The Worlds of Knowledge and the Classical Tradition in the Early Modern Age Comparative Approaches (Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions, 33) 2021022230, 2021022231, 9789004462328, 9004462325

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The Worlds of Knowledge and the Classical Tradition in the Early Modern Age

Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions Editor Mordechai Feingold (California Institute of Technology)

volume 33

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/​slci

The Worlds of Knowledge and the Classical Tradition in the Early Modern Age Comparative Approaches Edited by

Dmitri Levitin and Ian Maclean

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Jan van Noordt, Hippocrates visiting Democritus in Abdera. 80.5 × 63 cm. Oil on canvas. Private collection. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Levitin, Dmitri, editor. | Maclean, Ian, 1945- editor. Title: The worlds of knowledge and the classical tradition in the early modern age : comparative approaches / edited by Dmitri Levitin and Ian Maclean. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2021] | Series: Scientific and learned cultures and their institutions, 2352-1325 ; volume 33 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “The Worlds of Knowledge and the Classical Tradition in the Early Modern Age is the first attempt to adopt a comparative approach to this phenomenon. By adopting a comparative approach, this volume brings out some of the most important factors in explaining the contours of early modern intellectual life”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021022230 (print) | LCCN 2021022231 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004462328 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004462335 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Learning and scholarship–Europe–History. | Civilization, Classical–Study and teaching–Europe–History. | Europe–Intellectual life. | Europe–Civilization–Classical influences. Classification: LCC AZ604 .W65 2021 (print) | LCC AZ604 (ebook) | DDC 001.2094–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021022230 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021022231

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/​brill-​typeface. issn 2352-​1 325 isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 6232-​8 (hardback) isbn 978-​9 0-​0 4-​4 6233-​5 (e-​book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau Verlag and V&R Unipress. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-​use and/​or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill nv via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-​free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents  List of Figures vii  Notes on Contributors viii  Introduction 1 Dmitri Levitin

part 1 Secular Classical Scholarship 1  National Traditions in Scholarship The French and Dutch Schools of Classical Scholarship at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century 21 Floris Verhaart 2  Sex and the Classics The Approaches of Early Modern Humanists to Ancient Sexuality 63 Karen Hollewand

part 2 The Arts 3  “Three Days and Three Nights in the Heart of the Earth” Chronological Debates over the Period of Christ’s Rest in the Tomb in the Fifteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 93 C. Philipp E. Nothaft 4  The Early Modern Study of Ancient Measures in Comparative Perspective A Preliminary Investigation 118 Cesare Pastorino 5  The Pentateuch and Immortality in England and the Dutch Republic The Confessionalization of a Claim 142 Michelle Pfeffer

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part 3 Medicine 6  Sacred Medicine in Early Modern Europe 179 Jetze Touber 7  The Reception of Hippocrates by Physicians at the End of the Seventeenth Century A Comparative Study 217 Ian Maclean

part 4 Theology 8  What’s in a Name? Essenes, Therapeutae, and Monks in the Christian Imagination, c.1500–​1700 277 Jan Machielsen 9  Publishing a Prohibited Criticism Richard Simon, Pierre Bayle, and Erudition in Late Seventeenth-​Century Intellectual Culture 336 Timothy Twining 10  European Scholarship on the Formation of the New Testament Canon, c.1700 Polemic, Erudition, Emulation 366 Dmitri Levitin  Index of Names, Places and Institutions 435

Figures 1.1  Proportion of students per faculty at the University of Harderwijk (in percentage of the total) 29 4.1  Agricola’s list of sources, De mensuris & ponderibus (reissue of 1550) 128 4.2  Congius of Vespasianus, in J. B. Villalpando, Apparatus urbis ac templi Hierosolymitani, 1604; 501–​2 134

