The Medieval Heart 9780300153941

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The Medieval Heart  



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 The Medieval Heart  



HEATHER WEBB

Yale University Press New Haven and London

Published with assistance from Arts & Humanities at The Ohio State University. Copyright © 2010 by Yale University. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Designed by Mary Valencia. Set in Monotype Fournier type by Duke & Company, Devon, Pennsylvania. Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Ann Arbor, Michigan. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Webb, Heather, 1976– The medieval heart / Heather Webb. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-300-15393-4 (alk. paper) 1. Civilization, Medieval. 2. Human body (Philosophy)—History. 3. Heart— Symbolic aspects—History. 4. Medical literature—History—To 1500. 5. Heart in literature. 6. Mind and body—History. I. Title. CB351.W43 2010 909.07—dc22 2009028887 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10

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To the memory of Ellen Falk and Eugene H. Falk, in gratitude for their courage and generosity.

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Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction

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1. The Sovereign Heart 2. The Porous Heart

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3. The Engendering Heart 4. The Animate Heart Epilogue 182 Notes 187 Bibliography Index 237

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Acknowledgments

This book owes its existence to countless conversations over many years. Robert Harrison, as my mentor and as my friend, has continued to ask the hardest questions. I am endlessly grateful to him for drawing me into conversation, for teaching the art of insistent listening, and for modeling an inimitable eloquence and clarity of thought. And I should mention that he read and commented on more versions of these pages than either of us would like to remember. I began to work on these ideas at Stanford, while I was completing my PhD in Italian. My committee was a real dream team that has continued to sustain me even after I moved on to Ohio State. Affectionate thanks are due to Philippe Buc, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Jeffrey Schnapp, and Carolyn Springer. Many others have read and commented on my thoughts on the medieval heart, and I’d like to thank Nancy Caciola, William Christian, Elena Coda, Richard Davis, Marilynn Desmond, Rick Emmerson, Ronald J. Falk, Giorgio Ficara, Thomas Harrison, Rachel Jacoff, Gábor Klaniczay, Charles Klopp, Joshua Landy, Trina Marmarelli, Judith Mayne, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Barbara Newman, Lucia Re, Dana Renga, Cynthia Robinson, Antony Shuttleworth, Miguel Tamen, Matthew Tiews, Eugene Vance, the members of the department of French and Italian

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at The Ohio State University, and my chair, Diane Birckbichler. I’d like to thank Theodore H. and Frances K. Geballe and the Stanford Humanities Center for their generous funding of a year’s work at Stanford. Audrey Martinko did beautiful, careful work helping me with formatting. Two anonymous readers for Yale University Press gave helpful suggestions. I am very grateful to Jennifer Banks, editor, for her enthusiasm for the project and to Jack Borrebach, production editor. And finally, thanks to my dear friends and family for their loving support throughout this project.

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Introduction

The medieval heart was a very different organ from the one we know today. When we speak of the heart, we often find ourselves speaking from within one of two distinct categories: on the one hand, we pragmatically discuss that pump-like muscle hidden behind the rib cage; on the other, we speak metaphorically about the heart that loves, the heart that knows, or the heart that feels. We are quite secure in this division, assured that, in reality, the heart does a simple job (we hope it does so reliably) and has nothing to do with the messiness of emotion, thought, or sensation. The medieval heart was a considerably more complex, and more vulnerable, organ. Guido Cavalcanti (c. 1255–1300) writes: Love pulled sighs from your eyes, shooting them into my heart so strongly that I fled, confounded.1 This is no mere poetic conceit; for Cavalcanti, the heart is literally open to sensation. The arrows of love, now a timeworn trope devoid of meaning, are in this case real trajectories of breath and spirit, relentlessly invading the poet’s porous body. His heart was a heavily trafficked space, host to myriad entities that we would now divide into the categories of

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physical, spiritual, and psychological. One thing it did not do, however, was circulate blood. Western scholars in the medieval period traced the nourishing flow from the heart outward into the members but did not detect any path back to the source.2 It was only in the seventeenth century that William Harvey’s discovery of circulation supplied the Western world with what has often been described as the missing piece of a completed puzzle. Narratives of completion, such as the one we have crafted about Harvey’s discovery, work precisely because they obliterate from memory scores of other “pieces” that no longer have a place in our supposedly finalized picture. In fact, while scholars before Harvey did not see a path for blood that led back to the heart, they did see myriad other pathways leading into and out of the heart. Spirits issued from and returned to the heart through the pores in the skin and the gateways of the senses, forming circulations that were not limited by the confines of a single human body. This book explores such lost circulations, relics of a time when life was defined by extension into the world rather than effective protection from the world’s invasions. I use the word circulation here in a way that reflects the broader cultural notions of cardiocentric outflow and return that I believe permeated medieval visions of body and soul. Harvey’s work has led us to a highly specific notion of circulation as the one-way motion of blood through channels that complete a circuit. The medieval circulations that I explore in the following pages might best be defined in a much more general fashion: as the movement of any thing that returns again to the point of departure after making its way through intermediate points. By this deliberate opening of a restricted semantic field, we may examine a whole range of physical and spiritual entities in motion, variously routed out of and into the heart. Such relics would be of no use to us today if we could be sure that we now know everything there is to know about the life of the body.

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But this is not the case. As in the seventeenth century, we are once again posing basic, unresolved questions: Where is life located? What does it consist of? How is it maintained? When does it begin? How does it end? We are, again, engaged in the process of forming new concepts to address these issues. But new concepts do not arise spontaneously; they are born from the material of our ancestral conceptions. At any given time, we find ourselves in the presence not only of our dominant concepts, but also in the shadows of those ancestral concepts and the rudiments of future ones. If we resist the temptation to forge a narrative of progress and completion, of forward jolts and revolutions, if we allow ourselves instead to examine the tangled spaces in which contradictory concepts coexist, we may uncover vast resources to aid us in our current rethinking of the nature of life, organs, organisms, and environment.3 Harvey’s De motu cordis of 1628 documents a particular coexistence of two contradictory sets of dominant conceptions: those that had fully permeated the medieval world for centuries and those that, introduced by Harvey, still belong to our own time. To give just one example: we no longer think of the heart as a breathing organ, a notion so deeply ingrained in medieval thought that theology and poetics were grounded in this physiological “truth.” But we may approach the breathing heart if we are attentive to its shadowy presence in Harvey’s text alongside the alternative he prepares. From this unique point of departure, we may move in either direction; forward to the modern heart or back to the medieval heart.4 It is Harvey’s text that gives us the heart we know, rendering the medieval heart’s modes of being the mere stuff of metaphor. For this reason, the present study employs the De motu cordis as a lens, a means of approaching alternate systems of function that underlie an entirely different view of bodily interaction with the environment. A recovery of the circulations that described life some seven centuries ago does much more than illustrate earlier views of bodily function. If we can, through the process of this work of recovery, think our way

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into positioning the body within a larger circulation of any kind, rather than positing it as a self-perpetuating, self-limiting source, we may begin to approach a sense of individual corporeality as sustained by a radical state of relatedness to the external world. It may become possible, again, to conceive of different boundaries and sources for the life of the body. Today, in a world that takes for granted Harvey’s closed-circuit model of heart function, in a society committed to a certain inaccessibility of our “inner selves,” we are nonetheless becoming interested in understanding the body as influenced by and influencing its environment in countless ways that we cannot yet entirely fathom. The circulation concepts to be presented here, concepts that were prevalent in the medieval period and still debatable if out of fashion in Harvey’s time, are again surprisingly germane today. These varying pathways that begin and end in the human heart track the changing landscape of our perceptions of what it means to interact with the “external world” and, above all, the way in which we understand life. While Harvey sought to show that only blood and nothing else entered and exited the heart, today we are asking how the heart might be susceptible to numerous emotional and environmental agents. In short, we are describing new routes back into the heart. Even if we no longer think of the movements of the heart as designating the beginning and the end of life, our changing concepts of the degree of relation between the heart and the external world function as an indicator of changing notions of the autonomy of individual life. But how can we examine ancestral concepts? To begin with, how do we define the parameters of a study of ancestral concepts without anachronistically imposing our modern disciplinary or, better, “stylistic” divisions upon the subject? In the late medieval world, ideas of the heart and its circulations were elaborated and solidified by a group of people who shared the structuring principles of Aristotelian natural philosophy. Such a community would include theologians, philosophers,

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anatomists, physicians, and poets engaged in considering the principles and ramifications of that philosophy. In order to get fully inside this thought community, a broad range of texts must be taken into consideration.5 Anatomical treatises, while useful, are not sufficient to map the boundaries or locate the center of this space that we no longer inhabit. Philosophical treatises and religious writings speak to us from within its boundaries. Poetry and narrative usher us into its most shadowy recesses. Physiological subject matter was discussed in medical, natural philosophical, and theological works from this period. Many of these works asked similar questions, used the same scholastic apparatus of arguments, objections, and solutions, and cited the same authorities.6 As autopsy and dissection were rare at this time and had limited impact on the body of physiological knowledge, anyone with access to texts could interpret and assemble the wisdom of ancient authorities. The interpretation of a physician was not necessarily any more valid than the interpretation of a theologian, or for that matter of a poet. By considering this broader community defined by certain foundational principles, it is my hope that we may avoid the usual and rather fruitless burden of establishing cause and effect between what we now see as radically divided disciplines: Do poetic images reflect scientific discoveries? Or is it the opposite? Rather than addressing these sorts of questions, questions that ultimately impose our present thought style onto the past while subordinating one discipline (in its modern definition) to another, I propose to reconstruct a thought community relevant to the subject at hand and, in so doing, approach a series of concepts derived from a thought style at variance with our own.7 In various ways, these texts explore and render vivid a mode of understanding the relational powers of the body that gave way as Harvey’s theories were accepted, absorbed, and incorporated into a new general sense of bodily function. Rather than attempting to offer an ex-

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haustive catalogue of visions of the heart, I have focused my inquiry on those philosophical, theological, political, poetic, and medical texts that best illuminate four central concepts of medieval heart function. These concepts, I argue, alter the ways in which we understand the interaction between individual bodies and the world. This was no esoteric discussion among specialists, but a dialogue between images, metaphors, and models that could defi ne or shift such understanding. My emphasis, therefore, is on vernacular understandings of these concepts and not on technical treatises circulated between anatomists. I consider medieval encyclopedias, preachers’ manuals, a manual of dissection, works of natural philosophy, works of theology, lyric and epic poetry, short stories, the lives of saints, the writings of mystics, and plague tracts. The thought community featured in this study is predominantly Italian. The major centers for teaching and studying medicine in the Middle Ages and Renaissance were located in Italy, from the Salernitan School that led the so-called twelfth-century Renaissance to the universities at Bologna, Padua, and Pisa.8 Italian physicians of the medieval and Renaissance periods participated in philosophical and theological debates such as those on the nature and location of the soul as part of a greater university community. In this way, specific notions of heart function were widespread in learned circles all throughout Italy. Harvey studied in Padua with Hieronymus Fabricius; his treatise directly engages Italian anatomical and philosophical thought. Over the past decades, there have been numerous studies of the metaphors and analogies connected to the human body. Scholars have shown how writers in various countries, in various periods, have viewed writing, social structures, and so on “through the prism of the human body.”9 The present study differs in that the human body is not treated as a prism through which we may better see our true object of study. In the texts examined here, physiology in itself is very much at issue. In medieval thought, the body does not stand only for the world,

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it is defi ned, above all, by the way in which it stands in the world.10 Politics, philosophy, poetry, theology, and medicine are each founded on a definition of the nature of the relationship between the individual and the world. Thinkers of all kinds thus became interested in understanding and writing about the workings of the heart as the principal way to interpret that relationship. The main chapters in this book focus on four fundamental medieval conceptions of the heart and its circulations; I frame each of the worlds and communities these conceptions illuminate with Harvey’s efforts to shift the borders of those worlds. Though this is not a book about William Harvey, I employ Harvey’s text as a singularly useful vision of a moment when opposing dominant conceptions came into conflict. This is our entry point into a thought community of the past, a point of access into our ancestral concepts, from which vantage point we may perhaps discern the movement of our own present into its future ancestry. The first chapter considers the notion of the heart as sovereign of the body and as source of power. Today, we are firmly convinced that the brain is in charge of our physical being and have built countless political ideas, metaphors, and images within the borders of that concept. The political configurations that grow organically from within the boundaries of a cardiocentric body are not simply relocated; they offer an alternate vision of power and governance. I argue that a cardiocentric body, body politic, and body of the church each defy the hierarchical, vertical notion of a head that rules absolutely over a subjected body and instead propose a centralized model of unity through shared resources. The cardiocentric model embraces pluralities and multipolar structures by recourse to notions of source and nourishment, rather than control. While Harvey stands on the “medieval” side of this divide in terms of his political metaphors, his work reveals the heart to be a different kind of source than previously imagined, setting the groundwork for a later shift to our current physiological and metaphorical models.

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The second chapter focuses on the concept of the breathing heart. The medieval heart is a respiratory organ, open and porous, radically available to the outside world and host to varied intercorporeal circulations. Sensation was often described as occurring by means of a flow of airborne spirits into the heart. I propose that there are two cardiocentric models for vision in particular that coexist at this time. One conceives of vision as a stamping or inscribing of images upon the heart, while the second model posits a kind of vision that may occur between humans, or between a human and a divine entity, in which the act of seeing becomes a reciprocal, and potentially generational, mixing of foreign and innate spirits within the heart of the viewer. Harvey seeks to limit the space of the heart’s activity to the interior of the body, a limitation that would redimension configurations of poetic inspiration, divine possession, and human interaction. The third chapter examines the concept of the heart as a gendered and generative organ. It is the seminal heat and seminal action of the heart, rather than genital difference, that determines sex in the Middle Ages. The medieval heart is of necessity a double-gendered organ; it must be both receptive, as described in chapter two, and projective. Health depended upon an individual’s ability to push spirit from the heart into the world beyond the skin. Just as receptivity is a feminine characteristic essential to hearts of both sexes, the propulsive action of the heart is a masculine quality that is necessary to both women and men (if in varying degrees). Harvey’s rhetoric speaks to medieval notions of the heart’s virility; at the same time, he clearly delimits the scope of the heart’s action to the interior of a single body. For Harvey, it is the solidity of the boundary between an individual and the environment that makes us human. Autonomy, equated with sterility and death in medieval mappings of human action, is in Harvey’s analysis a sign of human superiority over the lower animals. The fourth chapter considers the idea that the heart, as the seat of

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the soul, is the last part of the body to die. I examine medieval accounts of the experience of looking at an extracted heart; from tales of hearts served to and eaten by unfaithful wives to Mondino de’ Liuzzi’s dissection manual to stories of the dissections of saints’ hearts, I note two alternatives in this experience. As the heart is the seat of the soul and thus the locus of identity, the living either come into contact with the horror of recognizing that a loved one has become mere unidentifiable flesh or have a privileged opportunity to interact briefly with the fleeing soul or the signs left by that soul. Harvey’s work with vivisection prolongs this liminal period. As he allows a dove’s heart to stop and then brings it back to life with the heat of his finger, he shows that the heart is not, in fact, the last to die. If the heart is no longer the last part of the body to die, where, then, is the soul lodged? This brings us to a set of very contemporary questions. To put the problem in secular terms, where is life located? An epilogue to the book considers a few attempts to shift our present dominant conceptions of the role of the heart, the brain, and the life of the body. Much of what the medieval world attributed to the heart we now attribute to the brain, but we are beginning to learn that the brain is not as self-sufficient as we once imagined. Perhaps the medieval heart, in its openness, vulnerability, and radical state of relation with the environment, still has something to teach us.

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C H A P T E R on e

The Sovereign Heart

What Rules the Body? The heart of creatures is the foundation of life, the Prince of all, the Sun of their Microcosm, on which all vegetation does depend, from whence all vigor and strength does flow. Likewise the King is the foundation of his Kingdoms, and the Sun of his Microcosm, the Heart of his Commonwealth, from whence all power and mercy proceeds.1 William Harvey begins the dedication of his De motu cordis of 1628 with a bit of flattery for King Charles I. The heart, he explains, is the natural analogue of a sovereign, radiating power within the body just as the king confers grace upon his kingdom. He adheres to a very old story, describing the heart as a fountain or foundation. We will begin, then, where Harvey begins, when it seems that his treatise will reinforce Aristotelian ideas of the heart as source of all things, ideas that dominated the medieval imaginary. Before Harvey can turn to the task of putting new boundaries on the heart’s function, he must pay tribute to its perceived powers. In order to do so, he revives a medieval notion of cardiac sovereignty.

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As Thomas Fuchs has pointed out, our sense of Harvey’s vision of the heart has been significantly colored by Descartes’ use of Harvey shortly after the De motu cordis was published. The Passions of the Soul of 1649 recast the heart as an automated machine, no longer a flattering model for a prince, and designated the brain as the sole active force in the body.2 The contradiction between these two texts was not based on facts of physical function as might be demonstrated by experiment; the disagreement was one of interpretation. Harvey and Descartes presented two alternative models of the human body and, simultaneously, contrasting models of political power. The brain, as Descartes imagines it, is an autocratic ruler that sends down commands from on high. He explains that in a moment of intense emotion, when one may feel a particular sensation in the chest, logic can inform us that the actual location of this emotion is elsewhere: “It is easy to see that the only reason why this change [due to the passions] is felt as occurring in the heart is that there is a small nerve which descends to it from the brain—just as pain is felt as in the foot by means of the nerves in the foot.”3 For Descartes, the brain is entirely other to the rest of the body. Rather than a source of some essence or substance shared with the whole, it remains separate, sending out commands, not its own qualities. As it does not occupy the physical center of the body, the brain stands superior, remaining at a remove from the body that it governs. The nerves that descend from the controlling brain create a vertical structure, a simple two-part hierarchy of sovereign and subject. In Harvey’s analogy, on the other hand, the heart-as-sun is the source of shared heat, distributing its warmth to all parts of the organism. Rooted in the physical center of the body, the heart, by the virtue of circulation, is connected to, and in communication with, every part of the body. The entire body is thus naturally dependent on this fountain of its most primary, common need. The alternatives offered in these two seventeenth-century maps

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of bodily power are not so different from those that were available centuries earlier. Why would the body be ruled by the heart rather than the head, or vice versa? From Aristotle on, scholars took sides in the debate not only by weighing current ideas of physiology but also, and perhaps primarily, by pondering what it meant, or should mean, to rule a body or a body politic. In the late medieval period, the available treatises on physiology authored by accepted authorities were divided between those that championed the heart as the governing organ in the body, those that championed the brain, and those that found a solution somewhere between the two. Consider the effects of such hierarchical instability on political metaphor: if one wished to use the body as a metaphor for the state, as was common practice in medieval Europe, one had to first describe and distribute authority within the body. Such political writings were also necessarily treatises of physiology; the nature of relations between organs had to be defined in order for meaning to be fi xed. Figurative language in this category could not rely on standard referents, but engaged instead in fresh interpretations of bodily function and in so doing took on a theoretical, rather than descriptive, function. If we contemplate the history of corporeal hierarchies, we may discern two sources of tension that delineate a recurrent alternation between two sets of configurations of the human. The first is an alternation between a sovereign brain and a sovereign heart and the corresponding visions of rule paired with each. The second is an alternation between the idea of a unitary source of power within the body and the concept of a multipolar body with a plurality of control centers. This chapter looks at convergences between physiologies and political metaphors in terms of these two tensions. For most of Western history, the brain or the head was the most common metaphor for the ruler of the body politic. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, however, the heart momentarily took over the role as sovereign in political metaphor and in physiology

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in a significant number of accounts. This required a deft negotiation of the problem of unity versus multipolarity. While the brain’s importance had to be acknowledged, the heart was nonetheless singled out as the organ that unified and originated all life processes. What is at stake in this alternate vision of the body and the body politic? What changes when the heart is sovereign, rather than the head? In order to address these questions, the chapter begins by sketching out some useful terms and concepts that derive from a perhaps unexpected source, the psychologist philosopher William James (1842–1910). James’ defi nitions of three kinds of function are singularly useful in mapping the complex relations between organs in a multipolar body. Our contemporary style of thinking bodily function and bodily control is still decidedly encephalocentric, and therefore a more nuanced idea of function is essential in order to begin thinking a body that is governed by multiple sources of power. From here, we may delve directly into medieval mappings of the body. The starting point for any such mapping is the origin of life, the infusion of the soul into the embryo. The location of this infusion indicates the locus of primal force in the body. From the theological writings of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas to the vernacular poetry of Dante Alighieri, we may trace reflection on the problem of a possible plurality of the soul and of its location and modes of action within the body. Spirits, hybrid entities that bridge the gap between the corporeal and incorporeal, allow for a compromise between a unitary soul and the multiple diverse actions of the soul in the body. With these maps established, the chapter turns to metaphors of the body of the church and the body politic. Here I am indebted to Jacques Le Goff ’s succinct catalogue of a great number of these metaphors in the writings of the late medieval period.4 I respond to his invitation to further inquiry into these issues by pairing some of the texts he cites with vernacular rewritings of these metaphoric bodies. I suggest that there are particular reasons

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why authors of the late medieval period might choose to emphasize the sovereignty of the heart, in both religious and secular contexts. In short, whether the body under discussion was understood to be a literal body or the metaphoric body of the church or state, late medieval scholars had a choice in defining the source and nature of control within that body. Choosing the heart meant choosing centrality over hierarchy and, further, emphasized a certain plurality within a unity. Now that our notions of physiology do not support such a vision of the body, we have been deprived of a particular metaphorics of power. It is, ironically, within Harvey’s embrace of the medieval notion of cardiac sovereignty that he provides the foundation for a permanent shift away from such concepts. He redefi nes the terms for designating a central power as sovereign and, in so doing, supplies the means by which the heart as center loses its nobility altogether. Rethinking Function How was it ever possible, one might ask, to imagine that the heart governed the principal functions of the body, in itself and in its relations with the external world? One would imagine that the example of individuals who had sustained a brain or spinal cord injury might have offered ample visible proof to permanently refute Aristotle’s notion that the heart ruled motion and sensation, for instance. But many late medieval philosophers, theologians, and physicians found ways to insist that the heart ruled the brain, even if they accepted the idea that the brain governed the nervous system. Scholars have often sought to reconcile this tenacious “inconsistency” by suggesting that notions of the heart’s dominion were limited to the metaphorical realms while medicine held to a more strictly delimited sense of the heart’s physical powers. This is, however, an overly simplistic distinction for a time when natural philosophy, theology, poetry, and medicine worked within the same frames

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of terminology and asked many of the same questions. If, at times, we find a debate on physiology that divides along the lines of the physicians’ adherence to Galen and the philosophers’ adherence to Aristotle, it does not mean that the philosophers meant to speak metaphorically. They simply had different authorities and different procedures for arriving at what was understood to be a literal, physical truth of bodily function. Another frequent explanation of such inconsistencies, until much too recently, went something like this: “During the Middle Ages beliefs about physiology were always based on Galen. They were frequently confused and often the result of a misunderstanding of his work.”5 These are the fi rst lines of Singer’s chapter in his Short Hist ory of Medicine entitled “The Rebirth of Science (From about 1500 to about 1700): The Anatomical Awakening,” and such sentiments were, and in some sense still are, pervasive. Even for those of us imbued with a hypersensitivity to differing historical paradigms, late medieval physiology presents itself as a frustrating hodgepodge of coexisting theories that would seem, on the face of it, to be consistent only in their contradictions of one another. The very same thinker, whether physician, philosopher, theologian, or poet, will at one moment attribute a certain function to the brain and at another moment attribute precisely the same function to the heart. One is tempted to use words like “confuse,” “conflate,” or “contradict” to describe the mess, or to line up one set of described function under the category “metaphor” and another set under the category “medicine.” But any of these neat solutions ultimately robs us of the beautiful complexity of medieval constructions of the body and its cohabitation with the soul. Worse, it renders exploration of these worlds a mere pleasure trip into the quaint errors of our predecessors, engendering an attitude that prevents our engagement with systems that demand us to think bodily experience in a different way. To begin to open a way into this intricate and challenging interweaving of corporeal functionality, it is necessary to linger for a moment on the concept of function

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itself. What do we mean when we claim that the heart or the brain has a certain function? We are all too accustomed to imagining that if the brain has a certain function, or does something, then the heart does not. In assigning function to an organ, we often isolate it, content in thinking that we have found the source of a specific action. But this is not the way the medieval world understood organ function. To begin to get back behind our own limiting notions of function, we might do well to begin much closer to our own time, with a few images derived from William James’ “Ingersoll Lecture on the Immortality of Man,” given in 1898. In his lecture, James addresses two principal objections to the doctrine of immortality, the first being an isolationist notion of the brain’s function, or as he puts it: “How can we believe in life hereafter when Science has once for all attained to proving, beyond possibility of escape, that our inner life is a function of that famous material, the so-called ‘grey matter’ of our cerebral convolutions? How can the function possibly persist after the organ has undergone decay?”6 He suggests that we are limited by a narrow definition of function; we must inquire into the possibility that there are different kinds of “functional dependence.” James offers three varieties: the first is productive function (a tea kettle produces steam); second, releasing or permissive function (the trigger of a crossbow releases an arrow); and the third, transmissive function (colored glass filters light). In general, our ideas of brain function have assumed that it is productive. But what if the brain’s function is instead transmissive? James proposes two analogies for imagining transmissive function, colored glass and the keys of an organ: “The keys of an organ have only a transmissive function. They open successively the various pipes and let the wind in the air-chest escape in various ways. The voices of the various pipes are constituted by the columns of air trembling as they emerge. But the air is not engendered in the organ. The organ proper, as

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distinguished from its air-chest, is only an apparatus for letting portions of it loose upon the world in these peculiarly limited shapes.”7 Another analogy for describing this transmissive function is that of the voice of the speaker: “The air now comes through my glottis determined and limited in its force and quality of its vibrations by the peculiarities of those vocal chords which form its gate of egress and shape it into my personal voice.”8 Rather than producing consciousness, thought, or inner life, the brain acts, in this analysis, like the organ or the vocal apparatus. It sifts, determines, and limits something that comes from beyond itself. According to this theory of transmission, the brain renders thought and inner life particular. When the brain decays, that which is personal is irreparably lost. After death, the mechanism of transmission, like a particular color in a prism, is no more, but the light continues to exist. To return to the air analogy, the particular sound of a personal voice has disappeared, but the air that constituted that voice is still with us. This notion of immortality wouldn’t appeal to the medieval Christian world, in which an individual soul must survive the death of the individual body in order to enjoy rewards or suffer personalized punishments in eternity. But James’ transmission theory aptly introduces the sophisticated and subtle ways that many late medieval thinkers envisioned inter- and intracorporeal circulations. On the intracorporeal level, the heart was the organ credited with productive function in the body. It made blood, created heat, formed semen, and generated spirits, those volatile entities that carried out the work of the soul.9 The brain’s function was entirely transmissive; it did not create but merely refined input received from the heart. The medieval world could explain paralysis due to head or neck injury by suggesting essentially that the transmitter was damaged. Motion was still being produced in the heart; it simply couldn’t be communicated to the limbs. James’ terminology is also well suited for describing medieval

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notions of intercorporeal circulations. He notes that the ordinary production theory of consciousness holds that the action of bodily sense organs on the brain leads to brain action in the form of sensations and mental images that in turn lead to higher forms of thought and knowledge. However, in the case of events such as religious conversion, miraculous healings, premonitions, apparitions, or visions, there is no role for the sense organs. Perhaps, James suggests, these effects are not “produced” within the body, but rather arrive from outside: “All that is needed is an abnormal lowering of the brain-threshold to let them through.” Further, “we need only suppose the continuity of our consciousness with a mother sea, to allow for exceptional waves occasionally pouring over the dam.”10 In medieval terms, it is not an abnormal lowering of the brain threshold that permits access to a greater entity continuous with the self (or to other entities), it is openness of heart. When it comes to intercorporeal circulation, the heart’s function is both productive and transmissive: sensory processes involve the traffic of spirits into and out of the heart, while divine intervention into an individual human soul takes place in the heart. In fact, medieval accounts of the entire range of human experience, from the mundane to encounters with the supernatural, suggest that very little was thought to be produced by the individual body in isolation. Living in the world was understood to entail a fundamental condition of openness or availability to the things in that world. Purely productive function of any kind is thus thrown into question; thought cannot be an unadulterated production created as a response to an entirely separate presentation of data. Thought (and particularly speech) is always a curious admixture of the thinking, speaking subject and the things themselves, as there is no absolute separation between the sensory presentation of objects and the production of thought in response to that data. I will return to this essential reciprocity in bodily function in later

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chapters. First, we must address the following question: How did we get from the notion of an essentially productive heart to our current certainty of an essentially productive brain? On the question of the primacy of the heart and the quality of its function, William Harvey had to find metaphors to match or to surpass the existing imagery of the heart as productive source. In Harvey’s language, the heart’s function becomes permissive (the trigger on a crossbow), rather than productive or transmissive. He defeats the metaphors of productivity and transmission through a deft rewriting and the substitution of powerful new metaphors in place of the old ones. The Unity of the Soul Both Harvey and Descartes place a new degree of emphasis on centralized control. The accepted physiologies in place at the time that Harvey publicized his discoveries tended to distribute powers generously, if not equally, around the body. The heart, the brain, and the liver each had a crucial role to play in maintaining life. Harvey’s rhetoric refocused such multipolar systems into a body politic with a unified source of power, a distinctly Aristotelian approach. At least in this regard, his concepts have much in common with late medieval models. I noted previously my intention to reconstruct a thought community organized around many of the structures and principles of Aristotelian natural philosophy. But in order to get at the central tenets held within that community, we must first sketch out the varieties of possible systems and styles of thought that coexisted in the late medieval West. Each of them hinges upon different ways of thinking the soul, its infusion into the body, and its subsequent inhabitation of the body. For Aristotle, the heart’s principality in the body was absolute. Galen proposed a contradictory, multipolar model, suggesting that many functions that Aristotle attributed to the heart were in fact functions of

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the brain or the liver. Specifically, Galen asserted that blood was made in the liver and that the brain was the source of movement and sensation. He further suggested that both veins and nerves initiated in the brain, rather than the heart, thereby rejecting Peripatetic doctrine. In the Middle Ages, this contradiction between two such trusted authorities led to the coexistence of two different systems for interpreting the body and, at the same time, tremendously creative solutions on the part of medieval scholars who were at pains to reconcile these contradictory accounts. Medieval knowledge of Aristotle was fi ltered through twelfthcentury translations of Avicenna’s Canon, written in the year 1012. And, happily, Avicenna had already given considerable thought to the problem of these conflicting authorities. His solutions were widely cited by Western scholars as the most satisfactory responses to the debate. Albert the Great’s thirteenth-century De animalibus, one of the countless medieval works to digest and comment upon the Canon, cites Avicenna’s reasoned judgment on the organizing principle of the body: “Galen must have been mistaken. . . . We will prove the words of the First Master [Aristotle] by setting forth the supposition that the soul is one power in and of itself, from which flow all the powers of the members. Since it is organic, there will necessarily be one member in which it is located and from which it causes all powers to flow. And just as it is the principle of the powers, so will that member necessarily be the point of origin of the organs. Now it is agreed that the soul, with respect to the act and power of life is in the heart. It is therefore necessary that the heart be the point of origin of all the nerves and the veins through which the soul accomplishes its operations in the members.”11 The soul is described here as the organic source of power for all the members of the body, located in a single space within the body.12 Natural philosophers referenced the fact that observation of embryos in chicken eggs revealed that the heart was the first organ to form. Harvey mentions that, in the first seven days

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of the incubation of a chick, “first of all there is in it a drop of blood, which moves, as Aristotle likewise observ’d.”13 As the heart contains the soul and the origin of the other organs, it must also be the origin of all nerves and veins, or the conduits for powers dispersed from the soul and distributed to all the members. According to Avicenna’s formulation of the problem, belief in the unity of the soul dictates that there must be a single point of origin for each of the organs and powers of the body. Albert even intimates that denial of the primacy of the heart would indicate belief in three separate souls in the three principal organs: the heart, the brain, and the liver.14 In other words, supporting the Galenic thesis of multipolarity was practically heresy. The heart was further established as the principal organ of the body by means of reference to the belief that the soul was responsible for movement and intellectual capacity. Aristotle stated that the heart was the principle of movement and of sensation. As both of these tenets were held as truth, the heart had to be the dwelling place of the soul.15 Or, as Pietro Torrigiani, a Florentine physician who was frequently cited throughout the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, puts it, the soul must be united with the body through the heart because the heart is the principle of all the faculties and the source of pneuma.16 In short, the heart’s primacy was constantly being “proved” as an article of faith. The soul is in the heart, and therefore the heart is the principle of the most important bodily functions; the heart is the principle of the most important bodily functions, and therefore the soul must be located there. For Thomas Aquinas, motion is the key to addressing the heart’s importance in the body and the relationship between the heart and the soul. He cites Aristotle’s On the Motion of Animals as proof that “the movements of all the other parts of the body are caused by the heart.” Aquinas then considers how the heart itself is moved: “As the animal has a particular kind of form, namely the soul, nothing prohibits it from having a natural motion as a result of that form. . . . I myself say that

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the motion of the heart is a natural motion of the animal. . . . Thus, the motion of the heart is a natural result of the soul, the form of the living body and principally of the heart.”17 In other words, the motion of the heart, a primary movement that in turn moves all the other parts of the body, is caused by the soul. The soul has its principal connection to the body in the heart. Aquinas was a major source of theology and philosophy for Dante, who agreed that the heart was the place where body and soul come together. In his Purgatorio, Dante has the soul of the poet Statius describe the formation of an embryo, and particularly of the soul of an embryo, at great length.18 That passage deserves our attention here, as Dante’s tremendous erudition allows him to synthesize and interpret the debates of natural philosophy and theology in terms adapted to a rather general, if educated, audience. These descriptions are in no way reiterations of a commonplace at the time Dante was writing, as there was no single accepted version of this process. His sense of the formative principle is Aristotelian: “The perfect blood, which never is drunk by the thirsty veins and is left behind as it were food which one removes from the table, acquires in the heart an informing power for all the bodily members, like that blood which flows through the veins to become those members.”19 Dante divides blood into two varieties, that which is consumed by the veins and that which is perfected within the heart. This perfect, or perfected, blood, which is imbued with formative power, will be transformed into semen so that it may shape another body. As in the Aristotelian and Avicennian iterations of the workings of the human body, Dante’s poem describes the heart as the single source of all the members. Pseudo–Albertus Magnus’ De Secretis Mulierum states that sperm is excess food that “has not been transformed into the substance of the body.” The treatise explains that there are four digestions in man, but that “natural philosophers disagree with the doctors on this subject [that the fourth digestion is in individual body members]

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because they believe that the primary—that is the last digestion—which is best and most perfect, takes place in the heart.”20 Dante follows the natural philosophers. In conception, Statius continues, the semen begins to act on the mother’s blood in the womb, and the shape of the body and of the soul begins to emerge: “The active virtue having become a soul, like that of a plant (but in so far different that this is on the way, and that has already arrived) so works then that now it moves and feels, like a sea-fungus; then it proceeds to develop organs for the powers of which it is the germ. Now, son, expands, now distends, the virtue which proceeds from the heart of the begetter, where nature makes provision for all the members. But how from animal it becomes a human being you do not see yet: this is such a point that once it made one wiser than you to err, so that in his teaching he separated the possible intellect from the soul because he saw no organ assumed by it.”21 Here Statius describes first how the active virtue, or the force that quickens and gives form to the passive blood in the womb, becomes first a vegetative (plantlike) soul and then an animal (or sensitive) soul; but, before explaining how the fetus is transformed from the level of animals to that of humans, he makes a point of rejecting the error of Averroës, who interpreted Aristotle as maintaining that the possible and the active intellect were separate from the individual human soul. The discourse is interrupted by an urgent warning: “You do not see.” In fact, the speaker will not show the truth, but offers the following injunction: “Open your breast to the truth which is coming, and know.” The union of the various parts of the soul must be known or incorporated within the heart. In fact, to come to know a truth such as this is to undergo a process similar to that which takes place within the embryo: “So soon as in the foetus the articulation of the brain is perfect, the First Mover turns to it with joy over such art of nature, and breathes into it a new spirit replete with virtue, which absorbs that which is active there into its own substance, and makes one single soul

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which lives and feels and circles on itself [sé in sé rigira].”22 The infusion of something new, whether soul or a glimpse of the “eternal view,” as Statius calls it, transforms that entity which preexists it, not canceling, but incorporating, its incomplete predecessor. Here, the intellectual or rational soul is breathed into the body by God himself, and at this moment a crucial unification takes place: the soul infused by God pulls the preexisting souls into itself and makes one unified soul.23 This is an important departure from Thomistic thought for Dante; Aquinas states that the rational soul already contains vegetative and sensitive faculties and thus replaces any preexisting soul in the embryo. Dante chooses unification rather than replacement as his guiding principle. But how is the unity of the soul to be understood? Is it a unified plurality or a perfectly singular entity? Replacement suggests a singular entity, while unification suggests a plurality. William of Auvergne’s authoritative 1240 text, The Soul, deals with the problem of the unity or multiplicity of the soul or souls as follows: But if someone asks whether such a [vegetative] soul is rational, I answer that it is not, and as I have said, the rational soul of the embryo is not created and not infused until its formation is completed by the integrity of the members suited for it. . . . But if someone asks what happens to such a soul when the rational soul comes to the embryo, I answer that it ceases to be, for its existence would be pointless after the arrival of the rational soul. The reason for this is that the rational soul fully suffices for governing and vivifying the body to which it comes. But if someone wants to say of the vegetative soul that the same thing happens to it at the arrival of the rational soul as happens to a smaller light when a far greater light overwhelms it, he does not say something improbably. For the lesser light seems to be, as it were, absorbed or extinguished by the greater.24 For William, there is clearly some amount of flexibility. While there is no

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need for the vegetative soul after the arrival of the rational soul, if someone “wants to say” that it is absorbed, this solution may be acceptable. He admits a possibility that would seem to contradict his first assertion. A larger light does not extinguish a smaller one by its mere presence. It simply makes it impossible to distinguish the smaller from the larger. And Dante, clearly, “wants” to include the vegetative soul, along with the sensitive soul, in the infused rational soul. In Dante’s embryology, the fact that nothing is replaced or discarded is absolutely critical. He stresses that the souls derived from the liquid substance of the parents’ blood are drawn into and made one with the divine breath. The product is a plurality of three, twice over: three souls made one, three parents made into one human individual. This is a perfected unification, modeled on the Trinity; here the embryo is all three entities in one. Such emphasis on integration and plurality leads to a vision of circulation as the mechanism and manifestation of perfected unity. After God breathes the rational soul into the fetus, its perfection and totality is celebrated and demonstrated in its circular motion “sé in sé rigira”: it turns itself back upon itself. The heart of the fetus has generated its body and has the power to generate another heart and another body. Its cyclical potential is one with the universal creative force. This perpetual turning is, for Dante, the movement of the entire universe and all the beings in the universe inspired by love for the creator. His vision of God in the uppermost regions of Paradise is a revelation of the divine as a point encircled by swiftly spinning souls. The circles of souls closest to that point spin fastest, while the farthest spin slowest. His guide, Beatrice, explains: “On that point the heavens and all nature are dependent. Look on that circle which is most conjoined to it, and know that its motion is so swift because of the burning love whereby it is spurred.”25 The creation of the unified soul in the embryo is accomplished when it begins to move with the universe in a plural circulation around the central point of all things.

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In his De motu cordis, Aquinas states that the soul follows the circular motion of the heavens: “Now the most subtle form on earth is the soul, which is most like the principle of the motion of the heavens. Thus, the motion that results from the soul is most like the motion of the heavens. In other words, the heart moves in the animal as the heavenly bodies move in the cosmos. Nevertheless the heart’s motion is not exactly like the heavens’, in the same way that what follows from a principle is never exactly like the principle itself. Now as the principle of all the motions in the universe, the motion of the heavens is circular and continuous. . . . In order for the heart to be the beginning and end of all motions in the animal, it had to have a movement that is like a circle, but not exactly circular, composed namely from a push and pull.”26 The motion of the soul follows the motion of the heavens; the motion of the heart follows the motion of the soul. Aquinas’ vision of circulation refers to the movement of the heart itself, rather than the blood or any other entity moving into and out of the heart. As the heart is both the source and the termination of motion, it works in a “nearly circular state” of pushes and pulls, according to Aristotle. For Aquinas, circulation is the natural quality of an originary force, of a principle such as the heavens, the soul, or the heart. The heart is the only organ in the body that has these characteristics, this continuous movement formed by the soul that is dictated in turn by the heavens above.27 The Spirit(s) Between Body and Soul Avicenna’s argument for the heart as center of the circulatory and nervous systems, as we have seen, hinges on the location of the soul. It is assumed that the soul dictates bodily function—a point of departure that forces the reader to interrogate the nature of the soul itself. In what ways could the incorporeal soul be imbricated in the quotidian workings of the physical body? For medieval scholars, the Latin translations of

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Avicenna’s work, along with the works of Costa ben Luca (fl. c. 912) and others, stimulated new ways of thinking about the relationship between body and soul.28 These works anchored their philosophies and physiologies in the idea that the soul operated in the body through traceable physiological systems centered in the heart. Costa ben Luca’s De differentia animae et spiritus was of particular importance, as it was cited by respected twelfth- and thirteenth-century natural philosophers such as Alfred of Sareshel and Albert the Great. De differentia animae et spiritus, as the title suggests, focused on defining spiritus as compared to the soul. Spiritus, Costa ben Luca explained, is a body, while the soul is an incorporeal thing. But spiritus is entirely of another order than the standard corporeal components of a human; it is “the proximate cause of life in the human body” as “life is produced through this spirit, which is in the ventricles of the heart.”29 Based on this text and others, medieval scholars came to the conclusion that the soul accomplished its works in the body by means of this more substantial entity, spiritus, or the spirit. To quote Alfred of Sareshel’s De motu cordis: “It is necessary that the body, that is of a blunt and solid nature, and the soul, that is of a very subtle [subtilissimam] and incorporeal nature, should be joined by a certain medium that, participating in the nature of both, unites in a single substance so discordant a variance.”30 That “certain medium” was the spirit. Notions of the spirit were originally derived from pneuma. Aristotle’s De generatione animalium identified pneuma, translated as spiritus in Latin, as the airy substance formed in the heart that rendered sperm fertile. According to Galen, pneuma was a mistlike substance engendered in concert with the environment, from a combination of blood and inhaled air. Avicenna and Costa ben Luca integrated Galen’s insights regarding the formation of pneuma into a cardiocentric system of spirits. The 1225 text Anatomia vivorum is a good example of medieval restatements of these systems. The text describes the production of the

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spirits as follows: “Between these chambers [of the heart] is a central opening called fovea by the authors, situated in the base of the heart, in which the blood is mixed with air, making vital spirits which the heart forces through all the organs of the body.”31 The body was thus divided into two systems: the venous system that distributed the blood to the body, and the arterial system that distributed spirit, also manufactured in the heart. The heart was understood to be composed of two ventricles separated by the septum. Pores in the septum allowed a small amount of blood into the left ventricle, where spirit was made from a combination of that blood and inhaled air. Some texts, such as the Anatomia vivorum, suggested that spirit was made between the two ventricles, in an intermediary chamber. The two systems, venous and arterial, blood and spirit, were brought into contact only in the heart. Spirit could be conceived of as a hybrid entity, comprising a mixture of that which is innate, or proper to the body (the blood that had been refined and purified within the intimate internal spaces of the heart), and that which is foreign to the body (inspired air). On a second level, the body as a whole is a sort of hybrid, with its dual systems of blood and spirit maintaining separate trajectories and spaces. These systems meet only in the heart, the single locus of fusion. In the Anatomia vivorum, vital spirits are described as moving throughout the body and into all the organs. But the spirits were often subdivided according to location and function. According to widely accepted late medieval models, there were three spirits at work in the body. After the vital spirit was formed in the heart, some of this spirit moved via the arteries toward the brain, passing through the rete mirabile, a network that purified and rarified the spirit. In this more subtle state, it was known as the animal spirit. The animal spirit was believed to relay sense perceptions and transmit them, via the nerves, throughout the body. It was also thought to control intellectual responses in general. The natural spirit, which inhabited the liver, maintained digestion. The

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vital spirit, in addition to functioning as the primary source of all the spirits, was responsible for regulating the heartbeat and respiration. Despite its diverse functions in various parts of the body, the spirit was nonetheless conceived of as unitary and heart-centered.32 Dante’s Vita nuova provides a particularly clear example of the ways in which the system of spirits was internalized by scholars.33 Dante conveys the three spirits as unified but at the same time distinct from one another. They are depicted in action at the moment in which the nine-year-old Dante first sees Beatrice: “At that moment I say truly that the spirit of life [lo spirito de la vita], which dwells in the most secret chamber of the heart, began to tremble so strongly that it appeared terrifying in its smallest veins; and trembling it said these words: ‘Behold a god more powerful than I, who comes to rule over me.’ At that point the animal spirit, which dwells in the upper chamber to which all the spirits of the senses carry their perceptions, began to marvel greatly, and speaking especially to the spirits of sight, it said these words: ‘Now has appeared your beatitude.’ At that point the natural spirit, which dwells in that part that ministers to our nourishment, began to weep, and weeping said these words: ‘Wretched me, for often hereafter shall I be impeded!’ ”34 The spirits are granted the power of speech to react to the apparition of Beatrice, but their other functions remain quite within the bounds of what natural philosophy ascribed to them. The first respondent to the stimulus of Beatrice’s presence is, in fact, the heart. The other two spirits that speak, the animal and the natural spirits, only perceive of this new and disrupting stimulus by way of transmission through the heart’s vital spirit. The heart remains, throughout the Vita nuova, the first receptor of Beatrice’s presence.35 The heart then spreads the effects of this presence to other parts of the body: “The shaking appeared in the smallest veins most horribly.” The use of the verb apparire, to appear, indicates further that the sensory event produces outwardly visible signs.

