinales, II, p. 27, consultatio 9, p. 247, consultatio 101; III, p. 139, consultatio 86. For a problematization of what appears to be a high incidence of melancholy in sixteenth-century Europe, see Angus Gowland, ‘The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy’, Past and Present, 191 (2006), 77–120. See also Yasmin Haskell’s chapter in this volume for further discussion of this issue in light of Gowland’s article. 34

Mercuriale, Responsa et consultationes medicinales, II, p. 254, consultatio 103. By res non naturales early modern medicine meant those things in the realm of nature that do not have to do with the constitution of the body. See Ian Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance: The Case of Learned Medicine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 252; Luis Garcia-Ballester, ‘On the Origin of the “Six Non-Natural Things” in Galen’, Sudhoffs Archiv: Vierteljahrsschrift für Geschichte der Medizin und der Naturwissenschaften, der Pharmazie und der Mathematik. Beihefte, 32 (1993), 105–15.

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herbal remedies included the borago (borage), a plant thought to have antidepressive qualities, the lupulus (hops), used to treat insomnia, nervousness, and anxiety, the oxalis (wood sorrel), a herb for the treatment of liver and digestive disorders, the rhubarb, with purgative properties, the cardamom, with digestive qualities, and the scolopendrium (hart’s tongue fern), which removes obstructions from the liver and the spleen.35 In cases when the heart was affected as well, Mercuriale suggested, following Avicenna’s advice, putting a sachet of flowers over one’s heart to be carried all the time.36 In the recipes issued by the ducal pharmacy between 1577 and 1578 for Tasso’s medications, it appears that the poet was treated with hellebore, borage, and other purgative concoctions, but also with opium and an ointment, populeon, made of poplar buds, mandrake, black poppies, and henbane, which were used to offer relief from insomnia but could also give hallucinations.37 Melancholy could also produce effects similar to those caused by mania, or be accompanied by mania. A twenty-year-old man had the strong desire to strike himself and others, which was the sign of a deranged mind and demonstrated a warm temperament. However, Mercuriale explained this peculiar behaviour by stating that burnt humours upset the hypochondrium and the liver, and consequently the brain. Mercuriale recommended that the young man be cured through sleep, a moderate life and diet, daily evacuation, bloodletting from the right arm and the haemorrhoids, and cauteries in both knees.38 Mercuriale, like many other physicians of the period, believed that excessive meditation and study, anguish of the mind, and constant imagination of dangers

35

For a sixteenth-century text dedicated to herbs, their composites and their function in relation to the four humours, see De medicamentis (Venice: Giunta, 1552), by the Ferrarese physician Antonio ‘Musa’ Brasavola. 36 Mercuriale, Responsa et consultationes medicinales, II, p. 211, consultatio 87; III, fol. 73 r, ‘De destillatione, et melancholia ad Leonardum Gerardinum medicum’; IV , p. 55, consultatio 25. 37

Patrizia Castelli refers to the writings of both Girolamo Cardano and Giambattista Della Porta, who define the herbs mentioned above as hallucinogenic. ‘“Ali bianche vestì”: La demonologia poetica nel manierismo tassiano’, in Torquato Tasso e l’Università, ed. by Walter Moretti and Luigi Pepe (Florence: Olschki, 1997), pp. 389–410 (p. 407). For the use of hellebore in postTridentine Italy, see Piero Camporesi, La carne impassibile (Milan: Il Saggiatore, 1983), pp. 131–38. See also Mercuriale, Responsa et consultationes medicinales, I, p. 59, consultatio 25 and IV , p. 107, consultatio 49, where he criticizes the use of hellebore for treating melancholy, as it warms up the body and inner organs excessively. 38

Mercuriale, Responsa et consultationes medicinales, III, fols 42 v –43 v , consultatio pro illustri iuvene melancholia laborante.

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and harm could cause and increase melancholy.39 In his treatise of medicina practica and in his consilia Mercuriale defined melancholy as the condition of ‘corrupted imagination’ or ‘corrupted discourse’, or both.40 He was convinced that melancholic people were very difficult to treat, since they were annoying towards their doctors and constantly added remedies upon remedies, even if they found them useless for the improvement of their health.41 Finally, he believed that the ‘protean’ nature of melancholy and its ‘wondrous’ effects on human bodies might lead people ‘ignorant of the things of nature’ to think that supernatural entities (‘Demonas’, ‘Daemonium’) produced the disease, and pointed out that Hippocrates and Avicenna had already observed the development of this sort of prejudice during their lifetimes.42 One can only speculate as to the kind of attitude with which Mercuriale interpreted Tasso’s belief that he had been bewitched. In the debate about whether the powers of imagination are caused by either natural or supernatural factors, Mercuriale’s position can be squarely identified with an ‘extreme Galenic

39

Mercuriale, Responsa et consultationes medicinales, I, p. 199, consultatio 86 ‘pro iuvene melancholico’ who should keep away from ‘litterarum studia’; II, pp. 213–14, consultatio 88 for a noble Polish man; IV , p. 89, consultatio 41 for a friend whose natural sanguine temperament has become melancholic, ‘studijs vero, animique aegritudinibus’; p. 157, consultatio 55 for a nobleman from Perugia, whom Mercuriale suspects to be like many other melancholic individuals, who ‘quod quae non sunt, imagine[n]tur, aut parva multo maiora sibi finga[n]t’. 40

‘Communiter comprehendit omne delirium, quod sequitur vel febres, vel alios morbos: proprie autem significant vel discursum depravatum, vel imaginatio depravata, vel utrumque.’ Girolamo Mercuriale, Medicina Practica, 5 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Schöwetter, 1602), I, 27. Mercuriale’s text is based on his lectures at the University of Padua, where he taught from 1569 until 1587. For selected cases in which Mercuriale talks about the corruption of the imagination, see Mercuriale, Responsa et consultationes medicinales, I, p. 87, consultatio 39, p. 198, consultatio 86; v v v v r r II, p. 80, consultatio 33; III, fols 31 –32 , 42 , 53 –54 , 91 ; IV , p. 40, consultatio 18; p. 89, consultatio 41, p. 121, consultatio 55. 41 ‘Melancholici enim, quemandmodum nosti, uti numquam a quovis remediorum genere utilitatem percipiunt, sic iugiter Medicis solent esse molesti, ut alia alijs praesidia semper adiungant.’ Mercuriale, Responsa et consultationes medicinales, I, p. 116, consultatio 53. 42

‘Iam vero quicunque varios melancholiae mores expendere diligenter vult, absque labore cognoscit, eum instar Prothei cuiusdammille formas habere, milleque admirandos effectus in humanis corporibus producere, qui non temere, ut perhibent Hippocrates, & Avicennas a populo rerum naturae ignaro in Demonas referuntur.’ Mercuriale, Responsa et consultationes medicinales, II, p. 47, consultatio 101. See also IV , p. 28, consultatio 13 and p. 89, consultatio 41.

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rationalism’ that explained melancholic behaviour and delusions in purely physiological terms, attributing them to the corruption of one’s imagination.43 Tasso’s conviction that he was bewitched cannot be attributed to ignorance or simple-mindedness, but rather to a vast knowledge concerning the existence of demons and their link with the faculty of imagination, as can be seen in the dialogue Il Messaggiero, which Tasso wrote while at the hospital of Sant’Anna in 1580, and revised in 1583 and 1587.44 The interlocutors of this dialogue are Tasso and a spirit, whom the poet at the end of the text considers the product of the power of his imagination while lost in deep contemplation.45 The theme of melancholy is woven into a discussion pertaining to the relationship between reality, vision, and dream, the existence of angels and demons and their association with humans, and the veracity of the existence of witches. Tasso’s attraction to demonology, astrology, and the power of imagination, evident in Il Messaggiero, follows from the poet’s interest in neoplatonic and occultist texts, which also reflects a wider interest in these subjects within Italian neoplatonic and Aristotelian circles.46 Critics have argued that Tasso’s views on the subject of 43 Gowland, ‘The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy’, p. 92. It is important to point out that corruption of one’s imagination did not rule out the notion of supernatural interference. See Donald Beecher’s contribution to this volume, pp. 103–38. 44

See Tasso, Dialoghi, p. 19.

45

‘I wanted to continue [talking], when it seemed to me that he [the spirit] beckoned to me, took himself away from my sight and disappeared, blowing a very sweet scent of ambrosia and leaving in the room his heavenly light, shining wonderfully, while disappearing. However, I roused and I realized that I had philosophized in my deep imagination, as contemplative men usually do during their meditation’ (Voleva oltre seguire, quando mi parve ch’egli accennando mi si togliesse da gli occhi e disparisse, spirando ne lo sparire soavissimi odori d’ambrosia e lasciando la camera de la sua celeste luce mirabilmente luminosa; ma io, riscotendomi, m’accorsi che ne l’alta mia imaginazione aveva filosofato non altramente che gli uomini contemplativi sogliano ne la loro contemplazione). Tasso, Il Messaggiero, p. 104. 46 Gowland, ‘The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy’, p. 91. For a succinct list of the most important texts that Tasso consulted for the composition of this dialogue, see Bruno Basile, ‘Nota introduttiva’, in Tasso, Il Messaggiero, pp. 29–31. On the issue of demonology in Tasso’s work and in Il Messaggiero, see also Bortolo T. Sozzi, ‘Il magismo nel Tasso’, in Studi sul Tasso (Pisa: Nistri-Lischi, 1954), pp. 303–36 (pp. 305–12); Ezio Raimondi, ‘Tra grammatica e magia’, in Rinascimento Inquieto (Palermo: Manfredi, 1965), pp. 197–227 (pp. 206–18); Stuart Clark, ‘Tasso and the Literature of Witchcraft’, in Renaissance in Ferrara and its European Horizons, ed. by J. Salmons and Walter Moretti (Cardiff: University of Wales Press; Ravenna: Lapucci, Edizioni del Girasole, 1984), pp. 3–21; Walter Stevens, ‘La demonologia nella poetica del Tasso’, in Torquato Tasso e l’Università, ed. by Moretti and Pepe, pp. 411–32; and Walter Stevens, ‘Tasso and the Witches’, Annali d’Italianistica, 12 (1994), 181–212.

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demons, witchcraft, and possession need to be placed in the context of the ‘medico-empiricist’ tradition represented by authors like Paracelsus, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, Girolamo Cardano, and Giovan Battista Della Porta, and have observed that around the time Tasso wrote about bewitchment and spirits in his letters, the topic of diabolic possession in relation to physiological illness received increasing attention.47 At the beginning of the dialogue Tasso asks himself if the vision of the spirit with whom he is talking could be the product of the imagination (imaginazione) of ‘a man who, awake, renders himself prey to his fancy (fantasia)’, adding that ‘the powers of the imaginative faculty are astounding’. Indeed, the imagination ‘sometimes compels the senses with the most violent power and deceives them so that they do not distinguish their proper objects of vision’.48After having found support for the previous statement in the verses of Petrarch, Virgil, Horace, and Dante, Tasso states that the power of imagination can produce ‘mental alienation’, whether it be madness like that which seized Orestes and Pentheus, or the ‘divine madness’ which Bacchus and Love send to humans. Since Tasso believes that he is not insane or divinely inspired, he concludes that perhaps he suffers from the melancholy described by Aristotle in Problemata, XXX, 1, which affects philosophers, statesmen, poets, and heroes like Heracles, Ajax, and Bellerophon; that is, individuals whom Aristotle calls ðgñéôôïß , and whom Tasso defines ‘of singular intelligence’ (d’ingegno singolare). Tasso comforts himself as his illness, which is caused both by a physiological condition and by nature, does not drive him to furious madness or to suicide, but places him together with people of outstanding talent and mythical heroes.49 It appears

47

Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, De occulta philosophia (1533); Girolamo Cardano, De rerum varietate (1st edn, 1557); Giovan Battista Della Porta, Magia naturalis (1st edn, 1558). See Castelli, ‘Ali bianche vestì’, pp. 400–06; and Gowland, ‘The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy’, pp. 90–93; for a discussion of the melancholic imagination within the context of the growing interest in the power of the imagination in philosophical and medical circles and their interest in occultist doctrines. Giovan Battista Codronchi, friend of Mercuriale, devoted De morbis veneficis ac veneficiis (Venice: de Franceschi, 1595) to the study of spells and charms. Codronchi wrote the text inspired by an illness of unknown origins that affected his daughter, who was healed after having been exorcized. 48

‘Vo pensando che questa sia una imaginazione […] d’uomo che desto a la fantasia si dia preda. Le forze de la virtù imaginatrice sono incredibili […] talora aviene ch’ella con violentissima efficacia sforzi i sensi e gli inganni di maniera ch’essi non distinguono gli obiettivi propri.’ Tasso, Il Messaggiero, p. 47. 49

Tasso, Il Messaggiero, pp. 47–50. See Basile, Poeta melancholicus, pp. 34–57, for an extensive

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that in the highly erudite context of Il Messaggiero, where neoplatonic and Aristotelian elements intersect with each other together with occultist and demonological allusions, Tasso sought to represent his illness as a phenomenon that ennobled him and emphasized his status as an intellectual and a scholar, a conscious aspect of his intellectual and artistic superiority.50 In Il Messaggiero the discussion between the benevolent spirit and the author on the link between the power of imagination and pathological states of one’s mind is lucidly controlled. However, in some of the letters that Tasso sent about his illness to friends and patrons, the conviction that his room was visited by spirits, demons, and elves, and that he had been bewitched throws a darker and more disquieting light on his melancholy. In a letter sent on 18 October 1581 to Maurizio Cataneo, Tasso wrote that he was affected by human and diabolical ailments. The human ones were the noises that Tasso might have heard in his surroundings (‘screams of men and especially of women and children, scorning laughter, noise produced by animals, and the din created by inanimate objects moved by men’), while the diabolical ones were spells and sorceries.51 While Tasso admitted that what he thought were spells — the uproar produced by the many rats that shared his room and other noises — could also be natural phenomena, he did not seem to have any doubts about having been bewitched. Voices of spirits that he believed to be evil resounded in his ears when he was trying to study, perhaps because they were ‘jealous of my calm’. Together with these phenomena, analysis of this section of Tasso’s dialogue. As for Aristotle’s Problemata, X X X , 1 as a source for Tasso, Basile argues that the poet could have used a fifteen-century Latin translation of the text by the humanist Theodore of Gaza included in a miscellaneous volume of Aristotle’s texts annotated by Tasso. Basile, Poeta melancholicus, pp. 37–38. 50 On the mixture of neoplatonic and Aristotelian elements in Il Messaggiero, Tasso wrote to Alessandro Pocaterra in 1581 that ‘in the dialogue Il Messaggiero the doctrine is Platonic with some peripatetic mixture, the way Platonic [thinkers] accept it’ (‘nel dialogo Il Messaggiero la dottrina è platonica con qualche mistura peripatetica, in quell modo ch’ i platonici la ricevono’). Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, II, 114, letter 155. See also Basile, Poeta melancholicus, pp. 37 and 46. Castelli believes that Tasso wrote Il Messaggiero to show to the outside world that he was healed from his bouts of violent madness, p. 409. See also Gowland, ‘The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy’, pp. 114–16, on the issue of scholarly melancholy in relation to the theory of melancholic genius. 51

‘Darò solamente avviso a Vostra Signoria de’ disturbi ch’io ricevo ne lo studiare e ne lo scrivere. Sappia che questi sono di due sorte; umani e diabolici. Gli umani sono grida di uomini, e particolarmente di donne e di fanciulli, e risa piene di scherni, e varie voci d’animali […] e strepiti di cose inanimate che dalle mani degli uomini sono mosse. I diabolici sono incanti e malie.’ Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, II, 161, letter 190.

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Tasso described a physiological symptom linked to hypochondriac melancholy, that is, the sensation of fumes ascending to his brain.52 What Tasso wrote in this letter seems to reflect the link that physicians and demonologists alike made between melancholy and demonic possession during this period.53 Tasso continued to believe that he had been bewitched: he conveyed his belief not only to Mercuriale but also to Don Angelo Grillo Spinola in a letter written in 1584, in which he stated that he believed that Agostino Mosti, the warden of the hospital of Sant’Anna, asked for the help of sorcerers to bewitch him.54 At the end of 1585, Tasso returned to the theme of sorcery and bewitchment in several letters written to Scipione Gonzaga, Enea Tasso, and Maurizio Cataneo.55 Here Tasso talked about a ‘elf’ (folletto), probably sent by a sorcerer, who stole money and food, hid objects and letters, opened cases, and turned books upside down, even though, Tasso admitted, some of this might have happened when he was away from the hospital, and his enemies could have gotten the keys and entered his room. In the letter to Maurizio Cataneo, Tasso’s hesitation in attributing all the turmoil that happened in his room to supernatural entities was soon swept away by the poet’s statement that the Devil’s actions and those of his helpers the sorcerers could modify one’s imagination but not one’s intellect, which depended only on God.56 As if to dispel any doubt in Maurizio Cataneo about Tasso’s 52

Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, II, 162, letter 190.

53

‘Across the Continent, for neoplatonic philosophers, neo-Galenic physicians, and demonologists alike, the imagination interacted not only with the physical world, but also with the preternatural and celestial domains. Thus, according to the demonologist Francesco Maria Guazzo, evil spirits were able to enter the body affected with melancholy through the imagination, and thereby corrupt the animal and vital spirits’. Gowland, ‘The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy’, p. 91. See also Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 187–89. 54

‘Perciochè dee sapere, ch’io sono stato ammaliato; ed egli [Agostino Mosti] ha tenuto mano co’ maghi, com’io dirò al serenissimo duca di Ferrara, s’io potrò parlarle; avendo ferma speranza che non mi debba mancar di giustizia, e di castigar chi m’ha sì scelleratamente offeso sotto la parola di Sua Altezza.’ Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, II, 277, letter 288. 55

Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, II, 468, letter 648 to Scipione Gonzaga, 9 December 1585; 472, letter 653 to Enea Tasso, 25 December 1585; 477, letter 656 to Maurizio Cataneo, 29 December 1585. 56

‘Laonde io non posso difendere cosa alcuna da’ nemici o dal diavolo, se non la volontà, con la quale non consentirei d’imparar cosa da lui o da suoi seguaci, né d’avere seco alcuna familiarità, o co’ suoi maghi; i quali, come dice il Ficino, possono muover l’imaginazione, ma senza l’intelletto non hanno alcuna autorità o alcuna forza; perchégli dipende da Dio immediatamente.’ Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, II, 478, letter 656.

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possible involvement with the magical arts, Tasso firmly denied ever being ‘a sorcerer or a Lutheran’ or ever reading ‘heretical books or about necromancy’, thus placing the magical and the heretical on the same level of aberrancy and transgression.57 Besides being harassed by the elf’s capricious actions, Tasso was also afflicted by nocturnal visions — of little flames in the air and sparkles coming out of his eyes, rats’ shadows on the mosquito net where logic would lead human sight to deny their existence, and also of the Virgin Mary with Child — and disquieting noises — whistles, tinkling bells, and the winding of watches. Between the description of the frightful noises at night and his vision of the Virgin, Tasso inserted a list of physiological ailments — falling sickness, dropsy, loss of sight, pains in the intestines, sides, thighs and legs, vomiting, flux of blood, and fever. The image of the Virgin appeared amidst these bodily sufferings, as a promise of grace and salvation. And yet, he feared that this vision could have been caused not by the presence of the divine but by his ‘imagination’, produced by his ‘frenzy’ and his ‘infinite melancholy’; and he concluded that the nature of this illness was so wondrous that he was convinced it was the work of a sorcerer, who could have induced his frenzy by corrupting his food.58 From reading these letters, and

57

‘Ma Iddio sa ch’io non fui né mago né luterano giamai; né lessi libri eretici o di negromanzia, né d’altra parte proibita.’ Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, II, 478, letter 656. 58

‘Sappia dunque, c’oltre que’miracoli del folletto, i quali si potrebbono numerare per trattenimenti in altra occasione, vi sono molti spaventi notturni; perché, essendo io desto, vi sono molti spaventi notturni; perché, essendo io desto, mi è paruto di vedere alcune fiammette ne l’aria; ed alcuna volta gli occhi mi sono scintillati in modo ch’io ho temuto di perder la vista; e me ne sono uscite faville visibilmente. Ho veduto ancora nel mezzo dello sparviero ombre de’ topi, che per ragione naturale non potevano farsi in quel luogo: ho udito strepiti spaventosi; e spesso ne gli orecchi ho sentito fischi, titinni, campanelle, e romore quasi d’orologi da corda; e spesso è battuta un’ora, e dormendo m’è paruto che mi si butti un cavallo addosso; e mi sono poi sentito alquanto dirotto: ho dubitato del mal caduco, de la gocciola, de la vista, ma non eccessivi; d’intestino, di fianco, di cosce, di gambe, ma piccioli: sono stato indebolito da vomiti, da flusso di sangue, da febbre. E fra tanti terrori e tanti dolori, m’apparve in aria l’imagine de la gloriosa Vergine, co’l Figlio in braccio, in un mezzo cerchio di colori e di vapori; laonde io non debbo disperar de la sua grazia. E benché potesse facilmente essere una fantasia, perch’io sono frenetico, e quasi sempre perturbato da vari fantasmi, e pieno di malinconia infinita; nondimeno, per la grazia d’Iddio, posso cohibere assensum alcuna volta; la quale operazione è del savio, come piace a Cicerone; laonde più tosto dovrei credere che quello fosse un miracolo de la Vergine. Ma, s’io non m’inganno, de la frenesia furono cagioni alcune confezioni ch’io mangiai tre anni sono; da le quali cominciò questa nuova infermità, che s’aggiunse a la prima, nata per simil cagione; ma non così lunga, né così difficile da risanare: e se l’infermità non è incurabile, è molto somigliante a quelle

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especially the second addressed to Maurizio Cataneo, one can see that Tasso’s attitude towards his illness was complex and at times contradictory. Indeed, he was convinced that his illness was caused by supernatural entities that affected his health via sorcerers, and that the mystic vision of the Virgin was the product of a corrupt imagination, while hoping, at the same time, that it could be a miracle witnessed only by him. He also claimed to be able, at times, to follow the example of the wise man as described by Cicero in the dialogue on academic scepticism, Academica, and suspend his judgement (cohibere assensum).59 In the letter to Cataneo, Tasso believed that he had been bewitched, but he also listed a series of unpleasant physiological illnesses and sufferings that had had a devastating effect on his health, as we saw he also did in the letter to Mercuriale. In contrast to what he wrote to the famous physician, Tasso does not gloss over his nocturnal frights and nightmares in the letter to Cataneo but describes them in great detail. One could argue that Tasso chose what to say about his melancholy and how depending on his interlocutor and on what he wanted to obtain from him. In the letter to Mercuriale and in others that he wrote to doctors Tasso seems to restrain himself from detailing his conviction of the power of magic and the existence of devils lest he appear completely insane, while with friends like Scipione Gonzaga, Enea Tasso, and Maurizio Cataneo, he clearly and vividly expressed these beliefs.60 che non si possono curare. Da poi la malia fu rinnovata un’altra volta […] e la qualità del male è così maravigliosa, che potrebbe facilmente ingannare i medici più diligenti; onde io la stimo opera di mago.’ Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, II, 479–81, letter 656. The belief that someone — human or supernatural — wanted to poison him with food or medications is a constant in Tasso’s reaction to his illness. Already in 1577, Tasso thought that the purgative medications with which the doctors in the service of the Duke Alfonso used to treat him for his melancholic humour were in fact poison. See Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, I, 222. 59

See Cicero, Academica, ed. by J. S. Reid (London: Macmillan, 1874), bk II, xx–xxi, §67–69. At the end of section xxi, § 68, Cicero writes: ‘Sin autem omnino nihil esse quod percipi possit a me sumpsero et, quod tu mihi das, accepero, sapientem nihil opinari, effectum illud erit, sapientem adsensus omnes cohibiturum, ut videndum tibi sit, iden malis an aliquid opinaturum esse sapientem’ (my italics). 60

Scipione Gonzaga (1542–93) was an important presence in Tasso’s life from the years they both spent in Padua. He was elected cardinal in 1587. For Gonzaga’s life see DBI (Scipione Gonzaga) [accessed 14 April 2009]. Enea Tasso (?–1608) was a cousin of the poet, who married Giulia Albani, daughter of Giovanni Girolamo Albani (1509–91) who, later in his life (1570), became a cardinal. For Albano’s life, see DBI

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If one reads the letters that Tasso wrote to other physicians, one notices the poet’s attempt to demonstrate his knowledge of medical terminology and his interest in the link between medicine and philosophy. Moreover, in two letters, one to Giovanni Angelo Papio written in 1582 and the other to Maurizio Cataneo written in 1585, Tasso invokes the medical expertise of Vincenzo Laureo, who, in his double role of physician and man of the cloth, could heal the poet’s body and soul, as the poet needed ‘excellent remedies for both’.61 In a letter he sent to the cardinal in 1588 Tasso diagnosed himself as suffering from hectic fever and dropsy, besides being affected by melancholy and frenzy, and in another written a short while later he begged Laureo to write to doctors and to ask them for medications, because he could understand both the pains of the body and those of the soul.62 Tasso took a different tack with Giovanni Battista Cavallara, wavering between flattery and flippancy. In the first extant letter he exchanged with Cavallara, Tasso thanked the doctor for sending him a cure without even being prompted by him, and hoped that he would take the same care of him in the

(Scipione Gonzaga) [accessed 14 April 2009]. Maurizio Cataneo was the secretary of Giovanni Girolamo Albano and a very old friend of Tasso. They had spent time together in Bergamo after the death of the poet’s father. Tasso makes Cataneo one of the interlocutors in the dialogue Il Cataneo overo degli Idoli (1585). 61

‘Non rimarrò nondimeno di dirle, ch’essendo io infermo d’infermità più tosto noiosa che grave, la quale non è meno fastidiosa a l’animo c’al corpo, in niun medico avrei fede maggiore, che nel signor Vincenzo Laureo , tanto amico di mio padre e di Vostra Signoria eccellentissima; il quale benché ora sia vescovo, non si dee essere scordato de l’arte del medicare già da lui esercitata così felicemente e con tanta eccellenza: e come vescovo dee esser medico de gli animi; e ‘l mio ho già detto ch’è infermo, e per la memoria de le cose passate non può esser soddisfatto de le presenti, né spera che le future debbano esser tali, ch’egli se ne possa contentare a pieno.’ Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, I, 224, letter 230 to Giovanni Angelo Papio. See also ibid., II, 388, letter 396 to Maurizio Cataneo. 62

‘Entro ogni giorno nel bagno, come etico; ma s’io son etico, dubito ancora d’esser idropico: e l’uno e l’altro male è invecchiato in me, ed io ne’ mali. De la malinconia non parlo, né de la smania; a la quale ha posto tal freno la riverenza ch’io porto a Sua Santità, ch’io non posso offender altri che me stesso, come fo spesso co’l ragionar di me medesimo con alta voce.’ Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, IV , 103, letter 1022. ‘Laonde la supplico che voglia giovarmi così lontano, e scrivere […] al medico di nuovo in mia raccomandazione; perché , senza aiuto de’ medici e di medicine, io non so se mai più rivedrò Roma […] ma ne le cose difficilissime si può conoscer la virtù di Vostra Signoria illustrissima: la quale è stata prima medico de corpi (e non se ne dee sdegnare) e poi de gli animi.’ Ibid., IV , 112, letter 1032.

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future.63 However, in a subsequent letter Tasso seemed to rebuff Cavallara, as it seems that his remedy — probably pills — did not achieve the goal of giving Tasso his memory back: ‘I realized that Your Lordship remembers me, even though I have no reason to remember you, as your vast learning did not help at all my weak memory.’64 His attitude towards Cavallara’s remedies was erratic: at one point he asked his friend Ascanio Mori to tell Cavallara that he was not taking the pills, while in a letter written shortly afterwards he claimed that he was taking them, even though he hoped to receive more powerful and efficacious remedies soon, and he would receive bloodletting from the front and the nose, apparently following Cavallara’s suggestion.65 At the end of 1586 Tasso asked Cavallara to send him pills again for his frenesia (frenzy, that is, madness caused by fever) and loss of memory, and suggested to the physician that he should receive bloodletting and cauteries.66 Tasso was afflicted by many irksome thoughts and frightful images, but what seems to have upset him the most was the weakening of his memory, the activity that allowed him to write and remember his and other people’s creations. What good was it to belong to the privileged group of outstanding melancholic individuals if one could not remember anything? Indeed, frustrated with his forgetfulness, Tasso spat out an acid statement against all doctors who were

63

‘La tardanza de la lettera di Vostra Signoria è stata compensata da l’opportunità del rimedio che m’ha mandato, il quale mi è stato più caro di ricevere da lei, perché volontariamente, senz’aspettar alcuna mia preghiera me l’ha mandato: e spero che mi debba esser giovevole. Ma poi c’ ha cominciato una volta a prendersi cura di me la prego che voglia averla per l’avvenire; e sarà minutamente informata de l’effetto c’avrà fatto il suo rimedio e d’ogni accidente alla sua infermità.’ Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, II, 573–74, letter 548. Tasso probably wrote this letter after he arrived in Mantua in July 1586. 64

‘Ho conosciuto che Vostra Signoria si ricorda di me, bench’io abbia piccola cagione di raccordarmi di lei; perché la sua gran dottrina non ha dato alcuno aiuto a la mia debil memoria.’ Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, III, 28–29, letter 633. 65

Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, III, 35, letter 643; p. 36, letter 644. Ascanio Mori da Ceno (1533–91) spent most of his life in the service of the princes of the house of Gonzaga. He published fifteen novelle in 1585, which he dedicated to Vincenzo Gonzaga. See Girolamo Ghilini, Teatro d’huomini letterati, I (Venice, 1647), p. 22. 66

‘Ma il maggior di tutti gli altri mali, e ‘l più spiacevole, mi par la frenesia; perché sempre son perturbato da molti pensieri noiosi, e da molte immaginazioni, e da molti fantasmi. Con la frenesia è congiunta una debolezza di memoria grandissima. Però prego Vostra Eccellenza, che ne le pilole c’ordinerà per me, abbia riguardo a l’uno ed a l’altro male particolarmente, e pensi di confortar la memoria […] Sarebbe forse anche necessario ch’io mi cavassi sangue, e che io mi facessi qualche cauterio; perché se n’è serrato uno ch’io aveva, e non era anche bastevole.’ Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, III, 71, letter 676.

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unwilling to heal him and whom he distrusted, so much so that he was willing to consult an astrologer to see if he could do something to help him.67 The relationship between medicine and philosophy, which Tasso touched upon in various correspondences, is exemplarily defined in a letter sent to the physician Giovanni Antonio Pisano, who treated the poet while he lived in Naples at the end of the 1580s.68 More than a letter in which Tasso communicated concerns about his health to a physician, it is a disquisition on the nature of philosophy and medicine, and a vehicle for boasting medical knowledge of his own illness, acquired in part through his readings of Galen and Hippocrates.69 By proclaiming himself a philosopher and Pisano a physician at the beginning of the letter, Tasso identified himself less with the role of a patient seeking a doctor’s advice than with that of an equal to Pisano, as the physician considered the health of the body while the philosopher cared for the health of the soul. After confessing that he could only understand illnesses of soul, Tasso skilfully adopted the rhetorical figure of recusatio, which allowed him to demonstrate his medical erudition concerning melancholy, its causes and its symptoms, while claiming to dismiss his opinion of the causes of his illness: ‘But I do not dare write to you my opinion on what pertains my long illness’ (Ma non ardisco di scriverle il mio parere in quel che s’appartiene a la mia lunga malattia).70 Tasso’s subdivision of melancholy into three types — natural, caused by bad diet, and hypochondriaca — repeats the categorization usually found in treatises of medicina practica, except when he states that his ‘fierce melancholy’ has been increased by magical spells. Tasso masterfully concluded the first part of his letter by apparently submitting to the physicians’ advice, even though he feared that their main goal was to deceive him, not heal him. This section of the letter is interspersed with quotations and references to Hippocrates: Tasso’s constant

67 ‘La colpa non è mia, ma de’ medici, i quali non vogliono guarirmi […] Al signor de gli astrologi do solamente tanta fede, quanto basta; pur ch’io possa leggere i lor giudicii. A’ medici credo poco; ma le ragioni senza l’esperienza, alcuna volta non appagano’. Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, III, 77–78, letter 684 to Ascanio Mori. 68

Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, IV , 205–08, letter 139. For an analysis of this letter, see Basile, Poeta melancholicus, pp. 57–64. 69

A few months before writing the letter to Pisano in 1589, Tasso asked his friend Antonio Constantini to procure Galen’s work for him. Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, IV , 199, letter 1126. Hippocrates’ name appears several times in Tasso’s letters. See, for instance, ibid., IV , 123, letter 1044; 129, letter 1046. 70

Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, IV , 206.

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reliance on the ancient physician, considered the ‘father’ of medicine, provides an aura of legitimacy and authority to the poet’s statements. In the end, Pisano was no longer the physician, but the student to whom Tasso stated the opinion of other doctors regarding his own illness, which had been caused by humours flowing down from his head: But, since some [physicians] thought that the flowing down of humours from the head was the main cause of the illness, I must say what Hippocrates writes to Democritus: ‘Those to whom catarrh flows down from the head [should be given] black hellebore’ (Ma essendo stata opinione d’alcuni, che la distillazione del capo sia la principal cagione de l’infermità, non posso trapassar con silenzio quell che scrive Ippocrate a Democrito: ‘Veratro helleborato eos, quibus de capite distillat rheuma’).71

Again, Hippocrates helped Tasso by providing the cure that Pisano should administer to him, that is, hellebore, an ancient remedy used to cure philosophers and heroes. At the end of this letter, Tasso’s melancholy seems to withdraw into a mythical dimension, where little importance is given to its physiological aspect, and where the only help Tasso has ever received to tolerate his sufferings is from his ‘virtue, whatever it is’: To conclude, I will quote the following maxim of Hippocrates in the Epistles: ‘Each man is affected by illness, and he needs to rely on his own help.’ I am all illness: and, if I must rely on my own help, on what shall I rely? So far I rely on and command myself, as I receive no more help in tolerating these evils and misfortunes than my virtue, whatever it is. However, philosophy could not set me free, as it should have had. Therefore, if I need to rely on something, I would like at least to rely on gratitude, not necessity; generosity, not avarice; leniency, not injustice. (Per conclusione addurrò quel detto di Ippocrate ne le Epistole: ‘Totus homo est morbus, et sui auxilii servus.’ Io sono tutto infermità: e se debbo esser servo del mio aiuto, di chi sarò servo? Sinora son di me stesso, ad a me stesso commando; perché non ho maggiore aiuto a sopportare questi mali e queste avversità, de la mia virtù, qualunque ella sia: ma poiché la filosofia non ha potuto farmi libero, come doveva; almeno, dovendo servire, vorrei che mi facesse servo la gratitudine, non la necessità; la magnanimità, non l’avarizia; la clemenza, non l’ingiustizia.)

In the end, it is neither philosophy nor medicine which can lift Tasso from his illness, but virtues such as gratitude, generosity, and leniency, which make him a sort of moral hero.72

71

Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, IV , 207.

72

See Basile, Poeta melancholicus, pp. 62–64.

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While Tasso sought the help of university and court physicians in treating his illness, he did not shun the use of alternative remedies. Not even two months after he had sent the letter to Mercuriale, Tasso received a box from Scipione Gonzaga containing the so-called ‘manna’ of St Andrew, an oily substance deriving from the body of the saint which was supposed to have miraculous effects.73 In the already mentioned letter to Ascanio Mori, Tasso proved not to be averse to the idea that an astrologer could heal him, even though he did not trust his method. At this point of his life, Tasso wrote he would try anything, as he was like a person condemned to death, on whose body ‘every experiment can be done’.74 A few years later, in 1588, Tasso received a piece of what was supposed to be the horn of a unicorn, and asked Don Angelo Grillo Spinola, who had sent him the gift, to explain to him how to use it.75 In 1591, Tasso asked the secretary of Pope Gregory XIV to send him a golden cross filled with ‘relics or prayers against evil spirits to be worn under the mantle’.76 Reading the vast number of letters Tasso composed between 1580 and 1595, the year he died, one gains the distinct impression that Tasso very often medicated himself with various types of substance, an impression which seems to be confirmed by a letter that Maurizio Cataneo wrote to a relative of Tasso after the poet’s death, according to which the indiscriminate use of these medications destroyed his innards and led to his death: The cause of his illness was the imagination, which made him suspect that he was going to die any day. Drawn by these suspicions and deceptions and imagining that he could preserve himself [from dying] by medicating himself, he would take theriac, the purgative aloe and rhubarb, cassia, antimony, which parched and consumed his innards and led him to death. (La cagion di sua infermità è stata l’immaginazione, che per sospetti s’avea concepita di dover morire di giorno in giorno, da’ quali sospetti, ed inganni tirato, immaginandosi di potersi preservare con medicarsi da sè stesso, pigliava ora triaca, or aloe, or cassia, or

73

Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, II, 244, letter 256 to Scipione Gonzaga, 13 September 1583. 74

‘Faccia qualche prova questo uomo mirabile, o astrologo che egli sia, perché in me puó farla: percioché io sono simile a coloro che sono dannati a morte, ne’ quali è lecito a far tutte l’esperienze.’ Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, III, 78, letter 684. 75

Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, IV , 38–39, letters 960–61 to Don Angelo Grillo, February–March 1588. 76

1591.

Le lettere di Torquato Tasso, ed. by Guasti, V , 45, letter 1326 to Dario Boccarini, 9 March

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Monica Calabritto reobarbaro, or antimonio, che gli avevano arse e consumate l’interiora, e condottolo finalmente a morte.)77

Tasso’s pluralistic approach to his illness is not a peculiarity, but the norm, as Gianna Pomata and Katharine Park point out in their studies on the relationship between patients and doctors in early modern Florence and Bologna. Pomata states that early modern patients consulted licensed and unlicensed practitioners and tried remedies that belonged to both the official and the fringe (if one looks at such practices from what was considered the official medical point of view) dimensions of the healing practice; Tasso’s attitude towards healing and diagnosis seems to exemplify her point perfectly.78 Tasso was both a typical and peculiar patient suffering from melancholy in sixteenth-century Italy. Tasso was a patient like many others, especially if one looks at him from the doctor’s point of view. Many of the symptoms he described in his letters can be found in Mercuriale’s medical consilia. Moreover, his distrustful behaviour towards physicians was, according to Mercuriale, a symptom of melancholy. For physicians like Mercuriale, physiological causes and bad habits — excessive study, meditation, immoderate use of the imagination — together with a natural temperament brought Tasso to his deplorable state. Finally, Tasso seemed open to trying a plurality of remedies, without excluding any of them a priori. And yet, Tasso was a peculiar patient in several ways. In his eagerness to know his illness and to stop relying on what he deemed the unreliable help of doctors, Tasso appears to have read Hippocrates and Galen, so that he could distinguish with precise medical language his type of melancholy and its symptoms. He also appears to have been aware that believing in demons and bewitchment would make him look raving mad or, perhaps, ignorant and prone to superstitions in the eyes of physicians such as Mercuriale. Tasso’s interest in and knowledge of witchcraft, demons, and supernatural forces reflects the intense debate on the issue of the powers of imagination and on the occult — demonic — causes of medical pathologies such as melancholy, but the way he wove this dimension into his experience of melancholy was deeply personal. The voices he heard and the entities that stole things from him give Tasso’s melancholy a dramatic, fascinating, and at the same time painful dimension, that no mere medical consilia could convey. If we try to look at Tasso’s melancholy from his subjective perspective, we have a glimpse into the frame of mind of an individual

77

Solerti, Vita di Torquato Tasso, II, 363–64, letter 374. Theriac was considered a panacea for any kind of disease, aloe and rhubarb were purgative, and antimony a mineral with emetic functions. 78

Pomata, Contracting a Cure, p. 122.

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who aspired to be a melancholic hero, who stated in a letter to Giovanni Antonio Pisano that he wanted to be medicated with hellebore, the ancient herb with which ‘philosophers and heroes had been similarly treated’. Although Tasso wanted to be considered a philosopher and a hero rather than a patient at the end of his life, physicians and laypeople continued to consider him an unbalanced individual, as is evident in one of the last reports written about him a few days before he died on 25 April 1595: Sir Torquato Tasso remarkably hit the doctor who was taking his pulse with a slipper, and made him promise him that he would never visit him again. And, stating that [doctors] treat [patients] at random, forced his servant to take the medication that had been prepared for him — an event, indeed, to record as a sign of his insanity. (Il signor Torquato Tasso ha dato una pianellata solennissima al medico che gli toccava il polso, e si è fatto promettere che mai più lo visitaria: e dicendo che medicano a caso, costrinse il suo servitore a pigliar la medicina ordinata per lui; cosa invero da registrare per sigillo della sua follia.)79

79

Solerti, Vita di Torquato Tasso, II, 463, letter 368 (‘Aviso da Roma, 8 Aprile, 1595’). The research for this essay was made possible in part by a PSC CUNY Summer Grant I received in summer 2008.

M ASQUERADES WITH THE D EAD : T HE L AUGHING D EMOCRITUS IN AN O BSERVATIO ON M ELANCHOLY BY P IETER VAN F OREEST Thomas Rütten

A woman from Alkmaar had two sons, both of whom were learned and exceptionally eager for knowledge. After she had sent the elder son to Leuven and he subsisted on alltoo-mean and -meagre fare and his all-too-miserly mother did not send enough food and the young man devoted every hour of the night and day to his studies, his strength waning due to working through the night and subsisting on very meagre fare, the son, by nature melancholic, fell into an extremely severe state of melancholy; proving himself unable to shake off this melancholy and not having consulted any doctors, he eventually heeded his mother’s call and returned, quite mad (delirans), to his hometown. But the mother, who paid too much attention to pecuniary matters, did not call a doctor to her son either, as a result of which the son’s melancholy worsened to such a degree that the poor young wretch (miser) refused to eat and drink altogether and eventually succumbed to the effects of his thus faded strength. After two or three years had passed, the mother sent her second son to Leuven, and he was no less studious than his elder brother. He lived a similarly frugal life, drank a lot of water, abstained from beer, eagerly pursued his theological studies, and when he had immersed himself in theological questions and was mired in more difficult ones than these in the manner of the Leuven scholastics, he became utterly melancholic and blathered about nothing else but that he had the Bible in his head. And he muttered incessantly in German 1 the following sentences: ‘Die Bibel is in den bol; die bol is in den Bibel’, which means, ‘the Bible is in the head, the head is in the Bible’. This melancholy began to grow so ferociously that, after the poor young wretch (miser) had left Leuven and, journeying on foot towards his hometown, reached the vicinity of Antwerp, he threw himself into a well and thus drowned. Having been found dead in the well soon afterwards, he was suspended by the magistrate from a fork [furca, a kind of gallows] (as

1

Or rather, Low German.

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Thomas Rütten is the customary lot of those who have killed themselves). A day or two later, when my brother, Nanning van Foreest, a most learned young scholar of Latin and Greek literature, happened to set out from Leuven in the direction of Antwerp, he came across this young man from Alkmaar hanging from the fork. Having seen the youth from Alkmaar and having recognized him to be that same melancholic he immediately approached the local superintendant, commonly referred to as the bailiff (amptmannus), who, as superintendant, had married our kinswoman Cornelia van Oudshoorn; and my brother having been emboldened on that account, related what had happened and told the bailiff that the young man had been suffering from melancholy at Leuven before he had departed from there, and explained that, once out of his mind, he had thrown himself into the well. When the matter had been cleared up in this way, the body was taken down and buried in all honour at a nearby cemetery.2

2

Quotes from Pieter van Foreest’s opus magnum Observationum et curationum medicinalium are taken from the 1634 Frankfurt edition of his Opera omnia: Pieter van Foreest, Observationum et curationum medicinalium ac chirurgicarum opera omnia in quibus omnium et singularum affectionum corporis humani causae, signa, prognoses & curationes graphice depinguntur; cum universali titulorum, observationum, morborum, secretorum singularium, ac rerum memorabilium indice locupletissimo […] (Frankfurt: in officina Paltheniana, Philippi Fieveti, 1634), bk X , pp. 330–31: ‘Mulier Alcmariana duos filios eosque doctos habuit, & valde studiosos. Priorem vero cum Louanium ablegasset, victu tenuiori ac sordido cum vteretur, matre admodum auara; victum non satis suppeditante, & adolescens die noctuque literis incumbens, vigiliis ac tenuiori victu sese macerando, propria natura melancholicus, in melancholiam grauissimam lapsus est, a qua cum euadere non posset, nec medicis vteretur, tandem delirans patriam accessit per matrem reuocatus. At mater nimium ad rem attenta, medicum neque hoc tempore ad filium vocat; unde melancholia adeo aucta est, vt neque edere neque bibere miser iuuenis vellet: vt ita postremo viribus deficientibus obierit. Duobus vel tribus annis deinde elapsis, alium filium quem habebat non minus quam priorem valde literis deditum, Louanium quoque mittit, qui similiter parcissime viuens, ita vt aquam tantum biberet & ceruisia abstineret, & impense studeret Theologiae, & quaestionibus Theologicis iisque grauioribus irretitus, more scholasticorum Louaniensium, omnino melancholicus factus est, nihilque aliud perpetuo garriebat, quam se in capite Biblia habere: atque has voces lingua Germanica indesinenter obmurmurabat, die Bibel is in den bol: die bol is in den Bibel, hoc est, Biblia sunt in capite: caput est in bibliis [sic]. Haec melancholia adeo saeuum cepit incrementum, ut relicto Louanio cum patriam accederet, pedestri itinere, Antuerpiae cum appropinquasset, se ipsum in puteum praecipitauit miser, & ita suffocatus est. In puteo mox mortuus inuentus per Magistratum furca (vt solet fieri iis, qui se ipsos interficiunt) suspenditur. Vno atque altero die intermisso, cum forte frater meus Nannius Forestus, iuuenis Graecarum ac Latinarum doctissimus, Louanio discederet, & versus Antuerpiam iter faceret, reperit iuuenem hunc Alcmarianum furca suspensum: quem, cum vidisset, atque hunc ipsum melancholicum fuisse cognouisset, statim accessit Praesidem vulgo Amptmannum dictum, qui praeses nostram cognatam Corneliam de Oesthoren duxerat, & ideo frater audentior factus, rem actam exponit, iuuenemque Louanii melancholia laborasse, antequam isthinc discederet, & sic mente captum se ipsum in puteum praecipitasse declarat: Et ita re intellecta, a furca tollitur, & in proximo coemiterio honeste sepelitur.’ See also T. Rütten, Demokrit — lachender Philosoph und

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T

his ‘case history’ is related by the physician Pieter van Foreest (1522–97) in his Observationes et curationes medicinales, the publication of which started in 1584, when their author had been serving the municipality of Delft as town physician for twenty-six years.3 The story of the two brothers from Alkmaar,4 which may have taken place in 1555/6,5 is curious because it is not a

sanguinischer Melancholiker: Eine pseudohippokratische Geschichte, Mnemosyne, Suppl. 118 (Leiden: Brill, 1992), pp. 107–08, n. 188 (now with minor corrections). I thank Jacob Wisse for discussing this passage with me. For the edition of the Observationes et curationes medicinales quoted here, see R . Breugelmans and W. K. Gnirrep, ‘Bibliografie van de werken van Pieter van Foreest’, in Petrus Forestus medicus, ed. by H. A. Bosman-Jelgersma and others (Amsterdam: Stichting, 1996), pp. 19–115 (pp. 100–01). The first edition of the tenth book of van Foreest’s Observationes et curationes medicinales was published in Leiden in 1590. See ibid., p. 33. 3

By 1606, the Observationes et curationes medicinales had grown to thirty-two books. On van Foreest, see J. Banga, Geschiedenis van de geneeskunde en van hare beoefenaren in Nederland, 2 vols (Leeuwarden: Eekloff, 1868); reprinted in facsimile as Facsimile herdruk met een inleiding door, intro. by G. A. Lindeboom (Schiedam: Interbook International, 1975), pp. 87–140; I. Meurnier, ‘Un grand praticien au XVIe siècle: Le Hollondais Pierre van Foreest (Petrus Forestus) 1522–1595’, Janus, 7 (1902), 307–12, 365–69, 466–69, 505–08, 586–89, 617–21; G. A. Lindeboom, Dutch Medical Biography: A Biographical Dictionary of Dutch Physicians and Surgeons, 1475–1975 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1984); R . Burri, Die Delfter Pest von 1557 nach den Beobachtungen von Petrus Forestus (Zürich: Druck, 1982) (= Zürcher Medizingeschichtliche Abhandlungen, N. R ., vol. CLI); Pieter van Foreest: Een Hollands medicus in de zestiende eeuw. Bundeling van de voordrachten gehouden op het Symposium ter Gelegenheid van het 25-jarig bestaan van de Pieter van Foreeststichting, Delft, 18 november 1989, ed. by H. L. Houtzager (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989); Pieter van Foreest: De Hollandse Hippocrates, ed. by H. A. Bosman-Jelgersma (Krommenie: Knijnenberg, 1996); Petrus Forestus medicus, ed. by Bosman-Jelgersma and others. On the print history of the Observationes et curationes medicinales, see Breugelmans and Gnirrep, ‘Bibliografie van de werken van Pieter van Foreest’, pp. 28–67; I. W. Müller, Iatromechanische Theorie und ärztliche Praxis im Vergleich zur galenistischen Medizin. Friedrich Hoffmann – Pieter van Foreest – Jan van Heurne (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1991); C. Santing, ‘Pieter van Foreest: Propagating Academic Knowledge and Professional Practitioning for the Sake of the Republic’s Health’, in Cultural Mediators: Artists and Writers at the Crossroads of Tradition, Innovation and Reception in the Low Countries and Italy 1450–1650, ed. by A. de Vries (Leuven: Peeters, 2008), pp. 65–87; Santing, ‘Pieter van Foreest and the Acquisition and Travelling of Medical Knowledge in the Sixteenth Century’, in Centres of Medical Excellence?: Medical Travel and Education in Europe, 1500–1789, ed. by O. P. Grell, A. Cunningham, and J. Arrizabalaga (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 149–69. 4 In the secondary literature, I have been able to find half a sentence on this observatio in Meunier, ‘Un grand praticien’, p. 507: ‘Il [i.e. van Foreest] nous parle de mélancoliques qui vont se jeter dans des puits’, a short summary in the commentary to Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (ed. by T. C. Faulkner, N. K . Kiessling, and R . L. Blair; comm. by J. B. Bamborough

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typical example of the observationes genre. While this genre only established itself in the book market during the second half of the sixteenth century, it nevertheless entertains close generic ties with medical case studies from the Classical period (chief among them the case studies presented in the Hippocratic Epidemics) as well as with neighbouring genres such as consilia. Using individual case histories, observationes typically aim to distil the sum of experiential knowledge gathered by medical practitioners who, as itinerant practitioners, court physicians, or town physicians, devoted their professional lives to the care of the sick and, towards the end of their careers, sought to pass on their knowledge in toto.6 At first glimpse,

and M. Dodsworth, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989–2000), I, 5, 19), and a full sentence in M. Kutzer, ‘Liebeskranke Magd, tobsüchtiger Mönch, schwermütiger Handelsherr: “Psychiatrie” in den Observationes und Curationes des Niederländischen “Hippokrates” Pieter van Foreest (1522–1592)’, Medizinhistorisches Journal, 30 (1995), 245–73 (p. 255): ‘So konnte ein Selbstmörder, der zunächst in Schande am Galgen aufgehängt worden war, auf Intervention des Bruders von van Foreest hin, d. h. nachdem ärztlich erklärt worden war, daß er an einer Form der melancholischen Krankheit gelitten hatte und deshalb “nicht zurechnungsfähig” und gleichzeitig selbstmordgefährdet gewesen war, mit Genehmigung des Bürgermeisters in allen Ehren bestattet werden.’ In the latter summary, the term ärztlich is as problematic (Nanning van Foreest was not a doctor) as the translation of amptmannus as Bürgermeister. On the actual office of the ‘amman’, see below, n. 22. 5

According to Leuven’s list of enrolled students, the two brothers could be identified as Cornelius Joannis enrolled in August 1550 and Christianus Joannis enrolled in April 1555. Since Nanning van Foreest read law at Leuven University from May 1548 to 1554, it is likely that the event in question dates to the years 1555 or 1556. See Matricule de l’Université de Louvain, IV : Février 1528–Février 1569, ed. by A. Schillings (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1961), pp. 366 (no. 84 for Nanning van Foreest), 409 (no. 61 for Cornelius Joannis), and 510 (no. 18 for Christianus Joannis); Matricule de l’Université de Louvain, IV : Février 1528–Février 1569. Corrections et tables, ed. by A. Schillings (Brussels: Palais des Académies, 1966), p. 323. Given that law students were exempted from studying the liberal arts ( J. N. M. Vis, ‘De Alkmaarse jaren 1528–1558’, in Pieter van Foreest: De Hollandse Hippocrates, ed. by. Bosman-Jelgersma, pp. 71–79 (p. 73)) and that Nanning had already earned his doctorate in law, it is curious that van Foreest emphasizes his brother’s familiarity with Greek and Latin literature. Nanning provided samples of his Latin poetry in editions of van Foreest’s Observationes, bks III– V , 1585, and bks VIII– X , 1590. See C. L. Heesakkers, ‘Petrus Forestus in gedichten en brieven: Een overzicht van het material en een editie van zijn correspondentie met Johannes Heurnius’, in Petrus Forestus medicus, ed. by Bosman-Jelgersma and others, pp. 116–241 (p. 123). 6

The most comprehensive study of the observationes genre is G. Pomata, ‘Sharing Cases: The Observationes in Early Modern Medicine’, Early Science and Medicine, 15 (2010), 193–236. In its appendix, Pomata lists sixty-three authors who published Curationes and Observationes between 1551 and 1676. In an earlier article (‘Praxis historialis: The Uses of Historia in Early Modern Medicine’, in Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, ed. by G.

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what we find in the observationes literature ‘looks very much indeed like the ancient empiricist notion of autopsia plus historia: firsthand observation plus accounts of similar cases by other observers’.7 To conclude that physicians like van Foreest were contributors ‘to the early modern reappraisal of the cognitive value and dignity of experience’8 does not tell the whole story, however, as we do well to take seriously these physicians’ own self-positioning within the tradition of the rational or dogmatic school of medicine and its well-documented opposition to the Empiricists.9 After all, van Foreest’s treatise De incerto, fallaci, urinarum judicio represents ‘one of the best-known tirades against empirics of the period’ and conveys van Foreest’s conviction that ‘empirics and iatrochemists understood little of what they were doing or — equally dangerous — did not understand things properly’.10 Even though we need to draw a clear distinction between early

Pomata and N. Siraisi (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), pp. 105–46), Pomata had mentioned Amatus Lusitanus as itinerant physician, Martin Ruland the Elder, Rembert Dodoens, Diomedes Cornarius, and Marcello Donati as court physicians as well as François Valleriola, van Foreest, and Johann Schenck von Grafenberg as town physicians. See also H. C. E. Midelfort, A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 169–81. For his views on van Foreest’s psychopathological observationes, see ibid., pp. 168–69. Between 1584 and 1606, van Foreest published 1350 case histories reflecting more than 50 years of medical practice. 7

Pomata, ‘Praxis historialis’, p. 137. In terms of the empiricists’ so-called epistemological tripod, the above quoted observatio would fall under the heading of historia, since van Foreest obviously only recounts it. 8

Pomata, ‘Praxis historialis’, p. 137.

9

Pomata (‘Praxis historialis’, p. 137) herself quotes van Foreest’s disclaimer, according to which his observations were not ‘mere observation, or historia of things observed, in the Empiricists’ fashion’. Santing (‘Pieter van Foreest’ (2010), p. 168) aptly talks about ‘the typically Renaissance interrelation of observational proficiency and philological learning, which led to a direct conciliation of empiricism and book learning’, thus portraying van Foreest as a representative of ‘learned empiricism’. The second part of the original title of van Foreest’s Observationes et curationes medicinales — sive medicinae theoricae & practicae libri — similarly emphasizes the double focus on medical theory and practice. 10

H. J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), p. 159. Vis, ‘De Alkmaarse jaren 1528–1558’, p. 75, summarizes: ‘Van Foreest gebruikt overigens de aanduiding “empiricus” in zijn werk uitsluitend in negatieve zin. Strikt genomen is een empiricus iemand die alleen over praktijkervaring beschikt en niet steunt op door wetenschappelijke studie en arbeid verkregen kennis.’ See also V. Nutton, ‘Idle Old Trots, Coblers and Costardmongers: Pieter van Foreest on Quackery’, in Petrus Forestus medicus, ed. by Bosman-Jelgersma and others, pp. 242–45; Santing (‘Pieter van Foreest’ (2010)), p. 164.