Notes on Contributors Karen Hollewand works on early modern social and cultural history. In her research, she concentrates on the history of scholarship in seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century Europe, focusing in particular on the study of sex in the Dutch Republic. She is currently employed as a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University, where she focuses on the early modern Republic of Letters as part of the Skillnet project. Analyzing the language used by scholars when discussing their learned community, she concentrates on perceptions of sharing knowledge and the way in which these learned men used the idea of an ideal scholarly republic for their own benefit as well as the common good. Her book on the banishment of humanist Hadriaan Beverland, based on her DPhil thesis completed at the University of Oxford, was published in 2019. Together with Floris Verhaart, she is at present finalizing an English translation of Beverland’s De Peccato Originali. Dmitri Levitin is a Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He works on the history of knowledge in the period c.1500–​1850, with a particular interest in the interaction of humanistic, philosophical, and scientific modes of thought, and the European encounter with global systems of knowledge. His monographs include Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science (Cambridge, 2015) and The Kingdom of Darkness (Cambridge, forthcoming); with Nick Hardy, he co-​edited a volume on Confessionalisation and Erudition in Early Modern Europe: an Episode in the History of the Humanities (Oxford, 2019). Jan Machielsen is Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History at Cardiff University. He is the author of Martin Delrio: Demonology and Scholarship in the Counter-​Reformation (Oxford, 2015) and The War on Witchcraft: Andrew Dickson White, George Lincoln Burr and the Origins of Witchcraft Historiography (Cambridge, 2021). He is also the editor of The Science of Demons: Early Modern Authors Facing Witchcraft and the Devil (London, 2020) and, with Clare Copeland, Angels of Light? Sanctity and the Discernment of Spirits (Leiden, 2013). Ian Maclean is Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, Emeritus Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Oxford, Honorary Professor at the

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University of St Andrews, and a Fellow of the British Academy. Among his many publications are The Renaissance Notion of Woman (1980), Meaning and Interpretation in the Renaissance: the Case of Law (1992), Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance: the Case of Learned Medicine (2001), Le Monde et les Hommes selon les Médecins de la Renaissance (2006) and, most recently, Episodes in the Life of the Early Modern Learned Book (Brill, 2020). C. Philipp E. Nothaft is a research fellow at Trinity College Dublin. His interests include the history of historical chronology in medieval and early modern Europe, which is the subject of his monograph Dating the Passion: The Life of Jesus and the Emergence of Scientific Chronology (200–​1600) (Leiden: Brill, 2012) and the forthcoming A Fourteenth-​Century Chronologer and Critic of Astrology: Heinrich Selder and his “Treatise on the Time of the Lord’s Annunciation, Nativity, and Passion” (Oxford University Press). Cesare Pastorino is intellectual and cultural historian of early modern science. His work focuses on the origins and development of empiricism in early modern Europe. He is especially interested in practical knowledge and the history of experimentation, which he studies with an interdisciplinary approach. He is currently developing a new area of research in the history of empiricism, which examines the use of quantification, measurement, and experimentation in the historical studies of antiquity in early modern Europe. Michelle Pfeffer is an historian of early modern intellectual culture and a Fellow by Examination at Magdalen College, Oxford. She has published articles about the popular dissemination of scholarship and science in the early modern period and is currently writing a book about some of the first and most influential people to deny the soul’s immortality in seventeenth-​century England. Her long-​term projects include an intellectual biography of William Warburton and a study of the marginalisation of astrology in early modern Europe. Jetze Touber After having held academic positions in the Netherlands (Groningen, Utrecht, Amsterdam) and Belgium (Gent), Jetze Touber is currently pursuing his historical interests as an independent scholar. His research interests include all aspects of the early modern history of knowledge at the intersection of cognition, belief and practices. He has published on hagiography, biblical

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philology, and antiquarian, technical, biological, and medical scholarship in various European contexts in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. Currently he explores the intellectual culture at the court of the last stadholders of the house of Orange, as it found expression in the circles around the philosopher François Hemsterhuis (1721-​1790). Timothy Twining is a Research Fellow at Gonville and Caius College, University of Cambridge. He received his PhD in History from the University of Cambridge in 2017. His publications include ‘Richard Simon and the Remaking of Seventeenth-​Century Biblical Criticism’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters 3 (2018), 421-​487, and ‘The Early Modern Debate over the Age of the Hebrew Vowel Points: Biblical Criticism and Hebrew Scholarship in the Confessional Republic of Letters’, Journal of the History of Ideas 81 (2020), 337-​358. Floris Verhaart is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow affiliated with University College Cork. He is primarily interested in the cultural, religious, and intellectual history of early modern Europe, and is the author of Classical Learning in Britain, France, and the Dutch Republic, 1690-​1750: Beyond the Ancients and the Moderns (Oxford: oup, 2020). His current research project, funded by the Irish Research Council, focuses on the conspiracy theories of the Parisian Jesuit Jean Hardouin and their impact on scholarly method and the public perception of expert knowledge in the eighteenth century (Enemies of the Text: Jean Hardouin and the Modernization of the Humanities).