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As these passages from the Vita nuova reveal, the spirits were thought to play a primary role in sense perception. But their function was certainly not limited to the sensory. In Dante’s work, and in a large segment of late medieval thought, the spirits had an impressive range of possibility. Their intermediary status between body and soul led to considerable scope for interpretation. A tremendously influential work entitled De spiritu et anima, written in the 1160s but mistakenly attributed to Augustine, explained that “the soul is an intellectual, rational spirit, always living, always in motion, capable of good or evil will. . . . It is known by various names according to its works. It is called soul when it vivifies; spirit, when it contemplates; a sense, when it senses; consciousness [animus], when it knows; when it understands, mind; when it discerns, reason; when it remembers, memory; when it consents, will. These are not, however, differences of substance, but of names, for all these things are a single soul: diverse properties, but one essence.”36 In short, it is the very same entity that senses, gives life, knows, understands, and so on. All of the diverse works of the soul were thus integrated into a unitary substance within the body, centered in the heart and circulating throughout the body. Just as the spirits were given different names for different functions within the body, this respected treatise suggested that perhaps the soul, the spirit, and the senses were all simply different names for what was essentially a unitary essence. While some, like Thomas Aquinas, cautioned against the conflation of spirit and soul, others were eager to adopt just such a model for understanding the workings of the soul and body as a continuum, rather than a binary pair. It is perhaps due to this notion of continuity between soul and body that many theologians in the later Middle Ages had such a strong interest in physiology. Albert the Great and the encyclopedists, Vincent of Beauvais and Thomas of Cantimpré, were at times criticized for dedicating so much time and textual space to the natural world. Not content simply to

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cite the information available to them, they added their own interpretations and conclusions to debates on the precise role of the heart, or the workings of the soul and spirit within the body.37 These thinkers were important authorities for the period considered here, a period in which physicians, philosophers, and theologians could all claim equal expertise in the workings of the physical heart, from the production of blood to the production of spirits to its modes of harboring the soul. One “language of life” that had the potential to describe both the life of the body and the life of the soul had obvious appeal for those medieval scholars who wished to embrace the knowledge of the ancient world that had recently become available to them.38 If natural philosophy and theology could inform one another, then a potent mixture of Greek, Arabic, and Latin texts might be brought together to explain the cohabitation of body and soul. The intermediary of the spirit, an entity that shared qualities of the body and of the soul, enabled a certain fluidity of categories. From this perspective, the heart, as the source of spirits and of life in the human body, was the true animae domicilium, or the domicile of the soul.39 Christ as Heart Now that we have seen how medieval natural philosophy managed to impose centralizing structures and principles upon a multiplicity of bodily and spiritual functions, we may turn to the political conjugations of these concepts. From Greco-Roman antiquity to the present time, discussions of governance and power in both church and state have always been intimately related to discussions of governance and power in the body. Livy reports that Consul Menenius Agrippa put an end to a secession of plebeians by telling a tale of a rebellion of the bodily members against the stomach (which here represents the Roman Senate), a tale reminiscent of Aesop’s fable of the Belly and the Members. The

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story reappears in Plutarch and eventually in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, where its telling is interrupted by a citizen who lists a veritable catalogue of bodily metaphors: “the kingly crown’d head, the vigilant eye, the counsellor heart, the arm our soldier,” and so forth. Clearly, at this time, the common view of bodily metaphor is fairly well established. Scholars suggest that in Coriolanus, the inspiration for these roles for heart and head is likely John of Salisbury’s 1159 text, Policraticus, in which the metaphor appears as follows: “The king indeed holds the place of head in the state, subject to none but God.”40 It would seem then that governing power has to do with place or position. Anything beneath the head would be subject to something, dominated. But must the body politic be an upright body? In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, this simple vertical model was bowled over, so to speak, by the surge of interest in Aristotelian notions of centralization noted earlier in this chapter. In Bernard Silvestre’s 1147–1148 Cosmographia, the heart has the place of the emperor, located in an upright body.41 But in the centuries that follow, many Aristotelian scholars chose to de-emphasize verticality and emphasize centrality. They proffered arguments of primacy as they reoriented questions of position. Reference to the visible proof that the heart is the fi rst organ to form in a chicken embryo, for instance, placed emphasis on temporal primacy, rather than vertical, physical hierarchy. That primacy functioned within medieval structures of reasoning as a principle, a fi xed point of reference in the search for truth. In his political treatise, the Monarchia, Dante describes the methods by which one may arrive at truth: “Now since every truth which is not itself a first principle must be demonstrated with reference to the truth of some first principle, it is necessary in any inquiry to know the first principle to which we refer back in the course of strict deductive argument in order to ascertain the truth of all the propositions which are advanced later.”42 Within mappings of the medieval body and body politic, the

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heart stood as this first principle to which every other organ or function must refer. In the words of Albert the Great: “Those who have held the opinion that the point of origin of the veins is in the head have been in error. One reason for this mistaken statement is that they posit many principles, separate from one another.” Their error lies in a lack of coherence; for Albert, it is evident that there cannot be multiple principles: “For a principle should be the cause of other things and it should be alone (that is, uniquely) the principle of all. It is also placed in the middle, for the middle is the most suitable place for a principle. The middle is unique by being equidistant, and by it the power is spread out proportionally into all the members in one and the same way. Nor can anyone reasonably say that the liver is the principle of the entire body or the principle of the blood. For it is not positioned in a place suitable for a principle.”43 Principality, in this case, not only follows the theological logic of the unity of the soul but also follows the political logic of nobility and the distribution of power. The heart must be the source of power for the body because it is uniquely positioned to spread its strength into all the members, these scholars suggest. As visions of bodily power structures were increasingly oriented around the heart, spatial descriptions of governance underwent a corresponding shift. The vertical binary model no longer applied. Thomas of Cantimpré (1201–1272), one of Albert’s students and also one of his sources for the De animalibus, emphasizes the same point in his Liber de natura rerum: “And we may note that nature placed the heart in the middle of the body and rightly so, as that which is noble is ordered in the most noble place.”44 The concept of nobility is not correlated here with the highest position in the human body, the head. Rather, the body is imagined as if supine in a horizontal plane, the heart like a king in the center of that sprawling kingdom.45 Viewed from this angle, the head is an appendage of the center, a peripheral member.

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The Christian incarnation of this set of concepts most often portrays the church as a body with Christ as its head. Paul is one of the main sources of these images, as in Romans 12:4–5: “For as in one body we have many members, and all the members do not have the same function, so we, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another.”46 Through Christ, individuals are brought into community, joining their particular functions into one unitary body. But the corporeal metaphors in Paul’s letters take on a different tone elsewhere, as in Ephesians 5:23–24: “For the husband is head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its savior. As the church is subject to Christ, so let wives be subject in everything to their husbands”; and in First Corinthians 11:3: “The head of every man is Christ, the head of a woman is her husband, and the head of Christ is God.” The emphasis here is on the head rather than the community of the body. The head signifies power, controlling all that lies beneath it. A vertical, hierarchical pair is established between head and subject. The body is, indeed, subjected to its head.47 In the early Middle Ages, bodily metaphors of this kind became prominent, notably in Gregory the Great, Bede’s Commentary on the Song of Songs, and Beatus’ Commentary on the Apocalypse.48 Following the Aristotelian turn toward centrality and primacy beginning in the twelfth century, however, some of these metaphors changed to fit the unifying theories of the soul’s action within the body.49 Paul remained an important reference of choice for describing the church as body, but Pauline metaphors were, at times, shifted to suit the contemporary focus on the powers of the heart. The letters of Catherine of Siena, a fourteenth-century mystic and political activist, offer a particularly revealing example of this shift. Catherine rose to prominence in the church due to her mystical visions and political activism.50 In 1376, she played a major role in convincing Pope Gregory XI to return the papacy from Avignon to Rome,

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the city that she saw as the center of the Christian world. Once he was established in Rome, Gregory XI employed Catherine as mediator and emissary. After his death in 1378, there was considerable pressure from the populace to appoint an Italian pope. Bartolomeo da Prignano, archbishop of Bari, was elected and took the name Urban VI. A few months later, the Count of Fondi, Caetano Onorati, invited a group of mostly French cardinals to his home, where another conclave was held. Cardinal Robert of Geneva (Clement VII) was elected in September, thus beginning the Great Schism. Catherine was a staunch ally of Urban VI. Her letters, seeking to convince the new pope’s enemies to accept his controversial election, are sprinkled liberally with partial quotations and rewritings from Paul’s epistles. Usually, Catherine does not directly reference her source; Paul’s language pours out of her spontaneously, melded inextricably with her own thought. As with many medieval writers, whose texts were created in the space between citation, commentary, and reference, Catherine felt no need to clarify—or perhaps had no sense of—what was Paul’s and what was her “own.” An educated reader would recognize an overt reference, but it was not, strictly speaking, necessary to distinguish between Catherine and her source. Texts and images existed in order to be reused. One senses that, from a young age, Catherine had internalized the building blocks of sermons, probably with the voracious aural memory of one who does not read. (Catherine learned to read later in life, after her religious celebrity allowed her the possibility of instruction.) Those instances when Catherine does not simply redeploy Pauline visions of the body of the church but instead transforms them are particularly significant as apertures into this very particular moment. In one of her letters, Catherine describes proper relations between Christ and his church by elaborating a vision of cardiac centrality: “In the middle of the vineyard [of the soul] He [Christ] placed the vessel of his heart, full of blood, to water the plants with it, so that they don’t

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dry out. . . . What is [the vineyard] watered with? Not with water but with precious blood spilled with much fire of love. That blood is located in the vessel of the heart, as it is said.”51 Christ’s heart features centrally and prominently within the individual human soul, thereby facilitating a series of implicit and explicit references to physiology and to ecclesiastical politics.52 While Biblical accounts of the wounding of Christ do not indicate that the lance reached Christ’s heart or that the heart was in fact wounded, it had become commonplace by this time for religious thinkers to assume that Christ’s heart was wounded on the cross. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux was one of the fi rst to make it clear that the lance wounding Christ’s side touched his heart, and Saint Bonaventure speaks of living within the heart of Christ, envisioning the wound as an entryway.53 The heart, here and in other letters, becomes a means of understanding and teaching spiritual and political responsibility. Catherine’s vineyard houses a heart that links and integrates three levels of meaning. First, the heart in the vineyard reflects concepts of how the heart works within the human body. Second, the example shows that each individual soul must take its nourishment from Christ, making his heart its own source of life. Third, Christ’s heart is located at the center of the body of the church, compelling each Christian to join under the care of the leadership of the church or be severed from that life-giving body. When Catherine locates the heart in the middle of the garden, her letter is organized to conform to the standard pattern for discussing the heart’s properties; the entries in both Vincent of Beauvais’ and Thomas of Cantimpré’s encyclopedias begin by mentioning and interpreting the heart’s central position within the body as a prelude to further conclusions about its primacy as an organ.54 The bleeding heart in the middle of the vineyard of the soul has the same function as the healthy heart within the intact human body; it is the only source that produces, contains, and gives forth life-giving blood. As in Albert the Great’s De animalibus,

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Dominican sources that would have formed Catherine’s immediate cultural milieu repeated Aristotle’s correlation between physical centrality and the center of power. “Blood is located in the heart,” Catherine insists, referencing unidentified sources: “as it is said.” Along with the centrality of the heart, the issue of the location of blood was a topic of debate between the proponents of Aristotelian and Galenic teachings on bodily function. Both Vincent and Thomas cite Aristotle and Avicenna’s commentaries on Aristotle on this issue, arguing against the Galenic assertion that the liver also produced and held (nutritive) blood. This idea that the “seat of the soul” was the only source of the substance essential for life opened the way to more unified modes of thinking about body and spirit. Christ’s heart is designated as the sole source of nutrients for the vineyard, just as the human heart, in the Aristotelian vision, was said to be the unique fount of blood for the body. As through the sacrament of the Eucharist, Christ’s blood offers eternal life to the soul; the heart’s blood offers life to the body. Like Christ, the heart is the principle or source of all power in the body. In short, the medieval recyclings of Aristotelian centralized physiology, employed to counter Galenic divisions of power between the heart and the liver (and also the brain), in this context take on new importance: the body reflects Christian teachings. Just as there is only one central source of life in the body, there is only one way to salvation and only one Christ. This structure of the Christian community recalls Paul: “We, though many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another”; but Catherine has departed significantly from Paul here. Christ is not the head of the human; he is the heart of the human soul and of the human body. He is the heart of the church. Not father, not husband, not master, Catherine’s Christ is a loving, maternal source of nourishment.55

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The Distribution of Blood Such a centralized theological structure found its reflection in an idealized central administrative body for the church. Papal politics of the time fell far short of the ideal, however, and in themselves provide a fascinating study of tensions between concepts of center and multipolarity. I will limit myself here to a very brief foray into cardiac notions of papal authority as seen through Catherine of Siena’s contribution in this tumultuous time. In a letter to the Count of Fondi, which I have already cited above, Catherine expresses her dismay over the Count’s reception of the cardinals who refused to accept Urban VI’s election. In the face of this conflict of curial authorities, Catherine describes what she sees as a “natural” structure for the church: “We have said that we are vineyards, and how the vineyard is ornamented, and how God wishes it to be worked. Now where have we been placed? In the vineyard of the holy church. There He has placed the worker, that is Christ-on-earth, who distributes the blood to us.”56 Catherine has indicated clearly who this “worker” is, as this is precisely the motivation for her letter: it is Urban VI.57 The pope, as she saw it, was designated by providence; only he had the authority to distribute the blood from Christ’s heart. The personal vineyard is a microcosm of the whole: each individual plot is placed within the larger vineyard of the church. Christ’s heart stands at the center of each plot, but also, paradoxically, at the center of the larger body of the church. The point that unifies each individual plot with the whole is the source or heart that is simultaneously at the center of the microcosm and the macrocosm. In this way, each Christian has an individual relationship with Christ and a public relationship with Christ. The latter is administrated by the pope and the ministers of the church, principally through the sacraments, and particularly through the community of blood.

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Urban VI is, then, designated by God to work the garden and administer the distribution of life-giving blood. Catherine calls upon the Count of Fondi to recognize this function and, in so doing, save both himself and the church. In the production and distribution of blood, the functions of Christ and the functions of the pope together correspond, respectively, to the functions of the heart. As Catherine unfolds her vision, it becomes clear that each Christian must understand himself or herself as dependent on his or her status as a member of a universal body. Since the heart was thought to be the source of heat, motion, and sensation within the body, any member of the body that became disconnected from the powers flowing from the heart would lose the capacity for movement, become insensate, and finally die. Vincent of Beauvais cites the physician al-Razi on this point: “The heart was made by God to be the fount and origin of natural heat and the heat proceeds from the heart to the entire body by the arteries, heating every member, and if any of the arteries leading to a member are cut, they will congeal and the movement and sensation beyond that point will harden and the member will be rendered dead.”58 An individual’s power to move and to feel is a divine gift in this analysis, a gift that depends on the connection of the parts to their point of origin. Catherine makes use of this unifying principle to try to convince one of the priors of Florence, Niccolò Soderini, to accept an offer of peace from the pope: “We putrid members . . . can clearly see that we cannot do without him [the pope]. . . . He who scorns this sweet Vicar scorns the blood. . . . How can you say that if you offend the body, you do not offend the blood that is in the body? Don’t you know that it [the body] has within it the blood of Christ?”59 Those who do not embrace the pope are rejecting Christ himself. In their scorn, they become like rotting limbs, having willfully disconnected themselves from the lifegiving, animating blood that flows from the heart. By seeking to remove themselves from the body of the state, the rebels against Urban VI scorn

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the blood of salvation that flows from Christ himself. Just as a severed limb cannot survive on its own, there is no individual access to Christ unless the individual is part of the greater community and is subordinate to those who administer to the common needs of that community. Catherine employs the figure of the heart to open the discussion outwards, moving gradually from the necessities for an individual’s salvation to the greater, more general needs of the church and the community of souls in the church. By establishing the heart as center and unique source of power and life in the body, Catherine crafts an argument for centralized political power in the church. If the soul can physically govern the body, the church should likewise govern the physical state. But above all, the notion of power is conceived of here as deriving from a natural or rightful source. Looking to the center for governance is, in these terms, simply an acknowledgment of the order of things. Catherine seeks to convince the noblemen that they are not being forced into a body politic by a subjugating head. Instead, she urges them to look inwards, to conceive of the papal role as a necessary part of their own spiritual health. Catherine does not wish to depict Christ or his agent, the pope, as a controlling entity; her powers of persuasion work in an entirely different way. As a woman and as a person of humble origins, Catherine was a canny ally of papal authority precisely because she could appeal to powerful men from outside the conventional vertical hierarchical structures that organized society. Rather than attempt to impose an autocratic head upon the Count of Fondi, Catherine reminds the Count of his own natural center. She refers him back to the source of his life. Christ’s heart is his heart, she explains, the fount of his physical and spiritual life. And only Urban VI can see to it that the blood from that fount reaches him.

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The Heart as King As we have seen, physiological, theological, and ecclesiastical structures that were organized around a life-giving source, rather than an authoritarian head, could be powerful tools in their coherence and their appeal to centralizing styles of thought. But what of secular politics? And what happens when a single body politic has within it two competing authorities, religious and secular? According to Jacques Le Goff ’s study of bodily metaphors for the state, power is almost always located in the head of the body politic. But, as he notes, there are a few exceptions to this rule, exceptions that are all the more notable for their density and concentration as a period of aberration. I propose that the importance of the heart as designated center of power emerges as a response to a conflict of authorities. In natural philosophy, there was a conflict between Galen and Aristotle. Avicenna and his medieval readers found ways of acknowledging the brain’s role while focusing on the heart as primary to the brain. In political philosophy, the heart as metaphor for necessary or vital leadership appears, to give one example, during the confl ict between Philippe le Bel, king of France, and Pope Boniface VIII.60 Philippe le Bel’s sense of the importance of the heart as a signifier of kingship even led him to begin the practice of the tombeaux de coeur (heart tombs) with a special burial for his father’s heart and instructions for the separate burial of his own heart upon his death.61 An anonymous treatise, Rex pacificus, was written in 1302 by one of the king’s supporters. In response to this problem of two authorities, religious and secular, the treatise describes man as an entity controlled by two principal organs, the head and the heart. The pope is the head, along with Christ. From the head come the nerves that distribute theological decrees. The prince, on the other hand, is the heart, and distributes law as blood through the veins. The author explains that, as blood is the vital element in the body, the heart and the king are more

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important. He goes on to offer this proof: the heart is the first entity to appear in the embryo, and therefore royalty must precede priesthood. Invoking the power of authorities to substantiate his position, he cites Aristotle, Augustine, Saint Jerome, and Isidore of Seville. In each case, his citations assert that the heart is superior to the head. A conciliatory note appears at the end; in the body the head and the heart have distinct functions and don’t encroach upon each other, and the same should be true of pope and king.62 Dante’s Inferno, written around 1310 (roughly eight years later than Rex pacificus), presents another conflict of powers and likewise correlates the two powers with head and heart. In the eighth circle of the Inferno, the pilgrim encounters a troop of gruesomely wounded sinners. As in life these sowers of discord divided people from one another, they are themselves divided, continuously carved up in various ways by a devil armed with a sword. One is acephalous: “Truly I saw, and seem to see it still, a trunk without the head going along as were the others of that dismal herd, and it was holding the severed head by the hair, swinging it in hand like a lantern, and it was gazing at us and saying: ‘Oh me!’ . . . ‘See now my grievous penalty, you who, breathing, go to view the dead: see if any other is so great as this! And that you may carry news of me, know that I am Bertran de Born, he who to the young king gave the evil counsels. I made the father and son rebel against each other. . . . Because I parted persons thus united, I carry my brain parted from its source, alas! which is in this trunk.’ ”63 Bertran de Born (c. 1140–1215), lord of Hautefort, urged Henry II of England’s son to revolt against his father. Or at least so says one of the Provençal lives of Bertran, an account that Dante seems to have accepted, at least for the purposes of his poem. Bertran’s suffering, perhaps the paradigmatic example of infernal punishment or contrapasso in the Inferno, reveals the true nature of his sin. His decapitated body figures his actions: he divided two people who were as a head and a trunk to one another and therefore is likewise split.

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But rather than following the perhaps expected solution of aligning the reigning authority with the head, Dante has Bertran carry his brain divided from “its source . . . which is in this trunk.” In the face of these two conflicting authorities—the older and the “young” king—it is the usurper that is figured in the head. Henry the Young King—as he was called to distinguish him from his nephew, Henry III—never in fact ruled, though he was crowned while his father was still alive and fought against him in two rebellions, dying in the midst of the second. The heart, as Dante explains in the passage of the Purgatorio cited earlier, is the origin of all the other organs in the body. In this passage, it is described as, specifically, the origin of the head itself. The old king is thus the heart of the body, the generative source and seat of power, while the son is the head. The head, as a dependent and derivative part of the body, is shown in the futility of its rebellion, reduced to a lantern that must be carried by the body it rejected—rather like the hands in Aesop’s fable that decide not to feed the stomach. There can be no rule and no life without the center in this analogy; the head cannot survive when detached from the source of life that is also its origin. Bertran’s speech, issuing from the severed head, locates its selfhood in the headless trunk: “I carry my brain,” he says, correlating the body that does the action of carrying with the subject, the “I.” The decapitated head is impotent without the body, a mere mouthpiece for the real self or origin in the heart. As in Rex pacificus, an attempt to justify the relations between two separate authorities inclines the author to designate one as the more natural source of power—as, indeed, the origin of life. The argument, corresponding with that of the natural philosophers who reference the first pulsation of blood in an egg, is one of primacy. The same rule of primacy applies in the symbolic mappings of torso and head on the bodies of other sinners in the same circle. Dante’s gory description of Mohammed and his cousin Ali rehearses a parallel spatial pattern of temporal precedence in the context of religious institutions:

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“Truly a cask, through loss of mid-board or side-piece, gapes not so wide as one I saw, cleft from the chin to the part that breaks wind; his entrails were hanging between his legs, and the vitals could be seen and the foul sack that makes ordure of what is swallowed. While I was all absorbed in gazing on him, he looked at me and with his hands pulled open his breast, saying, ‘Now see how I rend myself, see how mangled is Mohammed! In front of me goes Ali weeping, cleft in the face from chin to forelock.’”64 For Dante, Mohammed is a fallen Christian who has divided Christian believers. His sin, figured so graphically and crudely in his opened body, is that of splitting the body of the church in two. His cousin, Ali, who split Islam into the Sunni and Shiite sects, is cloven only from the chin to the hairline. His schism begins where Mohammed’s ends and is an appendage of Mohammed’s schism. Mohammed’s body is the body of the church as a whole; Ali’s head is a sect that branches off from that core. Here, as in the case of Bertran de Born, the head is seen as younger, newer, and functionally peripheral to its origin in the central trunk of the body. Mohammed opens himself, enacting his division of the very heart of the church. When cloven at its core, the body loses both integrity and nobility. Henri of Mondeville, Philippe le Bel’s surgeon, wrote a treatise on surgery at around the same time, between 1306 and 1320.65 Mondeville likewise makes the heart the center of the body politic, describing a monarchical state in which the most important thing is centralization, not vertical hierarchy: “The heart is the principal organ par excellence [membrum principalissimum] which gives vital blood, heat and spirit to all other members of the entire body. It is located in the very middle of the chest, as befits its role as the king in this midst of his kingdom.”66 It’s hard to say whether politics is modeled on physiology or physiology is modeled on politics. Perhaps it is both. While these texts may represent a short-lived anomaly in the history of metaphors of the body politic, this fourteenth-century shift seems to be rather significant.67 As

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in Catherine of Siena’s letter, these texts do not simply offer an alternate metaphor; they propose a different concept of power. The cardiocentric body politic presents authority as something other than control proffered from above, to which the subject is required to submit. Instead, these texts invite the reader to imagine their king, savior, or pope as the most natural of internal sources, a necessary center that nourishes and organizes their very existence. The Seventeenth-Century Return to Central Sovereignty In the seventeenth century, William Harvey returns to this early fourteenth-century idea of the body politic. In the dedication of his work, Harvey writes: “I was so bold to offer to your Majesty those things which are written concerning the Heart, so much the rather, because (according to the custom of this age) all things human are according to the pattern of man, and most things in a King according to that of the Heart; Therefore the knowledge of his own Heart cannot be unprofitable to a King, as being a divine resemblance of his actions (so us’d they small things with great to compare). You may least, best of Kings, being plac’d in the top of human things, at the same time contemplate the Principle of Man’s Body, and the Image of your Kingly power. I therefore most humbly intreat, most gracious King, accept, according to your accustom’d bounty and clemency, these new things concerning the Heart, who are the new light of this age, and indeed the whole Heart of it.”68 Harvey references the rhetoric of height—“plac’d in the top of human things”—but detaches this rhetoric from concepts of subjugation. Instead, the pinnacle of human affairs becomes a vantage point for contemplation of the whole. The prince’s height allows him a privileged view of the real center, of the prime mover at the core not only of the body politic, but also of the age. A reading of Harvey’s text allows the prince to see his true or ideal nature.

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Within his treatise, Harvey praises Aristotle for his appreciation of the “principality” of the heart, criticizing his contemporaries who believe that the heart is secondary in some way to the brain or the liver. It is due to this renewed sense of principality that the heart becomes once again a suitable metaphor for the king. The heart does not depend upon any other organ, in Harvey’s analysis, but instead stands as a source. Harvey argues, as Avicenna did, that the heart appears before either the brain or the liver in the embryo and therefore has blood, life, sense, and motion prior to the existence of any other organ thought to be responsible for such. The heart is unique amongst the organs due to what Harvey calls its publico usui, or public function. While other organs each have a privato usui, or private purpose, only the heart has an innate disposition toward the public good. The heart alone contains blood for general use in the entire body, while each of the other organs receives blood for private use.69 The king is, in this ideal vision, different from private citizens because of his exceptional orientation toward the public good. The newly conceived heart that Harvey presents to his prince is a generous organ, the sole entity in the body dedicated to distributing its power rather than reserving it for selfish purposes: “a Prince in the Commonwealth, in whose person is the first and highest government everywhere; from which as from the original and foundation, all power in the animal is deriv’d, and doth depend.”70 Power, like blood, is shared and distributed. The idealized king, modeled after the heart, does not subjugate, does not rule from on high, but instead is both vital and central to the entire body politic. Arguing against the dominant Galenic approach to the body as a multipolar organism, Harvey finds new ways to emphasize the unique powers of the heart. Principality and generosity are concepts that would appeal to the king politically and, as Harvey hoped, draw attention to a re-centered vision of the body. At the same time, Harvey has critically altered the terms for putting the heart at the center of the body politic. The medieval vision of

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the heart as center imagined the heart as productive of both blood and spirit. Harvey’s vision of heart function de-emphasizes production and focuses on what we might call, borrowing William James’ term, permissive function. According to Harvey, the heart spreads power throughout the body through the action of setting the blood in motion. But when it comes to stating whether the heart creates spirits, Harvey demurs, saying that “whether or no the heart contribute any thing else to the blood, besides the transposition, local motion, and distribution of it, we must enquire afterwards, and collect out of other observations.”71 In the eighth chapter of his treatise, he states, rather dramatically: “Now as concerning the abundance and increase of this blood, which doth pass through [from the veins to the arteries], those things which remain to be spoken of, though they be very considerable, yet when I shall mention them, they are so new and unheard of, that not only I fear mischief which may arrive to me from the envy of some persons, but I likewise doubt that every man almost will be my enemy, so much does custome and doctrine once received and deeply rooted (as if it were another Nature) prevail with every one.”72 While much of his language (and particularly the language used to appeal to his sovereign) refers to the heart as a kind of source, Harvey wishes to redefine the way in which his public understands the heart as source. That is, the heart must be transformed in the public imaginary from a fountain, or source in the sense of something productive of water or blood or spirit, and imagined rather as the source of motion. The heart is to blood as a crossbow is to an arrow, not as a kettle is to steam. It sets something preexisting into motion. In order to maintain notions of the heart’s sovereignty, Harvey attempts to transfer the prestige attached to productive function to permissive function. Production, in Harvey’s metaphorics, becomes the animalistic stuff of basic nutrition: “If any here can say that it can pass through in great abundance, and yet it is not needfull that there should

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be a circulation, since it comes to be made up by what we receive, and that the encrease of milk in the paps may be an instance, for a cow in one day gives three, four, or seven gallons, or more, a woman likewise gives two or three pints every day or more in the nursing of a child or two, which is manifest to be restor’d by what she receives, it is to be answer’d, that the heart is known to send out so much in one hour or two.”73 By this reasoning, the heart retains its nobility by not involving itself in what is cast here as simple manufacture when contrasted with Harvey’s characterization of the heart’s work of creating motion and therefore heat. Production, on the other hand, becomes the simple stuff of consumption and nutrition, a far cry from medieval analogies with Christ’s gift of his blood to mankind through his wound and through the sacrament of communion. In short, while retaining the Aristotelianmedieval language of source, sovereign, and center to describe the heart, Harvey seeks to subtly shift understandings of these terms away from the creation or production of blood, life, and spirit. If the heart is a deity, it is not one that creates, but rather one that sets things in motion. In both the fourteenth- and seventeenth-century iterations of the vision of the heart as center of the body and the body politic, the philosophers, politicians, physicians, and theologians cited here strove for a model of power that would unify their society. An emphasis on the heart as source of power allowed thinkers to reconcile desire for unity and synthesis with the multipolarity of the world and the bodies they inhabited. The heart could be justifiably designated as source (of some kind) for everything within the body, thus satisfying the need for universals or principles, while at the same time allowing for a different and distinct role for the brain. The heart, unlike the brain, was not allied with total control but represented, rather, a model of connection that shaped understanding of the bonds upon which the multiple parts of the body and of society depend. As we have seen, then, the designation of the heart as sovereign is

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not a mere election of a different part of the body to rule over the rest. An exploration of the conception of the heart as sovereign opens up another thought style at variance with our own. Within that thought style, physiological bodies as well as ecclesiastical and secular administrative bodies are organized according to principles we no longer share; governance itself has a character that is foreign to us today. In this case, Harvey’s text provides the terms for a mutation in thought style that he himself does not embrace. Harvey stands with one foot in each world but looks squarely back toward the vision of the heart as sovereign. By disconnecting sovereignty from its defining characteristic as productive source, however, and seeking to redefine sovereign power around permissive function, Harvey creates the foundation for a future and perhaps definitive shift away from notions of the heart as ruler. Increasingly mechanical visions of the principles of motion allow Descartes and others following him to locate power elsewhere within the body, in the autocratic head. It is, ironically, Harvey’s notion of the heart as prime mover that opens the possibility of mechanistic descriptions of heart function that dominate our discourse up to the present day.

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The Porous Heart

Holes in the Heart For William Harvey, the heart that his contemporaries knew had far too many holes in it. In order to explain the interconnections between the dual systems of the body, the venous and the arterial, anatomists had long pointed to invisible holes in the septum. Such pores would allow a small amount of blood to pass through to the left side of the heart and combine with air to form spirit. Another set of invisible holes explained how air could be drawn into the arteries. To counteract centuries of belief that the heart had as much to do with air as with blood, Harvey marshaled powerful images of the heart as an isolated creature, a hermetically enclosed entity. He was so successful in his insulation of the heart that the Western scientific world is still, to this day, reluctant to consider the heart as susceptible in any way to the outside world, or even to emotion (now located at a safe distance in the brain).1 The existence of holes in the heart or in the arteries was of necessity debated through images. Harvey could not demonstrate that something held to be invisible did not exist; he had to instead create new images of the heart and its relationship to the body enclosing it. His language

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is highly descriptive and allusive; he speaks of seals, whales, and the depths of the ocean. In short, he waxes poetic. In order to fully explore the dominant conception of the porous, breathing heart, a concept that endured tenaciously through Harvey’s time, we must excavate the images that made the heart what it was in the medieval imagination, holes and all. This is not simply a problem of the details of the heart’s anatomy. These porosities in the heart and openings in the arteries meant that each individual human heart was accessible to air from the outside world, or in other words that each individual person was open even to the very core of his or her being. The air that moved between people, as it moved between the earthly and the divine realms, could be imbued with spirits of all kinds, from the terrestrial purveyors of sensation to divine entities or even demonic creatures. Concepts and images of the porous heart were elaborated in religious texts and in poetry, shaping the ways in which people understood the relationship between their bodies and the external world. Today, we imagine the heart that beats within us as generally inaccessible to the outside world, sheltered deep within our bodies. As a result, the phrase open heart conjures up either the trite notion of someone who is very emotionally available to others or, on the literal side, a gruesome vision of sternotomy. The open medieval heart gave rise to a different field of concepts. Poets, for example, described the experience of the vision of the beloved as an intake of air, light, and spirit, substances that all found their way into the poet’s vulnerable heart. They examined their sensory experiences of love as heart-centered phenomena and analyzed the relationship between these experiences and inspiration. Theologians also took a keen interest in describing sensory phenomena in order to think through the soul’s relationship to the senses and to the body in general. Religious writings were concerned with human availability to divine forces, to demonic possession, and to the potentially

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dangerous sensory effects of other human beings upon the body and the soul guarded within. Senses in the Middle Ages were often imagined to work in patterns of circulation that not only brought together diverse parts of the body and soul but also brought input from the world into the body and from the body back out into the world. This chapter will consider airborne circulatory patterns that go beyond the individual body and include other bodies or other elements of the world beyond the skin. I argued in the previous chapter that two competing visions of governance coexisted in late medieval thought. I propose here another pairing of two cardiocentric conceptions of vision: the first is the concept of an image or inscription within the heart or stamped upon the heart, and the second is the concept of a visual spiritual exchange or circulation, in which both viewer and viewed are reciprocal agents. Indeed, in the second case, even distinctions between viewer and viewed are ultimately misleading. I will refer to the first model as the “impression” concept and the second as the “intercourse” concept. I use the word intercourse to suggest both literal reciprocal exchange between two bodies and a sense of the potential generational outcomes of this type of visual event. The second concept derives from the rather unique thought community of late medieval Italy that is the particular focus of this study, a community that can be identified by its interest in cardiocentric Aristotelian natural philosophy. Eric Jager’s The Book of the Heart details numerous images of inscriptions or impressions upon the heart; from the Song of Songs to the present day, poets and saints have imagined their hearts as signed, sealed, and painted with the object of their desires.2 These tropes visualize the heart as a flat tablet, an image that does not correspond to natural philosophical concepts of the heart as a generative receptacle. It is my intention, therefore, to dedicate the following pages to the other side of that story, or to what I distinguish as a second concept of vision that,

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unlike the first, is informed by natural philosophy and understands the heart not as a tablet or generalized interior space, but rather as a specific organ with defined capacities, openings, and depths. The focus of this chapter will be on vernacular understandings and associations with the porous heart. The sections that follow trace the ways in which each of the senses was imagined to bring something from the outside world into the heart. Such intake had a necessary correlate in outbound response, in the form of voice or projective spirits issuing from the eyes. This intercorporeal dynamism is quite at odds with the ways in which we now think normative relationality. When I walk by another person on the street, my senses may present things to me about that person, but I don’t like to imagine that any aspect of that person takes up residence within me. My body remains utterly distinct from hers. Anything else would be a violation, or more specifically a violation of the boundary that constitutes my sense of self. The spiriti generated in the medieval heart created different possibilities for the experience of the world. They extended far beyond the boundaries of a single body, reaching into other bodies and thus forming the potential for a certain porosity of selfhood that corresponded to the porosity of the heart. There is a contemporary correlate for such notions; recent and even current images of infection share much with the darker side of the late medieval model. For this reason, I propose a brief tour of medieval visions of pestilence and contagion before returning to Harvey’s effort to circumscribe notions of inner vulnerability to the surrounding world. Disease may “invade” according to our present metaphorics, but, as Susan Sontag points out, we are likely to blame the victim for allowing infection into the body by means of promiscuity or other lowering of natural defenses.3 The medieval heart, on the other hand, was meant to be promiscuous; the world rushed into it with every breath.

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Taste and Touch The concept of the heart as the center of sensory processes was already problematic in the late medieval world.4 But it endured alongside the competing encephalocentric model because of the degree to which it pervaded a thought style that viewed physical sensation and spiritual discernment as a unified process. Much like the debate on governance within the body, concepts of spiritual and sensorial openness to the outside world derived from Aristotelian and Galenic ideas. According to Aristotle, the heart ruled both motion and sensation. In late medieval accounts, the brain was acknowledged as a necessary mediator for sensory function, but the heart, as the seat of the soul, was designated as the point of origin and return for the trajectories of sensory processes. Aquinas and Albert the Great both cite Aristotle on this point, from his On the Parts of Animals. Albert’s On Animals puts it as follows: “The heart is the one in whose movements there first appear the things which are pleasurable and unpleasant through its expansion and contraction. Generally, the movements of each sense begin from it and return to it.”5 In order to look in detail at some thirteenth-century approaches to the heart’s role in sensory processes, I’ll turn briefly here to the writings of Giovanni da San Gimignano, a Dominican preacher born around 1260. Very little has been written about Giovanni da San Gimignano, despite the immense popularity of his Summa de exemplis, a popularity that lasted into the sixteenth century. The Summa, essentially a manual of examples for preachers to employ in their sermons, was filled with detailed accounts of physiology culled from the encyclopedias of Vincent of Beauvais and Thomas of Cantimpré. This work is, therefore, an important point of access to Dominican thought; not only did Giovanni compile the most important texts available to him at the time, he also assembled a work that was broadly disseminated to a literate and il-

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literate public, as the Summa was widely copied and its examples were employed in sermons. The work displays an intense fascination with bodily processes as a means of understanding and connecting into the life of the spirit. Giovanni’s examples opened to the faithful the mysterious workings of their own bodies, explaining how the soul was involved in every action or physical process. For instance, Giovanni contributes to the debate on sensory function regarding taste and touch in particular. He manages to reconcile the heart-centered process described in Aristotle’s De anima and De sensu et sensato with the competing Galenic theories, sustained by physicians such as Constantinus Africanus: The organ and instrument of taste (as the Philosopher says) is internal, in the area of the heart, and the same is true of the organ of touch. All the senses derive sensitive powers from the heart by means of the brain, such that from the heart they fi rst go to the brain, and from the brain afterwards to all the senses.6 Touch and taste bring their sensations to the heart by means of the connective medium, the flesh. And yet Constantine says that the closest and most evident instrument of taste, as far as the difference of flavors is concerned, is the tongue, which leads the animal spirit to the fullness of taste virtues. Taste, as he says, happens in this way: two nerves are fi xed in the middle of the tongue and are dispersed by many branches to the extreme edges of the tongue, and through them, (as it is said) the animal spirit is brought to the tongue. Thus when something tasted penetrates the tongue, the animal spirit is there transformed according to the properties of that thing, which it then re-presents to the judgment of the soul.7 Galenic physicians limited themselves to stating that the tongue was the organ of taste and was endowed with this power by the cerebral nerves running to the tongue.8 Giovanni does not refute this point of

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view. Rather, he incorporates Constantinus’ account of the role of the tongue and the nerves in the tongue into a larger system that begins in the heart as the source of all things and ends in the heart as the seat of judgment. The process of taste sensation becomes, then, a circulation, moving from the heart to the brain to the tongue and back to the heart. The brain mediates, or performs a permissive rather than productive function: “All the senses derive their sensitive powers from the heart by means of the brain.” The heart is the source of the spirit that becomes the animal spirit in the brain and is the receptor of the properties of the tasted object, as it houses the soul that acts as judge. Taste is not only a differentiation of flavors; it is an act of discernment in the spiritual sense. In other words, tasting is literally part of the process by which an individual may make spiritual judgments about the world as she or he encounters it. In this example, and indeed in many of Giovanni’s examples, the body does not merely provide metaphors for the life of the spirit; it takes part in the life of the spirit. If physical sensation is not limited to the tongue alone but is part of a larger circulation that involves the center—that involves the soul—then every action gains consequence. For Giovanni, the Galenic insistence on the connection between the tongue and brain is not wrong; it is simply incomplete. By focusing only on a simplistic discrimination between flavors, the Galenists are neglecting the source and the final objective of all physical experience. Physiology melds with theology when the heart is involved. Systems that intertwined body and soul were very fruitful for theologians and for preachers; physical life, they argued, could not be separated from spiritual life. By coming to a more complete understanding of the mechanisms of bodily function, the faithful could arrive at a more complete understanding of the soul. Giovanni’s example continues as he explains that the individual must taste or judge that which enters his body and manifest that judgment, or sapientia, by means of that same

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access point to the body, the mouth. Speech or praise is, then, the result of an inner circulation and heart-centered discernment within the body. In the same way that we know the world through the mouth, others know us by our mouths as well, by those words that we send out into the world. Giovanni describes an immense circulation: the heart produces spirit (in part from air that has entered from the outside) that moves to the brain and from there to the tongue, where it is transformed by the intrusion of an external thing that “penetrates” the tongue; it is presented to the heart and is subsequently transformed into words that exit from the tongue back out into the realm of external things.9 Giovanni describes the sense of touch in related terms. Quoting Aristotle’s De sensu et sensato, Giovanni says that the organ of touch is not the flesh but “something internal in the area of the heart.” Later in the same passage, he expands slightly but significantly upon this, saying that “the organ and principle of touch is not the flesh, but is something in the area of the heart.” (One proof that he offers for this, incidentally, is that when a wound occurs in the area of the heart, it is more painful.) By following the Aristotelian attribution of sense perception to the heart in this case as well, Giovanni is able to make a very clever example about love: “In the same way love that is caritas is not carnal love, but a spiritual love rooted in the heart, according to that verse: ‘Love your lord God with all of your heart.’ Thus it seems that the very organ of caritas is in the area of the heart. As the Apostle says, the caritas of God is diffused in our hearts by the Holy Spirit who was given to us. Augustine says that the love between you must not be carnal but must be spiritual; thus the organ of spiritual love is not the flesh, but the heart.”10 According to Giovanni’s description, the sensation of touch must be routed to the heart for two reasons: first, only in this way can it be comparable to the other senses (and this is Aristotle’s argument), and second, if the sense of touch is not routed to the heart and not processed properly, it is a moral malfunction, a carnal love or an erotic sensation. Giovanni’s

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reasoning is based in physiological and philosophical knowledge, following rational arguments and referring, at the same time, to scripture as another source of proof that may be added to the mix. Again, the physiological and the spiritual are blended in the search for the “organ of spiritual love.” Spiritual texts (and by that I mean any of those texts that take spiritus for their subject matter) that route the senses to the heart are not committing themselves to an anachronistic Aristotelian view of the world. This is no simple conflict between two systems for describing sense perception, the Galenic and the Aristotelian. Nor can we designate specific roles (medical versus philosophical or spiritual) to each of those systems. We find, rather, that these systems can coexist and converge, as they are of an equivalent ontological status. Late medieval notions of the integration of body and spirit and the desire to centralize and synchronize physiological and spiritual function created the concept of a totalizing cardiosensory circulation. Smell There is no more dramatic representation of sensory openness and openness of heart than what we may fi nd in the letters of Catherine of Siena. Catherine employs notions of expanded sensorial function to position herself as a crucial link between an individual sinner (soon to be penitent) and Christ, and between that individual and the church. Smell is a particularly important sense for Catherine in her descriptions of moments of mystical union. One of her letters, addressed to her confessor, Raymond of Capua, describes the execution of a young man and Catherine’s role in his salvation.11 The young man, referred to in the letter only as “the person you know about,” was identified by one of Catherine’s biographers as Niccolò di Toldo, a Perugian nobleman sentenced to death for supposedly creating discord in the city of

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Siena.12 Niccolò was thought to be an agent of Perugia’s vicar general and to be working to keep Siena from joining the league of republics against the papacy.13 Catherine begins by recounting her offer of spiritual comfort to the prisoner prior to his execution. The prisoner responds eagerly to her, which Catherine explains as the result of a divine “trick”: “But the immeasurable and fiery love of God fooled him, creating in him such affection and love in the desire for God that he could not endure without Him, saying, ‘Stay with me, and do not abandon me. And thus I will only fare well, and I will die content.’ And he laid his head upon my breast. I felt then a rush of pleasure [un giubilo] and the odor of his blood; and it was not without the odor of my own, which I wish to spill out for our sweet spouse Jesus.”14 Niccolò is filled with such desire for God that he cannot be apart from Him, saying to Catherine: “Stay with me.” By citing the young man’s words to her immediately after the male pronoun, Catherine asserts that, for Niccolò, she is Christ. The divine trick allows her to take Christ’s place in the condemned man’s affections and desires. In this privileged moment of intimate contact, with Niccolò’s head upon her chest, Catherine smells his blood mixed with the odor of her own. This inhalation is the first in a series of sensory encounters along the way to the young man’s salvation. In its entirety, the letter depicts Catherine’s sensory experience of the execution as analogous to Christ’s reception of the soul upon Niccolò’s death. The parallel, establishing Catherine’s status as an earthly agent of Christ, can only be appreciated in light of the heart’s role in respiration and sensory perception. Thomas of Cantimpré states that “the heart is the origin of life, as Aristotle says, and the origin of every movement and every sensation is in the heart. . . . And breath occurs through the lungs by means of the origin that is in the heart, as inhaled air first goes to the interior of the heart.”15 In Thomas’ account, the heart is the primary recipient of unmediated,