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modern empirics11 and Empiricists (i.e. members of the ancient medical school) in early modern parlance, the fundamental rootedness of our ‘Dutch Hippocrates’12 in the Hippocratic-Galenic (i.e. in the rational or dogmatic school) tradition alone should prevent us from proclaiming him a straightforward heir to the classical empiricist school of medicine.13 The following analysis of our observatio14 should confirm this caveat. It aims to illustrate the fact that it is, precisely, the theoretical concepts of physiology, pathophysiology, aetiology, nosology, and heredity — concepts both alien and largely irrelevant to the empiricist mindset — which not only fundamentally determine van Foreest’s interpretation of the case history (that is to say, his scholia), but also dictate its seemingly empirical (in our modern sense) perspective, indeed its very textuality. It remains to be shown that the observationes genre provided not only a new mould in which to cast fresh experiential knowledge, but also functioned as a receptacle of HippocraticGalenic medical theory, the mobilization of which not least served professionalpolitical interests and was intended to consolidate the social standing of physicians in a highly contested health market. Traces of theoretical concepts are already discernible in our case history: the distinction drawn between a melancholic temperament (propria natura melancholia) and a melancholic illness (in melancholiam grauissimam lapsus); the emphasis on intellectual overexertion15 coupled with lack of sleep and an inadequate diet,16

11

Van Foreest’s devastating criticism of empirics is formulated in his Vander Empiriken, Lantloeperen ende valscher Medicynsbedroch (Reg. Arch. Alkmaar, Inv. Van Foreest nr. 33). See also Petrus Forestus medicus, ed. by Bosman-Jelgersma and others, pp. 259–90. 12

Van Foreest’s tomb stone read: ‘Hippocrates Batavis si fuit ille fuit’. See Petrus Forestus medicus, ed. by Bosman-Jelgersma and others, p. 11. 13

Even within the classical frame of reference, the unambiguous association of individual physicians with particular medical sects (Rationalists, Empiricists, Methodists, Pneumatists) is problematic. As Vivian Nutton has recently emphasized once again, a fair number of classical physicians have to be regarded as ‘synthetics’ operating in an open and unregulated medical marketplace. This assessment applies even more forcefully to early modern medical practitioners. Cf. V. Nutton, ‘The Medical World of Rufus of Ephesus’, in Rufus of Ephesus: On Melancholy, ed. by P. Pormann, SAPERE, 12 (Tübingen: Siebeck, 2008), pp. 139–58. 14

For clarity’s sake, throughout this paper I will be using the terms ‘case history’ for the more descriptive first part of the observation 13 (as quoted above), scholia for the more interpretative second part of it, and ‘observatio’ with reference to both parts. 15

On this figure of thought, ubiquitous in the history of melancholy since Rufus of Ephesus, cf. P. Toohey, ‘Rufus of Ephesus and the Tradition of the Melancholy Thinker’, in Rufus of Ephesus, ed. by Pormann, pp. 221–43 (pp. 228–36); W. F. Kümmel, ‘Der Homo literatus und

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which hints, by implication, at prophylactic and/or therapeutic recommendations in the spirit of the sex res non naturales (six non-naturals); a belief in the therapeutic efficacy of dietetics, and the meaningfulness of potentially life-saving medical intervention; the tentative conception of religious melancholy.17 die Kunst, gesund zu leben: Zur Entfaltung eines Zweiges der Diätetik im Humanismus’, in Humanismus und Medizin, ed. by R . Schmitz and G. Keil (Weinheim: Acta humaniora, 1984), pp. 67–85; W. F. Kümmel, ‘Kopfarbeit und Sitzberuf: Das früheste Paradigma der Arbeitsmedizin’, Jahrbuch des Instituts für Geschichte der Medizin der Robert Bosch Stiftung, 6 (1989), 53–70. 16

On the importance of a caloric diet in the treatment of patients suffering from mental illnesses in two Hessian hospitals (Haina and Merxhausen) in the 1570s, see Midelfort, A History of Madness, pp. 342–50. Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, I, 215: 5–11, relates, with reference to van Foreest, Observationum et curationum medicinalium (1634), bk X , pp. 326–27 (observatio 16), ‘that Carthusian Friers, whose living is most part Fish, are more subject to melancholy then any other order’. 17

Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, III (1994), 360: 3–5 and III, 413: 6–7, who cites van Foreest as one of his sources for his concept of religious melancholy, ‘quotes’ on two occasions a sentence from the scholia to the case history under investigation here: ‘Nonnulli ob longas inedias, studia & meditationes coelestes, de rebus sacris & religione semper agitant[ur]’. Cf. van Foreest, Observationum et curationum medicinalium (1634), bk X , p. 331b. On another occasion, when speaking about the ‘love of learning, or overmuch study’ as a cause of melancholy, Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, I, 303: 9–10, partially summarizes obervatio 13 by saying: ‘So Forestus observat. lib. 10 observ. 13. in a young Divine in Lovain, that was mad, and said, he had a Bible in his head.’ It is interesting to note that Burton here ‘quotes’ Christian Joannis’s only surviving original utterance. By shortening it, however, Burton deprives van Foreest’s quotation not only of its chiasmatic structure, but also of its potential theological punch line, since his preference for the indefinite article in the phrase ‘a bible’, instead of the original definite article (‘the bible’) rather suggests that Christian imagined a copy of the bible to be physically sitting in his head. Burton thus renders Christian’s reported idée fixe as an unambiguous delusion. If van Foreest had put the mask of the melancholic Democritus on Christian’s face (see below), the theologian from Oxford now attaches a fool’s speech bubble to it. Incidentally, Burton continues with a quotation from Ficino. Van Foreest seems to have likewise associated his observatio 13 with Ficino, see below. Furthermore, when discussing ‘poverty and want’ as causes of melancholy, Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, I, 354: 1–3, again invokes the observatio 13 with the following words: ‘P. Forestus in his medicinall observations, hath a memorable example, of two brothers of Lovain, that being destitute of meanes, became both melancholy, and in a discontented humour massacred themselves.’ Finally, when dealing with the ‘prognosticks of melancholy’, Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy, I, 438: 14–16, once again reminds the reader of observatio 13, the ‘story of two melancholy brethren, that made away themselves, and for so foule a fact, were accordingly censured, to bee infamously buried, as in such cases they use: to terrifie others’. Although Burton quotes from a number of van Foreest’s case histories of melancholics, observatio 13 seems to be the one he refers to most frequently and in a variety of contexts. The inaccuracies of his varied

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More importantly, however, it is the rhetorical polarities which underpin van Foreest’s case history as a guiding figure of thought and structural element: an apparently single mother, who remains nameless, who is described as ‘miserly’, allows her sons to starve and denies them medical help (suggesting, taken at face value, moral stigma, but see below), is contrasted with a woman, mentioned by name,18 who has made an advantageous marriage and was thus able to assist her male relatives in influencing the turn of events. The contrast between the two women is mirrored in the contrastive portrayal of the two sexes in the narrative. Passivity on the part of the women (mittere — to send — and revocare — to call back — are the only two activities the mother engages in over the course of an otherwise dramatic and tragic story, while ‘having got married’ seems Cornelia’s only claim to fame) is juxtaposed with activity and efficiency on the part of the male protagonists. What the mother, whom we can safely assume to have a vital interest in cutting her son’s naked, desecrated, and decomposing body from the fork19 and give it a decent burial, would perhaps have failed to achieve is

‘summaries’ as compared with van Foreest’s account are noteworthy and seem to serve his various own agendas. On the wider context, see A. Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 18

Santing (‘Pieter van Foreest’ (2010), pp. 165–66) reminds us that van Foreest frequently identified patients by name and that most names ‘stem from either the neighbourhood of Alkmaar (c. 300) or Delft (c. 500)’. The fact that in our observatio, van Foreest only names his relatives, but neither the patients and their relatives nor his kinswoman’s husband, can be understood as a reinforcement of Santing’s impression that self-advertisement was ‘one of the strongest of the motivations behind van Foreest’s writing’ (p. 166). With reference to our observatio, H. W. van Leeuwen, ‘Patiënten en relaties’, in Pieter van Foreest, ed. by BosmanJelgersma, pp. 165–78 (p. 167), erroneously lists a ‘Oesthoren, Cornelius’. Harry de Raad from the Regionaal Archief Alkmaar kindly informs me that Cornelia de O esthoren is known as Cornelia van Oudshoorn, daughter of Andries Willemsz. van Oudshoorn (d. 1555) and Wilhelmina Paling or Wilhelmina van Sonnevelt as she called herself in later years. Cornelia van Oudshoorn died in 1558. Her mother, Wilhelmina Paling, was a daughter of Pieter Claesz. Paling and Josina van Foreest, one of the richest citizens of Alkmaar in the early sixteenth century. See also T. P. H. Wortel, Inventaris van het archief van het Provenhuis Paling en Van Foreest (Alkmaar: Gemeentearchief, c. 1969). 19

The fork had probably been erected for the occasion in the Big Market (grote markt). Compare Chronycke van Antwerpen sedert het jaar 1500 tot 1575 gevolgd van eene beschryving van de historie en het landt van Brabant, sedert het jaer 51 vóór J.-C. Tot 1565 na J.-C. Volgens een onuitgegeven handschrift van de XVI de eeuw met fac-simile van het hs. (Antwerp: Van Dieren, 1845), p. 40. On a fork’s appearance, see S. Deschrijver, ‘Misdaad, zonde en straf? Een onderzoek naar de betekenissen van en houdingen tegenover zelfmoord in de Zuidelijke Nederlanden, 16 de–17 de eeuw’ (unpublished master’s dissertation, University of Antwerp, 2007), pp. 152–53. I am

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accomplished by a casual passer-by by sheer virtue of his mindfulness, initiative, good social standing, education, and communicative skills: it is Nanning van Foreest20 who recognizes that the young man’s self-killing occurred as a consequence of his illness, and it is Nanning who successfully communicates this interpretation of events so that a burial can be effected and the honour of the deceased and his family can be restored.21 The amman22 similarly proves a

indebted to Sonja Deschrijver for kindly providing a copy of her excellent thesis. An illustration of a fork can be found in L. Vandekerckhove, On Punishment: The Confrontation of Suicide in Old-Europe (Leuven: Universitaire Pers Leuven, 2000), p. 55. 20

On Nanning Jordensz van Foreest (1529–92), see Nieuw Nederlandsch Biografisch Woordenboek, ed. by P. C. Molhuysen and others, 10 vols (Leiden: Sijthoff, 1911–37), I, 881–82; J. Cox, ‘De Heeren van Alkmaer’: Regeerders en regenten, vroedschap en raad 1264–2005 (Alkmaar: Alkmaar, 2005), p. 77; J. H. van Rombach, Inventaris van de archieven van de families van Foreest 1422–1979, van Egmond van de Nijensburg 1428–1765, de Dieu, Fontein Verschuir, van der Feen de Lille 1664–1955 (Alkmaar: Archief, 1992), p. 20; C. M. O. Verhas, De beginjaren van de Hoge R aad van Holland, Zeeland en West-Friesland […] tot onder houdinge van de Politque ordre ende staet der Landen van Hollandt, Zeelandt, Vriesland (Den Haag: Rijksarchief, 1997), p. 44; Pieter van Foreest, ed. by H. A. Bosman-Jelgersma, pp. 106–07. 21

On the dragging, ‘execution’, and ‘posthumous’ punishment of the corpses of suicide victims, the latter of which involved the exhibition of the suicide, the denial of church burial, and the hanging from a fork, see Vandekerckhove, On Punishment, pp. 47–68; on the patrimonial penalty, i.e. the forfeiture of all goods of which the suicide victim had possessed the right of disposal, ibid., pp. 95–120; compare also A. Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998–2000), II, 32–37 and 63–76; J. Monballyu, ‘De decriminalisering van de zelfdoding in de Oostenrijkse Nederlanden’, Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Filologie en geschiedenis, 78 (2000), 445–69 (pp. 445–50). Again, many thanks to Sonja Deschrijver for kindly providing a copy of the latter article. 22

From 1540 to 1564, Godevaert (or Govert) Sterck was the ‘amman’ of Antwerp. See A. Bousse, ‘Het Historisch Gebeuren’, in Antwerpen in de XVIde eeuw, ed. by Walter Couvreur (Antwerp: Mercurius, 1975), pp. 21–36 (p. 33). Mr Harry de Raad from the Regionaal Archief Alkmaar kindly confirmed in an email that Sterck was married to Cornelia van Oudshoorn. On the office of the ‘amman’, see J. Vanroelen, ‘Het Stadsbestuur’, in Antwerpen in de XVI de eeuw, pp. 39–40. Alongside the ‘schout’, the ‘amman’ was a law enforcement officer, appointed by the Duke of Brabant and representing royal authority at local level. The ‘amman’ was responsible for enforcing civil law, while the ‘schout’ reinforced criminal law. The ‘amman’ also kept accounts of revenues and expenses (e.g. costs for executioners, income from fines, rents, etc.), which he had to submit to a central institution called Rekenkamer. In cases of non-payment etc., he acted as public prosecutor. I thank Vanessa Toetenel and Marie Juliette Marinus from the Stadsarchief in Antwerp and Sonja Deschrijver from the History Department of the Universiteit Antwerp for information on the ‘amman’. Vandekerckhove, On Punishment, p. 100, suggests that in Antwerp in 1569, suicides fell in the ‘schout’s’ jurisdiction. There are at least two plausible explanations

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reasonable man in this scenario and knows how to go about restoring law and order in a social, legal, and religious sense. Finally, the creation of opposites also determines the psychopathological discourse of this case history — a fact already referenced in the title of the observatio: ‘On two melancholic brothers, one of whom died in bed, while the other one threw himself into a well’ (De duobus fratribus melancholicis, uno in lecto obeunte, altero in puteum sese praecipitante). While one son is melancholic by nature, constitutionally melancholic, the other apparently becomes melancholic. While one son is ultimately consumed by his melancholy, the other puts a gruesome end to his own life.23 One son presumably dies in his bed at home, while the other meets his end as a lonesome wanderer among strangers. The first son’s death occurs within a socially, legally, and religiously acceptable frame, since it is the result of a refusal, the in bono versions of which include renouncement, asceticism, and religiously or philosophically prescribed world negation.24 The other son’s death, in its violence, its uprootedness, and its clear breach of a taboo, calls the very order of the world into question.25 Again, such contrasting is dictated by

why Nanning van Foreest approached the ‘amman’ rather than the ‘schout’. Either, his being related to the ‘amman’s’ wife prompted him to contact the ‘amman’ rather than anyone else, or the ‘amman’ was involved in enforcing the patrimonial penalty. 23

G. Minois, History of Suicide: Voluntary Death in Western Culture, trans. by L. G. Cochrane (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), p. 60, reports on a case from 1525 where the same method of suicide was used. On the whole, it seems that this method of self-killing was not very common. Given the metaphorical usage of the well in biblical texts and reformatory pamphlets and given the second brother’s reported standard phrase, one may speculate about the theology student’s self-killing being linked to the tension between counter-reformatory activities at Leuven University and reformatory movements elsewhere in Brabant. 24

For the intellectual history of this figure of thought, see P. Sloterdijk, Weltfremdheit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993). 25

Even more so, since theology students do not feature prominently among sixteenth- and seventeenth-century suicide victims in Antwerp. See Deschrijver, ‘Misdaad, zonde en straf?’ , p. 51, where only one priest among thirty-two male suicide victims is mentioned. Since contemporaries such as Henri Estienne claimed that ‘members of the clergy committed suicide as frequently as the laity did’ (see Minois, History of Suicide, p. 61), some caution as to the accuracy of archival recordings of such cases seems to be advisable. In terms of gender (male), marital status (not married), age (under thirty), location (urban), and underlying cause (melancholy), the student from Alkmaar is more representative of Deschrijver’s sample. See ibid., pp. 57–64, 67–77, 113–37. Antonio Gómez (1501–c. 1570), a legal scholar and contemporary of van Foreest, in his commentary to the Ius civile, published in Antwerp in 1634, explains how order can be restored: through afflicting the suicide victim’s corpse with corporeal punishment:

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theoretical knowledge, i.e. the nature of van Foreest’s concept of melancholy as the polar disease par excellence: oscillating between hot and cold on the spectrum of qualities, yellow and black bile on the spectrum of humours, furor and boredom, laughing and weeping, fading and consuming on the spectrum of clinical findings. The key message of the observatio seems to be that it is only the physician, or at least a medically trained professional, who is truly able to deduce from the polar manifestations (behaviour and manner of death) a common psychopathological cause, i.e. the underlying nosological entity (melancholy), the proper recognition of which is not only relevant in medical terms, but also has important social, legal, and religious consequences. Van Foreest’s notion that physicians or, more precisely, academically trained medical professionals should rightfully be the sovereign interpreters of psychopathologically motivated suicides becomes even more apparent in the subsequent scholia. In this commentary to his case study, the author substantiates the claim that theoretical knowledge and scholarly book learning are precisely what qualifies him to act as an observer and chronicler of medical case studies. The scholia spread out and define the horizon of medical knowledge and authority against which we are not only to ‘read’ the case history, but which legitimizes its existence and shapes its textuality in the first place. This is the place where van Foreest, through medico-theoretically informed enquiries, completes the case history, manipulates its course, and explicates the general, typical, and exemplary aspects that render an individual case scientifically significant and representative. The scholia ‘cite’ the preceding case history as illustrative evidence. Van Foreest’s reading in the book of Nature, i.e. his reading of the signs revealed by the patient, is thus not only flanked by book reading, but dominated by it. The fact that the theoretical frame guides and determines the selection, ordering, and rendering of the observationes is not least confirmed by the fact that van Foreest presents his case histories in the manner of a systematic medical textbook.26 His chapter on melancholy, for example, presents successive case

‘non punitur cadaver aliqua pena sensitiva, vel afflictiva corporis, cum in eo non possit cadere, licet de consuetudine contrarium fiat, quia cadaver furca suspenditur’. See A. Gómez, Commentariorum variarumque resolutionum iuris civil[is]: Commun[is] et regii tomi tres […] (Antwerp: Bellerus, 1634), p. 457. See also Murray, Suicide in the Middle Ages, II, 35; and C. J. E. M. Laenens, De geschiedenis van het Antwerps gerecht (Antwerp: Van de Velde, 1953), p. 175. Van Foreest seems to imply that true order is only restored when the physician’s insights unmask the act of hanging the body from the fork as an injustice. 26

See A. Wear, ‘Explorations in Renaissance Writings on the Practice of Medicine’, in The

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histories on systemic melancholy, head melancholy, and hypochondriac melancholy, thus illustrating forms of melancholy that had dominated the discourse on melancholy since Rufus of Ephesus.27 The observatio thus becomes an ‘exemplum’28 that, as will be shown next, also serves didactic and moral purposes. Van Foreest begins his scholia with a moral lesson: the case of the two brothers, he writes, cautions us not to allow melancholics to be left alone. The collective pronoun (nos) does not just include doctors, but rather encompasses the entire community, perhaps even humanity as a whole — a fact that again underscores the ambit of medical insight and thus medicine’s, and its professional custodians’, wider social relevance. Van Foreest’s second conclusion from the reported case is that it confirms the existence of hereditary melancholy,29 since, in the family from Alkmaar, not only the two brothers suffered from melancholy, but also the mother and one daughter. Van Foreest thus intimates that he himself, prompted by his lay brother’s report, had made further enquiries, the findings of which he includes in the scholia rather than in the case history.30 The fact that the mother is identified as melancholic, and thus as ill, only in the scholia casts a highly significant light on the portrayal of this character in the case history. In hindsight, her miserliness, which the case history emphasized more than once, Medical Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century, ed. by A. Wear, R . K. French, and I. M. Lonie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 118–45 (pp. 125–27). 27

The structure chosen by van Foreest in his book on diseases of the head is conventional. Case studies of phrenitis (obs 1–7) are followed by those of lethargus (8–11), melancholy (12–19), mania (20–24), lycanthropy (29), cynanthropy (30), etc. Observatio 16 presents systemic melancholy, 17 head melancholy, and 18 hypochondriac melancholy. By implication, the assessment of patients was already dictated by such textbook systematization. 28

Van Foreest, Observationum et curationum medicinalium (1634), p. 331.

29

Other sixteenth-century authors similarly emphasize the hereditary nature of melancholy. See, for example, Philip Melanchthon, Liber de anima II, in Philippi Melanthonis Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. by K. G. Bretschneider and H. E. Bindseil, 28 vols (Halis Saxorum: Schwetschke, 1834–60), XIII (1846), col. 87: ‘Sed omnium specierum magna varietas est, ut in singulis corporibus temperamenta propter diversas parentum naturas et diversas stellarum commixtiones differunt.’ For other authors holding similar views, see Burton, I, 205: 5–210: 23. Burton also mentions van Foreest in this context, but refers the reader to the latter’s observatio 15 (bk X ), the case history of ‘a merchant his Patient, that had this infirmity by inheritance’. 30 Originally hailing from Alkmaar and having returned, in 1546, to his home town to practise there as a physician, van Foreest was, of course, in a prime position to investigate this case further. Pieter van Foreest, ed. by H. A. Bosman-Jelgersma, p. 10; Vis, ‘De Alkmaarse jaren 1528–1558’, p. 74.

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seems not so much a flaw of character but rather appears as a cardinal symptom of the melancholic.31 Thus, the scholia paint a rather different picture from the case history, where the reader is invited to assume that the mother’s failings have their roots in a flawed character or a fundamental disregard of her duties towards her sons, their presumably late father, the community, or the res publica litteraria. But rather than casting a more positive light on the mother, the additional information merely seems to add a biological stigma — she carries a hereditary disease and passed it on to her offspring — to the social and moral stigmata mentioned earlier. The empathic term ‘poor wretch’ (miser) is only assigned to the two sons, the male melancholics in the story. Three potential reasons for this spring to mind. First, the contrasting treatment of the characters clearly represents a compositional strategy on the part of the author, who, as we have seen, is keen to underscore the principle of polarity in the observatio in order to make the moral of the tale all the more obvious. Second, van Foreest is giving voice to the universal misogynist sentiments of his time, which are well documented.32 Third, the deliberate contrast illustrates what Juliana Schiesari has called ‘the gendering of melancholia’, namely the phenomenon that all genializing and ennobling forms of melancholy are exclusively associated with men, who regularly eclipse the thoroughly unpoetic ‘depressed’ woman as a dark icon of modern domesticity.33 Even though van Foreest regards the two brothers as ill, he clearly identifies with the intellectual young men to a certain degree — he, too, had left his hometown of Alkmaar at the age of fourteen to pursue his studies in Leuven (his brother following him in this path a few years later), and he, too, worked ‘night and day’ throughout his life, was an ‘indefatigable writer’,34 and went down in history as

31

Miserliness had been regarded as a characteristic feature of melancholia or black bile dyscrasia since late antiquity. Cf. R . Klibansky, E. Panofsky, and F. Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and Art (London: Nelson, 1964), pp. 55–66. On miserliness precipitating melancholy, see Haskell in this collection. 32

See, for example, M. L. King, Women of the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), esp. pp. 56–62 on widowhood; N. Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), pp. 124–51; Die Frau in der Renaissance, ed. by P. Schmidt, Wolfenbütteler Abhandlungen zur Renaissanceforschung, 14 (Wiesbaden: Harras-sowitz, 1994). 33

Cf. J. Schiesari, The Gendering of Melancholia: Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Symbolics of Loss in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), pp. 63–95. The fact that the figure of the grieving mother is also absent from this case history further supports this reading. 34

Both quotations from Lindeboom, Dutch Medical Biography, col. 613.

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‘exceptionally industrious’.35 The female melancholics in the family described in the observatio are, by contrast, rather reminiscent of the mulierculae — ‘silly women’ — who, alongside quacks and empirics, are the main object of van Foreest’s lifelong wrath on account of the fact that they hamper or even deny sufferers access to professional medical care.36 Another result of van Foreest’s further enquiries reveals the extent to which the representation of the case, both in the case history and in the scholia, is determined by theoretical (i.e. Hippocratic-Galenic) considerations. Friends or relatives of the deceased brothers (qui ab initio iis aderant) confirmed that both young men had always been meticulosi and moesti. This enables van Foreest to ‘cite’ two symptoms — anxiety and sadness — which lie at the very core of the classical definition of melancholy or, more precisely, of the melancholic condition as set out in the Hippocratic Aphorisms (VI, 23). What is presented as an impartial and medically uninformed clue provided by a third party turns out to match the most influential definition of pathological melancholy known in Western medical history.37 The congruence between lay language and academic language implied in van Foreest’s report of eyewitnesses’ statements may well be doubted. The doctor’s historically derived and theoretically substantiated suspected diagnosis — melancholy as Hippocrates defined it — is only ‘confirmed’ by medically untrained observers because the latter respond to the implications in the former’s questions or because the informants’ statements are translated into the language of the university-trained physician. Ultimately, the correspondence between Hippocrates’ classical definition and van Foreest’s ‘findings’ firmly embed the case, as well as its interpretation, in the Hippocratic tradition of pathological melancholy rather than in, for example, the tradition of an ennobled melancholy as described in the pseudo-Aristotelian Problemata, XXX, 1.38 The scholia show 35

H. Bosman-Jelgersma, ‘Petrus Forestus, the Dutch Hippocrates (1521–1597)’, in 31 st International Congress on the History of Medicine. Bologna, 30 agosto–4 settembre 1988: Proceedings, ed. by R . A. Bernabeo (Bologna: Monduzzi, 1988), pp. 721–26 (p. 722). 36

On van Foreest’s campaign against his competitors in the health market, cf. Nutton, ‘Idle Old Trots, Coblers and Costardmongers’. 37 Klibansky and others, Saturn and Melancholy, p. 15; H. Flashar, Melancholie und Melancholiker in den medizinischen Theorien der Antike (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1966), p. 47; J. Pigeaud, La Maladie de l’âme: Étude sur la relation de l’âme et du corps dans la tradition médicophilosophique antique (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1981), p. 124; J. Pigeaud, s. v. ‘Mélancolie’, in Dictionnaire de la pensée médicale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2004), pp. 725–30. 38

Cf. Klibansky and others, Saturn and Melancholy, pp. 15–41; Flashar, Melancholie und Melancholiker, pp. 60–72; with reference to the early modern period, see N. L. Brann, The Debate

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readers how varied and multiform this pathological (Hippocratic) melancholy really is and how broad a spectrum it covers in terms of humoral pathology, psychopathology, and physiognomy. The numerous sentences beginning with ‘Alii […]. Alii […]. Alii […]’ (‘Some […]. Others […]. Some […]’) continue the pattern of establishing opposites with which we are already familiar from the case history. They demarcate the broad field of melancholic symptomatology and establish the diagnostic entity of melancholy as a reservoir for highly disparate modes of behaviour, clinical presentations, humoral-pathological constellations, and delusions. The introduction of the two philosophers Democritus and Heraclitus into the scholia continues this polarity. Van Foreest writes: Heraclitus of Ephesus was all in tears and, as an old man and out of grief for the lot of humankind, lamented their sorrows and wretchedness: he loved solitude and lived on unclean and meagre fare. Theophrastus believed him to be melancholic,39 since his writings were dark and confused, and he died suffering from dropsy.40 For there is no single cause of melancholy (as we will say later in the paragraph on causes), and neither is the ailment brought on by a single humour, but rather by several, which is why not everyone (as we have said) suffers the same symptoms and not all sufferers are plagued by delusions in one and the same way; rather, some of them always laugh and phantasize cheerily; several people say that the ever smiling Democritus was melancholic. Valescus

over the Origin of Genius During the Italian Renaissance: The Theories of Supernatural Frenzy and Natural Melancholy in Accord and in Conflict on the Threshold of the Scientific Revolution (Leiden: Brill, 2002); J. Céard, La Nature et les prodiges: L’ insolité au XVI e siècle en France, 2nd rev. edn (Geneva: Droz, 1996); W. Schleiner, Melancholy, Genius, and Utopia in the Renaissance, Wolfenbütteler Abhandlungen zur Renaissanceforschung, 10 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1991); Kutzer, ‘Liebeskranke Magd’, p. 254, n. 72, points out that van Foreest was not only familiar with this tradition, but also refers to it in the scholia to his observatio 19. 39

Diog. Laert., IX , 6: ‘Theophrastus puts it down to melancholy that some parts of his work are half-finished, while other parts make a strange medley.’ Trans. after Diogenes Laertius: Lives of Eminent Philosophers, with an English translation by R . D. Hicks (1925), Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1970), II, 413. Cf. also Flashar, Melancholie und Melancholiker, p. 63, n. 7. 40

Diog. Laert. IX . 3: ‘Finally, he [i.e. Heraclitus] became a hater of his kind and wandered on the mountains, and there he continued to live, making his diet of grass and herbs. However, when this gave him dropsy, he made his way back to the city and put this riddle to the physicians, whether they were competent to create a drought after heavy rain. They could make nothing of this, whereupon he buried himself in a cowshed, expecting that the noxious damp humour would be drawn out of him by the warmth of the manure. But, as even this was of no avail, he died at the age of sixty.’ Trans. after Diogenes Laertius, II, 411.

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Thomas Rütten cured one such patient, who was laughing continuously, most heartily so at full moon:41 he cut a vein and cleansed the patient’s black bile, and later the same patient started bleeding through the nose, he lost about a libra of blood and was thus, praise be to God, cured.42

Given the long Stoic-Cynic tradition of the laughing philosopher Democritus and his customary opposition to the weeping philosopher Heraclitus, which virtually immunized the Abderite against melancholy, the introduction of a melancholic Democritus, a theoretical set piece that I shall focus my attention on for the remainder of this chapter, may well have surprised the contemporary reader. The quidam — ‘several people’ — who had diagnosed Democritus as melancholic include, first and foremost, Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), who saw the causa humana of melancholy, i.e. the ‘physiological consequences of the life led by the scholar — 41

Valescus de Tarenta, Practica […] que alias Philonium dicitur (Venice: Impensis Petri Liechtensteyn, 1502), fol. 16v (de melancholia): ‘Ego curabam vnum qui continue ridebat maxime in plenulunio. Et feci ipse flebotomari et purgaui choleram nigram et post euenit ei fluxus sanus narium et emisit quasi libram unam et dei gratia fuit curatus.’ Valescus’s main work, the Philonium pharmaceuticum et chirurgicum de medendis omnibus cum internis tum externis humani corporis affectionibus (Montpellier, 1418), is a Practica ranging from pharmacy to surgery organized a capite ad calcem, which first appeared in print in 1490 and was reissued in several new editions throughout the sixteenth century. Van Foreest’s reference to Valescus indicates the continuing impact of his work on university-educated physicians, which lasted well into the seventeenth century, as is aptly attested by his brief case history’s resurfacing in Johann van Beverwyck, Schatz der Vngesundheit Als der allgemeinen Artzeney-Kunst Zweyter Theil, trans. by J. Chr. Salbach (Frankfurt am Main: Fievet, 1672), p. 425. On Valescus, see W. H. York, ‘Experience and Theory in Medical Practice during the Later Middle Ages: Valesco de Tarenta [fl. 1382–1426] at the Court of Foix’ (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 2004). I thank Michael McVaugh for alerting me to this authoritative piece of literature on Valescus. On Valescus’s concept of melancholy, see Klibansky and others, Saturn and Melancholy, pp. 93, n. 84, 94, n. 90, and 98. For van Foreest’s usage of the medieval genre of Practica, see Santing, ‘Pieter van Foreest’ (2010), pp. 165–67. 42

Van Foreest, Observationum et curationum medicinalium (1634), p. 331: ‘Heraclitus Ephesius totus erat in lacrymis, miserias & calamitates hominum iugi planctu seniculus deplorabat: solitudines amabat, impuro, sordidoque victu degebat. Melancholicum fuisse, Theophrastus est opinatus, quod obscura & confusanea conscripsisset, hydropicus factus interiit. Cum neque vna est melancholiae caussa (ut postea dicemus de caussis) neque vnus humor vitium pariens, sed plures, inde neque omnes (ut iam diximus) eadem symptomata sustinent, neque similiter iisdem imaginationibus exagitantur, sed alii ipsorum rident semper & cum hilaritate imaginantur; qualem Democritum semper ridentem melancholicum fuisse quidam autumant. Talem curauit Valescus, qui continuo ridebat, maxime in plenilunio: cui adhibuit sectionem venae & purgationem cholerae nigrae, & postea accidit eidem fluxus sanguinis, narium, & emisit quasi libram vnam sanguinis, & Dei gratia ita curatus fuit.’

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drying up of the brain, thickening of the blood, poor digestion’43 — as applicable to every homo literatus. The causa naturalis of melancholy, which, for Ficino, corresponded to the intellectual strain suffered by the enquiring mind, was directed inwards and stood in analogy to the earth and black bile, could similarly be assumed to apply to Democritus.44 Ficino was also one of the pioneers of sixteenth-century theories of laughter, which further legitimized interpretations of the laughing philosopher Democritus as melancholic. To a certain degree, such theories of laughter were rooted in the humanist’s emancipation and his assuming his place at the centre of the world, a development which Ficino had himself experienced and reasoned to its logical conclusion. Self-affirmation and self-doubt, an awareness of both the tragic and the heroic, godlikeness and mortality represent, according to Ficino, the ambivalent legacy of the emancipation of the intellect. Indeed, pain and anguish become a constant in the Florentine’s own life: ‘For in the midst of pastimes and pleasures we often sigh, and when the pastimes are over we lapse into even greater sadness.’45 Pain and anguish also lend an inescapably ambivalent aspect to laughter. It is thus not surprising that Laurent Joubert (1529–82), one of the most eminent sixteenth-century theoretical writers on the subject,46 ‘conceived of laughter as a mixture of opposite emotions, joy and sorrow’.47 Similarly, Erycius Puteanus

43

Cf. Klibansky and others, Saturn and Melancholy, p. 266, n. 80.

44

Marsilio Ficino, ‘D e vita triplici’, I, 4, in Marsilio Ficino: Opera omnia. Con una lettera introduttiva di P. O. Kristeller, Monumenta politica et philosophica rariora, ser. 1, nos 7–10 (Turin: Bottega d’Erasmo, 1962), p. 496. See also Marsilio Ficino, Three Books on Life: A Critical Edition and Translation with Introduction and Notes, ed. by C. V. Kaske and J. R . Clark (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1989), pp. 114–15. 45

Ficino, Theologia platonica, 14.7.5, trans. after Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology, ed. by J. Hankins and trans. by Michael J. B. Allen, 6 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001–06), IV (2004), 275; Marsilio Ficino: Theologia Platonica. Text, Übersetzung, Kommentar, ed. by H. Dörrie (Stuttgart: Fromann-Holzboog, 2007). On sixteenth-century theories of laughter, see D. Ménager, La Renaissance et le Rire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1995); M. A. Screech, Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (London: Allen Lane, 1997). 46

Laurent Joubert, Traité du ris suivi d’un dialogue sur la cacographie française (1579) (Genève: Slatkine Reprints, 1973). 47

S. Kivistö, ‘Sour Faces, Happy Lives? On Laughter, Joy and Happiness of the Agelasts’, in Happiness, Cognition, Experience, Language, ed. by H. Tissari, A. B. Pessi, and M. Salmela, COLLeGIUM: Studies across Disciplines in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 3 (Helsinki: Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, 2008), pp. 79–100 (p. 80, n. 5). Q. Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), III, 146, discusses Joubert’s

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(1574–1646), author of a 1611 oratory entitled Democritus, sive de risu dissertatio Saturnalis, ‘also noted the close resemblance between joy and sadness: laughter could lead to tears’.48 Timothie Bright (1550–1615) devoted the entire twentyeighth chapter of his Treatise of Melancholie (1586) to the question as to ‘howe melancholie causeth both weeping and laughing’.49 In the wake of the discourses on laughter that positively boomed between 1550 and 1650, the career laugher Democritus could thus finally be exposed as a melancholic.50 Last but not least, Ficino also played a significant role in linking Democritus to the historically highly influential Problemata, XXX, 1, according to which all men in politics, science, and the arts were melancholics.51 More precisely, Ficino linked Democritus’s and Plato’s theories of enthusiasm to the Problemata, XXX, 1, as a result of which Democritus could henceforth be regarded as melancholic. Girolamo Fracastoro seems to have followed this line of thinking.52

emphasis on tristesse. Since it is produced by a mixture of emotions such as joy and scorn or dislike for baseness and ugliness, ‘laughter can never be wholly unconnected with sadness’. See also V. C. Machline, ‘The Contribution of Laurent Joubert’s “Traité du Ris” to Sixteenth-Century Physiology of Laughter’, in Reading the Book of Nature: The Other Side of the Scientific Revolution, ed. by A. G. Debus and M. T. Walton, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, 41 (Kirksville: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1998), pp. 251–64; and U. Link-Heer, ‘Physiologie und Affektenlehre des Lachens im Zeitalter Rabelais: Der medico-philosophische “Traité du Ris” (1579) von Laurent Joubert’, in Komische Gegenwelten: Lachen und Literatur in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. by W. Röcke and H. Neumann (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1999), pp. 251–82. 48

Kivistö, ‘Sour Faces, Happy Lives?’, p. 81. See also J. Verberckmoes, ‘Puteanus’ Democritus, sive de risu’, Humanistica Lovaniensia, 49 (2000), 399–409. 49

T. Bright, A Treatise of Melancholie (London: Windet, 1586), pp. 161–66. See Skinner, Visions of Politics, p. 43. 50

Cf. the discussion of Ercole de Sassonia in Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, pp. 56–72. 51

Ficino, Theologia platonica, 13.2.2 and 13.2.5. See Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV , 122–23, 126–27. 52

G. Fracastoro, ‘Naugerius’, in Hieronymi Fracastorii […] opera omnia quorum nomina sequens pagina plenius indicat, 3rd edn (Venice: Juntas, 1584), fols 112 v–113 r. See also Girolamo Fracastoro. Navagero. Della poetica: Testo critico, traduzione, introduzione e note, ed. by E. Peruzzi (Florence: Alinea, 2005). For an English translation, see Girolamo Fracastoro, Navgerius, sive de poetica dialogvs, trans. by R . Kelso (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1924), p. 51. See also E. Peruzzi, ‘La Poetica del Naugerius tra platonismo e aristotelismo’, in Girolamo Fracastoro tra medicina, filosofia e scienze della natura: Atti del convegno internazionale di studi in occasione del 450°anniversario della morte. Verona — Padova 9–11 ottobre 2003, ed. by A. Pastore and E. Peruzzi (Florence: Olschki, 2006), pp. 217–27.

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Post-classical humoral theory supplied further justification for the ‘melancholization’ of Democritus. Even though Rufus of Ephesus had already posited that the ‘excessive “cooking” of yellow bile’ could lead to ‘outrageous acts at the very moment when the bile is excessively cooked’, and to sadness and fearfulness ‘after the bile is burnt up’,53 it was only since Avicenna that such bilis adusta or incensa was regarded as the end product of the burning process of all four humours.54 Henceforth, one distinguished between melancholic, choleric, phlegmatic, and sanguine melancholia, depending on the respective humoral substrate undergoing the burning process. This not least also helped to account for the sheer heterogeneity of melancholy diseases and characters. The characteristics of the individual humours remained active even in their melancholy-carrying, ashlike state post burning and thus shaped the symptomatology of the respective adust melancholies. In terms of humoral pathology, Democritus, by nature a laughing sanguine type, became a melancholic once his lifestyle (bad diet, scholarly habits, lack of sleep, etc.) had led to the burning of the blood that determined his temperament and exposed him to the melancholy effects of the thus induced bilis adusta. By virtue of the nature of the substrate subjected to the burning process, that is, by virtue of the nature of his blood, Democritus’s sanguine melancholy represented a case of blithe insanity, and it was thus that the proverbially laughing philosopher could eventually be recast as a prototype of the melancholicus sanguinicus. Other authors who classed Democritus as a melancholic on the basis of such humoral readings include Philip Melanchthon.55 The notion of the sanguine melancholic, as it was derived in various ways from the theory of humours, the theory of laughter, and the history of ideas, as well as its personification in the figure of the Abderite, converged, in the sixteenth century, into a single text that would henceforth stand as the most important legitimizing source for this very figure: the pseudo-Hippocratic epistolary novel. According to this text, the Abderites had asked Hippocrates for help when they became worried about their fellow citizen Democritus, not only

53

Aëtius, Medical Books, VI, 9, trans. after Rufus of Ephesus, ed. by Pormann, p. 35. ‘We can […] be fairly certain’ that Aëtius here rehearses Rufus’s opinions. Cf. ibid., p. 85. 54

See also F. Pagés Larraya and G. Pagés, ‘La melancholia adusta en San Alberto Magno’, Asclepio, 44 (1992), 181–90. 55

Melanchthon, Liber de anima II, XIII, cols 5–178; see also Klibansky and others, Saturn and Melancholy, p. 90, n. 70; H.-G. Schmitz, ‘Das Melancholieproblem in Wissenschaft und Kunst der frühen Neuzeit’, Sudhoffs Archiv, 60 (1976), 135–62.

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on account of his untimely laughter,56 but also because he had left the polity and, now a hermit, buried himself in zootomical studies: For previously inattentive to everything, including himself, he is now constantly wakeful night and day, […] and thinks life in general is worth nothing. […] The man is investigating things in Hades,57 and he writes about them, and he says that the air is full of images.58 He listens to birds’ voices.59 Arising often alone at night he seems to be

56

Laughter, as the emblematic expression of the Democritean theory of mirth, can be understood as the ideal state of the soul, a notion which particularly impressed the Stoics (Sen., De ira, 2, 10, 5f.; De tranqu. Animi, 15, 2–3) and Cynics (Juv. 10. 2, 8–35, and 47–53; Lukian, Peregr., 7 and 45; Sacr., 15; Vict. Auct., 13–14). On the sixteenth-century reception of the Democritus ridens, see C. Lüthy, ‘The Fourfold Democritus on the Stage of Early Modern Science’, Isis, 91 (2000), 443–79 (pp. 455–61); A. M. García Gomez, The Legend of the Laughing Philosopher and its Presence in Spanish Literature (1500–1700), Monografías, 7 (Cordoba: Universidad de Córdoba, Servicio de Publicaciones, 1984). The core letter (no. 17) of the pseudoHippocratic epistolary novel was directly linked to contemporary theories of laughter when a French translation by M. I. Guichard, entitled La Cause Morale du ris de l’excéllant & tres-nommé Démocrite, expliquéé et témoignée par le divin Hippocras an ses Epitres, was appended to Joubert’s Traité du ris (1579). See Rütten, Demokrit, pp. 174–76 (with further references). 57

Diog. Laert. IX . 46 (= Diels 68 A 33 or Luria CXV) cites a title from the Democritean catalogue of works as compiled by Thrasyllus, who took over this task from Callimachus. C. C. W. Taylor, The Atomists Leucippus and Democritus. Fragments: A Text and Translation with Commentary by C. C. W. Taylor (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), testimonium 40, translates as ‘The Things in Hades’ or perhaps ‘The Souls in Hades’ (ibid., n. 50). On the polemical or parodic use of this title on Democritus’s part, see also T. Rütten, ‘Zootomieren im hippokratischen Briefroman: Motivgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zur Verhältnisbestimmung von Medizin und Philosophie’, in Hippokratische Medizin und Philosophie. Verhandlungen des VIII: Internationalen Hippokrates-Kolloquiums in Kloster Banz/Staffelstein vom 23. bis 28. September 1993, ed. by R . Wittern and P. Pellegrin, Medizin der Antike, 1 (Hildesheim: Weidmann, 1996), pp. 561–82 (p. 574). The allegation may also refer to Democritus’s zootomical activities. The narrative context makes clear that, in the author’s opinion, opposition to anatomical practices is linked to magico-animist and religious reservations and taboos. 58

A humorous corruption of Democritus’s eidola-theory and its application to the theory of dreams and the gods. See Rütten, Hippokratische Medizin und Philosophie, as well as Taylor, The Atomists Leucippus and Democritus, pp. 203–05 and 207–15. 59

An allusion to Democritus’s ornithological observations as described in the Etymologicum Genuinum in relation to the owl. Cf. Taylor, The Atomists Leucippus and Democritus, p. 148 (= Diels 68 A 157; Luria, p. 550). Democritus’s interest in voices, as evidenced by a title cited in Diog. Laert. IX 47 (= Diels 68 A 33; Luria CXV ; Taylor, The Atomists Leucippus and Democritus, p. 40), could also be a foil for the misunderstanding on the part of the Abderite Gothamites. See also Rütten, ‘Zootomieren’, pp. 575–76. On the equation of the owl and bat and the latter’s emblematic and allegorical significance in the context of early modern notions of melancholy, see P.-K . Schuster, Melencolia I: Dürers Denkbild, 2 vols (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1991), I, 168–70.

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singing softly. He claims he goes off sometimes into the boundless and that there are numberless Democrituses like himself.60 He lives with a complexion as ruined as his reason.61

After a long private conversation with the afflicted man, Hippocrates is, however, satisfied that Democritus is by no means insane, but rather very wise indeed and engaged in writing a treatise on human madness (mania), which he is seeking to illuminate by way of zootomical studies on the site and nature of the gall bladder. A number of these fictional and pseudonymous letters (nos 10–21), which, in their currently reconstructable form, probably originated in the first century BC,62 provide an intertextual nexus (the motif of the laughing philosopher from the Stoic-Cynical tradition, the Ilissus scene as a reference to Platonic theories of enthusiasm, and the Socrates mainomenos tradition, scholarly lifestyle, melancholy as the diagnosis suspected by Hippocrates when first called upon by the Abderites, the clean bill of health issued to Democritus by the physician summoned from Kos) that invited an early modern learned audience to read into the epistolary novel the very strategies that had been successfully used to ‘melancholize’ Democritus (in both the pathological and the ennobling sense of the term). This literally productive reception of an ancient text eventually — and both textually and iconographically63 — culminated in Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy. It divided readers into those who thought Democritus to be entirely sane, those who considered him to either simulate madness or suffer from madness, and those who

60

On the theorem of infinite and innumerable worlds, see S. J. Dick, Plurality of Worlds: The Extraterrestrial Life Debate from Democritus to Kant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Taylor, The Atomists Leucippus and Democritus, pp. 80 and 197. This theorem was criticized, in particular, by Plato (Tim. 55c) and by the Stoa. Cf. Cic. Acad. Priora II, 17, 55–56 and 40, 125, as well as Plinius’s (Nat. Hist. 2, 3) verdict: ‘furor est […] innumerabiles tradidisse mundos’. See also Rütten, ‘Zootomieren’, p. 576 and n. 41. 61

Hippocrates: Pseudoepigraphic Writings: Letters — Embassy — Speech from the Altar — Decree, ed. and trans. with an intro. by W. D. Smith, Studies in Ancient Medicine, 2 (Leiden: Brill, 1990), p. 57. The Greek can be found at 56. 4–13, and in ÉÐÐÏÊÑÁÔÏÕÓ ÅÐÉÓÔÏËÁÉ: ¸êäïóç êñéôéêÞ êáé åñìçíåõôéêÞ , ed. by D. Th. Sakalis (Ioannina: Panepistçmio Iôannin ôn, Iatrik ç Scholç, 1989), 302. 17–303. 7, and in [Hippocrates] Lettere sulla follia di Democrito, trans. and annotated by A. Roselli, Sileni, 3 (Naples: Liguori, 1998), p. 32. 62

R . Philippson, ‘Verfasser und Abfassungszeit der sogenannten Hippokratesbriefe’, Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, 67 (1928), 293–328. 63

Cf. T. Rütten and S. Jacobs, ‘Democritus ridens — ein weinender Philosoph? Zur Tradition des Democritus melancholicus in der Bildenden Kunst’, Wolfenbütteler Beiträge, 11 (1998), 73–143.

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diagnosed him as melancholic, either in the sense of the melancholia generosa or in the sense of a pathological disease of the imagination. For all these various ‘diagnoses’, the epistolary novel as received during the Renaissance provided corroborating clues. But how did van Foreest position himself in this tangled situation? The fact that van Foreest was familiar with the epistolary novel can be established from a letter dated 10 November 1595, which van Foreest received from his friend and colleague Jan van Heurne.64 In view of the impressive reception history of the epistolary novel during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, it is, however, more than likely that van Foreest would have encountered the text much earlier than that. The epistolary novel could, after all, be found in all the complete editions of the Hippocratic writings as well as in several editions of the Epistolographi graeci;65 what is more, it was among the first of the Hippocratic texts to be translated into both humanist Latin and the vernacular66 and was thus available to a wide readership. Last but not least, it had been adapted and appropriated on numerous occasions in both medical and nonmedical literature.67 The presence of the laughing philosopher in countless Italian

64

Heesakkers, ‘Petrus Forestus in gedichten en brieven’, p. 198: ‘Cum redidisset [sc. Democritus], insaniam (vt hominum insanias fugeret) simulabat: Hippocratemque ad eius curationem euocarunt sui ciues, existimantes Rempublicam beatam fore, si a virtute praeditis viris haberetur: miseram, cum per vitia duceretur.’ 65

M. Sicherl, Griechische Erstausgaben des Aldus Manutius: Druckvorlagen, Stellenwert, kultureller Hintergrund (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1997), esp. pp. 203–05. 66

L. Waanders has kindly alerted me to a Dutch translation of letter 17 of the Hippocratic novel, which appeared in Antwerp in 1573: ‘Eenê brief van Hippocrates […] aen Demagetum […] vvt den Griecxschen tonge inden duytschen ouergeset […] door […] Adrianus Iunius Hornanus’, in Misprysinghe ende miserie des hoefs ende der hoocheyt met lof van kleynen ende leeghen state: Uut de Spaensche in Nederduytsche tale overghezet, ed. by A. van Guenaer [sic] (Antwerp: Smits, 1573), fols 78v –95 v . Another edition was published in 1613 in Delft and may have helped to remind artists of the Hippocratic plot and the controversial role it had played, and was still playing, in the disputes between Venator and his critics discussed below. On Adriaen de Jonghe from Hoorn (= Adrianus Iunius Hornanus) (1511–75), see I. M. Veldman, ‘Enkele aanvullende gegevens omtrent de biografie van Hadrianus Junius’, Bijdragen en mededelingen betreffende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 89 (1974), 375–84. Incidentally, van Foreest was acquainted with Adriaen de Jonghe (see A. M. Luyendijk-Elshout, ‘Een humanistisch arts temidden van zijn tijdgenoten’, in Pieter van Foreest, ed. by Bosman-Jelgersma, pp. 49–56 (p. 55)) and, in 1574, both doctors were called to Prince William I of Orange-Nassau’s sick bed (see J. K. van der Korst, ‘De officiële functies van Pieter van Foreest’, in Pieter van Foreest, ed. by Bosman-Jelgersma, pp. 87–92 (p. 87)). 67

Rütten, Demokrit, pp. 144–87; T. Rütten, ‘Zur Anverwandlung eines Textes aus dem

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and Dutch paintings and emblem books will no doubt also have played its part in firmly embedding the Abderite in the cultural consciousness of the time68 and should have helped to direct contemporary physicians’ attention to the Democritus of the epistolary novel. Most importantly, van Foreest, unlike Jan van Heurne, who writes of Democritus’s simulated madness, was familiar with interpretations of the epistolary novel that called the wholesale clean bill of health issued by Hippocrates into question. The suspicion that Democritus may have been suffering from manifest melancholy after all could thus not wholly be dispelled by Hippocrates, whose authority was, at any rate, somewhat weakened on this score.69 The possibilities for drawing analogies between contemporary discourses (on laughter, on melancholy, on genius) and the epistolary novel simply proved too tempting, and the medical fraternity duly developed a renewed interest in the alleged patient as Hippocrates saw him when he first approached the hermitage: And Democritus himself was sitting under a spreading low plane tree, in a coarse shirt, alone, barefoot, on a stone seat, pale and emaciated, with untrimmed beard.70

Corpus Hippocraticum in der Renaissance’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 1 (1994), 75–91. Again, Ficino (Theologica platonica, 13. 3. 2) is among the first humanist authors to appropriate the epistolary novel. See Marsilio Ficino, Platonic Theology, IV , 158–59. 68

A. Blankert, ‘Heraclitus en Democritus in het bijzonder in de Nederlandse kunst van de 17de eeuw’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 18 (1967), 31–124. 69

Girolamo Mercuriale, in his 1585 treatise Censura et dispositio operum Hippocratis, had voiced doubts as to the authenticity of the epistolary novel, and Justus Joseph Scaliger (1540–1609), in a letter written from Leiden to the physician Everardus Vorst (1565–1624), a colleague at Leiden University since 1598, similarly expressed the view that the Hippocratic letters had to be regarded as apocryphal. See Rütten, Demokrit, p. 167, n. 160; A. Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983–93), II, 692. 70

Hippocrates: Pseudoepigraphic Writings, p. 75 (slightly modified). As Pigeaud, La Maladie de l’âme, pp. 455–59, first pointed out and further developed in his recently published monograph on melancholy (Pigeaud, Melancholia: Le malaise de l’individu (Paris: Payot & Rivages, 2008), pp. 54–66), the author of the epistolary novel places his protagonist in a landscape resembling the one along the Ilissus as represented in Plato’s Phaidros, thus bestowing on his portrait of Democritus features of Socrates. Certain divergences in detail — the plane-tree in the Phaidros is ‘tall’ and ‘mightily expansive’, while the plane-tree in the epistolary novel is ‘squat’ and ‘broad’; Socrates sits on the grass while Democritus sits on a rock; Socrates finds himself close to a river while Democritus is to be found near a streamlet — indicate a conscious attempt to portray the two main characters in a somewhat antithetical manner and ought to be read as a Cynic exaggeration of the figure of Socrates. The latter’s barefootedness in the Phaidros is transformed in the epistolary novel into a sign of Democritus’s state of Cynic neglect, his coarse robe and beard functioning as further Cynic props. And while the grassy banks of the locus amoenus in the

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Viewed, in particular, against the backdrop of the humoral pathology and physiognomic concepts of the time, such solitude, pallor, emaciation, and lack of personal hygiene could easily be interpreted as signs of madness.71 The information conveyed to Hippocrates in the initial letter from the Abderites only reinforced this impression. The differential diagnosis of melancholy, briefly considered by Hippocrates prior to his departure but abandoned again almost instantly,72 suggested itself with renewed urgency to early modern readers, who were, after all, familiar with the transformation of the figure of Democritus into a sanguinicus melancholicus, and who had witnessed the admission of the wise Pre-Socratic into the hall of melancholia generosa in the sense of the Problemata, XXX, 1. At the end of this process of creative appropriation, the epistolary novel was regarded as a

Phaidros stood for a comfortable and secure embeddedness in the Greek polis, the rock of the epistolary novel epitomizes the Cynicized Democritus’s loss of social anchorage. Similarly, Democritus’s laughter ought to be read as an expressive outbidding of Socratic irony. Thus, Democritus is cast as a Socrates mainomenos, a trope traditionally used by the Cynic school to portray their proto-philosopher Diogenes of Sinope. Pace Pigeaud (Melancholia, p. 56), for whom the description of the landscape holds clues as to Democritus’s melancholy, it is highly doubtful that the author had a melancholic Democritus in mind, particularly since laughter as a symptom of melancholy is only mentioned in late ancient sources. Rather, the epistolary novel can be read as a plea for a serious and respectable Cynicism that aligns itself with truth-seeking Socrates and the grand sage Democritus — a plea for a philosophy, that is, which had always, and at any rate, been more firmly rooted in everyday life, in signs, gestures, and anecdotes, than in theoretical constructs and philosophical tracts. 71

F. Platter, Praxeos seu de cognoscendis, praedicendis, praecauendis, curandisque affectibus homini incommodantibus, Tractatus Tertius et ultimus. De Vitiis, Libris duobus agens: quorum primus corporis. Secundus Excretorum vitia continent (Basel: Typis Conradi Waldkirchij, 1608), p. 71, writes of the paleness of the face that it occurs in those who grieve or are sad (‘ijs qui moerent & tristantur’), which, in accordance with Hippocrat., Aph. VI, 23, amounts to a diagnosis of melancholy. Classic in this context is, to cite but one example, the definition provided by Jean de Gorris, Definitionum medicarum libri XXIIII (Frankfurt: Typis Wecheliani apud Claudium Marnium, et haeredes Ioannis Aubrii, 1601), s.v. ‘Melancholia’: ‘Est desipientia sine febre, timorem & moestitiam sine causa inducens. Species est tes paraphrosunes. Habet enim deprauatam facultatis imaginatricis & ratiocinatricis motionem multa vana animo voluens quae metuat, magnumque inde moerorem concipiens. Sunt enim timor & moestitia duo perpetua communiaque omnium melancholia laborantium symptomata, vt habetur apud Hippocrat. Aphor. 23. Lib. 6.’ 72 Hippocrates: Pseudoepigraphic Writings, p. 63: ‘Such things are generally characteristic of melancholics. Sometimes they are quiet, solitary, and like deserted places. […] It is not wholly madmen who want caves and quiet, but also those who scorn human affairs in their desire for freedom from perturbation.’

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straightforward treatise on melancholy, while Democritus was declared a genial or pathological melancholic, who studied black bile in animals in order to fathom, by comparative anatomical means, the cause of melancholy in humans, and who intended to set out his findings in a study on the subject. This reading is already present in Marco Fabio Calvo’s widely available Latin translation, where it is reinforced in an intertextual manner by the attribution of Aëtius’s chapter on melancholy to Hippocrates.73 Calvo’s translation was still used by Burton, and it was by this process of successive reception and appropriation that the epistolary novel finally came to be regarded as the most important and seemingly ancient witness to a melancholic Democritus, whose laughter, meanwhile, grew ever fainter. The context of van Foreest’s introduction of Democritus into the scholia to his case study provides further clues to his interpretation of the case. A link with the melancholic brothers seems somewhat less apparent than in the case of Heraclitus, whose diet (impuro, sordidoque victu) is described in almost identical terms to that of the older brother (victu tenuiori ac sordido), as a result of which the reader instinctively draws a parallel between the two figures, particularly since this brother, like the weeping philosopher (who was, alongside Bellerophontes, regarded as the archetype of melancholic melancholia), is described as melancholic by nature. The polarization effected between the brothers (in terms both of their symptoms and of their manner of death) may have suggested an association of the second brother with Democritus, since this allowed a mirroring of the polarity between the two brothers in the polarity of the two philosophers. Unlike Heraclitus and the older brother, Democritus and the second brother have become melancholics and share what modern psychopathology calls ‘plus symptoms’, while the saevum incrementum (ferocious growth) conjures up the notion of adust melancholy. As an archetype, Democritus thus serves to explain the second brother’s death in pathophysiological terms. At the same time, Democritus’s physiognomy,

73 Cf. T. Rütten, ‘Pseudohippokrates, Marco Fabio Calvo und Robert Burton: Zur Rezeptionsgeschichte eines antiken Textes’, in Offenheit und Interesse: Studien zum 65. Geburtstag von Gerhard Wirth, ed. by R . Kinsky (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 1993), pp. 31–43; T. Rütten, ‘Rufus’ Legacy in the Psychopathological Literature of the (Early) Modern Period’, in Rufus of Ephesus, ed. by Pormann, pp. 245–62 (pp. 257–62). The first commentary on the epistolary novel, written by Alaard of Amsterdam in 1539, similarly joins the ideo-historical tradition of the Democritus ridens with the tradition of ennobled melancholy and the Galenic theory of black bile in order to diagnose the Democritus of the epistolary novel as a melancholic, as well as to validate his studies as pertaining to melancholy and to promote a reading of the epistolary novel as a whole as a treatise on melancholy. Cf. Rütten, Demokrit, pp. 169–73.

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as gleaned from the Hippocratic epistolary novel, stands in for the physiognomy of the second brother, whom only Nanning van Foreest had met personally, at least during the time of his illness.74 By posthumously making the dead brother wear the mask of Democritus, which now no longer stands for the countercultural way of life of a Diogenes or the Silenus mask of Socrates,75 but rather represents the sanguine and manifestly sick melancholic, van Foreest is able to render the young man’s sufferings visible in his facial features, gestures, and general physical appearance.76 By introducing a linking element in the form of the patient mentioned by Valescus, he also manages to construct a quasi-pathological genealogy that links the Abderite with the man from Alkmaar and allows extrapolations from the ancestor to the descendants. One question nevertheless remains unanswered: why is van Foreest, unlike many of his contemporaries, so unequivocal in his labelling of Democritus as melancholic in the pathological sense? What could have motivated such pathologization, which ran the risk of demonization?77

74

This latter fact does, of course, render the inclusion of this case in a collection of observationes — the very title of which emphasizes truthful and life-like depiction (graphice, depingere) as programmatic — highly problematic. 75

P. Zanker, The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). 76

Vandekerckhove, On Punishment, p. 52, reminds us of the usage of a dummy or other effigy of the suicide victim, in case his or her body was unavailable for the punishment. It could be argued that van Foreest is using Democritus as a dummy or effigy to undo the punishment, that is to say the dragging of the brother’s reputation through the mud, thereby replacing the bestializing effects of the punishment by rehumanizing the victim. Van Foreest was not interested in repersonalizing the victim by, for instance, calling him by his name, something he frequently does in other observationes. 77

On early modern links between melancholy and demonology, see, for example, J. Céard, ‘Folie et démonologie au XVIe siècle’, in Folie et déraison à la Renaissance: Colloque international tenu en novembre 1973 sous les auspices de la Fédération Internationale et Sociétés pour l’ Étude de la Renaissance, Travaux de l’Institut pour l‘Étude de la Renaissance et de l’Humanisme, 5 (Brussels: Éditions de l’université de Bruxelles, 1976), pp. 129–47; F. Azouvi, ‘Possession, révélation et rationalité médicale au début du XVIIe siècle’, Revue des sciences philosophiques et théologiques, 64 (1980), 355–62; Midelfort, A History of Madness, pp. 140–81. According to Vandekerckhove, On Punishment, pp. 86–88, melancholy did by no means automatically qualify as incapacity of guilt, as stipulated in article 135 of the Nemesis Carolina which came into effect in 1532: ‘There is therefore in the criminal proceedings for suicide something ambiguous in the meaning given to the phenomenon of “melancholy”. On the one hand, it was indeed recognized that the person could be overcome by melancholy to such an extent that he simply saw no way out but suicide. […] On the other hand, the suicide possibly ensuing from melancholy also seems

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In a stage play which was published and presumably also performed in Alkmaar in 160378 and which amplified the Hippocratic epistolary novel in dramatic form, only one of the characters diagnoses Democritus as melancholic. This character is a certain Anoethus — the Ignorant — whose very name calls his sagacity and reasoning powers into question in a rather drastic manner.79 The overall tone of this stage version of the epistolary novel is shaped by a benevolent interpretation of Democritus’s peculiarities. Its author, Adolphus Venator Tectander (d. 1619),80 was clearly able to identify with the laughing sage from Abdera. Venator, a preacher and notorious reformist, had, by this time, already earned himself something of a bad name, both with his colleagues and indeed beyond his immediate circle, mostly on account of his progressive views, his humanist affinities, and his predilection for bringing ancient comedies to the stage. 81 Under cover of the mask of Democritus, whose philosophy could be used to undermine the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and whose laughter could not fail to have a provocative effect on any sort of orthodoxy, Venator exposed hostility towards his own way of thinking as Abderite, i.e. Gothamite, foolery. The accompanying ennoblement of the figure of Democritus is also reflected in a number of oil paintings on the subject of the ancient epistolary novel, which appeared in the wake of Venator’s stage play.82 Pieter Lastman (1583–1633) and Jan Pynas (1583–1631), a painter originally hailing from Alkmaar, were among the first

often to have been considered malicious, on the grounds of the suicide victim’s having neglected to defend himself in time against the mortal danger of melancholy. […] The imperative to battle against despair was indeed considered categorical, and the best weapon in that battle was the consolatio preached by the Church.’ 78

A. Venator Tectander, Reden-Vreucht der wijsen in haer wel-lust / ende belachen der dwasen quel-lust / in’t lachen Democriti door persoon-tooningh (Alkmaer: De Meester, 1603). 79

Cf. Rütten, Demokrit, pp. 199–200.

80

M. Roos, Godsdienststrijd in het zeventiende eeuwse Alkmaar (Leiden: Diss., 1964); P. Visser, Broeders in de Geest: De doopsgezinde bijdragen van Dierick en Jan Philipsz. Schabaelje tot de Nederlandse stichtelijke literatuur in de zeventiende eeuw, Deel I. Tekst, Deventer Studies, 7 (Deventer: Sub Rosa, 1988), pp. 151–92. 81 J. de Vries, ‘Adolphus Tectander Venator’, Oud Holland, 40 (1922), 124–60 (pp. 129–60); J. Kok, s. v. ‘Venator, Adolphus’, Nederlands Woordenboek, 29 (1793), 193–201. As early as 1586, the Edam Synod had banned the staging of didactic plays (whether pagan or biblical). 82 L. Waanders, ‘De relatie tussen de ‘Reden-vreught’ en de voorstellingen in de historieschilderkunst’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Nijmegen, 1991); Rütten and Jacobs, ‘Democritus ridens — ein weinender Philosoph?’.