Introduction Dmitri Levitin

The History of Scholarship: Where Next?

In the Introduction to an important volume published in 2006, The History of Scholarship, the editors announced the evolution of the history of scholarship into ‘a distinct pursuit’, or even ‘an episteme’.1 A decade and a half later, their words have been spectacularly confirmed. A journal devoted to early modern scholarship has been founded and is flourishing.2 At the same time, a series of remarkable studies by scholars from Europe, the US, and Britain have expanded hugely our knowledge of early modern scholarship as it was actually conducted. That is to say, they have not sought to judge past scholars against some modern standard, or to award marks out of ten to those who are thought to deserve it. Rather, they have explored scholarly practices and their place in the wider intellectual culture of Europe in the period 1500–​1800. In turn, intellectual and cultural historians in other fields are coming –​slowly but surely –​ to recognise that those fields are significantly enriched by engagement with the long after-​history of the classical tradition. One can say without hyperbole that in the last two decades, the history of scholarship has been the animal that has most thrived in the jungle of early modern intellectual history. With that in mind, there is no need to regurgitate the long-​term history of the discipline, so well told in the aforementioned Introduction to The History 1 C. R. Ligota and J.-​L. Quantin, ‘Introduction’, in History of Scholarship, eds. ead. (Oxford, 2006), 1–​38, at 1. For some important subsequent comments on the historiography of humanist scholarship in particular, see D.J.J. Robichaud, ‘Competing Claims on the Legacies of Renaissance Humanism in Histories of Philology’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 3 (2018), 177–​222. 2 Erudition and the Republic of Letters, published by Brill and edited by Mordechai Feingold. The long-​standing Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes continues to publish much important work in the history of early modern scholarship. A great deal of early modern material also appears in the International Journal of the Classical Tradition, published by Springer; see in particular the special issue (23, (2016)) on ‘The Reception of Josephus in the Early Modern Period’, eds. M. Goodman and J. Weinberg. See also History of the Humanities (2016–​), edited by Rens Bod, Julia Kursell, Jaap Maat, and Thijs Weststeijn. From the same stable has emerged the synoptic The Making of the Humanities, ed. R. Bod, 3 vols (Amsterdam, 2010–​14). Prof. Bod’s own, high-​profile approach to the history of the humanities (summarised in A New History of the Humanities: the Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present, trans. L. Richards (Oxford, 2013)) is very different to the approach adopted here.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004462335_002

2 Levitin of Scholarship. Rather than look back, it seems a good moment to look forward. After all, the greatest danger for any emergent episteme is complacency: a self-​ congratulatory resting on one’s laurels that leads only to self-​perpetuation and then stagnation. With such a pitfall in mind, the aim of this volume is to promote further the amalgamation of the history of scholarship with various branches of intellectual history tout court –​the history of institutions, the book market, science, medicine, philosophy, theology, etc. –​by focussing less on individual episodes or national histories, and more on social and institutional factors that can be explored in a comparative perspective. To put it another way: we are attempting to continue the integration of the history of scholarship into the broader history of knowledge (another nascent meta-​ discipline).3 From a historiographical perspective, this is self-​consciously a continuist rather than a reformist project. That is to say, it is a project that is possible only because of the successes of the history of scholarship over the last few decades.4 More specifically, it is a project that emerges from some of the developments that have occurred in the field in the last fifteen years. (The following comments are not intended to be comprehensive, but only to give a hint of the richness of recent discussions, and the directions they have taken.) First and foremost, those developments have confirmed that the heritage of the classical tradition was not just a phenomenon of the Renaissance, but lasted far longer. The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries –​often still portrayed as witnessing the waning of the humanist movement in favour of a post-​Cartesian ‘age of reason’ or a non-​humanist ‘enlightenment’ –​are coming to be re-​conceived as a period in which humanist erudition, methods, and reading practices continued to flourish, albeit sometimes in different forms from those that they had taken during the previous two centuries. Recent studies have demonstrated this by focussing on the textual work that such ‘late humanism’ produced. They have charted how interest previously devoted to Latin literary texts shifted towards a fascination with recondite Greek and oriental material that stands well outside the boundaries of the classics as they are now conceived (another good reason to be sceptical about the usefulness 3 For attempts to define this field, see J. Vogel, ‘Von der Wissenschafts-​zur Wissensgeschichte: Für eine Historisierung der Wissensgesellschaft’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 30 (2004), 639–​60; and the discussion between Martin Mulsow and Lorraine Daston in Debating New Approaches to History, eds. M. Tamm and P. Burke (London, 2018), 159–​88, as well as the works cited there. This field has also seen the formation of a new journal (in 2020), History of Knowledge, edited by Sven Dupré and Geert Somsen. 4 The importance of the role played by Anthony Grafton in this process, both as a scholar and a teacher, need not be reiterated. See now the interesting comments on the Graftonian project in J. Soll, ‘The Grafton Method, or the Science of Tradition’, in For the Sake of Learning: Essays in Honor of Anthony Grafton, eds. A. Blair and A-​S. Goeing (Leiden, 2018), 1018–​31.