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inhaled air.16 Perceptual matter rushes into the heart along with the air; in the words of William of Auvergne, “The senses are like gates into the body through which ingressions and egressions . . . are made.”17 In moments of particular sensorial intensity, the gates were opened and the heart was flooded with spirits. In the embrace between Catherine and Niccolò, breath and spirits circulate between the two bodies, commingling the odor of two bloods.18 As Niccolò meets his death by decapitation, “his mouth said only ‘Jesus’ and ‘Catherine.’ And, as he spoke, I received his head in my hands, fi xing my eye on the divine goodness and saying, ‘I do!’ ”19 In Catherine’s breathless narration, Niccolò’s naming of his desires, Jesus and Catherine, merges them into one entity in the moment he is decapitated by the executioner’s blade and his head falls into Catherine’s hands. This climactic moment is figured as the marriage of Niccolò to Catherine-as-Christ and to Christ himself. Looking up into the sky, Catherine witnesses the following: “And then I saw God-and-Man, just as brightly as the sun, and He was open [at the side] and received the [man’s] blood. . . . After He had received his blood and his desire, He received his soul, which He put into the open cask of His side . . . with what sweetness and love He awaited this soul departed from its body! The eye of mercy was turned toward his soul as it entered into His side, bathed in his own blood which gained its merit in the blood of the Son of God! . . . As soon as he became concealed, my soul rested in peace and quiet, in such an odor of blood that I could not bear to remove the blood that had come onto me, from him.”20 Niccolò’s death and salvation have melded his blood with Christ’s. The two bloods are made one within Christ’s heart (Catherine refers to his heart as “the open cask of his side”) such that the substance pouring forth onto Catherine’s waiting body, and into her receptive soul, is the product of that union. She is covered, both inwardly and outwardly, soul and garments, with this blood; she states that she could not bear to remove

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the blood on her (presumably on her clothing) and that her soul rested in the odor of blood. As she physically receives Niccolò’s head, her soul breathes in his blood in simultaneity with Christ’s gathering in of that blood and the soul into his wounded, open heart. Just as the odor of Catherine’s blood mixed with Niccolò’s during their embrace, Christ’s heart effects a unification of his blood with the prisoner’s blood. In two stages, as Catherine breathes in Niccolò’s blood and is subsequently drenched in his blood, her physical interactions with the repentant soul mirror Christ’s reception of the soul and blood into the “open cask” of his heart. In these moments of particular proximity to death and to the possibility of salvation, blood, spirit, breath, and air circulate between three bodies. Catherine’s receptive body is an intermediary between the two violently opened bodies of the criminal and his redeemer. Her heart is as open as Christ’s but remains within the range of heightened natural function. Christ’s wound is the ideal of availability and openness to penitent souls; Catherine as his agent on earth can practice openness to the penitent through the portals of her senses. Sight Descriptions of secular love also stressed an essential availability to sensory experience and particularly to visible phenomena. In fact, secular elaborations of sensory events were not very different from theological or mystical explorations of the potential interactions between two individuals, or between a human individual and divine love. The perceptions that stimulate love and the physiological effects of love are a central topic of interest for scholars of all varieties in the later Middle Ages (and on into the Renaissance). I noted earlier that the vernacular production of late medieval Italy seems to present two coexisting models for conceiving of the act of vision, focused around notions of impression on the one hand and a

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reciprocal intermingling or intercourse on the other. In either conceptual field, sight was understood to be both active and passive and always potentially transformative.21 Within the field of the impression model, sight had the power to make the viewer similar to the viewed object. Francis of Assisi’s contemplation of the crucifi x between the wings of a seraphim, for example, results in the appearance of stigmata in his own body. As Saint Bonaventure tells it in his Life of Saint Francis: “When the vision left, it left him a wondrous feeling of love for Christ and, in his body, a wondrous impression of signs, such that . . . signs of the wounds of Christ remained in his members, just as he had seen in the vision.”22 The iconography of this event often shows the seraphim hovering above Francis, with lines connecting the wounds in the crucifi x to the corresponding places on Francis’s body, visibly pressing the signs of the passion into him. Francis’s perfect passivity and softness is paired with a perfect focus upon a proper object of contemplation. In other cases, malleability was understood to be a danger; pregnant women were thought to run the risk of marking their fetuses with the images of things they observed during pregnancy. Often, vision was described in terms of stamping or impressing some form onto matter; external objects emitted forms that penetrated the viewer’s body and made an impression on blood, brain, and spirit. Images or forms were, in fact, thought to be capable of traveling great distances; according to Albert the Great, cameos and fossils were the likenesses of the distant constellations, impressed into mineral matter. If stone could be so marked (and at such a remove), the porous body was infinitely susceptible to the world that pressed around it. In a human body, images could travel swiftly from the eyes to the heart or the uterus. Intense reflection upon the function of the heart in a broad community of fourteenth-century thinkers led to an alternate concept of vision: rather than a stamping of active form onto passive matter, the perceptual encounter could be conceptualized as an entering-into, a transformative

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commingling of two reciprocal entities. This alternate concept of vision must be approached by means of a consideration of the broader cardiocentric circulation that is sight; focus on the aperture of the eye alone deprives us of the density of the encounter, found within the open heart. The end result of vision conceived in this way does not produce similarity or likeness, but rather, in a generative mode, produces something new, something that is not reducible to the agency of the seer or the seen. This notion of “intercourse” vision challenges the “impression” concept of vision in two ways. First, it necessitates a reconsideration of visual effects within the heart; and, second, it introduces notions of reciprocal vision. If the contact between foreign and innate takes place within the heart as an organic, receptive container, rather than upon the heart as tablet, then such contact can be understood as mixing, blending, or coalescing.23 Given that the heart was thought to be a space in which refined blood produced within the individual body mixed with foreign air brought in from the external world, the notion that vision might consist of the same sort of mixing creates a harmonious alignment of function. Unlike the finalizing notion of impression, the intercourse concept suggests a potentially uninterrupted intercorporeal circulation that mixes the world beyond the skin into the individual who is in turn mixed into her or his surroundings. This concept proved particularly fruitful for a group of Tuscan poets, sometimes known as the Stilnovists, who were particularly indebted to Aristotelian natural philosophy and, further, had an interest in redefining inspiration, or the moment of vision that gives rise to poetry, in generational terms. In so doing, they ascribed to themselves a degree of radical openness to the external world. I will trace several of their concepts of transformative, natal vision in the pages that follow. Guido Guinizelli (d. 1276) was a Bolognese jurist, described by Dante as “the father of me and of the others my betters who ever used sweet and gracious rhymes of love.”24 Since Dante defi nes his own

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poetry by its “dolce stil novo [sweet new style],” Guinizelli has often been labeled the caposcuola, or head, of the Dolce stil novo “school” that would include Guido Cavalcanti, Lapo Gianni, Cino da Pistoia, and Dante.25 Guido Guinizelli sketches out a crucial distinction between the cor gentil (noble heart) and its natural opposite, the cor villan (base heart). This opposition is likely derived from the standards of Provençal fin’amor, in which cortesia referred to the young men refined enough to live at court, while the vilan’s baseness relegated him to the country.26 But for Guinizelli, the distinction is not based on class or nobility in the sense of lineage. Nobility, for Guinizelli, is a quality of the heart. It is above all to be discerned in the heart’s susceptibility to love and availability to the presence of the beloved. Guinizelli’s description of natural processes is highly technical as he describes the way in which the noble heart is susceptible to a lady: Love’s fire catches in the noble heart, Like the power of a precious stone [come vertute in petra prezïosa] Whose potency does not descend from the star [che da la stella valor no i discende] Until the sun makes it a noble object: After the sun has drawn out Everything base with its own force, The star confers power on it. In such a way, a lady, Like the star, transforms the heart [lo ’nnamora] Chosen by Nature and made pure and noble [gentile].27 Here, Guinizelli puts theories of mineralogy to work in order to liken the noble heart and the transformations it undergoes to the formation of a precious stone. Precious stones were thought to have particular powers and to have received these powers from the stars, as Albert the Great describes in his treatise Book of Minerals, in which he draws on

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Aristotelian, Avicennan, and alchemical sources.28 The stars will only distribute their virtues to those stones that have already been made worthy by the sun. The lady, like a star, will only make a noble heart, a cor gentil, fall in love, while the cor villan has a completely different experience of the presence of the donna. Guinizelli explains: “The sun strikes the mud all day long: / but it remains base, nor does the sun lose any heat.”29 In other words, both the cor villan and the sun (or love) are left unaltered by their interaction. The mud has no way of containing the sun’s heat, just as the cor villan has no space in it for love. The crucial characteristic of a noble heart is thus its openness to external powers. Mud remains base because it cannot absorb the virtues of the sun. A precious stone, or a noble heart, is able to be transformed by the sun, the stars, the lady, or Love that can enter into it, just as the bird finds its way into the gentle green foliage of the harsh forest, to use one of Guinizelli’s metaphors. Through reference to mineralogy, then, Guinizelli sets up a system of innate and potential capacities that are necessary for the poet who would author a new kind of poetry. But one of the most important innovations of this poetry is the guiding concept that the individual poet’s capabilities are inadequate to produce the sort of lyric envisioned here. This is an important mutation or shift away from the poetics that had come down to the Sicilians and later to central Italy from the Provençal tradition. Guilhem de Peitieus (William IX of Aquitaine, 1071–1126) famously crows: I will make a vers of exactly nothing: there’ll be nothing in it about me or anyone else, nothing about love or youth or anything else. It came to me before, while I was sleeping on my horse.30

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Guilhem boasts that he can create something out of nothing; the recurring element is the will of the subject that speaks. A product of pure volition, “Farai un vers” proclaims the poem’s right to speak of nothing at all. Guinizelli and his poetic “sons,” as Dante would defi ne them, emphasize that poetry must come from somewhere and must speak of, and indeed embody, that source. It is not enough for the poet to be a noble in himself; he is only noble in that he is available to the external source of his poetry. Lapo Gianni, a friend of Dante’s and fellow poet on the Florentine scene, takes a timeworn poetic trope, the wounding glance, and contextualizes it in a much expanded system, describing an interactive itinerary of sensation and of the experience of love: From within your heart a little spirit moved, exited through your eyes and came to wound me, when I looked at your lovely face; and it made a path through my eyes so fiercely and subtly, that it made the heart and the soul flee away.31 Here we see that the woman addressed in the poem is actively involved in the visual experience. Rather than describing his own powers of craftsmanship, the poet sets a dialogic scene. In the place of a single poetic ego that creates alone, Lapo depicts two hearts and two sets of eyes in interaction. The poet is a victim in the battle of love, defenseless against the attacking spirit that flies from his beloved. The trajectory or path begins in the woman’s heart and moves out through her eyes, in through the lover’s eyes and into his heart. The “little spirit,” not reducible to an image, is described as the source of the experience that creates the poem. While there was still a debate raging at this time over whether vision worked by extramission (rays exiting the eyes), as argued in Plato and Galen, or by intromission (rays entering the eyes), as argued in Aristotle, Avicenna, Averroës, and Alhazen, intromission had largely taken

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over as the dominant paradigm to describe sight.32 So what is going on in Lapo’s poem? If he is describing vision alone, it would seem that the lady sees by extramission while the poet sees by intromission. This apparent retrogression to notions of extramission may be explained in part by reference to Albert the Great’s description of a rather unusual beast, the basilisk, which “kills by sight: for everything upon which its sight falls dies. . . . Nor is it the cause that it kills by seeing, as some say, namely, that the rays exiting from its eyes corrupt those things upon which they fall: because it is not the opinion of natural philosophers that rays exit from the eyes: but rather the cause of the corruption is the visual spirit [spiritus visivus], which is diff used exceedingly far on account of the subtlety of the substance [substantiae subtilitatem], and this corrupts and kills all things.”33 In Lapo’s poem, the spiritello that exits his lady’s eyes is described as snello, thin or subtle. Subtlety is, in fact, a very important topos for many of the Tuscan poets and is used to describe spirits and their ability to pass into the poet’s body. The concept of subtlety may be traced back through the reception history of Galen’s descriptions of pneuma as a material but highly rarified substance. Akin to the concept of spirit itself, the word “subtle” itself came to suggest an intermediary quality, something that can be volatile, active, and powerful as the soul, but that has substance at the same time. In short, an entity that is subtle is a body that acts as a soul, an entity that enables the natural philosopher or the poet to speak of the physiological, psychological, and salvational effects of its movements. Peter of Limoges, who, like Giovanni da San Gimignano, filled his fourteenth-century preacher’s manual with the latest in physiological theory, likens the basilisk’s powers to those of a libidinous woman: “It seems probable that similar kinds of poisonous rays are given off when a woman looks at a man lustfully, for then a libidinous vapor arises from the heart of the woman up to her eyes; henceforth the vapor infects her visual rays, which so infected as they are emitted, come to the eyes of

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men and infect them, whence the infection enters the heart of man.”34 Jean Fernel’s later sixteenth-century recasting of notions of vision reveals the ways in which this tale of a venomous gaze remained wrapped up with changing ideas of vision in general. In his Physiologia, Fernel explains that vision is not a ray of spirit that comes out from the eye: “How could a ray extend out large enough to aim instantaneously right to the stars, and to occupy all the air between, however vast? A tale commonly told to support this, about the basilisk, or a woman whose menstrual flow is going on, seems entirely invalid and void: neither does a basilisk kill a man, nor does a menstruating woman stain a mirror (especially a bronze one) with visual spirit emanating from her eye.”35 Fernel appeals to our sense of bodily limitations; how could our eyes be capable of projecting a ray that can reach the stars? The fact that these ideas still had to be refuted in the sixteenth century is testimony to their enduring appeal. In the later medieval period, this elaborate language of vapors, infection, rays, subtle substances, and spirits provided a foundation for a new concept that would transcend the boundaries of the impression model and suggest intercorporeal invasions into the porous heart. While the impression concept does not depend on any consideration of physiological structures in its abstract, metaphorical declension of vision as stamping upon the heart, the intercourse concept of vision makes use of “known” channels and gateways in the body to trace the movement of foreign bodies into the heart. The Stilnovists praise the power of their beloveds to send forth ennobling and even beatific spirits, capable of penetrating to worthy hearts. Of course, in this there was also a kind of boasting about the poet’s own qualities, a boasting that claims sensitivity and susceptibility. In contrast to those possessing a cor villan, likened to mud in Guinizelli’s “Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore,” the poet with a noble heart is characterized by his ability to be transformed.

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Visual encounters, enriched by increasing reflection on the subtle and volatile nature of the spirits, remained the foundation of almost every poetic notion of love. At the same time, the notion of “visual” is perhaps no longer adequate to contain what occurs in such an encounter. Spirits, after all, are more than simply the conduits of vision. The traffic of spirits between the lady and the poet is then something beyond a mere “seeing.” Synesthesia is an inadequate term as well; more than a layering of the senses as we know them, this encounter between bodies surpasses the sensual. In short, it is not simply what the spirits do, but how they do it; they pass from the lady to the poet and vice versa. In addition to enabling sight, they create subtle and invisible connections between beings. Without touching, two bodies come into contact. Without breaking the codes of courtly love that hinged upon the inaccessibility of the lady, the notion of spiriti allowed for imaginings of the most purified, rarified, and yet somehow substantial union. In fact, the visual might almost be considered symptomatic of a more essential encounter. In Dante’s Vita nuova, the poet’s heart becomes aware of the presence of the lady before he actually sees her: “I seemed to feel a wondrous tremor that began in the left part of my chest and spread itself swiftly into every part of my body . . . I lifted my eyes and . . . saw the most noble Beatrice”;36 or later: “I felt the beginnings of an earthquake [tremuoto] in my heart, as if I was in the presence of this lady . . . and then I saw the wondrous Beatrice approaching.”37 The spirits that radiate from Beatrice’s eyes penetrate to the poet’s heart before he has time to lift his eyes and see her. It is no longer, then, the sight of the beloved that sets the love-encounter and its resulting poetic production in motion. The crucial first component of the poetic analysis of romantic love is a spiritual invasion of the poet’s body. The result of this traffic of spiriti is also striking when compared to earlier lyric tendencies. Dante’s “tremuoto” makes it clear that he is speaking of a sensible manifestation, and not any sort of representation of Beatrice in his heart; he is

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not the author of that which his heart contains. Dante’s heart is instead a receptacle of some “real” presence of Beatrice herself. The poet of the Vita nuova does not, in fact, describe himself as creator, but rather as one who is trasfigurato (transfigured) by his encounters with Beatrice. In his Purgatorio, Dante theorizes the relationship between inspiration and the creation of poetry directly. When questioned by the soul of the poet Bonagiunta about his identity, Dante describes his own poetics as the direct result of openness to inspiration: “But tell me if I see here him who pulled forth [fore trasse] the new rhymes, beginning: ‘Ladies that have understanding of love’?” And I to him, “I am one who, when Love inspires me, takes note, and goes setting it forth after the fashion which he dictates within me.”38 Bonagiunta cites one of Dante’s earlier lyrics, “Donne ch’avete,” as his example for this new poetry, characterized by the fact that it is “pulled forth.” Dante replies with an explanation of “where” it is the rhymes are pulled from: “Amor mi spira” (Love inspires me). In Italian, the verb spirare indicates a double meaning for the phrase: Love breathes into me, or, Love inspires me. Then I take note of that and signify that internal speech outwardly. Dante thus describes the passivity of the poetic body that receives inspiration, the internal work within that body, and fi nally the birth of the new thing—a creature of both flesh and spirit, style and sweetness. The ingression of the breath of love creates a reciprocal pull, an egression of breath in the form of poetry, moving outward from within. This process is clearly expressed as parallel to the process of the creation of human life, as may be seen in the discourse in Purgatorio on the creation of an embryo.39 As I noted in the previous chapter, the formation of the fetus culminates in a direct encounter with God: “The First Mover turns to it with joy over such art of nature, and breathes into

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it a new spirit replete with virtue.”40 Inspiration is the breath within, of love or of the divine, that provides the soul of the human creature or the “soul” of the poetic voice. And it is stressed that this is no traumatic entrance into the body: rather it is compared to “the sun’s heat, which is made wine when combined with the juice that flows from the vine.”41 This description is reminiscent of descriptions of Mary’s virgin conception of Christ, likened to the passage of light through glass.42 Each human is the product of a conception that is both earthly and divine, and poets, according to Dante, must attempt in some way to be Mary-like, to open themselves to this experience in order to give birth to poetry with a soul, poetry that is not simply spiritless matter. In the Paradiso, Dante discloses the nature of fully perfected vision in the pilgrim’s conversation with one of the souls he encounters: “ ‘God sees all, and your vision inheres in him [s’inluia],’ I said, ‘blessed spirit, so that no wish may hide itself from you. Then why does your voice . . . not satisfy my desires? I would not await your question, if I were in you, as you are in me [s’io m’intuassi, come tu t’inmii].’ ”43 Dante’s neologisms, his invented “in” verbs, s’inluia (inheres in him), m’intuassi (I in you), and t’inmii (you in me), accumulate here to demonstrate what the pilgrim is lacking. The souls in Paradise see within the pilgrim and thus essentially are within him, just as God sees within all creatures, leaving the pilgrim infinitely available to those surrounding him, while they in turn are closed to him.44 Seeing in Paradise is made equivalent here with knowing, understanding; but most important, seeing is conceived of as an entering into another space, or in this case another body.45 Vincent of Beauvais’ Speculum Naturale states that God can pour himself into the human soul and unite with it; the blessed souls have a lesser but similar capacity. When the pilgrim is finally granted a vision of God in the uppermost region of Paradise, that vision is described as leaving traces in the poet’s heart. From the center of the poet’s body to the center of universe and

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back, the circulation that forms earthly sensory perception is stretched to reach into divine spaces, to interrogate the limits of the human and the limits of poetry: “As is he who dreaming sees, and after the dream the passion remains imprinted and the rest returns not to the mind; such am I, for my vision almost wholly fades away, yet the sweetness that was born of it is still distilled within my heart [ancor mi distilla nel core il dolce che nacque da essa].”46 The comparison in this passage exposes the divergence of its terms while it sets up their expected correspondence. After a dream, only passion remains impressa, or imprinted, but Dante describes a “sweetness” born of his vision that is distilled within his heart. Dante’s truth claims for the Commedia, no matter how the reader may choose to interpret them, hinge on the belief that this is not the retelling of a mere dream, and likewise the effects of the divine vision are of a different order than those of a dream. A dream may have the power to leave seals or signs of its passion upon the dreamer, but Dante’s vision asserts its unique status through the power to instill some product of that vision into the heart. The heart, therefore, is a receptacle, a fully three-dimensional object that retains its function as an organ—that of containment. Even in this most mystical moment of Paradiso, the heart still works as the medical treatises describe.47 It is the container of blood and of life forces. In Paradise, this normal, organic function has been enhanced to the point where the heart can actually contain divine inspiration. More important, it can pour forth that inspiration in a poem “in which both heaven and earth have had a hand.”48 Thus the divine, by means of a human heart, circulates back into the world. Sound Such outward movements from the heart are often conceived of as voice. While a commonplace of literary history tells us that poetry fell silent as it moved from the great halls of Provence to the notary’s desk in Italy,

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from the traveling troubadours’ lips to the pens of the jurists, Tuscan poetry still proclaims itself song. And we have reason to suspect that this is more than just a poetic conceit. In Purgatory, Dante is met by a friend who sings one of his earlier poems to him. The Commedia itself, like most poetry, was most frequently memorized and recited, rather than read. We must, then, seek to imagine late medieval poetry not as a silent lyric, but as a dynamic vocal movement between bodies, from the heart of the poet toward and into his or her audience. As we have seen, the circulation that produces poetry begins, in the elaborations of the Stilnovists, in the lady’s heart. To put it in the terms of the push and pull movements that Aquinas outlines to describe the almost circular movement of the heart itself, the arc from the lady’s heart to the poet’s constitutes a push. On the poet’s part, the completion of the circulation will be a reciprocal “pulling forth,” to use the formulation that Dante places in the mouth of Bonagiunta. This pulling forth usually comes in the form of voice. Dante’s experience of Beatrice in the Vita nuova includes the sound of her voice in greeting, described as movement toward his listening body: “Her words moved to come to my ears.”49 To complete the circulation of this natal sensory encounter, the poet must move words back toward his beloved and the world at large. That which he pulls forth from his heart will be the product, or even the progeny, of this encounter. It is worth our while to note here, given the metaphorical remnants of this once physical phenomenon in our contemporary language, that the voice from the heart, like poetry as song, was also no mere poetic conceit at the time. Mondino de’ Liuzzi, a fourteenth-century anatomist, explains that the heart is indeed involved in speech: “The voice, although it depends on the brain as the principle of voluntary movement, also depends on the heart as [the organ] in which concepts are formed; thus, given that this is a communal action of the brain and the heart, the nerves that are the instruments of the voice must communicate with the heart and

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brain.”50 Mondino’s rather complex mechanism for the voice had a simpler correlate in the broader community; in the same way that inhaled air was understood to go first to the heart, so it came forth outward through the mouth, carrying sighs, spirits, and voice. Whereas Shakespeare’s Cordelia proclaims, “Unhappy that I am, I cannot heave my heart into my mouth,” Mondino’s contemporaries believed that at least the products of the heart could indeed be heaved forth from the mouth.51 Guido Cavalcanti (c. 1255–1300), whom Dante called his primo amico, or “fi rst friend,” dedicates a considerable portion of his stunningly beautiful and famously enigmatic verse to reflections on the poetic voice.52 In his work, we may see the shape of a circulation in which spirits, born of the heart, journey from one body to the next, triggering a desire for a return to their source. For Cavalcanti, the heart, wounded by his lady’s gaze, becomes dangerously open to the external world. The poet speaks from the brink of death, as his spirits flow from the wound as well as the usual portals of eyes and mouth. The poet’s body becomes exaggeratedly porous, vulnerable, and generous, promising either prodigious poetic production or death. The heart responds to the entry of, or even possession by, a foreign spirit by sending forth its own spirits, but in an excess of volume that responds to the magnitude of the lady’s virtue, power, or value. The poet’s spirits issue forth in floods of sighs and tears: I never thought that the heart could have so much torment from sighs that tears could be born from my soul showing, through my face, death to my eyes.53 This perceptual event has provoked conditions entirely beyond the ordinary. The body has been disrupted in its function—sbigottito, or confounded—by contact with an overwhelming force, the presence of the beloved. The poet is made aware of his mortality through the

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intensity of the encounter as his heart is tormented by sighs, a sign of the malfunction of regulatory systems in the body designed to maintain equilibrium. According to Avicenna, sighs are instruments of the soul, necessary for bringing cool air into an overheated heart and for transporting heat out of the heart. But here, their very excess torments rather than heals. The soul responds to the inner turmoil by sending forth tears from the heart. The tears present themselves to the poet, displaying death (back) to the eyes. In other words, tears exit the body in order to show themselves to the body. In this smaller-scale Cavalcantian circulation, the soul in the heart reacts to the intrusion of the lady by producing sighs and tears and externalizing them, so that the poet may view his own suffering and may bear witness to his own slow, excruciating death. Cavalcanti dramatizes the escape of his spirits almost as a form of incontinence in the presence of the sympathetic gaze of a group of ladies: They turned with their eyes so that they saw how my heart was wounded and how a little spirit, born of tears came forth from that wound.54 The spirit issues from the heart and enters into the presence of the ladies. Poetry, for Cavalcanti, is precisely this act of speaking through the wound. His poetry appears in a public birthing from the womb of the heart, where the material of the spirits is the tears contained in the heart, released through the wound that his beloved has opened in him. Tears thus emerge by two routes and outlets. They exit by means of the eyes, but also issue directly from the heart into the world. The wound opens up another doorway for these spirits. The wounds of love allow for a new kind of expression—in the literal sense of entities that are “expressed,” or pressed out of the body. Cavalcanti’s lyrics depend on such wounding to open a passageway between his heart, where the spiriti

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of the mixed presence of the lady and of his own body are stored (their substance is both blood and tears), and the public. His ostentation of vulnerability is, at the same time, a demonstration of poetic prowess. The gesture of displaying his wounds is clearly reminiscent of the ostentation of Christ’s wounds. The poet thus claims great suffering— suffering that in some way serves the observer who contemplates these wounds. In Cavalcanti, the pain of his wounding opens a space where the spiriti are rendered clearly visible. When created from the powerful mixture of a virtuous lady and a cor gentil, the spiriti display themselves as something entirely remarkable: Your wound, that is visible in your heart Was made by eyes of such value That they left inside you a brilliance Such that I cannot look upon it. Tell me if you can remember Those eyes.55 The brightness noted in the lady’s stunning appearance has been transferred, by the penetration of her spirits, into the poet’s heart. In the later Assempri of Filippo degli Agazzari, the wounds of Christ are perceived as similarly shining: “And right away he showed him the wound in his side, and his hands and his feet, from which so much splendor shone that that of the sun is nothing in comparison, and they all were bloody.”56 The splendor of the wounds indicates great value in great suffering. In the Assempri, the brilliance of the wounds testifies to the divinity of Christ within his completely human suffering. In Cavalcanti, the suggestion is that the attack of the lady has left some of the substance of her virtue within the poet’s all-too-human body. The wounds of love open the way for the poetic voice, often issuing directly from the heart itself:

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You, feeble and terrorized voice that crying exits my pained heart with my soul and with this ballad go forth to speak of my destroyed mind.57 The poetic voice, formed of the spirits generated in the heart, is suspended between the possibilities of a short circuit and a larger circulation that would return to the lady herself. Where does the voice go when it goes forth along with the poet’s soul and his ballad? In Cavalcanti’s more pessimistic moments, the spirits seem incapable of doing anything more than simply escaping the dying body (and of course, if all the spirits leave the body, the body dies). But in his more optimistic moments, he imagines his voice and his poetry returning to its generative source: Go to Toulouse, my ballad and go stealthily into la Dorata. Go before the one I asked you to go to and if she receives you tell her, with a gentle voice “I come to you for mercy.”58 To be received by the lady, to be heard and to be offered mercy, would constitute a return into the heart of the beloved; this is the ultimate aspiration of Cavalcanti’s poetry. Merzé is, of course, troubadour terminology; in the tradition that precedes Cavalcanti, poetry had long been figured as a means of courtship and access to an otherwise inaccessible and impossible love-object. The Cavalcantian revolution is that this is no longer a unidirectional trajectory of male desire, projected onto an unwilling or potentially inexistent object. Here, the song that goes forth to seek the lady is described as returning to its point of genesis. It seeks to return to the heart that began the circulation it would only

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complete. Poetry is a reaction to an inexorable force, to an inhabitation, a possession of the poet’s body. Cavalcanti remains committed to suffering as a necessary tool for opening up the capacity for speech. And it is this commitment to the wound that I believe Dante indirectly condemns in Inferno XIII. In the Inferno, Dante takes the opportunity to condemn various philosophies of poetry by putting them into the mouths of the damned. Pier della Vigna speaks through a wound inflicted not by Love, but by the pilgrim: “Then I stretched my hand a little forward and plucked a twig from a great thornbush, and its stub cried, ‘Why do you break me?’ And when it had become dark with blood, it began again to cry, ‘Why do you tear me? Have you no spirit of pity?’ . . . As from a green brand that is burning at one end, and drips from the other, hissing with the escaping air, so from that broken twig came out words and blood together; whereon I let fall the tip, and stood like one who is afraid.”59 Closed within the stiff bark of a thorn bush, Pier’s only outlet for speech is his wound. Words must be accompanied by blood, and the ability to speak must be violently inflicted upon the speaking subject by an outsider. The phrase “came out words and blood together” is reminiscent of a perverse wounded Christ figure. Here, the dispersion of the self is an occasion for both pain and the pleasure at that release from the confines of the body. While Pier complains of his wounding, Dante is only reenacting Pier’s own sin. Dante’s suicides sought to release the spirit from the body—the Harpies eating at the leaves of the suicides’ trees display this desire in a perfect example of contrapasso: “They give pain and to the pain an outlet.”60 Cavalcanti’s masochism is of this same variety. When the pilgrim encounters the soul of Cavalcanti’s father in the circle of the heretics in the Inferno, he is asked whether Guido Cavalcanti still lives: “Does the sweet light no longer wound his eyes?”61 For Guido, sensory interaction with the world is perceived as a wounding. The reception of a wound in the heart is occasion for both pain and the release

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of that pain. Poetic pleasure is precisely this excess of sensation that opens the self to the point where it is no longer a unified or contained entity. Rather than seeking to contain the presence of the lady, the heart fi nds itself incapable of or uninterested in the containment of its own presence. The evolution of Dante’s vision of the poetic act is dependent on his developing sense of how the outside world, other people (particularly Beatrice), and the divine impact his individual corporeality. Like Guinizelli and Cavalcanti before him, he carefully documents the physiological effects of his beloved, as we have seen. It is the encounter that is productive of poetry. Dante sets out to describe the sensory event in all of its significance in order to understand what kind of poetry can come forth from it: She shows herself so pleasing to those who look at her that through the eyes she gives a sweetness to the heart, that may not be understood by he who has not experienced it: and it seems that from her lips moves a gentle spirit full of love, that goes saying to the soul: Sigh.62 Rather than “enflamed spirits,” Beatrice delivers “dolcezza,” or sweetness to the heart, “given” the eyes rather than wounding them. This change may signal a rejection of the old symbols belonging to the “battle of Love” scenarios so common to the Dolce stil novo and brought to an extreme of violence in Dante’s own rime petrose. There is no aggression in Beatrice’s presence here. The spectator regards her entrance into his corporeal space as a gift, an endowment of blessings rather than an intrusion. Her beatific status and her capabilities for sharing beatitude grow as the poet becomes increasingly open to her presence. There are, here, two different pathways for the spirits that move from the beloved to the poet. The first is the visual, moving from

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Beatrice to the eyes and from there to the heart. The second is associated with breath and speech. A spirit moving from Beatrice’s lips speaks to the soul in the poet’s heart, telling it to sigh. This second movement of spirits begins to sketch out a circulation: the spirit that leaves Beatrice’s lips comes from her heart, as do all spirits; it enters the poet and goes to his heart, where it provokes a sigh that will in turn emerge from the poet’s own lips. In addition to Lapo Gianni’s design of the movement of spirits from the lady’s heart to the poet’s via the eyes, Dante (like Cavalcanti before him) adds the reciprocal movement, the sigh. Inspiration thus depends on the physical presence of Beatrice, a mode of poetic production that is thrown into crisis by Beatrice’s death. The Vita nuova stages a temporary silencing of the poetic voice in the absence of the beloved. Without sensory input, what can poetry consist of? In the last sonnet that appears in the Vita nuova, Dante describes a vision that allows him a mediated experience of the presence of Beatrice in beatitude: Beyond the sphere that circles widest penetrates the sigh that issues from my heart: a new intelligence, which Love, weeping, places in him, draws him ever upward. When he arrives where he desires, he sees a lady, who receives honor, and so shines that, because of her splendor, the pilgrim spirit gazes upon her. He sees her such that when he tells me of it, I do not understand him, so subtly does he speak to the sorrowing heart, which makes him speak. I know that he speaks of that gentle one, for he often remembers Beatrice, so that I understand him well, dear my ladies.63

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The sigh that leaves Dante’s heart is referred to as a peregrino spirito, or pilgrim spirit. It is not just a spirit of the old variety but is characterized as a “new intelligence.” As a pilgrim spirit with new capabilities, it manages to distance itself from the body and travels to heaven to find and view Beatrice.64 When it returns, the sigh speaks directly to the heart, which alone elicits the sigh or spirit’s speech, but it speaks so subtly that the poet does not have complete conscious comprehension of it. The only thing he knows is that it authentically speaks of Beatrice. This is the language of the heart and for the heart that he sets out to acquire before writing of Beatrice again. “Oltre la spera” promises a renewal of Beatrice’s presence after her death and a new language that can transform that inspiration into outward signification. The circulation of spirits here takes on a much broader scope. As Beatrice is now physically absent from the earth, Dante describes a grander scale for his inspiration. The spirits gain the capacity to venture forth beyond this realm and into the next, returning to his heart. It is at this point that Dante breaks off the Vita nuova. He resolves to write no more of Beatrice until he is able to access the proper language to do so. Beatrice reappears in the Commedia, as Dante continues to ponder, theorize, and rearticulate his ideas of the nature of interchange between people. From the descriptions of the sin-laden bodies in the Inferno to the luminous and ethereal souls in Paradiso, Dante explores the possibilities for one body to impact another, by means of a text or through physical presence. The reader navigates a sea of possibilities that range from the sick, cannibalistic coexistence of the sinners at the bottom of the Inferno to the ideal seeing-in or entering-in described in Paradiso. All along the way, variations on interpersonal exchange in the registers of sensory experience, love, and poetic inspiration and creation are continually presented and modified. But to get a sense of Dante’s circulatory poetics, we need look no further than the form of the Commedia itself. Terza rima, the “circular” rhyme structure of the poem, is a model of healthy

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circulation, infinitely open to gathering in new sounds and new material from outside itself.65 Plague and Contagion Thus far, we have seen a largely positive characterization of this broad vision of individual intercourse with the world beyond the skin. The body’s sensory pathways are constituted by their transcendence of the borders of the individual. Availability to the outside world and a corresponding overflow of one’s being into the world are signs of physical and spiritual vigor. We might characterize such concepts as participating in dominant notions of a circulatory drive, or as part of a circulatory imaginary. But there is, of course, another side to this emphasis on expanded relation that I have alluded to only in passing. Peter of Limoges’ warning of the heart’s vulnerability to the infection of female lust is indicative of the darker side of the circulatory imaginary; or, to use R. Allen Shoaf’s term, it points toward an “anxiety of circulation.”66 The porosity and availability of the heart had the positive potential to open the body to inspiration or to colloquy with the divine and the negative potential to open the body to attacks of lust or even literal infection. As Nancy Caciola shows in her book Discerning Spirits, most theologians assumed that the heart and the soul it harbored were safe from demonic possession (it seems that demonic spirits lodged themselves in the digestive system).67 But even if it was untroubled by demons, the heart was vulnerable to “possessions” of other kinds, such as human lust and human disease, and particularly the ravages of plague. In this section, I’ll examine the ways in which the dominant concept of intercorporeal sensory circulation pervaded discussions of the Black Death and of contagion in general. The plague tractates, as they are known, were a set of texts authored by Islamic, Christian, and Judaic practitioners. These tracts prolifer-

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ated from 1348 on in the hopes of diff using knowledge of the causes and symptoms of plague, as well as preventative and curative treatments. According to these texts, individuals fell ill due to their own particular complexional weaknesses and vulnerability to environmental contaminants. This so-called miasma theory looked to alterations in the air to explain the emergence and spread of plague. One 1348 plague tract, by Abi Gafar Ahmed ibn Ali ibn Khatimah of Almeria, an Andalusian physician, explains that plague is caused by the inhalation of corrupted air. Air itself figures as a victim of contagion or corruption, becoming tainted when it is mixed with foreign things. He posits that while the pure element of air cannot be corrupted, that which surrounds us, what we call “air,” is in fact a compound of fumes, smoke, and other things. Elemental air, in its pure condition, could potentially only be found above the level of circulating air currents. Water is also vulnerable to contamination from the plague, as it mixes with air currents.68 As we have seen in other contexts, circulation in the terrestrial sphere entails a kind of mixing or melding of elements. Since inspired air was thought to pass principally to the heart, physicians believed that putrefaction could be quickly carried into the core of the human body. In Book IV of the Canon, Avicenna explains that “when the air that has undergone such putrefaction arrives at the heart, it rots the complexion of its spirit and then, after surrounding the heart, rots it. An unnatural warmth then spreads all around the body, as a result of which a pestilential fever will appear. It will spread to any human who is susceptible to it.”69 It is, therefore, the heart’s availability to air that renders the body so vulnerable to plague. In a perverse imitation of the heart’s natural warming and life-giving properties, the plague spreads unnatural warmth from the body’s center, causing fever rather than supporting or maintaining life. Subsequently, in the extrusive mode, the heart puts forth this contagion or putrefaction, sending it into other susceptible bodies.

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The Paris medical masters pointed out that bad air was even more dangerous than food and drink, as air penetrates the heart more quickly. They thus stress the respiratory functions of the heart in its susceptibility to and promulgation of the disease.70 According to Gentile da Foligno, one of Avicenna’s principal commentators who eventually died of the Black Death in 1348, the vital spirit abandons the heart when the poison reaches it, resulting in the death of the infected individual. For others, such as Jacme d’Agramont, the poisonous air corrupts both the blood and the vital spirit in the heart, thus spreading its poison to all the parts of the body through the movement of the vital spirit. He explains that interpersonal infection happens through poisonous vapors that exude from the infected body and enter into other bodies through breath and skin.71 The senses thus become highly suspect. The Florentine chronicler Matteo Villani wrote: “It seems that this pestiferous infection is caught by the sight and by touch.” It was believed that the skin of an affected individual could emit a foul substance. If a healthy person were to touch the skin of an infected person, this foul substance could be absorbed by the pores and thus enter the body and eventually reach the heart of the formerly healthy person. But sight? According to an anonymous practitioner of Montpellier, “the most virulent moment of this epidemic, which causes an almost instant death, is when the air spirit emitted from the sick person’s eyes, particularly when he is dying, strikes the eye of a healthy man nearby who looks closely at him; then the poisonous nature . . . passes from one to another, killing the healthy individual.”72 The anonymous practitioner cites the cases of the basilisk and the “Venomous Virgin” as precedents for this toxic gaze. Comparisons between the gaze of a menstruating woman and a basilisk are found in the thirteenthcentury De secretis mulierum by Pseudo–Albert the Great; aspects of both examples reappeared in the Venomous Virgin stories that circulated widely at the end of the thirteenth century.73 Just as lust, venom, or impurities could infect the female gaze, the plague could fuse with the

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spirits circulating into the world and thus turn the natural mechanisms of life and sensation into a deadly vehicle of contamination. It is within this world of horrific cardiosensory vulnerability that Giovanni Boccaccio sets his Decameron. His text reveals just how the experience of the Black Death colored understandings of intercorporeal circulatory relationality. The Decameron begins with a vivid description of the havoc the Black Plague wrought upon the human body, the social order, and the city of Florence, stressing the necessity of such a frame narrative, a frame that the reader too often forgets as she passes on to the lively, humorous, and enchanting tales that lie beyond. But as the narrator establishes here, the plague is not only the situation from which his ten storytellers depart; it is the situation to which they must return. The plague is only very rarely mentioned in the hundred tales told within the frame, but it has already determined and predetermined, defined and redefined, the visions of life, of the body, and of the bonds that bind society as they appear within those tales. Whether the tales seek to distract the reader or listener from the prospect of death, or to remind the listener of that precise fate and the necessary preparations for that fate, they each have, as their constitutive reference, a mortality that is latent in the very breath that conveys them. In his introduction, Boccaccio describes the horribly contagious nature of the plague: “And the plague gathered strength as it was transmitted from the sick to the healthy through normal intercourse, just as fire catches on to any dry or greasy object placed too close to it.”74 The mere act of comunicare insieme (normal intercourse) transmits the pestilence from the sick to the healthy, and it is the realization of this peril that causes the breakdown of the bonds of society. Worse, the fear of contagion through normal intercourse dissolves not only the relationships between citizen and neighbors, but also those fundamental bonds between family members: “One citizen avoided the next, there was scarcely a man who would take care of his neighbor . . . but this was not

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all: men and women alike were possessed by such a visceral terror of this scourge that a man would desert his own brother, uncle would forsake a nephew, sister her brother, and often a wife her husband. What is more, believe it or not, mothers and fathers would avoid visiting and tending their children, they would virtually disown them.”75 On the one hand, Boccaccio decries the isolation of individuals through the dissolution of normal relations, but on the other, he denounces an equally disturbing promiscuity. Women who were unable to find female servants exposed their bodies to male servants without restraint, privileging the needs of their ailing bodies over social mores. Groups of people gave themselves up to debauchery, roaming in and out of other people’s homes. As the houses of the dead or those who had fled were abandoned, they became sites of revelry for those who gave free rein to their appetites. These roaming merrymakers existed alongside other groups that barricaded themselves into their houses. Whether seeking to seal themselves off from the world (or specifically the bodies in that world) or circulating aggressively and intrusively even into the homes and private properties of others, many Florentines ended up nonetheless in the worst sort of bodily promiscuity: the mass grave. Here, Boccaccio says, the bodies were packed in layers, just like goods in a ship’s hold. It was as if these corpses were reduced to so much unwanted or tainted merchandise. Boccaccio describes the manifestation of the disease on a single body with almost clinical detail. The first sign in his semiotics of plague is a swelling in the groin or the armpit. Boccaccio does not venture to analyze the cause or nature of this particular apparition of the disease, but others of his time found the location of these swellings, or apostemata, very significant. One main point of diagnosis was precisely the location of the apostemata. Several tractates suggested that practitioners ought to pay careful attention to swellings under the left armpit, behind the ears, and in the right groin, as these were linked to injuries of the heart, brain, and liver, respectively.