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artists to transfer the subject from the stage to the medium of painting.83 Notably, however, Venator only settled in Alkmaar in 1597. Even if van Foreest had penned his scholia very shortly before the publication of Book X of his Observationes in 1590, the dates clearly prohibit any reading of the scholia as a contrafact to the kind of instrumentalization of the Hippocratic epistolary novel exemplified by the play Venator later wrote in van Foreest’s home town. What is conceivable is that this sort of confessional exploitation of the Hippocratic Democritus, which was eventually channelled into the conflict between the Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants, had already been in the air for a while. If so, it could be argued that van Foreest reacted to this (to date seriously underresearched) discourse and, by pathologizing Democritus in such an unequivocal manner, also took an orthodox Calvinist stance. What is more, it is likely that van Foreest watched with some concern the exploitation of the epistolary novel for the purposes of promoting the figure of an atomistic or alchemical Democritus which gained increasing ground towards the end of the sixteenth century.84

83

A. Tümpel, ‘Claes Cornelisz Moeyaert’, Oud Holland, 88 (1974), 1–164 (pp. 133–34); B. Broos, ‘Hippocrates bezoekt Democritus door Pynas, Lastman, Moeyaert en Berchem’, Kroniek van het Rembrandthuis, 45 (1991), 16–23; A. Brandtner, ‘Das Demokrit-Heraklit-Thema in der Frühen Neuzeit: Rezeptions- und wirkungsgeschichtliche Skizze der Repräsentation in Text und Bild’, Frühneuzeit-Info, 2 (1991), 51–62; Pieter Lastman: The Man who Taught Rembrandt, ed. by A. Tümpel and P. Schatborn (Amsterdam: Het Rembrandthuis, 1991), pp. 110–11; Dawn of the Golden Age: Northern Netherlandish Art 1580–1620, ed. by G. Luijten and others (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1994), no. 251, pp. 578–79; Pieter Lastman: In Rembrandts Schatten? Ausstellung der Hamburger Kunsthalle 13. April–30. Juli 2006, ed. by M. Sitt (Munich: Hirmer, 2006), pp. 28–31. Even though Pynas’s oil painting (Amsterdam, Museum Het Rembrandthuis, oil on canvas, 110.5 x 139 cm, ‘JPynas fec[it]. 1614’, on permanent loan from a private owner) is older than the surviving one by Pieter Lastman (Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts, oil on wood, 111 x 114.5 cm, ‘Plastm[an]/ft /1622’, Inv. P-2055), it was probably based on another, now lost, painting by Pieter Lastman (K. Freise, Pieter Lastman: Sein Leben und seine Kunst (Leipzig: Klinckhardt & Biermann, 1911), pp. 72–73); the subject of this latter painting was identified and discussed in detail by W. Stechow (‘Zwei Darstellungen aus Hippokrates in der Holländischen Malerei’, Oudheidkundig Jaarboek, 4 (1924), 34–38 (p. 37)); C. Hofstede de Groot (‘Hippocrates op bezoek bij Democritus’, Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde, 69 (1924), 30–34); and J. B. F. Gils (‘Hippocrates op bezoek bij Democritus’, Bijdragen tot de geschiedenis der geneeskunde, 16 (1936), 115). What, to my knowledge, remains unresolved is how Anton Mozart’s visual version of the pseudo-Hippocratic story from the Pommersche Kunstschrank precisely fits into this chronology. See Rütten and Jacobs, ‘Democritus ridens — ein weinender Philosoph?’. 84 On Democritus the Alchemist, see J. Salem, La Légende de Démocrite (Paris: Kimé, 1996), pp. 117–39; Lüthy, ‘The Fourfold Democritus’, pp. 471–79. On Democritus the atomist, see ibid., pp. 448–55 (p. 451): ‘Only in the last decade of the sixteenth century do we find Democritean atomism all of a sudden held up as a powerful scientific model.’

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If this is indeed the case, Pieter van Foreest’s observatio would not only have been shaped by social, humoral, and laughter-theoretical preconceptions, but also by a desire to position the piece in denominational and professional political terms. Erudition and cultural practices govern van Foreest’s ‘observation’ and its linguistic rendering, while the early modern mask of the melancholic Democritus stands in for the disfigured face85 of a melancholic suicide victim.86

85 By the time Nanning ‘recognized’ the face of the student it would have been mutilated and covered with mud as a consequence of the dragging of the corpse — face down or on a mire cart (see Laenens, De geschiedenis van het Antwerps gerecht, p. 175, and Vandekerckhove, On Punishment, p. 48, citing an Antwerp chronicle of 1570) — to the place where the fork had been erected as part of the corpse’s punishment and desecration. See also Deschrijver, Misdaad, zonde en straf?, pp. 150–57. 86

I wish to thank Alexa Alfer for her valuable assistance in translating this contribution into English and Leonie v. Reppert-Bismarck, Yasmin Haskell, and the anonymous referee for their helpful suggestions and critical comments.

‘L IGHTNING STRIKES, WHEREVER IRE DWELLS WITH POWER ’: JOHAN W IER ON A NGER AS AN ILLNESS Hans de Waardt

I

n 1577 the Duke of Cleves’s personal physician Johan Wier (1515–88) published an analysis of the unrestrained violence that was at that time ravaging France and the Low Countries. Shortly after the death of King Henry II civil war had broken out in France between Catholics and Huguenots. In this conflict both parties committed horrific atrocities, butchering indiscriminately both armed and unarmed adherents of the antagonistic confession with the St Bartholomew onslaughts in 1572 as a sad climax. In 1566 a wave of iconoclasm swept over the Low Countries, then under the rule of the Spanish King Philip II. The King reacted to what he believed to be open rebellion by dispatching a powerful army of Spanish veterans under the command of the Duke of Alva to his northern domains. The ruthless policy of this — certainly in the eyes of the Dutch — merciless general only provoked new rebellion and in 1572 the insurgents managed to occupy large parts of the northwestern provinces.1 Alva of course launched a large-scale counter-offensive and a series of towns were re-conquered. However, as the Spanish army slaughtered massive numbers of citizens in each of these, the insurgents only felt inspired to offer even more resistance. In 1576 Spanish power temporarily collapsed when a mutiny broke out after the army had not been paid for a prolonged period. This gave the Prince of Orange the opportunity to unite all the provinces in a common

1

A still-unsurpassed overview of the military aspects of the Dutch Revolt is offered in Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977).

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front, however, as it turned out, only very briefly. This was the situation when Wier published his About Ire as an Illness.

A Biographical Note Wier was born in 1515 in the small town of Grave, now in the Netherlands, the eldest son of a hop merchant.2 He had two brothers, Arnold and Matthias, and a sister, Elisabeth.3 In 1529, at the age of fourteen or fifteen, Johan was sent to the famous Neoplatonist humanist Agrippa von Nettesheim, who for the next four years acted as his mentor. In 1534 Wier went to Paris to study medicine,

2

The literature on Wier is vast. The second edition of the first extensive biography, which was published by a German physician, is still useful: Carl Binz, Doctor Johann Weyer, ein rheinischer Arzt, der erste Bekämpfer des Hexenwahns: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Aufklärung und der Heilkunde (Berlin: Marcus, 1896). This book should be consulted with care as it contains a number of mistakes which are partly due to the fact that at the time when Binz was doing his research several relevant sources were not yet available, and partly to his wish to enlist Wier, or Weyer as he preferred to call him, as a true German hero. A few decades earlier, collaborators of the French neurologist Charcot had presented Wier as an enlightened forerunner of modern, i.e. secular or even anticlerical, psychiatry. The most outspoken example of this approach is Alexandre Axenfeld, Jean Wier et la sorcellerie (Paris: Baillère, 1866). See also Jan Goldstein, Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 355–59; Sarah Ferber, ‘Charcot’s Demons: Retrospective Medicine and Historical Diagnosis in the Writings of the Salpêtrière School’, in Illness and Healing Alternatives in Western Europe, ed. by Marijke Gijswijt-Hofstra, Hilary Marland, and Hans de Waardt (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 120–40. Since then Wier has been presented over and over again by psychiatrists as a sort of founding father of their profession who introduced innovative therapies, for example in Gregory Zilboorg, A History of Medical Psychology (New York: Norton, 1941), pp. 206–35. However, Wier was a traditional physician who always remained loyal to Galen’s humoral pathology; on this, see H. C. Erik Midelfort, A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 151–94. See also Patrick Vandermeersch, ‘The Victory of Psychiatry over Demonology: The Origin of the Nineteenth-Century Myth’, History of Psychiatry, 2 (1991), 351–63; and Hans de Waardt, ‘Johan Wier: Icoon van de psychiatrie’, in Heiligen of helden: Opstellen voor Willem Frijhoff, ed. by Joris van Eijnatten, Fred van Lieburg, and Hans de Waardt (Amsterdam: Bakker, 2007), pp. 72–87. Wier’s biographers have paid scant attention to his De ira morbo. See for example: Binz, Doctor Johann Weyer, pp. 139–49; Jan Cobben, Jan Wier, Devils, Witches, and Magic (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1976); Michaela Valente, Johann Wier: Agli arbori della critica razionale dell’occulto e del demoniaco nell’Europa del Cinquecento (Florence: Olschki, 2003), pp. 164–66. 3

Until recently, this sister was never mentioned in any biography of Wier; see, however, Hans de Waardt, ‘Witchcraft, Spiritualism and Medicine: The Religious Convictions of Johan Wier’, Sixteenth-Century Journal (forthcoming).

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returning a few years later to his native town Grave, where he took up practice. From there he went to Arnhem, but in 1550 he was appointed personal physician of the Duke of Cleves in whose service he remained for more than three decades. He died in 1588 in Tecklenburg. From his first marriage he had four sons and one daughter. A few years before his death his third son Galenus had succeeded him as the Duke’s personal physician. His oldest son Theodore became a counsellor of the Elector of the Palatinate. Wier’s fame largely rests on his De praestigiis daemonum, the book he published in 1563 in an attempt to show that witch trials were completely pointless because all the malicious events that witches seemed to bring about were actually the doing of demons who by their tricks (praestigia) sought to lead people astray.4 This book was either fiercely rejected or accepted with open arms. In the course of the following two decades five new editions of the Latin original were published (1564, 1566, 1568, 1577, 1583), as were several German translations, one of them by Wier himself, and a French version. Reginald Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft was indeed an adapted translation. Apart from De praestigiis and De ira morbo, Wier published a collection of medical case histories, and inserted in the 1577 edition of De praestigiis a treatise about feigned fasting, an abridged version of his main work, an apologetic answer to the numerous attacks on his reliability which a large number of defenders of the witch trials had launched since 1563, and a peculiar list of demons.5

Motivation and Structure Wier published his De ira morbo in 1577, just after a wave of unprecedented cruelty had swept over his native country.6 In his dedication to Count Hermann 4

Johan Wier, De praestigiis daemonum, et incantationibus ac ueneficiis, libri V (Basel: Oporinus, 1563). See also the English translation: Johan Wier, Witches, Devils, and Doctors: De praestigiis daemonum, ed. by George Mora and others (Binghamton: Center for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 1991). 5

These are: Johan Wier, Medicarum observatorum rararum liber 1 (Basel: Oporinus, 1567), which appeared in a German translation as Arztney Buch (Frankfurt: n. pub., 1580); Tractatus de comentitiis jejuniis; De lamiis; and Liber apologeticus et pseudomonarchia daemonum. Some of these annexed texts were later published as independent titles. All his Latin publications can of course be found in his Opera omnia (Amsterdam: Montanus, 1660). 6

Johan Wier, De ira morbo, eiusdem curatione philosophica, medica & theologica liber (Basel: Oporinus, 1577). Quotations here are from the Opera omnia which appeared in Amsterdam in 1660, where De ira morbo is on pp. 770–875. A digital version of this latter edition can be

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of Neuenahr and Moers he wrote that, having fought the distortions and fraudulent illusions of the Devil (‘diaboli praestigia & fraudulentia ludibria’), he now wanted to drive from human minds the inclination to slaughter one another. He had witnessed so many extreme disasters that he wished to establish the true origins of and sound remedies for this ire that was causing so many private factions, public wars, horrible murders, and unheard of terror by which simple folk were overwhelmed. There were three reasons, he wrote, that had compelled him to write this book. First of all, he had realized that there was not a single pestilence that with so much cruelty had depopulated such vast kingdoms, large dominions, and flourishing republics as this present disaster. He did not hold it alien to the vocation of a physician or philosopher to propose a cure against this nefarious malady that could rightly be called an epidemic. His second reason was his conviction that the notes he had taken in the course of his private meditations should be distributed among patients and, if possible, used to help suppress tyranny. Finally, he hoped that he could thus alleviate the enormous, but justified, sorrows he had been suffering since the death of his first wife five years earlier. Apart from these motives, Wier had another reason for writing this plea for tolerance and restraint. He chose the form of a medical treatise and by doing so he aligned himself with the last work of the famous spokesman for religious tolerance, Sebastian Castellio.7 Castellio’s fame largely rests on his edition of De haereticis an sint persequendi, which he published under an alias in 1554 in protest against the execution of the Spanish spiritualist Michel Servetus in Geneva a year earlier.8 Nowhere in his De praestigiis, or for that matter in his De ira morbo, did

found on Google Books (). It should be noted that in the Opera omnia, the title on p. 775 is wrongly given as De irae morbo, which suggests that the essay has a purely medical character. The table of contents at the beginning of the volume gives the correct title. 7

There exists a vast literature on the life and work of Castellio. Still the richest and most informative is the biography by Ferdinand Buisson which was published more than a century ago: Sébastien Castellion: Sa vie et son oeuvre (1515–1563). Étude sur les origines du protestantisme libéral français (Paris: Hachette, 1892). See also Hans R . Guggisberg, Sebastian Castellio 1515–1563: Humanist und Verteidiger der religiösen Toleranz im konfessionellen Zeitalter (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), translated into English as Hans R . Guggisberg, Sebastian Castellio, 1515–1563: Humanist and Defender of Religious Toleration in a Confessional Age (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). 8

Martinus Bellius (= Sebastian Castellio), De haereticis an sint persequendi et omnino quomodo sit cum eis agendum […] (Magdeburg: Rausch, 1554) = (Basel: Oporinus, 1554). See also the English translation Concerning Heretics: Whether they Are to Be Persecuted and how they Are to Be Treated. A Collection of the Opinions of Learned Men both Ancient and Modern. An Anonymous

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Wier mention the name of this humanist and spiritualist professor of Greek at Basel University, or that of any other spiritualist. Yet, in subsequent editions of his De praestigiis he inserted, without directly referring to Castellio or his work, quotations from De haereticis and other hints that disclosed to the informed reader his sympathy for people like Castellio.9 In the 1566 edition, for instance, he took up a list of friends he had made when studying in Paris.10 Among these figured a certain Michael Villanovanus, the alias Michel Servetus had assumed after the publication of his De Trinitatis erroribus in 1531 had brought upon him the intense hatred of both Catholics and Protestants.11 In other words, in 1566 Wier still considered Servetus a personal friend. Wier’s sympathy for the ideas of Castellio and for the circle of friends and supporters of this Basel professor must have been great. In 1561 he betrothed his sister Elisabeth to Charles Utenhove, a former member of the elite of the Flemish city of Gent who had fled his birthplace for religious reasons. This Utenhove was a former pupil of Erasmus and in the 1550s he had sent the sons of his first marriage to study in Basel where they lived in the house of Castellio.12 In 1562, shortly before his death, Castellio published his last book, Conseil à la France désolée.13 In the subtitle he announced that he would demonstrate the causes of the civil war that was tearing his native country apart, the remedy for this situation, and most of all, he would discuss the question of whether it was permissible to force a person’s conscience. According to Marius Valkhoff, who published an edition of this book with commentary in 1967, there were only four copies of it extant.14 But even if this indicates that the number of original

Work Attributed to Sebastian Castellio, trans. by Roland H. Bainton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935). 9

On this, see De Waardt, ‘Witchcraft, Spiritualism, and Medicine’.

10

Wier, De praestigiis, 4th edn (1566), p. 571.

11

On Servetus, see Roland H. Bainton, Hunted Heretic (Boston: Beacon, 1953); Jerome Friedman, Michael Servetus: A Case Study in Total Heresy (Geneva: Droz, 1978); A. Gordon Kindner, Bibliotheca dissidentium: Répertoire des non-conformistes religieux des seizième et dixseptième siècles, X : Michael Servetus (Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1989). 12

Willem Janssen, Charles Utenhove, sa vie et son oeuvre (1536–1600) (Maastricht: Van Aelst, 1939), pp. 4, 14, 17–19, 97. 13

Sebastian Castellio, Conseil à la France désolée, ed. by Marius François Valkhoff (Geneva: Droz, 1967). The subtitle of the original was Auquel es monstré la cause de la guerre présente, et le remède qui y pourroit estre mis; et principalement est avisé si on doit forcer les consciences. 14

Castellio, Conseil à la France désolée, p. 7.

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copies had been quite small, it would not have been difficult for Wier to get a copy of this text. It was not only family ties that connected him with the circle round Castellio. His publisher in Basel, Oporinus, had been Castellio’s employer just after the humanist’s arrival there and the two had remained in contact after Castellio had received his university appointment. Oporinus had, for instance, printed Castellio’s De haereticis in 1554, albeit under a false printer’s name and location. It is therefore certainly not unlikely that Wier had first-hand knowledge of Castellio’s Advice to the Desolate France. In the very first section of his book Castellio described the situation in which France found itself as a ‘malady’ and in the title he promised to offer a ‘remedy’. In the case of the Conseil à la France this terminology clearly had a metaphorical meaning. Castellio was not a physician and he did not endeavour in his book to analyse France’s problems as if they were the symptoms of a real illness. Wier, however, did have a medical background and in his De ira morbo he seemed to go to great lengths to prove that it was a specific disease that drove people to intense cruelty and savagery. The book was, as can be seen in Table 1, indeed structured as a medical essay in which first the illness was defined, after which its causes and symptoms were analysed and the possible therapies described. But it was, on the other hand, political and religious problems he was dealing with. So, to what extent was his use of medical terms metaphorical? Table 1. Structure of De ira morbo Section title Dedicatory letter [Introduction] Definition (De irae definitione) Causes (De causis irae) Symptoms (De signis irae) Effects (De effectibus irae) Prophylaxis through philosophy (De prophylactica irae curatione philosophica) Philosophical cure for a paroxysm of ire (Curatio paroxismi irae philosophica) A preventative medical cure for ire (Praeservans curatio irae medica) A theological remedy for ire, both preventative and curing (Remedia irae theologica, tam praeservantia quam etiam curantia)

Pages in Opera omnia 773–74 775–77 777–79 779–89 790–95 794–802 802–45 845–54 855–59 859–75

The quantities of pages reserved for the possible sources of relief seem to suggest that for Wier the medical approach carried less weight than the philosophical or

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theological. What he probably meant was that a mixture of the three approaches was the best therapy. This becomes apparent in the very first sentences of the treatise, where Wier explains that he wishes to discuss ire as a new sort of illness. He felt inspired by the Stoics, who wanted to take away both all affections and all maladies, and by Galen, who had emphasized the importance of mental disturbances as possible causes of disease. According to this famous physician many people could be liberated from an illness when experiencing some sort of pleasure, or vice versa had been rendered seriously ill by a mental perturbation. ‘Indeed’, Wier added, ‘there is no physical illness so serious that it is not easily aggravated by mental embitterment.’15 So, it was indeed a specific mix of corporeal and mental afflictions that Wier was discussing.

Defining Ire When it came to this interdependency of mind and body, Wier stated that the gravest physical illnesses had a mental origin. If the mind was affected in an unfavourable way then ‘the status of the body changes and, after the contamination of the spirits and their messengers, the blood gets agitated and the steadiness of the pulsation of the heart is disrupted, which results in a deceleration and lack of regularity of the pulse’.16 This situation could lead to fevers, lipothymia, consumption, and other ills, which disorders would then communicate to the brain the sort of impressions that often provoke phrenitis (inflammation of the mind), melancholy, mania, apoplexy, paralysis, epilepsy, and similar illnesses. Of all these disorders of the mind, however, none was more vehement than ire.17 Wier distinguished two main types of anger: the justified and the unjustified. It was legitimate to feel angry about crimes that had been committed by other people, or because of our sins, just as a father may become angry with his children if they do not behave properly, provided that he does this with moderation and without sin. That was what St Paul had meant when he said: ‘In your anger do not sin.’18

15

‘Verum quum nulla existat corporis invaletudo tam gravis, quam non animi exacerbatio longe exuperet.’ Wier, Opera omnia, p. 775. 16

Wier, Opera omnia, p. 775.

17

Wier, Opera omnia, p. 775.

18

Ephesians 4: 26. The quote is from the Vulgate: ‘Irascimini et nolite peccare.’

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Wier evidently focused on the unjustified type of anger. One of the constituent elements of this was, according to him, appetitus, by which he did not mean the natural appetite of the kind that makes magnets attract iron, or the impulses that lead inanimate beings. What Wier meant was the movement and interior agitation of the soul which we experience when we perceive that certain good things are wanting, or the sort of risky circumstances that make us feel unsafe and which we should like to avoid. He wanted to discuss a mental motion (motus animi) that according to the Stoic philosopher Zeno opposed reason and according to Galen did not obey reason. The causes of ire fell into two sorts: internal and external circumstances.19 People with an exceptional temperament, a debilitated judgement, impeded senses, or a hot constitution of the heart were more easily inclined to fall into a fit of rage. Wier underpinned this contention by quoting profusely from the works of classical authors such as Aristotle, Homer, Ovid, Lucretius, Cicero, Seneca, Persius, and Plautus. This sudden anger numbs the rationality of a person. However, it may also disappear rapidly because it is not persistent or of long duration due to the thinness of the humour, as is stated by Galen. To typify the quality of people who for very trivial reasons could become vehemently angry Hippocrates had used the word îõèõìïò .20 To explain what this classic Greek author had meant by that term, Wier referred to what he claimed to be a characteristic element of the French mentality.21 He related specific nations to particular frames of mind, which in itself is not so strange for a convinced humoral pathologist, but it is remarkable that he described the mentality of only three nationalities in any detail — the French, Italians, and the Spanish — and that he ascribed to each of these a negative quality. It should be added that he also mentioned the Germans, but only once and then briefly and in a laudatory manner. A tenacious memory for any offence, and vindictiveness, he claimed, were characteristic of both Italians and Spaniards, whereas Germans were so generous that when challenging an opponent they felt had offended them, they would not kill but would be satisfied if they managed to inflict minor bleeding.22

19

Wier, Opera omnia, p. 779.

20

Wier, Opera omnia, p. 780.

21

Wier, Opera omnia, p. 780.

22

Wier, Opera omnia, p. 792. A few pages earlier (ibid., p. 789) he mentions the Germans’ love of freedom as a cause for their iracundia. However, there he clearly means the Germans of classical times, as he brackets them together with the Scythians and gives Seneca as his main source for this pronouncement.

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When discussing one of the sorts of anger that melancholy could bring about, or as Wier, a true orthodox follower of humoral pathology called it, ‘cold’ anger, he gave what he saw as typical Italian behaviour as a very suitable example.23 Italians, he claimed, were able to disguise for years the fact that they were offended, only to lure their enemy into an ambush at an appropriate moment and have him killed by a gang of hired assassins. Neither the mentality of the French nor that of the Italians met with great sympathy in Wier’s discourse. But it was the Spaniards who received the worst treatment: Of all people, those whose temperature happens to be influenced by an excess of black bile, fly into the most violent and severest rages. […] These people remember the tiniest of insults even when everybody else has long forgotten it ever happened. In time, this wound transforms into a cancer, this most horrible disease, and if it is not eradicated root and branch, it will start to eat away adjoining areas. All conversation with these people is difficult if not dangerous.

Wier emphasized that he was averse to all national hatred, but he claimed that this sort of ire was typical of Spaniards in whom this humoral disorder ‘quadrupled [already existing] furious and inexorable indignations’.24 This sort of ire was appropriately called ‘leaden’, or, using a more elegant term, ‘Saturnine’. From this disorder ‘crept forward the savagery and the truculence of tyrants, of all those who have ever applied cruelty, whose present misdeeds cry for vindication before Christ’s just tribunal’. The implication of this imputation is clear: the Spaniards were affected by a severe disorder that had made them exceptionally cruel. Their ruler was a savage tyrant and it was downright hazardous to have any contact whatsoever with these bloodthirsty people. Wier could claim that his words were not inspired by any sort of national hatred, but it is obvious that the opposite was true. It appears as if in his eyes all Spaniards were mere ogres and a severe threat to other people. Another internal cause was debilitas judicii.25 The intellectual power which is known as ratio, he wrote, can be compared to the faculty of leadership and is like a jockey who drives a horse or a hunter who commands his hounds. A horse may be robust and fast, but if the jockey is incapable, the animal will be superior to the horseman just as insolent and biting dogs may overcome the hunter. According 23

Wier, Opera omnia, p. 782.

24

Wier, Opera omnia, p. 782: ‘[…] quod proprie, sine tamen nationis invidia, in Hispanorum saevas et inexorabiles quadrat indignationes’. 25

Wier, Opera omnia, pp. 783–84.

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to Wier children and women, ‘who break out into tears easily’, were prone to suffer this ‘debility of judgement’. An obstruction in the organs which serve the senses could also be an internal source. The fourth and final of these causes was the passion that could be brought about by injustice or maltreatment, without, however, a craving for vengeance. Thus parents may be angry with their children and God with man.26 Pride (superbia) is one of the factors that may promote ire, and this vice can be observed in powerful people who become unduly angry when the signs of external and empty nobility, or the privileges that come with some sort of honorary post or an academic title, are not properly recognized by individuals of lower rank. A very severe anger can appear in the form of morbid jealousy (zelotypia), for instance, when we fear we might lose something we love dearly. A remarried father who loves his second wife very much, or a mother who is very fond of her second husband, may be oversensitive towards his or her children from the first marriage because they suspect them of conspiring against them. Conversely, children from a former marriage may attack their step-parent for fear of losing their inheritance: ‘Then all love is forced out of the house.’ External causes stem from need or loss.27 Both poor and rich people may feel strong desires for things they do not have. This is the sin of avaritia. This may result in undue anger, particularly when we desire the possessions of somebody else; then we call it envy. We can even feel greater hurt when we lose something and believe this loss is the result of injustice. This feeling we call indignation. In a similar way we can become irate when we believe we are the object of contempt or when our honour is impugned. When our personal reputation or that of our family is called into question, and even more so when this is done in an ironical or derisive way, we feel offended and may become inflamed with anger.28 The final external cause is the situation in which we watch two people, both completely unknown to us, involved in a contest, and we feel sympathy for one of them. Then we easily get angry with the other contestant.29 At the end of this section Wier put forward a number of questions, such as why young people get angry more quickly than older people. And why are educated and learned people often prone to becoming irate? According to Wier

26

Wier, Opera omnia, pp. 784–85.

27

Wier, Opera omnia, p. 786.

28

Wier, Opera omnia, p. 788.

29

Wier, Opera omnia, p. 788.

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the answer to all these questions, and he posed several more of them, lay in the complexion of these people, that is, in the relation between their humours and their temperature.

Cures and Remedies Although Wier put much emphasis on the qualities of philosophy and theology to prevent or cure ire and, as shown in Table 1, devoted more than half of his treatise to the discussion of these means, it should be acknowledged that these sections show little variation as to the line of argument. They really are one long exhortation to curb passions and impulses, and are garnished with an impressive number of examples drawn from Greek and Roman mythology, the Bible, and classical and more recent history. Reverence for the Father, the teachings of the Son, and the consolation of the Holy Spirit were the best remedies against ire.30 Moreover, any real Christian should be willing to endure any injury or insult and to forgive his opponents.31 Whoever accounts his ire legitimate commits a sin.32 Was Nebuchadnezzar not so blinded by ire that he destroyed all the wise men of Babylon who were unable to explain his dreams? Did Herod not order the slaughter of all male infants in Bethlehem? Did Caiaphas not tear his clothes when he heard the voice of Jesus which caused him to fall into a rage?33 From Galen, Wier borrowed a list of medical prescriptions, most of which were of a prophylactic nature.34 If children in their infancy were properly fed, preferably with good milk from their mother, they could be expected to be less inclined to become angry. Food could also have a negative influence. If a person had not learned from the very outset to restrain his greed for food, he would also have less control over other types of appetite. Substances that are too sweet like sugar or honey should be avoided, just as foods that are too sharp like onions, leeks, or garlic, too acid like vinegar, radish, or mustard, or too salted like brined meat or fish. Herbs that are too aromatic like pepper, ginger, or galangal, or too bitter like lupine, absinth, or bitter almonds, should all be avoided. Hangovers should be avoided, as should overeating. 30

Wier, Opera omnia, p. 859.

31

Wier, Opera omnia, p. 861.

32

Wier, Opera omnia, p. 862.

33

Wier, Opera omnia, p. 865.

34

Wier, Opera omnia, pp. 853–54.

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Plato had advised keeping children from drinking wine until they were twelve years old.35 It was evident that at that early age the beverage would increase the heat both in the body and the mind. That would cause a young man to become enraged too quickly. Until they were thirty young people should only drink in moderation, but after their fortieth birthday they could indulge more in alcohol.36 Christians should also observe these limits carefully. Hot foods and drinks foment anger and therefore nobody in his right mind will prefer such dishes. God has provided us with enough other types of food. Overeating would lead to a piling up in the belly of quantities of food that would turn into corrupt matter and become a cause of illnesses and unsound anger. As a rule, ire should be avoided or cured, but in exceptional cases anger could have a benign effect. The Roman general Titus, for instance, fell into a dangerous disease when hearing that his father Vespasian had been appointed emperor. From this disorder he was saved by an experienced physician who caused his patient to become angry, as a result of which the new emperor’s son regained his senses. Music could also have a beneficial effect, as in the case of Saul when David by playing his lyre managed to sooth the King’s otherwise uncontrollable anger. Pythagoras also soothed perturbations of the mind with the lyre. Empedocles of Agrigento released a raging young man from a violent ire by singing a song. Gems, unadulterated cornel-wood, sapphire, and topaz were believed to help prevent ire.37

The Reputation of the Spanish Once More It has already been pointed out that the sections about the importance of philosophy and theology consist of examples taken from classical mythology, the Bible, and ancient and medieval history. It is in that context remarkable that Wier, notwithstanding the importance he attached to moral control, could not restrain himself from lashing out against the Spanish once more. Yet first, in the chapter about the prophylactic value of philosophy he told a series of stories to clarify how destructive cruelty and pointless violence could be. Alexander the Great, for instance, who had killed thousands of Persians, ordered the Persian

35

Wier, Opera omnia, p. 856.

36

Wier, Opera omnia, p. 857.

37

Wier, Opera omnia, p. 858.

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satrap Bessus to be torn to pieces for assassinating his king, Darius.38 When the Roman army under Scipio was advancing on Carthage, the Carthaginian general Hasdrubal ordered that Roman captives were to be put on the city wall where their eyes, tongues, tendons, and genitals were cut out.39 An impressive number of such stories followed, to which Wier added: I could give here many similar examples of the tremendous cruelty that our era has seen and which is still occurring as the result of disturbances which stem from religion […]. All of Germany is my witness, and Italy will not deny it, Spain feels it, England suffers the most, France has been mourning desperately for many years already, and now all the provinces of the Low Countries are also weeping miserably.40

On this followed a long list of horrific tyrants and despots which ended with Muslim rulers who had persecuted Christians. From these examples Wier shifted again to the situation of the 1570s: Oh religion, oh times (tempora), oh Frenchmen (Galli), oh Dutchmen (Belgae), oh bloodthirsty hypocrite and fratricidal Cain, who when offering a sacrifice became angry over the fragrance of the sacrificial animal which was welcomed by God, and killed the innocent Abel.41

But he then related a series of stories about remarkable leniency, about Julius Caesar, who treated his defeated enemies with courtesy, and Augustus, who followed this example.42 Pertinax, Vespasian, Titus, and other emperors also treated their vanquished enemies with grace.43 When Vitiges, the King of the Goths, was brought in captivity to Constantinople, Emperor Justinian did not treat him as an enemy, but as a friend. A similar kindness was displayed by the German Emperors Frederic and Sigismund and by other monarchs.44 Saladin, the famous Sultan of Egypt, treated his Christian captives and the widows of his slain opponents with great courtesy.45 But then Wier almost cries out: ‘If only Zutphen in Gelderland, Naarden and Haarlem in Holland had experienced similar barbaric treatment!’ These three 38

Wier, Opera omnia, pp. 823–24.

39

Wier, Opera omnia, p. 827.

40

Wier, Opera omnia, p. 831.

41

Wier, Opera omnia, p. 832.

42

Wier, Opera omnia, pp. 833–37.

43

Wier, Opera omnia, pp. 837–38.

44

Wier, Opera omnia, p. 838.

45

Wier, Opera omnia, p. 838.

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towns had all been captured and their citizens massacred by the Spanish army in the 1572–73 campaign. The implication was clear: even barbaric non-Christians could show mercy towards Christians, whereas the Spanish generals of his day refused to treat fellow-Christians with similar grace. He then resumed the list of merciful acts of kings and generals, thus sandwiching his charge against the Spanish between stories about good and humane behaviour. To top this off, two historic examples of Spanish mercy added even more sharpness to Wier’s reproaches against the Iberian grandes of his time. After King Alfonso of Aragon — Wier was clearly speaking of Alfonso V the Magnanimous (1396–1458) — had beaten his enemy Marino Bossa, he made this former opponent a member of his council and allowed his sons to live at his court. He treated the inhabitants of towns he conquered with great friendliness and readmitted to his court a Spanish knight who had seriously slandered his name and even gave him a higher salary than before.46 Similarly, El Cid, the famous archetypical knight, who in the course of a quarrel had captured King Pedro of Aragon, did not punish this prisoner as he could have done, but allowed him to go as a free man.47 From passages such as this and the remarks he made about the innate anger of the Spanish, we can clearly infer that Wier sided with the insurgents in the Low Countries. In this case, he was anything but the even-handed medical observer he claimed to be. Actually, he not only sympathized with the cause of the Netherlanders, he was an active supporter. As early as 1568 an ambassador of the Duke of Cleves in Brussels had been informed that the Duke of Alva was convinced that Wier was a spy for the Prince of Orange.48 Wier’s own correspondence and that of his son, Theodore or Dietrich, the trusted collaborator of the Calvinist Elector of the Palatinate, show that the two were busy collecting money and other support for the Dutch Revolt.49

46

Wier, Opera omnia, p. 841.

47

Wier, Opera omnia, p. 842.

48

Binz, Doctor Johann Weyer, pp. 160–61.

49

Wesel, 12 August 1572, Dietrich Weyer (= Theodorus Wier) to W illiam of Orange, (= Algemeen Rijksarchief (Royal Archives) Brussels Audiëntie 1689/2m) [accessed 15 April 2009]; Wesel, 31 May 1573, Dietrich Weyer (= Theodorus Wier) to William of Orange’s brothers Jan and Lodewijk of Nassau, in Archives ou correspondance inédite de la maison d’Orange-Nassau, IV : 1572–1574, ed. by G. Groen van Prinsterer (Leiden: Luchtmans, 1837), pp. 133–43, no. 424; Wesel, 1 June 1573, the same to the same recipients, ibid., pp. 143–52, no. 425; Dinslaken, 16 August [1577], Johan Wier to an unidentified doctor, in J. Geffcken, ‘Dr Johannes Weyer: Altes und Neues vom ersten

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This suggests that there was at least yet one more reason why Wier wrote this treatise. He felt without doubt appalled by the horrific cruelty of which fellow human beings were capable when inspired by religious zeal. It does appear that for him the actions of the Spanish in the Low Countries were more condemnable than abuses by the other side. In this context it is remarkable that he did not mention any of the terrorist actions of the Sea Beggars, the privateers who in April 1572 invaded the Low Countries after Queen Elizabeth had forbidden them to use English ports any longer.50

Illness and Anger It is clear that in contrast to Castellio, Wier did not use terms such as malady or cure as mere metaphors. For him, a professional physician, such terms had specific meanings. But does this imply that his treatise was really a medical discussion of a disorder, its prophylaxis, and effective cures? That characterization would also be incorrect, chiefly because it would be too strict. De ira morbo is certainly a medical essay, but it is also an ethical discourse, and on top of that it is a barely disguised anti-Spanish pamphlet. The main message of the book is that its readers should contemplate their moral weaknesses and more specifically their lack of self-control and tolerance towards other religions. To achieve this goal they should put all their trust in God, choose a healthy lifestyle, and refrain from all excess. Foods or beverages that would induce heat should be shunned and sound ethics should help them keep balanced. A good person was something of a Stoic and was always aware of the necessity to control his urges and abstain from impulses that would lead him to react out of proportion to unpleasant events. For a humoral pathologist such as Wier the difference between the two genres, between a medical discussion and a moral discourse, was not great. For him physical and mental health were almost inextricably intertwined. An excess of black bile, for instance, could make a patient feel melancholic; a problem could be solved by somatic treatments such as dieting, but also by other therapies — by music, for instance, or even sometimes by making a patient very angry. Bad foods could lead to bad morals just as a good diet could help a person act in a responsible way. For Wier, a healthy patient was not only physically and mentally in balance, but also

Bekämpfer des Hexenwahns’, Monatshefte der Comenius-Gesellschaft, 13 (1904), 139–48 (pp. 144–48). 50 On this, see Henk van Nierop, Treason in the Northern Quarter: War, Terror, and the Rule of Law in the Dutch Revolt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

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morally. Negative or positive developments or activities in any of the domains of the body, the mind, and the moral sense could affect the quality of the other two. This implied that somatic problems could be cured by a diet of ethics and moral instruction. A good example of this principle can be found in his 1583 correspondence with the Countess of Bergh, who was a sister of William of Orange.51 This noble patient was suffering a disorder which Wier believed ‘came from the stomach’. In these letters Wier sent her medicines and advised her to visit the baths at Spa if the war did not make that impossible. In one of his letters he informed his patient that he had wanted to send her a copy of Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, but had been unable to find a copy. Apparently the reading of theological literature like this contemplative tract could help people recover from a bodily problem. In his prescriptions Wier mixed Christian morality and classical ethics. He was clearly influenced by traditional Christian views, but did not copy old notions slavishly. The cardinal sin ira figured prominently in the title of his book. Four more of these vices were explicitly mentioned in the text: avaritia, superbia, luxuria, and invidia.52 One other cardinal sin, gula or gluttony, was not named specifically, but it evidently had a background role in the manifold passages where surfeit and extravagance were attacked. The two remaining cardinal sins, acedia and superbia, had similar positions. However, it should not be concluded from this that Wier drew his main inspiration from Christian moral tradition. He was at least as much inspired by humanist moral standards, more specifically by the medical teachings of Galen and Hippocrates. A — rather libertarian — Christian by birth and a humanist by training, Wier mixed the two value systems in a way that was not untypical for his day and age.53

51

An edition of these letters is in Leonard Dooren, Doctor Johannes Wier: Leven en werken (Aalten: De Graafschap, 1940), pp. 132–46. 52 53

Wier, Opera omnia, pp. 785, 786, 806. ‘Fulmen est, ubi cum potestate habitat iracundia’: Wier, Opera omnia, p. 819.

T HE A NATOMY OF H YPOCHONDRIA : M ALACHIAS G EIGER’S M ICROCOSMUS HYPOCHONDRIACUS (M UNICH, 1652) Yasmin Haskell

Hypochondria epidemica

I

t would be natural to assume that hypochondria is the proper domain of medical, literary, and cultural historians whose interests are comparatively modern, or at least post-early modern.1 Hypochondria (and hysteria) seem to

1 Roy Porter, introduction to George Cheyne: The English Malady (1733) (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. ix–li; Porter, ‘‘‘Expressing yourself Ill”: The Language of Sickness in Georgian England’, in Language, Self, and Society: A Social History of Language, ed. by Peter Burke and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 276–78; Porter, ‘The Body and the Mind, the Doctor and the Patient: Negotiating Hysteria’, in Hysteria Beyond Freud, ed. by S. Gilman and others (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 225–66; John Hill, Hypochondriasis: A Practical Treatise, Introduction by G. S. Rousseau (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1969); The Languages of Psyche: Mind and Body in Enlightenment Thought, ed. by George S. Rousseau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); George S. Rousseau, Nervous Acts: Essays on Literature, Culture and Sensibility (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); George S. Rousseau and David B. Haycock, ‘Framing Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Gut: Genius, Digestion, Hypochondria’, in Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History, ed. by George S. Rousseau and others (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 231–65; Anita Guerrini, Obesity and Depression in the Enlightenment: The Life and Times of George Cheyne (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000); Jeremy Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy and Madness in Early

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belong more naturally to the world of bewigged Augustan gentlemen and swooning Victorian ladies than to the altogether less refined territory of early modern war and witchcraft, to the taking of the waters rather than the ‘devil’s bath’ of melancholy. Jeremy Schmidt writes that the spiritual and moral analysis of melancholy continued to be articulated after the Renaissance and into the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which have been singled out as constituting yet another ‘Age of Melancholy’. Eighteenth-century literature is indeed filled with reflections on the melancholic condition, but it would be more correct to call it the age of hypochondriac melancholy.2

One of the aims of this chapter is to expose the need for a history (histories) of an earlier, possibly even more ‘hypochondriac’, age, one that had dawned well before the publication of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621 and which seems to have climaxed in the mid- to late seventeenth century, in the aftermath of the English Civil and Thirty Years Wars.3 Admittedly, the late Renaissance version of ‘hypochondria’ shares less with our modern conceptions of that condition than its eighteenth- and nineteenth-century counterparts: excessive preoccupation with health, much less the malingering or attention-seeking which

Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), chap. 6, ‘From Religious Despair to Hypochondria: The Languages of Melancholy Transformed’, pp. 129–62, and chap. 7, ‘Curing Augustan Hysterics: Morality, Politics and Religion’, pp. 163–83; Massimo Riva, Saturno e le Grazie: Malinconici e Ipocondriaci nella Letteratura Italiana del Settecento (Palermo: Sellerio, 1992); Elizabeth A. Williams, ‘Hysteria and the Court Physician in Enlightenment France’, EighteenthCentury Studies, 35 (2002), 247–55; Julia Schreiner, Jenseits vom Glück: Suizid, Melancholie und Hypochondrie in deutschsprachigen Texten des späten 18. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2003); J. Mullan, ‘Hypochondria and Hysteria: Sensibility and the Physicians’, Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 25 (1983), 141–74; J. Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Mark S. Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); E. Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era (New York: Free Press, 1992). 2

Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul, p. 6. For the earlier history of hysteria, see Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover Case, ed. by Michael MacDonald (London: Tavistock/Routledge, 1991); Katherine E. Williams, ‘Hysteria in Seventeenth-Century Case Records and Unpublished Manuscripts’, History of Psychiatry, 1 (1990), 383–401; Ilza Veith, Hysteria: The History of a Disease (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965). 3

But hypochondriac melancholy already features prominently on the frontispiece to the 1638 edition of Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, alongside the erotic, and more prominently than the religious and maniacal varieties.

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adhere to the concept in everyday usage today, is not yet its defining feature.4 In the early modern period hypochondria, or more properly ‘disease of/from the hypochondria’, was no snickering matter. It was (understood as) a physical disease, or group of diseases,5 afflicting the organs below (hypo) the soft cartilage of the ribs (chondria). It had an uncertain and often unhappy prognosis. Its hallmarks were gastric, cardiac, and respiratory problems, frequently accompanied by excruciating pain and by mental disturbances to varying degrees of severity. While sadness and fear were necessarily present, and while it was appreciated that some hypochondriac health fears were misplaced, few late Renaissance physicians were tempted to reduce hypochondriac disease to exaggerated health anxiety or maladie imaginaire. It is true that the modern-sounding suspicion (or intuition) that hypochondriac problems could be ‘all in the mind’, and that physicians were particularly susceptible to health fears because of their obsessive perusal of medical textbooks, is attested as early as Felix Platter (1539– 1614).6 However, for the sake of clarity I am tempted to introduce a differential diagnosis here, one of ‘metahypochondria’: the fear of having hypochondriac disease where that is itself the serious illness feared by the modern DSM IV-defined hypochondriac. Moreover, early modern physicians seem by and large to have accepted the fact that their hypochondriac patients’ physical suffering was, indeed, in the body, and that their apprehension of imminent death was reasonable, afflicted as they were, incessantly, by intolerable pains and troubling sensations.7 But hypochondriacs

4

As Schmidt reveals, though, the career of Richard Baxter, Puritan spiritual physician turned mortified valetudinarian, bridges an apparent paradigm shift between the cultures of Renaissance melancholy and eighteenth-century hysterics (Melancholy and the Care of the Soul, p. 151). 5

The subject of papal physician Paolo Zacchia’s De’ mali hipochondriaci (two books, Rome, 1639; three books, Rome, 1641). 6

Quoted by Stanley W. Jackson in Melancholia and Depression From Hippocratic to Modern Times (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 278. 7 There is rarely any suggestion of somatosensory amplification. See, however, the very perceptive discussion in Thomas Fienus, De viribus imaginationis tractatus (Leiden: Elsevier, 1635): ‘It seems that the imagination sometimes even creates diseases inasmuch as it uncovers and discloses diseases which are hidden because of their insignificance: and thus those who suffer from some illness or slight pain often do not perceive that pain, unless they pay attention to it, and when they pay attention, they perceive it. […] For in every sense attention is the reason that the dimly perceptible is more completely perceived’ (Videtur imaginatio etiam aliquando morbos facere, per hoc quod morbos parvitate sua latentes detegat & aperiat. Sic qui morbo aliquo aut dolore exiguo laborant, saepe illum dolorem non percipiunt, nisi attendant: & cum attendunt, percipiunt […] Attentio enim in omni sensu causa est, ut sensibile parvum perfectius percipiatur), Quaestio X , p. 187).

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might equally suffer, we are told, from paranoia about persecution by the law, or suspiciousness of close friends and relatives. Other mental health problems regularly associated with the condition in early modern times were profound sadness, emotional lability, hallucinations, and delusions (such as the belief that one was an emperor, an animal, made of glass, or even dead).8 A much-remarked-upon feature of melancholy from the late Renaissance onwards was the fact that it was (perceived to be) a pandemic. Angus Gowland cites witnesses to epidemic melancholy dating back at least to Melanchthon’s De anima.9 The variety of melancholy most often claimed to be proliferating was the hypochondriac.10 Gowland writes that Renaissance melancholy was above all a passionate condition and it is perhaps significant that early modern writers claimed to detect a prevalence of the hypochondriacal melancholy in particular, since, if we follow Burton’s account, psychological perturbations had a primary aetiological role in this subspecies (1. 2. 5. 4).11

It could of course be argued that Burton plays up the psychological colours of hypochondriac melancholy because he is animated in this context, as indeed he is throughout the Anatomy, by a pious humanist scepticism of Galenic

8

See Gowland in this collection on the mechanisms proposed by Renaissance physicians for the origin of such delusions. 9

Two Renaissance loci classici are Girolamo Mercuriale, in the chapter on melancholy in his Medicina practica (1601), and Giulio Cesare Chiodini, in his Responsiones et consultationes medicinales (1607). As Gowland points out, ‘It is clear that the writers who perceived the frequency of the disease and analysed it in detail, like Melanchthon, Du Laurens, and Burton, were influential across Europe in terms of numbers of books sold and read, and their status as eminent authorities gave their views wide dissemination in learned circles at least’ (‘The Problem of Renaissance Melancholy’, Past and Present, 191 (2006), 77–120 (p. 86)). 10

Cf. H. C. Erik Midelfort: ‘By the late sixteenth century, there was […] a growing concern with hypochondriac melancholy, a flatulent digestive disorder with psychic side effects; numerous consilia described the treatment of this increasingly common kind of melancholy’ (A History of Madness in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 167). On the other hand, Felix Platter observed in his practice that religious melancholy was the most common variety: ‘This is the case when they persuade themselves that they are damned, abandoned by God, and are not predestined, even though they had been religious and faithful all the while and when they fear the last judgment and eternal punishment. This frightful melancholy, which often drives men to despair, is the most common form of melancholy’ (quoted in Oskar Diethelm and Thomas F. Heffernan, ‘Felix Platter and Psychiatry’, Journal of the History of the Behavioural Sciences, 1 (1965), 10–23 (p. 15)). 11

Gowland, ‘The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy’, p. 97.

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materialism.12 Indeed, I suspect that it is because hypochondriac disease was a diagnosis conspicuously pertaining to the body — this is inherent already in its etymology — and hence requiring the expert counsel of learned physicians that it receives relatively short shrift in Burton’s work compared with the erotic and religious varieties.13 The general consensus among medical authorities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was that the causes of hypochondriac melancholy lay in a vicious cycle of bad diet, bad habits, and poor self-control. These (as we might say) ‘lifestyle’ factors rendered the condition primarily the preserve of the corporal rather than the spiritual physician.14 It is no accident, I think, that the prevalence of hypochondriac melancholy in early modern Europe is asserted most frequently in the learned medical literature.15 One certainly has the impression that ‘hypochondriacs’ are less widely represented in literary and artistic works of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than in those of the eighteenth and nineteenth, when outbreaks of ‘hyp’, ‘the spleen’, and

12

Note that the section cited comes within a member on ‘how the body works on the mind’. Burton’s subtle deconstruction of contemporary medical knowledge and practice is brilliantly exposed by Gowland in ‘Dissecting Medical Learning’, Chapter 2 of The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 98–138. 13

Gowland points out that Burton warns the reader against medical self-help, presenting himself ‘not as an expert in medicine but in philosophy and divinity’ (Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy, p. 98). 14

Giulio Cesare Claudini writes in a consultation for a noble senator of Bologna suffering from hypochondriac melancholy: ‘That the melancholy affection is both becoming much more frequent, so that it may rightly be judged a calamity common to all men, and that it constitutes the cause of the other affections contrary to nature, so that it may deservedly be held as something of a nursery for almost all diseases, is agreed by all; having pondered the many reasons for this over a long time I have hit on none more convincing than this: that there is no-one in this time of ours who does not delinquent in many respects in his style of life and who does not take every opportunity to gorge himself — of which I believe the aforesaid disease to be the progeny’ (Responsiones et consultationes medicinales (Frankfurt: Sumptibus Lazari Zetzneri, 1607), Consultatio CX , p. 261). 15

It is, though, reported less frequently in university dissertations than in consilia and medical textbooks (on the strength of my perusal of a large sample of Dutch medical dissertations at the university library of Leiden). However, the fact that there is a pronounced spike in dissertations on hypochondriac melancholy and related conditions in the last quarter of the seventeenth century is telling in itself. See the appendix in Oskar Diethelm, Medical Dissertations of Psychiatric Interest Printed Before 1750 (Basel: Karger, 1971), pp. 165–206.

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so on emerge into cultural consciousness at all levels.16 While hypochondriacs of the earlier generation may already have consoled themselves with the ‘secondary gain’ of being afflicted with a learned illness the diagnosis does not yet seem to have been fashionable.17 A tentative parallel might be drawn with modern attitudes to ‘bipolar disorder’ — a condition no one would wish to have, much less affect, but which is regularly associated in both popular and scholarly literature with ‘creative’ types.18 But once hypochondriac melancholy had escaped the humanist physician’s Pandora’s bag it is not difficult to see how it will have lost its pathogenicity, over time, as it raged through new media and populations, conferring a certain level of sceptical immunity to its more catastrophic claims.

Into the Entrails: A World Turned Inside Out The routinely asserted Protean character of (especially hypochondriac) melancholy in the early modern period bespoke a remarkable elasticity of concept. A veritable shopping list of symptoms ensured that an identifiable and respectable disease entity could readily adapt, virus-like, to different social, confessional, and micro-historical circumstances.19 Different features could be and were emphasized

16

See George S. Rousseau, Tobias Smollett: Essays of Two Decades (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1982) and Nervous Acts. Of course Cervantes and Molière remain important exceptions to this rule. For the latter, see the magisterial study by Patrick Dandrey, Molière et la maladie imaginaire ou De la mélancolie hypochondriaque (Paris: Klincksieck, 1998). For (mainly seventeenth-century) artistic representations of hysteria, see Laurinda S. Dixon, Perilous Chastity: Women and Illness in Pre-Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). 17

The possibility of ‘secondary gain’ is suggested by Gowland, ‘The Problem of Early Modern Melancholy’, p. 115; cf. Haskell, ‘Poetry or Pathology’, pp. 193, 196–97; and the chapter by Calabritto in this collection. 18

See, for example, Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched by Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994). 19

For Geiger’s list of symptoms, see Chapter 9, pp. 67–83. They include: fixed and absurd thoughts; meditation on and suspicion of evil things; shame and shyness; solitude; gloom; fearfulness and cowardice; dejection or despair; restlessness; dullness and dissociation [caligo & alienatio]; insomnia and disturbing dreams; poor judgement and decision making; dizziness; vision loss; sighing; heart tremors and palpitations or chest tightness; fainting; headache; intermittent delirium without fever; mood swings; ringing or crashing in the ears, and other sounds, such as of bells or water; sensation of everything turning; sensory and motor disturbances such as coldness in the arms, paralysis, and ant-like gait; hairiness; dark complexion, prominent veins and full lips; eyes sometimes protruding, sometimes sunken, now mobile, now still and

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in different contexts, and writers and sufferers could and did make their own meanings out of the diagnosis. Notwithstanding its universalizing title and encyclopaedic reference to the international literature, the work introduced in this chapter, Malachias Geiger’s Microcosmus hypochondriacus, will be found to be very much of its time and place.20 Its interest for me lies less in the fact that it constitutes a compendium of the humanist medical literature to date21 as in what it reveals, between the lines, about state(s) of mental health in its time and place — not least, the circumstances surrounding its composition. The scene is Catholic Bavaria in the aftermath of the Thirty Years War, a period of widespread anxiety and despair and of state-enjoined spiritual surveillance — but also, perhaps, a moment of transition towards a more secular outlook on madness, when, for example, the German Jesuits were losing their taste for spectacular exorcisms and the supernatural and were beginning to invoke the insanity defence in cases of witchcraft and demonic temptation to suicide. This, at least, is the picture painted for us by David Lederer in his rich and detailed study of spiritual physic and statecraft under the later Wittelsbachs.22 Malachias Geiger (1606–71) was physician to Maximilian I, Elector of Bavaria, and medicus et chirurgus ordinarius to the city and hospitals of Munich, a position he seems to have inherited from his father, Tobias.23 His treatise on hypochondria staring; racing or halting speech and speech defects; tension in the hypochondria, especially on the left side; weak stomach; poor digestion; burning in the hypochondria, with copious spit; acidic eructations; flatulence; stomach growling, murmuring, rattling, rumbling, heaving; biting pain in the belly extending up the spine and to the shoulders; compression of the midriff; dry throat; various shocks [saltus] in many parts of the body; constipation [alvus adstricta]; dry, hard, bulletlike feces; acid and reeking vomit; nausea, lack of or insatiable appetite; painful or struggling [renitens] swelling spleen or mesenterium. At pages 104 to 106, Geiger describes a hypochondriarelated outbreak of skin rashes in Hungary as reported to him by his uncle, Daniel, also a physician. 20

The Latin text, including a clickable chapter list, is available online from the Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de Médecine at [accessed 4 March 2010]. 21

This aspect is emphasized by Stuart Clark, Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 71, n. 53. 22 David Lederer, Madness, Religion and the State in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), as cited in n. 14. 23

Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, 56 vols (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1875–1912), VIII (1878), 505–06 (for both father and son). Cf. pp. 311–12 of the Microcosmus hypochondriacus for Malachias’s eulogy of his father, who seems to have been a late developer — he only began elementary studies (i.e. Latin language) in his thirties.

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was published in 1652 and dedicated to the adolescent and newly elevated PrinceElector Ferdinand Maria. Geiger’s title page announces that the ‘cure of this disease [sc. hypochondriac] — to the extent that it is curable and treatable — is drawn from the triple font of cure, viz. regimen, surgery, and pharmacy, and presented no less pleasurably than profitably’. The work will be enriched with emblems ‘both Galenic and Hermetic’ and interspersed with ‘controversies, observations, histories and political doctrines’; his ‘most choice remedies’ promise to be similarly catholic: ‘Galenic, chemical, and moral.’ While Geiger’s thirty-five chapters cannot compete in bulk or scope with Robert Burton’s, his title page already hints at what he shares with his more famous English precursor: an expansive humanistic learning pressed into demonstrating the interpenetration of the social and political macrocosm with the microcosm of human health.24 Moreover, in ‘no less pleasurably than profitably’ (non minus jucunde quam utiliter) we sense the author’s desire to capture the attention of a non-specialist reader, albeit a Latinate one.25 He claims to write ‘both according to the common and the usual and the unusual and extraordinary experience of our life’ (tam secundum communem & consuetum, quam inassuetum & extraordinarium vitae nostrae usum), nodding to a contemporary taste for curiosity which will be catered to in chapters on wonder cures (for example, vipers and gemstones) and bizarre hypochondriac case histories.26 Geiger’s was a German baroque culture 24

See Lederer, Madness, Religion and the State, p. 30 and n. 103 for the microcosm/ macrocosm analogy in the context of natural philosophers and physicians across Europe and especially Bavaria. The Kurzer Bericht von der Melancholia Hypochondriaca (Frankfurt am Main: Zunner, 1643) by Joannes Freytag contains a long chapter on the relation of microcosm to macrocosm (‘Analogia Macro- & Microcosmi’, pp. 313–19). A more direct (and acknowledged) precedent for Geiger’s treatise is Honorius Heringius’s Microcosmos melancholicus: Seu tractatus singularis de melancholia in genere, et affectione hypochondriaca in specie; una cum appendice variorum exemplorum & medicamentorum probatissimorum ex optimis autoribus collectorum (Bremen: Typis Wesselianis. Ac Sumptibus Georgii Hoismanni haeredum, 1638). 25

Compare Paolo Zacchia’s proem to De mali […] (1651) in which he defends his choice to write in Italian over Latin and claims that his treatise will prove curious, useful, and necessary to readers, ‘since the greater, nay, the better part of men find themselves afflicted by these diseases’ (unnumbered preface, p. i). 26

These are for the most part culled from ancient and earlier modern writers; that they are included primarily for the reader’s amusement and amazement is clear from their placement near the end of the treatise (Caput 33, De ingeniosissimis quorundam Medicorum curis, in depravata, imaginatione). The chapter begins: ‘It will be pleasing and permissible to introduce here the most true examples or observations of some very authoritative Medics about certain melancholics and hypochondriacs — examples various, rare, and worthy of note, from the reading of which the

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which Lyndal Roper has aptly characterized as aspiring to interpret ‘the whole world, the Old and the New; the natural and the supernatural; it revelled in cosmic statements about man’s place in the world and the universe’.27 The Microcosmus hypochondriacus is adorned throughout with allegorical/alchemical figures which have made their way onto many a New Age website (see Fig. 1). At page four we encounter a less glamorous but strangely beautiful anatomical plate of the hypochondriac organs. This is at once a ‘scientific’ illustration, duly captioned and keyed to the main text, and, with its fine and fiddly ramifications of arteries and intestines, nothing less than an inverted tree of life (see Fig. 2). The image serves as a graphic reminder that, in our period, physical and mental health were viewed as being as much connected to the proper functioning of the digestive system as to that of the heart or brain. Where Burton was a self-diagnosing and self-soothing sufferer of melancholy, Geiger is primarily a physician. He assumes as his first task a long and spirited defence of the dignity of his profession.28 The book’s preface, remarkable for its elegant chiastic style, begins with the arresting statement ‘that life in a sick body Reader will not only be able to enjoy himself, but from his discovery of the most ingenious cures he will also be able to marvel at the genius of those Doctors’ (p. 481). Clark, Vanities of the Eye, p. 51, notes Simon Goulart’s incorporation of curious contemporary medical case histories into his popular book of wonders (Thresor d’histoires admirables […] (Geneva: Marceau, 1610)). Zacchia titillates his readers with a more discursive, scientific wonder: ‘is there anyone who, either from personal experience or from observing in others the strange and wondrous effects of these diseases does not feel himself immediately most eager either to investigate them for himself or to know from others their true causes’ (unnumbered preface, p. i). 27

Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004), p. 19. It was also a culture, we should remember, that had recently succumbed to a wave of savage witch persecutions (in the 1610s, 20s, and 30s). We catch glimpses of that dark history in Geiger’s treatise. See below, pp. 295–98. 28

What prompted this florid apology? A defence of the prerogatives of the learned physician is a minor theme throughout Geiger’s treatise (cf. chap. 11, pp. 115–16, on God as supreme doctor and the human physician as his minister, and Geiger’s impassioned response to the calumniators of medicine). Geiger was a friend of the celebrated Jesuit Latin poet, Jacob Balde, who credited him with saving his life in 1647 (Georg Westermayer, Jacobus Balde, sein Leben und seine Werke: Ein Literärhistorische Skizze (Munich: Lindauer, 1868), p. 85). Balde was the author of various ‘paramedical’ works, including a series of poems celebrating learned medicine. See Hermann Wiegand, ‘Ad vestras, medici, supplex prosternitur aras: Zu Jakob Baldes Medizinersatiren’, in Heilkunde und Krankheitserfahrung in der frühen Neuzeit: Studien am Grenzrain von Literaturgeschichte und Medizingeschichte, ed. by Udo Benzenhöfer and Wilhelm Kühlmann (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992), pp. 247–69. The ‘Medicinae Gloria’ is available online through the CAMENA project: [accessed 9 April 2010].

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is scarcely vital, and that the power of the soul can sometimes be hindered, or even extinguished, by disease’. The physician’s domain is not the body alone but the complex of body and soul: ‘such is their society and sympathy that they communicate to one another both their vices and their virtues.’ If a body is weighed down by excessive food or humours, or afflicted by disease, the mind will become clouded in the same way as a cloud obscures the sun, ‘which happens most plainly in those who are affected by this hypochondriacal affection’. Conversely, immorality will precipitate bodily disease. The chief task of the physician, Geiger boldly claims, is to counsel the patient on temperate living. Indeed, whatever is excellent in man, whatever he has achieved in the arts and sciences, must be credited to the physician (!) since there is no life without health. It seems we owe our doctor a greater debt than even our parents, since they gave life to us only once — he gives it often.

Figure 1. ‘The Cosmos before the Fall’, illustration from Malachias Geiger, Microcosmus hypochondriacus (M unich: Straub, 1752); unnumbered plate between pp. 422–23. Used with permission, Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de médecine et d’ontologie, Paris.