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of the ‘classical tradition’ as anything but the most general of analytical categories). They have investigated the transmission through the Republic of Letters of Hebrew, Arabic, and other near eastern textual traditions. And they have begun to show how these and other developments in the history of philology and textual criticism cannot be understood outside of broader intellectual shifts in other fields, above all theology. The very notion of what it meant to be a ‘scholar’ has been consistently historicised.5 The results have often been dazzling, especially when it comes to the history of the interaction of scholarship with religious or theological concerns. Biblical criticism,6 the study of the early church,7 and religiously motivated 5

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This is the case for almost all the studies cited here, but see esp. the essays in Part 1 of Scholars in Action: The Practice of Knowledge and the Figure of the Savant in the 18th Century, eds. A. Holenstein, H. Steinke, and M. Stuber, 2 vols (Leiden, 2013); see also N. Mithen, ‘A Taste for Criticism: “Buon Gusto” and the Reform of Historical Scholarship in the Early Eighteenth-​Century Italian Republic of Letters’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 4 (2019), 439–​67. K. Collis, ‘Reading the Bible in the “Early Enlightenment”: Philosophy and the Ars Critica in Jean Le Clerc’s Early Theological Dialogues’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 1 (2016), 121–​50; P. Van Boxel, Jewish Books in Christian Hands: Theology, Exegesis and Conversion under Gregory XIII (1572–​1585 (Vatican City, 2016); S. Mandelbrote, ‘The Old Testament and its Ancient Versions in Manuscript and Print in the West, from c.1480 to c.1780’, in The New Cambridge History of the Bible: Vol. 3, From 1450 to 1750, ed. E. Cameron (Cambridge, 2016), 82–​109; G. McDonald, Biblical Criticism in Early Modern Europe: Erasmus, the Johannine comma, and Trinitarian Debate (Cambridge, 2016); D. Van Miert, The Emancipation of Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1590–​1670 (Oxford, 2017); J. Touber, Spinoza and Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1660–​1710 (Oxford, 2017); N. Hardy, Criticism and Confession: The Bible in the Seventeenth Century Republic of Letters (Oxford, 2017); Labourers in the Vineyard of the Lord: Erudition and the Making of the King James Version of the Bible, ed. M. Feingold (Leiden, 2018); T. Twining, ‘Biblical Criticism and Confessional Division from Jean Morin to Richard Simon’, PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2017; id., ‘Richard Simon and the Remaking of Biblical Criticism’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters 3 (2018), 421–​87; K. Macfarlane, ‘The Biblical Genealogies of the King James Bible (1611): Their Purpose, Sources, and Significance’, The Library, 19 (2018), 131–​58. See further the chapters by Pfeffer, Machielsen, Twining, and Levitin in this volume. J.-​L. Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17th Century (Oxford, 2009); J.M Sawilla, Antiquarianismus, Hagiographie und Historie im 17. Jahrhundert: Zum Werk der Bollandisten (Berlin, 2009); Sacred History: Uses of the Christian Past in the Renaissance World, eds. K. Van Liere, S. Ditchfield, and H. Louthan (Oxford, 2012); A.-​S. Schäfer, Auctoritas Patrum? The Reception of the Church Fathers in Puritanism (Frankfurt, 2012); A. Grafton, ‘Christianity’s Jewish Origins Rediscovered: The Roles of Comparison in Early Modern Ecclesiastical Scholarship’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 1 (2016), 13–​42; S. Tutino, ‘The Case of Carlo Calà and Giovanni Calà: Historical Truth and Doctrinal Orthodoxy in post-​ Reformation Italy’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 1 (2016), 412–​63. T. Wallnig, Critical Monks: The German Benedictines, 1680–​1740 (Leiden, 2019); S. Bauer, The Invention of Papal History: Onofrio Panvinio Between Renaissance and Catholic Reform (Oxford, 2019). See