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Others interpreted the swelling in the area of the groin as an indication that the genital organs were diseased.76 As always in the medieval world, direct experience was mediated by ancient authority. Boccaccio’s description of the plague (though he witnessed it firsthand) draws heavily on Lucretius’ rendering of Thucydides’ description of the plague that struck Athens in 430 B.C. Lucretius explains in Book VI of The Nature of Things that the plague would infect the heart and could eventually descend to the genitals. Some sufferers survived by “excision of the virile organ.”77 As Giuseppe Mazzotta shows in his The World at Play in Boccaccio’s Decameron, there is a certain metonymic continuity between the aegritudo amoris invoked by Boccaccio in his proem and the plague.78 Like love, the plague enters through the eyes; like love, the plague is as volatile as fire. Certainly, the remedies prescribed for both maladies sound quite similar. Tommaso del Garbo and Giovanni Dondoli recommend the same sort of divertissement to prevent plague that Arnaldus of Villanova, Avicenna, and Constantinus Africanus recommended for those suffering from lovesickness. Here is what Dondoli suggests for plague prevention: “Avoid the embraces of women and all disordered exercise . . . and flee all stench of rotting things, of human bodies and animals and invalids . . . and as far as it is possible, man should endeavor to flee all those things that make the mind sad. This is because melancholic passions make the heart despair and make our dreams disturbing. Instead, endeavor to do those things that make one laugh, that make the heart delight, such as singing and playing and listening to entertaining and diverting narrations. . . . Do . . . engage in table games and chess, but other games are not helpful, because of the breath that is rendered one to the other.”79 In other words, melancholy makes the body dangerously susceptible to the plague. Those who are suffering from lovesickness are not merely depressed, they are in grave danger. The cure for melancholy (and therefore a powerful plague preventer) is distraction. As Boccaccio

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explains in his proem, women have fewer distractions available to them and therefore suffer more from melancholy as a result of love than do men. Women (along with children) were also considered to be most susceptible to plague. Highly sensual women were in particular peril, and at the same time they presented a particular peril to those around them. The plague tractates urged everyone to avoid sexual activity, along with excesses of every kind. The Decameron is offered as both a source of distraction and as a model of the sort of lifestyle one ought to lead in order to avoid both melancholy and plague. The young ladies in the Decameron follow these instructions to the letter. They live virtuously as they laugh, sing, play music, and tell entertaining tales that delight the heart. While there are men in the group, Boccaccio stresses the propriety of the interactions between the sexes. The tales the young people tell derive a great part of their capacity to distract from the description of behavior that is not only improper but even, given the context of the plague, dangerous. The narrators, on the other hand, limit themselves to a promiscuity of language, carefully regulating their actions. But what is the telling of tales if not an exchange of breath? Furthermore, how is it possible to tell tales that are not, themselves, contaminated? The novelle of the Decameron do not merely tell of promiscuity, they participate in a circulation of foreign matter. In some way, each of the hundred tales of the Decameron figure a circulation of infection on a number of levels. From the breath that relays them, to their description of sexual transgression, to the promiscuity of sources for each story, the tales also infect one another, as tropes reappear from one story to the next, as obscenity and violence escalate. One of the most emblematic moments in this sustained exploration of contamination occurs in the third story of the sixth day. It is the tale of a young woman’s biting remark to a bishop—a story that is entirely symptomatic of the anxieties of circulation that rule plague-devastated

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Florence. As the story goes, a certain Dego della Ratta became interested in a young Florentine woman and offered her husband (the bishop’s brother) five hundred gold florins for one night with his wife. The man acquiesced, forcing his unwilling spouse to acquiesce as well. In return, he gets both “il danno e le beffe,” or, in this case, cheap silver coins gilded for the occasion, and innumerable jokes at his expense. One day, as the bishop and Dego are riding around town, they come across the beautiful and recently married Nonna de’ Pulci. Here the plague explicitly rears its ugly head in the midst of the tale telling, as the narrator pauses to mention that Nonna died in the current pestilence. The bishop asks Nonna in a joking manner what she thinks of Dego, and if she thinks she could “handle” him. Nonna feels that “those words . . . would contaminate her in the souls of those, and many there were, that heard him” (quelle parole . . . la dovesser contaminare negli animi di coloro, che molti v’erano, che l’udirono) and so responds that she doesn’t know if Dego could handle her, as she would want good coinage. The remark literally silences the bishop. The moral, according to the narrator, Lauretta, is, “Therefore it is important to take care how and when and with whom and also where one exchanges words.”80 Within the scope of this brief tale, we see the varied threats of the promiscuity of bodies, contamination, coinage, and words. By the tyrannical actions of her husband, the unwilling wife in this tale is forced, like the victims of the plague, into the role of merchandise, her body reduced to something that can be circulated, returning to her husband devalued. The explicit mention of the plague in the midst of this tale, something that happens very rarely in the hundred stories of the Decameron, signals the confluence of the themes of death and promiscuity. Nonna’s retort contains the threat of contagion in the forms of rumor and of sexual impropriety by stalling the excessive, abusive freedom of the bishop’s tongue and Dego’s actions. The tale recalls, in a grimmer tone, the comic story of Alatiel told

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on the second day. Alatiel, like the wife in this tale, is a passive object of circulation. Sent from home a virgin, she is possessed by nine different men located variously along the Mediterranean trade routes until she is finally returned to her father. The comic twist on that tale is its rewriting: Alatiel tells an alternate tale of a virtuous circular path that leads her back to her father as virginal as when she departed from the paternal household. Clearly, then, concerns about the free movement of goods and bodies appear in numerous places in the Decameron. The path that Alatiel’s words trace out is a virtuous one, but this is a sure sign that words themselves are detached from deeds and liberated to move as they will. The moral ambiguities in the Alatiel story are no longer ambiguous in the tale of Nonna de’ Pulci. In that tale, the flow of words, like the movement of bodies, merchandise, and cheap coinage, is seen as entirely too free. The only way to avoid contamination by words is to silence the speaker, to remind him that he must reduce the space of his verbal intrusions. Circulation in each of these cases is a process that is defi ned by fallenness. Circulation is devaluation, the loss of truth. While something may return to its source, or husband, or father, its essence, if not its appearance, has changed. Like a cheap, gilded coin, the things of the world and the bodies that inhabit it are definitively darkened within by their congress with the external world. Scholars have tended to point to Girolamo Fracastoro (1478–1554), Veronese physician and professor at Padua, as the first to properly understand contagion. As Jon Arrizabalaga has explained, however, Fracastoro merely managed to systematize Galen’s ideas on contagion and to fit them to his context. Like many others credited with a “new” theory, his work was rather more coherent than original. Medieval people were aware of the problem of contagion, as these plague texts amply demonstrate. As often happens in the late medieval period, they simply had it both ways. While recognizing that plague spread from one body to another, they saw this as a subsequent

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phase in the diff usion of the epidemic. In short, plague got into bodies from corrupted air in the atmosphere and from the corrupted air that was exhaled by other people. It could also be communicated, as medieval medical practitioners understood it, through the exchange of humors, through touch and even sight. Not only did the medieval world understand contagion, the medieval world was haunted by the idea. But as we have seen previously, examples of the potentially deadly effects of the visual spirit also gave rise to theories of the salvific effects of the gaze. In the space of Dante’s works alone, we find reference to the Medusa, a creature that contains all the gynophobic aspects of both the basilisk and the menstruating woman, but also the divine power of Beatrice’s gaze. As the functional opposite to the Medusa, the visual spirit that flows from Beatrice’s eyes has the power to give life, to inspire poetry, to effect salvation. If the gaze is a ray or is somehow constructed by the extramission of the visual spirit, the thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth century saw this gaze as potentially dangerous or potentially beatific but usually neither. But in plague and post-plague narratives, a ray coming forth from a body becomes a phenomenon that elicits horror in the context of a terrifying contagion.81 The senses have become apertures to be guarded with the greatest care. Secret and Invisible Porosities Harvey’s heart was immune to such invasions. Its principal function, after all, was to move blood; he specifically wanted to deny that the heart received anything. To convince his readers of a circulation of the blood within the body, Harvey had to reject two kinds of suppositions about other functions of the heart. First, he had to deny that the heart constantly received freshly made blood from the liver that was then used up. Second, he had to deny that half of the heart’s function was the creation and distribution of spirits alone, made from the reception

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of air in the heart. These lingering notions, embedded in the cultural consciousness by the works of philosophers, poets, mystics, and theologians, convinced the public, and even physicians, that the heart was accessible to air and other entities.82 At the time that Harvey was writing, most physicians were convinced that air entered the arteries through pores in the flesh and the skin. The arteries were also thought to emit fuliginous vapors through those pores.83 In other words, the heart and the arteries were thought to have a respiratory function. Arteries held air and spirit while the veins held blood. The two substances met and melded in the heart. Harvey explains that there was a logical reason for this false system that had endured for so long: when dissections were performed upon corpses, little blood was found in the arteries or in the left ventricle. He reasons that this happens because the heart continues to work for some time after a person or animal ceases to breathe, and therefore the left ventricle and arteries go on distributing blood without receiving any blood from the lungs. The medieval world, lacking this explanation, believed the empty spaces to contain invisible spirit.84 While this had been the prevailing belief since Galen, Harvey asked how it was possible for air to penetrate: “Likewise since all the arteries, as well those which lye deeper as those which are next to the skin, are distended with the same swiftness, how can the Air so freely, so swiftly, pass through the skin, flesh, and habit of the whole body, into the depth, as it can through the skin alone? And how shall the arteries of Embryons draw the air into their concavities through their mother’s belly, and the body of the womb? And how shall Whales, Dolphins, and great Fishes, and all sorts of Fishes in the bottom of the Sea, take in the air, by the swift pulse in the Systole and Diastole of their arteries, through such a great mass of water?”85 After centuries of images of openness of heart, such as those presented in this chapter, images from philosophical, literary, and religious texts that described the heart as open to air and to

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sensations understood as ingressions of spirit into the body, Harvey attempts here to present his own set of images. He focuses on a sense of depth, attempting to describe the heart and arteries as enclosed within an impenetrable body. The arteries of the fetus cannot draw air in, as they are divided from the air by two layers, the body of the womb and the abdomen of the mother. The image of this isolated fetus is utterly at odds with Dante’s description of the embryo in his Purgatorio, entirely open to the breath of God that fills it with spirit. For medieval people, the air was fi lled with spirits of all kinds, of human origin, of divine origin and of demonic origin. These spirits had the power to penetrate within bodies, unobstructed by the barriers of skin and flesh, entering subtly and swiftly through the sensory portals, or even through the pores of the skin. Harvey insists that the body of the womb and the abdomen of the mother are adequate to stop air from penetrating to the fetus’ arteries. While he does not speak of spirits, the work that he does with images seems aimed at counteracting the culture of susceptibility and porosity that dominated previous centuries. Envisioning seals, whales, and the great fishes in the very depths of the seas, the reader is led to connect the murky deep of the ocean with the amniotic fluid of the womb. Both spaces, linked together by their proximity to each other in Harvey’s text, hide the creatures within in mysterious occlusion. In this declension of metaphor, the heart and arteries appear as unutterably distant from the surface of the skin as the whale from the surface of the sea, as secret as the embryo masked and guarded by layers and walls of flesh. Harvey’s strategy is one of simplification.86 He seeks a unique function for each anatomical structure. In Galenic medicine, multiple functions were attributed to many parts of the body. For example, the arteria venosa brings pneuma to the heart, but at the same time, it carries fuliginous vapors from the blood in the opposite direction. The valves that lead from the arteria venosa to the ventricle do not fit tightly, so

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that the vapors may exit. Harvey found these two-way systems and multiplicities of purpose inelegant and indeed false. As the examples in this chapter have shown, the medieval heart and its veins and arteries constituted perhaps the most complex system in the human body. The heart had long been thought to govern the very broadest range of human functionality. While the veins were rarely attributed with more than the distribution of blood, the porosity and multi-functionality of the arteries made them the channels of numerous kinds of circulation that Harvey wished to eliminate from the medical and cultural imaginary. Harvey makes the point that he is not denying the presence of spirits. But he cannot tolerate a duality of systems within the body, with spirits on the arterial side and blood on the venous side. He instead suggests that all blood is full of spirits. In this way, he brings together the two systems. It is not his intention to destroy the notion of spirits, and he is even willing to concede that the arteries may be richer in spirits. He integrates the two substances by stating that they are inseparable. Again, he brings imagery to bear to create this conceptual possibility in the mind of a reader who is accustomed to imagining the spirits as entities in their own right, as a substance derived in part from blood, but entirely distinct from blood. Harvey explains that spirits and blood are like “whey and butter in milk, or heat and water in warm water.”87 According to his principles of internal coherence, the idea that spirits are only found in the left ventricle simply does not work. He fi nds it ridiculous that the heart is commonly believed to be the workshop and fountain of vital spirits and yet that people believe that it is only the left ventricle and not the right that produces spirit.88 Harvey also disputes the idea that blood oozes from right to left ventricle through numerous porosities: “And why, I beseech you, have they their refuge to hidden, invisible, incertain and obscure pores for the passage of blood into the left ventricle?”89 Or later: “But by my troth there are no such pores, nor can they be demonstrated.”90 The septum

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that separates the ventricles is very dense, he explains, more compact than anything except for bones and sinews. Instead, Harvey proposes an internal circulation of the blood and a solidly divided heart. Blood is transmitted from the vena cava to the arteries in such a quantity that it cannot possibly be supplied from the ingesta. In half an hour, the quantity of blood that moves through the heart is more than the quantity contained in the whole body. The blood could be furnished in no other way than by making a circuit and returning. Harvey thus does away with two different kinds of porosities, the porosity of the arteries and the porosity of the septum. He establishes impenetrable boundaries on the skin and within the heart. Simplification, in this case, means creating divisions and eliminating intermediaries. While Harvey does not reject the existence of spirits, he unites them with the blood and aligns them within the same circuit as the blood, thus effectively diminishing their range of possibility and their status as an intermediary entity. Furthermore, their access to the external world is limited by Harvey’s insistence that air does not enter the arteries through the skin. The commingling of blood and air in the body to produce spirit was, in the medieval world, a microcosm of the relationship between body and soul. The duality of systems within the body, blood and spirit, made each human individual a functional model of the relationship between the corporeal and the divine. The existence of an intermediary substance allowed for interactions with the world that were physical and spiritual at the same time, as the circulation of spirits linked each body into other human beings and potentially into divine spaces through sensory interaction. The images of depth and solidity that govern Harvey’s rhetoric in these passages establish, instead, an internal, unitary circulation, isolating the individual. The heart is divided and sealed within the body. In the absence of concepts of a porous, breathing heart, the notion of an open heart, must, of necessity, become a mere metaphor.

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CHAPTER three

The Engendering Heart

Virile Hearts At the opening of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, Philo remarks that Antony’s formerly virile heart, Which in the scuffles of great fights hath burst The buckles on his breast, reneges all temper And is become the bellows and the fan To cool a gipsy’s lust.1 Philo is suggesting, quite plainly, that Antony has been emasculated by his love for the Egyptian queen, even to the point of a reversal of gender roles: not only has the extrusive force of the heart been severely diminished, it is now merely a cooler counterpart to a woman’s ardor. From the ancient Greeks to Harvey’s time, the heat of the heart and the heart’s power to push that heat into the rest of the body and into other bodies were considered distinctly masculine qualities. At the same time, the heart’s receptive capacities aligned it with the functions of the female womb. Harvey, working according to his guiding principles of delimitation and simplification, rejected the receptive, or feminine, capacities attributed to the heart by working through images of inaccessibility, as

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we have seen in the previous chapter. Concepts of the masculine capacities of the heart, on the other hand, served Harvey’s purposes better.2 He transformed the complex ways in which the heart was gendered and the even more complex ways in which the heart gendered the body from within preexisting frames of reference. The heart might be phallic and ejaculatory, but its reach, he argued, went no further than the boundary of the skin. As Harvey sought to rededicate the heart to the single, corporeally delimited process of moving blood through the interior of the body, he harnessed significant portions of the long history of the heart’s prolific functions for his own purposes. Rather than violently sweeping away all of these notions in one bundle, Harvey brackets certain questions regarding the “products” of the heart. I noted in chapter 2 that he declines to pronounce a verdict on whether the heart adds heat, spirit, or perfection to the blood. He chooses his battles carefully and not only leaves aside this question, but indeed assumes, elsewhere in his treatise, that the heart does produce heat for the blood, as had been asserted for centuries. He employs this cultural certitude for his own purposes, explaining the necessity of circulation by recourse to long-familiar notions of vital heat. As he describes it, blood that comes into contact with other parts of the body becomes “refrigerated, coagulated, and made as it were barren [effetum], from thence it returns to the heart, as to the fountain or dwelling-house of the body, to recover its perfection, and there again by naturall heat, powerfull [potenti] and vehement [fervido], it is melted, and is dispens’d again through the body from thence, being fraught [praegnans] with spirits, as with balsam.”3 As the heart is the source of heat in the human body, the farther blood gets from that source, the cooler it becomes. Due to this drop in temperature, the blood grows thicker and even “effete.” Effetus is derived from ex- and fetus, or fruitful. The word has markedly gendered connotations; it has a secondary meaning of “effeminate,” intimating a lack of fruitfulness

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in a specifically masculine reproductive sense. Upon its return to the heart, the blood regains its “naturall heat” and becomes “powerfull” and “vehement,” having regained “perfection.” In the Aristotelian worldview, these were all gendered terms that in fact constituted the very definition of masculinity. Apart from his introduction of the notion of return, Harvey’s terms correspond closely to the male side of medieval vocabulary for describing heart function. It is the issue of return, however, that changes everything. This chapter will examine medieval concepts of the heart as a gendered and generative organ, an organ that, of necessity, had commerce with the outside environment. As numerous examples in the previous chapters have shown, medieval notions of healthy circulation involved circulation beyond the body, to it and from it, with the world. Circulations that remained within the body, on the other hand, were understood to be indicative of sterility. Harvey’s limitation of the heart’s virile propulsions operates from within a different concept of masculinity. It assumes a phallic character for the heart, while divorcing the heart from a literal role in generation, the most fundamental extension of the individual into the world. Robert Erickson, in his book The Language of the Heart, suggests that the “notion that the same heart operates in both women and men” is equivalent to a concept of an “ungendered heart.”4 I will argue that the heart is never ungendered in the late medieval thought-style under consideration here, but rather is, of necessity, double-gendered. A heart that is not temperate enough to be receptive or womblike is a source of spiritual and physical danger. At the same time, a heart that is not able to push spirit out from the body and into the world in the form of new life or simply spiritual participation in the circulation of things is equally in peril. The medieval heart must be both receptive and projective, both male and female. Studies of sex difference in the Middle Ages have tended to examine

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the parallelism or lack of parallelism between descriptions of male and female reproductive organs.5 It is my contention that such comparisons neglect the core of the issue. Passive and active, warm and cool—the central terms that defined sex difference in medieval thought—are determined by the heart. By examining the primary source of sex differences, we may come to understand more of what is really at stake in the gendered terms in play in medieval texts. The greater the heat of the heart, the more a person of either sex could take an active role in the world. Heated and thus volatile spirits could push themselves beyond the boundaries of the individual body and into other bodies. The medieval gendered body presented in the following pages is remarkably sympathetic with the most recent theories of sex and gender. After centuries of fi xation on the genital organs as markers of sexual alterity, we are returning to a vision of the body that looks beyond those often ambiguous signs to gradations of difference in the body’s relation to the external world. The now long-lost cardiocentric model for generation must be approached by means of multiple layers, beginning with theological definitions of primary causes of heat in the body and moving from there to descriptions of the heart’s anatomical capacities to contain, create, and externalize heat and heated spirit within the body and beyond. With these sources and pathways established, it becomes possible to think descriptions of gendered relationality differently as they appear in the poetic and mystical texts of the same period. As an outline of the cardiocentric model for sex and gender takes shape, Harvey’s redeployment of certain medieval, Aristotelian notions about vital heat may be viewed from the perspective of a new set of consequences. Harvey strives to limit the outward flow from the heart to the confines of the body, as in his view, the self is maintained by the containment of powers within the body. In the medieval world, the ability to relate ecstatically to what lay beyond the skin was the constitutive basis of life. The greater the capacity to move spirit through the boundaries of the body, the more

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perfect (and more masculine) the individual. The individual is asserted only by relationality, only by self-overreaching. This chapter seeks to unearth this alternate sense of the human, one that precedes the isolated individual familiar to us now. By tracing the outward flow from the heart as it was envisioned in the medieval period and positioning such a mapping against the contours established in Harvey’s treatise, we may comprehend the radical transformation in concepts of the boundedness of the individual. The individual that is now defined by containment within the skin was once determined by the ability to push her- or himself beyond that enclosure and into relations with the world. The Sources of Heat Before engaging these complex problems, it is necessary to sort out the relationships between the confluence of qualities and entities that flow forth from the medieval heart. It is, after all, the heat of the heart that determines sex difference and permits both circulation into the world and generation. As noted above, Harvey offers that fluidity, heat, power, and spirits may potentially be acquired in the heart; at this point in his treatise, his statements correspond perfectly with late medieval ideas. How are these qualities and entities related to each other and how are they infused into the body by the heart? Thomas Aquinas’ De motu cordis is a useful starting point in addressing these questions. As always, Aquinas seeks to categorize, sort, and distinguish between causes and effects, and, further, between primary and secondary effects. From the perspective of such definitions and distinctions, we may subsequently examine how medieval thinkers blurred Aquinas’ neat boundaries as the concepts of the heart’s heat were employed in different settings. Aquinas attacks the problem of principality in the relationship between heat and motion, seeking to clarify that heat, generated by spirit,

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is not the cause of the motion of the heart, as some say. Rather, it is the motion of the heart that creates warmth; the motion of the heart is a “deeper principle” than warmth. Aquinas points out that “heat . . . does not move something else into another place except incidentally. For an essential feature of heat is to warm, and incidentally to move something from one place to another.” In other words, although heat may move things, this is not its “essential feature.”6 For Aquinas, as we have already seen, it is the soul that moves the heart and thus by extension warms the body.7 To describe the nature of this motion, Aquinas explains that “whereas the heavenly movement is always uniform, the heart’s movement varies according to the different emotions and sensations of the soul.”8 While the circulations of the heavens follow a divinely ordered pattern, the individual soul is subject to emotions and sensations that alter and vary the imperfectly circular movement of the heart. The push and pull that constitute the imperfect movement of the heart as well as the intercorporeal circulations we have been describing thus far are fallible motions, dependent on the passions. Above all, human circulations depend on a duality of motions, a reciprocity; emotions and sensations result from interaction with the outside world. The movement of the heart thus depends not only on the individual but also on other bodies and the surrounding environment. Only heavenly circulation is a unitary circular movement that is fully self-sustaining. Aquinas establishes another causal relationship as he specifies that it is the soul that affects the heart, and not the reverse: “For the sensations of the soul are not caused by changes in the heart, but just the opposite is the case. This is why in the passions of the soul, such as anger, there is a formal part that pertains to a feeling, which in this example would be the desire for vengeance. And there is a material part that pertains to the heart’s motion, which in the example would be the blood enkindled around the heart.”9 The distinctions that Aquinas

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sets out are infrequently maintained in the writings of scholars that followed him in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The “formal part,” desire for vengeance, and the “material part,” blood enkindled around the heart, are often used interchangeably in texts of all kinds to mean precisely the same thing. These two parts of the passions of the soul are understood to go together; the formal does not exist without the material and vice versa. While Aquinas’ philosophy is dedicated to establishing such primacies and causal relationships, even followers of Aquinas were often more apt to emphasize the connections between the formal and the material and to seek intermediaries between overly distinct categories. Aquinas was one of the scholars who sought to maintain a clear distinction between the soul and the spirit, but, as we have seen, the intermediary notion of the spirit overflowed the boundaries of its more restrictive definitions for numerous other thinkers. Philosophically and theologically, the spirit brought together and integrated body and soul rather than enforcing the distance between the two. In terms of the passions as well, the notion of spirit in the non-Aquinian sense melded the formal and material in the intermediary space of the heart and its environs. Aquinas continues: “Although someone does not desire revenge because his blood is burning around the heart, he is more prone to become angry because of it. But actually being angry is from the desire for vengeance.”10 In this statement, Aquinas presents us with three orders of things that proceed from the material to the formal: blood burning around the heart, becoming angry, and desiring revenge. For Aquinas, the material part, or burning blood, can make a person more prone to anger but cannot provoke the desire for revenge. In other words, the physical heart can influence our passions to some degree but cannot influence the sort of formal thought that is required to desire revenge. Aquinas is careful to keep thought at some distance from the material and to emphasize a unidirectional chain of influence.

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But for Plato, Aristotle, and Galen, as well as for most scholars working in the scholastic tradition, the passions were thought to follow a cardiocentric and thermodynamic model.11 According to this model, rage is the boiling of blood and spirit in the heart. These substances are then pushed to the periphery of the body. In the case of fear, the reverse happens. Spirits, natural heat, and blood return to the heart and collect there, depriving the limbs of their strength. Aquinas chooses to examine the primary causes of these phenomena. Rather than simply imagining that thermodynamic processes are the cause of the passions, he seeks a different source of these manifestations. Which come first, the movements of the blood and spirit or the passions themselves? Aquinas’ logic promotes the soul as the primary cause of bodily effects, from emotion to the movement of the heart. The Anatomy of Heat Distribution These philosophical and theological notions of vital heat were redeployed and adapted in order to interpret anatomy. Mondino de’ Liuzzi, a professor of medicine at the University of Bologna, is credited with introducing human dissection as a means of instruction there. Mondino began the first official dissections of human cadavers in 1315 and wrote the Anothomia, his treatise of human anatomy, a year later. The Anothomia had great impact; it was used as a textbook for three centuries and as such gives us access to dominant concepts perceived in the structures of the body as they were taught for generations. The Anothomia begins with a reflection on the greatness of man, something that, at least at first, is stated a priori: “As compared to other animals of the same size [man] has greater heat, the purpose of which is to lift him up to higher levels.”12 Such capacity can be seen, as Mondino explains, in the organization and positioning of the organs of the body, mapped according to delicate balances of heat and cold. The heart’s

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output of heat dictates, among other things, the size of the brain: “Once you have eliminated the membranes, the brain will appear to you, which in man is of larger dimensions than in any other animal of the same size because man has a hotter heart than other animals and for this reason needs more animal spirits for the activity of the intellect. . . . Its function is to mitigate with its complexion the vital spirit so that it may become animal spirit.”13 Mondino’s Anothomia reveals the strange admixture of Aristotelian and Galenic ideas that ruled the Middle Ages. It was Aristotle who suggested that the brain’s function was to cool the blood and thus the heart, an idea that Galen ridiculed. Here, Mondino’s otherwise Galenic treatise returns to Aristotelian principles, bolstered, incidentally, by tangible evidence. Any butcher would assert that the brain of an animal (by the time he gets to it) is cool. There are two primary reasons why experimental evidence fails here: Blood drains rapidly from the brain of a hanging animal. Furthermore, the cranium presents an obstacle to the butcher such that by the time the brain is accessed, it feels cooler than other organs.14 Mondino explains that the brain’s size is defined by the heat of the heart, which depends not on the size of a living being, but rather on its perfection. It is only due to this heat that man has greater intellectual activity; the brain cools the great stream of vital spirit from the heart, thus transforming it into the animal spirit. One traditional medieval account explained that the transformation from vital to animal spirit was performed by the rete mirabile. The rete mirabile was derived from Galen’s solution for the problem of cognition and was widely accepted in the Middle Ages.15 Mondino speaks of the rete mirabile at length later in his treatise, specifying that “the rete is woven of little nerves or very small and thin arteries [arteriis parvissimis et subtilissimis], so that the spirit contained in them is easily altered and cooled by the brain and is converted into the animal spirit.”16 For Mondino, the principal action of the rete is to cool the vital spirit, not to purify or rarify it. By this analysis, the brain has a similar function

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to the lung. The heart is “covered by the lobes of the lung so that it may be cooled by the inhaled air from the same [lung] and the heat and the spirit generated in it may be tempered.”17 In fact, rarification, according to Mondino, is a process fueled in the heart by means of great heat. The left ventricle of the heart has a thicker and more compact wall than that of the right ventricle for several reasons. One is that it “must generate the spirit from the blood, but spirit is generated from blood by means of a great heat that has the capacity to purify it and to make it evaporate. But heat is greater when in a denser material and structure, for which reason the wall of this ventricle is thick and dense.”18 Heat, according to Mondino, purifies the blood, and thus the spaces of the heart are designed to prevent the dispersion of this precious heat. But while it has this positive effect, heat must be tempered by corresponding organs in the body, such as the brain and the lungs, that work to cool the heart and the spirits exuding from it. Balanced bodily heat is derived from the relationship between the heart and the other organs. Despite Aquinas’ careful reasoning, most physicians were content to state that the heart was the source of heat in the body. Taddeo Alderotti, Mondino’s teacher, leaves aside Aquinian reflections on motion as productive of heat and the soul as productive of motion. He writes simply, “The heart is the root and source of heat.” Mondino further explains the heart’s capacity to contain more heat than other organs: the heart “has more heat thanks to its dimensions, as will be clear to you by observing its form, as it has the shape of a pine cone or a pyramid; because all those things that have a considerable heat must have this shape, given that the initial form of primordial heat is the pyramidal shape.”19 The shape of a flame is roughly pyramidal; the heart is a kind of embodiment of the principle of heat in its elemental essence. Heat was thought to be more at home within a structure that reflected its own properties. Within the space of the same text, Mondino both describes

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how the thick walls of the ventricles preserve the heat of the heart, and, in a seemingly different register, identifies the heart with heat. Most important, the heart must distribute this heat to the rest of the body. As the heart was not a pump for Mondino, it was necessary to describe the ways in which it distributed heat and spirit, not merely blood. Numerous different concepts and terms were introduced to describe this distribution of rarefied and non-material entities. Mondino explains that “the base [of the heart is inclined] towards the right, in order to exhale [insufflare] heat and spirit toward the right part that must be hotter than the left.” The heart is imagined as a breathing organ (Shakespeare’s “bellows”), exhaling heat and spirit into the rest of the body. Alfred of Sareshel, in his De motu cordis, written before 1200, describes the externalizing force of the heart in different but related terms: “Indeed the Sun provides light and heat when it hurls its rays and brings the variety of colors into actuality; the heart also, in the middle [of the body] with the veins, nerves, and arteries, hurls out [eiaculans] the action of the first virtue [primae virtutes] and distributes all the rest [of the virtues] into the receptacle of each one.”20 For Alfred, the heart hurls out or “ejaculates” virtue to the surrounding body through the veins, nerves, and arteries. This vital outward motion is described in distinctly masculine, reproductive terms. Until and through Harvey, the outward leg of the various circulations the heart was thought to engender was closely associated with masculinity. The prototypical model for a gendered approach to outward movement derives from Aristotle. Harvey cites Aristotle’s observation that the seminal fluid of all animals, or the “prolific spirit,” leaves the body with a bound and like a living thing. In medieval Aristotelian natural philosophy, mobility was associated with heat and the ability to externalize, or to relate ecstatically to the environment. Albert the Great quibbles with Alfred on the exact nature of spirit. He rejects the vision of spirit as similar to sunlight. For him, it’s a more

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substantial entity: “The spirit that is in animals’ bodies is the vapor that is dispersed from seminal humidity during generation.”21 Spirit cannot move as light does, but rather it moves according to its properties. A fine vapor, made of seminal humidity, moves with less immediacy than sunlight. On both sides of this disagreement about the nature of its motion, however, Albert and Alfred tie spirit to the seminal. In all of its functions throughout the body, spirit vivifies through its essential reproductive qualities. The procreative nature of spirit is not reserved for the act of creating a new life alone; the spirit’s power to vivify and to enable relationality in the individual is essentially procreative. In order for an individual to survive, life in the human body must be continually renewed, as if recreated. Interactions between individuals, enabled by the spirit, are shadows of the reproductive act. The creation of a new life, then, through the act of intercourse, is but a subset of the quotidian prolific movements of the spirit from the heart. Cardiocentric versus Phallocentric Models for Gender and Generation The identification of the heart’s outward propulsions with notions of masculinity brings us to a point in which we must sort out in greater detail the ways in which gender was related to the properties of the heart. Our vernaculars retain traces of the association between the heart and specific virtues: courage, corage, and coraggio are derived from the Latin cor. Courage was directly related to the size and heat of the heart, though perhaps not precisely as expected. Albert the Great explains that hares have very large hearts in respect to their size and thus are timid. A smaller heart can contain and distribute greater heat that would otherwise be prematurely dispersed in a larger heart. Greater capacity for heat signified greater courage, active force, refinement of nutrition, and masculinity; the basic assumption was that gender differences arose from differences in body temperature.

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Most theorizations of sex differences were organized around designated roles in generation. Heat is the necessary fi rst ingredient for the life of the body and for the creation of new life, as Aristotle’s De generatione animalium claims: “In all cases the semen contains within itself that which causes it to be fertile—what is known as ‘hot’ substance.”22 This substance for Aristotle is pneuma (or spiritus) and is generated in the heart. So how is it that the male heart renders blood capable of forming semen and the female heart does not? Medieval analyses of male and female roles in procreation were just as complicated as discussions of the location and source of powers in the body.23 Again, scholars faced a similar conflict of authorities. Those who followed Aristotle (Dante, for one) held that the male heart refined blood capable of making seed while the female heart produced only the passive material for generation. Other scholars followed the Galenic line transmitted through Avicenna and Haly Abbas, maintaining that women produced seed as well that played a secondary, but nonetheless important, role in procreation.24 Temperature was the determining factor between active and passive roles. According to the Aristotelian notions that were widely accepted in the medieval period, the perfect heat of the father’s heart produces the formative power for life from blood contained in the heart. Women, who are naturally cooler, lack the sufficient heat to produce seed from blood, and instead make menstrual fluid, the passive matter necessary to constitute a fetus. A series of oppositions were thus developed and valorized: as men are hotter, they are stronger, and they produce semen that gives form and has the active role in creating life.25 The medieval treatise On the Secrets of Women states: “Male sperm is hot because it is of the same nature as air and when it is received by the woman it warms her entire body, so women are strengthened by this heat.”26 In the medieval account, pneuma is replaced with spirit or spiritus and made more substantial, but its essential qualities remain

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the same. Heat not only encourages (in the etymological sense) but also strengthens, and in the proper potency can even create a new life. The competing Galenic view, holding that women also produced a seed and that two seeds were necessary for conception, was still party to the same Aristotelian valorizations of heat. Galen believed that women were cooler and thus less perfect than men, retaining the fundamental basis for gender differences while suggesting a slightly more active role for the woman in generation. While this may at first appear to be a simple binary opposition—hot and active versus cold and passive—in reality, medieval constructions of sex difference are complex and anything but binary. Sex is defined by terms of scale, of gradations of qualities: men’s hearts are hotter than women’s. As both men and women’s hearts produce heat to varying degrees, sex is not a question of difference in the sense of alterity but is rather a question of proportion, a position on a scale or spectrum.27 The prevalent theories of heart function in Italy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries reveal much about notions of masculinity as a quality that is not proper to the male. The heart was, in many ways, the very center of masculinity, producing vital heat, and, at least in terms of prevalent philosophical accounts, the organ in which blood was refined adequately to produce semen. Male sex organs did not inherently contain the qualities and potentialities of masculinity; they were subordinate to the heart that alone could supply such qualities. As only male hearts were believed to create enough heat for the production of semen, it was assumed simply that women’s hearts did not produce quite enough heat. But the heart remained the hottest part of the female body, the “masculine” within. In symmetrical terms, the heart within the male body was often viewed as the “feminine” within, in terms of its passive and receptive capacities. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the poets of the Dolce stil novo described their hearts as womblike receptacles of the spirits flying into them from their lady’s eyes. The heart is thus both

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a passive “feminine” reservoir for blood and spirit and the “masculine” center of the body’s active life force, producing animating spirit and the materials of procreation. Until recently, we have had a rather Freudian way of looking at sex: either one has a penis or one does not. Alternatively, we have looked for the presence or absence of the Y chromosome to determine sex. The logic of this dividing line posits a definition that hinges on the feminine lack of a very specific thing. Those definitions are now changing. Ann Fausto-Sterling’s book Sexing the Body tells the story of Maria Patiño, Spain’s top woman hurdler, who was barred from the 1988 Olympics when she was found to have a Y chromosome. According to the International Olympic Committee’s defi nition, Patiño’s chromosomes made her a man, despite her visibly female form. In the days before cheek scraping, women athletes paraded naked in front of examiners to display visible signs of their sex. Fausto-Sterling argues that both of these contradictory definitions and tests are fatally flawed: “There is no either/or. Rather, there are shades of difference.”28 And these shades of difference are precisely what we find in the medieval cardiocentric concept of sex and gender. Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex argues that a “one-sex model” existed until 1750, when our current “two-sex model” took over. Until that point, he claims, woman was understood to be a degenerate form of man, as her reproductive organs were an inverted version of the male organs.29 Katharine Park and Robert A. Nye have refuted this theory, showing convincingly that the Middle Ages and the Renaissance were very clear on the systematic differences between male and female reproductive organs.30 I agree fully that as far as the reproductive organs are concerned, woman was not located on a spectrum of similarity with man. Furthermore, it seems clear that medieval natural philosophers firmly believed in two distinct sexes. But I’d like to simply shift the focus here to the designated source of that dimorphism. A slight difference

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in the temperature of the father’s heart, according to many accounts, determined the sex of the embryo.31 However, even once the sex of an individual was established in utero, the medieval world expected huge variation in the masculinity or femininity of males and females. These variations depended on the heat of the individual’s heart. When gendered terms are based on something that both sexes possess, the quality of the dividing line between categories must change. The female heart is not as hot as the male heart; this is the difference that many anatomists and philosophers alike focus upon when delineating the sexes. The sexual organs take a decidedly secondary position in this logical scheme. Furthermore, this scenario of a spectrum of heat levels allowed for considerable flexibility; while male hearts were generally hotter than female hearts, some male hearts were cooler than others. Likewise, some female hearts were hotter than others. Of course, the warmest female was generally thought to be cooler than the coolest male, as Albert the Great asserts. Like his student, Aquinas, Albert is interested in drawing clear boundaries, boundaries that the public imaginary could not entirely respect. Others, in fact, suggested that there were possible exceptions to this definitive distinction.32 The “shades of difference” formula that Fausto-Sterling offers for a contemporary way of thinking about both sex and gender fi nds its correlate in the ways in which this late medieval community conceived of cardiocentric sex difference. While there was little discussion of ambiguity of sex, there was much discussion of “manly” or “masculine” women, for example. Both men and women shared problems related to complexion and the delicate balance between heat and cool, moist and dry. Women could easily suffer from excessive complexionary heat or cold, as could men. These variable boundaries were reinforced through physiognomies. Avicenna and Albert the Great speak of the quantity and consistency of chest hair as signs of the strength of the heart.33 They refer to

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a thermodynamic model to explain chest hair as output of the masculine heart. In this view, natural heat produced by the heart makes vapors that rise. These dense vapors pass through the pores in the skin and, when they come in contact with the cold air outside the body, solidify into hair on the chest or the scalp. As Michael Scot puts it in his Liber phisionomie: “A sign of a hot bodily complexion is a body that is naturally hot . . . [and has] lots of abundant hair . . . that is thick and curly and shows much heat of the heart, such as in a lion.”34 The lion is, of course, associated with courage. At the same time, there were significant discussions of men who lacked beards and hirsute women.35 Hair is thus more often aligned with qualities of heat and masculinity than the male specifically. Signs of heat were not always so obvious, however. On Treatments for Women, part of the three-section Trotula texts produced in Salerno during the twelfth-century Renaissance, explains that tests may be performed to determine whether a woman is hot or cold: “In order that we might make a concise summary of the treatment of women, it ought to be noted that certain women are hot, while some are cold. In order to determine which, one should perform this test. We anoint a piece of lint with oil of pennyroyal or laurel or another hot oil, and we insert a piece of it the size of a little finger into the vagina at night when she goes to bed, and it should be tied around the thighs with a strong string. And if it is drawn inside, this is an indication to us that she labors from frigidity. If, however, it is expelled, we know that she labors from heat.”36 This practical manual, intended to promulgate information on the treatment of specific maladies and problems (often problems conceiving), places considerable emphasis on the variety of levels of heat in both sexes. Excessive heat in the womb can burn semen, while sterility on the part of the man is most frequently caused by a lack of heat.37

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Cold Hard Hearts Joan Cadden’s authoritative study, Meanings of Sex Diff erence in the Middle Ages, briefly mentions Dante’s Commedia. She points out that the long passage on embryology in the poem alludes only in passing to the importance of heat in sex difference and focuses primarily on the distinction between active and passive. For Cadden, this is an interesting exception to the general rule of Dante’s time, as the central opposition that scholars noted in this process was the heat of the father’s heart compared to the relative cool of the woman.38 While it is true that the distinctions Dante makes between the male and female contributions to the embryo do not consider temperature, heat is one of the governing themes of the Commedia. Dante’s extensive reflections on vital heat as a physiological necessity for life, for new life and for the life of the soul, are perhaps the most complete picture that we have of the medieval view of this concept in all of its complexity. In the Commedia’s pages we find a digestion of erudite and popular beliefs about the prolific movement of heat and spirit and the potential impediments to such movement. By examining these ideas, we will reach the very core of medieval notions of the creative powers of the human, from the procreative to the poetic to the prophetic. Before we arrive at the Commedia, however, it will be useful to begin with a brief look at Dante’s own journey toward this more developed theory of vital heat. His corpus is a tremendous work of synthesis, adapting poetic convention and innovation to fit a workable natural philosophical scheme. The spirits that fly from the beloved’s eyes are often described as “burning” in the common language of Dante’s stilnovist clan; they derive their heat, mobility, and force from the hearth that is the lady’s heart. Cavalcanti, for one, presents visible proof of his beloved’s virtue by describing the diff usion of spirits that emanate from her: “She makes the air tremble with clarity.”39 His lady’s virtue is not

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a quality that inheres within her alone; it is something so abundant and generous that it overflows into the world, reaching beyond her and into others. This excess of virtue makes the lady’s presence masculine in its externalizing character. While poets often made a male deity, the god of Love, the agent in such encounters, the Stilnovists sometimes opted to turn this agency over to the lady herself. The angelic ladies of the Dolce stil novo are described as such precisely because they are relevant (and revelatory) to a larger public. Their public impact is rendered visible by this overflow of spirits, revealing that the individual woman’s virtue has the nature of a gift offered to the surrounding environment. Her grace extends beyond the boundaries of her individual body. It follows, then, that the spirits flying forth from their bodies are not intended for a unique recipient. The poet’s cor gentil may be more susceptible than others and thus uniquely qualified to receive and respond to this invasion of presence, but a woman like Dante’s Beatrice, bringer of blessings, does not limit those blessings to the poet alone. In the poet’s celebration of his own susceptibility and availability to these blessings, the temperature of the receiving heart is very much at issue.40 Beatrice’s effects on those who encounter her vary according to the individual’s capacity to receive those spirits. After Beatrice’s death, Dante writes: “He who does not weep, when he thinks of her, has a heart of stone so base and low that no benign spirit may enter.”41 The loss of Beatrice’s presence is an occasion for public mourning; any person who does not participate must, by consequence, have somehow been denied previous experience of Beatrice’s presence in the fullest sense. The heart of stone in this case is one that was closed off to the benign spirits that came forth from Beatrice’s living body as she moved through the city. With no trace of that beatific presence in the heart, no tears may be pulled forth. Such a heart is thus sealed to both intromissive and extramissive functions. Albert the Great’s treatises on minerals tell us that stone is cold and

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dry, two characteristics that are together opposed to the proper qualities of a heart: warm and moist. A heart must be moist to be permeable; if it is too cold, it becomes stonelike and impenetrable. Dante’s rime petrose, or stony rhymes, reveal the nature of the physiospiritual dangers of a hardened heart. Two canzoni, one sestina, and one double sestina, the rime petrose have traditionally been grouped together for their common themes—a wintry landscape and the poet’s obsessive desire for an inaccessible, “stony” woman:42 High from the arid Ethiopian sand, now heated by the bright sphere of the sun, the pilgrim wind that disturbs the air arises; it crosses the sea, whence it takes along such copious mist, that, if by nought disturbed, closes and seals all this hemisphere; and then, disintegrating, falls in white flakes of cold snow and most annoying rain, at which the firmament grows sad and weeps.43 Such atmospheric blockage forecloses the hope for transcendence Dante offered at the conclusion of the Vita nuova. I noted in chapter two that “Oltre la spera” describes a new vision of poetic inspiration, in which the sigh that leaves the pilgrim’s heart travels to heaven to view Beatrice and then returns to the poet, envisioning a new kind of extracorporeal circulation, reaching even into the heavens. Here, Dante employs similar terms to describe a “pilgrim wind” that lifts itself to “the sphere of the sun,” clearly recalling the “pilgrim spirit” that passes “beyond the sphere that circles widest.” But while the spirito of “Oltre la spera” returns to its source after its journey to heaven, bearing the presence of Beatrice back to the poet, the pilgrim wind of “Io son venuto” becomes bogged down in snow, does not pass above the limitations of the earthly world, and does not ever return to its source. The dynamic

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cyclical motion in “Oltre la spera” is thus blocked, in the petrose, by a sudden cold. The frozen landscape acts as a mirror to the poet’s heart and body: “The earth makes a floor that seems made of marble / and the dead water is converted into glass / for the cold that locks it from outside.”44 In this universe, all circulation has ceased; the fog is such that the entire hemisphere is closed and sealed. The poet’s body, as microcosm of this frozen universe, is likewise closed within itself: “And thus before such cold / my blood is frozen over for all time.”45 An excessively cold heart is necessarily a hardened heart, as another poem in the cycle reveals: “Lord, you know that for such cold / water becomes crystalline stone.”46 This process, in which materials are hardened and immobilized, occurs symmetrically in the frozen landscape and in the petrified body of the poet. According to Albert the Great, poor circulation can cause problems not only for the health of the body, but also for the health of the soul. If the heart cannot heat the blood and move the spirits efficiently throughout the body and into the world, isolation sets in. The theological implications of this bodily state can easily be inferred. Faith, Albert explains, is indicative of a warm heart, while fear and sadness—despair, in theological terms— indicate a cold heart: “Thoughts that tend toward the joyful, such as hope and good faith, signify a strong heart and a balanced complexion. . . . If they tend towards fear and sadness, this means an excess of frigidity in the heart.”47 As I noted in my discussion of plague susceptibility and prevention in the previous chapter, this relationship between thought, human interaction, and the qualities of the heart is dynamic. Thoughts not only give an indication of the state of the heart, but may also influence the state of the heart. In the plague tracts, happy thoughts and pleasant, but circumscribed, interactions with others were meant to strengthen the heart and to keep its action oriented toward the projective rather than the receptive. Here, we are given a complete picture of what happens when lovesickness sets in.