Our life is like a storm-tossed ship, laden with weariness, sadness, and illness, for which we are in need of a provident pilot to guide us to the safety of shore. Without one, the wreck of our health is inevitable. In the current climate of peace

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the need for medical practitioners is even greater, since in order to enjoy it we need to be healthy: For what use is it to enjoy golden peace but at the same time to be destroyed by hunger, plague, and poverty, or for the body to be ever oppressed by daily attacks of disease, and indeed by melancholic ones? But why wonder? These are the dregs of war, and they are not so easily eliminated from our minds and bodies.

Interestingly, this reference to the lingering effects of war on mental health has no precise parallel in Burton, who, in his liminary ‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’, rails against the perversity and savagery of recent wars as evidence of a world gone mad (pp. 38–41) but does not list the experience of war among the specific causes of melancholy in the text of the Anatomy itself (which include, for example, psychological frights, banishment, and poverty).

Figure 2. ‘The Hypochondriac Organs’, illustration from Geiger, Microcosmus hypochondriacus, unnumbered page (additional page 4). Used with permission, Bibliothèque interuniversitaire de médecine et d’ontologie, Paris.

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One of the most wrought, not to say overwrought, passages in the Microcosmus evokes the madness and horrors of the Thirty Years War as experienced by the author.29 It is difficult not to be put in mind of ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ when Geiger writes of the cost to his physical and mental health of his medical efforts during the siege of Munich. He is bitter about the labour and money he has personally expended — not so much on his countrymen, but on the invading Rusticomastices (‘scourges of the peasants’) who wreaked carnage on his fellow citizens as Ajax once raged against the swine.30 His duty as a physician compelled him to tend enemy casualties: But I handled with my hands, with my nostrils inhaled, with my eyes surveyed the putrefactions of those dying men, the fetidness of them putrefying, which caused not only the eyes of onlookers to turn away and to turn over but also their stomachs. And while I was treating the foul sores and wounds of those impious men, expressing the corrupted blood bubbling out of their bodies, wiping their stinking boils, rotting abscesses, creeping cancers, the rough skin of their mange and erupting rashes, their filthy fungal tetters, and tending to other afflictions of this sort, binding, healing, and soothing, I did not complain. I pass over their internal, contagious, and pestiferous diseases, with which they were thereafter fairly punished by a just God.

Geiger points out that for twenty years since, with little assistance, he has overseen the operations of the charitable foundations established in the wake of the war (hospitals, nurseries, orphanages, boys’ homes, and nursing homes); he has also carried on a private practice tending to religious and lay, noble and common folk. All these obligations have rendered him ‘no less bound than Andromeda to her rock’. He has sought nothing else in this, he tells us, than to glorify God and to help his fellow man; this pure intention has earned him a safe passage through the calamities of the past to the safe haven of peace, where he should now be enjoying the tranquillity to meditate upon the life to come. Why, then, at a time when undiluted cheer might be expected from him, should Geiger regale his sovereign with this sad and peevish treatise? The primary reason, he tells us, is that hypochondriac illness is now rife among

29

The war is also lamented by contemporary Jesuit poets Jacob Balde and Nicolaus Avancini. See Bernhard Duhr, S. J., Geschichte der Jesuiten in den Ländern deutscher Zunge in der zweiten Hälftedes XVII. Jahrhunderts (Munich: Manz, 1921), p. 580. 30

‘The greater part of them was born to butchery and slaughter, sowers and sewers of crimes, hell-fodder, sweepings of the house of Hades. The entire army of the Furies could exhale nothing fouler than them from the throats of Orcus.’

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people of all classes, and especially among the lettered and religious.31 Who and where were all these hypochondriacs? Geiger has already answered this question in part when he claimed that mental illness is an inevitable consequence of war. But according to David Lederer there were only 3 named ‘hypochondriacs’ out of a total of 1122 mad pilgrims who sought cures at the Bavarian shrines of Beata Alta at Pürten and St Anastasia at Benediktbeuern during the early modern period.32 Of course, many of the other (self-)reported spiritual afflictions of those Bavarian pilgrims may have been interpreted by a corporal physician as indicative of hypochondriac disease (fear, terror, tribulations, sadness, and despair). But were these the suffering subjects Geiger had in mind? It is true that the case histories adduced from his personal practice concern relatively humble patients. In his chapter on the ingenious tricks played by doctors to cure the deranged imaginings of melancholy hypochondriacs we learn that: Lots of common and country folk, of both sexes, come to me very often seeking advice and cures for murmurings and motions, continual and extraordinary, persuading themselves most stubbornly that they have accidentally swallowed the spawn of frogs or other beasts in drinking water, from which, in their bodies, those beasts have thereafter hatched and been nourished, whence they suffer these problems, and that they cannot be liberated from them so easily save by the extermination and expulsion [of the creatures] by pharmaceutical means. Others, and especially those men of dimmer wits, imagine that similar flatulent and occasionally colic eructions are caused them by the motion of the womb (von der Beermutter); they are ignorant of the fact that the male sex is not destined to bear children and that they lack that organ, viz. the uterus. Since I have to agree with them, whether I like it or not, in deference to their most fixed melancholic impressions, I prescribe either vomitives or cathartic medicines, and I expel these imaginary beasts with their melancholy faeces, not without many incantations [non sine multis vocalibus], to the great relief of the sick. (Chap. 33, p. 493)

Then there is the teenaged student of rhetoric at the Munich gymnasium, ‘son of a peasant, humble and pious, but fastidious and melancholic’, who was ‘greatly afflicted by hypochondriac and melancholic impressions — which is unusual at this age33 — and by goads of the flesh’ (chap. 9, p. 74). When the young man was

31

The second is that there are many disagreements among doctors about the causes of the illness and its cures and Geiger has resolved to communicate these to the benevolent reader, but not in a spirit of contentiousness. 32

Geiger, Microcosmus, Table 4.1, p. 148; cf. p. 161: ‘Untreated, hypochondria could lead to serious complications, such as melancholia hypochondriaca, though in practice, sources do not report a single case.’ 33

This is an unusual claim. Geiger had earlier noted that the ancients Aetius and Aretaeus

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unable to suppress his lustful desires through abstinence and mortification he hacked off his own genitals.34 (For further observations from Geiger’s practice see below: Bad Winds or Evil Spirits? Case Notes from Catatonia.35) Needless to say, even if Geiger believed that hypochondria was spreading through all levels of society, the audience anticipated for this Latin treatise was not the common man or woman.36 But neither does his (conventional) claim that hypochondriac melancholy is most frequently found among the educated and religious necessarily ennoble it. A moralizing tone predominates throughout and the pious doctor administers some hard home truths under the rubric of dietetics. He insists sternly upon the connection between disease and disordered passions. The mundane causes of hypochondriac illness may be legion but Geiger bluntly affirms that such illness can be generated by, and its progress exacerbated by, anger, avarice, ambition, envy, and lust.37

found hypochondriac melancholy most common at maturity and afterwards, but that ‘in this century many adolescents are troubled by this kind of disease, both because of the tumultuous times and because they have inherited it from their parents’ (chap. 8, p. 62). Later he reports the case of a young man who believed himself accused before God for having applied various obscene names to a demon. He became so sleepless and obsessed by the idea that he had to be transferred to a nursing home; there he stole a knife and cut back the flesh of his big toe to the bone, supposedly at the promptings of God and of his guardian angel (chap. 33, p. 494). The Neapolitan Jesuit poet and professor Niccolò Giannettasio (1648–1715) claimed that adolescence was a prime time to develop hypochondriacal melancholy. Cf. Haskell, ‘Poetry or Pathology’, pp. 193, 196. 34

Geiger relates the deed and its aftermath in gory, if heroic, detail. The boy is said to have acted with ‘Manlian fortitude’ and to have returned to his hall of residence ‘grasping in his hands the tormented parts like captives, drenched and drunk with harmful gore, all the way home, like a victor returning from some battle or clash’. Geiger stops short of condemning the act as a product of hypochondriac delusion — indeed, while the boy’s ‘remedy is indeed harsh, tyrannical and extreme, it should be proposed and applied to all of those whom neither reason nor medicine will suffice to restrain from unbridled and furious lust, and especially those who are unable to be continent through prayer and the application of spiritual means’. 35 Geiger also discusses dealings with melancholy patients (he does not call them ‘hypochondriac’) in his Margaritologia; sive, Dissertatio de margaritis: In qua post varia ad margaritas pertinentia, demonstratur, margaritas Bavaricas in usu medicinali, viribus et effectibus aequivalere Orientalibus et Occidentalibus elaborata […] (Munich: Leysser, 1637). 36

The dedicatee, Ferdinand Maria, is said to have been a lonely, Saturnine type. Cf. Lederer, Madness, Religion and the State, p. 80, n. 147. Geiger is careful to avoid any suggestion that his advice is intended for the prince personally. 37

The perturbations accepted by doctors to shorten life are ‘anger, joy, sadness, fear, avarice, care, envy, lust, and others of this type’ (p. 202).

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Psychiatrist or Soul-Doctor? David Lederer is right to question the assumption that ‘the serious history of mental health care is limited to the story of university-trained medical professionals […] given the contemporary regime of phlebotomies, vomitives and clysters employed by corporal physicians, one has to question whether such methods truly deserve to be privileged over the analytic case histories of spiritual physic’ (p. 43). It is out of spiritual physic, he contends, that modern psychiatry emerged (p. 3). The medical authorities cited in Geiger’s appendix of sources (chap. 35) concluded many a consilium on hypochondriac melancholy with the briskest of formulae advising patients to moderate their passions. If the learned physicians of the Renaissance paid lip service to the health effects of the perturbations of the soul they did not as a matter of course speculate on or model psychotherapeutic techniques in their writings.38 Interestingly, though, in his prolusion to Microcosmus hypochondriacus Geiger gives this counselling/consoling function pride of place among the physician’s duties: ‘Who is a more firm persuader to the abstemious and sober life? Who is a more faithful promoter of the moderation of anger, of fleeing sadness, and of avoiding intoxication than the Doctor?’ 39 It is tempting to read Geiger as a sort of proto-modern (if not exactly ‘pop’) psychologist, attempting to bridge the gap between talking and pharmaceutical cures. To the extent that his book might be employed as a comprehensive self-help manual the physician-author seems to run the risk of doing himself out of a job.40 But if his treatise does the talking, it also does the spruiking. In relaying the 38

But see De Waardt in this collection for passages of moral exhortation in Johannes Wier’s treatise on anger. See also Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul, pp. 38–46, on the moral physiology of English physician, Thomas Willis, who in his De anima brutorum constructed ‘a pathology of sadness and fear in which ethical considerations were depicted and reinforced through physiological language’ (p. 45). 39 Reversing the modern mental health care model which sees psychotherapy as a first-line response, Geiger recommends that a strong therapy of the word be tried in the cases of those hypochondriacs whose disturbed imaginations do not respond to the usual prophylactic and remedial measures (Mundus, p. 480). 40 See Heikki Mikkeli, Hygiene in the Early Modern Medical Tradition (Helsinki: Academia Scientiarum Fennica, 1999), Chapter 3, on the rise of vernacular medical advice books in the sixteenth century. One of the most popular, Luigi Cornaro’s Trattato de la vita sobria (1558), was translated into Latin by the Belgian Jesuit, Leonard Lessius (Leendert Leys, 1554–1623) and appended to his own hygiene manual, Hygiasticon. As Mikkeli points out, Lessius approved Cornaro’s principle of medicus sui ipsius: ‘Private hygiene was ultimately in the hands not of the medical profession, but of the people’ (p. 93).

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complexities of contemporary debates about hypochondriac disease, enumerating a bewildering number of symptoms, and prescribing a plethora of more or less credible cures, Geiger ensures that the reader — not least the new Elector himself — is not tempted to dispense with the services of a trained and trusted medical specialist.41 The Microcosmus hypochondriacus does not just inform us dispassionately about the deleterious health effects of the passions. Geiger exhorts, excoriates, consoles, and employs rhetorical flourishes and humour to expose the error of our ways. What is more ridiculous than the senex amans if not the old lady lover (sed multò etiam suavius […])? Such as these are already dead with advanced old age, and so cadaverous that you would think they had returned from the Underworld, and yet they are still on heat (catulire) and exhibit at great expense some rented Phaon [Sappho’s unresponsive boyfriend], forever smear their faces with makeup, never leave the mirror, solicit weary love with tremulous yelping, go out drinking, mix with bands of young girls, scribble love notes, &c. (p. 209)42

Avarice, which Geiger suggests ‘is always accompanied by ambition or pride’, is ‘the most violent passion, which alone can render people hypochondriac or melancholy’ (pp. 205–06). Ceaseless anxiety, in combination with frugal eating and drinking, braving bad weather in the pursuit of profit, and parsimony in dealing with doctors and pharmacists, breaks the health of these men. Ironically enough from a modern perspective, the avaricious become hypochondriac because they have failed to pay enough attention to their health! If anger is not technically the worst of the passions it is arguably the one closest to our author’s heart.43 It has already merited separate treatment (in Chapter 8)

41

But interestingly, when Geiger does, as one might expect, concede that spiritual physic is the best treatment for disturbed passions, it is to the books of a now deceased Jesuit, Hieronymus Drexel (1531–1638), that he commends us (Spiritualium remediorum electionem, in aureis opusculis magni animarum Medici Rdi. P. Drexelij qui volet inveniet, cum theologica magis quam medica in his animi perturbationibus requirantur media, p. 208). 42

The misogyny is typical of the treatise, if not the times. Female hypochondriacs, though rarer than their male counterparts (chaps 8 and 11, pp. 63, 100), seem to be prey to a wider battery of psychological symptoms (see the list at chap. 10, p. 94); in fact, women live in a state of perpetual adolescence, which is partly what makes them attractive to men […] (chap. 6, p. 38). Women hypochondriacs are harder to cure because of the supervention of uterine disorders (chap. 11, pp. 100–01; although Geiger had earlier noted sudden, as it were, miraculous cures: chap. 10, p. 94). Women are more likely to think themselves victims of demonic obsession and possession (chap. 10, p. 95) but they are also more prone to demonic attack in reality: see below, p. 297. 43

Perhaps because of a fear of return to total war, perhaps also because he was struggling with

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before Geiger’s general review of the passions in Chapter 17. Anger takes the place usually reserved for ‘fear’ in the following formulation: ‘But the harm anger and grief, or sadness, can wreak on the human body, especially on one disposed to melancholic affections, and to the hypochondriac [melancholy], can easily be inferred from the following […]’ (chap. 8, p. 54). Geiger proceeds to explain the physiological effects of anger. First, it is well known that anger or fear undermine the digestion, diverting the spirits necessary for those processes, resulting in a debased chyle (digestive fluid). Then, since when bile is roused in anger it pervades and corrupts the other humours, it is credible that when anger and sadness are combined, the melancholic, phlegmatic, and black humour [sc. choler/yellow bile] are released also, which are mixed with the badly concocted chyle, corrupting it even more; whence the precious blood cannot be generated, but rather a humour corresponding to the qualities in the chyle, that is, partly melancholic, partly phlegmatic, partly black [sc. choleric], and hereupon it is transmitted to nourish the organs of the lower belly, and the depraved humours accumulate in the hypochondria. Add to these the fact that in passions of the mind the humours are moved and affected principally in the arteries; and since the spleen abounds in arteries and has more than five times as many of them as veins, it is necessary that its functions are overturned in such passions of mind [sc. anger and sadness]. (p. 55)

Such effects, the author concludes, ‘are also caused by common calamities, namely War, Hunger, and Plague, as we have learned all too well, alas, some years ago, to our great sadness and cost’ (p. 55). There follows another digression on the evils of war, and against those who seek to justify it. We might infer that the angry man, in Geiger’s view, is a microcosm of the war-ravaged state. Among the external causes of the hypochondriac affection Geiger lists all those things that raise the heat of those organs and render the blood more acrid, such as ‘over-work, anger, fasting or excessive abstinence, sharp foods, rich wine, the use of aromatics’ (chap. 8, p. 64). The collocation here of over-work and anger seems significant. Earlier in this chapter we seem to catch a glimpse of the obsessive scholar in the portrait of the narcissistic, cantankerous misanthrope: Who does not flee and shrink from such a man, as if from a monster or spectre, a man who has grown deaf to all the senses of Nature, who is given to no affections, and is no more moved by love and mercy than if he were hard flint or Marpessan marble; who never errs but, like a sort of lynx, does not not see anything, who weighs everything exactly, who excuses nothing, who is only content with himself, who alone is rich, alone well, alone king, alone free — in short, everything alone but only in his own judgment […] Of this

his own demons. See below, pp. 292–93, on his feud with Clauss. Cf. De Waardt in this collection for the characterization of anger as a disease in its own right.

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Geiger points out that these irascible Arguses are especially frequent at Court, a toxic environment full of persecutions, accusations, and calumnies, which are enough to cast down even the best and purest heart and drive it to the limits of impatience, grief, and anger. While the portrait is undoubtedly stereotypical, I suspect Geiger has a real-life model in mind: his medical colleague Matthias Clauß, the author of a book attacking a tract on temperance by the late Hieronymus Drexel, S. J.46 Clauß’s shadow hangs heavily over the Microcosmus: he is presumably one of the monstrous, gut-dwelling calumniators from whom Geiger seeks the Prince’s Herculean protection in the dedication, and one of the envious, malevolent, two-faced hypochondriacs despatched for hellebore in the Conclusion (pp. 523– 24); he is openly attacked in the Prolusio prooemialis; and three whole chapters, 13–15, are devoted to the refutation of his unfortunate book, which dares to 44

Quando ne quidem omnes luculli coqui, gratum ipsis ferculum condirent. Possibly an allusion to the anecdote in Plutarch’s Life of Lucullus, 41. 1–6, in which the legendary gastronome upbraids a servant for presenting him with a single course at dinner, even though he has no guest, on the grounds that ‘tonight Lucullus is dining with Lucullus’. 45

The theme of the contemporary corruption of scholarly life is reprised near the end of the penultimate Chapter (34), where Geiger notes that: ‘Many rush with fervent prayers to the God of profit — and these days even the learned — and as the wind tends to send off course spears which have been aimed and launched at a target, thus the accursed hunger for gold overturns the better concerns and pursuits of the learned’ (p. 511). 46

Matthaei Clauß, Archiatri & Archiducalis medici, &c., Oenohydromachia sive vini et aquae certamen (Innsbruck: apud D. Agricolam, 1638).

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defend the drinking of strong wine, and to a eulogy of the saintly Jesuit he has offended. The motivation for Clauß’s calumny, it is insisted, is irrational fury. A fuller explanation of the vehemence of Geiger’s assault on Clauß will have to wait for another occasion. Suffice it to say that Geiger’s relationship with the Jesuits was a very close one.47 Another form of self-satisfaction/self-ignorance is targeted by Geiger. In Chapter 20 he embarks on a defence of the usefulness of pharmaceutical remedies in the treatment of hypochondriac melancholy, but first he must address ‘the philosophizing of certain hypochondriacs who refuse medicines’. Some refuse all Galenic and Dogmatic medicines but only accept Chemical ones, and then there are those who are indeed so refractory that, in spite of being well enough off and of excellent means, yet because of their stubbornness and sordid miserliness desire to be cured by miracles or words alone, and they reckon they are wiser for being hypochondriacs (since hypochondriac melancholy is held by some to be a sign of wisdom [prudentiae]) and they philosophize as if they don’t care about death. (p. 250)

This tantalizing passage introduces two pages condemning the false (Stoic) philosophy spouted by such men, who feign lack of concern for their lives and will even defend suicide. How their tune changes, though, ‘when they see their futile speeches blown apart, their bellies not in agreement, and excrement presently bursting out of their mouths, that boasting tongue of theirs continuously befouled with reeking and rust-coloured filth from the belly, and the stomach and whole body thrown into chaos with incessant retchings and pains’ (p. 252). In short, they are beset by the whole gamut of hypochondriac symptoms: ‘how willingly do they then not divest themselves of those shade-loving philosophers? How generously do they then not promise everything to the Doctors? […] they never imagined that the darts of death could be so bitter, nor that the weapons which their imaginary philosophy set against death were so feeble’ (pp. 252–53). Who are these early modern anti-psychiatrists? Are they among the critics of medicine Geiger felt moved to confront in Chapter 11? Or was Geiger’s scorn for smug 47

He seems to have been a ‘temporal coadjutor’. The key to the third emblem, on pharmaceutical cures, contains a long meditation/triumphal hymn to the Virgin which culminates in praise for the Society of Jesus: ‘That is the Society of Jesus; which when I name it, I praise it enough. She is victorious over heresy, a lighthouse of virtues, the perfection of the century, the glory of the disciplines, the footman of Christ, the citadel of the Church, the pupil of God. And yet so that the Society might endure, the Sodality approaches […] The Son cannot be without the Mother nor the Mother without the Son. Thus I worship them, I venerate them, I serve them, as both sodalis [lay brother?] and physician, however unworthy, until such time as the light fails and I pour out my soul from my dying body’ (p. 247).

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pseudo-philosophers fed by a wider Jesuit preoccupation with the spiritual perils of self-sufficiency (if not a rather less spiritual concern about loss of professional income)? One senses the reverberations of Jakob Biderman’s Cenodoxus (Augsburg, 1602), staged in Munich in 1609, with many subsequent performances throughout the German-speaking lands, where it became a recruiting tool for the Jesuit order.48 This celebrated play on the legend of the Doctor of Paris (an ancestor of Goethe’s Faust) features a learned, charitable, and widely liked protagonist who sits up at his own funeral and, to the amazement of the congregation, announces his own damnation. His sin, of course, is pride. But if the learned can bring on hypochondriac disease by their sedentary habits, their bilious ambition, and their avarice, and if Geiger mercilessly reduces the airs which vain hypochondriac philosophers give themselves to so much flatulence, he somewhat inconsistently exempts the vocational religious from his censure of an unhealthy lifestyle. Religious men can seem sick or mad but they are not (pp. 45–50). Worn out by long vigils, fasting, singing, and study, so that their lives are a perpetual martyrdom, these pious men neglect their health and yearn for the blessing of death.49 Their fervour is misconstrued by the masses as insanity. They are removed from the more crass senses, and, as for the emotions, seek even to uproot the natural and neutral affections, such as patriotism, and love of family and friends. Sometimes they are ‘transported beyond themselves’ by their love of God and spiritual things. What do they care if they are charged with unhealthiness of body or mind: ‘for to simulate foolishness in its place is the height of wisdom.’ In a quite different context Geiger returns to the subject of the fool, in his sixteenth chapter, ‘on motion and rest in hypochondriac melancholy’. He is reviewing the various activities and distractions which may alleviate melancholy, among which are conversation and good-humoured banter ‘with good and wise men’. However such sages have always been in short supply, and the melancholic may be wearied by stern straight-talkers or by those who have two tongues, who only speak the truth when the occasion seems appropriate; in that case he should ‘bring on the natural fools, the daft, the silly or the stupid [moriones, fatuos, ac bliteos vel stultos], as that race of men is called, to raise the spirits’ (p. 191).50 Such 48

Jacob Bidermann: Cenodoxus, ed. by D. G. Dyer and Cecily Longrigg (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1975). 49 50

Although they also expose themselves to endless medications (chap. 7, p. 46)!

On the natural fool in Renaissance Germany, see Midelfort, A History of Madness, chap. 5, pp. 228–76.

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men have been given us by God’s grace to cheer us up; they cannot conceal their thoughts, and that which would be dangerous coming from the mouth of a wise man produces hilarity when pronounced by a fool. Without saying as much, Geiger paints a portrait of the fool that is almost the exact antitype of the melancholy hypochondriac: There is nothing more fortunate than that race of men! First of all, they lack a fear of death, of that not insignificant evil in respect of Jupiter [non mediocri Iovem malo = divine retribution?]. They lack the executioner of conscience. They are not terrified by the terrors of the Underworld. They are not tortured by the fear of impending evils. They are not wracked by the hope of future goods. In sum, they are not excruciated by the thousands of cares which beset this life. They are not ashamed, they do not feel awe, they do not toady, they do not love. And finally, if they approach the brute animals in their foolishness, they do not sin, according to the Theologians. (p. 192)

Bad Wind or Evil Spirits? Case Notes from Catatonia Unlike in Burton’s Anatomy, scant space is reserved in the Microcosmus hypochondriacus for religious melancholy per se. But in Chapter 31 on ‘ecstasy or inspired [attonitus] melancholy in hypochondriacs and hysterics’ Geiger records that there are ‘many’ who labour under a certain melancholy as if they are troubled by temptations [tentationibus, sc. ‘Anfechtungen’], on account of sins they had once committed which are not dreadful but clearly minor, and they are persuaded that they cannot return to God’s grace and that they are therefore damned for eternity, and consider themselves unworthy to live or carry out any respectable office (p. 464).

These people, ‘like those who are in despair’ (desperabundorum instar), attempt suicide and even offer violence to others. Geiger adds some intriguing detail to what looks at first like a conventional sketch of religious melancholy (recognizable from Burton, among others). Once their fury has subsided, such ‘ecstatics’ become preternaturally sad and silent, apart from a continual sighing. The consolation of friends proves futile and for weeks on end is met only with the occasional cry, ‘O God!’ Geiger proceeds to describe something which today’s doctors might be tempted to dub ‘major depression’, as such patients are said to wake early but lie immobile in their beds, from which ‘they are lifted by servants and dressed; they stand like statues, automatically raising their hands to their heads and temples — this usually makes them sad beyond measure — they sigh, they move along if they are pushed and led, and they sit at a bench or seat to which they are guided’ (p. 465). These wretches need to be fed and given to drink via a straw, but their

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symptoms, if they begin in spring, abate after the winter solstice, and they can be restored to full health if given the appropriate care. Geiger’s explanation for this ‘religious’ melancholy is uncompromisingly naturalistic. The stupor is caused by melancholic vapours rising to the brain and rendering the animal spirits fixed and to a certain extent immobile, so that apart from those firmly conceived and impressed phantasms, virtually none of the [spirits] are able and apt to form an imaginary species [speciei phantasticae] and to represent it to the reason. Thus the imagination and the reason, firmly in the grip of those occupying species, are not able to attend to other objects or to recognize them sufficiently. And as a consequence there is no desire for things placed before them or voluntary motion towards them, but simply that apparent paralysis [mera apparens stupiditas].

And so this anguished soul-searching (typical, as Geiger would have been well aware, of scrupulous Protestants) really has nothing spiritual about it. It is on a par with the more general form of hypochondriac ecstasy Geiger has just described — or, as modern psychiatrists might say, ‘catatonia’: I have had in my practice not a few such patients who seemed dazed [stupidos] and unable to move, but were only apparently so [sed apparenter solum]. They remained in a certain place as if fixed and immobile. If they were lying down, they didn’t sit up; if they were sitting, they didn’t stand; standing, they did not sit down. Nor did they spontaneously move their feet unless they were pushed along by friends or by-standers, and they requested assistance to change position. They did not actually flee men, but even if they seemed to attend to them they gave no reply, as if they were deaf, and did not process what they had been told, and as if thinking, and busy contemplating other matters, they did not pay attention to objects of sight, hearing, or touch placed before them. In the meantime they slept and were awake at intervals: they ate food which was brought to their mouths, they drank, and during these [procedures] were sufficiently compliant, or at least not very reluctant. Although, on the other hand, I have also had some who were refractory, for whom drink and nourishing broths had to be forcibly poured into their mouths, who foolishly imagined that they were only Logical beings [made] of reason [se stupidè imaginantes, se entia rationis Logica solummodò esse], and lacked a mouth and teeth, and so could not take food or drink, chew or swallow the same. In this most pertinacious delusion they were more prepared to die of hunger rather than admit food. (pp. 463–64)

However our loyal Jesuit sodalis, defender of the witch-hunter Jeremias Drexel, does not leave it at that. Thus far he has only described pathological ecstasy, but in the remainder of this chapter he reviews (briefly) divine ecstasy, as experienced by St Paul, the prophets, and the saints, and (more thoroughly) demonic ecstasy, as practised by the shamans of distant Lapland and by witches closer to home. Do witches really travel to the Sabbath? Geiger is emphatic: ‘But whatever the cause of this phenomenon is, it is not for the Doctor to investigate’ (Verum, quae

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cunque huius rei caussa sit, de eo disquirere, Medici proprium non est) (p. 468). So if we had hoped from our medical ‘scientist’ for something of the sceptical metanoia evinced by Jesuits Adam Tanner, Bernard Frey, and Friedrich Spee, we are disappointed.51 Geiger feels moved to declare that at the very least the dreams of witches are supernatural, indeed diabolical, since it is impossible for dreamers from so many different locations, of such diverse temperaments, ages, sexes, and levels of learning, all to dream the same thing on the same night and in the space of the same hour (p. 468). It is tempting to read the escalating diagnosis of hypochondriac melancholy in the sixteenth through seventeenth centuries as part of a trend to ‘rescue’ the despairing or diabolically accused from the spiritual and legal clutches and consequences of supernatural influence.52 Hypochondriac disease was, after all, a humane diagnosis available to physicians treating mentally unstable patients who might otherwise have been condemned, in this period, for witchcraft or immorality.53 Could the prevalence of the diagnosis, almost a will to see hypochondriac illness rather than diabolical influence everywhere at play, have accompanied that early modern ‘psychological revolution’ proclaimed by Febvre, de Certeau, and others?54 Vapours theory, as fantastical as it may seem today, was invoked in this period in hard natural-philosophical and freethinking contexts to explain away supernatural phenomena, and it was a literally watered-down version of the vapours (i.e. the less controversial bodily humours) that mediated the pathological imaginings of hypochondriac melancholy. But Geiger, appealing to scriptural as well as to medical authority, saw no incompatibility between a diagnosis of the ‘windy disease’ and the operation of evil spirits. He reminds us that a demon can gain control of a person who is wicked, vicious, of weak judgement, and prone to succumbing to the promptings of their passions — usually a woman — causing diseases, convulsions, even lycanthropy (citing Luke 8). The Devil targets the melancholic because their bodies are more accessible and manipulable 51

See Lederer, Madness, Religion and the State, p. 205.

52

This narrative cannot be too progressivist. As Strocchia, above, pp. 154–55, has shown not everyone wanted to be so rescued, as demonic influence — or divinely inspired prophecy — could sometimes be empowering. 53

Satyriasis, for example, could be a consequence of hypochondriac illness. Cf. the gruesome case history reported by Geiger, pp. 285–86, above. 54 Lucien Febvre, ‘Aspects méconnus d’un renouveau religieux en France entre 1590 et 1620’, Annales d’histoire économique et sociale, 13 (1958), 639–50. The persistence of the idea of a ‘psychological revolution’ in French historiography is discussed by Lederer, Madness, Religion and the State, pp. 202–06.

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for the production of more spectacular effects. While demonic disease is difficult to distinguish from natural, Geiger follows the majority opinion of the demonologists who claim that prophecy and speaking in tongues are a giveaway. The fact that such ‘gifts’ may be remedied by purgatives does not, according to Geiger, prove Levinus Lemnius’s theory that they are naturally caused. The demons may simply be withdrawing temporarily to confuse us! Geiger is by no means the first or last humanist physician to play devil’s advocate in this way against ‘modern science’. His farraginous treatise is an object lesson in the overdetermination of the early modern hypochondria epidemic(s).

Conclusion: The Meaning of the Microcosm The Microcosmus hypochondriacus, as I hope this chapter has confirmed, holds an historical interest beyond the sum of its rather miscellaneous medical parts. At one level, the author has set out to anatomize, like Burton, a baffling and seemingly ubiquitous ‘disease’. On another, he is using the medium of a medical treatise to advance his political prospects at Court under the new Elector, to defend his Jesuit friends, and to attack his enemies. Geiger’s intellectual understandings of hypochondria are likewise multiple and mixed. First and foremost, it is moral illness as a consequence of war, anger, avarice, and over-indulgence. It is just about all mental illness short of incoherent raving. It is much bodily illness, including paresthesias and motor disturbances, some of which are, however, only apparent.55 It is something approaching ‘somatopsychic illness’, and even twenty-first-century ‘hypochondriasis’ (fear of having a specific disease): some become dizzy, others sad or fearful. The false imagination and melancholic delusions arise through a vitiation of the spirits which are polluted by those vapours, for some patients are in constant fear of apoplexy, others of epilepsy, others of sudden death, some think they have been bewitched, and others imagine other diseases. (Chap. 9, p. 81)

Hypochondriac melancholy is serious and often intractable, and has been called ‘the torment, cross, and disgrace of doctors’ (chap. 11, p. 97) because patients do not persevere with their regimes and medicines, and frequently switch consultants. However, patients can be brought back from the brink by a properly qualified, morally upright physician, skilled at counselling. As for the ‘hypochondriacal microcosm’ of Geiger’s title, this is at one level the book itself — it digests and attempts to draw nourishment from all the contradictory

55

For motor problems, cf. Geiger, Microcosmus, pp. 81–82, 87.

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literature on ‘this most complicated and pertinacious hypochondriac disease, infesting the greater part of humanity in this century’ (chap. 35, Conclusion, p. 523) — at another, of course, it is the reader/patient.56 Indeed, the tenth chapter gives us an Everypatient in the form of an anonymous case history: ‘And so a certain microcosm, of the male sex, of confirmed age, a melancholic temperament, whose body was wracked in youth and adolescence with vehement and longlasting fevers and in his manhood was dried out by rather severe sorrows, on account of some most unfortunate events […]’ (p. 84). A microcosm implies a macrocosm, and for Geiger that macrocosm is the diseased modern world, disease permitted by God not so much as punishment as an occasion for/ invitation to concerted, collaborative, secular, and spiritual remediation.57 Geiger recommends the application of both natural and divine remedies to treat the spiritual illnesses described in Chapter 11. The good physician is the servant of God: Therefore the Theologian should not begrudge the Christian Doctor, if, on account of their partnership, he asks to borrow something from him. For they both have the same subject, viz. man, the compendium of the greater world and the image of the divine Creator; and they both have the same goal, the salvation/health of man. But the Theologian attends chiefly to the health of the soul, the Doctor primarily to the health of the body. In such a way, however, that the former does not neglect the good condition of the body, which is necessary for its proper obedience to the functions of the soul, and the latter does not neglect the passions of the mind, which delay or hasten the healing of bodies. Moreover God is the author of both sciences, the fount and origin of all good things, who so provided for the health of the whole man that He appointed, as His minister, the Theologian to cleanse away the corruptions of the soul and the Doctor to dispel the sufferings of the body, and He has confirmed both by His own authority and with His express words, and has, in fine, heaped them with gifts from His goodness so that each might carry out his function with greater success. (pp. 115–16)

In this anticipated collaboration between doctor and theologian, Geiger’s Anatomy is in the end much more optimistic than Robert Burton’s. It dissects so as to put back together.58

56

In his fiery conclusion Geiger commends his book to readers whose ‘mind and reason have not yet been confounded or undone by the dark and cloudy melancholic evaporations’, as opposed to those ‘whose hearts are possessed by the poison of spite and brain by black bile — I’m thinking of the envious and of calumniators’ (p. 523). 57

If I am right, Geiger’s treatise is infused with Jesuit ideology. See Steven J. Harris, ‘Transposing the Merton Thesis: Apostolic Spirituality and the Establishment of the Jesuit Scientific Tradition’, Science in Context, 3 (1989), 29–65. 58

Research for this article was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery Project grant.

L YCANTHROPY IN E ARLY M ODERN E NGLAND : T HE C ASE OF JOHN W EBSTER’S T HE D UCHESS OF M ALFI Brett D. Hirsch

I

n Of Englishe Dogges, the physician John Caius suggests that the reason why the English ‘shepherdes dogge is not huge, vaste, and bigge’, and is ‘of an indifferent stature and growth’ when compared to sheepdogs found elsewhere in Europe, is because

[ …] it hath not to deale with the bloudthyrsty wolf, sythence there be none in England, which happy and fortunate benefite is to be ascribed to the puisaunt Prince Edgar, who to thintent [that] the whole countrey myght be euacuated and quite clered from wolfes, charged & commaunded the welsheme[n] (who were pestered with these butcherly beastes aboue measure) to paye him yearely tribute which was (note the wisedome of the King) three hundred Wolfes.1

As a result of intense hunting, increased deforestation, and the sort of statesponsored campaigns that Caius refers to, ‘none of those noysome, and pestilent Beastes were left in the coastes of England and Wales’ and the wolf was effectively extinct by the end of the fifteenth century.2 There were, of course, exceptions, such as those reported by Edward Topsell as ‘kept in the Tower of London to be seene by the Prince and people brought out of other countries’,3 and others Caius 1

John Caius, Of Englishe Dogges (London, 1576; STC 4347), sig. D4. Presumably this is the ‘tribute of wolues paid in England’ referred to in John Webster’s The White Devil (London, 1612; STC 25178), sig. G2. 2

Caius, Of Englishe Dogges, sig. D4v .

3

Edward Topsell, The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes (London, 1607; STC 24123), p. 735.

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writes of as ‘brought ouer from beyonde the seas, for greedynesse of gaine and to make money, for gasing and gaping, staring, and standing to see them, being a straunge beast, rare, and seldom seene in England’.4 The werewolf enjoyed even less of an appearance on English soil: despite growing popularity on the Continent there were no reported cases against lycanthropes in early modern England. Given the general lack of wolves, real or transformed, in England, why did John Webster insert a lycanthropic character into The Duchess of Malfi? This chapter will explore the theological, philosophical, and medical backgrounds of the lycanthrope in early modern English thought in an effort to reconcile Webster’s unique choice with the wider concerns of his time: the precarious boundaries between animal and human, male and female, body and soul, sanity and madness, good and evil. Exploration may shed some light on the reasons for Webster’s construction of the first werewolf to appear on the early modern English stage.5 The term lycanthropy carried multiple meanings in the early modern mind, due to varied treatments of the subject in the discourses of theology, demonology, medicine, and folklore. For example, the term lycanthropy referred both to the perceived reality of the phenomenon of metamorphosis from human form to wolf, and to the delusion that one was capable of such transformations (whether this delusion was the result of madness, melancholy, hallucinogenic drugs, illness, or the diabolic exacerbation of any number of these causes). In our present age, these two divergent definitions have been distinguished between the terms werewolf, relegated entirely to the domain of fiction and folklore, and lycanthrope, which has been absorbed into the scientific discourses of medicine and psychology. However, this distinction was not current in the early modern period, and ‘at

4 5

Caius, Of Englishe Dogges, sig. D4 v.

While Webster’s werewolf was the first (and arguably the most memorable), there are a handful of analogous dramatic cases: a werewolf appears as part of the ‘masque of melancholy’ in John Ford’s The Lovers Melancholy (London, 1629; STC 11163), sig. K1; and a soldier is attacked by ‘a company of Hell-cats’ that are later found to be metamorphosed witches in Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome’s The Late Lancashire Witches (London, 1634; STC 13373), sig. K2v . Other references are largely figurative, such as the description of Shakespearean characters with ‘Woluish’ desires (The Merchant of Venice, TLN 2047, 4.1.37) or a ‘Woluish visage’ (King Lear, TLN 827, 1.4.288). All quotations from Shakespeare are from the First Folio of 1623, and are cited parenthetically throughout with references to the Through Line Numbers from The Norton Facsimile, ed. by Charles Hinman, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 1996), followed by corresponding act, scene, and line references from the Oxford Complete Works, ed. by Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

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this point in English linguistic history the words werewolf and lycanthrope seem to be interchangeable’.6

The Biblical Tradition Biblical literature was seen to endorse physical transformations (whether into animals or pillars of salt) as divine punishments for wickedness and disobedience. According to Dennis Kratz, while the controversial doctrine of transubstantiation recognized the miraculous transformation of bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Christ during the Eucharist, the Church, despite this scriptural and liturgical precedent, ‘steadfastly refused to accept the physical reality of the werewolf’ and ‘it became the doctrine of the Church that werewolves do not exist’.7 It was inconceivable that God would allow the transformation of man into wolf (and thereby replace his soul with that of an animal) because it conflicted with the doctrine of divine charity. Therefore, the theological dismissal of the reality of the werewolf was based on the distinction between illusory and actual change. This distinction was already articulated by St Augustine in Book XVIIII of The Citie of God, arguing that reports of such transformations ‘are false, or incredible, because vnusuall’, adding that […] we must firmely hold Gods power to bee omnipotent in all things: but the deuills can doe nothing beyond the power of their nature (which is angelicall, although maleuolent) vnlesse hee whose iudgements are euer secret, but neuer uniust, permit them. Nor can the deuills create any thing (what euer shewes of theirs produce these doubts) but onely cast a changed shape ouer that which God hath made, altering onely in shew.8

For Augustine, the power to alter and transform Nature is the prerogative of God alone. Consequently, he dismisses the belief that ‘the deuill can forme any soule or body into bestiall or brutish members, and essences’, positing instead that ‘they haue an vnspeakable way of transporting mans fantasie in a bodily shape’, so that

6

Charlotte F. Otten, A Lycanthropy Reader: Werewolves in Western Culture (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1986), Introduction, p. 8. 7

Dennis Kratz, ‘Fictus Lupus: The Werewolf in Christian Thought’, Classical Folia, 30 (1976), 57–80 (pp. 61–62). For a more detailed discussion of the theological debates surrounding bodily transformations and the Eucharist, see Caroline Walker Bynum, ‘Metamorphosis, or Gerald and the Werewolf’, Speculum, 73 (1998), 987–1013. 8

694.

St Augustine, The Citie of God, trans. by John Healey (London, 1610; STC 916), XVIII, p.

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‘while the bodies of the men thus affected lie in another place, being aliue, but yet in an extasie farre more deepe then any sleepe’, the demonic can appear to alter reality by affecting a sensory experience akin to dreaming, in that ‘though it be not corporall, yet seemes to cary itselfe in corporall formes’.9 Augustine’s distinction between real and illusory change was affirmed by St Thomas Aquinas and incorporated into canon law with the Canon Episcopi, which denounced many popular beliefs including transformations other than those by God: Whoever therefore believes that anything can be made, or that any creature can be changed to better or to worse or be transformed into another kind of likeness, except by the Creator Himself who made everything and through whom all things were made, is beyond doubt an infidel.10

The notion that God could transform a man into an animal (or allow the Devil to do so) was certainly terrifying for medieval and early modern Christian thinkers, since it threatened not only the concept of a charitable, loving God, but also that of sin and salvation: indeed, if a man is transformed into a beast (and thereby divorced of his rational nature), he is not responsible for any sinful act he commits, since the rational consent of the sinner is lacking. This is not the case when relinquishing one’s own sense of rational control, since any indulgence in carnal desire flows from the consent to abdicate restraint — a man who chooses to live like a beast is answerable for his sins. Thus, as Kratz observes, the Christian theological rejection of the reality of the werewolf is ‘essentially a rejection of two frightening notions: that God or the Devil can divorce a living person from the possibility of Heaven’ and ‘that a man can commit a sinful act for which he is not responsible’.11 By way of illustration, let us briefly consider two responses available to early Jacobean readers of the story of Nebuchadnezzar in the Book of Daniel, where the King was ‘driuen from men’ for seven years as punishment for his pride, during which time he ‘did eate grasse as oxen’, living like a beast, with his body ‘wet with the dew of heauen, till his haires were growen like Egles feathers, and his nailes like birds clawes’.12 In his Hexapla in Danielem, published in 1610, Andrew Willet

9

St Augustine, The Citie of God, XVIII, p. 694.

10

Quoted in Henry Charles Lea, Materials Toward a History of Witchcraft, ed. by Arthur C. Howland, 3 vols (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1939), I, 180. 11

Kratz, ‘Fictus Lupus’, p. 78.

12

Daniel 4. 29–37. All biblical references are to the King James Version.

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prefaces the question ‘Of Nebuchadnezzars transmutation’ by considering ‘first in generall of the diuerse kinds of transmutation’, of which he identifies five varieties.13 The first kind is characterized by Willet as ‘a fabulous and poetical fiction, rather then any true alteration and change’, citing the bestial transformations found in the myths of Homer, Apuleius, and Pliny.14 A ‘kind of naturall and phisicall transmutation’, such as ‘how certaine wormes become butter-flies’, forms the basis of Willet’s second category of transformation.15 The third kind includes ‘phantasticall changes, such as are wrought by sorcerie and art Magicke’, such as the Pharaoh’s magicians turning rods into snakes (Exodus 7. 10–12), or reports of ‘changes of men into the forme of wolues and other beasts’ in other countries.16 God’s turning of Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt (Genesis 19. 26) is cited as an instance of the fourth kind of transformation — ‘those true changes, which haue beene made by the power of God’ — which includes also the transformation of ‘Moses[’] rodde into a serpent’ and Christ’s ‘water into wine’.17 Willet’s final category of transformation is the ‘spirituall change’, which is ‘in the minde and vnderstanding’, whether for the better, such as ‘when men are renewed by grace, and from ignorance, infidelitie, carnall lusts, are turned’, or for the worse, such as ‘when the spirit of God left Saul’ and an evil spirit possessed him in its place.18 For Willet, Nebuchadnezzar’s change from ‘a reasonable man, [who] became in his minde an vnreasonable beast’ falls under this last category of transformation, since ‘he had not lost his shape, but his minde’.19 To explain the biblical account of Nebuchadnezzar’s physical deformities, Willet suggested that ‘as his minde was become sottish and bruitish, so the constitution of his bodie was much changed’.20 The second response to this biblical episode for our present consideration comes from William Perkins’s The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience, published posthumously in 1606. On the topic of melancholy, Perkins describes ‘Beastiall or Beastlike Melancholie’, a ‘disease in the braine whereby a man thinkes himselfe to be a beast of this or that kind, and carries himselfe accordingly’, such

13

Andrew Willet, Hexapla in Danielem (London, 1610; STC 25689), pp. 130–32 (pp. 130, 131).

14

Willet, Hexapla in Danielem, p. 130.

15

Willet, Hexapla in Danielem, p. 130.

16

Willet, Hexapla in Danielem, p. 131.

17

Willet, Hexapla in Danielem, p. 131.

18

Willet, Hexapla in Danielem, p. 131.

19

Willet, Hexapla in Danielem, pp. 131–32.

20

Willet, Hexapla in Danielem, p. 132.

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as those ‘which haue thought themselues to be wolues, and haue practised woluish behauiour’.21 Turning to Nebuchadnezzar, Perkins acknowledges that ‘some are of opinion that his humane shape was taken from him, and that he was transformed into a beast’, and that ‘at least he had the soule of a beast in stead of a humane soule for a time’. ‘But they are deceiued’, he continues, ‘for there is no such transportation of soules into bodies, either of men or beasts.’ Rather, ‘others thinke, that Nebuchadnezzar was smitten in the braine with this disease of beastlike Melancholy’, leaving him ‘so bereft of his right minde, that he carried himselfe as a beast’. While Perkins notes that ‘this interpretation is not against the text’, he is apparently uncomfortable reading the biblical account in wholly medical terms, conceding ‘the like is true in historie, by diuerse examples, though it were not true in Nebuchadnezzar’.22

Classical Metamorphoses Animal transformations are frequently found in Classical literature, such as men ‘turnd to swine’ by Circe in Book X of Homer’s Odyssey,23 or any of the vivid tales in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where men and women undergo metamorphoses into a diverse range of animal species.24 Of particular interest for our present purposes is the first tale in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Calling a council to address mankind’s increasing degradation through the ages, Jove describes his descent to the earth where Lycaon, King of the Arcadians, impiously doubts Jove’s divinity and plots to kill him, and, as an added insult, serves Jove the flesh of a hostage: In dead of Night, when all was whist and still, Me, in my sleepe, he purposeth to kill. Nor with so foule an enterprize content,

21

William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience (Cambridge, 1606; STC 19669), p. 192. See also the chapter by Yasmin Haskell in this volume. 22

Perkins, Cases of Conscience, p. 193. On the early English literary reception of the Nebuchadnezzar story, see: Penelope B. R . Doob, Nebuchadnezzar’s Children: Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974). 23 24

Homer, The Odyssey, trans. by George Chapman (London, 1614; STC 13636), p. 152.

For a useful survey of the werewolf in classical antiquity, see: Jan R . Veenstra, ‘The EverChanging Nature of the Beast: Cultural Change, Lycanthropy, and the Question of Substantial Transformation (from Petronius to Del Rio)’, in The Metamorphosis of Magic from Late Antiquity to the Early Modern Period, ed. by Jan N. Bremmer and Jan R . Veenstra (Leuven: Peeters, 2002), pp. 133–66 (pp. 134–44).

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An Hostage murders, from Molossia sent: Part of his seuer’d scarce-dead limmes he boyles; An other part on hissing Embers broyles; This set before me, I the house ore-turn’d With vengefull flames, which round about him burn’d. He, frighted, to the silent Desart flies; There howles, and speech with lost indeavour tries. His selfe-like jawes still grin: more then for food He slaughters beasts, and yet delights in blood. His armes to thighs, his clothes to bristles chang’d; A Wolfe; not much from his first forme estrang’d: So horie hair’d; his lookes so full of rape; So fiery ey’d; so terrible his shape.25

In these myths, as Joyce Salisbury has insightfully observed, the metamorphoses ‘usually occurred because people exhibited the characteristics of an animal to an extreme degree’ and the physical change ‘only made manifest the bestial nature that had been within’.26 Thus, Lycaon’s bloodlust and cannibalism results in his transformation into a wolf, ‘not much from his first form estrang’d’. As Raphael Lyne has noted, Ovid’s work ‘had a varied profile’ in early modern England, ‘serving as a school textbook and illicit pleasure, natural philosophy and racy narrative’.27 While schoolboys were taught to translate passages of Ovid in Latin classes, and poets (including Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare) admired and imitated his style, humanists and religious commentators sought to reconcile the more unsavoury pagan aspects of Ovid’s work with their own Christian theology. An excellent example of this interpretive strategy is to be found in George Sandys’s translation of and commentary on the text, Ouids Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologiz’d and Represented in Figures, completed in 1632. In his commentary on Lycaon’s transformation, Sandys writes that It is wonderfull saith Pliny, to consider how farre the Graecian credulity will extend: no ly so impudent that wanteth a witnesse. But would he not retract his censure, were he now

25

George Sandys, Ouids Metamorphosis Englished, Mythologiz’d and Represented in Figures (London, 1632; STC 18966), sig. A3v. Earlier English readers were no doubt more familiar with Arthur Golding’s translation (London, 1567; STC 18956), where Lycaon, ‘thirsting still for bloud as heretofore’, has ‘His garments turnde to shackie hair, his armes to rugged pawes: | So is he made a rauening Wolfe: whose shape expressely drawes | To that the which he was before’ (B4v ). 26

Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within: Animals in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 159. 27

Raphael Lyne, Ovid’s Changing Worlds: English Metamorphoses, 1567–1632 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 1.

308

Brett D. Hirsch aliue, and saw what is so ordinarily said to be practised by the witches of Germany, who take and forsake the shapes of wolues at their pleasure, and for which they are daily executed?28

Interestingly, Sandys goes on to suggest ‘As wee to magicall deceptions; so he [Pliny], a Naturalist, perhaps would ascribe it to that melancholy disease’. Who is this we to which Sandys is referring? His contemporaries? His countrymen? Did Sandys and his readers understand lycanthropy as a ‘magicall deception’ or a ‘melancholy disease’, a natural or supernatural phenomenon? To address these questions, we turn now to a consideration of the intersection of demonological and medical discourses of lycanthropy.

Demonology and Witchcraft Whilst the Church was concerned with distancing itself doctrinally from accepting the reality of physical transformations from man into wolf or other beasts, demonology picked up where orthodox theology left off, tackling the logistics of the illusory change as discussed by Augustine. Absorbing lycanthropy into the wider discussion of witchcraft, demonologists ‘agreed that shape-shifting was achieved through demonic agencies and pacts with the Devil’; however, ‘they disagreed among themselves over the precise mechanisms by which such a metamorphosis was accomplished’.29 Common procedures included donning magic items obtained from the Devil, such as a belt or wolf pelt,30 or the application of magic ointments or salves.31 In his Discours des Sorciers, Henri Boguet argued that these salves were used to deaden the senses and induce sleep, allowing the Devil to commit those acts ‘which the witch has in mind to do, giving himself the appearance of a wolf’ (que

28

Sandys, Ouids Metamorphosis, sig. D3v .

29

H. Sidky, Witchcraft, Lycanthropy, Drugs, and Disease: An Anthropological Study of the European Witch-Hunts (New York: Lang, 1997), p. 218. 30 31

Such as in the case of Peter Stumpf (1589), discussed in detail later in this chapter.

As Veenstra reports, ‘in his Metamorphoses, Apuleius parodies this magical shapeshifting when he describes the comic fate of the magician Lucius who turned himself into an ass by using the wrong ointment’, and that ‘Apuleius himself had to face trial for his detailed descriptions of the ointments, which incurred a charge for sorcery’ (‘The Ever-Changing Nature of the Beast’, p. 143). The use of ointments also is described in the trial records of Pierre Bourgot (1521), Georges Gandillon (1598), and Jean Grenier (1603), the last discussed in more detail later in this chapter.

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Satan quelquefois endort le sorcier dertiere vn buisson, & qu’il va luy seul executer ce que le sorcier a en volonté, se faisant voir en apparence de loup). Upon completion of these acts Satan ‘so confuses the witch’s imagination that he believes he has really been a wolf and has run about and killed men and beasts’ (ce pe[n]da[n]t il trouble telleme[n]t l’imaginatiue du sorcier, qu’il luy semble qu’il ait esté loup, & qu’il ait couru, & tué des personnes, & des bestes). This scenario also allowed Satan to inflict on the body of the witch whatever sympathetic wounds had been sustained whilst in wolf form. Boguet, however, did not excuse the witch from responsibility for these demonic acts, ‘[since] even if they were guilty in nothing but their damnable intention [those who harbour such intentions have] first renounced God and Heaven’ (Et puis quand il n’y auroit autre chose, que la damnable intention qu’ils ont […] qu’au preallable ils n’ayent renoncé à Dieu, & au Ciel).32 Nicholas Rémy, agreeing with Boguet, argued that although lycanthropic acts were instigated or carried out by demons, prosecution was justified on the grounds of moral violation, that these criminals were ‘so notoriously befouled and polluted by so many blasphemies, sorceries, prodigious lusts, and flagrant crimes [that they were] justly to be subjected to every torture and put to death in the flames’ (videlicet tot impietatibus, veneficijs, portentosis libidinibus, flagitiosisq[ue]; facinoribus vitam illis aperte[m] esse inquinatam ac contaminata[m] […] vt e[st] iure esse non dubite[m] omnibus tormentis excruciatos igni interficere).33 However, there were some authorities who insisted on the reality of lycanthropic shape-shifting, such as Jean Bodin, who maintained in De la Demonomanie des Sorciers that actual physical transformation was ‘an absolutely certain, true and undoubted thing’ (pour chose tres certaine, veritable & indubitable),34 since so many respectable witnesses — classical and contemporary historians, poets, doctors, and philosophers — firmly believed its reality. Bodin attacked sceptics

32

Quotations are taken from Henri Boguet, Discours des Sorciers, 2nd edn (Paris, 1603), sigs. I3, I6v . The English translation is from An Examen of Witches, trans. by E. Allen Ashwin, ed. by Montague Summers (London: Rodker, 1929). The earliest extant edition is from Lyon, 1602, although an earlier original publication is likely. Summers speculates that the original was published in Lyons in 1590 (pp. xii–xiv). 33

Nicholas Rémy, Demonolatria (Lyon, 1595), 3B4 v. The English translation is from Demonolatry, trans. by E. Allen Ashwin (London: Rodker, 1930), p. 188. 34

Jean Bodin, De la Demonomanie des Sorciers (Paris, 1580), sig. 2C1 v . The English translation is from On the Demon-Mania of Witches, trans. by Randy A. Scott (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1995), p. 127.

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such as Johan Wier, who argued in his De Praestigiis Daemonum that lycanthropy was the result of the demonic exacerbation of mental illness.35 As Stuart Clark has observed, authors like Bodin were in the minority, and most had trouble accepting that the phenomena of physical transformation were real, on the grounds that, as we have seen, ‘it was philosophically and morally distasteful to suppose that the human anima could function in an animal body (and vice versa)’, and equally impossible ‘for the devil to either effect the transfer or transmute substantial forms’.36 Instead, other Continental demonologists suggested that lycanthropy and other supposed transformations were wrought by demonic or hallucinatory illusions, or by melancholic delusions.37 For the most part, English demonologists were similarly sceptical. Examination of the demonological tracts published in England during this period uncovers a trend from the representation of lycanthropy as a manifestation of the demonic exacerbation of illness, madness, or melancholy, through to an understanding of lycanthropy set out in wholly natural terms. In The Discouerie of Witchcraft, Reginald Scot dismissed lycanthropy and actual transformations as ‘verie absurdities’, holding that ‘the transformations, which these witchmongers doo so rave and rage upon’ is ‘a disease proceeding partlie from melancholie’, denying outright the possibility of demonic intervention in such cases.38 Henry Holland, in A Treatise Against Witchcraft, considered the ‘transformation of men and women into wolfes and cattes’ to be ‘clean contrarie against nature’, and the product of ‘Sathanicall

35 For a more detailed examination of Wier’s treatment of metamorphosis, see Guido Giglioni, ‘Becoming Animal: Johann Weyer’s Critique of the Imagination as an Agent of Metamorphosis’, in Metamorphosis in Antiquity and Beyond, ed. by Ingo Gildenhard and Andrew Zissos, forthcoming. 36

Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 191–92. 37

See, for example: Henricus Institoris and Jacobus Sprenger, Malleus maleficarum (1486–87), ed. and trans. by Christopher S. Mackay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 59C–63C, 119A–121A; Claude Prieur, Dialogue de la lycanthropie (Louvain, 1596), fols 22 r–55 v; Jean Beauvois de Chauvincourt, Discours de la lycanthropie (Paris, 1599); Philip Ludwig Elich, Daemonomagia (Frankfurt, 1607); Francesco Maria Guazzo, Compendium maleficarum (Milan, 1608), pp. 50–51; Pierre de Lancre, Tableau de l’inconstance des mauvais anges et demons (Paris, 1612), pp. 243–45; and Francisco Torreblanca, Daemonologia (Mainz, 1623), pp. 240–44. In his De la lycanthropie (Paris, 1615), Jean de Nynauld provides an extensive list of the ingredients used by witches to prepare their ointments (pp. 27–63), concluding that their hallucinatory qualities explain all reports of transformation (pp. 67–81). 38

Reginald Scot, The Discouerie of Witchcraft (London, 1584; STC 21864), pp. 89, 102.

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delusions’ in those who ‘abound in melancholy’.39 Later authors would expand on this theme, suggesting that the Devil preyed on those who suffered from abundant melancholy, and were therefore more susceptible to delusions of this sort: for example, in A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraftes, George Gifford found that the Devil can ‘make the witches in some places beleeve that they are turned into the likeness of wolves’, since he ‘can set a strong fantasie in the mind that is oppressed with melancholie’.40 Likewise, William Perkins’s A Discovrse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft argued that lycanthropy was the result of ‘brains possessed and distempered with melancholy’, which the Devil exacerbated: Againe, the deuill knowing the constitutions of men, and the particular diseases whereunto they are inclined, taks the vantage of some, and secondeth the nature of the disease by the co[n]currence of his owne delusion, thereby corrupting the imagination, and working in the minde a strong perswasion, that they are become, that which in truth they are not.41

Moving further away from the supernatural model, the then King James VI of Scotland wrote in his Daemonologie that lycanthropes, or ‘men-woolfes’, are the product ‘of a naturall super-abundance of Melancholie’, which had reportedly ‘made some thinke themselves Pitchers, and some horses, and some one kinde of beast or other’.42 Similarly, John Deacon and John Walker rejected the diabolical aspects of lycanthropy in favour of a medical model, in a fictitious dialogue between the figure of a lycanthrope, Lycanthropus, and a physician, Physiologus: You are called Lycanthropus: that is, a man transformed to a woolfe: which name is verie fitlie derived from the verie disease it selfe that disorders your braine, called Lycanthropia. Which word, some Physitions do translate Daemonium Lupinum, that is, a woolvish Demoniacke: others Lupina melancholia, and Lupina insania, that is a woolvish melancholie, or a woolvish furie and madnes. And it is nothing else in effect, but an infirmitie arising upon such phantasticall imaginations, as do mightily disorder and trouble the braine.43

39

Henry Holland, A Treatise Against Witchcraft (London, 1590; STC 13590), sig. F3.

40

George Gifford, A Dialogue Concerning Witches and Witchcraftes (London, 1593; STC 11850), sig. K3. 41

William Perkins, A Discovrse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (Cambridge, 1608; STC 19697), sig. B4v . 42

James VI, Daemonologie (Edinburgh, 1597; STC 14364), sig. I3. James republished the volume in England upon his accession to the English throne (London, 1603; STC 14365), where the quote is found on sig. I2v . 43

John Deacon and John Walker, Dialogicall Discourses of Spirits and Divels (London, 1601; STC 6439), sig. L8.