4 Levitin (or sponsored) Hebraism or orientalism8 have all received seminal treatments, with more being published on a monthly basis. More generally, a vibrant discussion is now ongoing about the relationship between the structural process of religious confessionalisation and the practice of scholarship.9 This conversation extends to a discussion of the impact of confessionalisation on the marketplace for learned books.10 The ‘secular’ classical scholarship conducted in early modern Europe is also producing sophisticated attempts at historicisation. The discipline of Neo-​Latin has witnessed something of a mini-​renaissance, spurred by increased dialogue with historians.11 The history of Greek scholarship has likewise been subject to

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also the special issue of the International Journal of the Classical Tradition devoted to ‘The Reception of the Church Fathers and Early Church Historians in the Renaissance and the Reformation, c.1470–​1650’, eds. A. Ammann and S. Kennerley (2019). See further the chapter by Machielsen in this volume. E.g. S. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire (Washington D.C., 2009); id., ‘Dating Zarathustra: Oriental Texts and the Problem of Persian Prehistory, 1700–​1900’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 1 (2016), 203–​45; A. Girard, ‘Le christianisme oriental (XVIIe-​XVIIIe siècles): essor de l’orientalisme catholique en Europe et construction des identités confessionnelles au Proche-​Orient’, PhD Thesis, ephe, Paris, 2011; U. App, The Birth of Orientalism (Philadelphia, 2011); J. Loop, Johann Heinrich Hottinger: Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 2013); J.-​P. Ghobrial, ‘The Archive of Orientalism and its Keepers: Re-​Imagining the Histories of Arabic Manuscripts in Early Modern Europe’, in The Social History of the Archive: Record-​Keeping in Early Modern Europe, eds. L. Corens, K. Peters, and A. Walsham (Oxford, 2016), 90–​111; The Teaching and Learning of Arabic in Early Modern Europe, eds. J. Loop, C. Burnett, and A. Hamilton (Leiden, 2017); A. Bevilacqua, The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 2018); S. Mills, A Commerce of Knowledge: Trade, Religion, and Scholarship between England and the Ottoman Empire, 1600–​1760 (Oxford, 2020). For overviews, the first intellectual and the second institutional-​sociological, see D. Levitin, ‘From Sacred History to the History of Religion: Pagans, Jews and Christians in European Historiography from the Reformation to “Enlightenment” ’, Historical Journal, 55 (2012), 1117–​60; id., ‘Confessionalisation and Erudition in Early Modern Europe: a Comparative Overview of a Neglected Episode in the History of the Humanities’, in Confessionalisation and Erudition in Early Modern Europe: an Episode in the History of the Humanities, eds. N. Hardy and D. Levitin (Oxford, 2019), 1–​94, where much more of the recent (and not-​ so-​recent) literature is cited and discussed. The Confessionalisation and Erudition volume contains essays on all the subjects just listed. I. Maclean, Scholarship, Commerce, Religion: the Learned Book in the Age of Confessions, 1560–​1630 (Cambridge, MA, 2012); id., Episodes in the Life of the Early Modern Learned Book (Leiden, 2020). See e.g. Neo-​Latin Commentaries and the Management of Knowledge in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period (1400–​1700), eds. K. Enenkel and H. Nellen (Leuven, 2013); Neo-​Latin Philology: Old Tradition, New Approaches, ed. M. Van Der Poel (Leuven, 2014) (esp. the essays by Deneire and Tjoelker); Neo-​Latin Literature and Literary Culture in Early Modern Scotland, eds. S.J. Reid and D. McOmish (Leiden, 2017); Neo-​Latin and