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In his De vulgari eloquentia, Dante describes the stanza as a womb or “gremium.”48 According to the poetic mechanism detailed in the Vita nuova and the Commedia, poetry is understood to be conceived through a union of spirits and to be brought forth (essentially birthed) from the site of that union, the heart. The heart, the womb, and the stanza are thus presented as analogous creative spaces. In the petrose, then, the heart’s frozen blockage to inspiration indicates a sort of infertility. The stanzas are filled with repetitive images of frozen water and frozen hearts— sets of images that may be a double reference, both to theories of heart dysfunction and to theories on the causes of infertility. Albert postulates in his De animalibus that infertility may often be traced to a cold womb. Lack of heat in the womb leads to the retention of menstrual blood, essentially blocking the healthy cycle of fertility. The female reproductive organs, he suggests, are chilled by excessive sexual intercourse, as in the case of prostitutes, or may drop below the proper temperature if a woman imbibes large quantities of cold water. In men too, cold water was thought to cool and thus deactivate the sperm by remaining within the body without being adequately heated or sweated out.49 Infertile male and female bodies were imagined to be retaining something unhealthy, like the poet in the petrose: “I cannot unburden myself / of a single thought of love, with which I am laden.”50 “Io son venuto” elaborates a series of contrasts between the perpetual procreative motion of the heavens and the burdened poet who is immobilized at the point where he has arrived: “I have arrived at the point of the wheel / in which the horizon, when the sun sets / gives birth to the gemmed sky.”51 According to the Aristotelian and Aquinian theory, the heart should imperfectly mimic the circulations of the heavens. But here, the natality of movement in the skies serves to throw into relief the paralysis of the poet’s frozen body. The trarre fuori (pulling forth) that in the Commedia will be used to denote Dante’s birthing of rhymes from the poetics of inspiration appears in the petrose as an

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action beyond the poet’s realm of possibilities in an image later adopted by Petrarch: the cruel thorn however, Love will not pull out from my heart; so that I am sure that I will carry it always as long as I am alive, even were I to live forever.52 The poet’s body cannot bring forth the sort of poetry described in the Commedia because it is sealed, blocked by the retention of something we have yet to define. The sort of closed circulation described here is a nightmarish version of Harvey’s circulation that limits the heart’s scope of action to the interior of the body. In the medieval world, the notion of a closed circulation, of an isolated, interiorized circuit means stagnation, obsession, and compression. When the heart is blocked and cannot force the spirit within it from the interior of the body to the external world, the result can be death. Albert’s theory that infertility may be caused by excessive intercourse also informs a crucial opposition in Dante’s poetics, where melancholic, lustful sexuality is opposed to procreative sexuality. While the properly conceived poetry of the Commedia is frequently linked to reproduction, the sexuality of the petrose is continually exposed as infertile lust. This poem is formed under the influence of Saturn, “that planet that comforts ice.”53 Saturn, associated with melancholic sexuality, was also thought to be the slowest and coldest of all planets.54 It would seem, according to this characterization, to be the governing force behind the entire petrose cycle. In the medieval period, melancholia was considered to be one of the inevitable results of obsessive love.55 Guglielmo da Saliceto, whose Cyrurgia closely follows Avicenna’s theories, explains that lovesickness overcomes a man when he thinks obsessively about the beauty of a person, producing an abundance of the melancholic humor, which is cold

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and dry. The illness proceeds through depression, madness, and physical debilitation.56 The heart first overheats the body and brain, but this flash of fire is followed by the equivalent of cold coals and dirty smoke. The malady of the poet of the petrose is thus derived from disordered thought: “my mind, that is harder than stone / in holding tight an image of stone.”57 The normal cycle within the body, in which external perceptions are constantly relayed to the brain, has been blocked. The mind fixates on the contemplation of one particular image in an obsessive manner, rejecting any new input. As the melancholic humor is produced in response to this excessive thought, the brain only becomes colder and drier. It is essentially petrified. Even the forms of the poems figure this fi xation upon a single image; the second in the cycle is a sestina, a form that enforces the repetition of six words. The third tightens the structure even further in a double sestina, in which twelve-line stanzas repeat five rhyme-words. It seems that the poet’s icy burden leads him to embellish and harden the frame and the structure of his lyrics, while the content remains perfectly static—we might even say crystallized. The form of the double sestina exasperates a restricted set of rhyme-words in a game of endless reflection in which the stanzas mirror the infertile body, laden with material that cannot be expelled. Whereas in the Vita nuova Dante suggested that his most worthy poetry would be the product of direct inspiration received within the heart, these lyrics exhibit a more cerebral mode of production: “The newness that through your form shines / has never been thought in any time.”58 In fact, the head was particularly vulnerable to the sort of ailment described here. Albert the Great, when explaining why the heart is the principle of life rather than the head, gives the following rationale: “Since cold is a deadly quality and it is the cause of immobility and since cold befalls the front area of the head most quickly, it is clear that the principle of life cannot be here.”59 The poet of these rime

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is consciously disassociating his current mode of production from the principle of life and correlating it instead with vulnerability to the deadly quality of cold. Interestingly, this cerebral poetry is explicitly identified with imitation and competition in the poet’s drive to demonstrate formal mastery. The sestina was a form invented by a Provençal poet, Arnaut Daniel.60 The rime petrose cycle reveals Dante’s wish to first replicate the master’s design and then to surpass it. Furthermore, Arnaut’s poetry is famously playful; he depends heavily on the effects of repetition but does not allow it to limit his range of signification. Arnaut’s sestina allows for variation of meaning as long as the sound remains the same. This is the poetic form that Petrarch later chose to emulate; only Dante insists on maintaining the same meaning for each of the rhyme words in his sestinas, ensuring a complete petrification of content. Endless formal refinement in the articulation of an internal image is envisioned as blockage in the heart’s natural function in the poetic process, figuring a fi xation on a single image that does not permit the heart to take in new inspiration or to bring forth its burden. In the petrose, death looms large, canceling out any sense of the future. The temporal horizon, while omnipresent in the astrological references that frame the poet’s suffering, is completely extinguished in the poet’s immobilized desire. The closed circuit of the poet’s fi xated mind, figured in the sealed repetitive forms of these rime, is unsustainable physically, poetically, and spiritually. Just as the heart sends smoky fumes to the brain in the case of obsessive lovesickness, something similar occurs when the womb sends dangerous fumes upward to the heart. Perhaps the most famous, if equally incongruous, case is found in Shakespeare’s King Lear: O how this mother swells up toward my heart! Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow, Thy element’s below.61

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Lear complains here of what the medieval world referred to as suff ocatio matricis, or the suffocation of the womb, an illness that was a central topic in discussions of women’s health from ancient Greece through Shakespeare’s time.62 Hippocratic gynecology held that the uterus could, in fact, move through the body, rising far enough to put pressure on the heart. Galen, who had done enough dissection and vivisection to suspect that perhaps the organ wasn’t quite that mobile, described the phenomenon in terms of a buildup of female seed in the uterus that could cause inflammation and difficulty breathing. Ibn al-Jazzar’s Viaticum, one of the main sources for the transmission of Galen’s work in the twelfth century, explained that putrefying menses or female semen in the uterus produced a cold vapor that rose to the diaphragm. The Book on the Conditions of Women weighs in as well: “Sometimes the womb is suffocated, that is to say, when it is drawn upward, whence there occurs [stomach] upset and loss of appetite from an overwhelming frigidity of the heart. Sometimes they suffer syncope, and the pulse vanishes so that from the same cause it is barely perceptible . . . this [disease] happens to women because corrupt semen abounds in them excessively, and it is converted into a poisonous nature. . . . This happens to those women who do not use men, especially to widows who were accustomed to carnal commerce. It regularly comes upon virgins, too, when they reach the age of marriage and are not able to use men and when the semen abounds in them a lot, which Nature wishes to draw out by means of the male. From this superabundant and corrupt semen, a certain cold fumosity is released.”63 The writer or writers of this treatise want to have it both ways, a common medieval gesture at the reconciliation of divergent authorities. In this analysis, the womb is drawn upward (but only slightly), and at the same time, it releases a cold fumosity. The heart, as a result, is chilled and may be slowed to the point of syncope or a near-death state. Lovesickness could strike both men and women, while uterine suffocation, for obvious reasons,

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was at least mostly a female disease (Lear was probably misdiagnosing himself).64 In both cases, the retention of an image or of seed leads the heart or the womb to emit chilling fumes that threaten the life of the victim. Lovesickness and uterine suffocation are analogous maladies that set up the heart and the womb as parallel organs, organs that must continuously expel material in order to keep the body healthy.65 But how can circulation be restored? How can congress with the external world be reestablished? For men who suffered from seed retention, Galen and Avicenna recommended masturbation. Widows and virgins could be aided by midwives, who were instructed to help in the ejection of seed.66 A fantasy of sexual release provides the only sort of “resolution” we get in Dante’s petrose: If I could take hold of her beautiful locks that have been for me both whip and lash, I would take them from matins and with them I would pass vespers and compline; and I wouldn’t be piteous or courteous, but would be like a bear when it plays; and if Love tries to whip me, I will avenge myself thousandfold.67 Although practical, the sexual solution is reductive and only approaches one part of the problem. While the heart was inextricably linked to the sexual organs, it was equally bound up in countless other systems of circulation between the world and the individual. The systemic malfunction that Dante describes is a physical and spiritual, sexual and poetic blockage. By tracing the consequences and symptoms of this malady and its cure, we are given access to a vision of what normal, generative heart function was meant to be.

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Frozen Hearts We must turn to the Commedia to discover the cure for this temporary blockage in the cardiopoetic process. In Canto 1, we find the pilgrim alone in a dark wood, bearing the same sign of spiritual trouble as the poet of the petrose, “fear . . . in the lake of the heart.”68 But there is a crucial difference between this pilgrim and the poet of the petrose. The pilgrim is already beginning to recover: “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita / mi ritrovai per una selva oscura” (Midway in the journey of our life I found myself in a dark wood).69 In other words, he is already in the dark wood when he comes to himself, or realizes his condition. He does not know how he came to be in that place, “so full of sleep at the moment I left the true way.” The first thirty lines of the poem describe a very specific physical state that determines or is determined by a spiritual state. The indicator of physical and spiritual condition is the heart and its inhabiting spirits; when the pilgrim comes to himself, “the fear was somewhat quieted that had continued in the lake of my heart through the night I had passed so piteously.”70 As we have seen above, fear causes all spirit and heat to withdraw from the body and gather in the heart. This cessation of the heart’s outward propulsions within the body has deprived the pilgrim of proper motion and full awareness of his surroundings. It is, in fact, the same state of terror he describes in “Così nel mio parlar” in the rime petrose: “And the blood, that is dispersed through the veins / fleeing runs toward / the heart, that calls it; and so I become white.”71 Here in the first canto of the Inferno, the body is, in fact, described as lasso, or weary. It is bereft of strength.72 The pilgrim is awakening from the condition of the rime petrose. His ability to recognize where he is tells us that the heart is beginning to send forth blood and spirit to the brain, that slowly things are beginning to move again within the body. There are two levels of output from the heart. The first is a flow of spirit, heat, and blood within the

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body; the second is an overflow of spirit or other products of the heart that extends beyond the borders of the body. In the rime petrose and in the identical condition from which the pilgrim awakens at the beginning of the Inferno, both of these processes have been compromised. The individual body is isolated from the rest of the world in a kind of petrification that entails a lack of movement of the spirits of the heart and a resulting lack of heat. At this point, even the fundamental level of movement within the body is compromised. As blood and spirits collect in the heart, all connectivity ceases, both within the body and its members and with the external world. Of course, within the body, the movement generated by the output of the heart is not yet circulation. In order to have circulation in the medieval sense, that movement must transcend the limits of the body and enter into congress with other entities and spaces in the external world so that it may be sent back to the heart of the individual initiating body. At some level, circulation cannot happen without other people, or without a presence of some kind, human or divine. There must be a dialogic exchange in which something is given or pushed back. To return to the Aristotelian notion of human circular movement, as cited by Aquinas, the human echo of the divine circular motion of the heavens is formed by reciprocal pushes and pulls; but the movement of the heart, and the movement of any of the entities that flow into and out of it, are variable due to the complications of relationality. The divine spheres are the domain of the unmoved mover. God has no need for anything outside of himself. Human circulations of the heart and the spirits that flow from the heart are fragile and imperfect because of their reliance on reciprocity. But as Dante shows here, the potential for failure lies in the individual who may cease to be receptive to the outside world. Fortunately, in his forgiving world, help is always waiting. Already in the first line of the poem, the pilgrim has come out of self-enclosure adequately to look around himself. Dante is so precise in

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his treatment of physiology, and yet he describes the pilgrim’s vision in terms of both extramission and intromission. As noted in chapter two, intromission was the dominant theory of his time, and Dante was certainly aware of that. But here, and at other points in the Inferno, Dante describes vision in externalizing terms: “My soul that was still fleeing turned back to gaze upon the pass that never left anyone alive.”73 The pilgrim is able to look out from his body, something that requires the mobility of spirits to relay such perceptions. The spirit is still fleeing (presumably to the safe recesses of the sheltering heart), but it turns out briefly to look back as it flees. The spirit or spirits are figured here as fugitive entities, briefly breaking out into the world before returning to safety within. Of course, safety within is a paradox. The spirits take refuge in the heart as a measure of self-protection, but in so doing (and particularly if they do not return to motion promptly) they put the body in grave danger. In short, congress with the world is full of peril, but it is nonetheless that which sustains life. While interactions may be risky, isolation, in the long run, inevitably kills. Vision by extramission in the Commedia is often employed to show precisely this outward flow from the heart. In a tentative way, the pilgrim is becoming conversant with his world again. By looking, he discovers not only the grave state of danger in which he finds himself and his inability to proceed on his own, but also an offer of help: “Before my eyes one had offered himself to me [mi si fu offerto] who seemed faint through long silence. When I saw him in that vast desert, I cried to him, ‘Have pity on me whatever you are, shade of living man!’ ”74 These lines suggest that time has passed between Virgil’s offering of himself and the moment in which the pilgrim sees him. The pilgrim is undergoing a gradual process of reanimation and in that process is at long last able to see the help that had been offered, that was already there, and then to ask for it. Voice requires breath from the heart; like vision, it is another process that depends on the motion of the spirits and the resulting heat

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of the heart in order to reach out into the world. With his voice, his cry for help, the pilgrim is reconnecting into the world of human relations. Virgil then responds to that cry and continues the conversation that will lead the pilgrim to salvation. As Virgil tells it, Beatrice has explained the pilgrim’s danger to him in terms that conjure up the rime petrose: “My friend—and not the friend of Fortune—finds his way so impeded on the desert slope that he has turned back in fright.”75 Of course, the impediment is presented thematically in the Commedia; it is never embodied on the formal level. Even in the darkest moments of the Inferno, the poetry moves continually forward, through the motor of terza rima, the formal opposite of the stasis exemplified in the sestina. The threat of petrification reappears when Virgil and the pilgrim meet the Furies perched on a tower of the city of Dis.76 The city itself, with its impenetrable high stone walls, is a figure, it seems to me, for the sealed heart that is closed to the good that may come from outside itself. As Virgil and the pilgrim stand outside the gates, waiting for help, the Furies appear upon a tower, tearing at their breasts, beating themselves with their palms and shrieking. These traditional gestures of grief figure, visibly, the spiritual state that causes such hermetic closure. It is despair, the loss of any hope of help, that seals the heart. The Furies threaten the pilgrim: “Let Medusa come and we’ll turn him to stone.” Virgil reacts: “Turn your back, and keep your eyes shut; for should the Gorgon show herself and you see her, there would be no returning above.”77 Petrification is the one threat that could arrest the pilgrim’s journey. But salvation arrives in the form of overpowering motion; an angel arrives with a sound “as of a wind, violent from conflicting heats, which strikes the forest and with unchecked course shatters the branches, beats them down and sweeps them away.”78 It is as if the angel is a divine breath that forcefully blows life and will through the stagnant space of hell and breaks through the walls sealing that noxious body. He taps

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on the gate with a little wand and it opens easily, as if it had no ritegno, or restraint.79 Nonetheless, the problem of the petrose returns to haunt the pilgrim insistently as he journeys through Cocytus. The resurgence of those rime is signaled immediately as he descends into the ninth circle: “If I had harsh and grating rhymes, as would befit the dismal hole on which all the other rocks converge and weigh, I would press out more fully the juice of my conception; but since I do not have them, it is not without fear that I bring myself to speak.”80 This passage recalls the lines “So in my speech I wish to be harsh / just as this beautiful stone is in her actions.”81 And it is, in fact, in the realms of Antenora and Ptolomea that we witness the most profound revelation of the petrified condition that all the damned souls share with the poet of the petrose. The surroundings reflect the bodies of the sinners; the weight of the world presses upon the sad hole that is both the cavity of hell within the earth and the cavity of the heart isolated by despair. As the poet tells us that he would press the juice from his concept more fully if only he had rhymes to fit that claustrophobic space, we hear the voice of the saved poet, unburdened by this pressure and therefore unable to recreate fully what the pilgrim is experiencing. Couched in the safety of a form that is dynamically leading us to better places, the wintry landscape returns: “A lake which through frost had the semblance of glass and not of water. Never did the Danube in Austria, nor the far-off Don under its cold sky, make in winter so thick a veil for their current as there was here.”82 The frozen bodies of water illustrate the threat that the pilgrim must eventually overcome. This is a dangerous space for the pilgrim, as he reveals in his equivocal promise to one of the sinners to retell what he hears “if that with which I speak does not dry up.”83 The tears of the traitors freeze within their eyes, which is analogous to a drying of the material of speech. Both speech and tears issue from the heart, and the heart in this realm is frozen solid.

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It is not until we come upon Count Ugolino, gnawing on the skull of Cardinal Ruggieri, that the true nature of this physiospiritual malfunction is revealed in its most extreme form: “You will have me renew desperate grief, which even to think of presses upon my heart before I speak of it. But if my words are to be seed that may bear fruit of infamy to the traitor whom I gnaw, you shall see me speak and weep together.”84 The pain Ugolino feels in his heart is partly that of the cold, which was thought to exert pressure. Like the rocks that press upon the cavity of hell, the cold presses upon the heart. Ugolino alludes to the possible fertility of speech production—“if my words are to be seed”—but his own story reveals that his frozen heart is incapable of seeding anything but death. When he hears the tower door being nailed shut, as he retells it, “I did not weep, so was I turned to stone within me. They wept, and my poor little Anselm said, ‘You look so, father, what ails you?’ I shed no tear for that, nor did I answer all that day.”85 Ugolino’s petrification is a revelation of the real threat of despair. As the door is nailed shut, he turns to stone within and his heart halts the processes of extramission. No speech, no tears come forth from his body, indicating that all connection with the external world has been lost. His actions are instead turned against himself—“I bit both my hands for grief ”—as he is, from the moment of his petrification, utterly alone. He is therefore unable to receive the offers of salvation that come to him: “ ‘Father, it will be far less painful to us if you eat of us; you did clothe us with this wretched flesh, and do you strip us of it!’ ” These words contain within them all the promise of transcendence, of a spiritual release from the enclosing body, figured on multiple layers as the tower, the earth (“ah, hard earth, why did you not open”), hell itself, and Ugolino’s own hardened heart.86 Ugolino’s ironic language reinforces his identity with the pilgrim: “You are cruel indeed if you do not grieve already, to think what my heart announced to me; and if you weep not, at what do you ever

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weep?”87 The line “ ’l mio cor s’annunziava” (my heart announced to me) must be read as a parodic reference to the Annunciation.88 The Virgin can be considered emblematic of perfect receptivity to the divine. She is entirely, humbly, a vessel for the incarnation of the deity. Ugolino’s heart is figured as the infernal counterpart to Mary’s womb, announcing a sentence of death to itself: “s’annunziava.” As unreceptive as a stone to the otherness of divinity, Ugolino is unable to comprehend or to accept the possibility of salvation. In life, he was closed within himself; his punishment, enclosing him in a lake of ice, reveals that state, literally making him unavailable to the outside. Remarking on the pilgrim’s lack of tears, he calls attention to the fact that both he and his interlocutor show all the signs of a deadly imprisonment. Tears of all kinds have a distinctly gendered quality. While most of the products that come forth from the heart are understood to be masculine in nature, and even outflow in general is read as masculine in the Aristotelian Middle Ages, tears were associated with the feminine: “Because a woman is of greater piety than a man, she more quickly gives forth tears.” This was a summary of popular opinion on the subject as it appeared in Bartholomew the Englishman’s thirteenth-century encyclopedia, On the Properties of Things.89 And yet the poets flaunt their tears. Mingled with sighs, tears form part of the matter of poetry. The tear that issues from a heart full of the presence of the beloved bears traces of her, like the little spirit of tears emerging from the wound in the heart that Cavalcanti describes in his “Era in penser d’amor.”90 The pilgrim is bereft of tears and will remain so until the next stage in his healing, in Purgatory. Soon after Ugolino, we encounter Fra Alberigo, who treacherously had his family murdered. Fra Alberigo’s reference to his heart is another perverse reference to the Virgin’s womb: “Lift from my face the hard veils, so that, before the weeping freezes again, I may vent a little the misery that impregnates my heart [’l cor m’impregna].”91 Tears enact

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the punishment here; they move from the heart but freeze as soon as they reach the eyes, locking the sinner into a crystal shell of ice from which no release is possible. Again, as in Ugolino’s case, the language of reproduction is laden with irony. Alberigo had his relatives killed at the signal “vengan le frutta” (bring out the fruit); the fruits of Alberigo’s actions are death. The “impregnation” of the heart here, just like the “annunciation” in Ugolino’s case, is a reflexive verb, a reflexive action, and another perverse reference to the Virgin’s womb. In the ice of Cocytus, we find the metaphors of the Incarnation employed to expose the frozen, sterile womb of the self-enclosed heart. Both Ugolino and Fra Alberigo are isolated individuals, divorced from the generative world of human relations. They figure the poetic, physiological, and spiritual problem that the pilgrim’s trip through Purgatory and Paradise must undo. In the Inferno we thus find a revelation of the spiritual state of the petrose. Once the pilgrim recognizes these dangers, he is able to embark upon his apprenticeship in the process of regaining health and entering into circulation with the world. It is important to note that the solution to the problem of cold is not the greatest amount of heat. In Canto 12 of the Inferno, the pilgrim comes across the Phlegethon, a river of boiling blood, where the violent against others must cook their rage-filled bodies. Extreme heat reveals a lesser sin than the sins of cold, but it is still dangerous. The virtue opposed to cold is rather perfected, temperate heat. As William of Auvergne puts it in his treatise The Soul: “The heat that proceeds from the soul is not of the same species as the heat of visible fire that is found among us, but is rather far more noble, gentle, and preserving of the subject in which it is.”92 At the opposite pole from disordered cold in Dante’s cosmos, we find such a noble, gentle, and indeed nutritive heat. Noble heat is refined, just as the noble heart that the poets of the Dolce stil novo described is refined. Noble heat allows the heart to be vulnerable to love, to divine beauty, and it furthermore allows the heart to produce a response to the

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inspiration received within. Excessive heat is uniquely outward motion, a boiling up and out that does not allow for entrance into its overly volatile core. For Dante, inspiration must come from outside; poetry cannot be a mere bursting forth of the individual products of a single heart. In this way, properly inspired poetry resembles the generation of spirit. Spirit is not an emission of the heart alone, but is a product of refined blood within the heart, mixed with external air. Mobility, voice, and poetry are thus all products of the heart’s ability to interact with the external world. Melting Hearts The dominance of frozen hearts and sterile wombs gives way to a series of warming, melting moments and increasingly frequent allusions to birth as Mary comes to dominate the poem, in Purgatorio and particularly in Paradiso. We may, in fact, read the Commedia as a narrative of the physiospiritual training of the pilgrim’s heart in a Marian mode. The heart figures prominently at the beginning and at the end of the Commedia, first described as filled with fear and finally, at the end of the journey, filled with sweetness and ready to bring forth the poem itself.93 While this transformation of the heart may be traced throughout the poem, we’ll pause here to identify only a few of the most crucial moments in the process of becoming prolific. In Canto 30 of Purgatorio, we witness the cure for the ailment of the petrose: the ice that seals the pilgrim’s heart melts away, opening a path for a subsequent inspiration: “The ice that was bound tight around my heart [ristretto] became breath and water, and with anguish poured from my breast through my mouth and eyes.”94 In a reversal of the immutable fi xation of the poet of the petrose and the sinners in Cocytus, the pilgrim is unburdened as his spiriti are again set in motion. As the body is opened adequately to exude words and tears, it nears a state of

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receptivity that will allow for the possibility of a divinely inspired, even prophetic, poetry. The beginning of Paradiso is a prayer for such an encounter expressed in the terms of ancient poetry, to Apollo: “Enter into my breast and breathe there as when you drew Marsyas from the sheath [vagina] of his limbs.”95 In his Metamorphoses, Ovid tells of a musical competition between the satyr Marsyas and Apollo. Of course it ended badly for Marsyas, as it usually did for the humans who dared to challenge the gods, and he was flayed alive. Dante is asking here, in these striking terms, for inspiration, an intrusion into his heart, and the power to give birth, in a scenario where the entire body becomes a womb. Of course, this desire does not come without a fear of overreaching the creative powers of the human, as the example betrays. It reiterates, however, the two drives that together constitute “imperfect” human heart-centered circulation but at the same time constitute “perfect” human art: an inspiring in and a pulling out. Only God has no need for inspiration to create, as God is the only being that is self-contained. Dante goes to some lengths to emphasize the birthed nature of human creation; a flaying is usually imagined as pulling skin off the body, but Dante describes it here as pulling Marsyas out from his body, figured as a womb. Marsyas’ beautiful music that so angered Apollo is envisioned as being produced in a kind of ecstasy, a reaching through and beyond the limits of the human body by the means of art.96 Dante is tapping into a devotional tradition of envisioning conversion and spiritual experience as a birthing. Francis of Assisi writes: “We are [Christ’s] mother, when we carry him in our heart and body through pure love and sincere conscience and we give birth to him through a holy process, which must shine as an example to others.”97 Iacopone da Todi (1236–1306), a Franciscan friar from Umbria, employs very similar central terms to describe mystical union with Christ. In the poem “Omo chi vòl parlare,” Charity joins Christ to Iacopone in bed:

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Charity joins it [reaches the bed] and conjoins me with God; it joins my baseness with the divine goodness. Here a love is born, that has impregnated the heart, full of desire, of inflamed mystery. Full, it liquefies itself, languishing, it gives birth; and gives birth to rapture, and is caught up into the third heaven.98 While Iacopone’s writing lacks the physiological specificity that forms traceable systems in Dante, the sense of a Marsyas-like birthing of poetic language or rapture from the heart comes forth in this ecstatic verse. The heart is the site of impregnation, liquefaction, and plenitude, as it becomes the womb from which birth takes place. As the example of Marsyas reveals, the self-overreaching, ecstatic, and prolific leap from within the body to beyond the borders of the individual is never achieved without peril. This kind of birth from the heart entails the possibility that the entire self will be pulled forth, that there will be nothing left of the poet save an empty skin. In Iacopone’s poem, the heart not only gives birth to rapture but is subsequently caught up itself into the third heaven.99 In fact, before the pilgrim is ready to receive the final vision in his journey, the inspiration that will impregnate his heart with the poem itself, he must be prepared to sustain that vision without losing himself. While it was acceptable for a mystic to lose him- or herself utterly (and in fact near-death states were often taken as signs of divine possession), a poet was required to walk the narrow line between the ecstasy of inspiration and the rigors of form. In Bernard’s prayer to the Virgin,

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asking for the gift of this vision, he carefully stipulates that the pilgrim’s sentiments must be protected: “Further I pray thee, Queen, who canst do whatsoever thou wilt, that thou preserve sound for him his affections, after so great a vision. Let thy protection vanquish human impulses [i movimenti umani].”100 The inspiration that engenders the Commedia does not occur until after this prayer, in the final canto of the Commedia. And then it is described in terms of its aftereffects above all: “Yet does the sweetness that was born of it still drop within my heart” (ancor mi distilla / nel core il dolce che nacque da essa). We have already looked briefly at these lines in chapter two. But it is necessary to return to them here, in light of the issues of heat and outward flow that we have examined in this chapter. These verses recall and repair the fear in the lake of the heart of Inferno I.101 The heart is softened and unsealed as it warms to resemble the heat of the Virgin’s womb: “In thy womb was rekindled the love by whose warmth this flower has germinated in eternal peace.”102 The epic that is germinated at the culmination of this physiospiritual healing is thus figured as the product of a sacred source and a human matrix. It is, in Dante’s words, a sacred poem (sacro poema) in which “both heaven and earth have had a hand.”103 The language of loss to describe the fleeting nature of the vision is coupled with the certainty of something infused within the pilgrim’s heart. And it is important to stress that some of this language of loss echoes the melting moment in the pilgrim’s heart in Purgatorio 30. In short, the metaphors of snow melt put this loss in a different light—they indicate that the pilgrim’s heart has come to resemble the Virgin’s womb in its proper openness and warmth. While he cannot entirely possess the experience, he can feel it within himself. What is infused within his heart is not entirely his, just as Mary’s womb held something that was not entirely hers, something that she could not entirely contain. The sweetness born within the poet’s warmed heart has something in common with the flower germinated in the heat of Mary’s womb. In order for

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Dante to claim that his is a sacred poem in which both earth and heaven had a hand, he stages a divine conception for his poem. This means that the poet’s heart must be “feminized,” trained in proper passivity and receptivity—the traditionally female role in conception. But beyond this, the traditional polarities of complexion are altered. Fertile heat is associated with this perfected femininity while cold, despair, and the resulting infertility are linked to sins of the male, of the pilgrim and of those hardened sinners that reveal the pilgrim’s own condition in the frozen depths of the Inferno. The cosmos that is the Commedia thus borrows from the terms and concepts of natural philosophy and medicine, but reorients those concepts to visualize the conception of a new poetry, generated in the womb of the poet’s double-gendered heart. The Transfusive Heart Catherine of Siena’s letters, several of which we have already had occasion to examine in previous chapters, were often intended for a male audience. Nonetheless, she fashions herself as an example, focusing on the projective powers of her own heart to inspire a pope in need of guidance, to embolden her confessor, and to influence any man with the desire to fight for the church. By emphasizing her heart as the hottest (and thus most “masculine”) part of her female body, Catherine writes about passing on her strength and giving new life to the church. In one of Catherine’s letters to Pope Urban VI, written a few days before she died, she tells the story of a conversation she had with God: “ ‘O eternal God, receive the sacrifice of my life into the mystical body of the holy church. I do not have anything to give except that which you have given to me. Take out my heart, then, and press it on the face of this spouse.’ And so eternal God, turning the eye of his mercifulness, took out my heart and pressed it in the holy church. And he took it to himself with such force that, if he hadn’t immediately (not wishing that the vessel of

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my body be broken) encircled it with his strength, my life would have been lost.”104 This is one of the rare letters in which Catherine shares a personal experience of an encounter with Christ (another is the letter that describes Niccolò di Toldo’s execution). Most of Catherine’s writings offer spiritual advice to others or describe the general principles of universal salvation. We might, therefore, have reason to suspect that this turn toward the personal has a specific exhortative purpose. This letter was written during the Great Schism, as Catherine’s health was failing. She needed to inspire the pope to act with strength for the good of the united church and hoped to do so by describing her own sacrifice. Catherine concludes the letter with a summary that reveals her purposes in sharing her vision with the pope: “Thanks be to the highest eternal God, who has placed us on the battlefield, like knights, to fight for his spouse.”105 Catherine claims that she and the pope have both been chosen by God—“he has placed us” to fight on God’s behalf— encouraging the pope by suggesting that the two of them share an active role in saving the passive church, described as a bride. Catherine leads the fight, exhorting the pope to follow her in the rescue of their suffering bride. In another letter to Urban VI, she describes the church’s condition as follows: “The sweet spouse that is his and yours, that for so long has been all pale . . . because of those who fed and feed at her breast, that for their defects have made her pale and infirm, having sucked the blood from her with their own self-love . . .”106 The church is depicted as pale from the loss of blood, victim to corrupt priests who have sucked her dry of life and spirit while nursing at her breast. The church suffers from a lack of vigor and from internal cold. Catherine’s heart, squeezed by Christ’s hand onto the church, could infuse that pallid creature with hot, life-giving blood. The powers required to aid the church, heat and vitality, were virtues traditionally associated with the male. Here Catherine is depicting herself as a valiant savior, the bold groom that she wishes the pope could be, fearless in aiding a defenseless church.

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In other letters, Catherine refers to Christ as the “true sower,” pouring blood from his heart onto the garden of the soul. The creative force within the universe is reflected in the creative force within the body, the heart. In her gift to the church, Catherine emulates Christ’s attributes.107 Just as Christ’s blood brings new life to the soul, seeding the garden, Catherine’s blood, also issuing directly from the heart, offers new life to a wasting institution. In the context of the mystical vision, the heart itself reaches out through the body. As in Dante’s prayer to Apollo, evoking Marsyas, Catherine prays that her heart be pulled out from her, that her entire body become a womb. She delivers that which God gave her in the first place, her soul. God breathed her soul into her heart; she asks that it be pulled back out and pushed into the body of the church. In this birth-act, Catherine is left hollow.108 Christ must, in fact, encircle her body with his strength, so that vessel is not broken. Raymond of Capua, Catherine’s confessor, tells this story a bit differently in his biography: “Later, on one occasion, Catherine prayed fervently, like the Prophet, ‘Create a pure heart in me, God, and renew a virtuous spirit in my flesh.’ The Lord came to her in a vision and he opened her left side . . . and removed her heart, so that she remained without a heart inside. . . . Another day . . . she was surrounded by a light from the sky, and in the light appeared the Lord, holding in his sacred hands a human heart, red and shining. . . . The Lord opened her left side again. He put his own heart, which he held in his hands, inside her, saying, ‘Here, dearest daughter, since I took away your heart before, now I bequeath to you my heart, so that you may live forever.’ ”109 Catherine’s story tells of nourishing the church, of Christ’s need for her life-giving blood to sustain that institution. Raymond’s story, in contrast, focuses on Catherine asking for and receiving Christ’s heart. This conspicuous change in the episode can be attributed to Raymond’s desire to make Catherine’s excessively active life more acceptable to church authorities in order to speed her along to sainthood. In Raymond’s version of this

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episode, Catherine becomes a martyr, giving up her heart. She is singled out by Christ to receive his heart as a mark of her sanctity. She is then miraculously returned to life but is no longer quite herself; her female body has become a container for Christ’s will. Raymond locates this temporary death and heart transplant not in the last days of Catherine’s life, but immediately prior to Catherine’s apostolic travels, justifying this controversial activity by suggesting that all of Catherine’s subsequent actions were, in fact, God’s actions on earth.110 According to Raymond’s account, Christ informed the virgin during her temporary death that “you will no longer live the life you have lived thus far. . . . You will have to leave your city. . . . I will always be with you. . . . I will put wisdom upon your mouth. . . . I will bring you before popes, rectors of churches, and the Christian people, so that . . . by means of the weak, I will humble the pride of the strong.”111 Raymond emphasizes that Catherine is returned to life after her death only in service of God’s need for an agent on earth and that Catherine is vitally maintained by supernatural means. For Raymond, Catherine’s weak female body miraculously contains and carries out the divine will. Catherine’s own narration, by contrast, depicts a divine being in need of more than the mere shell of her body. Catherine effectively commands an obedient deity to remove her heart, not for the purposes of her own individual purity (which is of secondary importance), but in order to nourish the suffering church. She offers a transfusion of her own heat and strength. For Catherine, as for Dante, the gendered notion of vital heat and its association with the capacity for outward propulsions does not enforce a limiting binary. This idea of gender relies on gradation or continuum, allowing for a significant amount of play in the temperatures and extrusive or projective power associated with the sexes. The concept of the heat of the heart allowed these writers to reevaluate the key characteristic of masculinity as a quality that was derived from virtue, from the reception

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of divine gifts within the body, and from the desire to pull something forth in response to that gift—to give back. Humans and Earthworms “First (Arist otle de Respiratione, & lib. 2, 3. of the parts of creatures & elsewhere) seeing death is a corruption which befalls by reason of the defect of heat, and all things which are hot being alive, are cold when they die, there must needs be a place and beginning of heat (as it were a Fire and dwelling house), by which the nursery of Nature, and the first beginnings of inbred fire may be contain’d and preserv’d; from whence heat and life may flow, as from their beginnings, into all parts; whither the aliment of it should come, and on which all nutrition and vegetation should depend. And that this place is the heart, from whence is the beginning of life, I would have no body to doubt.”112 Harvey begins the chapter of his treatise entitled “The Circulation of the blood is confirm’d by likely reasons” with a safe statement. No one would deny that the necessity for life is heat, and that this heat within the body must come from a single source, the heart. This statement corresponds to ancient teachings and to the consensus of physicians and philosophers across the centuries from Aristotle to Harvey’s contemporaries. Heat, for Harvey, becomes the privilege of the human and is not necessarily greater in the male. The human heat of the heart is contrasted principally with lower animals. But the heart’s generative function, its supposed production of semen, according to Aristotelian notions, is absent in Harvey’s analysis. One important component in the gendering of heart is gone. It is Descartes who finally demystifies the virile power of the heat of the heart: he states that the heat itself is generated not by spirits, entities that Harvey preserved in his vision of the heart, but by a simple exothermic reaction of particles. In other words, vital heat is not the spark of life. It is decay.

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But for Harvey, how is it that this heat, whatever its nature, is distributed? “There is therefore a motion requir’d to the blood, and such a one as that it may return again to the heart; for being sent far away into the outward parts of the body (as Aristotle 2, de partibus Animalium) from its own fountain, it would congeal and be immovable. (For we do see, that by motion, heat and spirit is ingender’d and preserv’d in all things, and by want of it vanishes.) Seeing therefore, that the blood staying in the outward parts is congealed by the cold of the extremities and of the ambient air, and is destitute of spirits, as it is in dead things, it was needful it should resume and redintegrate, by its return again, as well heats as spirit, and indeed its own preservation, from its own fountain and beginning.”113 Harvey’s revision of medieval accounts is twofold. First, he designates a return to the heart. Second, he removes the power of the soul from the life of the body. For Harvey, motion is derived from the heart alone; there is no need for the action of the soul here. Even spirits, the material extension of the soul in the Middle Ages, are decidedly mortal (or at least easily lost) in Harvey’s account. The soul, its connection to the divine and to the divine movement of the spheres, is eliminated from the action of the motion of the heart and blood. By consequence, motion within the body is entirely self-reliant. The heart has no need to interact with the outside world in order to stay in motion. Harvey notes that not all animals have a heart. These are the coldest and simplest animals, such as grubs and earthworms, “very many things which are ingender’d of putrefaction and keep not a species.”114 In slightly higher animals, still colder than average, such as snails and shrimps, there is a part that pulsates, but slowly and inconstantly. This pulsation is perceptible only in the warmer season of the year. The pulsations can stop as a consequence of the cold “as it is meetest for them, being of a doubtful nature, so that sometimes they seem to live, sometimes to die, and sometimes to live the life of an animal, sometimes

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the life of a Plant.”115 The larger and warmer animals, with hotter and more spirituous blood, require a larger and stronger heart while “more perfect creatures need more perfect aliment and a more abundant native heat, that the nutriment of them may be concocted and acquire a further perfection, it was fit that these creatures should have lungs and another ventricle, which should drive the nutriment through them.”116 This gradation of hearts reveals Harvey’s belief that the more developed the heart, the more autonomy an animal acquires over its environment and its variations in temperature. Earthworms are all one with their environment, taking all into themselves and giving forth all that they have gathered in: they “have no heart, as needing no impulsor to drive the nutriment into the extremities: For they have a body connate and of one piece, and indistinct without members; so that by the contraction and returning of their whole bodie, they take in, expel, move and remove the nourishment.”117 The earthworm corresponds in many ways to Harvey’s critique of medieval ideas of the heart. The medieval heart is entirely too connate with the environment; it assumes substances and entities arriving from outside and expels them into the external world. For Harvey, it is the solidity of the boundary between the body and the environment that makes us human. Greater autonomy signifies a higher degree of perfection on the scale of being. This is directly opposed to the medieval view, in which a greater degree of autonomy from the environment suggests a greater degree of isolation and even potential petrification. Only a stone is perfectly autonomous in the terrestrial sphere. And only God himself has the capacity to be an unmoved mover. Humanity entails vulnerability and reliance on external forces in order to maintain mobility and vital heat. In the medieval world, human perfection was manifested by the ability to transcend the borders of the body, to project the self beyond the limits of an individual body, or to be pulled out of that body. The human individual took in inspiration and

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threw back poetry, prophecy, the seeds of new life. All of this changes when Harvey puts God inside the body, in the form of the heart. The heart is, in his words, the “household divinity.” If God is within, offering movement, perfection, and even preservation from corruption, what more do we need?

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CH APTER fou r

The Animate Heart

Harvey Is Unsettled When so many aspects of the heart are understood to be invisible, from the spirits that inhabit it to the pores that connect the sanguinary and spiritual systems, what can actually be seen when a person looks directly at the heart? As the preceding chapters have shown, the medieval heart can have an immediate impact on another body while it is safely lodged within its own porous body. The relation, usually constituted by the traffic of spirits, is dynamic, reciprocal, and what I have called generational. Spirits, heat, and seminal entities were imagined as extending the heart’s direct and even “physical” presence far beyond the porous boundaries of the individual. But what happens when one comes into contact not with the products brought forth from the heart but with the heart itself? This chapter will examine the experience of looking upon an extracted or otherwise exposed heart. In the medieval world, an exposed heart was patently de-animate or in the process of de-animation. It was either deprived of or soon to be deprived of the soul that gave it life and enabled its reciprocal, intercorporeal function. According to the principles of Aristotelian natural philosophy, the heart was the primum vivens, ultimum moriens, or the first to live, last

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to die. Life was entirely dependent on the soul’s vivifying action in the heart. As the heart died, so did the individual. The soul fled from the heart (often out of the mouth, if the heart was not wounded) and into the next world. Medieval interactions with a dead or dying heart, exposed to view, hung on this precarious temporality. The living either imagined a privileged moment of continued access to the lingering soul in the process of departing the body, or the heart was understood to have been abandoned by life, an empty bit of flesh rather than a transformational space. The fall from the powers of a living heart to the impotence of a dead heart is brief and dramatic indeed. Harvey’s work with animal vivisections stretches this liminal space, prolonging the period of dying, even reanimating the heart. What can bring the heart back to life? What does life consist of, if the heart can come back? These new questions produced by Harvey’s vivisections work from within our own thought style; they would have been irrelevant in the medieval world. Through vivisection and reanimation, Harvey aims at a kind of control over the processes of life; but he is, at least at first, not immune to the same sort of awe that the medieval world felt in the presence of the exposed heart.1 There is, of course, a crucial distinction to be made here; Harvey is looking at animal hearts in this case, and he therefore does not feel either desire to witness the lingering presence of a particular soul or horror at the sight of a human heart deprived of the soul. But he is seeking to observe animation and de-animation in the secular, physiological sense, to distinguish the motions that confer life upon the organism. He hopes to discover a simpler explanation for the mysterious, life-giving movements of the heart than those that the textual tradition has offered thus far. Why should the heart do two things at once? How can it expel vapors as it brings in blood? How can it move air as it moves blood? Why would one organ be dedicated to two separate systems? His questions, then, are posed according to a principle: simplicity. But if the questions derive from analysis of the systems and structures in texts,

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Harvey proposes to find the answer elsewhere, through direct observation of the thing itself. He reasons that if texts and authorities are offering unnecessarily complicated systems, the body, when stripped of these mystifying contexts, should reveal a “natural” simplicity to the observer. But Harvey’s experience does not provide the immediate reduction in terms he had hoped for. The heart, as exposed in vivisection, moves in a way that is anything but simple. Harvey confesses that “when I first applied my mind to observation from the many dissections of Living Creatures as they came to hand, that by that means I might find out the use of the motion of the Heart and things conducible in Creatures; I straightwayes found it a thing hard to be attained, and full of difficulty, so with Fracastorius I did almost believe, that the motion of the Heart was known to God alone.”2 He goes on to say that “I was much troubled in mind, nor did I know what to resolve upon my self, or what belief to give to others.”3 What are we to make of the anatomist’s unsettled mind? Harvey wishes us to understand, of course, that what he is doing is very difficult and utterly new. Joining his voice with the chorus of seventeenth-century praise of observation and defiance of authority, he presents himself as facing a daunting challenge. His narrative will be about obstacles overcome, motions distinguished, and functions determined. He writes that he has, finally, extricated himself and escaped from the “labyrinth” of his former confusion.4 But I have no intention to rehearse the old myths of “revolution” in method here, nor even to critique those myths. I wish to delve, rather, into the brief moment when the anatomist is unsettled by the discovery that if the texts about the heart are overcomplicated, the heart itself is even more disorienting. Life, as it turns out, is never easy to observe. We are privy only to a momentary confession on the part of our anatomist, a confession that perhaps owes much to the rhetorical commonplaces of the difficulty of this new observation, this new method. But nonetheless, the moment that Harvey presents as a temporary setback,

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a labyrinth from which the anatomist must extricate himself, is critical to our ability to approach a time when the body was lived differently. So while it would be easy to conclude that Harvey is simply troubled by his inability to parse and to immediately comprehend what he sees (and this is indeed the case), we might find greater reward in probing what is so difficult about observation of the heart, so difficult that it leads one to imagine that there is something divine about its mysteries and its modes of appearance. If one imagines that the heart is the space in which we interinhabit one another, and in which life is located, what can it mean to look into that space? What can be seen and what happens to the person who dares to attempt to observe or understand such a thing? As Harvey proposes to extricate his reader from the mess, I propose a trip back into the labyrinth. In the same way that seventeenth-century rhetoric is continually vaunting discovery, it simultaneously covers over undesired material. To get back behind Harvey’s challenging, but eventually comprehensible and divisible heart, and to see what a medieval person saw when she looked directly at the heart, we must turn to medieval anatomies but also, and above all, to literary and religious analyses of that encounter. Katharine Park’s book Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation and the Origins of Human Dissection explores the medieval and Renaissance fascination with seeing inside female bodies. The womb, she notes, is “a—arguably the—privileged object of dissection in medical images and texts.”5 Park attributes this fascination in part to concerns about blood relationships and paternity. A popular story in the Middle Ages told of the emperor Nero’s obsession with seeing the place where he was created. As told in Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, a midthirteenth-century collection of saints’ lives, Nero was “obsessed by an evil madness [and] ordered his mother killed and cut open so that he could see how it had been for him in her womb.”6 Nero’s dissection of his mother is often, in fact, paired with a tale in which he orders his court

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philosophers to make him pregnant, as he doubts that his wife would bear him a legitimate child. (They make a frog grow in his belly.)7 In the case of his mother, Agrippina, Nero desires to “see the place where he had been,”8 or to personally view the spatial locus of his own generation. Medieval people who had the very rare opportunity to view a dissected uterus of an unknown woman might have had a similar sense of looking at their origin, albeit in a generic sense. I will suggest, in the pages that follow, that while the uterus was an object of fascination and particular study in dissection texts, the heart was the object of fascination for those outside the medical community. The seed or seeds to form an embryo were (at least according to many) derived from the heart. Individual human life only really began with the process of ensoulment, when God infused a soul into the heart of that embryo. The heart was the first organ to form, the place where the soul took up residence, and the place to be vacated upon the death of the individual. If the uterus is the container for the embryo, the heart is the container for that which makes the embryo human, for that unique soul that alone can render the embryo a particular, identifi able individual. Seeing a heart, then, can be the closest thing to seeing the soul. At the same time, a de-animate heart becomes the most horrific spectacle of the bare and, indeed, anonymous materiality of flesh. Mondino de’ Liuzzi’s dissection manual can provide us with a partial sense of what it might feel like to look at a heart in medieval Italy. But, like Harvey, he too hopes to lead his reader or his student through the unsettling vision of the heart to a truth (a truth that will prove too complicated for Harvey’s tastes). For this reason, after discussing Mondino, this chapter turns to an examination of Giovanni Boccaccio’s stories of disembodied and eaten hearts, and from there to accounts of the dissections of holy hearts. As container of the soul, the dead or dying heart could retain traces of a particular presence or reveal the horror of the loss of that presence. Boccaccio’s tales dilate the temporal space

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in which the dead or dying heart is suspended, allowing the trauma of the sight of the heart to come to fore, to make itself felt in all of those contours that have been lost to us. In the medieval cult of saints, holy bodies and particularly holy hearts were believed to have a special capacity to retain traces of the divine presence, traces that could be seen with the human eye and that could perpetually bestow grace upon the community. From the vantage point of these extended medieval interactions with dead or dying hearts, it becomes possible to understand Harvey’s strategies differently. His “method,” whether it is revolutionary or not, cannot ultimately be understood in full without a sense of what his “extrication” really means or, in other words, without a vision of the labyrinthine entanglement of heart, texts and soul from which he seeks to emerge. Mondino Dissect s the Heart Along with the myth that medieval people thought the world was flat, the myth that medieval Europeans did not dissect cadavers due to religious concerns is false. Dissection was established in western Europe in the late thirteenth century, but it remained relatively infrequent.9 Most dissection took place in Italy, as the universities of Bologna, Florence, and Padua systematized anatomy based on dissection as part of the curriculum. Furthermore, as historians of medicine have noted, dissection was perceived to have little, if anything, to add to knowledge about the body. Such knowledge was readily available in authoritative texts.10 Dissection was not a method of finding new information, but rather for confirming established truths. As Ludwik Fleck puts it: “In the history of scientific knowledge, no formal relation of logic exists between conceptions and evidence. Evidence conforms to conceptions just as often as conceptions conform to evidence.”11 In fact, in the medieval world, the body worked as a three-dimensional illustration of the text.