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Other English authors on witchcraft were hesitant (or simply unable) to accommodate transformations within the discourse of medicine, and so clung to the familiar territory of supernatural causation. However, it must be noted that the majority of these writings barely mention lycanthropy, or transformations in general for that matter; and on those rare occasions mention is only in passing. For example, while Thomas Cooper’s The Mystery of Witchcraft provides a voluminous examination of all aspects of witchcraft, his discussion of transformations, ‘as a Witch into an Hare and Cat’, is completed within a single paragraph — that Satan ‘cannot change one creature into another’, and that ‘this is a meere delusion of the sense’.44 These infrequent (and insubstantial) deviations aside, perhaps more the product of neglect than intention, the overall trend returned to its course: the physician John Webster’s The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft argued that ‘many persons, by reason of Melancholy in its several kinds’ had been ‘mentally and internally (as they thought, being deprived in their imaginations) changed into Wolves’, emphasizing that ‘the change was only in the qualities and conditions of the mind, and not otherwise’.45 It is significant that lycanthropy was incorporated into discourses of demonology and witchcraft in England, since this reflects a broader popular concern with evil and maleficia, particularly from the middle of the sixteenth century onwards when witchcraft pamphlets, trial accounts, and demonological treatises were increasingly imported from the Continent.46 Whether or not the increased dissemination and consumption of witchcraft publications, local and imported, points to an increase

44

Thomas Cooper, The Mystery of Witch-Craft (London, 1617; STC 5701), sig. F4. Another example is John Cotta’s The Triall of Witch-Craft (London, 1616; STC 5836), which discusses the ‘seeming transmutations by the Divell of the substances of Men into Cattes, and the like’ only as part of a much larger effort to establish that the Devil cannot act contrary to Nature, and therefore ‘cannot make a true transmutation of the substance of any one creature into another’ (sig. F1 v ). 45 46

John Webster, The Displaying of Supposed Witchcraft (London, 1677; Wing W1230), p. 95.

Representative examples include: A True Discourse Declaring the Damnable Life and Death of One Stubbe Peeter, trans. by George Bores (London, 1590; STC 23375), and A Strange Report of Sixe Most Notorious Witches (London, 1601; STC 20890), both translated from Dutch copies of German pamphlets; Lambert Daneau, A Dialogue of Witches, trans. by Thomas Twyne (London, 1575; STC 6226), originally published in Latin in France; and The Life and Death of Lewis Gaufredy (London, 1612; STC 11687), Michel Marescot, A True Discourse, Vpon the Matter of Martha Brossier, trans. by Abraham Hartwell (London, 1599; STC 3841), and Simon Goulart, Admirable and Memorable Histories of Our Time, trans. by Edward Grimeston (London, 1607; STC 12135), all translated from the French.

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in belief in witchcraft itself, English readers could afford to be more sceptical than their Continental counterparts when it came to werewolves, since the chances of being attacked by a wolf, let alone a werewolf, on English soil, were negligible. Both creatures were, at best, theoretical threats for the English: Edward Topsell felt that little ‘benefit shal come to the knowledge of them by the English reader’ simply because direct contact with wolves was so unlikely.47 At any rate, no less an authority than the King insisted that if werewolves existed in England that they were to be found solely in the deluded minds of severe melancholics.

Medicine, Madness, and Melancholy Attitudes towards lycanthropy were changing by the close of the sixteenth century, and this change was reflected in the approach adopted by the courts on the Continent. The last major werewolf trial of the century began in 1598, with the discovery of the body of a fifteen-year-old boy in Angers. A group of men stumbled upon the corpse being mutilated by a pair of wolves, which scampered into the undergrowth when the men gave chase. Following the trail of bloody paw prints, the men found a half-naked man crouching in the bushes — his teeth were chattering and his hands, described as claws with long nails, were marked with blood. The man was a poverty-stricken mendicant named Jacques Roulet, and at his trial Roulet testified that his lycanthropic ability was the result of a magic salve in his possession. The trial court sentenced Roulet to death, but an appeal was lodged. The court of appeal held that ‘there was more folly in the poor idiot than malice and witchcraft’, and his sentence was commuted to imprisonment in a madhouse, where he was to receive religious instruction.48 Subsequent cases, such as that of the young werewolf Jean Grenier in 1603,49 affirmed the new approach

47

Topsell, The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes, p. 478. Topsell is specifically referring to knowledge of the ‘magical inuentions about the parts of wolues’, but the statement is ambiguous: is this knowledge of little benefit because he doubts the efficacy of these ‘magical inuentions’, or because contact with wolves in England was so unlikely that such details were unnecessary? 48

The Roulet case is reported in Sabine Baring-Gould, The Book of Were-Wolves (London: Smith, Elder, 1865), pp. 69–84. The judgment of the appeal appears at p. 84. 49 As reported in Baring-Gould, The Book of Were-Wolves, pp. 85–98. In Grenier’s case, the court determined that he was incapable of rational thought, stating that ‘the change of shape existed only in the disorganized brain of the insane, consequently it was not a crime which could be punished’ (p. 98), and so sentenced Grenier to spend the rest of his life in a monastery.

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by the courts, which tended to view the werewolf as ‘no longer the product of a fleshy, demonic transformation, but of an unstable mind’.50 It is at this point that the discourses of demonology and medicine intersect: as we have seen, English demonological opinion on the werewolf and transformations in general tended towards ascribing lycanthropy to madness and melancholy, although a minority view continued to profess its supernatural origins. The opinions of the corporal physicians of the time elicit a similar trend: they move towards a wholly medical model based on natural infirmity, whilst at the same time severing any lingering earlier distinctions between spiritual and natural causes.51 As Carol Thomas Neely has shown, Thomas Bright’s Treatise of Melancholie attempts to draw careful distinctions ‘between spiritual and physiological melancholy’, but she points out that these ‘repeatedly collapse’, since ‘both states are characterized by the same symptoms’ and each predisposes the sufferer to the other.52 The publication of Edward Jorden’s A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother continued the effort to distinguish the spiritual from the natural, bewitchment from insanity. Jorden argued that experienced physicians, like himself, were ‘best able to discerne what is naturall, what not naturall, what preternaturall, and what supernaturall’ and so could give unique insight into the credulity of witchcraft victims at trial.53 Appearing simultaneously was Samuel Harsnett’s A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, which attacked the (then illegal) Catholic and Puritan practices of exorcism, on the grounds that both demonic possession and exorcism were fraudulent spectacles.54

50

Erica Fudge, Perceiving Animals: Humans and Beasts in Early Modern English Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 54. It is unclear whether Fudge intended ‘fleshly’ or ‘fleshy’. 51

Of course, as Jeremy Schmidt reminds us, the vigorous tradition of applying ‘spiritual physick’ to treat melancholy survived well into the eighteenth century, even as the language of consolation was overtaken by the language of pathology: Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy and Madness in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), passim. 52

Carol Thomas Neely, ‘“Documents in Madness”: Reading Madness and Gender in Shakespeare’s Tragedies and Early Modern Culture’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 42 (1991), 315–38 (p. 319). 53

Edward Jorden, A Briefe Discourse of a Disease Called the Suffocation of the Mother (London, 1603; STC 14790), sig. C1. 54 Samuel Harsnett, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (London, 1603; STC 12880). For an important and insightful discussion of Harsnett in relation to Shakespeare, see Stephen Greenblatt, ‘Shakespeare and the Exorcists’, in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. by Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 163–87.

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Although witchcraft prosecutions continued in England until the end of the seventeenth century, Neely has observed that the growing tendency ‘to medicalize the behaviour of witches and the bewitched’ evinced by these treatises and others functioned to question not only the authority of the trials, but the supernatural mentality that supported it; and in the areas of ‘bewitchment, possession, witchcraft’ and lycanthropy, the emerging medical model would provide ‘a psychological alternative to conditions formerly defined as supernatural in origin and treatment’.55 Perhaps the most representative contemporary English medical diagnosis of lycanthropy is to be found in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy,56 which refers lycanthropy ‘to Madness, as most do’, although he reports that some authorities have considered it ‘a kind of Melancholy’. Renaissance medical authorities treated the terms melancholy and madness promiscuously, or, as Burton puts it, the terms ‘are confounded by many Writers’, and consequently at times it is difficult to discern the distinction between them. Burton’s own distinction between the two terms is based on the degree of violence involved: Madnesse is therfore defined to be a vehement Dotage, or raving without a fever, farre more violent then Melancholy, full of anger and clamor, horrible lookes, actions, gestures; and troubles the Patient with farre greater vehemency both of Body and Minde, without all feare and sorrow, with such impetuous force, and boldnesse, that sometimes three or foure men cannot hold them.57

The testament of the later physician Robert Bayfield affirms Burton’s position in his account of lycanthropy: ‘Wolf-madness, is a disease’, writes Bayfield, who follows with the story of a patient of his, ‘a certain young man’ with ‘a wild and strange look’ who set about ‘barking and howling’. In the course of his inspection, Bayfield ‘opened a vein, and drew forth a very large quantity of blood’ which was ‘black like Soot’. The patient, having been provided with a potion and an emetic to remedy his abundance of black bile, ‘became perfectly well’.58

55

Neely, ‘“Documents in Madness”’, p. 321.

56

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1621; STC 4159).

57

Burton, Anatomy of Melancholy, 1.1.1.4, pp. 12–13.

58

Robert Bayfield, A Treatise De morborum capitis essentiis & prognosticis (London, 1663; Wing B1467), pp. 49–51.

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Webster’s Werewolf Having duly considered the theological, demonological, and medical backgrounds of the werewolf up to Webster’s time, the discussion will now turn to the lycanthropic character of Ferdinand, with particular attention to the cause of his lycanthropy. The Duke’s affliction is first reported by the doctor as a ‘very pestilent disease’ which ‘In those that are possess’d with’it there ore-flowes | Such mellencholy humour, they imagine | Themselues to be transformed into Woolues’ (L2, 5.2.5, 8–10]).59 The doctor proceeds to inform Pescara (and the audience) that lycanthropes not only imagine themselves wolves, but also act accordingly, running about ‘Church-yards in the dead of night’ to ‘dig dead bodies vp’ (L2, 5.2.11–12). As it turns out, Ferdinand has been seen at midnight behind a church, ‘with the leg of a man | Vpon his shoulder’ (L2v, 5.2.14–15) and howling. When approached during this particular incident, Ferdinand claimed ‘he was a Woolffe’ and that while ‘a Woolffes skinne was hairy on the out-side’, his was hairy ‘on the In-side’ (L2v, 5.2.16–18). This diagnosis reveals that Ferdinand’s lycanthropia is a natural illness, since it is referred to as a ‘very pestilent disease’ and a ‘madnesse’ (L2v, 5.2.26), and it is treated as such: although he is ‘very well recouered’, this is ‘not without some feare | Of a relaps’ (L2v, 5.2.21– 22). It has been argued that Ferdinand’s lycanthropy is a supernatural phenomenon, more precisely, an episode of demonic possession.60 Typically, this argument relies on the supernatural overtones of other events in the play and on a heavy-handed interpretation of the doctor’s use of the word ‘possess’d’ (L2, 5.2.8). There is

59

All references to the play are given as signature references from The Tragedy of the Dvtchesse of Malfy (London, 1623; STC 25176), followed by corresponding act, line, and scene numbers from the edition of the play in The Works of John Webster, ed. by David Gunby, David Carnegie, and Antony Hammond (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995–), I. 60

Albert H. Tricomi, ‘Historicizing the Imagery of the Demonic in The Duchess of Malfi’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 34 (2004), 345–72; and ‘The Severed Hand in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi’, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 44 (2004), 347–58. Although Tricomi tries to distance himself from Gunby’s analysis of the play, both critics argue that Ferdinand’s lycanthropy is a case of demonic possession: see David Gunby, ‘The Duchess of Malfi: A Theological Approach’, in John Webster, ed. by Brian Morris (London: Benn, 1970), pp. 179–204. Susan Wiseman, in her provocative discussion of the play, ‘Hairy on the Inside: Metamorphosis and Civility in English Werewolf Texts’, in Renaissance Beasts: Of Animals, Humans, and Other Wonderful Creatures, ed. by Erica Fudge (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), pp. 50–69, argues that while Ferdinand is not possessed, ‘the play’s language toys with this possibility’ (p. 61).

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nothing in the text of the play to suggest that Ferdinand’s lycanthropy is an instance of demonic possession — in fact, the only reference to any character being possessed with the ‘diuell’, or anything else for that matter, is to the Cardinal, who is ‘able to possesse the greatest | Diuell, and make him worse’ (B1v , 1.1.44–46). Notwithstanding, an element of the demonic undoubtedly informs the play — in particular, the scenes featuring a dead man’s hand, the parading of grotesque wax figures of the murdered Antonio and his children, and the ghostly graveyard echo — but this, coupled with the literal interpretation of a term intended to be taken figuratively, is not enough to maintain that Ferdinand’s lycanthropy is ‘an inadequately understood, rare but terrible spiritual disease that possesses his whole being’.61 On the contrary, Ferdinand’s lycanthropy is clearly treated in medical, naturalized terms, as are other instances of disease in the play. Aside from Ferdinand’s lycanthropy, there are many cases of actual and supposed illness in The Duchess of Malfi: Antonio diagnoses Bosola’s ‘Court-Gall’ (B1v , 1.1.23) as resulting from ‘foule mellancholly’, ‘too immoderate sleepe’, and ‘want of action’ (B2, 1.1.71, 72, 75); upon eating the apricots offered to her as a pregnancy test,62 the Duchess remarks that ‘this greene fruit and my stomake are not friends’ (D3v , 2.1.149), and her subsequent swelling and sweating is passed off as a stomach ache or possible poisoning in order to safeguard her secret and hide her having gone into labour; and, before the masque of madmen begins, the servant explains each individual’s madness in terms of emotional and occupational stress: There’s a mad Lawyer, and a secular Priest, A Doctor that hath forfeited his wits By iealousy: an Astrologian, That in his workes, sayd such a day o’th’moneth, Should be the day of doome; and fayling of’t, Ran mad: an English Taylor, crais’d i’th’braine, With the studdy of new fashion: a gentleman vsher Quite beside himself, with care to keepe in minde, The number of his Ladies salutations; Or how do you, she employ’d him in each morning: A Farmer too, (an excellent knaue in graine) Mad, ‘cause he was hindred transportation. (I4, 4.2.45–56)

61 62

Tricomi, ‘Historicizing’, p. 363.

On the use of the dung-ripened apricots as a pregnancy test, see Dale B. J. Randall, ‘The Rank and Earthy Background of Certain Physical Symbols in The Duchess of Malfi’, Renaissance Drama, 18 (1987), 171–203.

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In each of these instances, illness is treated in wholly natural, medical terms. So too is its cure. For example, to counter the effects of the apricots, Delio suggests that the Duchess ‘vse some prepar’d Antidote’ (D3v, 2.1.171); and Ferdinand calls for rhubarb ‘to purge this choller’ (E4, 2.5.12–13), although he later suggests a more radical therapy: Apply desperate physicke, We must not now vse Balsamum, but fire, The smarting cupping-glasse, for that’s the meane To purge infected blood. (E4v, 2.5.23–26)

Noting the plentiful medical references in Webster’s plays, Lawrence Babb concluded that Webster had ‘considerable physiological, pharmaceutical, and psychiatric learning’,63 and his presentation of lycanthropy reflects this accumulated medical knowledge. Although the doctor is unable to cure Ferdinand, Maurice Hunt suggests that his failure is but one of a number of poignant instances of Webster’s condemnation of ‘corrupt physicians and bogus cures’,64 such as the Duchess’s censure that ‘Physitians thus, | With their hands full of money, vse to give ore | Their Patients’ (H2v, 3.5.7–9). In other words, the doctor’s failure does not of itself establish that Ferdinand’s lycanthropy is a supernatural affliction — this is not a case, like that of Lady Macbeth, of needing more ‘the Diuine, then the Physitian’ (Macbeth, TLN 2166, 5.1.64), but rather an indication that Ferdinand should seek a second opinion, and enlist the services of a more competent medical practitioner.65 Having established that Ferdinand’s illness is a natural phenomenon, we must now examine its cause. According to humoral theory, the body is comprised of four humours (blood, phlegm, choler, melancholy) and pathological conditions 63 Lawrence Babb, The Elizabethan Malady: A Study of Melancholia in English Literature from 1580 to 1642 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1951), pp. 70–71. 64

Maurice Hunt, ‘Webster and Jacobean Medicine: The Case of The Duchess of Malfi’, Essays in Literature, 16 (1989), 33–49 (p. 39). 65

The depiction of doctors as mountebanks, frauds, or otherwise incompetent had become a common topos in literature and drama by the time of Webster’s play. For a more detailed discussion, see Andrea Carlino, ‘Petrarch and the Early Modern Critics of Medicine’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 35 (2005), 559–82. On early modern English representations, see Tanya Pollard, ‘“No Faith in Physic”: Masquerades of Medicine Onstage and Off’, in Disease, Diagnosis and Cure on the Early Modern Stage, ed. by Stephanie Moss and Kaara Peterson (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 29–41; and F. David Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare in the English Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992), pp. 54–59.

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are the result of humoral imbalance or abnormality. These imbalances may be due to excess or deficiency of a particular humour, to improper concentration of a humour in parts of the body, or to the putrefaction and transformation of a humour into a kind of unnatural melancholy (usually the result of adustion, or unnatural heat, arising from excessively hot passions). The term melancholy carries multiple meanings, encompassing the cold, dry humour itself, as well as the various diseases brought on by its excess. Melancholic personalities are characteristically cold and distant, tending towards solitude, and plagued by fearfulness and sorrow. When in excess, the pathological condition only differs from the complexion in degree, and is occasioned by exaggerated sadness and fear, hallucinations, seclusion and lethargy, aloofness, and darkness.66 Ferdinand is clearly not of a melancholic character. Rather, he is choleric in disposition: he is passionate, intemperate, and prone to rashness and anger. He is constructed as having ‘a most peruerse, and turbulent Nature’ (B3v , 1.1.157), and his passionate, furious eyes ‘mocke the eager violence of fire’ (H1, 3.3.48). During a particularly telling scene with the Cardinal, Ferdinand becomes ‘so wild a Tempest’ that he needs ‘to purge [his] choller’ (E4, 2.5.17, 13) with rhubarb. The Cardinal, so taken aback by this ‘starke mad’ (F1, 2.5.66) spectacle, compares his brother’s belligerent shouting to ‘violent whirle-windes’, whose ‘intemperate noyce’ is likened to ‘deafe-mens shrill discourse, | Who talke aloud, thinking all other men | To haue their imperfection’ (F1, 2.5.51–54). Whether Ferdinand’s intense fascination with his sister is the manifestation of latent incestuous desires or otherwise,67 the result is the same: he is ‘so

66

On the intersection of medicine and early modern drama, see: Hoeniger, Medicine and Shakespeare; Gail Kern Paster, Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Tanya Pollard, Drugs and Theatre in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and Todd H. J. Pettigrew, Shakespeare and the Practice of Physic: Medical Narratives on the Early Modern English Stage (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007). 67

Representative studies that canvas Ferdinand’s possible sexual interest in his sister include: Elizabeth Brennan, ‘The Relationship between Brother and Sister in the Plays of John Webster’, Modern Language Review, 58 (1963), 488–94; Charles R . Forker, ‘“A Little More than Kin, and Less than Kind”: Incest, Intimacy, Narcissism and Identity in Elizabethan and Stuart Drama’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 4 (1989), 13–51; and Richard A. McCabe, Incest, Drama, and Nature’s Law, 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 251–52. Frank Whigham has argued that Ferdinand’s incestuous actions are political manoeuvres geared towards the maintenance of class structures: ‘Sexual and Social Mobility in The Duchess of Malfi’, Publications of the Modern Languages Association, 100 (1985), 167–86.

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deform’d, so beastly’ by his ‘intemperate anger’ (F1, 2.5.57–58). His intemperate anger, according to the humoral model of the body, is the direct cause of his later lycanthropic affliction: Ferdinand’s sustained and intemperate anger heats the choler in his system to an excessive and unnatural level, which, according to a contemporary account, then ‘becommeth blacke’ and ‘dries up and burnes’.68 This burnt, unnatural substance that has been created is called adust melancholy, and it is the presence, and excess, of this unnatural form of melancholy that manifests itself in Ferdinand’s lycanthropy.69 While it is possible to diagnose the cause of Ferdinand’s illness by turning to the prevailing medical knowledge of Webster’s age, it does not answer what, to me, seems the more important question: out of all of the pathological conditions in the catalogue of Renaissance medical lore, why was lycanthropy Webster’s affliction of choice? Why would Webster choose a malady that was unfamiliar enough to his English audience that he needed to outline its symptoms, in detail, onstage? Ferdinand’s lycanthropy was unquestionably an intentional addition to The Duchess of Malfi, since there is no mention of it in Webster’s source for the plot, an Italian novella available in English translation in William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure.70 It is generally agreed that Simon Goulart’s Admirable and Memorable Histories was a source (if not the source) for Webster’s werewolf, in particular his report of a man In the yeare 1541 who thought himselfe to bee a Wolfe, setting vpon diuers men in the fields, and slew some. In the end being with great difficultie taken, hee did constantlye affirme that hee was a Wolfe, and that there was no other difference, but that Wolues were commonlie hayrie without, and hee was betwixt the skinne and the flesh. Some (too barbarous and cruell Wolues in effect) desiring to trie the truth thereof, gaue him manie wounds vpon the armes and legges: but knowing their owne error, and the innocencie of the poore melancholic man, they committed him to the Surgions to cure, in whose hands hee dyed within fewe days after.71

68

Phillipe de Mornay, The True Knowledge of a Mans Owne Selfe, trans. by Anthony Murray (London, 1602; STC 18163), p. 160. 69

Alternatively, as Burton suggests, lycanthropy may be the result of madness, which differs from melancholy only in its degree of violence; as it stands, there is not enough evidence from the text to distinguish with any degree of certainty whether Webster’s werewolf is the product of the one or the other. In either case the root cause of the affliction is Ferdinand’s intemperate anger and its effect on his constitution. 70

William Painter, The Second Tome of the Palace of Pleasure (London, 1567; STC 19124).

71

Goulart, Admirable and Memorable Histories, sig. 2C2.

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As Gunnar Boklund has noted, the resemblance between the doctor’s description of Ferdinand’s lycanthropy and Goulart’s passage ‘is so striking as to settle the question of Webster’s source immediately’.72 However, identifying Goulart’s passage as a source hardly provides a satisfactory answer to the question of why Webster incorporated lycanthropy into his play, and for this we must look elsewhere. Albert H. Tricomi has argued that the following case, reported in Henri Boguet’s Discours des Sorciers, is a ‘pertinent source’ for the werewolf as well as the ‘dead-mans hand’ (I1v , 4.1.42–52) episode in the play: One evening a gentleman, standing at the window of his château, saw a huntsman whom he knew passing by, and asked him to bring him some of his bag on his return. As the huntsman went his way along a valley, he was attacked by a large wolf and discharged his arquebus at it without hurting it. He was therefore compelled to grapple with the wolf, and caught it by the ears; but at length, growing weary, he let go of the wolf, drew back and took his big hunting knife, and with it cut off one of the wolf’s paws, which he put in his pouch after the wolf had run away. He then returned to the gentleman’s château, in sight of which he had fought the wolf. The gentleman asked him to give him part of his bag; and the huntsman, wishing to do so and intending to take the paw from his pouch, drew from it a hand wearing a gold ring on one of the fingers, which the gentleman recognized as belonging to his wife. This caused him to entertain an evil suspicion of her; and going into the kitchen, he found his wife nursing her arm in her apron, which he took away, and found that her hand had been cut off. Thereupon the gentleman seized hold of her; but immediately, and as soon as she had been confronted with her hand, she confessed that it was no other than she who, in the form of a wolf, had attacked the hunter; and she was afterwards burned at Ryon.73

While The Duchess of Malfi and Boguet’s narrative share the common elements of a werewolf and a severed hand (complete with wedding ring), the suggestion that Boguet is the ultimate source for this episode in the play is not convincing. There is no evidence that Webster read in French, and Boguet’s treatise — popular as it was on the Continent — was only available in the original French. Tricomi is certainly aware of this, since he admits that the ‘defect in designating Boguet as a source is that despite Webster’s strong attraction to Continental sources, he usually resorted to them in translation’,74 but nonetheless maintains his case for Boguet.

72

Gunnar Boklund, The Duchess of Malfi: Sources, Themes, Characters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), p. 32. 73

Boguet, An Examen of Witches, pp. 140–41.

74

Tricomi, ‘The Severed Hand’, p. 351.

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Even if we entertain the possibility that Webster read in French and had access to Boguet’s tale, the narratives are barely analogous to one another: the hand in question in The Duchess of Malfi is not severed from the lycanthropic character Ferdinand — whose hands remain intact throughout the play — but rather it is intended to be mistaken by the Duchess as belonging to her husband, Antonio. Whereas the audience knows that her husband is still alive, the Duchess is momentarily shocked by the possibility that the severed hand does in fact belong to her husband. However, as soon as the lights return she recognizes that the hand is not Antonio’s, but is instead ‘a dead-mans hand’ (I1v, 4.1.54). We never learn the actual origin of the severed hand in Webster’s play, unlike the origin of the severed hand in Boguet’s tale, which is unequivocally certain. Thus, even in the unlikely event that Boguet was the source for this scene, Webster is only faithful to Boguet’s narrative insofar as he retains the three separate elements of a severed hand, a werewolf, and a wedding ring. What is noticeably lacking in Webster’s version is the precise link between the three found in Boguet. In light of these doubts, Boklund’s earlier assertion that Goulart’s Admirable and Memorable Histories is Webster’s ultimate source for the lycanthropy motif remains persuasive, since textual traces are clearly identifiable in Webster’s play, and the material was readily available in English translation. As we have seen, an increased interest in witchcraft and demonology during this period saw a number of texts imported from the Continent and translated for consumption by English readers. One of these is a pamphlet of 1590 detailing ‘the damnable life and death of one Stubbe Peeter [Peter Stumpf]’, described as ‘a most wicked Sorceror’ that ‘in the likeness of a Woolfe, committed many murders’ and continued in ‘this diuelish practise 25 yeeres, killing and deuouring Men, Women, and Children’.75 Although Webster clearly would have enjoyed reading such a provocative, blood-curdling pamphlet, it does not appear to be a source for his play. While both works feature a werewolf and incestuous desires,76 the incest motif in Webster’s play remains debatable, and differs from the Stubbe 75

A True Discourse Declaring the Damnable Life and Death of One Stubbe Peeter, trans. by George Bores (London, 1590; STC 23375), title page. In A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (Antwerp, 1605; STC 21361), Richard Verstegan refers to the trial and grisly execution of ‘One Peeter Stump for beeing a were-wolf, and hauing killed thirteen children, two women, and one man’ (sig. 2G3r ) as part of his discussion of the origin and use of the term werewolf. 76 The implications of the Stubbe Peeter pamphlet in relation to The Duchess of Malfi are discussed by Wiseman, who argues that the play ‘foregrounds the social and psychic dimensions of wolf transformation that are implicit in the Stubbe Peeter narratives’ (‘Hairy on the Inside’, p. 59). See also: Fudge, Perceiving Animals, pp. 51–52.

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Peeter pamphlet in that Ferdinand’s alleged desires are directed towards his sister (as opposed to his sister and daughter) and are nonetheless, to our knowledge, never fulfilled. Whatever his sources may be, Webster’s motivation must surely have rested upon the consequences, dramatic and moral, of constructing a villain afflicted with lycanthropy. While he is a werewolf, is Ferdinand still morally responsible for his actions? In theological terms, the responsibility for sinful acts rests upon the rational consent to commit such acts, and there is surely adequate evidence in the final act of the play to contend that Ferdinand lacks this ability. But if Ferdinand is not a werewolf for the entire play, when does the Duke actually become a werewolf? Certainly his rational ability (and therefore moral culpability) is not lacking in the earlier parts of the play. If we accept that arranging for the masque of madmen in Act Four is a projection of Ferdinand’s own degenerating mental state, then it may be argued that he was ‘distracted of [his] wits’ (K3v, 4.2.266) during the Duchess’s murder, as he attests. Bosola later reflects that Ferdinand is ‘much distracted’ (K3v, 4.2.323) at this time. As further evidence of his impending affliction, Ferdinand frequently mentions wolves, calling the Duchess’s children ‘Cubbs’ (I1v , 4.1.33) whose death as ‘young Wolffes, is neuer to be pittied’ (K3, 4.2.246), foreshadowing his own bestial demise. We can suppose with some certainty that Ferdinand is known to be ‘Sicke (as they giue out) of an Appoplexie’ or, as ‘some say […] a frenzie’ upon his arrival in Milan (L1v , 5.1.57–58). If we concede that moral culpability requires rational consent, and that by his arrival in Milan Ferdinand is known to be ‘Sicke’ and suffering from lycanthropy, it follows that he is not morally responsible for the deaths of Bosola and the Cardinal. On the other hand, Ferdinand’s complicity in the death of his sister’s children and the Duchess herself is less obvious: although his illness is clearly beginning to take hold, Ferdinand still has the presence of mind to act in a calculated fashion, as he does in the chilling episode with the dead man’s hand. Indeed, lycanthropy poses important questions of moral responsibility, but other mental infirmities would have had the same effect. Even if Ferdinand’s affliction is the result of demonic possession or divine punishment, this is accompanied by a moral ambiguity in respect of his subsequent actions. Webster, then, must have chosen lycanthropy on other criteria. Any effort to identify these criteria surely must rest upon one essential question: what is it about being a werewolf that sets its condition apart from all other conditions?

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The Borders of the Human The significance of the werewolf is that it is a liminal creature. By virtue of its precarious position between the human and bestial, the werewolf ‘constantly threatens the ontological status of being human’,77 and as such engages in a range of anxieties about identity. The phenomenon of the lycanthrope blurs the line between man and beast, a distinction that was under increased scrutiny during the early modern period, and raises an unsettling question: are we indeed that far removed from the animal? For Webster’s generation, the possession of a human body itself was no longer sufficient to distance the human from the animal, since Theology taught that human form was no guarantee of humanity when angels or devils might take that shape; when, under certain circumstances — as in the case of children, the mad, the colonized other — creatures that appeared human might also be understood to be closely associated with the animal.78

If, then, the only intrinsic difference between man and beast is our capacity for reason,79 is our humanity forfeit upon our loss of that capacity? It is on this basis alone that animals, unlike man, are not capable of sin.80 The werewolf therefore 77

Nicole Jacques-Lefèvre, ‘Such an Impure, Cruel, and Savage Beast: Images of the Werewolf in Demonological Works’, in Werewolves, Witches, and Wandering Spirits: Traditional Belief and Folklore in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Kathryn A. Edwards (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2002), pp. 181–97 (p. 195). 78

Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert, and Susan J. Wiseman, ‘Introduction: The Dislocation of the Human’, in At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period, ed. by Erica Fudge, Ruth Gilbert, and Susan J. Wiseman (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 1–8 (p. 3). 79 For a brilliant and comprehensive examination of this question, as it was asked and variously answered in the early modern period, see Erica Fudge, Brutal Reasoning: Animals, R ationality, and Humanity in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006). 80

However, this did not excuse animals from criminal prosecution. On the history of this (seemingly) bizarre practice, see E. P. Evans, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals (London: Heinemann, 1906); Esther Cohen, ‘Law, Folklore, and Animal Lore’, Past and Present, 110 (1986), 6–37, and ‘Animals in Medieval Perceptions: The Image of the Ubiquitous Other’, in Animals and Human Society: Changing Perspectives, ed. by Aubrey Manning and James Serpell (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 59–80; Peter Dinzelbacher, ‘Animal Trials: A Multidisciplinary Approach’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 32 (2002), 405–21; Anila Srivastava, ‘“Mean, Dangerous, and Uncontrollable Beasts”: Mediaeval Animal Trials’, Mosaic, 40 (2007), 127–43; and Darren Oldridge, Strange Histories: The Trial of the Pig, the Walking Dead, and Other Matters of Fact from the Medieval and Renaissance Worlds (London: Routledge, 2005), pp. 40–55.

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threatens the identity of being human and straddles the precarious boundary between man and beast, as well as undermining the theological framework of sin and salvation. The werewolf may seem to partake of the human, but, insofar as it is an animal (or non-human), it is excluded from divine judgement and the possibility of salvation that proceeds therefrom. The werewolf is not only dangerous because it is capable of committing such depraved acts, but because it is a hidden threat: unlike the wolf, which is ‘hairy on the out-side’ and clearly identifiable, the werewolf is hairy ‘on the In-side’ (L2v, 5.2.17–18). Identifying evil within early modern society was particularly problematic for this reason, and was not limited to the case of the werewolf alone. In 1612, while Webster was writing The Duchess of Malfi, ten of the nineteen persons accused of being witches were sentenced to death at the assizes in Lancashire.81 Witches, werewolves, and secret Jews all threatened a Christian society concerned with identifying and purging a perceived evil that was no different in appearance from itself. Cannibalism was one method of establishing otherness in early modern representations of all three groups.82 According to Charles Zika, this anxiety about the hidden other, the ever-present cannibalistic enemies within the society it threatened, stemmed from a ‘growing fear for the disintegration and loss of Christian community and identity’, of which the figure of the werewolf is but one articulation.83

81

As reported by the assizes clerk, Thomas Potts, in The Wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the County of Lancaster (London, 1613; STC 20138). 82 For a discussion on the uses of cannibalism in late medieval and early modern literature and culture, see Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Frank Lestringant, Cannibals: The Discovery and Representation of the Cannibal from Columbus to Jules Verne, trans. by Rosemary Morris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Cannibalism and the Colonial World, ed. by Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Ted Motohashi, ‘The Discourse of Cannibalism in Early Modern Travel Writing’, in Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit, ed. by Steve Clark (London: Zed Books, 1999), pp. 83–99; and Merrall L. Price, Consuming Passions: The Uses of Cannibalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 2003). 83

Charles Zika, ‘Cannibalism and Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Reading the Visual Images’, History Workshop Journal, 44 (1997), 77–105 (p. 101).

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The Borders of the Wo/Man Among other things, Webster’s werewolf also engages in contemporary anxieties about sexual identity, as Ferdinand’s lycanthropy not only threatens his human identity, but his masculine identity as well. In The Duchess of Malfi, female sexuality is represented as being essentially aggressive, and as presenting a challenge to the normative construction of gender roles: the Duchess initiates the controversial relationship with Antonio; and Julia is at once Castruchio’s wife, mistress to the Cardinal, and the initiator (at pistol-point, no less) of the short-lived affair between Bosola and herself. Male sexuality, on the other hand, is for the most part represented as passive, or otherwise asserted defensively. For example, although the Duchess laments that she is ‘forc’d to woe, because none dare woe vs’ (C4, 1.1.428) Antonio recognizes her usurpation of his role when he admits that ‘these words should be mine’ (C4v, 1.1.457). Similarly, Julia usurps Bosola’s role in initiating their short-lived relationship, and is apparently frustrated by his failure to perform his manly roles, ordering him to ‘put your selfe to the charge of courting me, | Whereas now I woe you’ (L4v, 5.2.174–75). Further, Bosola feels he has to distance himself from the feminine act of crying, resolved that his tears are ‘manly sorrow’ and ‘neuer grew | In [his] Mothers Milke’ (K4v , 4.2.349–50). The Cardinal appears to be the only assertive masculine figure, although he too seems under Julia’s control, with her ‘tongue about his heart’ (M1, 5.2.214). Ferdinand, at the other end of the spectrum of masculine sexual behaviour, is incapacitated sexually by his melancholy and seems able only to engage his ‘poyniard’ (C2, 1.1.317) vicariously through his sister. As Lynn Enterline has insightfully argued, it is in this way that melancholy is figured as ‘a disruption in the symbolic order’, a social contagion. Whereas lycanthropy disrupts the corporeal order, melancholy disturbs the ‘functional order of the body’ and its representation, and it ‘profoundly unsettles’ the ‘recognizable difference between male and female subjects’.84 While the boundary between masculine and feminine is already distorted by the aggressiveness of female sexuality in the play, Webster’s representation of masculine sexuality, whittled away by melancholy, blurs these distinctions further. Melancholy is not the only vehicle through which the traditional boundaries between male and female are examined by the play. The opposition between Ferdinand and the Duchess further highlights the contested site of masculinity: 84

Lynn Enterline, ‘“Hairy on the In-Side”: The Duchess of Malfi and the Body of Lycanthropy’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 7 (1994), 85–129 (p. 91).

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she is the ‘Excellent Hyenna’ (E4v , 2.5.39) set against his lycanthropic wolf. Edward Topsell reports that, since Pliny, the hyena was thought to be a hermaphrodite, where both male and female ‘have under their tailes a double note or passage’. That is, in the male ‘there is a scissure like the secrets of a femal’ and ‘in the femal a bunch like the stones of the male’.85 This ambiguity is reinforced visually with the inclusion of a woodcut (see Fig. 3), derived from the original in the second volume of Konrad Gesner’s earlier Historiae animalium (Zürich, 1554), of the rear-end of the hyena. Aside from matching the Duchess, the ‘Excellent Hyenna’, with Antonio, himself described as ‘an hermophrodite’ (G2v, 3.2.219), in constructing oppositions of wolf and hyena, male and hermaphrodite, Webster frames an anxious masculine identity whose ontological status is severely undermined, since it can only be defined in terms of opposition from its other.86 In other words, how different can the male be when the female is described as possessing ‘a bunch like the stones of the male’? It seems that Ferdinand’s lycanthropy figures not only the precarious boundary between man and beast, but between man and woman.

The Babylonical Circe The werewolf is, among other things, a site of contention between civility and wildness, and, as Karen Edwards has argued, ‘lycanthropy (like any other cultural form) may be seen as having a political dimension’. Lycanthropy was used as a literary motif expressing un-Englishness: Milton and Marvell, in charging their ‘Protestant opponents with lycanthropy’ imply that ‘Salmasius and [Samuel] Parker are types of the deeply perverse, darkly superstitious, un-English intellect’, who are ‘guilty of intellectual, if not theological, Catholicism’.87 Webster’s characterization of Ferdinand clearly has similar motivations — by presenting an Italian character as a werewolf, Webster endorses the popular association between Italians and depravity. For Webster’s audience, Italy was perceived as a site of political intrigue, economic power, decadence, and moral decay, as Lara Bovilsky eloquently summarizes: 85

Topsell, The Historie of Foure-Footed Beastes, p. 435.

86

Enterline discusses these oppositions and their implications in detail at pp. 111–13.

87

Karen Edwards, ‘Lycanthropy, or the Un-English Disease’, paper presented at the Seventh International Milton Symposium, University of South Carolina, Beaufort, 2002. See also Edwards’s ‘Milton’s Reformed Animals: An Early Modern Bestiary: T–Z’, Milton Quarterly, 43 (2009), 241–300 (pp. 277–87).

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Italy represented a nation among whose famous identity effects were Popery, atheism, sodomy, murder and poison, deceit, ‘practice’, erotic obsession and sexual promiscuity, and a preternatural propensity for revenge, any and all of which were available for the playwright’s use in plot devices that both shocked and titillated.88

Figure 3. Edward Topsell, ‘Hyena’, The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents (London, 1658). Image courtesy of Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries.

Even the mythical city-state of Venice was tainted by its Italianate excesses: for example, in The Merchant of Venice Shakespeare depicts Venice as a mercantile state whose economic openness, the very reason for its financial success, literally threatens the lives of its (Christian) citizens.89 Jonson’s vision of Italy in Volpone is one of such moral decay that men of wealth and power use their position only

88

Lara Bovilsky, ‘Black Beauties, White Devils: The English Italian in Milton and Webster’, Egnlish Literary History, 70 (2003), 625–51 (p. 627). 89

For an important and detailed study of the varied English perceptions of Venice, see David C. McPherson, Shakespeare, Jonson, and the Myth of Venice (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1990).

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for decadence and deceit, whilst others disinherit their sons and sacrifice their wives in the pursuit of monetary gain. Amidst these contemporaneous examples, Webster’s corrupt and unbridled Machiavellian, a duke whose depravity is literally inhuman, is hardly out of place or without precedent. In The Scholemaster, Roger Ascham expressed the fear of the corrupting influence of Italian depravity in terms of physical transformation, warning young travellers ‘Some Circes shall make him, of a plaine English man, a right Italian’.90 Ascham refers to Circe eleven times in order to drive his point home, namely that even those ‘partyng out of England feruent in the loue of Christes doctrine, and well furnished with the feare of God’, nevertheless ‘returned out of Italie worse transformed, than euer was any in Circes Court’, with ‘some into Swine, som[e] into Asses, some into Foxes, and some into Wolues’.91 Although he stresses the transformative power of Italy on impressionable young Englishmen, Ascham recognizes that some travellers were Italians ab initio, ‘beyng Mules and Horses before they went, returned verie Swyne and Asses home agayne’, or ‘verie Foxes with subtlie and busie heades’ and ‘verie wolues, with cruell malicious hartes’,92 bestial before they arrived on the island of Circe. Had Ascham survived to attend a performance of The Duchess of Malfi, he would not have been surprised to witness Ferdinand’s bestial transformation at one of the Circean courts of Italy. As Gareth Roberts has noted, the figure of Circe was conflated ‘by some Protestant exegetes’ with that of the Whore of Babylon, and so ‘became a figure for the Church of Rome’.93 For example, William Fulke’s sermon at Hampton Court in November 1570, in which he protested against ‘the Babylonical Circe the church of Rome’ and ‘proued Babylon to be Rome, both by Scriptures and doctors’, was evidently so popular that it required reprinting in 1571, 1572, 1574,

90

Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster (London, 1570; STC 832), sig. H4.

91

Ascham, The Scholemaster, sigs H4 v, I1.

92

Ascham, The Scholemaster, sig. I2.

93

Gareth Roberts, ‘Three Notes on Uses of Circe by Spenser, Marlowe, and Milton’, Notes & Queries, n.s., 25 (1978), 433–35 (p. 433). See also Roberts’s entry on Circe in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. by A. C. Hamilton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), pp. 165–67, and his chapter, ‘The Descendants of Circe: Witches and Renaissance Fictions’, in Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe: Studies in Culture and Belief, ed. by Jonathan Barry, Marianne Hester, and Gareth Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 183–206. On the cultural and literary reception of Circe, see Judith Yarnall, Transformations of Circe: The History of an Enchantress (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); and Marina Warner, No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), pp. 262–300.

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and 1579.94 Fulke’s apt anti-Catholic phrasing was apparently popular with clergymen as well as lay readers, since we find the same pronouncement against ‘the Babylonical Circe the Church of Rome’ in a sermon preached by William Perkins at Cambridge in 1595.95 Dramatists, too, found the association seductive, exemplified by Thomas Dekker, whose The Whore of Babylon allegorically casts Queen Elizabeth as the Fairy Queen Titania against the failed plots of Romish Babylon.96 As a final example, in The Historie of the Defendors of the Catholique Faith, Christopher Lever sets out to compare ‘Queene Mary of England’ and the ‘Queene-Mother of France, Katherine de Medices’, mitigating a harsher assessment on the grounds of ‘the frailty of their Sexe, which hauing but weake iudgement, is the lesse able to make resistance against strong temptations’, a weakness that resulted in their ill hap, to sucke the milke of so venimous a breast as the Church of Rome; which is indeed the Circe of the world, transforming men by her enchanted potions into beasts, and metamorphosing euen the innocent disposition of gentle Ladies, and Princesses into a Leonine and Tigerlike sauagenesse.97

Fed ‘with the like milke’ from ‘the teats of a shee-Woolfe’ that ‘first fostered Romulus’, these ‘gentle Ladies, and Princesses’ were, ‘by guise of piety’, unwittingly drawn in to ‘the bloud sucking tyranny of that Romish strumpet’.98 As the use of the figure of Circe suggests, English xenophobic fears and fantasies of Italians and Italy were often conflated and compounded with anti-Catholic sentiment.99 Following the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, English Protestants were even more suspicious of Catholics than they had been under Elizabeth: Catholics abroad and at home — recusants and the fugitive Jesuit priests that ministered to them in secret — were perceived as a threat to both Faith and State.

94

William Fulke, A Sermon Preached at Hampton Court (London, 1570; STC 11449.5), sig. G4, and titlepage. 95

William Perkins, Lectvres Vpon the Three First Chapters of the Reuelation (London, 1604; STC 19731), 3B1 v . 96

Thomas Dekker, The Whore of Babylon (London, 1607; STC 6532).

97

Christopher Lever, The Historie of the Defendors of the Catholique Faith (London, 1627; STC 15537), pp. 246–47. 98 99

Lever, Defendors of the Catholique Faith, p. 247.

On this conflation in travel literature, see also Steven J. Masello, ‘Thomas Hoby: A Protestant Traveler to Circe’s Court’, Cahiers Élisabéthains, 27 (1985), 67–81.

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The Romish Wolf In this atmosphere of suspicion and fear, Webster’s inclusion of a lecherous, murdering Cardinal in The Duchess of Malfi is hardly unexpected, since it belongs to a tradition of anti-Catholic rhetoric and ad hominem attacks that already spanned a century since the Reformation. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus warned his followers to ‘Beware of false prophets which come to you in sheepes clothing, but inwardly they are rauening wolues’ (Matthew 7. 15), and medieval anti-clerical satires frequently depicted the clergy as dissembling foxes and ravenous wolves.100 This trope continued after the Reformation, and Protestant polemics used ‘the fox to indicate a member of the Church of England who harboured secret Romish beliefs’ and the wolf to represent ‘a committed and outwardly professed member of the Catholic Church’.101 For example, consider the series of Protestant pamphlets by William Turner and his collaborators: The Huntynge & Fyndyng Out of the Romishe Fox (1543) bemoans the failure of the Henrician Reformation to completely rid the English church of popery, laying no small portion of the blame at the feet of the Bishop of Winchester, Stephen Gardiner, ‘master steward of the stews’;102 and The Rescuynge of the Romishe Fox (1545), opening with ‘the bannished fox of rome’ lamenting that while ‘My son steuen gardiner with wepyng teares | Hath cut away the toppes of myn eares’, that ‘the rest of my body abydeth hole still’ and that even ‘myn eares shal grow agayn | When all the gospellers ar ones slayn’.103 In The Huntyng of the Romyshe Wolfe (1555), the ‘Romyshe Foxe latelye returned into Englande’ with the death of Edward VI and accession of Mary, announcing that his ears ‘are growen and healed agayne’.104 The Huntyng of the Romyshe Wolfe also included a folded engraved print entitled The Lamb Speaketh (Fig. 4) that simultaneously circulated as a 100

Representative studies include: Sacvan Bercovitch, ‘Clerical Satire in The Fox and the Wolf’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 65 (1966), 287–94; Debra Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries: Text, Image, Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 62–71; and Dorothy Yamamoto, The Boundaries of the Human in Medieval English Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 56–74. 101

Michael G. Brennan, ‘Foxes and Wolves in Elizabethan Episcopal Propaganda’, Cahiers Élisabéthains, 29 (1986), 83–86 (p. 84). See also John N. King, English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), p. 446; and Patrick Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambledon, 1994), p. 214. 102

The Huntynge & Fyndyng Out of the Romishe Fox (Bonn, 1543; STC 24353), sig. f1.

103

The Rescuynge of the Romishe Fox (Bonn, 1545; STC 24355), sig. A1 v.

104

The Huntyng of the Romyshe Wolfe (Emden, 1555; STC 24356), sig. A3 v.

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broadsheet in Latin, German, and English versions, depicting Stephen Gardiner as a bishop with a wolf’s head biting the neck of the Christ-lamb while other Catholic bishops and clerics — all wolf-headed — catch the lamb’s blood in their chalices.105 Applauding the carnage from above is a winged devil with a head curiously shaped like a papal crown, and below the altar bound at Gardiner’s feet are six more lambs awaiting slaughter, identified as the Protestant reformers John Bradford, Thomas Cranmer, John Hooper, Nicholas Ridley, and John Rogers.

Figure 4. The Lambe Speaketh, London, British Museum. Engraved print dated 1555. Reproduced with permission of the Trustees of the British Museum.

Poetry of the period also relied on the tradition of the fox and the wolf as anticlerical figures, such as in Edmund Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, where the main theme of the Maye, Julye, and September eclogues is ‘the inadequacy of the

105

On the history of the print and its various editions, see: R . J. Smith, ‘The Lambe Speaketh … An English Protestant Satire’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 61 (1998), 261–67; and Malcolm Jones, ‘The Lambe Speaketh … An Addendum’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 63 (2000), 287–94.

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ministry’, the ‘worldliness of some pastors, the self-aggrandizement of certain bishops’, and ‘the threat from Catholics (wolves) and the presence of covert Catholics (foxes)’.106 For instance, in the September eclogue, Hobbinoll tells Diggon: Well is knowne that sith the Saxon king, Neuer was Woolfe seene many nor some, Nor in all Kent, nor in Christendome: But the fewer Woolues (the soth to sayne,) The more bene the Foxes that here remaine.107

To which Diggon replies, ‘Yes, but they gang in more secrete wise, | And with sheepes clothing doen hem disguise’.108 John Milton also engaged with the tradition, not least as a result of his reading of Spenser.109 Thus, the ‘grim Woolf with privy paw’ in Milton’s Lycidas110 is glossed by Roy Flannagan in The Riverside Milton as a reference to ‘the agents of the Roman Catholic Church, seeking converts’, noting that ‘the Jesuits, whose coat of arms included two wolves, were especially liable to be accused of such secret proselytizing’.111 Since the coat of arms of its founder Ignatius Loyola includes two grey wolves about an argent cauldron and sable chain (Fig. 5),112 the wolf became emblematic of the Jesuits, whose popish plots and conspiracies (both real and imagined) constantly threatened the English state and faith.

106

Alan Sinfield, ‘Puritanism’, in The Spenser Encyclopedia, ed. by A. C. Hamilton (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), pp. 573–74 (p. 573). On Spenser’s use of the Tudor polemical distinction between the fox and the wolf, see Harold Stein, ‘Spenser and William Turner’, Modern Language Notes, 56 (1936), 345–51; and Anthea Hume, Edmund Spenser: Protestant Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 13–41. 107

Edmund Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender (London, 1579; STC 23089), sig. K1v (September, ll. 151–55). 108

Spenser, The Shepheardes Calender, sig. K1 v, ll. 156–57.

109

John N. King, ‘Milton Reads Spenser’s May Eclogue’, in Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in Paradise Lost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 23–68 (p. 33). 110

John Milton, Poems of Mr John Milton (London, 1645; Wing M2160), p. 62.

111

The Riverside Milton, ed. by Roy Flannagan (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), p. 105, n. 54.

112 The traditional explanation for the Jesuit coat of arms comes from the etymology of the name Loyola as a contraction of lobo y olla (wolf and pot), supposedly referring to the reputation of the House of Loyola being so generous to its armed retainers that even the wolves could feast on the leftovers.

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English drama also relied on these fox/wolf allusions, as Alizon Brunning has recently argued in the case of Jonson’s Volpone.113 Compounding these antiCatholic associations in The Duchess of Malfi is Ferdinand’s inverted wolfskin, hairy ‘on the In-side’ (L2 v , 5.2.18), which, as a number of scholars have noted, calls Figure 5. ‘Loyola Coat of Arms on the to mind the hair shirt worn by penitents W all of the Santuario de Loyola, and ascetics,114 a practice frequently mocked Azpeita, Spain’. by English Protestants in polemics, poetry, Photograph by Professor Elizabeth and performance.115 Is it not then plausible Liebert, San Francisco Theological Seminary. Used with kind permission. that Ferdinand, as a werewolf and corrupted member of Circe’s Italian court, is simply another manifestation of this traditional fear of Catholic deception and pollution of the state? For a Jacobean audience, the werewolf and the Catholic were similar beasts. Both were essentially wolves dressed as men; otherwise indistinguishable from the rest of society, but still a threat to church and state, and both as depraved, bloody, and ruthless as each other.

113

Alizon Brunning, ‘Jonson’s Romish Foxe: Anti-Catholic Discourse in Volpone’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 6 (2000), 4.1–32. See also Don Beecher, ‘The Progress of Trickster in Ben Jonson’s Volpone’, Cahiers Élisabéthains, 27 (1985), 43–51. 114

Susan C. Baker, ‘The Static Protagonist in The Duchess of Malfi’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 22 (1980), 343–57 (p. 350); Whigham, ‘Sexual and Social Mobility’, p. 171; and Michael Neill, Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 345. 115

A few representative examples will suffice. Debating the sacrament of penance, William Fulke reminds readers of A Reioynder to Bristows Replie (London, 1581; STC 11448) that ‘God requireth not the burthen of shirts of haire, nor to be shutte vp in the streightes of a little cell’ (sig. Q8). In the ‘Ashwednesday’ verse of his Seauen Satyres (London, 1598; STC 20700), William Rankins confesses that ‘though I weare no shirt of Cammels haire, | A boasting shew the flesh to macerate’, his heart is nonetheless ‘prickt with true faiths desire’ (sig. C6 v). In The Famous Tragedy of the Rich Iew of Malta (London, 1633; STC 17412), Christopher Marlowe has Barabas mockingly dismiss Christian penance, ‘to fast, to pray, and weare a shirt of haire, | And on my knees creepe to Ierusalem’ (sig. G3).

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Irish Wolves When considering the question ‘How the English Colonies’ in Ireland ‘became degenerate’, John Davies drew on the same motif of Circean transformation that Roger Ascham had previously used in relation to Italy: English colonists made the perilous mistake of embracing Irish customs after they had reiected the Ciuill and Honorable Lawes and Customes of England, whereby they became degenerate and metamorphosed like Nabuchadnezzar: who although he had the face of a man, had the heart of a Beast; or like those who had drunke of Circes Cuppe, and were turned into very Beasts.116

Other commentators made the same association between the degeneration of English colonists in Ireland, old and new, and the myth of Circe. For instance, Richard Stanyhurst’s description and history of Ireland, absorbed into Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles, related how even ‘the verie English of birth, conuersant with the sauage sort of that people’ had ‘become degenerat’ and ‘quite altered’, as ‘though they had tasted of Circes poisoned cup’.117 As with the myth of Circe, the figure of the wolf in early modern England was emblematic not only of Italians and Catholics, but of the Irish as well. According to medieval authorities, the Irish shared a special bond with wolves: in his Topography of Ireland, Gerald of Wales includes the tale of a ‘wolf that talked with a priest’ in that country, describing how his fellow ‘natives of Ossory’ are ‘compelled every seven years to put off the human form’ and to ‘assume that of wolves’.118 Gerald’s relation of a ‘creature […] in the shape of a beast utter[ing] human words’,119 for Caroline Walker Bynum, reflects his anxiety about ‘human-

116

John Davies, A Discouerie of the True Causes why Ireland was Neuer Entirely Subdued (London, 1612; STC 6348), sig. 2A2 v . 117 Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles (London, 1586–87; STC 13569), II, sig. D5. Representative studies of early modern English perceptions of the Irish and the concomitant fear of physical, cultural, and linguistic degeneration include: Michael Neill, ‘Broken English and Broken Irish: Nation, Language, and the Optic of Power in Shakespeare’s Histories’, Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 (1994), 1–32; Christopher Highley, Shakespeare, Spenser, and the Crisis in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Andrew Murphy, But the Irish Sea Betwixt Us: Ireland, Colonialism, and Renaissance Literature (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999); and Patricia Palmer, Language and Conquest in Early Modern Ireland: English Renaissance Literature and Elizabethan Imperial Expansion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 118

References are taken from The Historical Works of Giraldus Cambrensis, ed. and trans. by Thomas Forester and Thomas Wright, rev. edn (London: Bell, 1905), 2.19, p. 80. 119

Giraldus Cambrensis, ed. and trans. by Forester and Wright, 2.19, p. 80.

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animal hybrids that result from human-animal sex, a practice he thinks “barbarous” and particularly Irish’.120 Although sceptical of such ‘meere fable[s]’, William Camden nevertheless reports in his Britannia that the Irish ‘are yeerely turned into Wolves’, supposing that the inhabitants, ‘through that malicious humour of predominant unkind Melancholie’ are ‘possessed with the malady’ of ‘lycanthropia’, which ‘raiseth and engendreth such like phantasies, as that they imagine themselves to be transformed into Wolves’.121 Edmund Spenser confirms these representations of the Irish in A View of the State of Ireland, concluding, ‘the Irish are descended from the Scythians’, since both are wild and bloody pagans who are reportedly ‘once a yeare turned into Wolves’.122 References to the association between the Irish and wolves are also found in literary and dramatic texts of the period. In The Newe Metamorphosis (c. 1615), an unpublished epic satire based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Gervase Markham relates how Jove descended to ‘Bernia Lande’ (Ireland), and, upon finding ‘the kerns practicing all kinds of unnatural vice’, transforms ‘the inhabitants into wolves which can take man’s shape’.123 Andrew Hadfield has also suggested that Rosalind’s description of the interplay between the would-be lovers in Shakespeare’s As You Like It as ‘like the howling of Irish Wolues against the Moone’ (TLN 2516–17, 5.3.92–93) is ‘possibly a reference to Hugh O’Neill’s rebellion’ against Queen Elizabeth, ‘since Elizabeth was invariably associated with the moon’.124 There are even surviving official communications from Elizabeth’s reign instructing deputies in Ireland ‘to refuse none that proffer submission, nor to credit any [of] their promises, but to think of them as wolves or foxes’.125

120

Bynum, ‘Metamorphosis’, p. 1000.

121

William Camden, Britannia, trans. by Philemon Holland (London, 1610; STC 4509), sig. 4G6. 122 Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland (1596), in Two Histories of Ireland, ed. by James Ware (Dublin, 1633; STC 25067), sig. D3. 123

Gervase Markham, The Newe Metamorphosis, London, British Library, MSS Additional 14824–26. The manuscript is described in J. H. Lyon, A Study of the Newe Metamorphosis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1919), and I have quoted his description of the episode (xvi), which is found in MS Additional 14824, fols 19 r–21 v. 124

Andrew Hadfield, ‘“Hitherto She Ne’re Could Fancy Him”: Shakespeare’s “British” Plays and the Exclusion of Ireland’, in Shakespeare and Ireland: History, Politics, Culture, ed. by Mark Thornton Burnett and Ramona Wray (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 47–67 (p. 48). 125

Reported in K. J. Kesselring, Mercy and Authority in the Tudor State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 195.

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The association between wolves and the Irish are also reinforced in visual representations: as Richard McCabe has noted, the title-page woodcut (Fig. 6) of John Bale’s The Vocacyon of Ioha[n] Bale to the Bishoprick of Ossorie in Irela[n]de126 displays ‘two contrasting figures, “The English Christian” and “The Irish Papist”’, the former ‘meek and civil, like the sheep that shelters by his legs’, and ‘the other violent and savage, like the wolf that accompanies him’.127

Figure 6. Title page woodcut depicting ‘The English Christia[n]’ and ‘The Irishe Papist’. From John Bale, The Vocacyon of Ioha[n] Bale to the Bishoprick of Ossorie in Irela[n]de (W esel: J. Lambrecht for H. Singleton, 1553). By permission of The Huntington Library, San Marino, California.

As Joan Fitzpatrick has insightfully observed, ‘like the wolf with whom they are associated, the Irish have not yet been controlled but rather lurk on the periphery of civilized society ever ready to attack’.128 Thus the emblem of the wolf cemented

126 John Bale, The Vocacyon of Ioha[n] Bale to the Bishoprick of Ossorie in Irela[n]de (Wesel, 1553; STC 1307). 127

Richard A. McCabe, Spenser’s Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 106. 128

Joan Fitzpatrick, Shakespeare, Spenser and the Contours of Britain: Reshaping the Atlantic Archipelago (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2004), p. 32.

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iconographically the danger of the bloody Papist, whether this threat was from over the waters on the Continent, beyond the Pale in Ireland, or hidden away in secret on English soil. Webster was certainly aware of this popular conception of the Irish when he penned his earlier play, The White Devil, which is replete with derogatory references to the ‘wild Irish’ and the ‘howling’ at ‘Irish funeralls’ (G4). Although The Duchess of Malfi lacks direct references to Ireland and the Irish, it is not implausible to suppose that Webster and his original audiences may have noted the similarities between the Italian lycanthrope and the howling, wild Irish closer to home.

Degenerating Dukes and Diminishing Returns In the same way that Jacobean audiences perceived Italians or the Irish (or any Catholic foreigners for that matter) as a threat to notions of Englishness, the spectacle of the werewolf presents a challenge to notions of acceptable, civilized behaviour. Ferdinand’s lycanthropy is symptomatic of the political turmoil, ‘the corruption of the times’ (B1, 1.1.18), that occupies the court: in the words of Susan Wiseman, it is both ‘specifically a mania generated by the court’ and an ‘index of its moral crisis’.129 Consider Ferdinand’s behaviour at the beginning of the play: [Ferd.] Rod. Ferd.

How doe you like my Spanish Gennit? He is all fire. I am of Pliney’s opinion, I thinke he was begot by the wind. He runs, as if he were ballass’d with Quick-siluer. Sil. True (my Lord) he reeles from the Tilt often. Rod. Gris. Ha, ha, ha. Ferd. Why do you laugh? Me thinks you that are Courtiers Should be my touch-wood, take fire, when I giue fire; That is, laugh when I laugh, were the subiect neuer so wity. (B2 v –B3, 1.1.111–19)

Upon entering the stage, Ferdinand is established as ‘the great Calabrian Duke’ (B2v , 1.1.82), and the description is fitting. Ferdinand immediately dominates the scene and its participants: he cuts Castruchio off mid-sentence, makes bawdy jokes and doubles entendres — for example, ‘drawne their weapons, | And were ready to goe to it’ (B2v , 1.1.107–08) — and, as we have seen, asserts control over the actions of his courtiers, even their laughter.

129

Wiseman, ‘Hairy on the Inside’, p. 61.

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Although Ferdinand begins as a towering figure in the opening scenes, by the final act he is reduced to a cowering, confused madman attacking his own shadow: Ferd. Mal. Ferd.

Mal. Ferd. Mal. Ferd. Mal. Ferd. Mal. Ferd.