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renewed attempts to incorporate institutional, pedagogical and other contextual elements.12 In turn, literary scholars are happily integrating the findings of the history of scholarship into their research.13 Important studies have sought to historicise the very act of scholarship, and to show how practices or choices that to us seem natural or self-​evident (or bizarre) were in fact the process of complex and contingent historical circumstances.14 Concomitantly, fields of the Vernaculars: Bilingual Interactions in the Early Modern Period, eds. A. Winkler and F. Schaffenrath (Leiden, 2019). See also The Classics in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom, eds. J. Feros Ruys et al. (Turnhout, 2013). 12 See e.g. W. Stenhouse, Reading Inscriptions and Writing Ancient History: Historical Scholarship in the Late Renaissance (London, 2005); H. Parenty, Isaac Casaubon helléniste. Des studia humanitatis à la philologie (Geneva, 2009); E. Nuti, Longa est Via: Forme e Contenuti dello Studio Grammaticale dalla Bisanzio Paleologa al tardo Rinascimento Veneziano (Alessandria, 2014); Teachers, Students, and Schools of Greek in Renaissance Europe, eds. F. Ciccolella and L. Silvano (Leiden, 2017); ‘Constructing Hellenism: Studies on the History of Greek Learning in Early Modern Europe’, ed. H. Lamers, special issue of the International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 25 (2018); M. Lazarus, ‘The Dramatic Prologues of Alexander Nowell: Accommodating the Classics at 1540s Westminster’, Review of English Studies, 69 (2018), 32–​55; Receptions of Hellenism in Early Modern Europe: 15th–​17th centuries, eds. N. Constantinidou and H. Lamers (Leiden, 2019). For a very interesting long-​term study of the development of the notion of Greek ‘dialects’, see R. Van Rooy, ‘Through the Vast Labyrinth of Languages and Dialects: the Emergence and Transformations of a Conceptual Pair in the Early Modern Period (ca. 1478–​1782)’, PhD Dissertation, University of Leuven, 2017. For Byzantine studies, see for the Italian humanists, H. Lamers, Greece Reinvented: Transformations of Byzantine Hellenism in Renaissance Italy (Leiden, 2015), and for later developments, M. Völkel, ‘Von Augsburg nach Paris, von Oporin zu Cramoisy: Die reichsstädtische Byzantinistik und die europäische Respublica litteraria in der Frühen Neuzeit’, in Humanismus und Renaissance in Augsburg. Kulturgeschichte einer Stadt Zwischen Spätmittelalter und Dreissigjährigem Krieg, ed. G.M. Müller (Berlin, 2010), 293–​308. 13 See e.g. G. Waller, ‘Reformation Theology and the Christianization of Tragedy: Neoclassicism, Epistemology and Tragic Spectacle in the Christus Patiens Drama” in The Transformations of Tragedy: Christian Influences from Early Modern to Modern, eds. F. O’Neill Tonning, E. Tonning, and J. Mitchell (Leiden, 2019), 116–​39; M. Lazarus, ‘Tragedy at Wittenberg: Sophocles in Reformation Europe’, Renaissance Quarterly, 73 (2020), 33–​77, and the overviews in Neo-​Latin Drama and Theatre in Early Modern Europe, eds. J. Bloemendal and H.B. Norland (Leiden, 2013); E. Sandis and S. Knight, ‘Latin Drama, Religion and Politics in Early Modern Europe’, Renaissance Studies, 30 (2016), 495–​504. For the later period, see M. Cattaneo, ‘Scholarship, Polemics, and Confession in the Early Satires of Jonathan Swift’, PhD Thesis, University of Oxford, 2018. 14 See e.g. K. Haugen, Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 2011). For some of the issues thrown up by this book, see the in-​depth discussion in N. Hardy, ‘The Enlightenments of Richard Bentley’, History of Universities, 26/​2 (2012), 196–​219. See further L. Deitz, ‘Poetics, Polymathy, and Critice. On some Controversial Notions in Early Modern Intellectual History’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters 5 (2020), 1–​52 (an important contribution to the long-​standing debate about what ‘criticism’ was perceived to be);