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Mondino de’ Liuzzi’s Anothomia of 1316 provides a unique point of entry into the space between body and text that fourteenth-century scholars inhabited. The myth that there was no dissection in medieval Europe is due in part to the extreme reliance of medieval texts on ancient authority. In other words, scholars wondered how people could have been actually looking at bodies and yet still believe everything they read in Aristotle. Mondino’s text offers insight into the delicate and precarious balancing act that began with Avicenna’s work and continued through the Middle Ages. The text’s very existence shows that Mondino felt the need to write a new work of anatomy; the ancient texts are thus not entirely adequate to the needs of his students. Furthermore, the Anothomia leaves no doubt that Mondino is really looking, and looking carefully, at cadavers: “Then, having lain the cadaver, or the man dead from decapitation or hanging, flat on his back, the first thing we must do is take stock of the whole, and then of the parts. Since everything we know begins for us with the things that are the most well-known, the things that are the most confusing are the ones already known, and the whole is more confusing than the parts, we must begin by getting to know the whole.”12 Despite the fact that Mondino begins his treatise with a statement that he is offering instruction in the “manual method,” he follows with several paragraphs that address the whole of creation as he defines man’s position in respect to animals and angels. Man’s physical form determines his perfection and his place in the great chain of being. Once again, context is essential. The entire body is located, in this introduction, in terms of its relations to the universe, just as each part of the body must be located in terms of its relation to the whole. This attention to relations rather than the specificity of parts is particularly notable as Mondino approaches the heart: “[After having] removed the membranes, the lung will appear, in the middle of which is the heart so that it may be cooled by the air. . . . The position and localization of the heart are evident, as it is in the middle between the anterior

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region and posterior region, the right and the left, if you consider that the top is inclined toward the left, while the base [is inclined] toward the right, so that it may exhale the heat and spirit toward the right side that must be hotter than the left. It is also in the middle between the upper and lower regions [of the body], excluding the extremities, and was placed in this way because it is the origin and first root of all the organs. Therefore, its relations will be clear.”13 Mondino continuously seeks to ascribe meaning to the organs before him, to explain why they are formed as they are, and, above all, to analyze the relationships between them. It is part of his cultural constitution, this impulse to explain, to look for connections between the parts, to attempt to envision the whole organism. This is particularly important in the approach to the heart, as Mondino guides his students to a view of the source of animation in a now de-animate body. The position of the parts, as Mondino describes them, is often accompanied by a teleological explanation: “so that it may. . . .” As for the philosophical centrality of the heart, a topos that I discussed in chapter 1, Mondino is at pains to make philosophical centrality into visible physical centrality. With some manipulation, it is possible. The heart can be in the middle between left and right if we imagine it tipped in order to blow spirit towards the right. The heart can be in the middle vertically if we exclude the extremities. Even temporality is made visible in the immediate presence of the dissected corpse; the heart’s qualities of “origin” and “first root” can be noted in its placement and serve to render its relations with the other organs clear. Not only does Mondino see the intangible quality of primacy traced in the heart’s tangible location and connectedness, he also sees several anatomical structures that no dissection today would ever show. One is the middle ventricle of the heart: “And these [valves] are wondrous works of nature [mirabilia opera naturae], just as the construction of the middle ventricle is wondrous [mirabile]; in fact, this ventricle is not a single cavity, but there are many small cavities that are broader

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on the right side than on the left, because the blood that goes to the left ventricle from the right, that must become spirit, is refined immediately, given that its refinement is a preparation to the generation of spirit; nature, in transmitting something to the organs or through some passage, never transmits it with negligence, but preparing it for the form that it must take, as Galen often affi rms in his work De juvamentis membrorum.” This is precisely one of those points that cause modern readers to wonder if Mondino could possibly be looking at a heart at all. If the heart has no middle ventricle, what can he be describing here? One of Mondino’s modern editors, Piero Giorgi, suggests that the use of the word mirabilia conveys a sense of irony. In other words, the anatomist feels compelled to describe something that he really does not see. But perhaps Mondino does see something that he is interpreting based on preexisting frameworks.14 Aristotle suggested that the heart had three ventricles. Some smaller animals, such as frogs, do. Galen consistently spoke of only two ventricles and even mocked Aristotle for his belief that large animals had hearts with three ventricles. Avicenna, as usual, sought a compromise. In his Canon, he explained that the heart has three cavities, two of which are large, while the third is between them. He adds that the third is like a canal between the two primary cavities.15 When Gerald of Cremona translated Avicenna into Latin at the end of the twelfth century, he elaborated at some length, citing Galen in such a way that one might think Galen was in perfect agreement as to the existence of a third intermediate ventricle. According to some, Mondino might be looking at the fleshy columns that cover the walls of the ventricles and are more numerous on the interventricular septum; they are larger on the right side and more numerous on the left. These columns form little recesses that could be interpreted as canals.16 The heart here is not a source of innate truth to be studied attentively. The truth of what the heart is and what the heart

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contains is a matter for philosophers, theologians, and poets. What the anatomist can see is only a part of the picture, a small section that must be informed by a whole comprising invisible and even supernatural components. Another wondrous component of the body that we no longer believe exists is the rete mirabile that I discussed briefly in chapter 3. Mondino explains, with extreme topographical precision, that once you have removed the brain and cut through certain membranes you “will find the rete mirabile, woven from a very strong network and duplicated in a wondrous way, or multiplied by very thin arteries woven close to one another. . . . In this lattice, or in the veins of this lattice, the vital spirit that rises from the heart to the brain to become animal spirit is contained.”17 The use of the word mirabilius, “wondrous,” appears here somewhat redundantly as an adjective to describe the rete mirabile. Indeed, much of the structure of the rete mirabile is unavailable to the naked eye in its intricacy and the extreme “subtlety” or thinness of the arteries involved. It is possible that Mondino was looking at the Circle of Willis, or the arteries that supply blood to the brain. While the Circle of Willis does not fit Mondino’s description precisely, it might provide the framework that permitted Mondino to fill in the blanks with what he knew to be there. Furthermore, the removal of the brain can easily disrupt the arterial structure beneath it, requiring the anatomist to interpret or to imagine what has been lost. Mondino refers to the almost magical nature of this transformative structure that must, to his mind, be present, whether he can see it properly or not. The vital spirit must be transformed into the animal spirit; it must somehow be refined. If there is no mechanism for such transformation, it would even be possible to postulate a nonunitary spirit and, from there, the heresy of a plural soul. Structures of spiritual transformation are the wondrous parts of the body where mysteries take place. These are the middle ventricle, the part of the heart where vital

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spirit is created; the rete mirabile, where the spirit changes its nature; and the uterus, where new spirit is created. Looking into the Uterus By examining his mother’s uterus, Nero masters a set of temporalities ordinarily unavailable to the individual. He views the space where he was created in the past, sees it empty and separate from himself in the present, and ensures that there will be no occupants of that space in the future. Just as the heart was believed to create spirit from a mixture of blood made inside the heart and air from outside the body, the uterus was seen as a similarly productive space, in which the woman’s blood already in the uterus combined with male seed to form a new creature of both flesh and spirit. Given the spiritual (literally) nature of the generative events and processes taking place in both sites, an examination of these privileged containers demanded a kind of vision that embraced what was readily available to the eye as well as the latent structures of natality. When it comes to the uterus, Mondino’s statements do not seem to fit with observation in the least: “The cavity [of the uterus] has seven cells, three on the right, three on the left and one at top or really in the middle; these cells are simply cavities found in the uterus in which the sperm can coagulate with the menstrual material and be retained and placed in relation with the opening of the veins.”18 The seven-celled uterus is a Hippocratic notion, promulgated in the Middle Ages by Michael Scot. Strange and imaginative as this notion is, it does serve the purposes of parallelism. The subdivision of the uterus shapes the organ in a way that closely recalls the heart, divided into a right side and a left side, but with something in the middle. All the cavities of the uterus recall the middle ventricle of the heart in their capacity to bring together two different entities. It seems only reasonable that these two generative

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spaces should resemble one another in their construction, even if this logic does not match the data that observation can provide. Observation does permit Mondino to confirm Galen’s comments on what actually occurs when a woman suffers from uterine suffocation, a problem I alluded to in chapter 3: “From anatomy you can certainly evaluate one thing that Galen lays out in the sixth book of his De interioribus; and that is that the congestion that derives from the uterus does not happen because the uterus physically moves as far as the throat or the lungs, because this is impossible, but this happens . . . because, lacking the possibility of expelling the vapors through the lower parts, for some reason [the uterus] moves and compresses itself in the lower parts to expel them toward the upper parts. . . . In what way and by what routes [the vapor] can arrive, you have seen; which is the cure and by what means ask the authors, because in these things anatomy can only give information on topography.”19 Mondino’s analysis reveals much about the possibilities of empirical analysis and the limits of anatomy. Here, observation allows the anatomist to evaluate the veracity of two conflicting opinions on the causes of various kinds of female maladies. That various female discomforts and maladies are derived from the uterus is not debatable; Mondino accepts this as based on Hippocratic teachings and the rule of common knowledge. He repeats, “Women say the uterus has reached the stomach (or the throat or the heart).” These highly varied ailments, ranging from hiccupping to difficulty breathing to syncope, were attributed to the arrival of uterine vapors into different bodily spaces. In Salerno, as the twelfth-century Book on the Conditions of Women attests, the condition was treated as if the womb had moved away from its proper location. Odiferous therapy was the most common palliative practice. By holding items with a foul odor such as pitch and burnt wool to the nose and anointing the vagina with sweet-smelling oils such as iris and chamomile oil, the physician or midwife would encourage the

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womb to descend to its proper place.20 Mondino carefully skirts the issue of therapy to focus on topography. But his description makes it clear that in this case, the body offers evidence for Galen’s writings as it refutes common knowledge. Observation leaves no doubt that the uterus cannot travel as far as the heart or the throat. Instead, Mondino attributes the uterus’s far-ranging effects to the circulation of invisible vapors. Since he sees that it is impossible for the uterus to move as others have suggested, the only explanation for its powers of disturbance lies in an invisible substance. The uterus can thus affect the principal organs of the body without physically moving to each of them. Mondino establishes a relational vision of the body in which each organ is placed in contact with each of the others. But in order to maintain these relations, the organs must be stable and fi xed in their separate positions. The traffic of blood, spirits, and vapors connects the individuality of the parts. One way of seeing an invisible flow of vapors is through the delineation of the boundaries that limit that flow. For example, the diaphragm is seen as delimiting the circulation of a different variety of vapors: “Its function derives from its position, in the first place to separate the organs of the chest cavity and the visceral cavity, so that the vapors from food during digestion and from the feces do not reach the organs of the chest cavity; because they would damage the mind and the reason.”21 The anatomist returns to a fully Aristotelian vision in these lines, locating the mind and reason in the heart. What is perhaps even more fascinating here, however, is the anatomist’s interest in the invisible and his designation of visible structures as barriers, transmitting spaces, or creative spaces for those entities and substances that he cannot see. The diaphragm is designed to stop the flow of vapors from the lower to upper regions. The middle ventricle, on the other hand, is designed to facilitate the mixing of blood and spirit. In other words, Mondino sees much more than the eye permits. The relationality of the parts of a living individual, both amongst themselves and in congress with the outside

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world, is visible through the traces that are the tangible structures of the dissected body. Mondino never forgets that this cadaver was alive, that the spaces between the parts were filled with mobile spirit, vapor, and creative potential. And not only between the parts: even seemingly solid surfaces can transmit and transform substances the human eye cannot detect. He knows that he must see more than he can touch in order to get the body right. Eating the Heart We have seen how Mondino de’ Liuzzi, as he dissects the body to reveal the heart, is insistent upon keeping the organ in its context. The bulk of his discourse about the heart is dedicated to showing where and how it connects to the other organs of the body. He removes it only in order to show all the ways in which it is linked to the whole. By verbally maintaining each of its connections, his dissection narrative resists disembodying the heart. Outside the realm of the relatively organized and contextualized university dissection of a corpse, literary texts that describe the viewing of a heart tend to depict the event in the register of horror. As the organ in the body that is most defined by its connections to other things, by its mediating and relational position, by its status between spirit and body, self and other, human and God, it is utterly transformed by its excision from the body. Elaborate medieval visions of the multivalent functionality of the living heart are, in fact, shadowed by a spectral vision of the disembodied and, worse, potentially edible heart. Tales of women being tricked by a vengeful spouse into consuming the hearts of their lovers have been traced back to legends of the Punjab hero Raja Rasalú.22 In the European context, different versions of the story appear in Tristan, in the Provençal vida, or biography, of Guillem de Cabestaing, in the thirteenth-century Lai d’Ignaure and the Roman du chatelaine de Couci,

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in Dante’s Vita nuova, and in Boccaccio’s Decameron, where it receives perhaps its most sustained meditation.23 Nothing could be more shocking than seeing the seat of the soul, the heart of love, the site of divine passion, exposed before one’s eyes. While the sight of a corpse reveals the undeniable absence of spirit in the visible difference of a known body, the very fact that the heart is visible reveals that it can no longer be both body and spirit, but must be body alone. In its decontextualized nudity, it takes on the roles of an animal organ, or a phallus, or a piece of meat. To maintain the heart’s identity as a heart and, even more challenging, to maintain its identity as the heart of a particular individual, the viewer must go to tremendous lengths to hold it back from slipping into obscene or base organic matter. Oddly, when the heart becomes tangible, the only way to relate to it as a presence is either by not recognizing it as a heart (and eating it) or by manually restoring its productive capacity (as we will see, some holy women’s hearts were made to give birth by opening them surgically, for example). Otherwise, when faced with a nonproductive, extracted heart, the viewer finds herself experiencing a crisis of lost reciprocity. In order to gaze at the heart that has become a nonproductive, noncirculatory, nonreciprocal object, the viewer needs mediation. It is the disembodied thing in itself that calls for the most interpretation.24 The Provençal vida that serves as Boccaccio’s source for one of his tales is the story of Guillem de Cabestaing. The troubadour Guillem has been carrying on an affair with the wife of Raimon de Castel Rossillon. Raimon discovers the affair and kills Guillem: And he had the heart taken from the body and had the head cut off; and he had the heart brought back to his castle and the head too; and he had the heart cooked and made into a meal, and had it given to eat to his wife. And when the lady had eaten it, Raimon de Castel Rossillon said to her: “Do you know what you have eaten?”

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And she said: “No, only that it was good and flavorful meat.” And he told her that it was the heart of Guillem de Cabestaing that she had eaten; and, so that she would believe him better, had the head brought before them. And when the lady saw it and heard this, she lost her sight and her hearing. And when she returned to herself, she said “Lord, you have given me such good food that I will never eat anything else again.” And when he heard this, he ran toward her and wanted to hit her on the head; and she ran to a balcony and let herself fall down, and so died.25 As in each of the eaten-heart tales, the woman sees the heart in ignorance and eats in ignorance. It is only after the meal that the significance of her action is revealed to her. This conferral of identity or significance after the fact works as a sort of perversion or reversal of the ritual Eucharistic meal, in which the bread is identified as body and the wine as blood before it is consumed. To consume body and blood without this mediation, without this conferral of significance in advance, is to commit an act of cannibalism rather than communion.26 Raimon’s wife loses her capacity for sight and hearing once the identity of her meal is revealed. Her senses have literally failed her. She was unable to recognize her beloved’s heart, as her jealous husband asserts with his question, “Sabetz vos so que vos avetz manjat?” (Do you know what you have eaten?) Her senses did not supply her with this information; it is only through her husband’s mediation that she arrives at the fullness of understanding what she has seen, consumed, become. As she recognizes that failure, her senses leave her altogether. The trope of the lover’s heart made visible undergoes an interesting transformation in the poetry of Guido Cavalcanti and Dante. If the eaten-heart tales cited thus far hinge on the problem of recognition, the stil novo version is about the identification and revelation of the poet’s heart as a cor gentil. As Robert Harrison puts it, Dante’s early

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dream vision that involves his own heart “conceals the genetic secret of Dante’s literary career.”27 Conceals is the proper word here, as Dante subverts the traditional contours of the eaten-heart tales while at the same time referencing them blatantly, creating a narrative of poetic visionary initiation that cites its genealogy as it provocatively alters the terms of signification. The central element of the eaten-heart tales, as we have seen, is the fact that the female protagonist is unaware that she is consuming the heart of her lover. In Dante’s dream, a round of introductions and recognitions—“ego dominuus tuus,” “vide cor tuum,” and “conobbi ch’era la donna della salute”—makes the participants (and the reader) aware of the identity of each of the figures involved.28 The Lord of Love, after identifying himself and Dante’s heart, gives the burning heart to Beatrice to eat. She eats of it until Love begins to weep and flies with her heavenwards. Beatrice’s death is prefigured in Love’s mourning and flight toward heaven; in this way, the coupling of eating of the heart and death is preserved in the dream. But interestingly, in this dream that is subsequently analyzed by Dante’s fellow poets (unsuccessfully, he informs us) and by critics over the centuries without consensus, the misunderstanding, failure of perception, and failure of interpretation thematized in the other eaten-heart tales is absent. Failure of interpretation occurs outside the frame of the dream itself. Within the dream, it is the identification of Dante’s heart that is central. He stages a ceremony of consecration for his own heart, dedicating it to the work of prophetic love poetry. Dante subverts the defi ning parameters of the eaten-heart tales, but in terms of this trope of self-identification, he follows closely in the footsteps of his first friend, Guido Cavalcanti. For Guido, the heart is exposed as the poet’s body is doubled, serving first as victim and then as observer. In the poem “Voi che per li occhi mi passaste ’l core” (You who through my eyes passed to my heart), it is death that is displayed to the

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poet, who is doubled or divided: “The blow struck directly on the first attempt, so that my soul, trembling, drew back, seeing my heart dead on my left side.”29 The spirits flowing from the woman’s eyes strike with such force that the soul is shaken from its dwelling and turns back to see that dwelling destroyed, or in other words to see the heart dead. The poet’s privilege is that he may look upon his own death. It is by gazing at his wounds, the products of his heart, and even his death that Cavalcanti comprehends the mechanism of love and of poetic production. When the poet stages his encounter with the public, rather than with the lady herself (or with some displaced element of himself ), then the spectacle of his wounds or of his death becomes centrally important. The public gaze shifts attention onto the wound itself: I walk like one outside of life who appears, to those who gaze upon him, like a man made of copper or of stone or of wood who moves only by magic and carries in his heart a wound that is, as he is dead, an open sign.30 In the presence of “those who gaze upon him” the poet’s altered functionality is made a spectacle. The nature of his changed appearance and the nexus of that change, the wounded heart, are described as eminently visible: “He who feels great pain / look at this one, and see his heart / that Death carries in his hand, carved with a cross.”31 The poet describes himself as no longer in control of his own corporeality; his spirits have escaped through his unnaturally open heart, leaving him dead to the world. Dante’s dream, then, combines Cavalcanti’s ostentation of the heart with the erotic-religious themes of the Provençal eaten-heart tales. Identi fication is above all what is at issue here, in each of these declensions of the same motif. Cavalcanti and Dante suggest that the

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exposed heart of the poet can reveal his singular status, his susceptibility to the powers of love. Their focus on nobility of heart would have them believe that there is something recognizable in that organ, something that can be revealed. It is in the tales of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron that we fi nd the most rigorous investigation of human interaction with an extracted heart. Without this literary vision, the heart cannot look to us, cannot feel to us, the way that it did before it became only a pump. The hundred tales of the Decameron include not only a retelling of the Provençal vida, but also a tale in which a woman is presented with her lover’s identified heart. In short, the disembodied heart is a persistent motif, or rather it is an obsession. Boccaccio’s desire to dissect the scene of the encounter with the heart, as it were, reveals that there is much more at stake here than the personal tragedy of a slain lover. In his rewritings of the various declensions of the tales I have discussed above, from the troubadour vida to Dante’s dream of initiation, Boccaccio gives us a picture of the relational power of the heart as is only accessible through the frame of the potential or even present loss of that power. One of the tales is, in fact, a close rewriting of the vida of Guillem de Cabestaing. Boccaccio focuses on lengthening and emphasizing the scene in which the woman comes to realize what she has eaten. The husband asks, “Lady, how did this meal seem to you?”32 She answers, “My lord, in good faith I liked it well.”33 But whereas in the Provençal tale the woman is then informed of what she has eaten, Boccaccio draws out the suspense as the husband taunts his wife: “I believe you: it’s no wonder if you liked dead that which you had liked more than any other thing when it was alive” (io il vi credo, né me ne maraviglio se morto v’è piaciuto ciò che vivo piú che altra cosa vi piacque). This sequence of tenses, “credo” (I believe), “v’è piaciuto” (you liked/found pleasing), and “vi piacque,” (you had liked/found pleasure in), establishes his knowledge of a temporal or historical frame that his wife could not

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see as she ate of that heart, detached from its remote past, dislocated upon the plate. It is in this absence of temporalities that horror emerges. In his book The Dominion of the Dead Robert Harrison remarks that “the past (or no-longer-hereness of the person), the present (the corpse in its presence-at-hand), and the future (the fate awaiting those who follow in the footsteps of the deceased) all converge in the dead body, as long, that is, as it remains an object of concern or solicitude for the living. . . . Only in its genealogical, sentimental, or institutional relation to the surviving loved one does it become the personification of transcendence. This, of course, presupposes that the corpse is the ‘perfect likeness of the person who has passed away.’ ”34 The heart on a plate is no likeness of the beloved; it is the actual site of the creation, production, and reception of sentimental, sensorial, and spiritual relation. The sequence of tenses the jealous husband spins out indicates the vastness of temporalities unrecognized: this is the space my lover’s soul once inhabited; this is the space in which I was once held; this is now an empty thing, passive enough to be consumed; this heart is as empty as my heart will be when I go to join him. But without recognition, there is no concern or solicitude for this object on the plate. It has been stripped, in its mere placement, of all the institutions and connective structures of relation that would allow the heart its proper dynamism, its proper capacity to reveal transcendence. It is only with agonizing slowness that the wife becomes aware that she is missing something: “The lady, hearing this, paused for a moment; then she said: ‘What? What is this that you have made me eat?’ The knight replied: ‘That which you have eaten was really the heart of Sir Guglielmo Guardastagno, the one who you, my unfaithful wife, loved so much; and know for sure that’s what it was, because I tore it from his chest with these hands, shortly before I came back.’ ”35 It is the wife who asks the question here; her husband’s response now

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provides the heart’s identity with great precision and emphasis: truly, it is the heart of her lover. In Boccaccio’s tale, the wife does not lose her senses but rather condemns her husband for his betrayal: “God forbid that any other food should follow after a food as noble [nobil vivanda] as the heart of the brave and gallant knight, for such was Guglielmo Guardastagno.” With this speech, she returns the quality of nobility to Guardastagno’s heart, even if it is as a meal. In the light of the information her husband has given her, Guardastagno’s heart is again “noble,” “brave,” and “gallant,” while her husband is “disloyal.” To consecrate the value of this food, she not only decides never to eat again, but actually shatters her body by jumping from the balcony: “She was dashed to pieces.”36 This encounter with horror and subsequent descent into savagery can only be resolved through the work of collecting the two bodies, uniting them, and inscribing the tomb with the identity of the lovers enclosed there. As in the Provençal vida, they are placed in a single tomb: “On the tomb were inscribed some lines to identify the couple here buried and the manner and occasion of their deaths.” In this way, meaning is restored and permanently defined. Never again will these bodies be misidentified or deprived of their context. Furthermore, their identities are tied not only to their names, but are bound up with the means and reason for their death. The context and frame around their bodies has thickened as a correction to the disruption of the social order that made a human heart a meal.37 Drinking from the Heart The most extended consideration of this problem in the Decameron, however, may be found at the beginning of the fourth day. In the first story of the fourth day, an identified heart is presented to the female protagonist. As Giuseppe Mazzotta has pointed out, this tale is closely

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connected to the extended introduction to the fourth day, in which Boccaccio responds to censors who have objected to content in the preceding stories. In that introduction, Boccaccio tells a brief tale that focuses on the problem of relationships between things in themselves, the names that they are given, and the contexts into which they are placed. Filippo Balducci has raised his only son in a monastic atmosphere, far from the world and worldly desires. But one day, he brings his son to Florence, where for the first time the young man espies a group of beautiful young women and immediately wishes to know what they are called, but “anxious to avoid any counter-productive notion of lechery in the young man, his father would not give the women their proper name, but told him they were known as ‘geese.’ ” This name does not, however, lessen his son’s desire to have one of these “geese” for himself; he begs his father to let him have one, offering that he would see to feeding it grain. The father responds: “Absolutely not! You don’t know which end to feed.”38 Boccaccio comments on the anecdote as proof of the natural quality of desire, desire that cannot be contained by the control that Balducci attempts to exert over his son. As Mazzotta shows, however, the anecdote speaks perhaps more profoundly to the problem of names and things, as a comment upon Balducci’s “naïve nominalism.”39 The act of renaming women does nothing to limit the natural desire his son feels. But Balducci does not simply attempt to rename the women. He attempts to situate his son’s relation to this new group of foreign beings in his own frame. In a maneuver somewhat akin to setting a lover’s heart upon a plate, Balducci locates women in the animal realm. Geese may be fed grain, or eaten; they are not the objects of lust. In the novella that follows, Boccaccio sets out to rigorously test the roles of nominal identity and context as they determine relation. The protagonist is a woman named Ghismunda, who, widowed at a young age, returns to her father’s home. Her father, prince Tancredi,

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neglects to remarry her, preferring to keep his adored daughter near him. Ghismunda decides to discreetly find herself a lover, choosing a young man of good character but of humble origins. She is eventually discovered, and a tearful Tancredi berates his daughter for, above all, her choice of a humble rather than an aristocratic lover. Tancredi appeals to established notions of nobility, but Ghismunda responds by redefining nobility according to different standards.40 In a long speech replete with the language and metaphors of the dolce stil novo, Ghismunda explains that nobility is not found in our flesh and blood: “We all of us, you see, take our individual flesh from a mass of flesh, and our souls, created with equal powers, equal potentialities, equal qualities, all derive from the same Creator.”41 The repetition of the word carne (flesh) suggests an originary mass of undifferentiated flesh, utterly without boundaries or identifying factors. This mass of flesh, this initial equivalency of souls, means that all men and women have a full range of potentialities. Our virtues, displayed by our actions, she goes on to explain, set us apart and allow us to be identified as noble or base individuals. It is up to those who observe us to properly name that which we are according to what they observe: “Therefore if a man is virtuous in his actions and shows himself to be noble [gentile], but is addressed as though he were otherwise, it is not the man so addressed who is at fault but the one who addresses him.”42 The giver of names, not the named, is at fault if proper discernment is not employed. Such discernment depends upon active observation and identification, rather than reliance on preexisting terms of definition. Above all, Ghismunda traces her own “election” of Guiscardo to her father: “Where Guiscardo’s qualities and merits are concerned I was not swayed by anyone else’s opinion, only by the witness of your words and my own eyes. Who ever spoke as highly of him as you did? And how right you were! Unless my eyes deceived me, there was nothing for which you praised him that I did not see borne out in his own

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actions, and even more remarkably than your words could suggest. Had I been deceived, it would have been because you deceived me.”43 The vocabulary of the dolce stil novo in Ghismunda’s speech indicates that her desire is mediated through the philosophical and literary authorities of her time. But here, Ghismunda points boldly and plainly to the primary mediator of her desire, her father. She has not judged the men in her father’s court according to literal nobility and blood lines; she has judged according to her father’s words and, secondarily, her own eyes. As in the Balducci anecdote, we see a staging of the relationship between the sensory experience of things and the names and frames that are placed around those things. While Balducci sought to contain his son’s sensory experience of the women with the word papere (geese), here Ghismunda was prepared by her father’s words to admire Guiscardo. Her eyes confirmed what her father told her. It is Tancredi who has unwittingly played the role of Galehaut, or go-between. Determined to “cool her fervent love,” Tancredi has Guiscardo’s heart sent to Ghismunda in a golden chalice. This is a precise re-creation of the scene of mediated desire as Ghismunda has described it. Otherwise unidentifiable and undifferentiated flesh is framed by her father in the form of the gold that circumscribes the exposed heart. Tancredi’s words distinguished Guiscardo from his other courtiers when the young man was alive. In death as well, Guiscardo is defined and identified by Tancredi’s mediating power, not only by the chalice but also his words transmitted by a servant to Ghismunda: “Your father sends you this to console you for that thing that you most love, just as you have consoled him for that which he most loved.”44 This scene of the presentation of the heart is radically different from the others we have seen thus far. The horror of the previous scenes in which the heart became food was derived from the fact that the heart is unidentifiable when stripped of its context. Here, it is the mode of identification of the object that is at issue: “When she saw the heart and understood the words, then she knew for

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certain that this was Guiscardo’s heart; and so, lifting her face towards the attendant, she said: ‘A heart such as this one deserved nothing less than gold for its tomb: my father has acted wisely.’ ”45 Again, as in her choice of lover, Ghismunda relies on her father’s words and her eyes to determine what she sees. An anonymous man at court (flesh amidst so much other flesh) or an anonymous heart (flesh like any other flesh, noble or otherwise) find their meaning through the mediation of authority. Tancredi is to be praised, she says, for his discretion in finding the proper frame, in properly identifying, Guiscardo. Tancredi’s implicit message here is that without him, Ghismunda would not be able to discern the qualities of the objects before her eyes. He asserts his power by confirming that his daughter has no individual experience of the world. Her sensory perceptions are only a part of experience; he provides the greater part, the part that gives form to that experience. Unlike Balducci, who fails to delimit his son’s experience of desire, Tancredi reasserts his presence as the shaping force in his daughter’s desire. A good anatomist must be able to identify what she is looking at. In order to do so, Ghismunda needs her father’s text. In a dissected body, meaning and function are visible in the context that surrounds an organ and allow the anatomist to identify the organ according to its role. The extracted heart forces the viewer to identify it in order to ascribe meaning and function. The protagonists in this battle of wills are acute readers of the literature of their time. Ghismunda does not mention the heart in her speech on nobility, but she references the vocabulary of the stilnovists repeatedly. Her father, it seems, picks up on the allusions. As the poetics of dolce stil novo describes a nobility of heart that does not depend upon lineage, Tancredi offers up Guiscardo’s heart. But he also seems to have the eaten-heart tales in mind. Without the golden chalice, this piece of flesh would bear no trace of nobility, his gift suggests. It is only through his chalice and his words that Ghismunda can recognize her lover. Tancredi offers Ghismunda the possibility of

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seeing the heart in the hopes that this experience will be instructive; Guiscardo’s only nobility is the gold that surrounds his ordinary heart. There is nothing identifiable in this mass of flesh, nothing that distinguishes Guiscardo’s heart from any other heart. Ghismunda, however, takes up the challenge. Rather than reflecting on the contrast between the abject thing and its noble frame, she interprets the chalice as beginning the work of restoring context. She picks up where her father has left off. Once the heart is identified, it can be reendowed with all of its qualities. Unlike the unhappy wives in the earlier tales, Ghismunda is able to experience the dynamism of the extracted heart as it becomes, through her care, a fully relational thing, binding past, present, and future.46 In the past, “it was enough for me,” she says, “to keep you in my mind’s eye from moment to moment.” In the present, she must look upon “the sweetest refuge of all my delight,” as “with my physical eyes he makes me see you” (con gli occhi della fronte or mi ti fa vedere). But she states that the soul of her lover still inhabits the heart: “I know that his soul still resides here in you [quincentro] and is looking at the place where he and I knew happiness; I know his soul loves mine, which so loves his, and that it is there waiting for me.” Its presence awaits her future: “O beloved heart, all I was to do for you I have now done, and nothing remains but to make my soul join with that one which you have held so dearly.”47 In defiance of the potential this object has of slipping into the status of mere flesh, Ghismunda sees soul within it and thus the presence and virtue of her beloved. Rather than allowing this heart to reveal absence, her words reanimate the spirit that should dwell in this organ without ever discarding the frame her father has provided. That frame becomes her point of departure as Ghismunda displays her own literary mastery. The naked heart is territory that she can navigate by means of poetic authority and physical manipulation. After weeping over the heart within it with studied ceremony,

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Ghismunda pours poison into the chalice and drinks from it. In theory, the two-way traffic of spirits and other entities into and out of the heart should cease at death, when the soul leaves the heart (traditionally through the mouth).48 As Bernard of Clairvaux puts it, after death “all the gates of the body by which the soul has been used to wandering off to busy itself in useless pursuits and to go out to seek the passing things of this world will be shut.”49 But here, Ghismunda is convinced that the soul of Guiscardo is still lingering in the heart, waiting for her soul to join it. Ghismunda keeps the gates open, animating the supposedly closed heart with a lingering soul. As she pours the poison into the chalice containing the heart and drinks from it, she is presumably drinking through the heart. The poison flows through the heart’s cavities, mingling with the presence of her lover’s soul, pouring into her body and her heart. In this last moment of intercourse, she keeps her lover’s heart open to her. By pouring poison mingled with tears into the heart and then drinking from it, she manually prolongs the heart’s receptive and productive faculties, causing it to bring forth her death. In a beautiful ironic turn, the heart that in life produces spirit that vivifies the body here gives forth the poison that Ghismunda’s body consumes, bringing her death. As the lingering soul flows to meet hers within her own heart, she enacts a kind of correction of the eaten-heart tales. Rather than mistakenly consuming the productive matrix of relation, she reanimates and reconstitutes relation through the extracted heart.50 For the medieval author, poet, philosopher, or physician, the heart or the thing in itself is always already in context. The heart within the body creates and fosters connections between the physical and the spiritual, between the material and its meaning. Dramatizations of viewing the heart outside the body, then, permit the author to consider whether it is possible to experience the thing in itself without mediation. There are two possibilities. First, the thing or the object is not really seen at all. It is instead consumed, incorporated into the subject as it loses its

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distinct identity. The viewer becomes a cannibal, deprived of the ability to interpret or understand. Incorporation erases the boundary between the viewer and the object, rendering relations impossible. Without mediation, one does not see but consumes. In the case of Ghismunda, a second possibility appears. In her recognition of the heart as a present thing, Ghismunda is able to locate the traces of the animating soul as it withdraws from the object and, by drinking through the heart, fuse her departing soul with that of her lover. Through her manipulation, the heart retains its reciprocal power to engage her own. Postmortem Productions of the Inspired Heart As Clare of Montefalco lay dying in 1308, a nun tried to make the sign of the cross over her and was reprimanded by Clare herself: “Why do you make the sign of the cross over me? Did I not tell you that I have within my heart the cross of my crucified Lord Jesus Christ?”51 When Clare died shortly thereafter, her fellow nuns went looking for that cross, tactfully cutting the body open from the back and dissecting the extracted heart. The various descriptions of what was seen and touched within that revered heart will provide a focal point for a brief examination of the ways in which certain hearts belonging to holy corpses maintained their ability to produce effects on other bodies through the interventions of the living. As I have shown, the heart in its tangible appearance reveals the scenario of horror that can occur when mediation, interpretation, and the scaffolding of relational structure disappear. But as the case of Ghismunda reveals, an alternative scenario also exists. The recognized heart can, through manipulation, retain its intercorporeal powers, or its powers to affect other bodies. In the short tour of holy dissected hearts that follows, I will argue that engagement with the exposed hearts of certain privileged individuals allowed for a broadening of the heart’s

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circulatory powers. While Ghismunda maintains the spiritual union between herself and her lover, these saintly hearts and their products bring the presence of the divine into the public space. When considered in the context of relics more generally, the heart and those objects drawn from the heart constitute a particular case. Relics are often those parts of the body that came into contact with the external world, a finger of the hand that gave miraculous blessings, or the head that shows the beatific face, for example. Relics frequently reveal something about the sanctity of the holy person, such as St. Francis’ rough tunic. The heart would seem, at first, to defy both of these categories. It is only within the imagination space of the medieval Western world that the heart as relic fits the model. The central site of Clare’s contact with Christ is within her heart. Her heart contains physical traces of that encounter. The heart, then, becomes the privileged place to look for the saint’s connection to God, for proof of her sanctity, and, finally, for the locus of her beatific effects on the larger community. Some years earlier, Clare had reported that Jesus appeared to her as a beautiful young man, searching for a place to set his cross. That place was Clare’s heart; a 1333 fresco in the Church of Saint Clare in Montefalco shows a mournful Jesus thrusting the cross into Clare’s breast as he looks into her eyes. The legend and the fresco stage precisely the sort of penetrative, intercorporeal vision that medieval notions of the circulatory heart enabled as a possibility alongside other models of vision. To understand just how literally this intercorporeal exchange was imagined, we have only to think that Clare’s statements led to the dissection of her body and the opening of her heart. Clare’s encounter with Christ may be understood as generational or perceptual. In either case, two models that I have mentioned previously may be employed for the purposes of imagining the encounter: the impression model (in which an active force stamps something upon passive matter) and the intercourse model (in which an exchange between

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active bodies occurs and each may incorporate the tangible presence of the other).52 Clare as viewer is not engaging in the phenomenon of imitatio Christi. She does not, like St. Francis and other stigmatic saints, become similar to the object of her vision. Nor does her vision fit the standard model of inscription into or a seal set upon the heart.53 Rather, the visual exchange constitutes a kind of intercourse during which an actual object takes its place within her heart. We are granted unusual access to the intimate scene of Clare’s autopsy due to the exhaustive records of her canonization proceedings. According to Sister Francesca of Montefalco, the nuns decided that her body should be preserved in accordance with her holiness and “because God took such pleasure in her body and her heart.” Francesca of Foligno “cut [the body] open from the back with her hand . . . and they took out the intestines and closed the heart in a box, and they buried the viscera in the oratory that evening.” The next day “the said Francesca of Foligno cut the heart open with her hand, and when it was open they found a cross in her heart, or the image of Christ crucified.”54 When asked to explain their actions (and those of the then-deceased Francesca) at the apostolic canonization proceedings of 1318 and 1319, the sisters stated that they thought it was appropriate to open Clare’s heart as “they imagined that, since God took such pleasure in that heart, something new and wondrous would be shown in it.”55 As Berengario, the author of the Life of Saint Clare of Montefalco, puts it: “This remark [Clare’s description of the vision] led to the well-founded belief that the virgin Clare, known as Clare of the Cross, had received the cross and all the signs of Christ’s passion in her heart, not simply as images in contemplation, but also materially and sensibly.”56 The sisters make several assumptions: not only are they convinced that Clare received the cross and other signs of the passion literally and materially; they are also convinced that these objects will be sensibly available to them as observers. The divine contents of Clare’s heart are expected to be available to a larger public after her death.

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Berengario explains that he was initially called in to investigate what he imagined was a falsification of evidence for sanctity but found himself entirely convinced by the contents of Clare’s heart: “In her heart, then, there were, in a fleshy likeness formed by hardened veins, on the one side, the cross, three nails, the spear, and the reed, and, on the other, the pillar, the scourge of five cords, and the crown.”57 Berengario walks a narrow line in his description of the contents of the heart. First, he wishes to assert that the material of the objects is organic, that they are not fabricated foreign objects. They are, therefore, fleshy likenesses formed of veins, rather than wood or metal or rope. But at the same time, Berengario avoids the possible assumption that Clare’s heart formed these things entirely of its own will and provenance. He must assert that what he is looking at is not simply the natural form of a normal heart. This is, indeed, a claim that might be made. The crucifi x found in Clare’s heart, still visible today behind glass in Montefalco, does not immediately resemble a crucifi x as much as a thickened version of the usual divisions that form the four chambers of the heart, with the external borders missing. But Berengario is wary of accusations that he might simply be a bad anatomist, that he might be looking at perfectly normal structures he is unused to seeing. He asserts that he is not looking at any ordinary heart. “On the inside, it was hollow and empty, without any of the internal divisions found in every heart”; the objects are the “only things in the cavity.”58 Furthermore: “The cross was not united at any point with the flesh of the heart, but was set and pressed down into a cavity or little recess of the heart, as though it had been placed within a holder entirely shaped like it . . . the cross could be removed and made completely available to sight and observation.”59 Echoing the language of Clare’s vision, Berengario asserts that the cross is separate from the heart, that it was set into it, presumably from an outside source. He thus affirms that he is not looking at the ordinary internal divisions of the heart, suggesting

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that he would know what those look like. Instead, he claims the ability to assert that the cross does not connect with the structure of the heart itself, that it does not grow from it organically. In fact, “one of the transverse arms of the cross which she carried in her heart had transfixed and penetrated her heart even as far as the outside of her body, as is attested by all those who made sure to see Clare after her death.”60 Clare’s heart cannot fully contain the cross that has penetrated it. Berengario essentially has it both ways: the cross is a product of the organic matter of Clare’s heart and a separate, divine power outside of herself. Its genesis is a process between intercourse and incorporation. The cross pierces the boundaries of the heart and of the body itself, asserting its otherness, its divine nature that transcends human limits, even as it finds its place within the body. Its miraculous nature is available, as Berengario points out, to observation, as it can be removed and viewed. He says that he himself saw it and touched it several times.61 Berengario describes himself as an anatomist who can distinguish between the natural and the supernatural within the human body, who can see and detail the distinction between the organic and the hybrid organic and divine production that is the cross. But not everyone who saw the cross saw the same thing. There was some dispute as to whether Clare had only the cross in her heart, or the cross with Christ’s body on it, or only the crucified body. Berengario explains that he saw the cross and the contours of a crucified body, but was not able to “make out the outlines of tiny members.”62 Sister Giovanna, for example, saw much more: “The cross was like a little human body [corpusculum humanum] though not completely well formed, since that little body appeared to have a little head made of flesh, of about the size of a small bean. But that little head did not have [fully] formed and distinct little members, like eyes or nose.”63 As Katharine Park and Nancy Caciola point out, this description suggests a fetus.64 In this context, the act of cutting into Clare’s heart resembles a Caesarian section. In the

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Middle Ages, Caesarian sections were performed on mothers who had died in childbirth, in an attempt to extract a living baby. Life is thus pulled from death; the eternal life promised through the crucifi xion is born from Clare’s heart as uterus, emptied of the usual divisions found in every heart and given over entirely to the purpose of holding Jesus within, both fetal and crucified. By means of human intervention, Clare’s heart continues its productive function after death. Through both supernatural and humanly abetted means (that in no way contradict one another), her heart gives birth to presence, bringing forth Christ into the world and into the tactile sphere. Through her, observers can touch the cross (or the crucified Christ) with their own hands. Clare’s followers know precisely what they will find within her heart. Her words, or the text of her vision, are made tangible in the flesh. Just as Mondino has Galen and Aristotle’s texts to show him where and how the inanimate heart had its connection between ventricles, into the rest of the body, and to the external world, the nuns of Montefalco have Clare’s words and the example of Mary to show them how Clare’s heart can continue to be animated with Christ’s presence and to animate the public sphere with that presence. The act of bringing forth the corpusculum is a verification of Clare’s words as a revelatory text. At the same time, this act continues the circuit or circulation of grace; Christ entered into Clare’s heart and must be brought forth in an unveiling to the larger community. We are so often presented with the notion of the body as text. And indeed, throughout the Middle Ages, we see examples of inscriptions found upon the heart, or assertions of inscriptions upon the heart.65 In the cases of Mondino, of Ghismunda, and of Clare’s followers, a different possibility emerges. In these examples, the body is not a text that must find its metaphysical explanation. Rather, there is always a text for which the body must provide a demonstration. The heart, in particular, is also much more than a three-dimensional figure. With proper manipulation,

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it can be a working model or, even better, the continued matrix for the enduring presence of the soul it houses. The text, whether it is Galen’s treatise, or the poetry of the dolce stil novo, or the testimony of a living saint, does not beg a metaphysical interpretation. It asks, rather, to be rendered present, to be made available in a tangible manner to bodies in the world.66 When Elena Duglioli reported that Jesus instructed her that “the milk in her virginal breasts would last until the end of the world,” her “interpreter” or her confessor did not seek to develop some sort of metaphysical explanation for this statement. Rather, when Elena died in 1520, her body was laid out on the altar in the Church of San Giovanni in Monte. And before a vast public, her confessor uncovered her chest and pressed her breasts with his hands, bringing forth “pure and white milk.” Some devotees suckled from the corpse.67 While seventeenth-century rhetoric suggests that, suddenly, people had a desire to see for themselves (no longer depending on what they had read in texts), we find that the medieval world had an intense desire to see, and not only to see, but also to touch. What changes is the context. The medieval world saw the body as a figure or model or locus of birth within a larger context that was made up of texts. The body was always embedded in texts. This does not necessarily imply a subordination of body to text, but rather a continuity between the two that nonetheless distinguishes between the two entities. If the body, and even the dead body, can give birth to presences of different kinds, it can only happen through our knowledge of the contexts that make this possible. Elena’s body would not have brought forth milk, nor Clare’s the cross, if her followers did not have the revered text of the holy women’s words that indicated the genesis of these products and thus knew how to intervene to make these births happen. Just as the Annunciation provides the context for Christ’s birth, words and texts permit people to interact properly with the things they touch. The exposed heart reveals this network of relations in a way that

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no other organ could. Unlike any other part of the body at the time, the heart is called upon to show heat, generational power, primacy, union, the presence of the soul, the presence of the divine; to demonstrate, indeed, any number of intangibles. It falls to Harvey to eliminate the traces of these intangibles from the exposed physical heart. In order to show the heart in a new way, he must place it within a new context, a fresh network that does not set up expectations for invisible or hybrid entities. He must change the way in which one interacts with the heart. The Temporalities of the Vivisected Heart This study has dedicated itself to the circulatory powers of the heart and to the pathways that lead into and out of the heart itself. It has been concerned with the myriad systems, cycles, and relations constituted by and through the heart. By consequence, the preceding chapters have examined the living heart, embedded and imbricated in a living body. Here, we have turned to a different sort of question: what can the heart be when it is detached from those systems? What can we observe when it is extracted from the very circulations and systems that define it? If it is true, as I have argued, that the heart was understood to be the dynamic site of intercorporeal encounters and transformations, is there any way that an observer can know the heart by observing the dead organ? Prior to Descartes’ mechanization of the heart, people were drawn to look at (or to avoid looking at) the heart itself in search of the source of life in general or traces of a particular soul. But none of these things are easy to see, in any sense of the word. Harvey’s prose reflects a sense of awe as he attempts to view the source of life itself through the performance of a vivisection. Even with a maximal number of processes and connections preserved intact, however, the living but exposed heart is reluctant to disclose its secrets. In the case of the heart, vision, sensation, and experience could

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easily betray the anatomist. Those things that might have helped anatomists understand the circulation of the blood had they been able to see them—namely, the tiny capillaries connecting arteries and veins—were too small to be discerned by means of contemporary technology. At the same time, many believed in the undetectable presence of other invisible structures and entities that determined heart function and patterns of circulation. As noted in chapter two, the invisible porosities between the ventricles that allowed blood to ooze from one side to the other were a matter of faith, along with the invisible porosities that made the arteries directly available to external air. And certainly the presence of the soul or of the spirits could not be detected empirically. Harvey notes that his work presents a great challenge. How does one look at a thing and understand its function? Harvey’s words on the matter, which I cited near the beginning of this chapter, show the anatomist’s consternation. Direct observation of the beating heart does not offer immediate answers. Quite the opposite: Harvey suggests that the indecipherability of the heart’s motion initially led him to fear that only divine vision can make sense of the movement of the heart. As with the disembodied heart, the problem is one of temporalities. The disembodied heart is detached, potentially, from past and future. The vivisected heart, on the other hand, beats too quickly to allow the observer to separate its movements into a first, second, and third. It seems to move all at once and all together, to indeed perform multiple functions at one time. To comprehend it, the viewer or the vivisector needs to see or even impose a before and an after, a first and a second. As Dante says of looking at God in Paradiso: “I saw ingathered, bound by love in one single volume, that which is dispersed in leaves throughout the universe.”68 In the medieval world, this is what the living heart would look like. It would be the space where all that finds separation and distance within the body and the terrestrial world is bound together: body and soul, blood and spirit, life and natality. Harvey does

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not expect to find the second aspect of any of these pairs in the organ that he examines, but nonetheless the heart presents a binding together of movements that he has thus far been able to perceive only in their separate appearances as they spread throughout the body. He speaks of Galenic experiments in which an artery in the arm is cut, for example. Through the spurts of blood that issue rhythmically from the wound, he can trace one aspect of the heart’s hidden movements. To learn about the heart, one must look elsewhere, not at the thing itself. At the source of that blood, the movement “appeared in the twinckling of an eye, like the passing of Lightning . . . sometimes the motion was various, sometimes confus’d.” This confusion, this simultaneity of movement, leads to the anatomist’s sense of disquiet that I noted at the beginning of this chapter: “I was much troubled in mind, nor did I know what to resolve upon my self, or what belief to give to others.”69 In order to reach his desired conclusions, Harvey must actually step back from this unsettling scene of the exposed beating heart in its singular appearance. Like Mondino, who does not approach the corpse until he has sketched out the whole of creation and man’s place in it, Harvey seeks a broader context. In time, by means of repeated vivisections of a great variety of animals, from the coldest to the warmest, he believes that he has “unwinded and freed myself from this Labyrinth.”70 For Harvey, who privileges heat as a mystical source of vitality, observing the range of animals from coldest to warmest is tantamount to reconstructing the medieval chain of being. But instead of finding his place within this larger context, Harvey aims at extrication, at separating himself from the subject of his observations. Rather than get lost within the unsettling mysteries of the heart, he seeks to discover or lay bare “the motion and the use of the heart.”71 The notion that the heart has a use to be discovered already suggests an approach wildly at variance with the medieval way of looking at the organ. The heart does not have a use in the medieval world; it is life, it does not serve life.