Leaue me. Why doth your Lordship loue this solitarines? Eagles co[m]monly fly alone: They are Crowes, Dawes, and Sterlings that flocke together: Looke, what’s that, Followes me? Nothing (my Lord) Yes: ’Tis your shadow. Stay it, let it not haunt me. Impossible; if you moue, and the Sun shine: I will throtle it. [Throws himself on the ground.] Oh, my Lord: you are angry with nothing. You are a foole: How is’t possible I should catch my shadow Vnlesse I fall vpon’t? (L2v, 5.2.28–40)

We have witnessed the transformation of an assertive, socially dominating stage presence to a solitary, paranoid, cowering figure of abjection. What has happened between the opening scenes of the play and the final act to bring about such a radical change in character? Ferdinand’s steady decline into madness parallels the rising intrigue and erosion of justice at court, as both stray further away from their civilized, ideal forms. Thus, Ferdinand’s lycanthropy represents not only the degeneracy of the individual from the human, but also the degeneracy of society from the civil. What is the essential cause of this degeneration? Perhaps it is, as Alfred North Whitehead has suggested, that evil ‘promotes its own elimination by destruction, or delegation’ since it is by its very nature unstable.130 Whitehead’s analysis seems pertinent to The Duchess of Malfi, since both Ferdinand and the society in which he resides are clearly diminished by their involvement with evil: whether in the guise of intemperate anger, incestuous desires, cruelty, or corruption and injustice, each is degenerated from the human to the bestial, and from the civil to the chaotic.

Conclusion As Nicole Jacques-Lefèvre has observed, the werewolf ‘inherits all of the attitudes underlying the real wolf’ as well as ‘the tradition which metaphorically situates the 130

Alfred North Whitehead, Religion in the Making (New York: Macmillan, 1926), p. 95.

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relations between man and animal in terms of individual or social morality’,131 and, as such, is a rich and complex figure. The wolf had been employed as an emblem of Catholic deception and savagery by poets and pamphleteers alike, as well as symbolically encapsulating the perceived wild and uncivil nature of the rebellious Irish and the depravity of the Italians and their Circean courts. Similarly, medieval chronicles noted the propensity of the Irish to turn into wolves, and contemporary pamphlets and trial transcripts told of the havoc wreaked by lycanthropes on the Continent. Whilst earlier and contemporary authorities on the Continent turned to witchcraft and the supernatural to explain these accounts of butchery, the English (for the most part) cultivated a growing scepticism that looked to medicine and natural causes to understand such episodes. Webster was no doubt aware of all this when he incorporated Ferdinand’s lycanthropy into The Duchess of Malfi. Webster was familiar with and critical of Jacobean medical knowledge and practice, and his scepticism is reflected in his treatment of illness and those that fail to minister to it in his plays. Webster was certainly also aware of the cultural stereotypes and suspicions surrounding Italians and the Irish, and he was not above deploying these in his drama: The Duchess of Malfi can boast some of the most striking examples of Italianate depravity and Catholic savagery on the Jacobean stage. Against this cultural and intellectual background, it is hard to accept the suggestion that Ferdinand’s lycanthropy is simply a case of demonic possession. This is simply inconsistent with Webster’s construction of the play primarily as a medical universe with eschatological overtones. The evidence is there in Webster’s treatment of illness throughout the play as a natural phenomenon. There is no reason to extrapolate from the doctor’s use of the term ‘possess’d’ (L2, 5.2.8) an entire world of demonic possession and diabolic intervention. This is not to say that Webster’s world is one completely free of supernatural intervention, since the graveyard echo clearly has ghostly connotations; but Ferdinand’s lycanthropy is not one of them. The horror in The Duchess of Malfi comes, for the most part, from the knowledge that real people are capable of committing depraved acts, that intemperate anger and Machiavellian ambition can push a man past the limits of civility, and perhaps even past the border of the human.132

131 132

Jacques-Lefèvre, ‘Such an Impure, Cruel, and Savage Beast’, p. 195.

Although the current essay is much revised, an earlier version was published as ‘An Italian Werewolf in London: Lycanthropy and The Duchess of Malfi’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 11 (2005), 1–34. I wish to thank Matthew Steggle for permission to republish those earlier portions here. I also wish to thank Chris Wortham, Gabriel Egan, and Yasmin Haskell for their useful comments and suggestions in revising this essay.

V AMPIRES AS C REATURES OF THE IMAGINATION : T HEORIES OF B ODY , S OUL, AND IMAGINATION IN E ARLY M ODERN V AMPIRE T RACTS (1659–1755) Koen Vermeir

Introduction

I

n the summer of 2006, Matteo Borrini, a forensic anthropologist from the University of Florence, found the remains of a female ‘vampire’. The skeleton was found in a mass grave from the plague of 1576, on Lazzaretto Nuovo, a sanatorium for plague sufferers north-east of Venice. The woman could be identified as a vampire because she had been buried with a brick jammed between her teeth, to prevent her from preying on the survivors.1 ‘Vampires’ from the late sixteenth century did not suck blood, but they were hungry. It was believed that some corpses masticated in their graves, that they ate their shroud, and sometimes even their own limbs. The effects of this mastication were not confined to the tomb, however. These ‘masticating bodies’ were believed to be the origin of

1

The main facts of the discovery were presented by Matteo Borrini at the reunion of the Italian Anthropological and Ethnological Society, 22 May 2008 as ‘La scoperta di una sepoltura di “vampiro”: archeologia e antropologia forense analizzano la genesi di una leggenda’. A summary of this presentation is published as part of ‘Rendiconti della Società Italiana di Antropologia ed Etnologia’, Archivio per l’Antropologia e l’Etnologia, 138 (2008), 215–17.

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pestilent diseases that struck villages and cities. To stop this mastication, villagers put earth and sometimes stones in the mouth of the dead body.2

Figure 7. Photograph of the recently found remains of a female ‘vampire’ from 1576, with a brick forced into her mouth. Copyright: Matteo Borrini, .

In the first section of this article, I will show that stories about masticating corpses were related to the first vampire stories, which appeared in the middle of the seventeenth century. Contemporaries understood the effects of both masticating corpses and vampires in terms of the imagination. The core of the article will be about the diverse ways in which the powers of the imagination were evoked as an explanatory category for understanding the phenomenon of vampirism. In the seventeenth century, physicians and theologians did not dismiss vampirism as merely illusionary. Some scholars believed that vampires did not really exist, but

2

This can be seen, for instance in two texts that we will study in detail later: Marigner, ‘Sur les Stryges de Russie’, Mercure Galant, February (1694), 103; and Michael Ranft, De Masticatione mortuorum in tumulus Liber singularis: Exhibens duas excercitationes, quarum prior historicocritica posterior philosophica est, II (Leipzig: Martini, 1728): ‘Dissertatio posterior philosophica’, § 56–59: ‘Haec enim glebam terrae recens effossae sub sepeliendorum cadaverum mentis ponit, quo se vetuisse cadaverum masticationem & quicquid in sui perniciem inde sequatur.’

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they admitted that the overheated imagination of the alleged victims could have very real effects. These victims imagined that members of their family came back from the dead to prey on them, and this imagination could be so strong that many died as a result. Other scholars believed in vampires in the sense that they considered the pernicious action that cadavers could exert on the living to be very real. They argued that the imagination of the corpse, still active because of the continuing operation of the vital powers, sent out noxious vapours or even a semi-corporeal avatar that could kill specific surviving relatives. In both cases, the death of a victim of vampirism was interpreted as the very real result of the powers of the imagination, of the victim, or of the vampire-corpse respectively. It was only in the middle of the eighteenth century, as I will show, that the perception of vampirism shifted from a ‘disease of the imagination’ to an ‘imaginary disease’. When gravediggers reopened mass graves to add newly deceased victims of pestilence, they would sometimes come across bodies bloated by fermented blood and gasses, with hair and nails grown, and blood seeping from their mouths. They were struck by the fresh complexion and the appearance of life these corpses gave. Some people believed that these corpses could leave their graves and pester their family and friends. In an account recorded by Martin Weinrich, a sixteenthcentury Silesian physician and philosopher, a shoemaker who had died in Breslau in 1591 came back from the grave as a semi-corporeal ghost and terrified the sleeping with horrible visions. He delivered pinches and blows to his kin and tried to suffocate them, so that blue marks and the impression of his fingers were visible on his victims’ bodies.3 These curious stories are easily relegated to folkloristic history. Early modern scholars took these stories seriously and elaborated theoretical systems to make sense of them. Revenants and vampires presented a challenge to early modern philosophers and physicians and their hypothetical explanations illuminate their theoretical allegiances. Living dead, masticating cadavers with evil powers, corpses that could get out of their graves without disturbing the tomb or soil: such phenomena challenged their preconceptions and beliefs. The Cambridge Neoplatonist Henry More, for instance, used the story of the shoemaker from Breslau as proof for an immortal soul and as a test case for his metaphysical system. Similarly, the first authors writing about blood-sucking vampires were confronted with hard metaphysical and medical questions. They had to find solutions for problems related to the connection between spirit and

3

The story became widely publicized when it was put in the preface to the 1612 edition of Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola’s Strix or De ludificatione daemonum (1523) by Weinrich’s brother Charles.

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matter and the borderline between life and death. They were also confronted with practical questions about diseases, contagious vampirism, and the efficacy of proposed remedies. Vampires were border phenomena and they allow us to highlight the boundaries of these scholars’ conceptual structures, and the frontiers of their thinking. In this paper, I will study some unknown and neglected texts from the time that the vampire was introduced to Western Europe. I will show that vampires were an Eastern European phenomenon, arising where cultures mixed, at the crossroads of Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant beliefs, at the shifting borders of the great Central European and Ottoman empires in a time of regional political and religious upheaval. Liminal creatures from the East, they came to haunt the Western imagination. From these early theoretical tracts written in France and later in the Holy Roman Empire, it becomes clear that early modern vampirism was considered to be a disease of the imagination. The ambiguous imagination served these theorists to negotiate and bridge the boundaries between body and soul, the corporeal and the spiritual, and life and death. But the imagination was used in many different ways by these authors, enabling us to offer a striking cross section of early modern conceptions of diseases of the imagination.

What Were Early Modern ‘Vampires’? Many believe that vampires were invented by Bram Stoker, or were at least a figment of John Polidori’s imagination.4 Historical sources show that vampires were first mentioned in the early modern period, however. How exactly do these early modern vampires resemble the vampires of popular culture today? Can these early modern vampires be ‘vampires’ if they do not even suck blood? The correct definition of a vampire is a heated topic in scholarly vampirology. Recently, David Keyworth has argued (inspired by the eighteenth-century Benedictine monk and vampire authority Dom Augustin Calmet) that ‘the vampire per se can be defined as an undead-corpse with an insatiable thirst for blood’.5 Keyworth therefore 4 John Polidori, The Vampyre: A Tale (London: Sherwood, Neely and Jones, 1819); Bram Stoker, Dracula (Westminster: Constable, 1897). An earlier vampire poem, Heinrich August Ossenfelder’s ‘Der Vampir’ (1746), is virtually unknown by the broader public as well as by vampire scholars. 5 David Keyworth, Troublesome Corpses: Vampires and Revenants from Antiquity to the Present (Southend-on-Sea: Desert Island Books, 2007), p. 56. For a similar argument, see also his ‘Was the Vampire of the Eighteenth Century a Unique Type of Undead-Corpse?’, Folklore, 117

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refuses to use the term ‘vampire’ for masticating corpses and late sixteenth-century revenants, which were only semi-corporeal and did not suck blood. Keyworth’s distinction is somewhat crude and gratuitous, however. As he himself shows, the early modern and Enlightenment vampire was a creature akin to many others in ancient, medieval, and early modern literature, historiography, and folklore. It resembles the Greek lamiae, shape-changing creatures that fell in love with young men and fed on their blood and flesh. It is akin to the malevolent wandering corpses from twelfth-century Anglo-Saxon accounts, to the reanimated corpses from thirteenth-century Scandinavian sagas, and to the seventeenthcentury Greek vrykolakas, uncorrupted corpses to which all kinds of malevolent influences were ascribed. According to early modern belief, demons were also able to move corpses and make them harass the living.6 Furthermore, I will show that there is continuity, not merely a similarity, between vampire stories, stories of masticating corpses, and stories of the dead coming back in a semi-corporeal way like the shoemaker from Breslau. This shows that the ‘vampire’ cannot be isolated from these other creatures by artificial definitions. Another approach to the question is to look where the word vampire comes from and how it was used by contemporaries. The first use of the word in Western Europe that I have found is the introduction of the Polish variant of vampire: Upior or Upyr. This term appears in a letter from Pierre Des Noyers, secretary of Marie Louise de Gonzague, a French princess who was Queen of Poland from 1645 until 1667. This French–Polish connection would help to introduce vampires to Western Europe. Des Noyers wrote from Danzig to his friend Ismael Bouillaud in France on 13 December 1659. In the letter, Des Noyers describes vampirism (without mentioning the sucking of blood) and refers to the ‘Ukrainian’ term Upior. Katharina Wilson affirms that the most accepted etymological theory traces the word vampire to Slavic origins, probably to the Bulgarian word Upir.7 Not(2006), 241–60. For a good reference work on early modern vampirism, see Klaus Hamberger, Mortuus non mordet: Kommentierte Dokumente zum Vampirismus 1689–1791 (Wien: Turia und Kant, 1992). Relevant also is Jean-Claude Aguerre, ‘La Naissance du vampire au XVIIIe siècle: En quoi l’évolution de la pensée au XVIIIe siècle a-t-elle permis l’apparition d’un mythe comme celui du vampire’ (Thèse de Diplôme d’études supérieures spécialisées (DESS), Institut polytechnique de philosophie, Université Paris 8, 1981). 6

See, for example, Martin Del Rio, Disquisitionum magicarum libri sex (Louvain, 1599– 1600). For more on demonology, see Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 7

Katharina M. Wilson, ‘The History of the Word “Vampire”’, Journal of the History of Ideas,

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withstanding references to Western European revenants and undead corpses from before and after the 1650s, it is better historiographical practice to reserve the term vampire in early modern historiography for the revenants that belong to the lineage of early modern Slavic Upior, conforming to the usage of contemporaries when the term was first introduced in Western Europe.8 The meaning of the word vampire could then change according to modifications in its characterization in early modern and Enlightenment reports and books. Vampires could be considered shroud-eating or blood-sucking, more or less corporeal, depending on the period and the specific author. It should be stressed, however, that it does not make sense to draw too definite boundaries. Early modern authors were aware of classical precedents of similar creatures when they first heard about vampires, yet they usually maintained a distinction between them. Often, the Strix, a witch or blood-sucking bird from Classical literature, is referred to in early modern sources.9 Similarly, Michael Ranft refers to many earlier sources related to the mastication of the dead and relates them to vampirism.10 Zedler and Voltaire refer to vampire beliefs as superstitions of the Orthodox Church and see their origins in early modern

46 (1985), 577–83. Wilson seems to believe (mistakenly) that the term vampire was first used in France in a 1693 article in the Mercure Galant. In fact, in that article, the Polish term Upierz is used. 8

This conforms to the preference to use actors’ categories in historiography. In this way, it is also possible to include an element of ‘strangeness’ of the East for Western-European readers that is not captured in definitions that seek to define the ‘essence’ of the vampire as a ‘blood-sucking corpse’. It is indeed crucial to note that vampires were liminal creatures that appeared in regions where Orthodox, Protestant, Catholic, and sometimes even Ottoman cultures mixed. See also Marco Frenschkowski, ‘Keine spitzen Zähne: Von der interkulturellen Vergleichbarkeit mythologischer Konzepte: das Beispiel des Vampirs’, in Poetische Wiedergänger, ed. by Julia Bertschik and Christa Agnes Tuczay (Tübingen: Francke, 2004), pp. 43–59, for the problematic nature of comparisons of alleged ‘vampire’ discourses in different cultures. 9

Zedler refers to the Strigoi and to Hungarian magicians who suck the blood of children. See Johann Heinrich Zedler, ‘Vampyren, oder Blutsauger’, in Grosses vollständiges Universallexikon, 64 vols, plus 4 suppl. (Leipzig/Halle, 1731–54), XLVI (1745), 474–82. For lack of a better term, Des Noyers (Mercure Galant, May (1693), 63) writes that vampires are called Striges in Latin. Marigner (‘Sur les Stryges’) writes that people compare vampires to the carnivorous nocturnal birds called Strix (Striges) in Latin. See Samuel Grant Oliphant, ‘The Story of the Strix: Ancient’, Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association, 44 (1913), 133–49 for more on the ancient Strix. 10

Ranft, De Masticatione, I (Dissertatio prior historico-critica), §11.

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Greece.11 If the first reports of vampires reached Western Europe in 1659, vampires became publicized for the first time only in 1693. Vampirism was still very much unknown in the West, and some authors soon ventured to give an explanation of the phenomenon. It was only around 1725 that vampires became widely known and discussed, with the vampire craze of the 1730s as a high point.

The Introduction of the Vampire to the West In 1693, a series of strange phenomena caused a commotion in Paris. The curious prophecies of the Camisards had hardly been dissipated by Royal forces when reports that a diviner from Lyons could find criminals with a divining rod caused a new stir.12 In the Parisian journals, interspersed between reports of this diviner, we can find the first publicized accounts of vampires in Western Europe. In this section, I will describe the context of the first reception of vampire stories in the West. It has never been noted, but dead bodies that suck blood were mentioned for the first time in print in France in La Baguette justifiée, a treatise on the divining rod published in the Mercure Galant of March 1693, and republished as a separate volume later in the same year.13 The author, Claude Comiers, had studied

11

Zedler, ‘Vampyren, oder Blutsauger’; Voltaire, ‘Vampires’, in Oeuvres complètes de Voltaire, 71 vols (Gotha, 1786), XLIII, 386–92. 12

For the Camisard case and the divining-rod case, see Koen Vermeir, ‘The “Physical Prophet” and the Powers of the Imagination. Part I: A Case-Study on Prophecy, Vapours and the Imagination (1685–1710)’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 35 (2004), 561–91; and Vermeir, ‘The “Physical Prophet” and the Powers of the Imagination. Part II: A Case-Study on Dowsing and the Naturalization of the Moral (1685–1710)’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of the Biological and Biomedical Sciences, 36 (2005), 1–24. 13 The first mention in personal correspondence that I have found is from 1659 (cf. infra). Wilson (‘The History of the Word “Vampire”’) only refers to an article of May 1693, which is explicitly dedicated to vampirism. On page 579 Wilson asserts that also in 1693 a Polish clergyman asked the Sorbonne how one should deal with corpses believed to be vampires. This claim is not substantiated by the sources she cites and I have not been able to find a reliable source for this assertion. The first printed works in which blood-sucking vampires are mentioned are probably Johann Weichard von Valvasor, Die Ehre deß Herzogthums Crain (Nüremberg, 1689), a historical-geographical work on Carniola, which is now a large part of present-day Slovenia, Istria, and surrounding regions; and in a book by Valvasor’s collaborator Erasmus Francisci, Der höllische Proteus (Nüremberg, 1690).

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theology and was a canon at the cathedral of Embrun as well as professor of mathematics at Paris. He was known as a controversialist and as a Cartesian-minded philosopher with an interest in the occult. He was employed for some time at the Journal des Savans and wrote numerous articles on topics in natural philosophy and medicine for the Journal des Savans and for the Mercure Galant. Struck with blindness in 1690, he became priest at the Hôpital Royal des Quinze-Vingts in Paris and took on the title Aveugle-Royal.14 In his tract, Comiers asserts that he wants to explain the action of the divining rod in a natural way, by referring to the exhalations of water and metals. When he tries to explain that the divining rod can track down murderers, however, he asserts that the souls of the victims play a central role. God has permitted these souls to stay with their bodies, waiting for an occasion to expose the criminals and take revenge. When the diviner enters the place where the corpses of the victims have been found, these wandering souls enter the pineal gland of the diviner’s brain, Comiers argued, setting the diviner’s nerves and animal spirits into motion, causing heart spasms and making the divining rod turn. It is these souls, according to Comiers, that put the diviner and his rod on the track of the criminals, so that he can follow them. For Comiers, it was clear that the divining rod could not be diabolical, because the Devil would never bring criminals and murderers to justice. Only a physical explanation was appropriate.15 Pierre Le Brun, one of the main adversaries of Comiers, did not agree and he argued forcefully that the working of the divining rod could only be due to demonic involvement. Le Brun had the support of many clerical authorities and prominent figures such as the philosopher Malebranche and Cardinal Camus.16 Comiers expressed the hope of proving his critics wrong by giving more physical demonstrations in the sequel of his Medicine universelle. In this book, he promised, he would explain in a natural way various topics related to medicine and occult philosophy, as well as the strange phenomenon of vampirism. Here, Comiers would have been able to elaborate on the similarities between the natural processes behind divination and vampirism. Unfortunately, Comiers died in the

14

See Louis Moreri, Le Grand dictionnaire historique, 10 vols (Paris, 1759), III (C–COM), p. 860; Monique Vincent, ‘Un Philosophe du XVIIe siècle, Le Père Comiers “Savant Universel”’, XVIIe Siècle, 169 (1990), 473–80. Joachim Von Zur Gathen, ‘Claude Comiers: The First Arithmetical Cryptography’, Cryptologia, 27 (2003), 339–49. 15 16

Claude Comiers, La Baguette justifiée (Paris, 1693), pp. 10–12.

See especially Pierre Le Brun, Histoire critique des pratiques superstitieuses (Paris, 1733); and Vermeir, ‘The “Physical Prophet” and the Powers of the Imagination. Part II’, p. 12.

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autumn of 1693 and never finished this projected work. On vampirism, he indicates that Polish people had to decapitate the corpses of their family members, or at least put high collars on them so that these corpses could not eat the shrouds or suck blood from their kin. Comiers thought that they were able to suck the blood by some kind of sympathy, and this would explain why the corpses had been found with large quantities of fresh blood.17 The context in which this discussion of vampirism appeared indicates a first attempt at an explanation, albeit unfinished. Comiers suggests strong similarities between vampirism and divining, and from his explanation of the divining rod, we might glean some crucial elements that might have been part of his explanation of vampirism. Comiers believed that souls could be permitted or obliged to stay in the vicinity of their dead bodies. These wandering souls could enter the brains of passers-by and affect the imagination (or the nerves and animal spirits), in this way disturbing the bodies of the victims and creating curious effects. This explanatory model offers an interesting template to understand vampirism. This naturalist approach, defended by Comiers but opposed by Le Brun, can also be found in the vampire debates, and the same tensions between natural and demonic explanations are present. Two months later, in May 1693, we find an eyewitness account of the Polish vampire craze published in the Mercure Galant.18 This account was written by Pierre Des Noyers, formerly secretary of the Queen of Poland during the ‘deluge’ of Poland, the time when Poland was overrun by foreign forces. Des Noyers was a curious character. Correspondent of Pascal and Mersenne on the problem of the void and a good friend of the astronomer Hevelius, he was fascinated by astrology, alchemy, and other occult arts. He maintained correspondence with like-minded savants, including Rosicrucians, and he visited many of them on his travels between Poland and France.19 Like Comiers, Des Noyers died in 1693, so he never saw the responses to his article in the Mercure. Des Noyers writes that in Poland and Russia there are corpses filled with blood, called Striges in Latin and Upierz in the local tongue. He mentions that these dead bodies eat their shrouds, but he stresses in particular that they suck blood. Local people believe that a demon leaves the corpse between noon and midnight and harasses the kin and acquaintances of the deceased person. The 17

Comiers, La Baguette justifiée, pp. 12–14.

18

Pierre Des Noyers in Mercure Galant, May (1693), 62–69.

19

François Secret, ‘Astrologie et Alchimie au 463–79.

XVII

e

siècle’, Studi Francesi, n.s., 60 (1976),

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demon crushes them, presents them with the image of the deceased person and sucks their blood. It then carries back the blood and deposits it in the corpse for storage, often in such quantities that it flows through all the orifices of the dead body. The victims become weaker and weaker until they die, and the demon does not stop until the whole family has been wiped out. The local remedy is to behead the suspect corpse, to open its heart and let the large quantities of blood flow out. To protect themselves, the villagers collect the blood, mingle it with flour, knead the dough and make bread from it. The victims eat this bread in order to save them from such a terrible vexation.20 It is enlightening to compare this account with a letter Des Noyers wrote from Danzig to his friend, the mathematician, astronomer, and astrologer Ismael Bouillaud, thirty-four years earlier, on 13 December 1659. At that time, Des Noyers wrote about a ‘Ukrainian illness’ called Upior or Friga, which would seem fabulous if it were not attested by many credible and honourable persons. When a person who was born with teeth dies and is buried, he will start to eat his shroud and his hands and arms in his coffin. Simultaneously, the members of his family will die one after another. Once it becomes clear that people are dying from this disease, the corpse of the first person who died is disinterred, and if it turns out that it has eaten its shroud and limbs, it is beheaded. The blood that flows from the corpse is fresh as if from a living person.21 The differences between these two accounts are striking: the location has changed from Ukraine to Poland and Russia, and a natural disease has been transformed into a demonic phenomenon. In these thirty-odd years, the characteristic aspect of the Upior or vampire has changed from eating its shroud to sucking the blood of its victims. Furthermore, once people believe that the fresh blood of the corpse originally belonged to the victims, the remedy also changes. The blood is restored to the victims in the form of bread for their convalescence and semi-magical protection. Although Des Noyers was an avid scholar of the occult, a more thorough investigation into the medicine and metaphysics of vampirism would be executed by his friend, Mr Marigner, Lord of Plessis, Ruel, and Billoüard. Little is known of Marigner, apart from the fact that he was a barrister at the High Court of Paris. In the Mercure Galant of January and February 1694, he published a dissertation in two instalments, first written as a long letter addressed to Charles de Voland de Materon II, on the ‘creatures of the elements’, vampires, and (allegedly) also on

20

Mercure Galant, May (1693), 62–70.

21

Lettre CCXXV, in Lettres de Pierre Des Noyers (Berlin: Behr, 1856), pp. 560–64.

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the divining rod.22 The first part of the dissertation contains a lengthy exposition of a metaphysical system and is called ‘Sur Les Creatures des Elemens’. The second part of the dissertation, a detailed analysis of the vampire account given by Des Noyers in the Mercure of May 1693, is called ‘Sur les Stryges de Russie’. Marigner had written letters with explanations of vampirism to Des Noyers, but Charles de Voland had pressed him to expound his ideas in a more systematic matter. This correspondence gave rise to the first theoretical discussions of vampires: certainly of vampires as Upierz or Upior, but also of vampires characterized as dead bodies that in some way or another suck blood. From the beginning of the eighteenth century, reports of vampires became more and more common. In 1704, the Catholic lawyer Karl Ferdinand de Schertz published Magia posthuma (posthumous magic) and examined cases of spectres that haunted Moravia. Later, in 1718, a vampire case was reported in Hungary. More importantly, Serbia was taken from the Ottomans and incorporated in the Habsburg Empire at the peace of Passarowitz, bringing subsequent vampire cases under the scrutiny of administrators in Vienna.23 In 1725, the first well-documented vampire case appeared, with reverberations all over Europe. The vampire, Peter Poglojowitz, of the village Kisilova in current-day Serbia, was accused of killing nine villagers. An Austrian judge had to investigate the case and he wrote a report that was taken up by newspapers all over Europe. Particularly relevant for our account is that the pastor Michael Ranft took this case as the basis of his master’s dissertation and later elaborated it in several extensively expanded, published editions. In the 1728 edition of his text, Ranft refers to the Polish name Upiers and Upierzyca, and he quotes a report in which the name vampyri is used. He did not treat these vampires as a separate new species, but saw his work as part of a longer tradition of writings about the ‘mastication of the dead’, calling his book De Masticatione mortuorum in tumilis.24 22

Not only Comiers, but also Marigner seems to have perceived interesting similarities between the divining rod and vampirism. Unfortunately, there is little to be found on this topic in the text published in the Mercure Galant. Charles de Voland de Matheron II, Seigneur d’Aubenas, Sailignac et Entrepeires, was a nobleman from Provence. Second consul of Aix, Procureur du Païs, deputy for the Provençal nobility to the King in 1664 and to Paris in 1671 and 1679, Charles de Voland is said to have been one of the best minds of his age who corresponded with many savants. See Louis Ventre Artefeuil, Histoire héroïque et universelle de la noblesse de Provence (Avignon, 1776), pp. 532–33. 23

Antoine Faivre, ‘Du vampire villageois aux discours des clercs (Genèse d’un imaginaire à l’aube des Lumières)’, in Colloque de Cerisy: Les Vampires (Paris: Michel, 1993), pp. 45–74 (p. 48). 24

Michael Ranft, De Masticatione mortuorum in tumulis; Ranft, Tractat von dem Kauen und

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In this book, he explicitly advocated an explanation of vampirism based on natural magic. From the above, it is clear that the first reports of vampirism arrived in Western Europe as part of a network of scholars interested in the occult. These scholars also ventured to give the first explanations of vampirism, based on naturalistic premises but with an eye for the hidden powers of nature. They explicitly opposed what they believed to be common superstitions related to vampirism and they debunked the traditional idea that the Devil was involved. Instead, they explained vampirism by elaborating theories of the powers of the imagination. Interestingly, later Enlightenment and rationalist writers refused to refer to these theories. Even Calmet, who made the great and renowned compilation of vampire sources in 1746, a book that went through many editions and translations, did not give these authors credit. Their work has disappeared out of sight and it has not yet received serious historical study.25 Antoine Faivre has argued that Enlightenment debates about vampirism were organized around three different types of discourse: rationalist, theological, and esoteric. Faivre also characterizes the esoteric discourse as Paracelsian.26 However ‘esoteric’ is a category that does not fit the late seventeenth century and the first years of the eighteenth century well.27 Furthermore, the texts we will discuss cannot be separated from their theological context. Des Noyers’s text refers explicitly to demonic involvement, and Marigner’s analysis draws extensively on Christian imagery and Catholic theological concepts. Although Faivre classifies Marigner’s text as ‘esoteric’, angels, the afterlife, limbo, and the resurrection of the flesh loom large in his text. Marigner himself attests that the problem is in part natural and in part supernatural. A later text by Michael Ranft is also classified as esoteric by

Schmatzen der Todten in Gräbern, worin die wahre Beschaffenheit derer Hungarischen Vampyrs und Blut-Sauger gezeigt, auch alle von dieser Materie bißher zum Vorschein gekommene Schrifften recensiret werden (Leipzig: Teubner, 1734). 25

Only Antoine Faivre (‘Du vampire villageois’) and Jean-Claude Aguerre (‘La Naissance du vampire’) have looked into the theoretical aspects of Ranft’s work in more detail and cursorily studied the text of Marigner. 26 27

Faivre, ‘Du vampire villageois’, pp. 45–47.

The word esotericism (ésoterisme) first appears in 1828, and the use of the concept for the early modern period is the centre of scholarly debate. See, for example, Wouter Hanegraaff, ‘The Study of Western Esotericism’, in New Approaches to the Study of Religion, ed. by Peter Antes and others (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004), pp. 489–520.

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Faivre, although it has distinct rationalist elements. It is clearly and succinctly argued and rejects the mastication of the dead as superstitious. On the other hand, it also draws explicitly on explanations from natural magic. Faivre’s classification is based on Enlightenment distinctions that do not fit the complexity of the pre- and early Enlightenment periods. It would be better to distinguish four kinds of discourses, according to the prominence of four different kinds of causes early modern scholars distinguished for explaining wondrous phenomena: God, demons, man, and nature.28 No one argued that vampirism was miraculous, but many saw an uncanny parallel between ghosts, vampires, and other revenants on the one hand, and the miraculous resurrection of the flesh at the end of time on the other hand. Although God’s punishment plays an important role in Marigner’s analysis, he explicitly distinguished vampires from the resurrection of the flesh. For Calmet, however, this connection proved to be very troubling, as we will see. A demonic explanation was proposed by the Polish people Des Noyers refers to in his report in the Mercure, but also by other authors such as Philipp Rhor.29 More sceptical thinkers explained vampirism as a man-invented phenomenon: these vampire stories were only a figment of the human imagination. This would become the ‘rationalist’ trope later in the course of the Enlightenment. What characterizes the fourth, ‘natural’ discourse as opposed to the other three is the willingness to see these curious phenomena as real (because, for instance, they are attested by credible people) and a willingness to search, to a large extent, for a natural explanation. Often, to explain curious phenomena, authors would draw on eclectic sources from natural magic and occult philosophy. As we will see, characterizing Marigner and Ranft as Paracelsians is not incorrect, although they were often very critical of Paracelsus and drew heavily from other sources as well. It is this discourse that came to the fore in the first explanations of vampirism.

Marigner’s Elemental Creatures In ‘Sur les Stryges de Russie’, Marigner examines the possible causes of the ‘malady’ of vampirism.30 Marigner is disparaging about physicians, because they would like to attribute all kinds of suffering to melancholy only, as if every disease is caused by coarse and malignant vapours coming from the spleen, overheated bile, or from 28

See Vermeir, ‘The “Physical Prophet” and the Powers of the Imagination. Part I’, p. 566.

29

In his Dissertatio historico-philosophica de masticatione mortuorum (Leipzig, 1679), the Leipzig theologian Philipp Rohr argues that masticating corpses were real, but caused by the Devil. 30

Marigner, ‘Sur les Stryges’, pp. 13–119.

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the suffocation of the womb. These physicians pretend to treat all illnesses that have the most diverse hidden and extraordinary causes with the same methods. In many cases, they have not succeeded, and Marigner gives the example of religious possessions. The debate around the Camisard prophets, still prominent in 1693, was highly medicalized, for instance. Physicians tried to attribute the convulsions and strange pronouncements of the prophets to a melancholic disorder of the imagination. In this way, they naturalized prophecy and they undermined the potential for a Protestant revolution in France. At the same time, however, they took away the moral responsibility of the prophets. Therefore, these physicians were not only contradicted by the prophet’s followers, but also by Catholic thinkers. First, naturalizing prophecy was prone to lead to atheism. Second, Catholic polemists believed that the curious prophecies should be attributed to the Devil. In this way, the prophets could be held responsible for demonic involvement and they could be suppressed.31 In the case of prophecy, Marigner argues that medical remedies did not work, and that only exorcisms and the spiritual support of the Church were effective. Similarly, it was clear to him that the effective remedy against vampirism — beheading buried corpses and eating their blood — was not a natural cure. Such a remedy rather indicated the action of a demon or of another kind of malignant spirit. On the other hand, Marigner argued, the withering away of the victims could hardly be ascribed to possession by a demon. The fact that the victims were invariably cured when the corpse in its grave was beheaded indicated that no demon was involved. Phenomena that worked in a constant and uniform way were considered to be natural, and phenomena that were inconstant or whimsical indicated demonic involvement.32 Furthermore, there seemed to be no practice of exorcism or other Church rituals. Therefore, Marigner concludes, the phenomenon should be attributed not to a demon but to another kind of spirit. For Marigner, vampirism, like the action of the divining rod, is the result of a curious interaction between the corporeal and the spiritual. This is treated as part of his physics, which he elaborates upon in his text on the ‘Creatures des Elemens’.33

31

See Vermeir, ‘The “Physical Prophet” and the Powers of the Imagination. Part I’, pp. 562–69. 32

See Koen Vermeir, ‘Divination and the Circulation of Contested Knowledge Claims (1690–1720)’, paper presented at the HSS 2006 Annual Meeting (Vancouver). 33

Marigner, ‘Creatures des Elemens’, Mercure Galant, January (1694), 58–165.

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What kind of creature is a vampire? Is it similar to those other strange creatures, such as the ghosts, lemurs, harpies, pythons, oracles, giants, mermaids, evil spirits, and werewolves from ancient sources, or to the gnomes, pygmies, nymphs, sylphs, undines, vulcanians, or salamanders of Paracelsus? These Paracelsian creatures were a different kind of human, with the figure and qualities of a man, to an even more excellent degree, only without a soul. Marigner wants to counter Paracelsus’s argument by showing that there is only one possible kind of human being, and that there is no place in the cosmos for an infinite variety of strange creatures. In order to do this, he expounds a whole cosmological system with all the orders of being, in which each creature is assigned a place. This physical and metaphysical system is illuminating, because it explicates the world image in which his notion of a vampire finds its place.34 According to Marigner, the world consists of purely corporeal substances (the elemental elements), purely spiritual substances (angels), and in between a variety of mixed substances that participate in both. These mixed substances consist of spirits that are more or less corporeal, from stones and metals (which have only very coarse spirits), to vegetal and animal spirits (the most subtle spirits). The more subtle the spirits become, the more movements and powers they can acquire, from the simple attraction of the metallic spirits to the complex sensitive and imaginative powers of the animal spirits. Marigner’s metaphysics posits three kinds of spiritual creatures: pure spirits (angels), intermediate spirits, which are in contact with the corporeal (man), and unfortunate spirits, which are subject to what is most gross and coarse in the corporeal realm (demons). This subordination of the demon’s spirit to gross matter is the hardest punishment and suffering possible because of the metaphysical opposition between corporeal and spiritual. Marigner’s physics is a study of the mixture between the corporeal and the spiritual.35 The mixed substances are divided into three large orders (according to matter, medium, and form), each of which consist of four divisions (according to the four elements). In each progressive

34 Notably Paracelsus, and more recently Montfaucon de Villars had written about the Elemental Creatures in his Le Comte de Gabalis ou Entretiens sur les sciences occultes (Paris, 1670). The possibility that vampires were akin to Kobolds, Bergmännigen (gnomes), lemurs, etcetera, was also raised by Ranft, in reference to Rüdiger and Paracelsus. See Ranft, De Masticatione, I , § 23. 35 The corporeal and the spiritual are mixed to such an extent that there is continuity between them. This is similar to the work of Henry More, where one can also perceive a tension between metaphysical dualism and gradualism in physiological descriptions. See Vermeir, ‘Imagination between Physick and Philosophy’, Intellectual History Review, 18 (2008), 119–37.

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order, and in each division, the mixture becomes more delicate, subtle, and perfect, resulting in the most perfect species, which is man. (See Diagram 1.) Marigner’s physics allows for 43 or 64 species in total, and he claims that no more subdivisions are possible. From this structure, he deduces that there is no place for different kinds of humans or for curious Paracelsian creatures, and an infinitude of species is certainly impossible.36 Marigner has a lot of respect for Paracelsus, whom he calls ‘the most profound physician of his age’,37 and he cannot believe that Paracelsus actually believed that these elemental creatures were really types of human, or some kind of real extraordinary species. Therefore, he suggests going beyond the literal level and looking at the spirit in which Paracelsus told these wondrous stories about elemental creatures. He believes that one should interpret Paracelsus at a metaphoric level and he reads alchemical processes and procedures in the curious histories of gnomes, nymphs, and Mélusines.38 Marigner’s cosmology presupposes a strict and divinely instituted order of nature. As a result, strange creatures can only be the product of the imagination: either they are created as figments of a poetic imagination, or they are real but monstrous creatures, born from a mother with a depraved imagination.39 Even in this last case, in which real preternatural creatures upset the order of nature, this assault on order cannot be permanent. Such monsters must be infertile, and cannot generate progeny and their own lineage, because otherwise the order and beauty of the universe, which is created by God according to harmonic proportions, would be perverted — and this is a metaphysical impossibility for Marigner.

36

See Marigner, ‘Creatures des Elemens’, p. 97: ‘au delà desquelles il n’y a plus de division à faire, parce que dans ces trois sortes d’ordres & de divisions, se rencontre le supérieur, l’inferieur & le mitoyen, par rapport aussi aux trois principes de nature, matière, forme, & moyen’. Marigner is inconsistent in this respect, because later in the text (p. 141) he makes further subdivisions into first, second, and third species (minor species). Because of this further division of species, Marigner also contradicts himself that there is no space for different kinds of humans. He insists that there can only be one real human species (e.g. p. 102), and he asserts later (after a suspect sum) that there are sixteen human species. If there are many human species after all — even if these are ‘minor species’ — it is not clear why gnomes and other creatures could not be one of them. 37

Marigner, ‘Creatures des Elemens’, pp. 143–44.

38

Marigner, ‘Creatures des Elemens’, pp. 154–63.

39

The idea that the mother’s imagination could transform the unborn foetus (imprint images, change its colour, or deform it) has a very long tradition and was somewhat of a trope in early modern Europe. It starts to be challenged around the middle of the seventeenth century, is still widely prevalent until the mid-eighteenth century, and it disappears from the medical literature only at the end of the eighteenth century. Cf. Haskell in the introduction to this volume.

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Diagram 1. Marigner’s classification of mixed substances.

There are, of course, different human individuals, with striking variety between them, but the point is that they all have the same essence. The variety follows from the different degrees of perfection in which they realize the essence of their species (he calculates from abstract principles that there are 8000 variables to be taken into account). What is also distinctive to man, of course, is his immortal soul (something Paracelsus admits these other creatures do not possess). Because of this soul, man stands above all other corporeal creatures; humanity is the link between the superior and inferior parts of the created world. After death, man’s immortal soul can find itself in three different states: in a beatific vision together with the angels; enduring the punishments of hell; or in between these two, suffering the ordeal of limbo. From accepting Des Noyers’s account as true, together with all the above (meta)physical peregrinations, it follows for Marigner that vampires cannot be independent human-like creatures. Vampires can only be either demons or damned souls that are bound to the coarse corporeal world. Because of the strange remedies involved, demonic interference was already ruled out, and therefore vampires, just like genii, familiars, and kobolds, are identified by Marigner as condemned souls in limbo. They wander certain regions of the earth and take on

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particular forms depending on their specific punishment. Vampirism, for Marigner, is a divine punishment particularly fitting the sins of the coarse and superstitious Polish and Russian population.40

Stryges from Russia Now that the basic nature of vampires is established by means of a (meta)physical classification, the crucial problem for Marigner is to make clear how the spiritual and the corporeal realms interact, so that he can explain the particular phenomena of vampirism. The relation between the corporeal and the spiritual, between body and soul, and between the internal and external senses of man, is central to his (meta)physics and his explanation of vampirism. The layered structure of the cosmos, between more corporeal and more spiritual, between less and more perfect, is mirrored within man himself. In order to explain vampirism, it is necessary to understand the action of spirit on matter, a conundrum related to the so called mind-body problem. According to Marigner’s physics, each power, object, and means has to be of a proportionate nature. This implies that for a spiritual power to act on a corporeal object, it has to draw on almost immaterial matter, that is, subtle spirits, which it spiritualizes even more. Indeed, the different faculties of man draw on more or less refined spirits to execute their functions, depending on their place in the hierarchy between corporeal and spiritual. The senses are considered more corporeal than the imagination, which in its turn is more corporeal than reason. The spirits employed by these faculties are all coarser than the very subtle spirits that serve man’s intellective power. In Marigner’s cosmology, subtle spirits flow between body and soul and between man and environment in a continuous reciprocal flux. Depending on the situation, the soul receives impressions from the senses, processed by the spirits and the imagination, or the soul descends into the various levels of corporeality and emits spirits outside the body to perceive and act on external bodies. By means of spirits and ‘species’ (or images) moving in and out the body, Marigner explains a number of curious phenomena, such as fascination by the evil eye, mirror images, phantom images, the reception of external images in dreams, and the power of the imagination of the mother on the unborn child.41

40

This is Marigner’s explanation of the geographical specificity of vampirism. See also n. 8.

41

Marigner, ‘Sur les Stryges’, pp. 50–72. Marigner elaborates on an emission as well as a

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In religious ecstasies, the sensitive, imaginative, and rational spirits leave their respective faculties, rendering them inactive. These spirits are absorbed by the intellective faculty and attach themselves immediately to the soul, to aid it in its meditations and purely spiritual operations. There are even ecstasies so extreme and profound that the most gross and crude spirits are obliged to follow the superior spirits, and the soul, drawn to heaven, lifts the body up from the earth and keeps it suspended in the air in a state of levitation. Similarly, with holy people who announce God’s Word and preach with a strong fervour and enthusiasm, a luminous circle can be perceived around them. It seems as if their soul is attached to their imaginative and reasonable spirits and accompanies their words all the way to the ears of the auditors. Marigner solves the problem of the interaction between body and mind by positing continuity between the corporeal and the spiritual. In this way, he takes a similar approach to other Neoplatonists such as Henry More.42 Marigner writes: ‘In the created corporeal and spiritual things, there cannot be an infinite distance […] the spiritual ends there where it encounters the most subtle of the corporeal, that is to say, the most perfect and most noble of the corporeal is continuous with the spiritual.’43 The soul is encircled by the most subtle spirits in order to exert its functions. These spirits are so subtle and akin to the soul that they are rendered incorruptible and leave the body to join the soul after death. Marigner’s theory is inspired by Paracelsus’s Archeus, but also by the Neoplatonist notion of the astral body.44 According to Henry More, spirits and the souls of the

reception theory of perception. The Platonist emission theory of perception, in which the eyes send out particles or rays which get reflected by the objects in the world (akin to the perception of bats) had been discredited at the end of the sixteenth century in favour of a reception theory of perception. The emission theory retained some popularity with Neoplatonists and scholars interested in natural and spiritual magic, however. For the history of theories of ‘species’, see Leen Spruit, Species Intelligibilis: From Perception to Knowledge, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, 48 (Leiden: Brill, 1994). Marigner’s theory belongs to a long tradition of the ‘powers of the imagination’, in which the imagination acts on the external world by emitting vapours. See Vermeir, ‘The “Physical Prophet” and the Powers of the Imagination. Part I’. 42

See Vermeir, ‘Imagination between Physick and Philosophy’. Henry More is a complex case because of a tension between dualism and gradualism in his work. 43 44

Marigner, ‘Sur les Stryges’, pp. 37–38.

It was, in particular, the later Neoplatonists such as Proclus, Iamblichus, and Synesius who developed Plotinus’s thought into a mystical philosophy in which the imagination and the astral body played a central role. The astral body enveloped the soul and constituted a connection to the divine. While the corporeal body decayed after death, the astral body remained with the soul.

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deceased have bodies, only their bodies are more ‘spiritualized’ astral bodies. Their vehicle is akin to our animal spirits, and their soul can act upon it and shape it by their imagination, just as humans send out and direct their animal spirits to move their body: ‘And verily, considering the great power acknowledged in Imagination by all Philosophers, nothing would seem more strange, then that these Aiery Spirits should not have this command over their own Vehicles, to transform them as they please.’45 Marigner explains that there are different degrees of perfection a human being can attain. The less attached to bodily desires and the more spiritual one becomes, the more the corporeal becomes adapted, spiritualized, and amenable to the soul. This implies that death is much more painful for base and sinful people, because their soul has to disentangle itself from all its attachments to crude matter. When crude and base habits have corrupted the body to such an extent, it affects the spirituality of the soul and it hinders the proper functioning of the higher functions. This can already be seen in the momentary effect of the gross fumes of wine that corrupt the imagination and envelop and absorb the reasonable and intellective spirits, rendering reason and intellect dysfunctional. A continued base life can cause the higher faculties of man to degenerate and makes him fall below the spiritual level of brute beasts. This coarseness is also reflected in his physiognomy. In this way, Marigner writes, habit really becomes a second nature.46 This unhappy situation not only remains during life, it also persists in the afterlife.47 The souls of debased people are entangled with the corporeal realm. The envelope of their soul also contains the spirits of the senses and the imagination, being corrupted because of the bad use made of them during life. This envelope does not leave the soul and its crudeness makes the soul earthbound. It makes the soul suffer in a spiritual and transcendent way. According to Marigner, this is the depraved soul’s due punishment. This is the predicament of the vampire. For Marigner, the Russians are justly punished for the baseness and sinfulness typical of them. They did not even listen to the French missionaries to give up their superstitions. They still believed, for instance, that their dead bodies had a need

45

Henry More, The Immortality of the Soul, in Henry More, A Collection of Several Philosophical Writings (London, 1662), p. 168. 46

This might be a reference to Pascal, who writes about the imagination (and the related notion of habit): ‘Cette superbe puissance, ennemie de la raison, qui se plaît à la contrôler et à la dominer, pour montrer combien elle peut en toutes choses, a établi dans l’homme une seconde nature.’ Blaise Pascal, Pensées, in Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Seuil, 1963), p. 504. 47

Marigner, ‘Sur les Stryges’, p. 84.

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for food, and they put earth in their mouths to stop them from eating their shrouds. Marigner ridiculed them for not seeing that this mastication was a natural effect of putrefaction coming from the mouth. The Russians were very coarse people, by their general temperament already subject to the vices of blood and flesh. Their region was ruled by the astrological sign of the Balance (Libra), which meant its natives were characterized by humidity and grossness. According to Marigner, the Russians’ imagination was sorely affected by this gross and abundant humidity, and their blood could not furnish sufficient warm and dry spirits required for the higher functions of the soul. They were characterized by a crude imagination, which was reduced to its most corporeal aspect. Therefore, these people generally were attached to their passions and idolatries, and they were attracted to unclean and base animals. After their death, the souls of these base Russians were destined to roam the earth to suffer for their sins. Their coarse imaginations and the envelopes of crude imaginative spirits held back their souls from rising to heaven. Their desire for flesh and blood during their lives made them into vampires after death. The Russians’ unhappy constitution did not destine all of them to the doomed state of vampirism. Marigner explained that people born under positive circumstances could debase themselves by crude behaviour and sin, but people born in unfavourable conditions could improve via the spiritual remedies of the Church. They could leave their crude corporeal nature behind and become more spiritual. If they did not rectify their ways during their lives, they had to atone after death and make their body and soul more spiritual. The souls of vampires were still connected to their dead bodies, and they chose this body as their home from which to do penance. These souls, wrapped by a kind of astral body, carried the fresh blood that they sucked to this corpse, to keep it flexible and suitable as a dwelling, and to make it less crude and more spiritual. In this way, they could ease the pain and make their crudeness affect the spirituality of their soul less.48

48

Marigner, ‘Sur les Stryges’, pp. 112–13: ‘Il n’y a point d’inconvenient ny d’impossibilité qu’ils choisissent leur cadavre propre, pour y faire l’expiation de leurs fautes, & tâchent à le rendre moins proportionné à la spiritualité de leur ame, pour adoucir leurs peines. Ils peuvent donc pour cela sortir du cadavre où ils font leur retraite, & aller dans la nuit pendant le sommeil, embrasser leurs plus proches Parens, & Amis tres-intimes, leur faire voir leur image, & leur succer le sang jusques à ce que la souffrance les éveille, & qu’à leurs cris l’on vienne à leur secours. Ce sang peut estre porté dans leur cadavre, pour rendre ce domicile moins infect & corrompu’. The debauched corporeal life has corrupted the vampire’s body and spirituality in a proportionate way. By carrying on fresh blood, the vampire can clean the corpse and at the same time reduce the heavy corporality and corruption of its spirituality.

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Marigner’s analysis does not go deeply into the way these vampires suck blood and how they carry it to the grave. This was one of the points of controversy in the vampire debates, however, because it seemed to present a problem related to the vampire’s spirituality versus its corporeality. Marigner only writes that the blood cannot have gone to the corpse by itself without being introduced by an appropriate agent. We might speculate that the soul’s envelope can become corporeal enough to suck and carry the blood. Again, Henry More’s understanding of the shoemaker from Breslau might be similar to Marigner’s analysis of vampires. For More, these spirits could condense their astral bodies so much as to become visible and punch and suffocate the living.49 It is striking that Marigner does not interpret the vampires’ sucking of their kin’s blood as a malignant phenomenon or a dangerous epidemic. When a vampire sucks someone’s blood, it is a warning to his loved ones, permitted by God, that they also lead a debased life and should repent. If these people die and become vampires, it is because of their depraved way of life. If they do not change their lives, their debased imagination, a result of their sins, perverted passions, and debauched ways, will also keep their souls earthbound and transform them into vampires. In Marigner’s account, vampirism is a disease resulting from a debauched imagination. This disease is as much moral as it is physical. For Marigner, morality and physiology are two sides of the same coin. This holds on the level of physiognomy as well as on the level of the coarseness or subtlety of the spirits that traverse the body and its environment. It is the ambiguity of the imagination, located at the juncture of morality and physiology, that makes this account possible.

Michael Ranft’s Magical Imagination In De Masticatione mortuorum in tumulis (1728), Michael Ranft opts explicitly for a natural philosophical or natural magical explanation of vampirism.50 Neither God nor the Devil has anything to do with vampires. Like related phenomena, such as the working of the divining rod, the bleeding of a corpse when its murderer is near,

49

Cf. ‘But their Bodies being of diaphanous Aire, it is impossible for us to see them, unless they will give themselves the trouble of reducing them to a more terrestrial consistency, whereby they may reflect light.’ More, Immortality, p. 161. 50

For another magical approach to vampirism, see Christian Friedrich Demelius, Philosophischer Versuch, ob nicht die merckwürdige Begebenheit derer Blutsauger in Nieder-Ungarn, an 1732 geschehen, aus denen principiis naturae könne erleutert werden (s.l., 1732).

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fascination, the presentiments of animals, or prophetic dreams, vampirism should be attributed to hidden powers in nature.51 Although Ranft’s book was presented as a study of the ‘mastication of the dead’ and was directly inspired by the famous 1725 vampirism case of Peter Poglojowitz in Kisilova, for Ranft the real phenomenon of vampirism was something very particular. Against most popular accounts of vampirism at the time, Ranft dismissed the idea that vampires suck blood as ridiculous. Ranft also went to great lengths to explain away the idea of masticating dead bodies by attributing the devoured shroud and hands as well as the chewing sounds coming from the graves to other causes, such as natural putrefaction or rats gnawing at the limbs of the corpses. For Ranft, it is only the deceptive power of the imaginations of feeble ladies, or similarly weak persons, overwhelmed by tremors of fear, which causes them to believe that they perceive chewing in tombs, and which makes them attribute it to the dead. Ranft dismisses the masticating of the dead as a human invention, a figment of the imagination.52 The fresh complexion of the corpses in the grave, the growing of hair and nails, the appearance of a new fresh skin, the flowing of the blood, and even the erection of the penis of the corpse are all attributed to natural causes, the study of which belongs to ordinary medicine and natural magic. Many of these phenomena can be attributed to the natural vital powers that remain in the body after death. It is even possible, according to Ranft and the many authorities he cites, that new blood is formed and stays in circulation for days, even weeks after death. Even if dead, a cadaver can still have a vegetative life. Ranft shares these physiological explanations of the bodily complexion of certain corpses with some of his contemporaries. What makes Ranft’s work special, however, is that he accepts as true that ‘vampires’ or so-called masticating corpses have a malignant influence on the living. For him, this is the central issue of vampirism. In order to explain this influence, Ranft draws on his metaphysical and magical theories. Nature as a whole is characterized by a unique principle: activity. The system of all bodies is itself a unique body in which all parts affect each other continuously by sympathies and antipathies. The atmosphere allows these bodies to act on one

51 52

Ranft, De Masticatione, I, §1, 2 & 7.

Ranft, De Masticatione, I, § 29: ‘Terror enim si pectora occupavit, cerebrum movet, in vanas mentem imagines evocat, multumque inter falsum ac verum mediae caliginis fundit. Quid igitur mirum, si mulier trepidationis plena vel alia huius farinae persona in coemeteriis aliquid sub tumulis pulsare aut stridere percepit, quod tamen nil nisi kat’ eidolon phantasia fuit?’

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another by effluvia, which form a permanent link between them. The flow of these vapours is the foundation of all magical action.53 Ranft has no need to expound a complete theory of magic; he will only refer to the power of the imagination, which has a magical efficacy and at the same time is singularly important for understanding the malignant operation of vampires and masticating death on the living.54 Only the strong imagination is able to produce an effect on another body, according to Ranft. The typical example was the force of the imagination of the pregnant woman on the child she carries. Ranft gives other examples as well, such as fascinations, bewitchments, and diseases contracted by fear. Even if the practitioners of magic do not really understand how magical aids work, Ranft argues that magical herbs, rituals, and cabbalistic signs have no intrinsic power, but all can be effective because they excite and strengthen the magical powers of the imagination of the magical practitioner. Even if demons or angels sometimes affect and excite the imagination, the power of the imagination itself is purely natural. Some believe with Avicenna that the imagination is so powerful as to be able to strike a horseman from its horse, or to cause storms and earthquakes. According to Ranft, one does not have to believe in such a strong imagination in order to admit that the imagination is powerful enough to make an illness turn for the worse and lead to death. After a person’s brutal death, it is normal that his friends, neighbours, and kin are strongly affected. Their conscience, feelings of responsibility, and even accusations by others might take their toll. These sad events might affect their spirits and imagination. Stories about death, the afterlife, and purgatory might have their effects too. The people close to the deceased might suffer nightmares and even have illusions of the dead coming back to them. They are not themselves anymore, their sadness causes melancholy to take root and nights without sleep weaken them and wear them out. This might in the end cause their own deaths.

53 Ranft, De Masticatione, II, § 41: ‘Nam cum cuilibet corpori a Natura insita sit perceptio aliqua grati & ingrati, facillime quoque cuiusvis alterius corporis operatio magica, quae fit per effluvia, sentiri & recipi potest. Videmus hinc tam mirabiles in morbis sympatheticis effectus, quia corpora nostra a natura prona sunt ad recipiendum in se, quicquid in magica operatione intenditur.’ On the desideratum of a history of vapours, see Vermeir, ‘The “Physical Prophet” and the Powers of the Imagination. Part I’, pp. 580–84. 54

Ranft, De Masticatione, II, § 44: ‘Quod vero imaginatio ad operationes magicas plurimum conferat, vel exinde pater, quod ea sola in alterius corpus possit fieri operatio.’

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In the early modern period, people believed that the imagination could generate diseases and particular illnesses, such as madness and hypochondria, but also the plague.55 Paracelsus, for instance, sketches the gloomy image of a woman, totally abandoned and without help in a time of plague, dying in the midst of the pains of childbirth. He thinks that at that moment she might curse the whole of mankind to die with her. But this curse, imprinted on the strong imagination of a dying pregnant woman, might out of itself create a contagion that will doubly poison the living. According to Ranft, the powers of imagination do not necessarily end after death. Some scholars believed that a corpse would start bleeding, by some kind of natural sympathetic principle, when its murderer was nearby. But Marci of Kronland writes that the dead body of a young girl started to bleed when someone came close whom the girl had falsely preconceived to be her murderer. At the time of her death, this idea became forcefully imprinted in her imagination. It was therefore not some kind of natural sympathy between the victim and the murderer, but it was the fixation of her still-active imagination that caused her body to bleed post-mortem. This phenomenon demonstrated that the imagination was still active after death.56 In a similar way, Ranft argued, the imagination of the vampire Peter Poglojowitz could still be active after death. Furthermore, the imagination did not necessarily have a diffuse action, but a vivid imagination could direct its power to specific individuals. In this way, in only eight days, Poglojowitz might actually have killed the nine particular persons whose deaths were attributed to him. Maybe he had had a strong hatred for and had fought with his neighbours so that he would not leave them in peace even after death. The magical power of the imagination, probably by emitting vapours, weakened his victims. It spread a kind of pestilence, directed at specific people, and made them wither away until they died.57 55

See, for example, Friedrich Hoffmann, Opera omnia physico-medica, 6 vols (Geneva, 1740–53); and Johann Samuel Carl, Vom Pest-Engel: oder medicinisches Votum zu denen heutigen Pest-Consiliis wohlmeynend beygetragen (Büdingen, 1721). Carl argues that the plague is partly due to fear and superstition. Because of fear, the body loses its composure and this may change its internal contexture. This leaves room for internal putrefaction which causes the plague. 56

See Joannes Marcus Marci a Kronland, Philosophia vetus restituta (Frankfurt, 1662); and Bohuslav Balbín, Miscellanea historica regni bohemiae, 6 vols (Prague, 1679–87). Both are mentioned in Ranft. 57

Ranft argues that the emission of vapours is the central magical action (De Masticatione, II, §40–41) and that the imagination is the quintessential magical power (De Masticatione, II, §43–44). Therefore, although Ranft does not make it very explicit, one can expect that the

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The dreadful disease of vampirism, which can kill numerous people, is to be attributed to the strong imagination of a deceased acquaintance. Annihilating the corpse by beheading or burning it will stop the action of its imagination and will end this contagion. The best way to prevent or end such plagues, according to Ranft, is to reconcile oneself with one’s neighbours and to live in peace with them, so one will not be harassed or taken to the grave by some death acquaintance. In his explanation of vampirism, Ranft uses different registers of the imagination. First, he explains that weak persons are carried away by their imagination when they imagine chewing sounds coming from the buried corpses in the graveyard. This notion is just a human invention, that is, a figment of the imagination. Second, Ranft does accept the pernicious effects a vampire can have on the living. On the one hand, he explains this by the credulity of the people who are carried away by fear and guilt after a relative dies. Their imaginations affect their bodies; they become sick and might even die. This is an imagination of the stronger kind, with real physiological effects on the victim’s own body. On the other hand, in his explanations, Ranft also has recourse to the strong imagination that has real effects outside the body and soul it belongs to. Here, Ranft introduces a strong imagination that is still active after death and that is the real cause of the disease of vampirism.

Figments of the Imagination in Sceptical and Theological Responses to Vampirism The most famous case of vampirism took place in 1727, after the death of Arnold Paole, a soldier in Medwegya, Serbia. The case lingered until 1731, when villagers still complained that vampires were terrorizing them and the Austrian authorities started formal investigations. The accounts and documents of this case were incorporated in a much larger German version of Ranft’s book in 1734.