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Harvey’s discoveries pertaining to the heart are described in the terms of one who has attained new capacities of vision. He achieves a control of temporalities that allows him to split the movements of the heart into a before and after: “First then in the hearts of all creatures, being dissected whilst they are yet alive, opening the breast, and cutting up the capsule, which immediately environeth the heart, you may observe that the heart moves sometimes, sometimes rests: and that there is a time when it moves, and when it moves not.”72 The colder animals, whose hearts beat more slowly, have shown him this secret. But also the hearts of warmer animals, as they begin to die upon his table, have allowed him to “unravel” their motions. The anatomist must gain control of the process of death in order to extricate himself from the confusion that is life and separate the processes as those processes come to an end. Harvey’s mastery of the processes of death allows him to engage in the same sort of practice I have discussed in respect to saintly bodies; reanimation through manipulation of the heart: “This is certain, that upon a time trying an experiment upon a Dove, after the heart had quite left motion . . . I wetted my finger with spittle, and being warmed kept it a while upon the heart; by this fomentation, as if it had received strength and life afresh, the heart and its ears began to move, to contract, and open, and did seem as it were recall’d back again from death.”73 Here, the act seems to deify the anatomist. Harvey explains that through the transfer of heat from his body, he can bring the dove’s heart back to life (life that consists in the pulsation of the heart). In the previous examples of holy reanimation, the focus was not on restoring life to the heart, but rather on bringing something forth from the heart that might prolong relation between the individual and the outside world. Harvey is indeed godlike as he presses his finger to the dove’s heart, but unlike the medieval heart manipulators, he does not believe that a heart can have an impact on him, that it can affect him corporeally. Harvey adds something to a closed circuit from outside, transmit-

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ting an intangible as he himself remains unaltered by his action. Such action might be compared to the impression model for describing how one body acts upon another. In the pages of this book I have described an alternate model that emerges and exists alongside the impression model for a period of time. Harvey’s text reveals that the alternate intercourse model for imagining perceptual or generational interaction is no longer, in his field of concepts, viable. But above all, the act of making the dove’s heart beat again through contact with heat suggests that it was not fully dead. If the heart can stop and start again, life must be elsewhere. But where? And if life cannot be traced to this discernable motion, how can we be sure of its presence, or even of its absence?

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The present study has engaged in an exercise that I believe is a timely one. If we can approach an earlier thought style by examining a series of dominant concepts that seem impossible or incomprehensible today, we can perhaps find our way toward a new thought style at variance with our own. We stand once again in a space similar to the one in which William Harvey stood; many of our dominant concepts are holding on stubbornly against the rudiments of a new set of concepts that threaten to shift the entire style of cultural thought on the subject of the life of the body. Paired with an obsessive focus on the beginnings of human life, equally difficult questions have arisen about the end of life. In order to decide when life is over (or has begun), we must decide where that life is located and how to determine its presence. The philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, as he writes of the experience of going through a heart transplant, states our dilemma as follows: “What is this life that is ‘mine’ and that must be ‘saved’? We must at least affirm that this properness does not reside in anything that is in ‘my’ body. It is not situated in any place, not in this organ [heart] that has nothing more to do with its symbolic reputation. (One will say: the brain remains. And to be sure, the idea of a brain transplant shakes up the news every so often. Without any

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doubt, humanity will speak of this again one day. For the moment, we must concede that a brain does not survive without the rest of the body. On the other hand . . . it would survive perhaps with the entire system of a foreign body transplanted).”1 What if the brain were to lose its hegemony as the seat of life, as the determinant factor in the survival of an individual self? Michael D. Gershon suggested in his 1998 book The Second Brain that we have what amounts to another, smaller brain located in the gut. The idea was ridiculed at first; Gershon explained in an interview that it was “like saying that New York taxi drivers never miss a showing of ‘Tosca’ at the Met.”2 But the theory is now widely accepted. In short, the enteric nervous system, as it is known, manages every aspect of digestion by using many of the same tools that the first brain does. It is nearly self-contained, assessing conditions, deciding on courses of action, and initiating responses on its own. Put this way, the theory makes sense. Why should it be necessary for the first brain to send commands all over the body? Wouldn’t it be more efficient if control mechanisms were located near the systems they govern? So why is that idea so unsettling? And why did the mainstream medical community resist the results of ongoing research in the field of enteric neurology for almost a century? Perhaps there was some reluctance to rob the brain of its sovereignty. In the new account, the brain is no longer entirely unique; in fact, even the gut can do what it does. Forced away from a comfortable top-down model of command in the body, we must contemplate an interaction between two control centers or, worse, a gut that can act of its own accord. Viscerally, this is an unpleasant dislocation of high and low, literally and figuratively speaking. We have believed single-mindedly in the exceptionality and superiority of the brain until certain discoveries like Gershon’s began to emerge. One of the most disturbing implications of the second brain theory is that the lower brain can send messages up to the first brain

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that are of an order we had only imagined going in the other direction. Descartes’ brain relocated centralized control away from the physical center of the body, a movement that requires a corresponding shift in visions of the human. But the emergence of a second brain does something even more radical. This is a de-centering of the body; there is now no single place that we can point to as the unique source of control, or of life, within us. And it is de-centering, perhaps, that poses the greatest problem for our understanding of the self. Human imagination has managed to make the conceptual leap from heart to brain as the source of life. Once it was general knowledge that life ended when the heart stopped beating. Now we see hearts stop on television emergency room dramas almost every night of the week. Usually a doctor is able to jump-start the unreliable thing, and a comforting blipping noise returns to fill the room with the sound of restored normalcy. Today, to establish the end of life, doctors describe patients as brain-dead. While heart transplants are ever more frequent and less physically problematic (the patient’s psyche may still suffer the replacement, as the reflections of Jean-Luc Nancy and others can attest), we are not yet capable of conceiving of a brain transplant. Nancy is right: we’d much rather attach a new body (possibly a slimmer one, a younger one, one less genetically prone to disease). How can it be that life isn’t situated or centered in any particular place? How can it be that my self, that which is proper to me, is not located in some specific space within me? It seems entirely reasonable that we could sacrifice almost any part of the body (a foot, for instance, is relatively expendable) and still be recognizable to ourselves as the same person. But this is true only as long as we retain the organ that we believe to be guiding our decisions, holding our memories, interacting with the world and keeping us alive. Even if the heart has been deemed replaceable (although numerous heart transplant patients maintain that a new heart brings changes in personality, particularly in the sexual realm), it still has much to teach

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us about the ways in which life is sustained. As long as we imagine that the heart maintains relations only with the interior of a single body, we remain confounded by its mysteries. The medieval heart, in its radical openness to the world, in its generous capacity to overreach the limits of its containing body and to enter into communion with the external world, represents perhaps a less accurate model in its details, but a truer model in terms of where it sets in parameters: not within the body but at the margins of our social networks and the borders of our beliefs, no matter where they may lie. Today, we stand awkwardly between two extremes; we are still very much attached to the idea of the heart as an “isolated creature,” but the radically open heart may offer certain insights into the ways we are beginning to understand bodily interaction with the environment. While Harvey’s theories on the function of the heart defined the circulation of the blood much as we understand it today, fresh approaches to the heart’s engagement with the environment are now forcing a reimagining of a certain kind of receptivity in the heart itself. We may mechanize the heart, call it a pump and measure its functions metrically, but we cannot explain why one person survives a heart attack and another does not, to give just one example, as long as we limit our inquiry to the borders of an individual body. Some of the best indicators for the outcomes of heart disease cannot be found anywhere within; they must be sought in the surrounding worlds of the patients. Recently a proliferation of studies of heart attack survivors has repeatedly produced the same dramatic results: the heart draws strength from the circulation of human relationships. In a study of 2,320 male survivors of acute myocardial infarction, the chance of survival for patients who were socially integrated was approximately twice as high as those who were classified as “socially isolated.”3 A Swedish study of cardiac heart patients showed that those without a social network had three times the ten-year mortality rate of those who were socially integrated.4 In short,

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the medieval concepts of necessary circulations into the world and the perils of isolation are relevant again in the wake of a thought style with a microscopic focus that insisted upon looking within individual bodies and within individual cells while neglecting our surrounding worlds. The secrets encoded in our DNA do not determine our lives after all. The illusory hope that we could discern future illnesses spelled out within our cells has passed. Genetic predisposition is in dynamic relation with our lived worlds; the future of a single body is continuously woven, undone and rewoven in the web of that relation. If the brain is not the sovereign and sole ruler of the body, if the heart is after all receptive to the outside world, if sex and gender are not determined by sexual organs and if we cannot say where life resides, then the dominant concepts discussed in the chapters of this study are only as incomprehensible as our current dominant concepts soon will be. As we stand, like Harvey, in a space between two styles of thinking the body, we must turn with urgency to that great sea of images and ideas that have come down to us across the ages. Those images form the precious material of our ancestral concepts and, at the same time, reveal the rudiments of our future. In short, we find ourselves at a critical point in our understanding of ourselves on the most fundamental level. We have begun the process of revolutionizing our concept of organs and their function. An individual organ is not as discrete as we thought in the modern period, and it is not reducible to any single function that is proper to it. Function itself is beginning to be conceived of more broadly, as a plurality of actions integrated within the body. It may be that the medieval heart can provide us with a figure for rethinking function in terms of interdependencies both within the body and in those mysterious relations each individual body maintains with our surrounding worlds.

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Notes

Introduction E’ trasse poi de li occhi tuo’ sospiri, i qua’ me saettò nel cor sì forte, ch’i’ mi partì sbigotito fuggendo. Cavalcanti, Rime, 21:8–11. 2. For the complicated and contested history of the discovery of circulation, see Pagel, William Harvey’s Biological Ideas. 3. I borrow the notion of the coexistence of dominant, ancestral, and future concepts from Fleck, Genesis and Development. See Fuchs, Mechanization of the Heart, for his assessment of the ways in which Fleck’s notion of overlapping concepts is preferable to T. S. Kuhn’s notion of “revolution” in this case. See Kuhn, Struct ure of Scientific Revolutions. Like Fuchs, I simply fi nd that the materials I consider show that contradictory concepts can and do coexist. I have therefore adopted Fleck’s terminology rather than Kuhn’s. 4. On points of contact between William Harvey’s work and cardiocentrism around the year 1200, see Ricklin, “Le coeur, soleil du corps.” On contemporary cardiocentrism that has sympathies with Harvey’s thought, see Erickson, Language of the Heart. 5. Fleck speaks of both a Denkkollektiv and a Denkgemeinschaft. He emphasizes that the Denkgemeinschaft is different from an official community, comparing 1.

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the thought community to the group of “true believers” versus the members of any given church: see Genesis and Development, 103. The group of true believers does not correspond to the official membership of a given church, but is constituted around adherence to or dialogue with a common set of ideas, rather than physical proximity or official status. 6. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, 79. 7. A thought style, as Fleck defi nes it, is “readiness for directed perception and appropriate assimilation of what has been perceived.” See Genesis and Development, 142. 8. On Italy’s preeminence in medicine and anatomy in this period see Park, Secrets of Women, especially the introduction. On Bologna see Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils. On Salerno see Monica Green’s introduction to her edition and translation of The Trotula. 9. Harris, Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic, 1. 10. I am indebted to the work of Caroline Walker Bynum, whose studies of medieval spirituality break down the body as metaphor versus body as body divide by suggesting that the metaphors of Christianity frequently inspired corporeal experiences and practices. See particularly Holy Feast and Holy Fast, Fragmentation and Redemption, and, most recently, Wonderful Blood. For the heart as book, see Carruthers, Book of Memory, and Jager, Book of the Heart. Chapter One. The Sovereign Heart 1. Harvey, De motu cordis, v. 2. Fuchs, Mechanization of the Heart. 3. Descartes: Selected Philosophical Writings, 1: 340–341. 4. See Le Goff, “Head or Heart?” and Le Goff and Truong, Une histoire du corps. 5. Singer and Underwood, Short History of Medicine, 88. 6. James, Human Immortality, 18. 7. James, Human Immortality, 31–32. 8. James, Human Immortality, 36. 9. Many accepted Galen’s suggestion that blood was generated in the liver. Others followed Aristotle’s claim that the heart was the true generative source of blood. Albert the Great explains that the physicians believe that the liver is

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the source, while the philosophers locate the source in the heart. As my focus is on understandings of the capacities of the heart, I follow the trajectory of the philosophers. When I state that it was believed that blood was generated in the heart, one must always insert the caveat that not everyone believed this, and that many others held that blood was generated in both locations. The same is true for the question of where semen was made, etc. 10. James, Human Immortality, 54–55. 11. “Non oportet verum dixisse Galienum . . . dicta autem magistri primi probabimus supponendo quod anima quidem, secundum se est una virtus, a qua fluunt omnes virtutes membrorum. Cum enim ipsa sit organica, oportebit unum esse membrum in quo sita omnes effluat a se virtutes: et sicut ipsa est principium virtutum, ita necessario erit illud membrum principium organorum. Constat autem animam secundum actum vitae et potestatem esse in corde. Oportet igitur cor esse principium omnium nervorum et venarum per quos anima in membris perficit suas operationes.” Albert the Great, ed. Stadler, De animalibus, 3.1.4, par. 41, 294. Trans. Kitchell and Resnick, p. 363. 12. See Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 162, for notions of the presence of the soul in blood. 13. Harvey, De motu cordis, 31, describes this moment to elaborate the growth of the heart. For Harvey, the heart itself is not the “primum vivens, ultimum moriens”—it is the blood that already contains some primal spirit of life within it. For Aristotle, the entire heart is the primum vivens, ultimum moriens. 14. Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti, 176. 15. See Ricklin, “Le coeur, soleil du corps,” 125–126. He cites Alfred of Sareshel, David of Dinant, and Nicolaus phisicus, who refer back to Aristotle and this particular solution in De somno et vigilia II. 16. Turisanus, Plusquam commentum, ed. Venice 1557, fol. 35r, quoted in Jacquart, “Coeur ou Cerveau?” 85. 17. Gregory Froelich, trans., “De motu cordis,” Niagara University: The Aquinas Translation Project, http://www.niagara.edu/aquinas/De_Motu_Cordis/ De_Motu_Cordis.html (accessed April 23, 2009). 18. For a very long time, scholars were rather mystified as to why Dante chose to

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go into such detail in this very elaborate digression. In his Dante: Poetics of Conversion, John Freccero suggested that the digression on the formation of the soul functions as a metaphor for poetic production as it is described in the previous canto. However, it is important to note that the embryology is not featured in Canto 25 merely to illustrate Dante’s notions of the poetic process but has its own physiological specificity. The fetal body does not only stand for the poet’s body or poetry or mind; the development of the fetal body is a subject in its own right. 19. Purgatorio 25.37–42. All references to the Commedia are taken from Dante Alighieri, La Commedia secondo l’antica vulgata, ed. Giorgio Petrocchi (Milano: Mondadori, 1967). Translations of the Commedia are those of Charles S. Singleton, Inferno (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), Purgatorio (1973), and Paradiso (1975). I have, where necessary, made changes to these translations to get as close as possible to the literal meaning of references to heart and body. Petrocchi, 3:428–429: Sangue perfetto, che poi non si beve da l’assetate vene, e si rimane quasi alimento che di mensa leve, prende nel core a tutte membra umane virtute informativa, come quello ch’a farsi quelle per le vene vane. 20. Lemay, Women’s Secrets, 144. 21. Purgatorio 25.52–66. Singleton, 273. Petrocchi, 3:430–432: Anima fatta la virtute attiva qual d’una pianta, in tanto diff erente, che questa è in via e quella è già a riva, tanto ovra poi, che già si move e sente, come spugno marino; e indi imprende ad organar le posse ond’ è semente. Or si spiega, figliuolo, or si distende la virtù ch’è dal cor del generante, dove natura a tutte membra intende.

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Ma come d’animal divegna fante, non vedi tu ancor: quest’ è tal punto, che più savio di te fé già errante, sì che per sua dottrina fé disgiunto da l’anima il possibile intelletto, perché da lui non vide organo assunto. 22. Purgatorio 25.68–75. Singleton, 273. Petrocchi, 3:432–433: Apri a la verità che viene il petto; e sappi che, sì tosto come al feto l’articular del cerebro è perfetto, lo motor primo a lui si volge lieto sovra tant’arte di natura, e spira spirito novo, di vertù repleto, che ciò che trova attivo quivi, tira in sua sustanzia, e fassi un’alma sola, che vive e sente e sé in sé rigira. 23. See Gragnolati, Experiencing the Afterlife, for a detailed analysis of Dante’s embryology. 24. William of Auvergne, The Soul, 160. 25. Paradiso 28.41–45. Singleton, 315. Petrocchi, 4:463: “Da quel punto Depende il cielo e tutta la natura. Mira quel cerchio che più li è congiunto; e sappi che ’l suo muovere è sì tosto per l’aff ocato amore ond’ elli è punto.” 26. Aquinas, De motu cordis. 27. In the sixteenth century, Giordano Bruno will say that any circle we can perceive is imperfect. A perfect circle is infinite. See Saiber, Giordano Bruno, 134–135. 28. Nancy Caciola’s Discerning Spirits provides analyses of late medieval theological uses of the theories of spirit physiology. For an extensive bibliography of theological and medical approaches to the physiology of the spirit, see Discerning Spirits, 140n20, 179–180n5. 29. See Bono, “Medical Spirits,” 95.

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30. Alfred of Sareshel, De motu cordis, 37–38. My translation. 31. Ricardus Anglicus, Anatomia vivorum (1225), in Corner, Anatomical Texts, 108. 32. See Agamben, Stanze, 114. 33. Bruno Nardi has established the significance of Albert the Great, among others, for Dante in Saggi di filosofia dantesca. 34. Dante Alighieri, Vita nova, ed. Gorni, 1.6. Trans. Cervigni and Vasta, 48–49. I have adapted Cervigni and Vasta’s translation. 35. Robert Harrison’s Body of Beatrice makes a crucial distinction between Beatrice’s presence and her appearance. See p. 48. 36. Alcher of Clarivaux, “De spiritu et anima,” 784 (translation by Nancy Caciola in Discerning Spirits, 181–182). Spirit and soul were not always conflated in this manner. However, even for those who distinguished between the two, the heart-based spirit was nonetheless understood as a material extension of the soul into the body. For a more complete view of this relationship between spirit and soul, see Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 180–183. 37. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, 79. 38. Bono writes of a “medieval language of life” founded around the notion of the “medical spirits” in “Medical Spirits.” 39. Alfred of Sareshel, De motu cordis, cap. 8, p. 33. 40. John of Salisbury, Policratus, 67. This is already a change from those who took the Platonic line, such as Guillaume de Conches, who in his commentary on the Timaeus linked the heart with the digestive organs. See Ricklin, “Le coeur, soleil du corps,” 138. 41. See Ricklin, “Le coeur, soleil du corps,” 138–139, and Zink, Nature e Poesie au Moyen-Age. 42. Dante Alighieri, Monarchia, 1.2.4 (p. 7). I have adapted Kay’s translation. 43. Albert the Great, trans. Kitchell and Resnick, De animalibus, 996–997. 44. “Et notandum quod natura posuit cor in medio corporis, et merito, ut quod nobilius est ordinetur in loco nobiliori. . . . In homine autem declinat cor ad mamillam sinistram.” Thomas of Cantimpré, Liber de natura rerum, 1.47.7–23 (p. 49). 45. On the heart’s political uses as a metaphor see Le Goff, “Head or Heart?”

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46. All biblical references are taken from the New Oxford Annotated Bible, Revised Standard Version, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). 47. See Le Goff, “Head or Heart?” and Alcuin Blamires, “The Medieval Gender Doctrine of Head and Body,” in Medieval Theology and the Natural Body, ed. Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis (Suffolk: York Medieval Press, 1997), 13–30. 48. Congar, L’ecclésiologie du haut Moyen Age, 83. 49. As Le Goff puts it: “From the thirteenth to the fifteenth century, the ideology about the heart grew and proliferated with an imagery that sometimes bordered on delirium.” “Head or Heart?” 20. 50. On Catherine’s political importance, see Blumenfeld-Kosinski, Poets, Saints and Visionaries, and Luongo, Saintly Politics of Catherine of Siena. I have written at greater length about Catherine’s use of the figure of the heart as a mode of persuasion in “Catherine of Siena’s Heart.” 51. Catherine of Siena, Lettere, 5:16, 21. All translations of Saint Catherine’s letters are my own. See Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 156, on a very similar vineyard image in Gerhard of Cologne. 52. For a linguistic study of the garden in Catherine’s writings see Sliwa, “Le metafore del ‘giardino.’ ” 53. A. Hamon, “Coeur (Sacré)” in Dictionnaire de la spiritualité, vol. 2 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1953), 1027. On a history of devotion to the Sacred Heart, see Augustinus Bea, Hugo Rahner, Henri Rondet, and Friedrich Schwendimann, eds., Cor Jesu, vol. 1 (Rome: Herder, 1959). 54. On the role of encyclopedism in diff using knowledge on physiology, see Moulis, “Sang du coeur qui monte as yeulx fait larmes,” in Le “cuer” au Moyen Âge (Aix-en-Provence: Centre Universitaire d’Etudes et de Recherches Médiévales d’Aix, 1991). 55. See Bynum, Jesus as Mother. 56. Catherine of Siena, Lettere, 5:22–23. 57. Catherine of Siena, Lettere, 5:19. 58. Vincent of Beauvais, Speculum naturale, 28.60: 2032. 59. Catherine of Siena, Lettere, 3:68. See also Catherine of Siena, Libro della divina dottrina, 233–234: “E so’ ribelli a questo Sangue, perché hanno levata la rever-

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enzia, e levatisi con grande persecuzione. Essi sono come membri putridi, tagliati dal corpo mistico della santa Chiesa.” 60. Bande, “Philippe le Bel,” 278. 61. See Brown, “Death and the Human Body,” 254–257, and Gaude-Ferragu, “Le coeur ‘couronné.’ ” 62. Le Goff, “Head or Heart?” 21–22. 63. Inferno 28.118–141. Singleton, 301–303. Petrocchi, 1:485–488: Io vidi certo, e ancor par ch’io ’l veggia, un busto sanza capo andar sì come andavan li altri de la trista greggia; e ’l capo tronco tenea per le chiome, pesol con mano a guisa di lanterna: e quel mirava noi e dicea: ‘Oh me!’. ................................ ‘Or vedi la pena molesta, tu che, spirando, vai veggendo i morti: vedi s’alcuna è grande come questa. E perché tu di me novella porti, sappi ch’i’ son Bertram dal Bornio, quelli che diedi al re giovane i ma’ conforti. Io feci il padre e ’l figlio in sé ribelli; ................................ Perch’ io parti’ così giunte persone, partito porto il mio cerebro, lasso!, dal suo principio ch’è in questo troncone.’ 64. Inferno 28.22–33. Singleton, 295. Petrocchi, 2:474–475: Già veggia, per mezzul perdere o lulla, com’ io vidi un, così non si pertugia, rotto dal mento infin dove si trulla. Tra le gambe pendevan le minugia; la corata pareva e ’l trist o sacco che merda fa di quel che si trangugia. Mentre che tutto in lui veder m’attacco,

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guardommi e con le man s’aperse il petto, dicendo: ‘Or vedi com’io mi dilacco! vedi come storpiato è Mäometto! Dinanzi a me sen va piangendo Alì, fesso nel volto dal mento al ciuff etto.’ 65. See Pouchelle, Corps et chirurgie. 66. Pouchelle, Corps et chirurgie, 198–199. 67. See Le Goff, “Head or Heart?” 23; Bande, “Philippe le Bel,” 277. 68. Harvey, De motu cordis, v–vi. 69. Harvey, De motu cordis, 60. 70. Harvey, De motu cordis, 115. 71. Harvey, De motu cordis, 37. 72. Harvey, De motu cordis, 57. 73. Harvey, De motu cordis, 68–69. Chapter Two. The Porous Heart 1. See Stansfeld and Marmot, Stress and the Heart. 2. Jager, Book of the Heart. 3. Sontag, Illness as Metaphor. 4. On normative sensory function as it was understood in the medieval world and expanded notions of the sensory, see Nichols, Kablitz, and Calhoun, Rethinking the Medieval Senses. 5. Albert the Great, trans. Kitchell and Resnick, De animalibus, 997. 6. “Organum enim & instrumentum gustus, (ut Philosophus dicit) est aliquot intrinsecum circa cor, & similiter, organum tactus. Nam ad alios tres sensus derivat virtus sensitiva, ex corde mediante cerebro, ita quod a corde primo venit ad cerebrum, & a cerebro postea ad ipsos sensus.” All translations of Giovanni da San Gimignano are my own. 7. Joannes de Sancto Geminiano (Giovanni da San Gimignano), Summa de exemplis, vol. 6, c. LXV: 194. 8. Penso, La medicina medioevale, 175. 9. The mouth was a particularly important portal in the body, potentially opening the way to two different systems, the spiritual system in the heart and the

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digestive system in the stomach and intestines. The sensation of taste was a means of judging those substances entering by that gateway. The sweetness of the Host is a sign of its holiness, a sweetness that indicates that this substance is routed to the heart. Indeed, it was believed that the Host passed directly into the heart, bypassing the digestive system. See Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, and Caciola, Discerning Spirits. 10. Giovanni da San Gimignano, Summa de exemplis, vol. 6, c. XIII: 167. 11. On the importance of Christ’s blood to Catherine of Siena as evidenced by this letter, see Bynum, Wonderful Blood, 164–165. 12. Laurent, Il Processo Castellano, 43. There is a long debate on the authenticity of letter 273, the identity of the condemned man and the actuality of the execution. Robert Fawtier is the source of these doubts in La double expérience de Catherine Benincasa, 122–132, 220–222. Dupré Thesedier dismisses these doubts as “original and disconcerting” in his article on Catherine in the Dizionario biografico degli Italiani, XXII: 364. Anna Imelde Galletti’s archival work in “Uno capo nelle mani mie,” 121–128, supports the identification of the young man as Niccolò di Toldo. 13. For a succinct and thorough summary of the affair and related bibliography, see Suzanne Noffke, The Letters of Catherine of Siena (Binghamton, N.Y.: State University of New York, 1988), 1:82–84. Niccolò’s sentence may be found in Laurent, Il Processo Castellano (Documenti), 1:31. 14. Catherine of Siena, Lettere, 4:175: “Ma la smisurata e affocata bontà di Dio lo ingannò, creandogli tanto affetto ed amore nel desiderio di Dio, che non sapeva stare senza lui, dicendo: ‘Stà meco, e non mi abbandonare. E così non starò altro che bene; e muoio contento.’ E teneva il capo suo in sul petto mio. Io allora sentivo uno giubilo e un odore del sangue suo; e non era senza l’odore del mio, il quale io desidero di spandere per lo dolce sposo Gesù.” 15. Thomas of Cantimpré, Liber de natura rerum 1.47:49: “Cor principium est vite, ut dicit Aristotiles, et est principium omnis motus et omnis sensus in corde. . . . Et anhelitus est per pulmonem propter principium quod est in corde; et anhelitus aeris primum vadit ad interius cordis.” 16. See Klein, “Spirito peregrino,” and Agamben, Stanze, particularly part three. 17. William of Auvergne, “De universo,” 1:1042. The translation appears with

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commentary in Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 189. In her book, Caciola describes how spirit possessions were mapped onto different parts of the body according to their merit. The heart was viewed as the only worthy space for divine possessions; demons were confi ned to the bowels. See particularly chapter 4 and her article “Mystics, Demoniacs and the Physiology of Spirit Possession.” 18. Notions of the spirits and the soul were frequently conflated. See Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 180–183. On meanings of blood in the medieval and Renaissance periods, see Piero Camporesi, The Juice of Life: The Symbolic and Magic Significance of Blood, trans. Robert R. Barr (New York: Continuum, 1995). 19. Catherine of Siena, Lettere, 5:176–177 (273): “La bocca sua non diceva se non, Gesù, e, Catarina. E, così dicendo, ricevetti il capo nelle mani mie, fermando l’occhio nella divina bontà, e dicendo: ‘Io voglio.’ ” 20. Catherine of Siena, Lettere, 5:177 (273): “Allora si vedeva Dio-e-Uomo, come si vedesse la chiarità del sole; e stava aperto, e riceveva il sangue . . . poichè ebbe ricevuto il sangue e il desiderio suo, ed egli ricevette l’anima sua, la quale mise nella bottiga aperta del costato suo. . . . Con quanta dolcezza e amore aspettava quella anima partita dal corpo! Voltò l’occhio della misericordia verso di lei, quando venne a intrare dentro nel costato bagnato nel sangue suo, il quale valeva per lo sangue del Figliuolo di Dio. . . . Riposto che fu, l’anima mia si riposò in pace e in quiete, in tanto odore di sangue, che io non potevo sostenere di levarmi il sangue, che mi era venuto addosso, di lui.” 21. Park, Secrets of Women, 73; Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment; and Hamburger, Nuns as Artist s, particularly the chapters entitled “Wounding Sight” and “The House of the Heart.” 22. Bonaventure, Vita di San Francesco, 207–208. “Onde, partendosi quella visione, sì gli lasciò un mirabile ardore dell’amore di Cristo e lascogli nel corpo suo mirabile impressione di segni, chè di presente, partita la visione, nelle sue membra rimasero li segni delle piaghe di Cristo, siccome egli aveva veduto nella predetta visione, in quella imagine d’uomo crocifisso.” 23. Jeffrey Hamburger’s Nuns as Artist s analyzes drawings by nuns in which the heart is depicted as a house, open to the presence of Christ. See particularly pages 138, 158, and 163–164.

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24. Purgatorio 26.98–99. Singleton, 285. Petrocchi, 3:452: “Il padre / mio e de li altri miei miglior che mai / rime d’amor usar dolci e leggiadre.” 25. It is not clear whether it is appropriate to refer to this as a school. Many of these notions are projected backward through Dante. It is clear that these poets were in conversation and sent poems to each other. 26. See, for example, Linda Paterson’s “Development of the courtly canso,” 34. 27. Guido Guinizelli, “Al cor gentil rempaira sempre amore,” in Cudini, Poesia italiana, 327–328, 11–20. 28. See Albert the Great, Book of Minerals. See also Durling and Martinez, Time and the Crystal. 29. Guinizelli, “Al cor gentil,” 328, ll. 31–32. “Fere lo sol lo fango tutto ’l giorno: / vile reman, né ’l sol perde calore.” 30. Farai un vers de dreyt nien: non er de mi ni d’autra gen, non er d’amor ni de joven, ni de ren au, qu’enans fo trobatz en durmen sobre chevau. Guillaume IX, “Farai un vers de dreyt nien,” in Lyrics of the Troubadours and Trouvères: An Anthology and a History, translated and introduced by Frederick Goldin (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1983), 24–25. On William IX, see Daniel Heller-Roazen, “The Matter of Language,” 869. 31. “D’entr’al tuo cor si mosse un spiritello, / escì per li occhi e vennem’a ferire, / quando guardai lo tuo viso amoroso; / e fe’ il camin pe’ miei sì fero e snello, / che ’l core e l’alma fece via fuggire.” Capitoli per una st oria del cuore, ed. Francesco Bruni, et al. (Palermo: Sellerio editore, 1988), 111. Lance Donaldson-Evans notes the piercing eye already present in sixth-century Arabic literature in Love’s Fatal Glance, 26–27. See also Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment, chapter two. 32. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, 108. 33. See Stewart, Arrow of Love, 88–89. 34. Peter of Limoges, De Oculo Morali, quoted in Clark, “Optics for Preachers,”

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342. Also see chapter two of Biernoff , Sight and Embodiment, and Dallas G. Denery, Seeing and Being Seen in the Later Medieval World: Optics, Theology and Religious Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 75–115. 35. Fernel, Physiologia, 473. 36. Dante Alighieri, Vita nova, ed. Gorni, 7:4. My translation. 37. Dante Alighieri, Vita nova, ed. Gorni, 15:1–3. My translation. See Harrison, Body of Beatrice, 48. 38. Purgatorio 24.49–55. Singleton, 261. I have altered the translation slightly for more literal approximation of the Italian. Petrocchi, 3:411–412: Ma dì s’i’ veggio qui colui che fore trasse le nove rime, cominciando “Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore.” E io a lui: “I’ mi son un che, quando Amor mi spira, noto, e a quel modo ch’e’ ditta dentro vo significando.” 39. See John Freccero’s Dante: Poetics of Conversion for a discussion of the parallelism of Purgatorio 24 and Statius’ explanation of the formation of the embryo. 40. Purgatorio 25.70–72. Singleton, 273. Petrocchi, 3:432: “Lo motor primo a lui si volge lieto / sovra tant’ arte di natura, e spira / spirito novo, di vertù repleto.” 41. Purgatorio 25.76–77. Singleton, 273. Petrocchi, 3:433: “Il calor del sol che si fa vino, / giunto a l’omor che de la vite cola.” 42. See Mancini, who speaks of the “esemplificazione—frequentissima, del resto, dall’innografia mariana in tema di concezione e parto virginei—del raggio luminoso . . . capace di attraversare il vetro ‘sanza far rottura.’ ” La figura nel cuore fra cortesia e mistica, 16. 43. Paradiso 9.73–81. My translation. Petrocchi 4:145–146: “Dio vede tutto, e tuo veder s’inluia”, diss’ io, “ beato spirto, sì che nulla voglia di sè a te puot’ esser fuia. Dunque . . . perché non satisface a’ miei disii?

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Già non attendere’ io tua dimanda, s’io m’intuassi, come tu t’inmii.” On the fi nal vision in Dante’s Paradiso, see Mazzotta, Dante’s Vision, especially chapter 8. 44. On bodies in Paradiso see Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 ( New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Rachel Jacoff, “‘Our Bodies, Our Selves’: The Body in the Commedia,” in Sparks and Seeds: Medieval Literature and Its Afterlife; Essays in Honor of John Freccero, ed. Dana E. Stewart and Alison Cornish (Turnhoust: Brepols, 2000), 119–137; and Cestaro, Dante and the Grammar of the Nursing Body. 45. On different notions of what “vision” could actually mean, and a detailed analysis of different types of medieval visions, see Newman, “What Did It Mean to Say ‘I Saw’?” 46. Paradiso 33.58–63. Singleton, 375. I have altered the translation slightly for a more literal rendering of what exactly is going on in the pilgrim’s heart. Petrocchi, 4:549: Qual è colüi che sognando vede, che dopo ’l sogno la passione impressa rimane, e l’altro a la mente non riede, cotal son io, che quasi tutta cessa mia visïone, e ancor mi distilla nel core il dolce che nacque da essa. 47. Sonia Gentili’s article “Due defi nizioni di cuore,” 8, speaks of the medieval understanding of the lago del cor as a “cavità cardiaca in cui si raccoglie il sangue nell’individuo biologicamente vivo.” 48. Paradiso 25.2. My translation. Petrocchi 4:409: “ ’l poema sacro / al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra.” 49. Dante Alighieri, Vita nuova, trans. Cervigni and Vasta, 48; Vita nova, ed. Gorni, 3:2: “Le sue parole si mossero per venire a li miei orecchi.” 50. Mondino de’ Liuzzi, Anothomia. The translation is my own. 51. Shakespeare, King Lear, I.1.91–92. 52. On Guido Cavalcanti’s “haunting” of Dante see Robert Harrison, “Ghost of Guido Cavalcanti.” This article contains numerous invaluable insights into

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the nature of Guido’s poetry, including reflections on Guido’s approach to sensation. 53. Cavalcanti, Rime, 9:1–4. Io non pensava che lo cor giammai Avesse di sospir’ tormento tanto, Che dell’anima mia nascesse pianto most rando per lo viso agli occhi morte. 54. Cavalcanti, “Era in penser d’amore,” in Rime, 30:13–16. Elle con gli occhi lor si volser tanto che vider come ’l cor era ferito e come un spiritel nato di pianto era per mezzo de lo colpo uscito. 55. Cavalcanti, “Era in penser d’amor,” in Rime, 30:23–26. ’L tuo colpo, che nel cor si vede, fu tratto d’occhi di troppo valore, che dentro vi lasciaro uno splendore ch’i’ nol posso mirare. Dimmi se ricordare Di quegli occhi ti puoi. 56. Filippo degli Agazzari, “Gli Assempri,” in Vitale, Antologia, 1106–1108: “D’un fanciullo religioso, al quale apparbe Gesù Cristo in forma d’un venerabile uomo, e mostrogli la piaga del costato. E subbitamente gli mostrò la piaga del costato, e de le mani, e de’ piedi; de le quali uscì tanto splendore, che quello del sole non è cavelle, respective, e tutte parevano sanguinose.” 57. Cavalcanti, Rime, 35:21–26, 37–40: Tu, voce sbigottita e deboletta ch’esci piangendo de lo cor dolente, coll’anima e con questa ballatetta va’ ragionando della st rutta mente. 58. Cavalcanti, Rime, 30:45–52: Vanne a Tolosa, ballatetta mia, ed entra quetamenta a la Dorata . . . dinanzi a quella di cui t’ho pregata;

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e s’ella ti riceve, dille con voce leve: “per merzé vegno a voi.” 59. Inferno 13.31–45. Singleton, 131. Petrocchi, 2:210–212: Allor porsi la mano un poco avante e colsi un ramicel da un gran pruno; e ’l tronco suo gridò: “Perché mi schiante?”. Da che fatto fu poi di sangue bruno, ricominciò a dir: “Perchè mi scerpi? non hai tu spirto di pietade alcuno?” ................................... Come d’un stizzo verde ch’arso sia da l’un de’ capi, che da l’altro geme e cigola per vento che va via, sì che de la scheggia rotta usciva insieme parole e sangue; ond’ io lasciai la cima cadere, e stetti come l’uom che teme. 60. Inferno 13.102. Singleton, 135. Petrocchi, 2:219: “Fanno dolor, e al dolor fenestra.” 61. Inferno 10.69. “Non fiere li occhi suoi lo dolce lume?” Singleton, 102. Petrocchi, 2:166. 62. Dante Alighieri, Vita nova, ed. Gorni, 17:7. Most rasi sì piacente a chi la mira, che dà per gli occhi una dolcezza al core, che ’ntender no la può chi no la prova: e par che de la sua labbia si mova un spirito soave pien d’amore, che va dicendo a l’anima: Sospira. 63. Dante Alighieri, Vita nova, ed. Gorni, 30:10–13. Oltre la spera che più larga gira passa ’l sospiro ch’esce del mio core: intelligenza nova, che l’Amore piangendo mette in lui, pur su lo tira. Quand’elli è giunto là dove disira,

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vede una donna, che riceve onore, e luce sì, che per lo suo splendore lo peregrino spirito la mira. Vedela tal, che quando ’l mi ridice, io no lo intendo, sì parla sottile al cor dolente, che lo fa parlare. So io che parla di quella gentile, però che spesso ricorda Beatrice, sì ch’io lo ’ntendo ben, donne mie care. 64. See Harrison, Body of Beatrice, 123–126, for a discussion of the new awareness of distance and space at the end of the Vita nuova. 65. See Freccero, Dante: Poetics of Conversion. 66. In his book Chaucer’s Body, R. Allen Shoaf proposes that the phrase “anxiety of circulation” provides the terminology to describe a troubled relationship to different kinds of accelerating exchange in the fourteenth century, from coinage to vernacular texts to revolutionary ideas. See also Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations. 67. Caciola, Discerning Spirits. 68. Ibn Khatimah, “Plague Tract” (1348), in Byrne, Black Death, 155–158. 69. For a wealth of information on reactions to the Black Death 1348–1349, see Arrizabalaga, “Facing the Black Death.” This citation appears on page 251 of that article. 70. See Arrizabalaga, “Facing the Black Death,” 248. 71. See Arrizabalaga, “Facing the Black Death,” 261. 72. Cited in Arrizabalaga, “Facing the Black Death,” 263. 73. See Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine, 74–76, 191–192, 211–212, 232. 74. Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, trans. Guido Waldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 7–8; I have made some changes to Waldman’s translation. Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Branca, 1:17. “E fu questa pestilenza di maggior forza per ciò che essa dagli infermi di quella per lo comunicare insieme s’avventava a’ sani, non altramenti che faccia il fuoco alle cose secche o unte quando molto gli sono avvicinate.”

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75. Boccaccio, Decameron, trans. Waldman, 10; Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Branca, 21–22: “E lasciamo stare che l’uno cittadino l’altro schifasse e quasi niuno vicino avesse dell’altro cura . . . l’un fratello l’altro abbandonava e il zio il nepote e la sorella il fratello e spesse volte la donna il suo marito; e, che maggior cosa è e quasi non credibile, li padri e le madri i figliuoli, quasi loro non fossero, di visitare e di servire schifavano.” 76. Giuseppe Mazzotta sees Boccaccio’s location of the swelling at the groin as indicating that he sees the genitals as diseased. This follows Thucydides, Hippocrates, Galen, Lucretius, and Gregory of Tours. Mazzotta, World at Play, 28–29. 77. Lucretius, Nature of Things, VI, l. 1209. 78. Mazzotta, World at Play, 30; Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages; Ciavolella, La “malattia d’amore.” 79. Mazzotta, World at Play, 32–33. “Fuggansi abbracciamenti di femmine e tutti gli exercitii disordinati, . . . Anchora si fugghino tutti e puzzi di cose corrotte di corpi umani e d’animali o di gente inferma. . . . Anchora in quanto è possibile, studi l’uomo di fuggire tutte quelle cose, che anno a contristare la mente. Imperochè per le passioni malinconiche il cuore sbigottisci, e li sogni non turbano. . . . Ma per lo contrario studi a le e cose, che abbono a conducere riso, donde lo cuore si dilecti, come è cantare e sonare o udire cose giocose e vaghi narramenti. . . . Usare . . . giuochi di tavole o di scacchi, nè altri giuochi non sono utili per lo fiato che rende l’uno a l’altro.” 80. Boccaccio, Decameron, trans. Waldman, 390; Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Branca, 2:727: “Per ciò è da guardare e come e quando e con cui e similmente dove si motteggia.” 81. The plague-ridden body, as described in a 1447 text written by an anonymous Italian practitioner, is particularly leaky, leaching all manner of stinking fluids, from sweat to vomit to urine to blood. Byrne, Black Death, 169. 82. Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) reached the conclusion on his own that Galen was wrong and that the arteria venalis (pulmonary vein for us) did not convey air to the heart. Singer and Underwood, Short History of Medicine, 89. Vesalius also wrote, in the second edition of his Fabrica, that he was unsure about pores in the septum. His first edition was published in the same year as Copernicus’ treatise.

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83. Harvey, De motu cordis, 2. 84. Harvey, De motu cordis, 67. 85. Harvey, De motu cordis, 3. 86. Fuchs, Mechanization, 57. 87. Harvey, De motu cordis, 6. 88. Harvey, De motu cordis, 9. 89. Harvey, De motu cordis, 13–14. 90. Harvey, De motu cordis, 13. Chapter Three. The Engendering Heart 1. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, I.1.7–10, p. 91. 2. See Erickson, Language of the Heart, 61–88, for a discussion of gender in the narrative and rhetorical dimensions of the 1653 English translation of De motu cordis. 3. Harvey, De motu cordis, 59. 4. Erickson, Language of the Heart, xii. 5. Cadden, Meanings of Sex Diff erence. 6. William of Auvergne, The Soul, ch. 2, part 9, p. 83, explains that motion is the principle and cause of heat in large and earthly bodies. Aquinas, De motu cordis. 7. See Pagel, William Harvey’s Biological Ideas, 90. 8. Aquinas, De motu cordis. 9. Aquinas, De motu cordis. 10. Aquinas, De motu cordis. 11. See Laurenza, “Cuore, carattere e passioni,” on Leonardo’s notions of thermodynamics and his medieval precedents. 12. Mondino, Anothomia. This translation is my own. 13. Johannes de Ketham, Fasciculo di Medicina, I:108, note 111. 14. See Mondino, Anothomia, note 470. 15. Rocca, Galen on the Brain. 16. Mondino, Anothomia. 17. Mondino, Anothomia. 18. Mondino, Anothomia.

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N o t e s t o Pa g e s 10 5 – 111

19. Mondino, Anothomia. 20. “Sol enim iacto radio lucem et calorem ministrat colorumque varietatem ducit in actum; cor quoque mediantibus venis et nervis et arteriis primae virtutis actum eiaculans ceteras omnes circumquaque distribuit in susceptiva singularium.” Alfred of Sareshel, De motu cordis, 94. See Ricklin, “Le coeur, soleil du corps,” 124. Ricklin describes a new cardiocentrism in 1200, a symbolic constellation that compares the heart and the sun, picked up in Harvey’s De motu cordis. 21. Bono, “Medical Spirits,” 121; Albert the Great, De animalibus, ed. Stadler, XX.1.3, p. 1278. “Et ideo spiritus qui est in animalium corporibus, est vapor resolutus ab humido seminali in generatione.” 22. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, II.iii.736b, p. 171. 23. For a complete account on the very “ambiguous” answers to the question of the origin of semen, see Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine, 52–60. Semen was alternately associated with the brain, the blood (in various forms), and the heat of the vital spirit. See chapter 1 for the disagreement between natural philosophers and physicians on the formation of sperm. 24. Cadden, Meanings of Sex Diff erence. See also Sissa, “Subtle Bodies.” 25. For a thorough discussion of sexuality in the Middle Ages, see Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine. Also see Salisbury, “Gendered Sexuality.” On Michele Savonarola’s fifteenth-century analysis of the temperature differences between male and female hearts, see Jacquart, “La morphologie du corps feminine,” in La science médicale occidentale, 81–98. 26. Lemay, Women’s Secrets, 127. 27. Laqueur, Making Sex. For an in-depth analysis of the fluidity of gender boundaries in medieval spirituality see Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption, 218–221 and the chapters entitled “Continuity, Survival and Resurrection” and “ . . . And Woman His Humanity”; and Bynum, Jesus as Mother. 28. Fausto-Sterling, Sexing the Body, 3. 29. Laqueur, Making Sex. 30. Park and Nye, “Destiny is Anatomy,” 53–57. See also Park, Secrets of Women; and Jacquart and Thomasset, Sexuality and Medicine. 31. Cadden, Meanings of Sex Diff erence, 132–133.

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N o t e s t o Pa g e s 111 – 115

32. Cadden, Meanings of Sex Diff erence, 171. 33. Laurenza, “Cuore, carattere e passioni,” part 2, cap. XXVI, p. 232. 34. See Laurenza, “Cuore, carattere e passioni,” 234. “Signa corporis calidae complexionis Corpora naturaliter calida . . . multis abundant capillis et pilis . . . quae sunt grossii et rici quod contingit a multo calore cordis ut patet in leone . . .” 35. Cadden, Meanings of Sex Diff erence, 182–183. 36. Green, Trotula, 117. 37. Green, Trotula, 113, 115. 38. Cadden, Meanings of Sex Diff erence. 39. Cavalcanti, “Chi è questa che vèn,” Rime, 4:2: “fa tremar di chiaritate l’âre.” 40. Caciola, “Breath, Heart, Guts”: “We have widespread evidence from the thirteenth through fi fteenth centuries that describes women’s natural affi nity for techniques of spiritual dislocation (ecstasy), as well as their particular vulnerability to spiritual invasions (possession).” See also Dyan Elliott, “The Physiology of Rapture and Female Spirituality,” in Biller and Minnis, Medieval Theology and the Natural Body. 41. Dante Alighieri, Vita nuova, trans. Cervigni and Vasta, 121. 42. Gianfranco Contini calls for an end to the debate over the identity of the “donna Pietra,” stating that she is simply the link between Dante’s most technical poems. Dante Alighieri, Rime, 149. While Franco Ferrucci’s article “Plenilunio sulla selva: il Convivio, le petrose, la Commedia” suggests that more than four of Dante’s poems ought to be considered petrose, I will employ the term petrose as the bulk of Dante criticism has, in reference to: “Io son venuto al punto della rota,” “Al poco giorno e al gran cerchio d’ombra,” “Amor tu vedi ben che questa donna,” and “Così nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro.” Other crucial studies of the rime petrose are: Durling and Martinez, Time and the Crystal; Freccero, “Medusa: The Letter and the Spirit,” in Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, 119–136; Mazzotta, Dante, Poet of the Desert, 285–286. 43. Dante Alighieri, Rime, 43:14–22: Levasi de la rena d’Etïopia lo vento peregrin che l’aere turba, per la spera del sol ch’ora la scalda; e passa il mare, onde conduce copia

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N o t e s t o Pa g e s 116 – 11 8

di nebbia tal che, s’altro non la sturba, questo emisperio chiude tutto e salda; e poi si solve, e cade in bianca falda di fredda neve ed in noiosa pioggia, onde l’aere s’attrista tutto e piagne. I’m using Joseph Tusiani’s translation, with alterations as needed for literal meaning. Tusiani’s translation is available online: http://www.italianstudies .org/poetry/index.htm (accessed May 13, 2009). 44. Dante Alighieri, Rime, 43:59–61: “La terra fa un suol che par di smalto, / e l’acqua morta si converte in vetro / per la freddura che di fuor la serra.” 45. Dante Alighieri, Rime, 45:31–32: “Così dinanzi al sembiante freddo / mi ghiaccia sopra il sangue d’ogne tempo.” 46. Dante Alighieri, Rime, 45:25–26: “Segnor, tu sai che per algente freddo / l’acqua diventa cristallina petra.” 47. Albert the Great, De animalibus, ed. Stadler, I.3.4. “Meditationes vero, quoniam quae declinant ad gaudium, sicut fiducia et bona spes, significant cordis fortitudinem et aequalitatem complexionis. . . . Quae autem declinant ad timorem et tristitiam, significant excessum in frigitate ipsius.” 48. Dante Alighieri, De vulgari eloquentia, Liber secundus, IX:2. 49. Albert the Great, De animalibus, X.1–X.2.1. 50. Dante Alighieri, Rime, 43:10–11: “Non disgombra / un sol penser d’amore, ond’io son carco.” 51. Dante Alighieri, Rime, 43:1–3: “Io son venuto al punto de la rota / che l’orizzonte, quando il sol si corca, / ci partorisce il geminato cielo.” 52. Dante Alighieri, Rime, 43:49–52: “La crudele spina / però Amor di cor non la mi tragge; / per ch’io son fermo di portarla sempre / ch’io sarò in vita, s’io vivesse sempre.” 53. See Durling and Martinez, Time and the Crystal. Dante Alighieri, Rime, 43:7: “quel pianeta che conforta il gelo.” 54. Durling and Martinez, Time and the Crystal, 82. Ferrucci suggests that this pianeta is the moon, rather than Saturn. In either case, it seems safe to associate the pianeta che conforta il gelo with a melancholic state. 55. Ciavolella’s La “malattia d’amore” offers an in-depth study of medieval concep-

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N o t e s t o Pa g e s 119 – 1 23

tions of the illness that I believe is at work in the petrose. Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages. 56. Ciavolella, La malattia d’amore, 66–67. 57. Dante Alighieri, Rime, 43:12–13: “La mente mia, ch’è piú dura che petra / in tener forte imagine di petra.” 58. Dante Alighieri, Rime, 45:65–66: “La novità che per tua forma luce, / che non fu mai pensata in alcun tempo.” 59. Albert the Great, De animalibus, trans. Kitchell and Resnick, 996. 60. The debt that Dante’s lyrics owe Arnaut Daniel is discussed in Bondanella, “Arnaut Daniel and Dante’s ‘Rime Petrose.’ ” Bondanella points out that perhaps critics have assumed too much in that relationship, and that there are important thematic and stylistic differences between Dante’s and Daniel’s lyrics. I am concerned with the formal level of imitation, particularly in the sestina and the double sestina, that Dante acknowledges in his De vulgari eloquentia. 61. The lines are quoted from Shakespeare, King Lear, II.2.246–248. 62. See Peterson, “Historica Passio,” for a summary of the debate on these lines and a historical reading of hysterica passio, not as hysteria, but as something that was understood to be a physical female condition or disorder. In other words, she argues that Shakespeare intends for Lear to misdiagnose himself in order to show the reader something about the king’s character. 63. “Book on the Conditions of Women,” in Green, Trotula, 83–85. 64. See Peterson, “Historica Passio.” 65. See Dixon, Perilous Chastity. 66. See Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference, 275, and Cadden, “Western Medicine and Natural Philosophy,” 57–59. 67. Dante Alighieri, Rime 46:66–73. My translation. 68. Inferno 1.19–21. Singleton, 5. Petrocchi, 2:6. “Paura . . . nel lago del cor.” Richard Lansing points out rightly that the lago del cor here really means the concavity in the heart in which the spiriti dwell. See Lansing, “The Pageantry of Dante’s Verse,” Dante Studies vol. 126 (August 2008). 69. Inferno 1.1–3. Singleton, 3. Petrocchi, 2:3. 70. Inferno 1.19–21. Singleton, 5. Petrocchi, 2:6. “Fu la paura un poco queta, / che nel lago del cor m’era durata / la notte ch’i’ passai con tanta pieta.”

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N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 23 – 1 2 6

71. Dante Alighieri, Rime, 46:45–47: “E ’l sangue, ch’è per le vene disperso, / fuggendo corre verso / lo cor, che ’l chiama; ond’io rimango bianco.” 72. Albert’s De animalibus informs us that fear is related to a problem of inadequate heat. 73. Inferno 1.25–26. Singleton, 5. Petrocchi, 2:6–7: “L’animo mio, ch’ancor fuggiva, / si volse a retro a rimirar lo passo / che non lasciò già mai persona viva.” 74. Inferno 1.61–65. Singleton, 7. Petrocchi, 2: 12: Dinanzi a li occhi mi si fu off erto chi per lungo silenzio parea fioco. Quando vidi costui nel gran diserto, “Miserere di me,” gridai a lui. 75. Inferno 2.61–63. Singleton, 17. Petrocchi, 2:29: “L’amico mio, e non de la ventura, / ne la deserta piaggia è impedito / sì nel cammin, che volt’ è per paura.” 76. John Freccero shows that the petrose are textually recalled in the ninth canto of the Inferno and suggests that this moment represents a risk of blockage due to the threat of idolatry. Giuseppe Mazzotta adds that “Così nel mio parlar voglio essere aspro” depicts a specifically Medusian image of what he terms the poet’s madness. Rime 1:14–17: Non truovo schermo ch’ella non mi spezzi né luogo che dal suo viso m’asconda; ché, come fior di fronda, così de la mia mente tien la cima. This image of the poet as defenseless Perseus is complexified by the fact that the Medusa is within, fi rmly implanted in the lover’s mind. According to Mazzotta, the call in the Inferno to intelletti sani brings to light the issue that fascination with the donna petrosa or the Medusa is an insane love suggesting the sin of heresy, a failure of understanding. Not only is this fascination an insane love, it is an unhealthy one. The intelletto sano capable of proper interpretation must be connected to the natural circulation within the body, to that flow of spiriti responsible for warmth, health, and, as we have seen above, belief and understanding. 77. Inferno 9.52–53, 55–57. Singleton, 93. Petrocchi, 2: “Vegna Medusa: sì ’l farem

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N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 2 6 – 1 2 8

di smalto,” / dicevan tutte riguardando in giuso; / “Volgiti ‘n dietro e tien lo viso chiuso; ché se ’l Gorgón si mostra e tu ’l vedessi, / nulla sarebbe di tornar mai suso.” 78. Inferno 9.67–70. Singleton, 93. Petrocchi, 2:151. non altrimenti fatto che d’un vento impetüoso per li avversi ardori, che fier la selva e sanz’ alcun rattento li rami schianta, abbatte e porta fori. 79. Inferno 9.90. 80. Inferno 32.1–6. Singleton, 339. Petrocchi, 2:543: S’io avessi le rime aspre e chiocce come si converrebbe al tristo buco sovra ’l qual pontan tutte l’altre rocce, io premerei di mio concetto il suco più pienamente; ma perch’ io non l’abbo, non sanza tema a dicer mi conduco. 81. Dante Alighieri, Rime, 46:1-2: “Cosí nel mio parlar voglio esser aspro / com’è ne li atti questa bella petra.” 82. Inferno 32.23–26. Singleton, 341. Petrocchi, 2:546: “un lago che per gelo / avea di vetro e non d’acqua sembiante. / Non fece al corso suo sì grosso velo / di verno la Danoia in Osterlicchi.” 83. Inferno 32.138–139. Singleton, 347. Petrocchi, 2:560: “nel mondo suso ancora io te ne cangi, / se quella con ch’io parlo non si secca.” 84. Inferno 33.4–9. Singleton, 349. Petrocchi, 2:561–562: Tu vuo’ ch’io rinovelli disperato dolor che ’l cor mi preme già pur pensando, pria ch’io ne favelli. Ma se le mie parole esser dien seme che frutti infamia al traditor ch’i’ rodo, parlare e lagrimar vedrai insieme. 85. Inferno 33.49–52. Singleton, 353. Petrocchi, 2:567–568: “Io non piangëa, sì dentro impetrai: / piangevan elli; e Anselmuccio mio / disse: ‘Tu guardi sì, padre! che hai?’ / Perciò non lagrimai, nè rispuos’io.”

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N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 2 8 – 133

86. Inferno 33.61–63. Singleton, 353. Petrocchi, 2:569: “ ‘Padre, assai ci fia men doglia / se tu mangi di noi: tu ne vestisti / queste misere carni, e tu le spoglia.’” Inferno 33.66: “Ahi dura terra, perché non t’apristi?” Petrocchi, 2:569. 87. Inferno 33.40–42. Singleton, 351. Petrocchi, 2:566: “Ben se’ crudel, se tu già non ti duoli / pensando ciò che ’l mio cor s’annunziava; / e se non piangi, di che pianger suoli?” 88. Durling and Martinez note that annunziava gains particular weight here due to the importance of the Annunication. Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, trans. Durling, 1:527, n. 41. 89. Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 134. 90. See chapter 2. 91. Inferno 33.112–114. Singleton, 357. Petrocchi, 2:575–576: “Levatemi dal viso i duri veli, / sì ch’ïo sfoghi ’l duol che ’l cor m’impregna, / un poco, pria che ’l pianto si raggeli.” 92. William of Auvergne, The Soul, 83. 93. The training involves a new conception of a poet’s relationship to his masters or predecessors. The problems of poetic competition exposed in the petrose and in the Inferno are gradually neutralized through gender alterations in Purgatorio and Paradiso. See Schnapp, “Virgilio Madre e Beatrice Ammiraglio.” As Schnapp has shown, the Virgin’s generosity becomes central as a model for relations between poets, while poetic genealogies are redrawn along matrilinear lines. See especially p. 237. 94. Purgatorio 30.85–99. Singleton, 333. Petrocchi, 3:525: “Lo gel che m’era intorno al cor ristretto, / spirito e acqua fessi, e con angoscia / de la bocca e de li occhi uscì del petto.” For a study of the recurrence of the language of the petrose in Purgatorio 30, interpreted as a reevaluation of earthly love, see Sturm-Maddox, “Rime Petrose and the Purgatorial Palinode.” 95. Paradiso 1.19–21. Singleton, 5. Petrocchi, 4:5: “Entra nel petto mio, e spira tue / sì come quando Marsïa traesti / de la vagina de le membra sue.” 96. See Levenstein, “Re-Formation of Marsyas.” 97. Francis of Assisi, “Epistola I.” Cited in Park, Secrets of Women, 60. 98. Iacopone da Todi, “Omo chi vòl parlare”: “La caritate ’l iogne / e con Deo me coniogne; / iogne la vilitate / cun la divina bontate. / Ecco nasce un amore, /

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N o t e s t o Pa g e s 133 – 13 6

c’à emprenato el core, / pleno de disiderio, / d’enfocato misterio. / Preno enliquedisce, / languenno parturesce; / e parturesce un ratto, / nel terzo cel è tratto.” 65.61–72. Mancini, 192. See Howie, Claust rophilia, 90–101. 99. See Howie, Claust rophilia. 100. Paradiso 33.34–37. Singleton, 373. Petrocchi, 4:546: “Ancor ti prego, regina, che puoi / ciò che tu vuoli, che conservi sani, / dopo tanto veder, li affetti suoi. / Vinca tua guardia i movimenti umani.” 101. See Mazzotta, Poet of the Desert, 264–266. 102. For comments on the prominence of womb imagery in Paradiso 33, see West, Lectura Dantis Virginiana, 16–17. “nel ventre tuo si raccese l’amore / per lo cui caldo ne l’etterna pace / così è germinato questo fiore.” Paradiso 33.7–9; Singleton, 371. Petrocchi, 4:543. 103. Paradiso 25.2. Singleton, 279. Petrocchi, 4:409: “al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra.” There is an interesting connection to be made here with Petrarch’s poetry, in which the desire for a mystical encounter is continually thwarted as the lyric becomes the space in which that frustration is documented. Exhibiting the same self-conscious awareness of spiritual failure that we witness in the petrose, Petrarch’s poetry elaborates the blockage of isolated obsession. In the Canzoniere, poetry and mysticism are defi nitively separated, as poetry is found to be reflective of the mind, of what is specifically human and flawed. Dante’s rime petrose, through Petrarch, create a lasting legacy of melancholic lyrics that dramatize their divorce from faith, a legacy defined by its distance from the alternative offered in the Commedia. Ironically, a poetics of infertility engenders perhaps the greatest and most enduring poetic tradition of all, Petrarchism. For perspectives on the relationship between Petrarch’s Canzoniere and the petrose, see Antoni, “Esperienze stilistiche petrose da Dante al Petrarca,” which speaks of a petrosità puramente di contenuto in Petrarch; and Robert M. Durling’s introduction to Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, 1–35. 104. “ ‘O Dio eterno, ricevi il sacrifi zio della vita mia in questo corpo mistico della santa Chiesa. Io non ho che dare altro se non quello che hai dato a me. Tolli il cuore dunque, e premilo sopra la faccia di questa Sposa.’ Allora Dio eterno, vollendo l’occhio della clemenzia sua, divelleva il cuore, e premevalo nella santa Chiesa. E con tanta forza l’aveva tratto a sè, che, se non che subito (non

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N o t e s t o Pa g e s 13 6 – 1 4 4

volendo che ’l vasello del corpo mio fusse rotto) il richerchiò della fortezza sua, ne sarebbe andata la vita.” Letter 371, 5:277. See Karen Scott, “Mystical Death, Bodily Death: Catherine of Siena and Raymond of Capua on the Mystic’s Encounter with God,” in Gendered Voices: Medieval Saints and Their Interpreters, ed. Catherine M. Mooney (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 136–137. 105. “Grazia sia all’altissimo Dio eterno, che ci ha posti nel campo della battaglia, come cavalieri, a combattere per la Sposa sua.” Letter 371, 5:278. 106. “La dolce Sposa sua e vostra, che tanto tempo è stata tutta impallidita . . . in coloro che si pascevano e pascono al petto suo, che per li difetti loro l’hanno mostrata pallida e inferma, succhiatole il sangue d’addosso con l’amore proprio di loro.” Letter 346, 5:162–163. 107. See Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, for analysis of notions of women’s virility and roles as co-redeemer with Christ. 108. Elena Duglioli (d. 1520) also claimed that Jesus removed her heart. See Park, Secrets of Women, 161–170, for a discussion of the post-mortem inspection of Elena’s body (no heart was found). 109. Raymond of Capua, “Legenda maior,” 3:907. My translation. 110. For a history of the trope of holy woman as dead or in near-death states, see Elliott, Proving Woman, particularly the chapter “Between Two Deaths”; and Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist, chapter 4, “On the Threshold of the Dead.” 111. Raymond of Capua, “Legenda maior,” 216, p. 915. 112. Harvey, De motu cordis, 92. 113. Harvey, De motu cordis, 92–93. 114. Harvey, De motu cordis, 103. 115. Harvey, De motu cordis, 104. 116. Harvey, De motu cordis, 105. 117. Harvey, De motu cordis, 103. Chapter Four. The Animate Heart 1. For a discussion on Galen’s performance of public vivisection and his rhetoric of power, see Gleason, “Shock and Awe.”

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N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 45 – 15 8

2. Harvey, De motu cordis, 16. 3. Harvey, De motu cordis, 16–17. 4. Harvey, De motu cordis, 17. 5. Park, Secrets of Women, 26. 6. Park, Secrets of Women; also see The Romance of the Rose. 7. Park, Secrets of Women, 155–156. 8. Park, Secrets of Women, 151. 9. Park, Secrets of Women, 13. See also Sawday, Body Emblazoned, and Carlino, Books of the Body. 10. See Siraisi, “Introduction,” in Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine, 89. 11. Fleck, Genesis and Development, 28. He adds that “the path from dissection to formulated theory is extremely complicated, indirect, and culturally conditioned” (35). 12. Mondino de’ Liuzzi, Anothomia. My translation. 13. Mondino de’ Liuzzi, Anothomia. 14. Mondino de’ Liuzzi, Anothomia. See Giorgi’s notes. 15. See Singer and Underwood, Short History of Medicine. 16. Piero Giorgi, Note 338, in Mondino de’ Liuzzi, Anothomia. 17. Mondino de’ Liuzzi, Anothomia. 18. Mondino de’ Liuzzi, Anothomia. 19. Mondino de’ Liuzzi, Anothomia. 20. Green, Trotula, 85. 21. Mondino de’ Liuzzi, Anothomia. 22. Matzke, “Legend of the Eaten Heart.” 23. For more in-depth coverage of eaten-heart imagery in Dante, in Boccaccio, and in the French context, see Doueihi, Perverse History of the Human Heart, and Huot, “Troubadour Lyric and Old French Narrative.” See also Vincensini, “Figure de l’imaginaire et figure du discours.” 24. I am employing concepts of presence effects and meaning effects throughout this chapter from Gumbrecht, Production of Presence. 25. “E fetz li traire lo cor del cors e fetz li taillar la testa; e·l cor fetz portar a son alberc e la testa atressi; e fetz lo cor raustir e far a la pebrada, e fetz lo dar a manjar a la moiller. E qan la dompna l’ac manjat, Raimon de Castel Rossillon

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N o t e s t o Pa g e s 15 8 – 16 0

li dis: “Sabetz vos so que vos avetz manjat?” Et ella dis: “Non, si non que mout es estada bona vianda e saborida”. Et el li dis q’el era lo cors d’En Guillem de Cabestaing so que ella avia manjat; et, a so q’ella·l crezes mieils, si fetz aportar la testa denan lieis. E quan la dompna vic so et auzic, ella perdet lo vezer e l’auzir. E qand ella revenc, si dis: “Seigner, ben m’avetz dat si bon manjar que ja mais non manjarai d’autre”. E qand el auzic so, el cors ab s’espaza e volc li dar sus en la testa; et ella cors ad un balcon e laisset se cazer jos, et enaissi moric.” Biographies des Troubadours, eds. Jean Boutière, Alexander H. Schutz (New York: B. Franklin, 1972), 157–158. 26. Here it is the heart and the head that are taken from the body of the lover. In variations on the Punjab tale of Raja Rasalu, Rasalu sometimes has the heart alone removed and at other times removes the heart and liver, which are then cooked together. In the Lai d’Ignaure, the betrayed husbands (in this case they are twelve) decide to feed Ignaure’s heart and penis to their wives (quoted in Doueihi, Perverse History of the Human Heart, 28): In four days we will take From him precisely this fi fth member That gave them so much pleasure. We will make a meal out of it for them. We will add to it his heart. We will make twelve servings out of it, By ruse we will have them eat it. For we cannot better avenge ourselves! The heart is actually a second thought here. The fi rst and primary notion is to have the wives consume their lover’s “fi fth member.” The sexual jealousy of the husbands prompts their desire to see the women consume that which they coveted. Castration is perhaps more at issue than rendering up the heart of love, the heart that becomes merely another castrated part. See Harrison, Body of Beatrice, 25. 27. Harrison, Body of Beatrice, 18. 28. Harrison, Body of Beatrice, 22. 29. Cavalcanti, Rime, 13: 1, 12–14: “Si giunse ritto ’l colpo al primo tratto, / che l’anima tremando si riscosse / veggendo morto ’l cor nel lato manco.”

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30. Cavalcanti, Rime, 8:9–14: I’ vo come colui ch’è fuor di vita, che pare, a chi lo sguarda, ch’omo sia fatto di rame o di pietra o di legno, che si conduca sol per maest ria e porti ne lo core una ferita che sia, com’egli è morto, aperto segno. 31. Cavalcanti, Rime, 12:12–14: “Chi gran pena sente / guarda costui, e vedrà ’l su’ core / che Morte ’l porta ’n man tagliato in croce.” 32. Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Branca, 1:567: “ ‘Donna, chente v’è paruta questa vivanda?’ ” 33. Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Branca, 1:568: “ ‘Monsignore, in buona fé ella m’è piaciuta molto.’ ” 34. Harrison, Dominion of the Dead, 92–93. 35. Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Branca, 1:568: “La donna, udito questo, alquanto stette; poi disse: ‘Come? che cosa è questa che voi m’avete fatta mangiare?’ Il cavalier rispose: ‘Quello che voi avete mangiato è stato veramente il cuore di messer Guiglielmo Guardastagno, il qual voi come disleal femina tanto amavate; e sappiate di certo che egli è stato desso, per ciò che io con queste mani gliele strappai, poco avanti che io tornassi, del petto.’ ” 36. Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Branca, 1:568: “ ‘Ma unque a Dio non piaccia che sopra a così nobil vivanda, come è stata quella del cuore d’un così valoroso e così cortese cavaliere come messere Guiglielmo Guardastagno fu, mai altra vivanda vada!’ . . . Quasi tutta si disfece.” 37. Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Branca, 1:569: “In una medesima sepoltura fur posti, e sopr’essa scritti versi significanti chi fosser quegli che dentro sepolti v’erano, e il modo e la cagione della lor morte.” These themes return in another mode in the story of Federigo degli Alberighi. Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Branca, 2:689: “‘Come io udi’ che voi, la vostra mercè, meco desinar volavate, avendo riguardo alla vostra eccellenzia e al vostro valore, reputai degna e convenevole cosa che non più cara vivanda secondo la mia possibilità io vi dovessi onorare, . . . per che ricordandomi del falcon che mi domandate e della sua bontà, degno cibo da voi il reputai, e questa mattina arrostito l’avete avuto in sul tagliere.”

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38. Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Branca, 1:465: “Il padre, per non destare nel concupiscibile appetito del giovane alcuno inchinevole disiderio men che utile, non le volle nominare per lo proprio nome, cioè femine, ma disse: ‘Elle si chiamano papere.’ . . . Disse il padre: ‘Io non voglio; tu non sai donde elle s’imbeccano!’ ” 39. Mazzotta, World at Play, 137. 40. Mazzotta, World at Play, 147. 41. Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Branca, 1:480: “Tu vedrai noi d’una massa di carne tutti la carne avere e da uno medesimo Creatore tutte l’anime con iguali forze, con iguali potenze, con iguali vertú create.” 42. Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Branca, 1:481: “E per ciò colui che virtuosamente adopera, apertamente sè mostra gentile, e chi altramenti il chiama, non colui che è chiamato ma colui che chiama commette difetto.” 43. Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Branca, 1:481: “Delle virtù e del valor di Guiscardo io non credetti al giudicio d’alcuna altra persona che a quello delle tue parole e de’ miei occhi. Chi il commendò mai tanto quanto tu commendavi in tutte quelle cose laudevoli che valoroso uomo dee essere commendato? E certo non a torto: chè, se’ miei occhi non m’ingannarano, niuna laude da te data gli fu che io lui operarla, e più mirabilmente che le tue parole non poteano esprimere, non vedessi: e se pure in ciò alcuno inganno ricevuto avessi, da te sarei stata ingannata.” 44. Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Branca, 1:483: “Il tuo padre ti manda questo per consolarti di quella cosa che tu più ami, come tu hai lui consolato di ciò che egli piú amava.” 45. Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Branca, 1:483: “Come il cuor vide e le parole intese, così ebbe per certissimo quello essere il cuor di Guiscardo; per che, levato il viso verso il famigliar, disse: ‘Non si convenia sepoltura men degna che d’oro a così fatto cuore chente questo è: discretamente in ciò ha il mio padre adoperato.’ ” 46. Harrison, Dominion of the Dead, 93. 47. Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Branca, 1:483–484: “Farò che la mia anima si congiugnerà con quella, adoperandol tu, che tu già tanto cara guardasti.” 48. See Caciola, Discerning Spirits.

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49. Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment, 54. 50. As she lies dying, she asks one favor of her father: “Let my body lie next to his, wherever you’ve had it thrown, for everyone to see” (Che ’l mio corpo col suo, dove che tu te l’abbi fatto gittare, morto palese stea). Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Branca, 1:486. As in the other tales of exposed hearts, this fi nal and conclusive naming or identification provides resolution. Tancredi will frame these two lovers one fi nal time, in a tomb that he will inscribe with their identities. 51. Berengario, Life of Saint Clare, 81. For detailed accounts of the “autopsy” of Clare of Montefalco, see Park, Secrets of Women and “Relics of a Fertile Heart,” and Caciola, Discerning Spirits. See also Polo de Beaulieu, “La légende du coeur inscrit.” 52. See chapter 2. In the case of Margherita of Città di Castello, who died in 1320, we get a bit of both. In her heart, cut open after her death, the Dominicans found three small stones impressed with images of Mary, infant Jesus, Joseph, the Holy Spirit, and a kneeling penitent, probably Margherita herself. See Caciola, Discerning Spirits, 207–212. As Katharine Park puts it: “Like the father’s seed in the mother’s uterus, Christ’s presence in the heart created new life; this might manifest itself materially in the form of objects impressed with his likeness, which only dissection could reveal.” Park, Secrets of Women, 35. The heart contains foreign objects, impressed with images. 53. Biernoff, Sight and Embodiment, 136–137. 54. Menestò, Il processo, 339. “Quia Deus in corpore et corde suo tantum se delectaverat”; “dicta Francescha sua manu scidit ex parte posteriori. . . . et extrasserunt intestina et recondiderunt cor in una cassa, et intestina humaverunt in oratorio illo sero”; “dicta Francescha de Fulgineo scindit cor ipsum sua mano, qui scisso invenerunt crucem in corde ipso, seu ymaginem Christi crucifissi.” 55. Menestò, Il processo, 340: “habuerunt ymaginationem quod, quia Deus tantum se delectaverat in ipso corde, quod aliquid inveniretur in eon ovum vel mirabile.” 56. Berengario, Life of Saint Clare, 35. 57. Berengario, Life of Saint Clare, 87.

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58. Berengario, Life of Saint Clare, 87. 59. Berengario, Life of Saint Clare, 88. 60. Berengario, Life of Saint Clare, 35. 61. Berengario, Life of Saint Clare, 88. 62. Berengario, Life of Saint Clare, 88. 63. Park, Secrets of Women, 66; Menestò, Il processo, 87. 64. Caciola, Discerning Spirits; Park, Secrets of Women. 65. I have not considered these cases here, and I refer the curious reader to other studies where this trope is examined thoroughly. I have instead traced out an alternate model. 66. My notions and ways of speaking about presence in terms of saintly bodies are indebted to Gumbrecht, Production of Presence. 67. Subsequently, investigations were launched to test Elena’s sanctity. In an autopsy, physicians examined the contents and level of corruption of her breasts and then penetrated further toward the source, her heart. They found that her heart was missing, or rather had been replaced by a pale, flat mass, like a piece of soft liver. Park, Secrets of Women, 161–163. 68. Paradiso 33, 85–87. Singleton, 377. Petrocchi, 3:552: . . . vidi che s’interna, legato con amore in un volume, ciò che per l’universo si squaderna. 69. Harvey, De motu cordis, 16–17. 70. Harvey, De motu cordis, 17. 71. Harvey, De motu cordis, 17. 72. Harvey, De motu cordis, 19. 73. Harvey, De motu cordis, 31. Epilogue 1. Nancy, L’ intrus, 27. “Quelle est cette vie ‘propre’ qu’il s’agit de ‘sauver’? Il s’avère donc au moins que cette propriété ne reside en rien dans ‘mon’ corps. Elle n’est située nulle part, ni dans cet organe [heart] dont la reputation symbolique n’est plus a faire. (On dira: reste le cerveau. Et bien entendu, l’idée de greffe du cerveau agite de temps à autre les chroniques. L’humanité en

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reparlera sans doute un jour. Pour le moment, il est admis qu’un cerveau ne survit pas sans un reste du corps. En revanche, et pour en rester là, il survivrait peut-être avec un système entier de corps étrangers greffés).” The translation is mine. 2. Harriet Brown, “The Other Brain, the One with Butterfl ies, Also Deals With Many Woes,” New York Times, August 23, 2005. Gershon, Second Brain. 3. Study by Ruberman, Weinblatt, Goldberg, and Chaudhary in 1984, cited in Kruglanski and Higgins, Social Psychology, 610. 4. Illingworth, Trusting Medicine, 80.

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Index

Abi Gafar Ahmed ibn Ali ibn Khatimah of Almeria, 83 Agazzari, Filippo degli, 76 Albert the Great: on the basilisk, 67; on heart as principle, 20, 33, 54, 119; on heat of heart, 116–117; interest in physiology, 30–31; on mineralogy, 62, 64, 114–115; on nature of spirit, 106–107; on production of blood, 188n9; on sex difference, 111; on size of heart, 107 Alfred of Sareshel, 27, 106–107 Alighieri, Dante. See Dante. Anatomia vivorum, 27–29 Aquinas, Thomas: on circulation, 26; on heart as seat of soul, 21, 54; on heat and emotion, 100–103; on spirit and soul, 30. See also Dante and Aquinas Aristotle, 27, 57, 108; See also Galen vs. Aristotle

Augustine, Saint, 57 Avicenna, 20, 83, 151 Bartholomew the Englishman, 129 Berengario, 172–174 Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint, 36, 169 Black Death. See Plague Blood: of Christ, 35–39, 59–61, 137; and emotions, 101–103, 123; in the heart, 92–95; heat of, 97, 101–103; as law, 41–42; as nourishment, 46, 136–137; procreative quality of, 22– 23, 108, 153; production of, 48; and spirit, 94–95 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 88; and eaten heart tales, 161–170, 219n50; on the plague, 85–87, 89–90. See also Plague Body: metaphors of, 6; multipolar, 12, 21, 46. See also Church, as body; Political bodies Bonaventure, Saint, 36, 62

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index Book on the Conditions of Women, 154–155 Brain: contemporary ideas of, 9; according to Descartes, 11; function of, 14, 16–20, 48, 104, 152; as principle, 7; role in sensation, 55–57; as seat of life, 183–184 Bruno, Giordano, 191n27 Catherine of Siena: as agent of Christ, 58–61, 138; on Christ and church, 35–38; on the execution of Niccolò di Toldo, 58–61, 196n12; relation to papacy, 34–35, 38–40, 135–138; relation to Paul, 35, 37 Cavalcanti, Guido, 1, 74–78, 113, 158–160 Christ: as head of church, 34, 41; heart of, 35–38, 40, 60–61, 137–138; presence in heart, 132, 171–172, 175; wounds of, 62, 76, 78. See also Blood, of Christ. Church: as body, 34, 36, 38–39, 43–44 Circulation, 17; and contagion, 53, 82– 83, 88, 90; defi nition of, 2; human and divine, 72; intercorporeal, 52– 53, 60, 63, 81, 85; and poetry, 73, 75, 77, 80–81; and sensation, 56–57, 101; of soul, 25–26; of vapors, 155 Clare of Montefalco, 170–175 Constantinus Africanus, 55–56 Cor gentil. See Heart, noble Costa ben Luca, 27 Daniel, Arnaut, 120, 209n60 Dante and Aquinas, 22, 24

Dante: works of De vulgari eloquentia, 117 Inferno, 81; Inferno 1, 123–126; Inferno 2, 126; Inferno 9, 126– 127; Inferno 12, 130; Inferno 13, 78; Inferno 28, 42–44; Inferno 32, 127; Inferno 33, 128–130 Monarchia, 32 Paradiso, 81, 131; Paradiso 1, 132– 133; Paradiso 9, 71; Paradiso 28, 25; Paradiso 33, 71–72, 134–135, 178. See also Vision, in Paradiso Purgatorio 2, 73; Purgatorio 24, 70, 73; Purgatorio 25, 22–25, 70–71, 113, 189n18; Purgatorio 26, 63–64; Purgatorio 30, 131 Rime petrose, 115–120, 122–124, 127, 207n42, 210n76 Vita nuova, 29–30, 69–70, 73, 79–81, 114–115, 158–160 De spiritu et anima, 30 Demonic possession, 82, 196n17 Descartes, René, 11, 139 Dissection, 5, 103, 148–149, 152, 156 Dondoli, Giovanni, 87 Duglioli, Elena, 176, 220n67 Embryology, 20–22, 32, 93, 111, 113, 147; in Dante, 22–25, 70–71 Emotions, 101–103, 116, 123. See also Love Eucharist, 37, 158 Fernel, Jean, 68 Fleck, Ludwik, 3, 187n3, 187n5, 188n7 Francesca of Montefalco, Sister, 172

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index Francis of Assisi, Saint, 62, 132 Function: permissive, transmissive, productive, 16–19, 47, 49, 56 Galen vs. Aristotle, 15, 19; on brain, 104; on production of blood, 20, 37, 188n9; on sense perception, 55, 58; on sex difference, 108–109; on spirit, 27; on structure of heart, 151 Gentile da Foligno, 84 Gerald of Cremona, 151 Gershon, Michael D., 183 Gianni, Lapo, 66–67 Giovanni da San Gimignano, 54–58 Guglielmo da Saliceto, 118 Guilhem de Peitieus, 65–66 Guinizelli, Guido, 63–66, 68 Harvey, William, 3–4, 19; on heat, 139–142; and masculinity of heart, 96–100; and political metaphor, 10, 14, 45–49; on porosity of septum and arteries, 50–51, 91–95; and vivisections, 144–146, 177–181 Heart, as center, 7, 11, 19, 38, 40, 44–46; double-gendered, 8, 98, 109–110, 135, 138; eaten, 156–163, 166–167, 169–170, 216n26; and environment, 4, 18, 51, 83, 141, 185–186; extracted, 143, 157, 170, 176–177; of holy women, 170–176, 219n52, 220n67; masculinity of, 106–107; nobility of, 14, 33, 47–48, 130; noble (cor gentil), 64–65, 68, 114, 130, 158, 163, 165, 167–168; openness of, 8, 51, 63, 92, 95, 185;

petrified, 114, 116–120, 124, 126– 128, 141; poet’s wounded, 74–79, 160; as principle, 19, 21, 33, 43, 46, 48, 59, 139, 150, 189n13; projective, 8, 98, 106; receptive, 8, 29, 63, 70, 72, 96, 98, 114; seat of soul, 9, 20– 21, 31, 147–148, 168–170; structure of, 28, 150–151; transplant, 137–138, 182, 184 Henri of Mondeville, 44 Iacopone da Todi, 132–133 Inspiration, 63, 66, 69–73, 79–81, 131–134 Jacme d’Agramont, 84 Jacobus de Voragine, 146–147 James, William, 13, 16–18 Jesus. See Christ John of Salisbury, 32 Leonardo da Vinci, 204n82 Liver, 19–21, 46; natural spirit in, 28; source of blood, 20, 33, 37, 91, 188n9 Livy, 31 Love, 61, 64–66, 69; god of, 70, 80, 114, 118, 159; spiritual, 57–58; wounds of, 1, 66, 76, 160 Lovesickness, 87, 116, 118–122 Lucretius, 87 Margherita of Città di Castello, 219n52 Mary, mother of Jesus. See Virgin Mary Medicine: vs. philosophy, 14, 22, 31; study in Italy, 6, 148

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index Medusa, 91, 126 Mineralogy, 64–65. See also Albert the Great, on mineralogy Mondino de’ Liuzzi, 149–156; on heart’s role in speech, 73–74; on heat, 103–106 Motion: of blood, 47–48, 140, 179; of heart, 179; of heavens, 25–26, 101, 117; of soul, 21–22, 26, 100– 101, 140 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 182–184 On the Secrets of Women, 108 Patiño, Maria, 110 Paul, Saint, 34–35, 37 Peter of Limoges, 67–68 Petrarch, Francis, 118, 120, 213n103 Philippe le Bel, 41, 44 Physiology and faith, 37, 56, 58 Plague, 53, 82–91, 204n81; explanations for, 83; prevention of, 87–88; theories of transmission, 84, 90–91 Political bodies, 11–12, 31–33, 41–49; in Dante, 32, 42–43. See also Harvey, political metaphor Pseudo–Albert the Great, 22–23, 84 Raymond of Capua, 58, 137–138 Rex pacificus, 41 Sacred heart, 193n53 Scot, Michael, 112, 153 Semen: female, 112, 121; formation of, 22, 27, 108–109, 139, 206n23; heat

of, 108–109, 117; relation to spirit, 106–107 Sensation, 18, 21, 29–30, 52–54 Sex difference, 98–99, 108–112 Shakespeare, William: Antony and Cleopatra, 96; Coriolanus, 32; King Lear, 74, 120, 209n62 Sighs, 1, 74–75, 79–81 Sight. See Vision Silvestre, Bernard, 32 Smell, sense of, 58–61 Soderini, Niccolò, 39 Soul: heat of, 130; modes of inhabiting body, 15, 19, 26, 30, 56–57; unity or multiplicity of, 24; vegetative, sensitive, animal, 23–25, 55 Speech. See Voice Spirit, as intermediary, 27, 30–31, 67, 95; formation of, 28, 50, 105, 131; vs. soul, 27, 30, 192n36; vital, animal, natural, 23, 28–29, 56, 84, 94, 104, 152 Taste, sense of, 55–57, 195n9 Tears, 74–75, 114, 127–131 Thomas of Cantimpré: on centrality of heart, 33, 36; in Giovanni da San Gimignano, 54; interest in physiology, 30–31; on production of blood, 37; on sensation, 59 Torrigiani, Pietro, 21 Touch, sense of, 55, 57–58, 84 Trotula, 112 Urban VI (pope), 35, 37–40, 135–136 Uterus: dissected, 146–147, 153–156;

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index heart as, 129–130, 134, 175; heat of, 112, 117; and metaphors of inspiration, 75, 117, 132–134, 137; suffocation of, 120–122, 154–155 Vida, of Guillem de Cabestaing, 156–158, 161 Villani, Matteo, 84 Vincent of Beauvais: on centrality of heart, 36; on divine possession, 71; in Giovanni da San Gimignano, 54; on heat of heart, 39; interest in physiology, 30–31; on production of blood, 37

Virgin Mary, 71, 129–131, 134 Vision: and contagion, 84, 91; diff usion of spirits, 113–114; models of, 8, 52, 61–63, 66–69, 125, 171–172; in Paradiso, 71–72, 134 Voice: and contagion, 89–90; in Giovanni da San Gimignano, 57; and openness of heart, 125–128; poetic, 72–73, 76–78, 80–81 William IX of Aquitaine. See Guilhem de Peitieus William of Auvergne, 24–25, 60, 130 Womb. See Uterus

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