However, the reverberations of Paole’s vampirism evoked so much attention that even the future Pope Benedict XIV and the Empress Maria Theresa became involved in the vampire debates. In the course of the eighteenth century, the blood-sucking

magical power of the imagination if the vampire works by means of vapours, as in the tradition of the powers of the imagination. (For this tradition, see Vermeir, ‘The “Physical Prophet” and the Powers of the Imagination. Part I’).

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and embodied nature of vampires became more pronounced. Partly as a result of this development, vampire stories became drawn into theological discourses and, at the same time, they were easier for more sceptical authors and later rationalists to reject. Sceptics had recourse to a different register of the imagination to explain away most of the phenomena of vampirism. In the Lettres Juives of 1738, Boyer d’Argens reflects that it would be easiest to deny the truth of these vampire stories totally, but he admits that this is difficult given the numerous attestations. He proposes accepting that there are many people dying from a curious affliction called ‘vampirism’, but he ascribes this disease to the power of the imagination of the victims. It is proven by many authors that the imagination of certain sick and susceptible people can cause very strong derangements of the body.58 The victims fancy being sucked by strange creatures and the fear caused by this imagination, being plagued day and night by these imaginary phantoms, affects their body in such a way that it can cost them their lives. The author of an article in the Glaneur historiques discovers the symptoms of a contagious fanaticism and even an ‘epidemic of the imagination’ in the vampire craze.59 Vampirism, for him, is nothing more than the result of a shaken imagination, but this imagination had real effects, and by affecting others’ imaginations, these effects could be transmitted to other people, causing a real epidemic. Even some of the highest Church officials adhered to these sceptical arguments. The theological stakes were particularly high because vampires and saints were similar in that their corpses were not subject to bodily corruption.60 Therefore, it was essential to determine whether vampirism was miraculous, demonic, natural, or just fraudulent. In the 1749 edition of his seminal book on beatification and canonization, Prospero Lambertini, Archbishop of Bologna and the future Pope Benedict XIV, discussed vampires.61 He concluded that the incorruptibility of corpses should be ruled miraculous only after an extremely rigorous consideration of evidence and other possible explanations, because in most cases it could be explained

58 Jean-Baptiste de Boyer, marquis d’Argens, ‘Lettre 137’, in Lettres Juives, ou correspondance philosophique, historique et critique, 2nd edn (La Haye, 1738); also cited in Dom Augustin Calmet, Traité sur les apparitions des esprits, et sur les vampires, ou les revenants de Hongrie, de Moravie, &c., 2 vols (Paris: Debure, 1751), II, 46–48. 59

Le Glaneur historique, The Hague, 18 (3 March 1732) and 22 (17 March 1732). Also cited in Calmet, Traité, II, 54–59. 60 61

See also Ranft, De Masticatione, II, § 4.

Prospero Lambertini, De servorum Dei beatificatione er de Beatorum canonizatione (Rome, 1749), bk IV , pt I, chap. 21, pp. 323–24.

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Figure 8. Frontispiece of Michael Ranft, Tractat von dem Kauen und Schmatzen der Todten in Gräbern, worin die wahre Beschaffenheit derer Hungarischen Vampyrs und BlutSauger gezeigt, auch alle von dieser Materie bißher zum Vorschein gekommene Schrifften recensiret werden (Leipzig: Teubner, 1734). Reproduction from Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, 8° XV: 23. Courtesy of Klassik Stiftung, Weimar.

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by natural causes. As for vampires, he followed the sceptics and dismissed belief in them as an effect of fear and imagination.62 The Benedictine Dom Augustin Calmet took a more ambiguous stance. Viewed from a purely rational perspective, Calmet wrote, he could not believe in vampires. Calmet specifically had problems with the embodied nature of vampires. Some had even claimed that the feet of vampires appeared muddy the day after they showed up among the living. This would suggest not that some kind of semispiritual appearance (an astral body or spiritual envelope of the soul) harassed the living, but that the corpse itself left the grave. Calmet stated that it was ‘morally impossible’63 for revenants to leave their tombs, especially if it was said that they did so without disturbing the earth of the graves.64 These stories Calmet also relegates to the imagination of the living, who wanted to reassure themselves that they had not erred in executing these corpses (desecration and mutilation of corpses was against the law and it was a sin according to Christian doctrine). As Fernando Vidal has argued, however, it was also the embodied nature of the vampire that made Calmet suspend his disbelief in vampires.65 Even if he would not believe in vampires after considering them from a purely rational perspective, a religious perspective outdid his rational considerations. These wandering corpses too much resembled the resurrected Christ and the blessed who would be resurrected in their own bodies at the Last Judgement.66 In his 1694 article in the

62

See the excellent study by Fernando Vidal, ‘Extraordinary Bodies and the Physicotheological Imagination’, in The Faces of Nature in Enlightenment Europe, ed. by Lorraine Daston and Gianna Pomata (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts, 2003), pp. 61–96. 63 This means: practically impossible (according to human reason and experience, for instance), but not impossible in principle (it could be possible for theological reasons, such as the resurrection of the flesh). 64

See Calmet, Traité, II, 299–302.

65

Vidal, ‘Extraordinary Bodies’, pp. 74–82.

66

Gabor Klaniczay has argued that vampires replaced witches in seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury Eastern Europe. (Gabor Klaniczay, ‘Decline of Witches and Rise of Vampires in Eighteenth-Century Hapsburg Monarchy’, Ethnologica Europea, 17 (1987), 165–80). If vampires retained some of the same social and religious functions, this might partly explain the popular connection between vampires and demonic involvement. For her part, Marie-Hélène Huet argues perceptively that eighteenth-century reports turned the vampire into an inverted image of Christ. ‘The vampire’s public life starts after his death, and, instead of fasting and resisting temptation, he indulges in blood feasts that cannot be stopped until forty days after his life as a vampire has started. Like an inverted image of Christ, the vampire wins disciples who will in turn make their victims into new converts. Vampirism is not just a plague, it is a false religion. The sacrificial

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Mercure Galant, Marigner had already discussed the resurrection of the body in the context of vampirism. According to Marigner, many phenomena in nature prefigured and embodied the divine truth of the resurrection of the body. St Paul had written about the seed that grows into a plant as a metaphor for the resurrection of the body. Marigner mentioned the generation of plants, but also mineral processes and palingenesis. Most strikingly, he described how ‘human phantoms’ could emerge from the blood of corpses. A spirit that remained in the corpse in the central heat of the blood could rise in the air and condense in the cold night, representing the phantom of the deceased as an obscurely luminous body floating above the graveyard. This was a natural and incomplete process, which could never be mistaken with the miraculous resurrection of the body at the end of time. It was only a divine sign, placed into nature, which embodied and testified to a religious truth. The situation was different for Calmet. He also felt the need to find a physical expression of a fundamentally theological fact. Partaking in the tradition of physicotheology, and physica sacra, however, he did not look for divinely instituted signs, but for natural processes that could support and make more credible theological truths in a literal way.67 At the same time, he believed that the existence and action of corporeal revenants was one of those phenomena that ‘neither Theology nor Philosophy knows how to explain’.68 Vampires were ultimately inexplicable for Calmet because the religious and philosophical approaches seemed to contradict one another, and it was impossible for him to take either a straightforwardly fideist or naturalist position because of his

burning of vampires cannot fail to evoke the burning at the stake of heretics and devil worshippers. […] Reflecting on the likelihood that people can come back after their death to haunt the living, and wondering whether there are resurrections, Calmet comments on the most sacred resurrection, that of Christ. […] A last unexpected ritual echoes a religious sacrament: the Eucharist. On several occasions, it is suggested that the way to get rid of vampires is to eat them. “In Russia,” notes Calmet, “people eat bread mixed with vampire’s blood” (p. 100). The vampire thus becomes once more the inverted body of Christ, the unlikely Messiah of a troubled postmortem life, bringing both death and resurrection to his disciples.’ Marie-Hélène Huet, ‘Deadly Fears: Dom Augustin Calmet’s Vampires and the Rule Over Death’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 21 (1997), 222–32 (pp. 227–28). 67

See Peter Harrison for a grand narrative about the shift from a symbolic attitude to a literalist approach to nature and religion in The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 68

Calmet, cited in Vidal, ‘Extraordinary Bodies’, p. 82.

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physicotheological commitment, in which natural explanation and religious belief converged.69 As Vidal writes: ‘Denying vampires outright, without leaving open a remote possibility that they be real, seemed to Calmet dangerously close to refusing authenticated apparitions and resurrections. Under the circumstances, only suspension of judgment appeared safe.’70 The vampire crazes of the mid-eighteenth century came to an end after prolonged official investigations and condemnations by imperial authorities. Empress Maria Theresa’s court physician, Gerhard van Swieten, wrote a report against vampirism beliefs and the Empress issued a Decree on Vampires in March 1755 condemning belief in vampirism as ‘superstition and fraud’. She observed that investigations had found nothing unnatural. She prohibited religious orders and local authorities from making judgements in vampire cases and declared vampirism a mere figment of the imagination.

Conclusion: A Spectrum of Imagination Vampires were creatures at the borders of what was acceptable in early modern medical, philosophical, and theological discourse. Nevertheless, some scholars tried to get to grips with the phenomenon and tried to explain it (or explain it away). Sometimes, they had to go to the limits of their conceptual framework do this. This gives us an excellent opportunity to study the diversity, latitude, and flexibility of the belief systems of early modern scholars and savants. Typically, explanations of curious events in the early modern period drew on certain characteristics of the imagination. This study of early modern theories of vampirism serves as an excellent lens to trace a whole spectrum of different views of the imagination, and how changes occurred from the mid-seventeenth century until the mid-eighteenth century. The central characteristics of vampirism were not stable throughout the early modern period. Vampires started to suck blood only in the late seventeenth century and they became more and more embodied in the course of the eighteenth century. Furthermore, scholarly authors were careful in deciding what to accept of the stories that were circulated before they started their explanatory

69

For Calmet, if the vampire as a corporeal revenant was physically impossible, it would cast doubt on the theological maxim of the resurrection of the body. Because of his religious beliefs, he had to admit the possibility of vampirism against his philosophical convictions. 70

Vidal, ‘Extraordinary Bodies’, p. 82.

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endeavours. Some authors, such as Marigner, accepted the semi-corporeal visions of wandering dead and the sucking and carrying away of blood. Ranft, on the other hand, dismissed the belief that vampires sucked blood as ridiculous, but he accepted that some corpses could have pernicious effects on the living, because of the magical powers of their imagination. Sceptical writers did not accept much of popular vampire lore. They did admit that in some cases many people fell ill at the same time, and they tried to account for this by introducing the idea of an epidemic of the imagination. For his part, Calmet did not know what to believe, because his philosophical and religious commitments pulled in different directions, and his writings testify to this ambivalence. Finally, the future Pope Benedict XIV, Empress Maria Theresa, and later rationalists such as Voltaire, denied any truth to the popular vampire beliefs. I have particularly focused on the first reception of vampirism in Western Europe. The first theoretical tracts explaining vampirism emerged from a circle of thinkers interested in natural magic and the occult. Looking at the way they employed the imagination in their theories, I also contrasted their views with a selection of later writers on vampirism.71 All the writers I studied used the concept of the imagination to make their case. For all of them, vampirism was a ‘disease of the imagination’ or an ‘imaginary disease’ in one sense or another. However, it should be clear that they all had different concepts of the ‘imagination’ and many used multiple meanings of the word in the same text. Some referred to the imagination of the victims to explain why they withered away, while others attributed pernicious effects to the still-active imagination of the buried corpse. Ranft, for instance, employed the full spectrum of the imagination in his theories, from weak and unreal to strong and with real effects on external bodies. He referred in different places and for different purposes to the product of the imagination as a humanly invented figment or maybe even fraud, to the imagination as a psychosomatic power with the potential to create an epidemic, and to the imagination as a magical force that could act outside its proper body. For magically oriented writers such as Marigner and Ranft, imagination and reality were not in opposition. The imagination of someone could have a very real,

71

Anja Lauper seems to think only later authors referred to the imagination to explain vampirism. Although she gives an interesting account of Johann Christoph Harenberg’s Vernünftige und Christliche Gedancken über die Vampirs […] (1733), her corpus and analytic framework are not that relevant for our current purposes. (Anja Lauper, ‘Die “phantastische Seuche” Johann Christoph Harenbergs Theoretisierung der vampiristischen Einbildungskraft’, in Dracula Unbound, ed. by Christian Begemann, Britta Herrmann, and Harald Neumeyer (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2008), pp. 51–73.)

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direct, and natural effect on someone else. The power of the imagination did not refer to the isolated internal world of a lunatic, but to a power to affect the world in a very concrete and directed manner. The imagination was even so powerful that it could act after the death of a person, and it was this strong imagination that turned him or her into a vampire. For Marigner and Ranft, the imagination was a moral and religious faculty as much as it was grounded in a physical and physiological reality. This ambiguity allowed these authors to merge religious and natural explanations. As Marigner asserted, vampirism is partly a natural and partly a supernatural phenomenon. For them, a disease was not just some bodily affliction; it could be a divine punishment or warning at the same time. In this account, religion, natural philosophy, and natural magic merged without conflict. More sceptical writers, such as the authors of the articles in the Lettres Juives and the Glanneur historique, but also Calmet and Lambertini, moved their attention from the imagination of the deceased person or ‘vampire’ to the imaginations of the victims instead. In their accounts, too, the imagination could be very forceful, but it affected only the victim’s own mind and body. Here the imagination is a ‘psychosomatic’ force, but such a strong one that it could bring about death in the space of a few days. There are some hints that the imagination of the victim could also affect the imagination of other victims, having a contagious transitive effect, and sometimes resulting in real epidemics. This is not thought of in magical terms, however, but is a ‘moral’ force that works by the impact of stories and images combined with fear and credulity. Finally, Empress Maria Theresa and her physician dismissed all there is to vampirism as illusions of the imagination. The imagination was locked up in the internal realms of a solipsistic mind. At the end of this history, the imagination creates only figments. The spectrum of different powers and meanings of the imagination in the early modern period is reduced to a powerless faculty that only produces unreal spectres.72

72

This research was supported by the Fund of Scientific Research — Flanders and Harvard’s R adcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies. A first version of this paper was presented at the Princeton-Bucharest Seminar in Early Modern Philosophy 2009. I would like to express my gratitude to Yi Jean Chow and Daan Harmsen for their research assistance and to Yasmin Haskell for her editorial efforts.

‘[W ]HAT FATIGUES WE FINE LADIES ARE FATED TO ENDURE ’: S OCIOSOMATIC H YSTERIA AS A F EMALE ‘E NGLISH M ALADY ’

Heather Meek

I

n 1702, poet Anne Finch aptly labelled the eighteenth-century medical condition known variously as spleen, melancholy, vapours, hypochondria, hysteria, and nerves ‘Proteus to abus’d Mankind’.1 Indeed, the condition was in many respects indefinable. Lay and medical writings provided endless lists of mental and physical symptoms, many of which mimicked those of other diseases. Understandings of the condition were evolving slowly into something like what we might call depression. However, the influence of classical humoral theory, even though ostensibly dismissed, lingered. Many medical men saw mental disorders as rooted firmly in the body, and emerging mechanical and nervous models paralleled humoral ones as somatic imbalances and impurities were seen as primary causes. Such outmoded views were prevalent in explanations of female mental troubles, usually called hysteria, or vapours. These ills were commonly perceived as being inherent to a disordered female body. Weak nerves, unruly animal spirits, corrupt reproductive organs, and even wandering wombs were thought to be at the root of the disease, and physician Thomas Sydenham’s 1682 assertion that most women suffered from hysteria to some degree carried considerable weight over the course of the long eighteenth century.2 As G. S. 1

Anne Finch, ‘The Spleen: A Pindarik Poem’, 1702, in The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea, ed. by Myra Reynolds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1903), pp. 248–52 (l. 2). 2

G. S. Rousseau writes that Sydenham ‘took the largest strides’ in the progression of eighteenth-century medical theorists, and indeed, Sydenham insists that hypochondria and

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Rousseau observes, ‘[t]hroughout the Restoration and eighteenth century, at least in the British Isles and France, even the healthy woman was […] seen as a walking womb’.3 In this paper, I hope to offer an alternative view of eighteenth-century hysteria by examining poetry and life-writing by Anne Finch, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Elizabeth Carter, and Hester Thrale Piozzi — women who themselves suffered from and wrote about their mental ills. Their works offer unique perspectives in the quest to define hysteria by revealing a dialectical relationship between medical symptoms and eighteenth-century society. In their hands, hysteria emerges as a ‘sociosomatic’ illness, to use Arthur Kleinman’s term; it is a disease of culture (as opposed to nature) whose roots are to be found in social transformations and expectations, and in gender norms.4 A model of this kind

hysteria — the male and female versions of mental disorder — are as alike ‘as one egg is to another’. Nonetheless, he resorts to gendered explanations: ‘As to females, if we except those who lead a hard and hardy life, there is rarely one who is wholly free from [hysterical disorders].’ A similar view is espoused by physician Bernard Mandeville when he writes, in 1711, that the number ‘of hysterick Women far exceeds that of hypochondriack Men’. The notion of woman’s inherent weakness and dysfunction is echoed in 1725 by Richard Blackmore, who writes that women’s nerves are ‘of a finer and more delicate Thread’ than men’s, and again in 1729 by Nicholas Robinson, who refers to female ‘animal Spirits’ as ‘by Nature of a tender and volatile Disposition, easily incited and scattered, till their violent and irregular Flights produce the Symptoms proper to this Disease’. Similar views persist into the latter half of the century: Robert Whytt, in his 1764 treatise, sees the nervous system in women as ‘generally more moveable than in men’. G. S. Rousseau, ‘“A Strange Pathology”: Hysteria in the Early Modern World, 1500–1800’, in Hysteria Beyond Freud, ed. by Sander L. Gilman and others (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 91–221 (p. 145); Thomas Sydenham, ‘Epistolary Dissertation to Dr. Cole’, 1682, in The Works of Thomas Sydenham, M.D., 2 vols (Birmingham, AL : Classics of Medicine Library, 1979), I, 53–118 (p. 85); Bernard Mandeville, A Treatise of the Hypochondriack and Hysterick Passions (London: Leach, 1711), p. 166; Richard Blackmore, A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours: or, Hypochondriacal and Hysterical Affections. With Three Discourses on the Nature and Cure of the Cholick, Melancholy, and Palsies (London: Pemberton, 1725), p. 130; Nicholas Robinson, A New System of the Spleen, Vapours, and Hypochondriack Melancholy (London: Bettesworth, 1729), p. 52; Robert Whytt, ‘Observations on the Nature, Causes, and Cure of those Disorders which Are Commonly Called Nervous, Hypochondriac, or Hysteric’, 1764, in Significant Contributions to the History of Psychology 1750–1920, E: Physiological Psychology, ed. by Daniel N. Robinson, 4 vols (Washington, DC : University Publications of America, 1978), I, 21–147 (p. 97). 3 4

Rousseau, ‘A Strange Pathology’, p. 149.

Elaine Showalter, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, and Mark Micale have recognized the elusive and protean nature of hysteria. Focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Showalter argues that the hysteric woman as cultural icon shifts with the ages, thus revealing that her disease

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more effectively highlights the vast and complex causes of hysteria, and elucidates social contexts within which women both wrote about and struggled against the condition.

The ‘sociomatic reticulum’ of Hysteria In his prologue to Social Origins of Distress and Disease, Arthur Kleinman offers this explanation of the ‘sociosomatic’ dimension of depression: In the following chapters depression is viewed as a disease characterized by psychobiological dysfunctions which appear to be universal, but which is best regarded as a relationship between a person and society. Depressive illness not only reveals the relationship a person establishes with society; it also illumines the influence of society on individuals. This social influence extends to the person’s cognitions, emotions, even physiology. Analyzing the relationship of depression (or any disorder) to society offers a glimpse of a sociosomatic reticulum (a symbolic bridge) that ties individuals to each other and to the local systems within which they live. Depression is thus a social affect and disorder: the origins of depression are meanings and relations in the social world, and these in turn are its consequences. The social world is affective; it is embodied in the individual and his or her disorders.5

This view of depression enhances an understanding of eighteenth-century incarnations of the illness.6 Indeed, the popular condition known as ‘spleen’

is culturally constructed. Smith-Rosenberg’s analysis of hysteria in Victorian America looks at the condition from a ‘social perspective’, and ‘explores the complex relationships that exist between cultural norms and individual behaviour, between behaviour defined as disease and behaviour considered normal’. In his emphasis on the importance of a feminist historiography of hysteria, Micale writes that the condition has ‘represented, quite literally, an embodiment of female nature in the eyes and minds of male observers’. Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1985), pp. 10–11; Carroll SmithRosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 198; Mark S. Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 68. 5

Arthur Kleinman, Social Origins of Distress and Disease: Depression, Neurasthenia, and Pain in Modern China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 1–2. 6

Using the word depression to designate eighteenth-century mental illness is somewhat risky. G. S. Rousseau recognizes the problems inherent in ‘anachronistically impos[ing] the newer psychological depression back on to the eighteenth century’. ‘Melancholy, spleen, vapours, bile, nerves, hypochondriasis, hysteria, fits, the entire vocabulary of being in the dumps’, he argues, suggest ‘boundaries’, and are ‘hardly interchangeable’ with ‘the more modern depression’. Nonetheless, ‘the older version contained a sufficient quantity of characteristics of the newer to

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emerged from a complex web of social causes. Rapid economic growth led to transformations which left many Britons unsure of their place in society, and their struggles and negotiations in this regard often led to a strain of spleen that was different in key ways from its earlier forms. In a changing economic climate, luxurious living became associated with mental troubles, and spleen was popularized as it became associated with privilege and power. Many assumed the pose of melancholy because it was a sign of status, or because it was fashionable to do so, revealing the condition as both ‘social affect and disorder’.7 The ‘sociosomatic reticulum’ of spleen, then, was the result of a broad range of cultural definitions and expectations which circulated freely in the period, and which individuals internalized and then exhibited in the form of nervous symptoms. The ‘symbolic bridge’ connecting spleen and society is further complicated by the mixture of terms used to designate the various strains of eighteenth-century mental illness. Hysteria (closely akin to vapours) was a term associated most frequently with women, and its connotations were largely negative: as discussed above, it evoked lingering theories of wandering wombs, diseased uteri, and inherently weak and pathological female bodies. Consequently, sufferers were helpless, ignorant, irrational, unimaginative, and disengaged from the public and political happenings of their day. Spleen and melancholy, by contrast, were terms most often applied to men, and associations were typically positive. The splenetic man was often solitary and inward-looking, but he was also creative and intellectually gifted. As the despondency of the English was exalted, sufferers could be viewed as accomplished men of the world. Implicit in my use of the word hysteria is a challenge to such gendered terminology.8 On the one hand, I use the

permit the conceptualization of a “history of depression” as if it had been a single, continuous category’. Rousseau insists on this model ‘despite its obvious discontinuity’, and indeed, examining eighteenth-century mental illness through the lens of contemporary depression is productive in many ways. G. S. Rousseau, ‘Depression’s Forgotten Genealogy: Notes Towards a History of Depression’, History of Psychiatry, 11 (2000), 71–106 (pp. 73–74). 7

Jeremy Schmidt explores this issue in Melancholy and the Care of the Soul. In his chapter ‘Curing Augustan Hysterics’, he looks at the ways eighteenth-century physicians viewed hypochondria and hysteria as ‘pathological form[s] of sociability’. According to some, ‘hypochondriacs and hysterics were […] intentionally using physical illness behaviours to express, to mask, or perhaps to legitimate and understand, emotional perturbance, and many suggested that hysteria was a ploy of specifically female desire’. Schmidt goes on to examine the spiritual and moral dimensions of these ailments. Jeremy Schmidt, Melancholy and the Care of the Soul: Religion, Moral Philosophy and Madness in Early Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 163. 8

Mark Micale’s Hysterical Men: The Hidden History of Male Nervous Illness provides yet

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term to designate a uniquely female strain of mental affliction, but I look beyond commonplace understandings to uncover a ‘sociosomatic’ condition — a female ‘English Malady’ of sorts — in which female sufferers are at once rooted in their bodies and their homes, and granted entrance into literary, imaginative, and civic spaces. The title of George Cheyne’s 1733 medical treatise, The English Malady, hints at the powerful relationship between disease and culture in this period.9 ‘The English Malady’, Cheyne suggests, is so named because it is a condition particular to British natives. The epidemic proportions of the disorder in England, Cheyne felt, were due to the country’s variable weather, geographic position, rapid progresses in trade and commerce, and ‘Wealth and Abundance’.10 Though he aligns personal virtue with good health, suggesting that ‘[i]t is the miserable man himself who creates his miseries, and begets his Torture’, and that people bring ‘all their Wretchedness on themselves, by constantly over-loading, bursting and cramming the poor passive Machine’, Cheyne does not wholly blame individuals for provoking their own illnesses. He points to a rapidly changing culture in which the lures of fashion and luxury had become difficult, even impossible to resist.11 The ‘Rich, the Lazy, the Luxurious, and the Unactive’, he writes, ‘those

another perspective on the meanings of ‘hysteria’ in the early modern period. Micale points to ‘the existence of masculine nervous and mental illness’ throughout the ages and claims that ‘in Great Britain for a full century following the 1688 revolution, the male hysterias flourished’. Mark S. Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and Its Interpretations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 6, 48. 9

Anita Guerrini elaborates upon this relationship in her book on the life and work of George Cheyne. Though she focuses on the spiritual dimension of spleen, she positions Cheyne at the centre of a debate about ‘eighteenth-century madness and its cultural place’ and highlights his ‘vision of melancholy and “the spleen” as a complex amalgam of physical, mental, and spiritual influences at a time when most believed it to be largely physical in origin’. According to Guerrini, Cheyne recognizes spleen as a real, somatic illness, while also viewing the ailment as fashionable — as ‘directly attributed to the progress of society’. Anita Guerrini, Obesity and Depression in the Enlightenment: The Life and Times of George Cheyne (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2000), pp. xx, xv, 144. 10

George Cheyne, The English Malady: or, A Treatise of Nervous Diseases of all Kinds, as Spleen, Vapours, Lowness of Spirits, Hypochondriacal, and Hysterical Distempers, &c. In Three Parts (Dublin: Powell, 1733), pp. i–ii. 11 Cheyne, The English Malady, pp. 20, 203. Cheyne himself admits to having been seduced by these lures. In his final chapter, titled ‘The Case of the Author’, he explains that he engaged in a temperate (yet sedentary) lifestyle until he moved to London, where he ‘all of a sudden changed [his] whole Manner of Living’ and ‘found the Bottle Companions, the younger Gentry, and Free-

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who fare daintily and live voluptuously, those who are furnished with the rarest Delicacies, the richest Foods, and the most generous Wines’ are susceptible to the English Malady.12 Over-consumption, he implies, is not merely the result of individual weakness or moral depravity, for it is an accepted lifestyle among the English upper classes. Indeed, those ‘inhabiting barren, and uncultivated Countries, Desarts, Forests, under the Poles of the Line, or those who are rude and destitute of the Arts of Ingenuity and Invention’ are rarely plagued with the condition.13 The English, Cheyne concludes, are splenetic as a result of social, economic, and intellectual change. ‘Coffee, Tea, Chocolate, and Snuff’, ‘Assemblies, Musick Meetings, Plays, Cards and Dice’, as well as new inventions such as ‘Coaches […] improv’d with Spring horses’ are all listed as possible causes for nervous disorder.14 As consumerism, commerce, trade, urban expansion, and consumption boomed, physicians continued to recognize culture as an important origin of nervous disorder. James Makittrick Adair, in his 1786 treatise, praises England’s rapid advances, but acknowledges that ‘Fashion, like its companion Luxury […]

livers’. This led to a flurry of symptoms, including ‘giddiness, lowness, anxiety and terror’, fits of the gout, and asthma. He also suffered from obesity, and at one point ‘swell’d to such an enormous Size’ that his weight ‘exceeded thirty two Stone’. Ibid., pp. 222, 224, 235. 12

Cheyne, The English Malady, p. 20. Cheyne suggests that nervous disorder is caused by an overindulgence that wears on the body and disturbs the natural ‘Ballance between the Force or Elasticity of the Solids, or the moving Organs and Channels, and the Resistance of the Fluids mov’d in them’. When an individual ‘tak[es] down more than the Supplies of Action and Living require in Quantity’, he suggests, ‘[they] must suffer Diseases, Pains, and Miseries, in Proportion to the Greatness of the Overballance’. Ibid., p. 21. 13 14

Cheyne, The English Malady, p. 20.

Cheyne, The English Malady, pp. 34, 36. G. J. Barker-Benfield discusses ‘the permeation of “groceries” in the English diet’ in the eighteenth century, and identifies ‘a connection between nervous susceptibility and nervous disorders and the new, mass consumption of tea and coffee, their caffeine compounded with lashings of sugar, as well as tobacco in its various forms’. He finds an example in Samuel Johnson’s ‘relish’ for tea, of which Boswell wrote: ‘The quantities that he drank of it at all hours were so great, that his nerves must have been uncommonly strong, not to have been extremely relaxed by such an intemperate use of it, he assured me, that he never felt the least inconvenience from it; which is a proof that the fault of this constitution was rather a too great tension of fibres than the contrary.’ G. J. BarkerBenfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 26.

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may be occasionally injurious’.15 Though fashion advanced ‘civilization’, it also ‘creat[ed] artificial wants’ that contributed to the spread of nervous disease.16 The consequences of eighteenth-century luxury and fashion were particularly insidious for women. ‘Following the same logic as that which associated hypochondria with reclusiveness or scholarly obsession,’ John Mullan observes, ‘women are declared to be more prone than men to nervous disorder because they are supposed to lead sedentary lives uninvolved in the business of acquisition and yet rich in the experience of luxury.’17 Moreover, women were both ‘consuming and consumable objects’, and the woman of fashion was encouraged to assume the symptoms of nervous disorder.18 In ‘The Spleen’, Anne Finch describes a brand of hysteria common to the ‘weaker sort’:19 When the Coquette whom ev’ry Fool admires, Wou’d in Variety be Fair, And, changing hastily the Scene, From Light, Impertinent, and Vain, Assumes a soft, a melancholy Air, And of her Eyes rebates the wand’ring Fires, The careless Posture, and the Head reclin’d, The thoughtful, and composed Face, Proclaiming the withdrawn, the Absent Mind,

15

James Makittrick Adair, Medical Cautions: Chiefly for the Consideration of Invalids (Bath: Crutwell, 1787), p. 9. 16 Adair, Medical Cautions, p. 10. The notion that overindulgence led to nervous disorder was a prominent theme in most of the medical treatises of the period. Richard Blackmore sees the ‘Intemperate drinking of Wine and strong cordial Waters’ as ‘destroy[ing] the Appetite’ and eventually ‘introduc[ing] a Palsy into the Stomach’, and Nicholas Robinson discusses the dangers of ‘over-charg[ing] the Blood with unfriendly Juices’. John Armstrong, in his didactic The Art of Preserving Health: A Poem (1744), blames alcohol, debauchery, bad diet, and the ‘abominable growth | Of rest and gluttony’ for nervous disorders. He criticizes the people of Albion, who ‘consecrate’ the ‘silent hours’ to ‘mirth and wine’ and ‘sleep till noon’. This behaviour, he suggests, inevitably leads to illness. Blackmore, A Treatise of the Spleen and Vapours, p. 206; Robinson, A New System, p. 265; John Armstrong, The Art of Preserving Health: A Poem, 1744 (Dublin: Rudd, 1756), I, ll. 211–13, II, ll. 73–74, III, ll. 421–23. 17

John Mullan, ‘Hypochondria and Hysteria: Sensibility and the Physicians’, EighteenthCentury Theory and Interpretation, 25 (1984), 141–74 (p. 156). 18

Helen Deutsch, ‘Symptomatic Correspondences: The Author’s Case in EighteenthCentury Britain’, Cultural Critique, 42 (1999), 35–80 (p. 35). 19

Finch, ‘The Spleen’, l. 114.

382

Heather Meek Allows the Fop more liberty to gaze, Who gently for the tender Cause inquires.20

Finch, of course, satirizes such ‘Coquette[s]’. She highlights the artificiality of their spleen in the ‘hast[y]’ shift from an air ‘Impertinent, and Vain’ to one ‘soft [and] melancholy’. The coquette’s elaborate affectation is for the benefit of her male onlookers, Finch claims. The ‘careless Posture’, the ‘Head reclin’d’, and the ‘thoughtful, and composed face’ are all to capture the attention of the Fop. Paradoxically, there is nothing ‘thoughtful’ about the lady; she merely wants the Fop to ‘gaze’, to admire her fairness, and to be lured by her physical wiles and won over by the ‘wand’ring Fires’ of seduction. To assume the pose of hysteria, it seems, was to attract men. Such ladies were not necessarily to blame for feigning illness, for their posturing was deeply ingrained in contemporaneous understandings of the condition. In ‘The Spleen’, Finch claims that before the fad of ‘spleen’ we find man in his ‘fertile Garden in the fragrant East’:21 No armed Sweets, until thy Reign, Cou’d shock the Sense, or in the Face A flusht, unhandsom Colour place. Now the Jonquille o’ercomes the feeble Brain; We faint beneath the Aromatick Pain, Till some offensive scent thy Pow’rs appease, And Pleasure we resign for short, and nauseous Ease.22

The speaker here implies that fashion determines the manifestations of illness. Sweet perfumes and the ‘Jonquille’, a fragrant flower, did not commonly overwhelm the ladies’ spirits before the fashionable ‘Reign’ of spleen. Now, they incite physiological changes: they ‘shock the sense’, overcome ‘the feeble Brain’, and cause the ladies to faint. Fashion and medicine have become indistinguishable, and Finch’s paradoxical word pairings — ‘armed Sweets’, ‘Aromatick Pain’, and ‘nauseous Ease’ — further reinforce this idea, conjuring a condition that is both fashionable and painful, both artificial and real, both ‘social affect and disorder’. With ‘The Spleen’, Finch anticipates a trend in the second half of the eighteenth century, when female weakness was aggrandized for the sake of male

20

Finch, ‘The Spleen’, ll. 99–109.

21

Finch, ‘The Spleen’, ll. 34–35.

22

Finch, ‘The Spleen’, ll. 37–43.

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pleasure, and when, as G. J. Barker-Benfield notes, ‘[a] high value was placed’ on ‘women’s greater sensibility’, which ‘men said they found […] a source of attraction’.23 In 1774, John Gregory informed his female readers that ‘extreme sensibility which blushing indicates, may be a weakness and encumbrance in our sex […] but in yours it is peculiarly engaging’.24 Mary Wollstonecraft vehemently criticized such views, and in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) provides the example of a ‘woman of fashion’ she had once known, ‘who was more than commonly proud of her delicacy and sensibility’; she ‘thought a distinguishing taste and puny appetite the height of all human perfection, and acted accordingly’. ‘I have seen this weak sophisticated being neglect all the duties of life, yet recline with self-complacency on a sofa’, Wollstonecraft continues, ‘and boast of her want of appetite as a proof of delicacy that extended to, or, perhaps arose from, her exquisite sensibility; for it is difficult to render intelligible such ridiculous jargon.’ In assuming the poses of delicacy and sensibility, as this woman believed she should, she actually became weak and delicate. Wollstonecraft here recognizes the thin line between feigned illness and genuine illness, and suggests that the former eventually evolves into the latter. As a result of this encouraged indolence, Barker-Benfield observes, women’s ‘bodies were weak and their understandings narrowed’; moreover, they ‘were trained to affect a weakness which eventually became real’.25 The ‘sociosomatic reticulum’ of hysteria, then, served as an oppressive force for eighteenth-century women. Dominant masculine ideologies celebrated women as luxurious, weak, and hysterical, driven in large part by the eighteenth-century male world of commerce. Understood in these terms, hysteria was a culturally determined category that served to narrow woman’s sphere and render her powerless.

23

Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, p. 28. In The Disease of Virgins, Helen King elaborates upon the eroticization of doctor-patient relationships from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. She turns to physician Ambroise Rue, for instance, who, in 1819, ‘described how menarche “gives to this young beauty, no matter how sad or languid, the freshness and sparkle which mark the dawn of her life”’. Though many physicians attempted to dispel the myth of the ‘erotic chlorotic’, others ‘continued to find sufferers attractive’. Helen King, The Disease of Virgins: Green Sickness, Chlorosis, and the Problems of Puberty (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 6–7. 24 25

Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, p. 28.

G. J. Barker-Benfield, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Depression and Diagnosis: The Relation between Sensibility and Women’s Susceptibility to Nervous Disorders’, Psychohistory Review, 13 (1985), 15–31 (p. 27).

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The ‘p[u]rsuit of pleasure will be ever attended with Pain’ Even as women of the ‘weaker sort’ were seduced and rendered ill by fashion, luxury, and idleness, others strove to resist these lures. In much of her poetry, Finch exposes the absurdity of the hysteric coquette who feigns spleen for show. She does this by countering what Myra Reynolds calls ‘the true apostolic succession of poetical heroines who abhorred the country’. Reynolds provides a partial list of these Restoration and eighteenth-century heroines: Isabella in John Dryden’s Wild Gallant, who ‘cannot abide to be in the country like a wild beast in the wilderness’; Harriet in George Etheredge’s The Man of Mode, who ‘counted all beyond Hyde Park a desert’; Alexander Pope’s ‘fond virgin’, whose ‘unhappy fate compelled her to seek wholesome country air’; and [Edward] Young’s Fulvia, who preferred ‘smoke and dust and noise and crowds’ to ‘odious larks and nightingales’. ‘The attitude of these ladies towards the country’, Reynolds observes, ‘was but the attitude of their time.’26 Finch rejected this attitude and offered an alternative in her poetry. In ‘A Nocturnal Reverie’ and ‘The Petition for an Absolute Retreat’, for example, she juxtaposes the tranquillity of the country with the bustle and vice of the town. The theme of London as a source of strife is also found in ‘A Ballad to Mrs Catherine Fleming in London from Malshanger farm in Hampshire’ in which the speaker laments the ‘hurry, smoke and drums’ of the city.27 Likewise, ‘Ardelia’s Answer to Ephelia, who had invited her to come to her in town — reflecting on the Coquettrie and detracting humour of the Age’ is a satirical portrait of fashionable London life. Her characterization of the vain Almeria, ‘the gay thing, light as her feather’d dresse’ who ‘discerns all failings but her own’ sets up the city as a site of frivolity and boredom.28 Almeria takes Ardelia on a ‘tedious’ ramble about the streets of London, ‘To see this Monster, or that waxwork show’.29 While Ardelia escapes into a church to avoid the uproar, Almeria

26

Myra Reynolds, Introduction, in The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea, ed. by Reynolds, pp. xvii–cxxxiv (pp. cxxi–cxxii). 27 Anne Finch, ‘A Ballad to Mrs Catherine Fleming in London from Malshanger Farm in Hampshire’, in The Anne Finch Wellesley Manuscript Poems, ed. by Barbara McGovern and Charles H. Hinnant (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998), pp. 56–59 (l. 4). 28

Anne Finch, ‘Ardelia’s Answer to Ephelia’, in The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea, ed. by Reynolds, pp. 38–46 (ll. 45, 27). 29

Finch, ‘Ardelia’s Answer’, ll. 39–40.

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Flyes round the Coach, and does each cusheon presse, Through ev’ry glasse, her sev’ral graces shows, This, does her face, and that, her shape expose, To envying beautys, and admiring beaux.30

After strolling through Hyde Park, for an ‘hour of finding fault’, Ardelia longs for her ‘groves, [her] Country walks, and bow’rs’, where ‘Trees blast not trees, nor flow’rs envenom flow’rs, | As beauty here, all beautys praise devours’.31 For all of these reasons, Ardelia tenaciously refuses Ephelia’s invitation to ‘resort | To that great Town’.32 Reynolds notes that ‘Ardelia’s feeling towards the city and country becomes novel in the extreme’, and that the ‘antithesis between the town and the country was not so sharply defined by any succeeding poet before Cowper’.33 Finch’s employment of this antithesis highlights the particular hurdles women faced in the new booming consumerism of the century. There were many frivolous, mean-spirited ‘Almerias’ who served to keep women in positions of servitude. Finch posits an alternative, however, in the form of the female social outcast, Ardelia, who, according to the satirized coquette Almeria, does on books her rural hours bestow, And is so rustick in her cloaths and meen, ’Tis with her ungenteel but to be seen.34

As the century progressed and brought increased prosperity, many Ardelia-like figures lamented the limited opportunities for women and the consequent proliferation of ‘Almerias’. ‘Increasingly, during the eighteenth century’, BarkerBenfield observes, ‘men could express their expectations and appetites in new kinds of paid work and economic organization, in politics, and in new kinds of professionalization’, but this newfound prosperity meant something very different for eighteenth-century women, who could only aspire to lives of leisure and idleness. This imbalance, Barker-Benfield writes, ‘would give rise to a persistent, two hundred year lamentation over the declension in the activity and health of women’.35 Many women writers expressed an awareness of the lures and dangers of fashionable life, and were not easily seduced by it. They distanced themselves 30

Finch, ‘Ardelia’s Answer’, ll. 46–49.

31

Finch, ‘Ardelia’s Answer’, ll. 106, 130–32.

32

Finch, ‘Ardelia’s Answer’, ll. 2–3.

33

Reynolds, ‘Introduction’, p. cxxii.

34

Finch, ‘Ardelia’s Answer’, ll. 66–68.

35

Barker-Benfield, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Depression and Diagnosis’, p. 19.

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from easily corrupted, deceitful, and frivolous coquettes, and asserted their status as intellectual women, aware of the commercial advances of eighteenth-century England and the superficiality, apathy, and boredom consequent of modish life. In a 1787 Thraliana entry, Hester Thrale Piozzi marvels at the growth of London, noting that the city is ‘larger & more lovely than ever, the increasing population, Riches, & Splendour are scarce credible; and its Superiority to all other Capital cities very striking’.36 But, in another entry she exhibits a wariness of the ‘Distress, Fraud, [and] Folly’ inherent to these progresses and worries that London is ‘but a poor thing’ that leaves ‘a void in the mind’.37 Elizabeth Carter also recognizes the destructive quality of the gay urban world, and in a 1772 letter remarks, ‘what fatigues we fine ladies are fated to endure in the exercise of a London life’.38 Carter contends that the headaches and faintings of London ladies were not always feigned, and that the annoyances of the town did indeed provoke hysteric symptoms. The ‘highly perfumed powder’ of some ladies, she complains, ‘poisons the atmosphere’, ‘disgust[s]’, and prompts her headaches, while the hot, crowded assembly rooms of the town both ‘[heat] and confus[e]’ her.39 In fact, she blames her friend Elizabeth Vesey’s hysterical illness in part on the ‘joyless hurry and heat of London’, and notes on one occasion that the ‘fatigues of the town’ have played on her ‘health and spirits’.40 These women found their desire to escape the fashionable world to be at odds with cultural expectations. They were to entertain visitors, indulge in the luxuries of London, and enjoy the pleasures of the period’s commercial boom. But, for many, the pursuit of pleasure was a futile endeavour that ultimately led to depression. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, for example, recognized the dangers of the conventionally monotonous education and lifestyle of upper-class women. ‘People that do not read or work for a Livelihood’, she writes to her daughter Lady Bute mid-century, ‘have many hours they know not how to imploy, especially Women, who commonly fall into Vapours or something worse’.41 Lady Mary was 36

Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, Thraliana: The Diary of Hester Lynch Thrale (later Mrs Piozzi) 1776–1809, ed. by Katharine C. Balderston, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), II, 682. 37

Piozzi, Thraliana, I, 486.

38

Elizabeth Carter, Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter to Mrs. Montagu, between the Years 1755–1800. Chiefly Upon Literary and Moral Subjects, 3 vols (New York: AMS, 1973), II, 135. 39

Carter, Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, III, 255–56; I, 274.

40

Carter, Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, II, 195; I, 373.

41

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. by Robert Halsband, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966–67), II (1966), 450.

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ever suspicious of fashionable society and often referred to ‘pleasures’ as ‘transitory’.42 In another letter to Lady Bute on the topic of the ‘many [uneasynesses] attach’d to Humanity’, she suggests that the ‘the persuit of pleasure will be ever attended with Pain’ (sic).43 Montagu and her contemporaries often depicted themselves as solitary outsiders, scornful of fashion, superficial conversation, and company. In a 1711 letter to her husband, she outlines her ‘Schemes of Happyness’: ‘the way I now live in is intirely disagreable to me, from the same reasons most women would be pleas’d with it. I detest the croud I am oblig’d to live in, and wish it in my power to be retir’d’ (sic).44 In the second half of the century, women writers continued to describe themselves as depressed social outcasts. Elizabeth Carter frequently expresses a dislike for the ‘general hurry’ of ‘balls, assemblies, concerts, plays, card-tables, &c. &c. &c.’, which she believed was bad for the nerves.45 Guests and company also foster unhappiness, as is evident when she describes the aftermath of a dinner she has hosted, which leaves her with a terrible headache: ‘all this bustle and heat was too much for me, and I was confined to my pillow in consequence.’46 Carter’s poor spirits, which she claims are ‘as good as any body’s spirits can be who lives in this worky-day world’, are the result of an aversion to the social world and to ‘any set of human creatures assembled together’.47 Piozzi similarly expresses her hatred of ‘Visitants’, who ‘do nothing for me’, she writes, ‘but at best keep my Mind in Exercise, my Spirits in Motion; & make me lash myself up — As Astley does his Horses — to find them Amusement’.48 The above examples show Piozzi and Carter rejecting contemporary medical theories which commonly described social distractions, particularly ‘company’, as a cure for melancholy. Other women writers consumed and interpreted contemporary medical literature in ways that allowed them to reject the fashionable remedies for female melancholy so current in the period. In a letter to a male friend, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu invokes Thomas Sydenham, her ‘Oracle in Physic’, to dispel the notion of vapours as a frivolous female malady.

42

Montagu, The Complete Letters, II, 30.

43

Montagu, The Complete Letters, II, 446.

44

Montagu, The Complete Letters, I (1966), 73.

45

Carter, Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, I, 98.

46

Carter, Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, III, 45.

47

Carter, Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, I, 222; II, 168.

48

Piozzi, Thraliana, I, 976.

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Sydenham, she writes, ‘tak[es] off the reproach which you men so saucily throw on our sex, as if we alone were subject to vapours. He clearly proves that your wise honourable spleen is the same disorder and arises from the same cause’.49 Montagu uses Sydenham’s words to equate male and female spleen and argue that ‘vapours’ is a distinguished and intellectual disease.50 Anne Finch similarly manipulates medical discourse in ‘The Spleen’, where she rejects degrading medical treatments, many of which encouraged women to remain within the domestic sphere and occupy themselves with fashionable female accomplishments. The speaker expresses her reluctance to, in fading Silks compose Faintly th’ inimitable Rose, Fill up an ill-drawn Bird, or paint on Glass The Sov’reign’s blurred and indistinguish’d Face.51

Instead of producing, as Katharine Rogers observes, the ‘needlework and amateurish painting with which women were supposed to divert their spleen’, the speaker here indulges an unconventional desire to write.52 In doing so, she confronts her illness more directly than was recommended by the medical establishment. Piozzi, in her Thraliana, likewise rejects conventional treatments of hysteria by drawing on George Cheyne’s The English Malady: Few Books carry so irresistible a Power of Perswasion with them as Cheyne’s do; when I read Cheyne I feel disposed to retire to Arruchar in the Highlands of Scotland — live on Oat bread & Milk, and bathe in the Frith of Clyde for seven Years.53

Piozzi draws upon Cheyne to formulate her own ideas of treatment that involve a removal from fashionable society. Like the above women, she manipulates

49

Montagu, The Complete Letters, II, 442; III (1967), 171–72.

50

John Mullan describes how the intellectual distinction of spleen was understood in terms of gender. ‘The refined or studious hypochondriac is a necessarily exceptional figure,’ he writes, ‘deriving both his status and his “Distemper” from preoccupations and proclivities which remove him from “the common People”.’ But, because woman is constituted as disordered, inconstant, and precarious, hysteria does not generally assume the privilege of hypochondria. Indeed, the intellectual hysteric is a rare figure in the eighteenth century. Mullan, ‘Hypochondria and Hysteria’, pp. 146–47, 149–50. 51

Finch, ‘The Spleen’, ll. 85–88.

52

Katharine M. Rogers, ‘Finch’s “Candid Account” vs. Eighteenth-Century Theories of the Spleen’, Mosaic, 22.1 (1989), 17–26 (p. 24). 53

Piozzi, Thraliana, II, 778.

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medical discourse to show that female splenetics were not mere hysterical coquettes. Montagu, Finch, Piozzi, and Carter were clearly not weak victims of luxury and fashion, unable to resist its pleasures and its lures. Rather, like the melancholic men of the age, they were drawn away from the bustle of the commercial world, and towards solitude and study. The unique hurdle for them as women was that they were constrained by gendered expectations that required them to participate in fashionable society, to entertain visitors, and to visit the city. The divide between their desires and cultural expectations was thus a distressing difficulty that can be linked directly to vapours, uneasiness, headaches, and agitated spirits. The social forces of hysteria created, on the one hand, a coquette whose aspirations to weakness made her hysterical. On the other, a woman of the ‘stronger sort’ emerged, one who recognized the dangers by which the coquette was made hysterical, but who was not unaffected by the social world, whose fatigues — in all their frivolity and absurdity — made her quite depressed. Both types of women found themselves entangled in hysteria’s web.

A Female ‘civic melancholy’ Some eighteenth-century women writers exhibited an astute awareness of hysteria’s causes and challenged the dogma that confined hysteria to the pathological female body. They resisted their conventional roles by articulating the more civic origins of the condition. Eric Gidal asserts that there was indeed an eighteenth-century ‘civic melancholy’ in which ‘English melancholy’ became ‘inextricable’ from English ‘civic culture’.54 Considering ‘the disposition of the autonomous self par excellence’, he writes, ‘melancholy would seem to belong more to the realm of the private spirit than to the public sphere, [and] the conjunction of civic harmony and melancholy gloom may seem counterintuitive’.55 Nonetheless, a tradition exists that unites the sceptical peevishness of the melancholy soul with the civic virtue of the magnanimous hero to articulate what we may call a civic melancholy. Grounded in classical and medieval humoral theory, yet aligned with the methods and aspirations of the Enlightenment, this tradition understands melancholy as the dark undercurrent of

54

Eric Gidal, ‘Civic Melancholy: English Gloom and French Enlightenment’, EighteenthCentury Studies, 37 (2003), 23–45 (p. 24). 55

Gidal, ‘Civic Melancholy’, p. 25.

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Heather Meek political identification, removing the individual from vain aspirations and luxurious selfindulgence while simultaneously promoting civic ideals and public engagement.56

‘The union of melancholy and civic virtue in the English character’, Gidal continues, ‘recasts in the language of temperament and sensibility the traditional stoic advocacy of public service as a rational response to the hardships and vicissitudes of life.’57 However, the works of George Cheyne and others reveal that discussions of the public and political nature of spleen depended on both male power and female weakness. The notorious, and often celebrated, gloominess of the English temperament was viewed as predominantly male. The ‘magnanimous hero’ and ‘English character’ to which Gidal refers are male figures; women did not have the luxury of an outlet such as ‘public service’ to counter the particular ‘hardships and vicissitudes’ of their lives. Nonetheless, women writers carved out their own ‘civic melancholy’ — one in which they became part of a community of suffering individuals. This ‘civic melancholy’ can be viewed as a dimension of sociosomatic hysteria, one that is connected to woman’s growing self-awareness. A ‘sociosomatic reticulum’, as Kleinman points out, ‘ties individuals to each other and to the local systems within which they live’.58 Women who suffered from hysteria articulated their troubles within literary systems — within poems, journal entries, and letters. Gidal’s civic melancholy and Kleinman’s sociosomatic reticulum are therefore complementary in the sense that they help us to understand the socio-cultural foundation of female hysteria. The literary systems these women formed had a civic character, but also a national one. Elizabeth Carter, for example, makes a distinction between the French and the English temperaments, as does Lady Mary Wortley Montagu when she expresses her happiness that her friend Lady Pomfret ‘enjoy[s] a purer air’ in France, lamenting ‘to what state we are fallen’ in England.59 Montagu describes her experience of personal distress in terms that align it with a sort of national hysteria. In February 1738, she writes, ‘we have a complication of everything in London that is contrary to my Inclination: Noise, croud, Division […] Faction and Nonsense.’60 ‘[M]y Ears are daily wounded with epidemic madness’, she complains, ‘and my person expos’d to the Rheumes and

56

Gidal, ‘Civic Melancholy’, pp. 25–26.

57

Gidal, ‘Civic Melancholy’, p. 26.

58

Kleinman, Social Origins of Distress and Disease, p. 2.

59

Carter, Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, II, 322; Montagu, The Complete Letters, II, 126.

60

Montagu, The Complete Letters, II, 114–15.

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disorders incident to this watry climate.’61 As women such as Montagu began to articulate their troubles in relation to the nation at large, they carved a unique place for themselves in the public, male world of affairs — a world they insisted adversely affected their personal lives. Indeed, a distinctly female civic melancholy emerges in works by Finch, Carter, Montagu, Piozzi, and other eighteenth-century women as they express personal grief as a reflection of and response to national difficulties and upheavals. For example, Anne Finch’s loyalty to the Jacobite cause is often reflected in her poetry, where melancholy serves as a metaphor for political exclusion and alienation. This type of melancholy was most often linked to the plight of Jacobite women in particular. Finch sometimes ‘denot[es] her identity as a [suffering] countess’ (Hinnant and McGovern observe).62 In ‘The Petition for an Absolute Retreat’, the splenetic state of Ardelia (Finch’s literary name) mirrors the sad state of the nation as a whole. ‘So the sad Ardelia lay’, the speaker asserts, ‘Blasted by a Storm of Fate, | Felt, thro’ all the British State.’63 Similar comparisons, in which female personal losses come to represent the tragic demise of Britain are standard in Finch’s poetry. In ‘A Letter to Mrs. Arabella Marrow’, Finch aligns the Jacobite rebels with her own friends, and, as is customary, recalls a time before 1688 when the Stuarts ruled and all was peaceful. The speaker goes on to describe the death of her friend in relation to a national catastrophe. Her sadness over the death is one and the same with the grief of those saddened by war: Thus Arabella’s loss we feel Dejected and opprest Whilst but the noise of war and steel Can other minds molest.64

Finch takes us into ‘the larger socio-political world’, McGovern and Hinnant observe, ‘and imagine[s] the abolition of the differences between self and other in a circle of friends whose harmony of interests exposes the obstacles — the barriers of prejudice, factionalism, and ambition — that stand in the way of achieving a

61

Montagu, The Complete Letters, II, 115.

62

Barbara McGovern and Charles H. Hinnant, Introduction, in The Anne Finch Wellesley Manuscript Poems, ed. by McGovern and Hinnant, pp. xv–xxxix (p. xxviii). 63

Anne Finch, ‘A Petition for an Absolute Retreat’, in The Poems of Anne Countess of Winchilsea, ed. by Reynolds, pp. 68–77 (ll. 159–61). 64

Anne Finch, ‘A Letter to Mrs. Arabella Marrow’, in The Anne Finch Wellesley Manuscript Poems, ed. by McGovern and Hinnant, pp. 54–55 (ll. 50–53).

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just and rational polity’.65 Just as Finch expresses her feelings of loss, grief, and spleen, she implicates herself and her women friends in the public happenings of the day and offers a particularly female perspective that blends public and private disillusionment. Such expressions of female civic melancholy surface throughout the eighteenth century in accounts of hysteria that envision public events as metaphors for private distress. This becomes particularly marked towards the end of the century as women seemed to align themselves increasingly with massive upheavals such as the French Revolution and the subsequent wars with France. From approximately 1787 onwards, Carter is very much affected by the unstable political situation in England and the pending war, ‘hop[ing] that all this bustle will end in peace’.66 She worries at length about the ‘violent proceedings’ of the ‘savage’ French.67 Her ‘spirits’ are described as inextricable from national ones, as when she writes of the English celebration of Bastille Day in France on 18 July 1791: ‘I felt a very great horror of the general spirits that gave rise to that absurd celebration.’68 Her despair at the political situation only increases as the century draws to an end, and in one letter she expresses her sadness and surprise: ‘I never was so much alarmed by any circumstance of our political situation, as by the horrid mutiny of our sailors.’69 In 1799, we learn that Carter’s spirits are already down due to her deteriorating eyesight; however, the news of war ‘in the paper […] [does] not help to raise [her] spirits on this subject’.70 ‘It ma[kes] me melancholy to reflect’, she writes, ‘how many would probably never return to their families, and their country.’71 Carter expresses a sort of communal grief in describing the ways in which war affects women and their families, and shows how large-scale public change contributes to her personal suffering as a woman. Her private grief is articulated through — and intimately connected to — political instability, national crisis, and war. This grief is further aggravated because she does not have the male outlet of ‘public service’. It was an affront to her nature to sit and watch,

65

McGovern and Hinnant, Introduction, in The Anne Finch Wellesley Manuscript Poems, ed. by McGovern and Hinnant, p. xxxix. 66

Carter, Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, III, 284.

67

Carter, Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, III, 316.

68

Carter, Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, III, 327.

69

Carter, Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, III, 350.

70

Carter, Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, III, 355.

71

Carter, Letters from Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, III, 355.

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and to repress the impulse to act: Carter could only observe as the ‘horrors’ of the French Revolution were carried out, and she found herself unable to prevent the havoc of the changing times. Women sometimes made strides in carrying out ‘public service’ through their writings, however. They were largely barred from public life, but they found ways to engage in the events of the day. In Piozzi’s diaries and letters, for example, personal and political distresses bounce off one another, and we find a woman immersed in private and public frustrations. Her second husband’s gout worsens between 1798 and 1801, a time when tensions in France are also escalating and fear of instability in England is a very real concern. Piozzi is distressed over her husband’s health, but she is also troubled by the state of her country, and both situations — which are often described alongside each other — spark personal anxieties. In a 1799 letter to the Reverend Leonard Chappelow, she explains that Gabriel Piozzi is constantly tormented by his illness.72 These comments are followed abruptly by a passage detailing her anxiety regarding affairs in England: ‘Things do run very cross and You are afraid of Famine and Insurrection, while my Terrors are chiefly of the Plague.’73 Piozzi describes herself as ‘anxious and fatigued’, and observes, ‘I write from the Bedside in some faint Hope of getting a little Sleep. For the last 50 hours none has visited’.74 We find a similar instance in Piozzi’s descriptions of her first husband’s illness. As she watches him deteriorate, she writes: ‘How all the World is rushing on its own Ruin! nations & individuals, & all!’75 ‘Mr. Thrale is eating himself into an Apoplexy’, she continues, spite of Friends, Physicians, & common Sense; one Man is drinking himself into Madness, and another engaging in Party Feuds, till he is in danger of violent death. My Spirits are really affected […] & the Country hastening so to Bankruptcy & Demolition.76

Piozzi here describes a confusing network of splenetic causes. The ‘World’ is degenerating; this in turn affects ‘nations & individuals’, and, on a more intimate level, Thrale (who is much like other men ‘drinking [themselves] into Madness’ or ‘engaging in Party Feuds’) and Piozzi herself are suffering. In her articulation

72

Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi, The Piozzi Letters: Correspondence of Hester Lynch Piozzi, 1784–1821, ed. by Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom, 3 vols (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989–99), III, 148. 73

Piozzi, The Piozzi Letters, III, 148.

74

Piozzi, The Piozzi Letters, III, 148.

75

Piozzi, Thraliana, I, 440.

76

Piozzi, Thraliana, I, 441.

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of a ‘civic melancholy’, Piozzi’s personal suffering becomes indistinguishable from the public and political distresses she observes around her. Piozzi typically places herself at the centre of these national troubles. In the late 1770s, for example, the Thraliana describes the growing tensions between England and France, and Piozzi refers to ‘the great Talk about the Town of a War with France’.77 She uses the public world as a measure of her own private distress, noting that ‘[t]he Ladies would not be perfuming their Persons, nor the Confectioner puffing his Wares, if there were any real Consternation or Distress’.78 In 1781, we again find her aligning public and private difficulties: Here is the New Year begun amidst publick & private Calamities — a Dutch War added to our Original Enemies; a Hurricane which has almost depopulated Barbadoes, a Nobleman going to be hanged for Promoting such a Spirit of Riot as half ruined the City of London itself, & which evil May-day in Henry the 8 th’s Reign was only a faint Sketch. In our own Family, the death of its Principal hourly expected from a Repetition of dangerous Fits; the Trade going — as ev’ry Trade is — most rapidly to decay — & I! writing in Thraliana! I do not do it often tho’, & am always ashamed when I do.79

Piozzi’s comments circle inward, moving from global, to local, to familial conflicts. Her observations culminate in a very personal diary entry; the repetition of ‘I’, as well as her frantic use of hyphens and exclamation marks, underscore both her heightened stress about the difficult times, and her guilt about writing in the midst of these difficulties. Piozzi thus positions herself at the epicentre of an intricate network of circumstances and events, ranging from the deeply personal to the more broadly socio-political, all of which contribute to her mental state. Piozzi in fact takes her socio-political engagement even further, into a more cosmic realm, as she elevates herself and her condition by depicting herself as a prophet and by aligning her hysteria with apocalypse. This inclination is most pronounced in her later years, when she begins to see the world of her immediate environment as a reflection of the larger turmoil in the universe. In a 1796 Thraliana entry, she claims to read the weather by observing a ‘strange Appearance in the Sky — a prismatic Halo round the Moon when She was full’.80 ‘’Tis the sure presage of a desperate Storm’, she writes, and, ‘accordingly, three

77

Piozzi, Thraliana, I, 226.

78

Piozzi, Thraliana, I, 242.

79

Piozzi, Thraliana, I, 468.

80

Piozzi, Thraliana, II, 950.

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Days after came such a Hurricane as I did ever see’.81 From this observation she senses a pending war, which she then aligns with a ‘horrible tempest’.82 Piozzi’s somewhat hysterical prophecies of apocalypse reflect her shifting views on her own life. Her choice to record her apocalyptic vision in her private journal suggests that she felt personally moved by this vision. ‘I do myself verily think’, Piozzi writes in the Thraliana, ‘that the World is drawing on to a Conclusion.’83 Orianne Smith emphasizes the significance of this remark: ‘One might take this as hyperbole, but for the fact that Piozzi did believe the world was ending and that Christ’s reign on earth was imminent.’84 Piozzi’s sense of a coming apocalypse is tied to her own fears of this impressive event, and so her personal struggle with hysteria is described through a most grand metaphor. A more explicit link between her nervous tendencies and the pending doom of the nation emerges in a February 1798 letter to Penelope Sophia Pennington, in which Piozzi elaborates upon the weak state of her nerves: ‘My Nerves are […] terribly shaken, […] [and] my Stomack […] is now grown so weak it rejects everything almost, and increases the Giddiness and Tinnitus which so perplex me.’85 Piozzi further compares her health to that of the nation as she moves into a discussion of England’s despairing situation. ‘But we will not talk of declining Health’, she writes, Individuals are now of less Consequence than ever, while the Nation, the Continent, the World itself seems [sic] in its last Convulsions. Can too many Efforts be made to keep these Marauders out? These Pests of Society who have shaken such a Fabric to its foundations?86

Although she gestures to move away from talking about declining health, she uses language that sounds very much like a description of hysteria. Like Piozzi’s ‘weak’ stomach and ‘terribly shaken’ nerves, the Nation itself, she believes, suffers from nervous disorder; it is weakened, it experiences ‘Convulsions’, and it is ‘shaken […] to its foundations’. Piozzi aligns hysteria with the rapid change, military aggression, and stifling duplicity of the increasingly modern world, and indeed her own hysterical symptoms are a reaction to this turmoil. As she desperately tries to

81

Piozzi, Thraliana, II, 950.

82

Piozzi, Thraliana, II, 952.

83

Orianne Smith, ‘“Unlearned and Ill-Qualified Pokers into Prophecy”: Hester Lynch Piozzi and the Female Prophetic Tradition’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 28 (2004), 87–112 (p. 87). 84

Smith, ‘Female Prophetic Tradition’.

85

Piozzi, Piozzi Letters, II (1991), 478.

86

Piozzi, Piozzi Letters, II, 478.

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gain control of her rapidly changing surroundings, her nerves deteriorate, and, like her country, she is ‘shaken’. Piozzi’s apocalyptic metaphors allow her to describe her hysteria in ways that capture the severity of her mental state in the midst of a male world that is exclusionary and dismissive.

Conclusion Piozzi, Finch, Montagu, and Carter all explore how social environments affect mental states. Their unique contribution to the hysteria debate is a convoluted causative model that places woman within a larger sphere, allowing her to escape the supposedly restrictive and pathological confines of her body. Hysteria’s elusive causes can be traced to the changing, difficult, and perplexing world in which women such as these were trying to adapt. The ‘sociosomatic reticulum’ partially liberates them from hysteria as it recognizes a causative model with social norms and expectations at its centre. Certainly, female weakness was, in the eighteenth century, aggrandized for the sake of male pleasure, and hysterical coquettes and intellectuals alike suffered in this regard. Nonetheless, these women’s writings reveal a community of female sufferers that sets itself against the lures of commerce and fashion. The version of hysteria that emerges in these writings is at once private, public, destructive, and liberating. Even as women suffered, their experiences granted them power and agency. They resisted their conventional roles by describing the social origins of their conditions and by participating (usually vicariously) in the public events of their day. The ‘fatigues […] fine ladies [we]re fated to endure’ did not merely doom them to hysteria; rather, women writers explored such ‘fatigues’ to establish their legitimacy as intelligent citizens and literary women.

E NVOI: T HE A FTERLIFE OF M ALADIES IMAGINAIRES George S. Rousseau

‘His disease is nothing but Imagination.’1

Imagination Manufacturing Illness

T

he chapters in this erudite book will be consulted for many years, yet no one should think the conditions they treat faded after 1750 or 1800. They intensified and with modernity came new stresses and strains, rural and urban, private and public, leaving the perception of lived life more difficult than previously. The history of imaginary maladies from the ancient and medieval world forward is thus a trajectory of chronological intensification: as we approach present time, the better known these conditions become the more diverse their forms of somatization. Since the eighteenth century, moreover, their transformations have been national, cultural, institutional, professional, gendered, classbased, and especially riddled by definitional quandaries. The last is imperative: what exactly are maladies imaginaires? Replies differ, most clusters having developed along an axis of change in the concept of imagination from the era of Hobbes and Locke. Yet the imagination — with or without the grammatical article — is not identical to the imaginary; and however direly the post-1800 sufferer’s imagination was said to have ‘throbbed’ when under the spell of some seizure, she wanted to know, more than anything, from exactly what she was suffering. A hesitant reply from the doctor intimating there was no organic basis

1

Lodwick Knowell commenting on ‘Sir Patient’, in Aphra Behn, Sir Patient Fancy: A Comedy (London: 1678), p. 45.

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for her malady was a severe blow unless the patient was faking her illness — tantamount to a verdict that the condition was imaginary. The imagination (here with the grammatical article) had been a more concrete and vivid entity in the early modern world than it has since become. Between the Renaissance and Romantic eras it was also mechanized and medicalized, pathologized, and symbolized, and often functioned as palpable mediator between mind, soul, and spirit despite lodging in different parts of the body. The Newtonian revolution, coupled to philosophies of idealism and ‘common sense’, cut against this grain to transform it into a thoroughly ‘incorporeal’ and even ‘infinite’ faculty. To others it seemed — here following anti-Newtonian principles — ‘sympathetic’ by virtue of its incorporeality, capable of being ‘creative’ and functioning similarly to a sort of Kantian theoretical ‘reason’. But a countertendency towards corporeality also ran concurrently, conceptualizing it as a living organ distinct from our (current) sense of all things imaginary. In this latter camp the imagination was anything but imaginary. It produced ideas and passions — creative, associative, idiosyncratic — but existed apart from (what we today call) imaginary realms. Scholarship has not yet produced a reliable ethnography of the different strands over time: a study of the culture(s) of imagination as it evolved in different societies and epochs from the Renaissance forward. The nineteenthcentury rise of institutionally based, and empirically biased, medicine acted to erode imagination’s authority; perhaps not among Romantic poets and utopian thinkers who still extolled its powers yet who themselves often suffered from ‘maladies’ — and this is the point — about whose origins they could spend years speculating. Their doctors were less than reliable guides for detecting the sources. Think of the long chain of hypochondriacs — among fictional figures Tristram Shandy, Smollett’s ailing males, especially Matthew Bramble, Mackenzie’s ‘Man of Feeling’ named ‘Harley’, and among literati Coleridge, DeQuincey, and Carlisle — whose imaginations worked overtime for fear of further affliction. By the twentieth century, when multiple theories of the brain loomed, imagination (of whatever type) was no longer an operative concept in academic medicine. Neuroscientists discussed it quantitatively in terms of neurons while the new psychologists and psychiatrists downgraded its cognates in ‘spirit’ and ‘soul’. Even Freud and Jung, whose ‘sciences of mind’ depended on factors other than imagination, occasionally invoked the word without the investiture of significant substance. The emerging psychology and psychiatry had not entirely banished the role of imagination in the production of thought but the rise of sciences of cognition developed new languages and ideas to account for it in words such as delusion, ecstasy, phantasm, psyche, and reverie.

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Figure 9. Henri Daumier, Le Malade imaginaire, a lithograph showing a hypochondriac imagining himself being prepared for burial. London, The W ellcome Library, 1833. Reproduced by kind permission of The W ellcome Library.

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Medically the early modern aftermath of maladies imaginaires sought to codify imaginary illnesses in disease clusters according to anatomico-physiological systems. The old hysteria — gender based for so long and then vacillating until the mid-nineteenth century — was widened after 1700 to encompass males and tailored to suit their masculine anatomies after Italian physician Giovanni Battista Morgagni demonstrated that the womb was incapable of rampaging through the body. But this gender augmentation was problematic for physicians and taxonomers bewildered by the mechanisms by which males became hysterical. Likewise hypochondriasis: an even larger category of maladie imaginaire, a sort of maladie noir, whose sources had rested on combinations of the anatomical (‘under the ribcage’) and the situational (caused by particular events). Hypochondria also swerved in the direction of the anatomical and the location of the specific body part became the hypochondriac’s cri de coeur. Normally no single organ fit and hypochondriacs could spend years fixating upon one body part only to scrap it, after consulting another doctor, for another body part. During the twilight period between premodern and modern — if one can refer to chronologies such as 1700–1850 through the use of such labels — contested conditions such as ‘spleen’ and ‘vapours’ were still being verbalized along the two causal axes of the anatomical and the situational, but were gender-free into the 1830s. The trend did not change until the Paris doctors of mid-century declared earlier theories inadequate and poet Baudelaire set spleen on another course altogether in his Les Fleurs du mal. The dual causation — anatomic and situational — was evident in poetry, where verse adhering to established ‘conventions’ and poetic ‘rules’ narrated the spleen by dividing its gaze between the unfolding dramatic moment of ‘onset’ (the situational) and the ‘body part’ (anatomical) to which it sought to give voice. Another strain blamed both types as imaginary sufferings, thereby denigrating the fortitude of the afflicted. The sufferer’s gender continued to be overlooked: a double affront if you happened to be female as well as ‘vapourish’. Queen Anne was much to be admired for dumping her Physician Royal, John Radcliffe, when classifying her as ‘splenetic and vapourish’ — she expected a more specific diagnosis. By the 1720s, Dr George Cheyne’s (1688–1743) hypochondriacal patients wanted concrete assurance of the ‘diseased organic part’ before they would accept his ‘nervous diagnosis’ and, presumably, pay up. Alexander Pope, who once quipped about his existence as ‘This long Disease, my Life’, held no notion that a defective ‘imagination’ (he thought his own was enraptured and intense) had produced unrelenting maladies; when told he might be hypochondriacal he whinged that his complaints entailed urethras, consumptions, diuretics, and

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dropsies, not imaginations. Two generations later Coleridge, already mentioned, spent long years of his own disease-riddled life persuaded that his hypochondria was owing to derangements of his digestive tract; if only he could eat properly and sleep peacefully, as he laments in ‘The Pains of Sleep’ (1816), he would be well. Conceding that his ‘imagination’ had played some minor role in deranging his digestion, he reluctantly diagnosed himself, no less than his dyspeptic Victorian heirs — Thomas Carlyle, Charles Darwin, T. H. Huxley, and others — later did as hypochondriacal. The Victorians often reduced imagination’s authority to generate disease on grounds that it was too elusive. These sufferers — self-confessed, inveterate, chronically entrenched dyspeptics and hypochondriacs whose nervous systems had been wrecked by worry about their affliction — rarely resorted to ‘imagination’ as a cause. Their trouble, they thought, was organic. For example, the anonymous author of the 1849 Confessions of a Hypochondriac,2 who was medically trained, was sure they were, but now, in the nineteenth century, they found a scapegoat in the stresses and corruptions of ‘modern life’ and were sufficiently leisured to be able to ponder the causes. They attributed much to the jagged edges of modernity. ‘Diseases of modernity’, or civilization, was indeed becoming a catch-all phrase containing consensual meaning for the afflicted. Even the tumble of their new train journeys was jolting their systems into malady. Thomas Trotter (1760–1832), an important naval doctor contemporaneous with Coleridge who had also been Nelson’s chief military physician, hinted earlier that ‘modern life’ was the culprit in his books about the ‘nervous temperament’. Coleridge himself was prescient in these matters even if his mindset did not include evolution as a working concept; so he never considered the evolution of diseases — the notion that hypochondriasis itself had been evolving.

Melancholy Turns Nervous Melancholy, like imagination, was also fading: the relic of a lost world now reduced to a shadow of what it had been during the Renaissance. If ‘melancholy’ as a disease diagnosis had been among the most concrete of verdicts in the premodern world, by the time the Georgians ascended to power in Britain it was losing its lustre. To wit, the precipitous decline of interest in Robert Burton’s famous bookish ‘anatomy’ of it, despite lingering curiosity about topics such as the

2

London: Saunders and Otley.

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sight of ‘mad dogs’ among dehydrated hydrophobics. Nor was melancholy’s cache much more promising in Continental Europe where its constitutive basis — that it was caused by excessive black bile in the system, creating imbalance among the four humours — had not died out. But after the Galenic decline of the eighteenth century, physicians considered it too amorphous to be localized when pressurized by their patients to identify the specific body part. One new candidate was the nervous system: that huge complex of fibres and nerves extending throughout the body and succumbing to the new tensions and anxieties brought on by an increasingly industrialized, secularized, and class-based urban world. If ‘modernity’ betokened encroaching industrial revolutions, it also suggested a ‘nervous revolution’ soon to erupt — having been stirred by a broadly based mechanical Newtonianism developing since the early eighteenth century and enhanced by an ethos of sympathy later on. These developments converged to raise the types of maladies imaginaires. The more stressful society was perceived to be, the larger the number of arising ailments to deflect hypochondriacs searching for the accurate body part — this was the logic and prediction for the future of those concerned with imaginary maladies. Therefore set the chronological dials to 1820 or 1840 and a good deal of doubt existed about what melancholy was. This is why the poets felt obliged, in part, to invigorate it. Everyone had an idiosyncratic view: to some it was primarily a religious mindset; for others a pessimistic, stoic adjustment to the human condition. But was it also a valid medical condition capable of profiting from medical intervention, or was the state of melancholy merely the soul’s habitat — the soul newly generating both physical and psychological malady as so many German philosophers were declaring? The new stake in soul must be sharply delineated here: mind influenced body and could hurl it into derangement, but in the new investiture soul itself generated mental or psychic affliction. It amounted in most cases to soul’s enlargement. Yet some still wondered whether melancholia was an idiopathic ailment driven by the body’s vitalism gone wild; a condition whose somatic consequences could only be identified by eagle-eyed nerve-doctors, or — alternatively at a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree swerve — a generalized malaise of the whole human nature. Others speculated whether it was a chimera of imagination touching only certain members of society. Defences had been made for each of these positions by the eighteenth century, as the chapters of this book show, but in the later generations I crudely call ‘twilight’ no consensus existed. In the early nineteenth century ‘melancholy’ occupied an ambiguous niche in the pantheon of maladies imaginaires, some judging it as no more medically

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authentic than nostalgia, the condition of longing for ‘home’ (however defined), often virulent among soldiers and travellers undertaking Grand Tours or religious pilgrimages. Simultaneously, Romantic poets such as Keats and Coleridge extolled melancholy and wrote odes to it, while Middle European anthropologists and philosophers dissected its effects on human affairs, and memoirists attested to its plangency. Those of more curative inclination looked to the ever-growing diaspora of the literature of mental health, derangement, and insanity. A huge gap eventually developed between Romantic poets and Romantic thinkers on the one hand — extolling it, especially among geniuses — and on the other hand trained medical types trying to understand its vectors. The word melancholia began to lose the grandeur and nobility it held for some during the Renaissance: as Noel L. Brann has shown in The Debate over the Origin of Genius during the Italian Renaissance3 the ‘genial melancholy’ strain was by no means the dominant one in the early modern period. Gradually melancholia was replaced with cognates describing chronic states of sadness and the loss of selfhood altogether. As the nineteenth century unfolded, it ebbed under the weight of professionalized medicine — especially psychology — and the word itself practically dropped out except among Sunday pulpit-orators and philosophers like Walter Benjamin, who returned it to centre stage in his dialectics of mourning. But the self-identity of a ‘melancholic’ could no longer be pinpointed — it was anything and everything. Everyone recognized the wild antics or outpourings of religious maniacs, as when Benjamin Fawcett described them in Observations on the Nature, Causes, and Cure of Melancholy.4 Yet some medical doctors remained suspicious, viewing melancholia as the affective sign — under the ribcage — of further underlying pathology awaiting detection. This was the suggestion in John Beaumont’s obscure 1810 Treatise on Lowness of Spirits, and the Disease of Melancholy,5 an anthology of ‘melancholy snippets’ containing as many pulpit sermons as medical passages. Even John Haslam’s more scientific approach to insanity published a year earlier, in 1809, his Observations on Madness and Melancholy,6 blushed before melancholy, out of uncertainty whether it was bona fide lunacy. These men matured in a milieu still reticently invoking ‘spleen’ and ‘vapours’; but their attention was affixed to the ‘nervous revolution’ taking hold, especially its new

3

Leiden: Brill, 2001.

4

Shrewsbury: Eddowes; London: Longman, 1780.

5

London: n. pub.

6

London: Callow.

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knowledge in physiology. For example, in John Reid’s (1776–1822) Essays on Hypochondriasis and other Nervous Affections7 these constellations overlapped so extensively that you could substitute one for another — insanity for hypochondriasis, hysteria for the even vaguer biliousness — all depending on an errant ‘mind’ playing havoc with a captive ‘body’. Yet Reid has little room for ‘imagination’ in his concept of ‘mind’. It lurks somewhere, he thinks, but he won’t probe where. In his view the old ‘spleen’ has also withered: a hag in tatters; and he doubts that Tobias Smollett’s (1721–71) — the late doctor-novelist and man of letters — ‘spleen’ had been the cause of that physician-author’s legendary irritability. The even older ‘vapours’, by now a coded word according to Reid, merely revealed the speaker’s antiquity. The general perception was that the statistical number of maladies imaginaires was increasing. Medicine itself was proliferating into a galaxy of diseases; expanding in the imperial world, whose number was not to be underestimated. As traveller-discoverers returned with new flora and fauna, they also brought back tales and proof. At home, more efficient civil societies, sensitive to public concerns for universal health and individual misfortune when eluded by it, had arisen since the war-torn, bloodstained seventeenth century. Nevertheless — and this was the paradox — the sheer number of the alienated contingent appeared to be growing. No one tried to prove it — it was a sign of modernity.

Hypochondriacs Abounding The public was also becoming preoccupied with mental deviations: whether mildly delusional, corporally diseased, or marginally eccentric. The unquenchable fascination for Samuel Johnson’s (1709–84) eccentric behaviour, for example, especially after the appearance in 1791 of Boswell’s biography, attests to their appetite, a type of voyeurism. Johnson’s profile in those post-Boswellian biography days was as an ‘eccentric hypochondriac’ — both simultaneously — though no two men can have been more different. Boswell’s pseudonym in his periodical journalism was ‘the Hypochondriack’, a boast made in the belief that ‘our sufferings mark our superiority’. Portraits of Johnson as the eccentric literary lion of his generation, painted from the time of Joshua Reynolds’s illustrious one of 1772, drew out his melancholy gaze, replete with piercing eyes and extended lips. To a certain extent Johnson’s life engendered the notion of eccentricity itself,

7

London: n. pub., 1823.

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which previously bore — like melancholy — a low profile as the word’s post-1750 trajectory shows. However, the relation between hypochondria and eccentricity remained unclear: were hypochondriacs eccentric because they physically ailed, or were eccentrics hypochondriacal as the result of ingrained temperamental flaws not yet recognized? The late eighteenth-century physiognomy movement added colourful twists. Its scrutiny of facial parts — nose, eyes, mouth, forehead, lips, cheeks, chin, gaze, smile — promised to segregate genuine ‘invalids’ (the word itself implied fakery and fraud before it became more narrowly medical) from pretenders and malingerers. Physiognomy was popular but inept at distinguishing between melancholics and malingerers. During the peak of its acclaim a tight lid was kept on this limitation among those touting its ‘scientific’ veracity. Further back, in the Renaissance, when earlier versions of physiognomy flourished, the success of such detection was no less vital than it became for Byron and Shelley. Perhaps physiognomy’s starkest irony was that its chief Enlightenment proponent, Casper Lavater (1741–1801), who began life as a poet and priest but would be remembered for his ‘new system of physiognomy’, was himself intensely hypochondriacal, as recorded in his much-neglected diary. While he was generating a ‘universal physiognomic system’, Swiss physician Samuel Auguste Tissot (1728–97) meticulously documented why studious, sedentary types, of which he and Lavater were exemplars, were hypochondriacal. So Europe’s most famous student of faces turns out to be a prize case — a consequential fact for the evolution of maladies imaginaires down to the present time. Lavater was not alone among ‘studious’ hypochondriacs, the diagnosis being far-flung, extending geographically from Cornwall to Königsberg and further across the Atlantic and Mediterranean too, and including thinkers and creative artists. All three of Königsberg’s most celebrated native sons — Immanuel Kant, Richard Wagner, and E. T. A. Hoffmann — were arch hypochondriacs. Proceed west from this not-so-remote capital of East Prussia and it becomes evident that many other creative geniuses also were, yet physiognomy’s companion, phrenology, did even less for the detection of the ‘sad’. The dominant response to phrenology over the longue durée was scepticism and satire; in hindsight it is astonishing how historically weak the degree of scepticism was: not only in regard to phrenology’s boasts but also to the wider category of maladies imaginaires. A pseudoscience built on risible premises, it created a wall between felt suffering and eventual detection, between patient and doctor, and plunged melancholics and hypochondriacs alike further into the dark than they had been in the days of iatromedicine and early nervous diagnoses. Under the pretence of deploying up-

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to-the-minute ‘brain research’, and professing to penetrate to the corporeal function of every major bodily organ, phrenology set back the still-understudied class of phantom illnesses. Set the chronological dials to circa 1800, or a generation later to 1830, and the unmasking of hypochondria had revealed little beyond the codification of a creative-sedentary-studious-solitary stereotype. Nothing new was asserted about its versions of collective imagination; not even how it associated ordinary sensory impressions and higher abstract ideas into the stuff of genius (Beethoven) or, contrarily, of derangement (Schumann). And the psychological unconscious still resided within the dark underbelly — and much understudied — human soul, especially of the genius. What could be said was that the unconscious possessed the power to generate mysterious, and even asymptomatic, illness replete with delusory and ecstatic side effects. As a byproduct hypochondriasis amalgamated itself to genius and declared the admixture influential across disparate fields of endeavour — artistic, philosophical, and scientific. Its physical site ‘under the ribcage’ was generalized to the whole gut; the digestive tract once again reigning as the chief site of personal talent. Tissot, still the most recent apostle, if now deceased, of the hypochondria amalgamation, knew nothing of psychological unconsciouses. He emphasized the nervousness of the afflicted and their lack of physical activity, attributing much to their ‘pathetic inactivity’, while pondering the degree to which the hypochondriacal sedentary state propelled them into sinful onanism; then he isolated onanism as a way of life, measuring the effects of the accumulated or spent semen in relation to the nervous consequences of constant discharge. Scholars, clerks, and clerics glued to their chairs were configured as more prone than those whose exercise was robust. Tissot’s hunch was that these types yielded to dejection as their natural psychic habitat; a view extending back to the Greeks and already a developed topic when Rufus of Ephesus wrote at the end of the first century AD. But Tissot breathed new life into the view. New forms of detection were still arising, even in places rarely thought to be instructive. Late Enlightenment portraiture was becoming a spy-glass into this interior world; under the right conditions it could capture the paradoxes of the hypochondriacal personality and unmask it. No one can have been a better candidate for these lower ranks than Henri-Fréderic Amiel (1821–81), who had grown up in Geneva, lost both parents while a boy, was reared by an uncle, demonstrated unusual academic precocity, distinguished himself as a student of Hegelian philosophy in Berlin, witnessed there the first uprisings of revolution (1848), returned to Geneva to be installed at twenty-seven in the new Chair of

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Aesthetics, barely lectured or functioned within the university — then withered hypochondriacally on the vine for three decades until his pathetic death in 1881. Out of desperation Amiel recorded every nervous attack in the longest diary in the French language: 17,000 manuscript pages. No one could diagnose his malady other than as an octopus of hypochondriasis, or prescribe remedy beyond acknowledging his logorrhea — a compulsive, sort of fetishistic logomania compelling him to record each and every symptom. Provided he could keep compiling he was content in his misery and harboured little sense he was suffering from any maladie imaginaire. Read on to see what our contemporary doctors would have decreed about his maniacal pathographesis.

Fashionable Maladies Increasing Fashionability played no small role in the 1700-afterlife of these maladies imaginaires; not merely in the well-heeled Parisian milieu of Moliere’s Argan — the rich hypochondriacal protagonist of Le Malade Imaginaire,8 Moliere’s last play depicting his comic hero spending his entire fortune trying to cure his imaginary ailments — but amongst hundreds of real patients during the next two centuries. Enigmatic maladies were often configured as modish and raffish, especially in mesmeric séances in Europe’s capitals. Strange, unaccounted for afflictions had also flourished in Renaissance Italy but now, in the high Enlightenment, the more elusive the malady’s origins and ambiguous its signs and symptoms, the more ‘genteel’ the condition could seem. This ‘polite’ component did not extend to the therapies of imaginary maladies: for instance, the annals of the 1750s and the 1760s are littered with cases of hysterical persons of both sexes and varied backgrounds cured by electrical shock treatment whose improvement occurred irrespective of their social background. (The splendid recovery of a fourteen-year-old Philadelphia girl treated by a Pennsylvania doctor describing himself as ‘Cadwallader Evans student in physic’ is narrated in the Medical Observations and Inquiries by a Society of Physicians in London;9 Evans sent her to Benjamin Franklin who plied her with eight electrical shocks per day after which she claimed to be perfectly well.) These maladies imaginaires thrived within the confusion of competing medical theories about their origins, their mystique far-flung except among sufferers wondering what

8

Paris: n. pub., 1673 [1732].

9

3 vols (London: Printed for William Johnston, 1757), I, 68.

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their personal affliction was. Only a few physicians were energized to undertake ‘research’ about the mystery, while most others cashed in on the burgeoning market of patients willing to fork out large sums merely to be told they were ‘hysterical’ or ‘hypochondriacal’. James Makittrick Adair (1728–1802) is a wonderful, if also loathsome, specimen. He had been trained in Enlightenment Edinburgh and was medically certified. Yet he made no secret of ‘specializing’ in (read ‘preying on’) the ailments of the rich and wrote treatises about their ‘fashionable diseases’. He presented the nervous-hypochondriacal diagnosis as modish in Essays on Fashionable Diseases.10 For every patient he diagnosed with heart, lung, or liver disease, nine others were stylishly ‘nervous’ — the code word for their species of ailment. His search for rich clients, coupled to an obtuse disposition, did not endear him to the Edinburgh medical fraternity and despite having died rich he left no memorials of a medical practice that improved anyone’s lot. By the turn of the nineteenth century European capitals and fashionable spas supported many Adairs, especially in the smart quarters of London, Bath, Aix, Paris, Nice, Abano, Rome, Berlin, Baden-Baden, Vienna, and others. The goal was fashionability for its lucrative sake — ‘Diagnose for Mammon’, as one satirical squib called it — but these practitioners could not have succeeded without an ever-swelling class of nervous hypochondriacs suffering somatic symptoms. To pursue Lucre they affixed their eyes especially on gender and genius, while also seeking out the hypochondriacally confused, especially among women and intellectuals who could afford their services. The doctors offered explanations and salvos when none seemed available elsewhere, and even Adair had ‘preyed on’ (the phrase was his enemies’, not his) vulnerable rich women who could not ‘throw off’ their chronic nervous afflictions. The Adairs of Europe seemed ready to exploit any condition as a maladie imaginaire if the patient could not explain to herself what ailed her. Each body ‘part’ suggested a public profile, and the ‘derangement’ of one organ — heart, lungs, liver, stomach, bowels — simultaneously suggested both an explicit medical diagnosis and symbolic valence about the picture of one’s health. A weak heart was interpreted in relation to a diseased liver. Weakness in the bowels and digestive tract existed by comparison with ‘weak tubercles’ in the lungs. All had psychosomatic consequences: if you expected a ‘severe’ diagnosis in one somatic sphere and discovered it was more benign in another, the ensuing psychological lift could strengthen the already diseased organ(s). So certain diagnoses served as 10

London: Bateman, 1790.

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placebos for other, more serious, complaints. A chronically nervous stomach was less debilitating than persistent headaches. A male penis, chronically dripping with fluid, veiled a deranged psyche trapped in a wasted body — signs as revealing as those of linguistic semiotics.

Sexual Frustration, Creativity, and the Production of Illness As the nineteenth century dawned some doctors veered away from the ‘studioussedentary’ emphasis and towards sexual aetiologies of imaginary, nervous diseases. Identify specific cases among the famous — Kant, Lavater, Chopin, Wagner, E. T. A. Hoffmann — resurrect their deep-layer lives, and often you uncover sexual secrets. Even the bachelor Kant can be considered a case in point without reading backwards into his life or imposing post-Freudian concepts. Kant’s biographers underestimated his chronic hypochondria and devalued his maladie imaginaire; coupled to his curious sexuality his lingering malaise looks even more bizarre. Kant himself worked hard to regulate his chronic hypochondria, grappling with it from early days and fumbling to understand what drove him to such disquiet. By the time he was launching metaphysical systems of morality his distress had been fused with his philosophical quest in such early works as his ‘Essay on the Maladies of the Mind’. One wonders what modern philosophy would have become without a hypochondriacal Kant monitoring himself, planning out each day with unflinching regularity. Did Kant ponder the suppressed libidinal desire of his compulsive behaviour? Especially the single thrust leading to reproduction? No one knows, but other hypochondriacs were more forthcoming in making the connections to their personal sexuality, which Kant-the-revered-professor apparently could not; to help themselves they often ‘wrote themselves out’ of their plight, or — in the case of composers — ‘composed their way out’. Ambiguous sexualities should not be fatally wrenched away from chronically hypochondriac bodies. The pianist-composer Chopin, cast of the most delicate, almost feminine, constitution, ailed long before his ‘wasting consumption’ was identified. His piano works, said by some to be anaemic and emasculated, were thought to reflect this sexual ambiguity, as Jeffrey Kallberg has admirably demonstrated in Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History, and Musical Genre.11 Likewise, we imagine that everything that can be known about Wagner’s life and

11

Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996.

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music already is, but the connection between his own withering health and charged erotic imagination remains understudied. No wonder the stage was set for Doctors Charcot and Freud to impose their psychosexual magic upon les malades imaginaires to a degree never before witnessed in history. The main stimulus had been the growth of ‘nervous science’. Imaginary maladies were old, yet without the recent sense that nerves — rather than bodily blood or fluid — in a perfect state of equilibrium ‘between tautness and flaccidity’ kept people in normal mental and healthy emotional states, the proliferation of maladies imaginaires could not have occurred. This rise of nervous science in the nineteenth century gradually opened up a new explanatory province of the interaction of mind and body. Nerves were the new catch-alls functioning as mediators between body and mind, brain and soul. Without nerves, the links continued to be illusory; with nerves, mind-body linkage was mechanized and medicalized and even microscopically verified (especially the nerves under the glass when seen as damaged) — removed from the realm of older magic, superstition, and occult explanation. Enlightenment Germans took the lead. Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert’s (1769–1828) ‘romantic neuroanatomy’ is now completely forgotten but in Coleridge’s day it was representative of the most current view of how the anatomical nervous system enabled mind-body connections. This ‘other Schubert’ was influential on Romantic philosophy: for example, Karl Moritz (1756–93), a trailblazing psychologist in Enlightenment Germany who wrecked his own health by overly zealous study, wondered in his Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde (Magazine for Experimental Psychology) what produced imaginary diseases. His conclusion too was ‘damaged nerves’. Johann Christian Reil (1759–1813) was more specific than Moritz, demonstrating the nervous production of both psychological and physical disease, including madness produced through ‘pathologically irritated ganglial knots’. Reil included hypochondria as chief among these, for him nervously and somatically produced, and it could also segue into ‘melancholia amentia’; that is, chronic generalized malaise without bodily symptoms. Reil’s proof? Insane people ‘dream while awake’. It would not be long before the concept of the ‘unconscious’ was generated, and it too sprang from notions, in Germany, of a psyche harbouring ‘imagination’ coupled to a powerful ‘nervous’ body. This unconscious will be said to be capable of manufacturing imaginary illness. Cross the ocean and American physician Silas Weir Mitchell (1829–1914), now remembered for his ‘rest cure’ for hysterical women, describes the first detailed medical case of phantom limb syndrome. In July 1866 he anonymously published a short story in the Atlantic Monthly called

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‘The Case of George Dedlow’, recounting how a medically trained young man is injured in both legs in the battle of Chickamauga during the American Civil War. Unaware that his legs have been surgically amputated, he awakens and asks an orderly to massage his left calf, where he perceives a cramp; when the orderly draws the covers back the amputation is revealed. Such ‘sensory ghosts’, as Dr Mitchell called them, could not have permeated le malade imaginaire’s universe without a prior revolution in popular knowledge about the nervous system, and the soldier claimed that the nerves in his already amputated leg still hurt him. Three centuries earlier military surgeon Ambroise Paré made similar observations despite omitting the nervous aspects, but comprehending how these afflictions arose even when the organ — or limb — was severed. Yet phantom limb is not an ‘imaginary disease’ and gathers interest precisely when contrasted with our maladies imaginaires. Flashing ahead to Kant’s world, Lord Admiral Nelson, famous for defeating the French in the Napoleonic wars, had his right arm amputated. But the pain he afterwards felt in his ‘phantom fingers’ proved to him — he thought — the existence of the soul. A generation later, in 1851, Mark Twain recounted in Moby Dick how another amputee, Captain Ahab, Twain’s tragic protagonist whose leg is severed by the whale Moby Dick, had first-hand knowledge of phantom limb. Captain Boomer has lost his arm and Ahab enlists the ship carpenter to make him an artificial limb; once attached both carpenter and Captain Boomer jest about sensations still dancing in the severed arm. Sexual contexts were increasingly being included in these conditions. While neurology marched throughout the nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle and generated further theories about debilitating neurasthenic disorders, sexual excess, or its opposite, was being enlisted as a primary cause. Other factors ranging from anatomical injury, like Ahab’s, to mechanical shock were also given, the commonest remedy physically administered to provide stimulation and vibration of the nerves. Over and again the putative affliction of the hypochondriacal imaginaire was said to reside in her nerves — oscillate and palpitate them and the patient recovered. Not long after Dr Mitchell published his paper about phantom limb syndrome, Joseph Mortimer Granville (1817–89), an obscure English physician who studied imaginary maladies in Common Mind Troubles (1878), wrote a letter to the Lancet claiming that railway spine — then a new complaint — was a ‘real’ disease; caused, he affirmed, by ‘mechanical shock’ to the system grounded in ‘sexual excess’ — both concurrently. How was it to be treated? Odd as it seems to us today, through radical vibration of the nerves.

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Factitious Illness versus Fictitious Malady In 1835 an Edinburgh medical student wrote an essay that won the university’s medical prize for the best statement about imaginary — or ‘factitious’ — diseases. The introduction of factitious, in contrast to fictitious, was salient. Eight years later and by now a practicing doctor, Hector Gavin published all 436 pages of it under the title On Feigned and Factitious Diseases, Chiefly of Soldiers and Seamen, on the Means Used to Simulate or Produce them, and on the Best Mode of Discovering Impostors.12 His main point was that all factitious disease is consciously pretended; a form of malingering, or counterfeit, which had occurred throughout history and is produced to suit the counterfeiter’s needs, but Gavin sensed that ‘malingerers’ produced their disease the better to manipulate the world around them. They were ordinary people, usually mentally deficient, and had difficulty coping with life’s daily challenges; for the most part dissimilar to Adair’s ‘fashionable patients’ and Tissot’s ‘intellectual lights’. Yet Gavin still considered factitious disease ‘imaginary’ because it was dishonest, feigned, fake, pretended, and therefore in his conception ‘in-valid’. His book opens with these words: Disease has been simulated in every age and by all classes of society. The monarch, the mendicant, the unhappy slave, the proud warrior, the lofty statesman, even the minister of religion, as well as the condemned malefactor […] have sought to disguise their purposes, or to obtain their desires, by feigning mental or bodily infirmities [...].13

All consciously ‘sought to disguise’ but Gavin’s purpose was demonstration that they were a different type of hypochondriac: each forged fake ailments with the full knowledge they were fake. These were voluntary frauds aimed to quell some pressing purpose in the malingerer. For this belief he was harsh on the diagnosis, maintaining that the physician’s preeminent task was to detect the difference between forged and genuine illnesses. Dr Gavin accomplished his purpose. Within one decade — 1843–53 — the British physician Robert Carter carried on with a landmark study entitled On the Pathology and Treatment of Hysteria, affirming that hysteria is a genuine, non-forged malady in Gavin’s sense despite its lack of uniform somatic symptoms. Others had previously catalogued lists of imaginary illnesses, as John Gideon Millingen (1782–1862) did during the years he treated ‘lunatics’ and included an account of his patients in Curiosities of

12

London: Churchill, 1843.

13

Gavin, On Feigned and Factitious Diseases, p. 1.

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Medical Experience.14 The road to psychiatry was paved earlier, from the days of the Munro brothers and Battie in Britain, and Pinel and Esquirol in France. The difference now — in the mid-nineteenth century — was that the new psychiatry was arising along fault lines of the genuine and the counterfeit: Gavin’s ‘factitious’ feigning malingerers versus Carter’s ‘genuine’ hysterics driven to despair by circumstances beyond their control. Entire books can be written about the disparities of these phantom illnesses in the 1860s during a decade when the new disciplines of psychiatry and sexology were slowly converging, during the period French satirist Honoré Daumier painted his other caricature not displayed here of ‘The Imaginary Illness’, featuring the bewildered gaze of three characters who look on incredulously. There is no space here to discuss its iconography in an Envoi, except to notice that the confluences and divergences demonstrate how both classes of alleged ‘sickness’ (sexological and psychiatric) were ‘nervous’ and germinated a culture of disease within a poetics of the neural. Chart the 1860 afterlife of imaginary diseases and you see how much depends on concepts of troubled minds trapped inside dysfunctionally nervous bodies rather than their inherited constitutions. And when the class of ‘asthmatic’ ailments also became neuralized at mid-century, with their wheezing patients gasping for breath, overly nervous bodies and imaginary diseases were cemented even more. Small wonder that the Lady Chettams, Mrs Renfrews, and the rest of their chatty church society in George Eliot’s Middlemarch did what they could to stave off disease by keeping the mind ‘sound’ while lamenting how little their doctors could do to alleviate its infirmities. The temptation among post-Freudian synthesizers of disease constellations when glancing back is to elide imagination — even the purely imaginary — with sexual realms. But the psychosexual root was not a pre-condition for somatization or factitious malady in all patients, as Foucault has purported in his various archaeologies of illness. The psychosexual elision suggests the illusion of solution: the idea that former maladies imaginaires were au fond sexual diseases of one type or another. The addition of ‘psycho’ to the sexual component rendered the elision even more appealing to post-Freudian interpreters. Psychosexual conditions, now recognized categories in DSM III and DSM IV, must have clear-cut psychosexual causes, and when they do they elucidate some, but not all, of the maladies in this book’s chapters. If the imagination had been mysteriously empowered to generate somatic maladies in the early modern world, it surrendered that capability to psychosexual energies by the late nineteenth century. No longer would an 14

London: n. pub., 1837.

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‘imagination-run-riot’ account for the genesis of ailments populated by demons, nightmares, vampires, and werewolves anywhere except, perhaps, in the literature of divertissement. Today the distinction between factitious illness (classified medically as FFI in DSM IV) and other forms of maladies imaginaires lies in the motivation for the production of symptoms. If you declare yourself ill when you are knowingly well then you are sick, even if you produce counterfeit symptoms. The malingerer has a conscious purpose grounded in fraud (to cope and manipulate) without underlying anatomic pathology; others more innocent may also produce somatic symptoms but nevertheless struggle to understand them — this is the difference. A huge gulf separates the classes yet they remain only two among many: the phylogeny of imaginary diseases whose appearance with or without symptoms troubles doctors and patients alike. Just twenty years ago British literary critic D. J. Enright (1920–2002) compiled The Faber Book of Fevers and Frets,15 an anthology of three hundred and thirty well-chosen snippets — some extensive passages — about the role of illness in human life, whose surprise was the number of entries enlisting ‘imagination’s role’. The longest chapter is titled ‘Strange Complaints’, most of whose explanations prove to be ‘imaginary’. The closer one studies these annals the clearer it becomes that the English language has always needed a phrase such as ‘warmth of imagination’ to designate various excesses: those suffering from baffling conditions usually possessing ‘warm’ imaginations and vice-versa. The idea is that imagination of some type drove their malady but ‘how’ no one knows. Glancing backward again to the Renaissance, it is straightforward to see why Ben Jonson’s Volpone feigned illness to become rich but harder to understand how Joseph Addison, the great man of letters, could claim to become ‘an imaginary valetudinarian’ by studying ‘Physick’ without working out the complex mechanisms from reading medical books to developing chronic ailments. Likewise, one understands how lovers develop ‘love sickness’ given that love, as Shakespeare knew so well, entails a kind of blindness cast over by the power of imagination. But more difficult to understand — again flashing forward — how Canadian concert pianist Glenn Gould’s fear of germs and love affair with his Steinway piano could become explicitly ‘sexual’. There is no hint in Gould’s life that he ‘feigned’ his eccentricities for personal gain, unless his many phobias included fear of flying and his alleged illnesses prevented it — hence his most accurate self-diagnosis an ingrained hypochondria that became habitual to 15

London: Faber and Faber, 1989.

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overflow his life. The role of hypochondriasis within the factitious cluster continues to be problematic today for its overlaps with other conditions, as in Gould’s case, and within the mysteries of brain localization. French critic-psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva avoided the problem in New Maladies of the Soul,16 by returning to the concept of a troubled ‘soul’. Her range includes narcissisms, false personalities, borderline states, and the whole psychosomatic pantheon. All these malades ail — according to Kristeva — because their sick immaterial souls lack pathways to integrate thought, action, and emotion. They are stuck, as it were, under the sign of Saturn. Having no other recourse these conditions generate meaning through representations in the body and sometimes they include the malingerers we have just discussed. All are, in our historical attention to premodern and modern mindsets, imaginaire but no one could think our contemporary human condition more wholesome than that of the subjects studied in this book. Our only cause for hope now, as Kristeva suggests, is a restored, embodied psychic life. How to achieve that future utopian state is another matter.

Modernity’s Diseases of Deception The overlaps of these classifications — FFI, malingering, the much broader Munchausen’s Syndrome (named for Rudolf Erich Raspe’s (1736–94) creation of this fictitious Baron who lied his way through Europe in the eighteenth century), histrionic personality disorder (HPD), mythomania (pathological lying), daemonomania (being preyed upon by devils), the large cluster of war traumas including Gulf War Syndrome, and several hundred others that include addictions and delinquencies — is less vexing than their contexts and explanations. Some types were classified without labels, such as persons who infected others with diseases they hoped would be spread far and wide. Others had eloquent tags: for example, ‘Stendhal Syndrome’, said to have been defined in the great Italian cities as hypersensitivity to art works, causing collapse necessitating hospitalization. Each raised questions about the ‘imaginary’ portion and how it was conceptualized. For example, do you include literary as well as medical texts to show that each is a symptom of modernity and its discontents, as well as an expression? What is the justification for ‘maladies of civilization’? We have seen the theory moving towards aetiologies based on psychosexual explanations; what

16

Trans. by Ross Guberman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).

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about politically generated syndromes and the consequences of gender identity in the production of FFI? If Renaissance melancholy and spleen also had cultural profiles in addition to their medical ones, especially among the gifted and privileged at that time, so do the more recent diseases of deception. The young, neurasthenic Marcel Proust struggled for years with a disbelieving family who considered his breathless spells imaginary. He was often so exhausted and breathless that he could not fall asleep; when he dozed off his dreams entailed recurring nightmares in the perpetual state of asphyxiation. His mother listened but his disdainful father, a famous Parisian doctor who ought to have known better, was dismissive; construing his son’s exacerbations as imaginary bouts brought on by sickening hypochondria and effeminate indolence, at best the products of ‘hypersensitivity’ — catch-all censure hurled at those feigning. Years after Proust died his housekeeper, Céleste Albaret, wrote of her master that his chronic affliction had not been imaginary but served strong psychological functions for him. It permitted Proust to avoid military service and shun society, devalue the homosexuality that gnawed at him, and sequester himself in his bed to write undisturbed. Proust died in 1922 at a time when successful therapies for asthma, his main complaint, were still in their infancy. His condition had long since been properly diagnosed, as his biographers have demonstrated, but little could be done to treat him. Asthma in the early twentieth century was a welldiagnosed disease even if its therapy was ineffective. Hilary Mantel, winner of the 2009 Man Booker Prize, recently wrote an autobiographical memoir about her own plight, Giving up the Ghost.17 During her twenties she suffered from a debilitating and painful illness. It was initially diagnosed as psychiatric for which she was hospitalized and treated with antipsychotic drugs, which in turn produced such further aggravated psychotic symptoms that she fled from doctors altogether. The disease endured for many years and continued on several continents, and after marrying and moving to Africa with her husband in the 1970s she continued to suffer. Desperate to understand her affliction she scanned medical textbooks, until one day while reading one she realized she had a severe form of endometriosis, a pathological condition of the uterine cavity causing pelvic pain and infertility — a diagnosis confirmed after immigrating back to London. Mantel’s earlier surgery left her so irrevocably impaired she could not conceive. What concerns us is her struggle in the dark for illumination no different from puzzled patients in Cheyne’s and Kant’s milieu. The paradox is that this writer can have been so lucky in her literary 17

London: Fourth Estate, 2003.

ENVOI: THE AFTERLIFE OF MALADIES IMAGINAIRES

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career and unfortunate in her doctors. Moreover, her writing demonstrates how the autobiographical memoir has proved to be the literary form par excellence through which to process experience long after visceral pains have ceased, not only in Mantel’s misdiagnosed endometriosis but in the more routine imaginary ailments we have been discussing (a generation ago Marie Cardinal narrated her hysteria, or ‘conversion syndrome’, in Les Mots pour le dire, 1975). Flashing backwards, it becomes evident how prominent the autobiographical elements are in Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time; earlier translated as Remembrance of Things Past). In summary, these ‘patients’ were not factitious: whether in first- or thirdperson narratives the putative malade imaginaire has sought to capture the pain without a name; to fix it without allowing it to flit-flat promiscuously; textually to stab it here and wound it there. Fear can drive the psychological process to the point of fetish: the patient dreading every bodily sensation in a type of dance of death. Yet when the patient tries to identify the condition, describe and name the pang, it vanishes or alters shape. Attending doctors do not have the answers but learn to enlarge their toleration and empathy — little else can be done. Some day a cultural history of this postmodern afterlife of physico-mental maladies will be written and when it is, it will be seen to what degree the ‘imaginary maladies’ of prior centuries have become the transformed neuroses of today. Their web of literary components will also be disentangled as it becomes apparent to what degree the confessional literature of the last two centuries has been invested in it, even when the malady’s signs and symptoms were disguised. As a result it may be that the enduring achievement of this volume is the anticipation of modernity in all this Renaissance medical theory.

INDEX *

Adair, James Makittrick, 380, 408, 412 Agrippa [von Nettesheim], Heinrich Cornelius, 40, 94, 216, 260 Albaret, Céleste, 416 Alexander of Aphrodisias, 27, 79n114, 85, 97 Allen, Michael, 32n35, 40 Amaro, Don alias José Amaro Sánchez, 198 Amiel, Henri-Fréderic, 406–07 Anderson, Isabell, 173 Anges, Jeanne des, 129 Anne, queen of England, 400 Argens, Boyer d’, 367 Argent, John, 127 Aristotle (see also Aristotle, Pseudo-), 53–55, 66–68, 71, 72–81, 85 Aristotle, Pseudo-, 99, 206, 216 Ascham, Roger, 329, 335 Augustine, St, 303–04, 308 Averroes, 27–28, 39, 71, 81–84, 86–87, 89, 96

*

Page numbers in italics refer to figures.

Avicenna, 60–01, 82n128, 107n08, 247, 364 Babb, Lawrence, 318 Baccilieri, Tiberio, 83 Bacon, Francis, 108n09, 125 Bale, John, 337 Balthus of Rostock, 126 Barrough, Philip, 168 Basile, Bruno, 201, 217n49 Baudelaire, Charles, 400 Bavent, Magdaleine, 130 Bayfield, Robert, 315 Benedict XIV, Pope, 366, 367, 372, 373 Bernard, Richard, 178 Bernardo, Giovanni Batista, 84 Biderman, Jakob, 294 Bilby, Dol, 176 Bodin, Jean, 123, 128n63, 309–10 Boguet, Henri, 116 Boklund, Gunnar, 321, 322 Borrini, Matteo, 341 Borromeo, Carlo, Cardinal, 73–74

420

Index

Bosch, Juan, 182, 183 Bradwell, Stephen, 169 Brann, Noel L., 403 Bricot, Thomas, 69, 80 Bright, Thomas, 314 Bright, Timothie, 246 Brossier, Marthe, 127, 128 Brossier, Simon, 69 Browne, Thomas, Sir, 125 Bruno, Giordano, 37 Burton, Robert, 3, 163, 167, 171, 173, 177, 178, 235n17, 240n29, 278, 283, 285, 315, 320n69 Burton Russell, Jeffrey, 122 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 335

Charcot, Jean-Martin, 131n69, 260n2, 410 Cheyne, George, 15, 379–80, 388, 390, 400, 416 Chopin, Frédéric, 409 Cicero, 90n163 Clark, Stuart, 9, 16, 126, 132, 310 Clauß, Matthias, 292–93 Coimbra Commentators, 70, 71, 76 Comiers, Claude, 347–49 Cooke, Alexander, 166 Cooper, Thomas, 312 Corbett, Faith, 165, 176 Corso, Maria Benigna del, Sister, 147–48

Caius, John, 301 Calmet, Augustin, Dom, 344, 352, 353, 369–73 Calvo, Marco Fabio, 253 Camden, William, 336 Capo di Vacca, Girolamo, 60–02 Cardano, Girolamo, 89–90, 94, 124, 216 Carter, Elizabeth, 376, 386, 387, 389, 390, 392–93, 396 Carter, Robert, 412–13 Casaubon, Meric, 100 Cassedy, James, 111–12 Castellio, Sebastian, 262–64, 273 Cataneo, Maurizio, 221n60, 225 Cavallara, Giovanni Battista, 207, 221–22 Céard, Jean, 106n4, 128 Certeau, Michel de, 131, 297 Cervantes, Miguel de, 187, 188, 200 Ceva, Tommaso, 1–2, 16–17

da Monte, Giambattista, 61n32, 98 Darling, Thomas, 165, 172 Daumier, Honoré, 413 Davies, John, 335 Davis, Ade, 125 Deacon, John, 311 Del Río, Martin, 114 Democritus, 243–47, 249, 251–57 Des Noyers, Pierre, 345, 349–51, 352 Devil, the (see also Satan), 8, 105, 108–14, 116, 120, 123, 124, 136–37, 174, 218, 297, 308, 311, 312n44, 348, 353n29, 354, 362 Diethelm, Oskar, 126 Drage, William, 106n6, 178 Du Laurens, André, 70, 75, 100, 127 Duncan, Marc, 129, 131–32 Earnley, Mary, 170–71 Edwards, Karen, 327 Enright, D. J., 414 Enterline, Lynn, 326

421

Index Erastus, Thomas, 122–23 Este, Caterina d’, 149–51 Evans, Cadwallader, 407 Fairfax, family, 166–67, 170 Faivre, Antoine, 352–53 Fernel, Jean, 112–13, 116, 136 Ferrand, Jacques, 125 Ferrier, Auger, 80 Ficino, Marsilio, 19–51, 58, 107n8, 143, 244–45, 246 Finch, Anne, 375–76, 381–82, 384–85, 388–89, 391–92, 396 Foucault, Michel, 181–83, 185, 194, 196 Franzosi, Girolamo, 96–97, 99 Freud, Sigmund, 40, 398, 410 Fulke, William, 329–30, 334n115 Galen, 57, 61–62, 71, 265 Galgarand, 120 Gardiner, Stephen, 331–32 Gavin, Hector, 412, 413 Geiger, Malachias, 6, 280n19, 281–84, 284, 285, 286–99 Gerald of Wales, 335 Gessner, Conrad, 71 Gifford, George, 178 Glover, Mary, 169 Gonzaga, Scipione, 220n60, 225 Goulart, Simon, 320–22 Granville, Joseph Mortimer, 411 Grenier, Jean, 313–14 Guazzo, Francesco Maria, 116 Guibelet, Jourdain, 115 Hadfield, Andrew, 336 Harsnett, Samuel, 314

Hatfield, Martha, 174 Hawenreuter, Johann Ludwig, 76 Heinrich Kramer, 109, 110, 111, 115 Heraclitus of Ephesus, 243–44, 253 Hippocrates, 131n69, 132, 133, 135, 214, 224, 242, 247–49, 251–52, 266 Hobbes, Thomas, 100–01 Hoffmann, Friedrich, 126 Holinshed, Raphael, 335 Holland, Henry, 310 Huarte de San Juan, Juan, 186 Hunt, Maurice, 318 Huson, Alice, 165–66, 176 Iamblichus, 25, 40, 43, 48–49, 359n44 Íñiguez, Bartolomé, 189–97 Istitoris (see Heinrich Kramer) Jackson, Elizabeth, 127, 169 James I/VI, King of England and Scotland, 176, 311 Jennings, Elizabeth, 159, 162, 165, 167, 169, 170, 175 Johann Sprenger, 109 Johnson, Elizabeth, 173 Johnson, Samuel, 404 Jorden, Edward, 127, 134, 166n48, 314 Joubert, Laurent, 245 Kant, Immanuel, 409 Keith, George, 15–16 Keyworth, David, 344–45 Kleinman, Arthur, 376, 377, 390 Krampl, Ulrike, 112 Kratz, Dennis, 303, 304 Kristeller, Paul Oskar, 25 Kristeva, Julia, 415

422

Lambertini, Prospero (see Benedict XIV, Pope) Lanciuole, Dorotea da, 148 Lastman, Pieter, 255, 256n83 Laureo, Vincenzo, 207, 221 Lavater, Casper, 405 le Breton, Jean, 129 Le Brun, Pierre, 348 Lederer, David, 145n17, 169n43, 281, 282n24, 287, 289 Lemnius, Levinus, 120n35, 298 Leo XI (see Medici, Alessandro de’) Lever, Christopher, 330 López Alonso, Carmen, 198 Loyola, Ignatius, 333, 334 Lucretius, 1, 17 Maestro, Raffaella del, Sister, 144, 146 Mantel, Hilary, 416–17 Maravall, José Antonio, 199 Marci of Kronland, 365 Marescot, Michel, 127n57, 128 Maria Theresa, Empress, 366, 371, 372, 373 Marigner, Mr, 346n9, 350–51, 352, 353–62, 370, 372–73 Markham, Gervase, 336 Marsilio Ficino (see Ficino, Marsilio) Medici, Alessandro de’, 154–57 Melanchthon, Philip, 240n29, 278 Menghi, Girolamo, 153, 155, 156 Mercuriale, Girolamo, 135, 140, 144, 152, 202–03, 206–08, 210–14, 216, 218, 220, 225–26 Midelfort, H. C. Erik, 182n2, 183, 196n31, 278n10 Millingen, John Gideon, 412

Index Milton, John, 108, 327, 333 Mitchell, Silas Weir, 410–11 Molière, 407 Montagu, Mary Wortley, Lady, 376, 386–91, 396 Montalto, Filoteu Eliau, 60, 61, 62, 65, 98 More, Henry, 100, 343, 355n35, 359, 362 Mori, Ascanio, 222, 225 Moritz, Karl, 410 Mosti, Agostino, 218 Mullan, John, 381 Murphy, Terence, 172 Napier, Richard, 162–63, 171, 174, 177 Naudé, Gabriel, 129 Nebuchadnezzar, 304–06 Nelli, Plautilla, Sister, 143 Nider, Johannes, 111 Nifo, Agostino, 53, 69, 84 Nymann, Hieronymus, 107 Nynauld, Jean de, 127, 310n32 Paole, Arnold, 366 Paracelsus, 126, 216, 353, 355–57, 359, 365 Park, Katharine, 4n10, 203, 226 Pascal, Blaise, 23, 360n46 Perkins, William, 305–06, 311, 330 Perry, William, 165, 172 Pietro d’Abano, 68, 89n158 Pilet de la Mésnardière, Hippolyte-Jules, 132 Pinelli, Giovan Vincenzo, 208, 209n23, 210 Piozzi, Hester Thrale, 376, 386, 387, 388, 393–96

Index Pisano, Giovanni Antonio, 207, 223–24, 227 Plato, 44, 79, 270 Platter, Felix, 277, 278n10 Plotinus, 27–28, 29, 34, 35, 38, 41, 43, 47, 48 Poglojowitz, Peter, 351, 363, 365 Pomata, Gianna, 203, 226 Pomponazzi, Pietro, 28, 55, 85–89, 92–94, 99 Pope, Alexander, 400 Priscianus Lydus, 22, 25 Proclus, 44 Proust, Marcel, 416 Purkiss, Diane, 178 Puteanus, Erycius, 245–46 Pynas, Jan, 255–56 Quijote, Don, 200 Quondam, Amedeo, 201 Ranft, Michael, 346, 351, 352, 362–66, 368, 372, 373 Reid, John, 404 Reil, Johann Christian, 410 Rémy, Nicholas, 309 Rena, Sibilla della, Sister, 151–52 Reynolds, Myra, 384–85 Rinuccini, Agostina, Abbess, 154–55 Rinuccini, Nera, Sister, 145, 146 Rodes, Sara, 168, 176 Roper, Lyndal, 10, 160n4, 283 Rosselli, Fede, Sister, 139, 145 Roulet, Jacques, 313 Rousset, François de, 129 Rufus of Ephesus, 234n15, 240, 247, 406

423 Russell, Margaret alias ‘Countesse’, 160, 175 Sanches, Francisco, 90–92, 99 Sandys, George, 307–08 Santa Cruz, Alfonso de, 134, 187 Sassonia, Ercole, 60, 62n35, 63–65, 70–71, 98 Satan (see also Devil, the), 9, 108, 111, 115, 117, 309, 312 Schegk, Jacob, 71 Schertz, Karl Ferdinand de, 351 Schiesari, Juliana, 241 Schubert, Gotthilf Heinrich, 410 Scot, Reginald, 107, 123–25, 136, 261, 310 Servetus, Michel alias Michael Villanovanus, 262–63 Sharpe, James, 161, 163n16, 164 Shereman, Dr, 169 Sikes, Mary, 168, 176 Smollett, Tobias, 398, 404 Sommers, William, 165, 172 Speak, Gill, 187 Spenser, Edmund, 332–33, 336 Spinoza, Benedict de, 8, 100, 101–02 Stanyhurst, Richard, 335 Starkie, John, 171–72 Tasso, Torquato, 202–11, 215–27 Taxil, Jean, 9, 114 Teresa of Avila, 152 Theophrastus, 25, 243 Tissot, Samuel Auguste David, 405–06, 412 Tomeo, Niccolò Leonico, 78–80 Topsell, Edward, 302, 313, 327, 328 Tricomi, Albert H., 316n60, 321

424 Trotter, Thomas, 401 Valescus de Tarenta, 243, 244n41, 254 Valladier, André, 116 Valles, Francesco, 114 van Foreest, Nanning, 230, 232n5, 237, 254 van Foreest, Pieter, 231, 233, 235n17, 239–43, 250–51, 254, 256–57 Vanini, Giulio Cesare (Lucilio), 8, 92–95, 96, 99 van Swieten, Gerhard, 371 Vasari, Giorgio, 143 Venator Tectander, Adolphus, 255–56 Veniero, Maffeo, 204–05 Vidal, Fernando, 369, 371 Voltaire, 346, 372

Index Walker, John, 311 Webster, John, physician, 312 Webster, John, playwright, 13, 302, 312, 318, 320–23, 325, 326, 327, 331, 338, 340 Weinrich, Martin, 343 Wells, Marion, 201–02 Wieland, Melchior, 210 Wier, Johan, 12–13, 39–40, 48–49, 118–23, 125, 133, 259–74, 310 Wilkinson, Anne, 170, 171n57 Willet, Andrew, 304–05 Wilson, Katharina, 345, 347n13 Yvelin, Pierre, 130 Zacchia, Paolo, 2n3, 4n7, 140, 283n26 Zimara, Marcantonio, 84

E ARLY E UROPEAN R ESEARCH

All volumes in this series are evaluated by an Editorial Board, strictly on academic grounds based on reports prepared by referees who have been commissioned by virtue of their specialism in the appropriate field. The Board ensures that the screening is done independently and without conflicts of interest. The definitive texts supplied by authors are also subject to review by the Board before being approved for publication. Further, the volumes are copyedited to conform to the publisher’s stylebook and to the best international academic standards in the field. Titles in series Sociability and its Discontents: Civil Society, Social Capital, and their Alternatives in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. by Nicholas Eckstein and Nicholas Terpstra (2009)

In preparation Writing Royal Entries in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Marie-Claude Canova-Green, Jean Andrews, and Marie-France Wagner