6 Levitin scholarship that flourished in the early modern period but have long died out –​ for example ‘universal history’, ‘polyhistory’, or historia literaria –​have been the objects of acute re-​consideration.15 For all the differences between them, these studies have one thing in common: they are driven not by the concerns of modern classics (or any other field of modern scholarship), but by a desire to illuminate early modern intellectual life on its own terms. That is to say, they eschew the truffle hunt for the origins of ‘the modern humanities’/​‘modern philology’/​‘the modern Homer’ (or Plato, Bible, or whatever). Similarly, they do not limit themselves to offering synoptic jaunts through the ‘afterlives of Plutarch’ or ‘Apuleius in the sixteenth century’, etc. Rather, they ask why early modern scholars conducted any kind of investigation into ancient texts and cultures in the first place, and then enquire how the historical conditions in which it was conducted shaped its results. Of course, such an enterprise is difficult. It demands knowledge not only of the ancient texts and objects being studied, but of the histories of reading, the book market, censorship, educational institutions and the curriculum, and modes of learned communication –​and that’s before one even turns to the intellectual contexts of the texts under discussion. Due to these difficulties, the most prominent studies that have sought to historicise the history of scholarship have tended to focus either (i) on seminal individuals (one thinks of Grafton on Scaliger; Toomer on Selden; Haugen’s work on Bentley; or Ulrich Groetsch’s re-​contextualisation of Hermann Samuel Reimarus);16 or (ii) on individual S. van Romburg, ‘Hyperboreo sono: An Exploration of Erudition in Early Modern Germanic Philology’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 3 (2018), 274–​313. Antiquarianism –​still as ambiguously defined as ever –​remains another important object of study: see the full overview in K. Jackson Williams, ‘Antiquarianism: a Reinterpretation’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 2 (2017), 56–​96. Another step towards the historicisation of commentaries is taken in Transformations of the Classics via Early Modern Commentaries, ed. K.A.E. Enenkel (Leiden, 2013). 15 A. Ben-​Tov, Lutheran Humanists and Greek Antiquity: Melanchthonian Scholarship between Universal History and Pedagogy (Leiden, 2009); Polyhistorismus und Buntschriftstellerei. Populäre Wissensformen und Wissenskultur in der Frühen Neuzeit, ed. F. Schock (Berlin, 2012); F. Clark, ‘Universal History and the Origin Narrative of European Modernity: The Leiden Lectures of Jacob Perizonius (1651–​1715) on Historia Universalis’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 2 (2017), 359–​95; D. van Miert, ‘Structuring the History of Knowledge in an Age of Transition: The Göttingen Geschichte between Historia Literaria and the Rise of the Disciplines’, History of Humanities, 2 (2017), 389–​416; see also A.R. Wright’s PhD thesis, cited in the next note. 16 Haugen, Bentley; Loop, Hottinger; A. Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: a Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 2 vols (Oxford, 1983–​93); G.J. Toomer, John Selden: a Life in Scholarship, 2 vols (Oxford, 2009); Bonaventura Vulcanius, Works and Networks: Bruges 1538–​Leiden 1614, ed. H. Cazes (Leiden, 2010); The Kaleidoscopic Scholarship of Hadrianus

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topics considered within national or confessional boundaries (Quantin on French and English patristics; Suzanne Marchand on German orientalism; Van Miert and Touber on Dutch biblical criticism; etc.).17 Of course, none of these studies is narrowly limited to any individual or nation –​indeed, their strength lies in the richness of their contextualisations, often more international than those in other fields of intellectual history. Moreover, any historian of scholarship is de facto forced into a transnational approach by considering the nature of the so-​called ‘Republic of Letters’, a topic that is currently the subject of fascinating, heated, and very diverse re-​interpretations.18 Nonetheless, a natural next step seems to be to adopt a wide-​ranging approach that not only charts

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Junius (1511–​1575): Northern Humanism at the Dawn of the Dutch Golden Age, ed. D. Van Miert (Leiden, 2011); Isaac Vossius (1618–​1689): Between Science and Scholarship, eds. E. Jorink and D. Van Miert (Leiden, 2012); U. Groetsch, Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–​ 1768): Classicist, Hebraist, Enlightenment Radical in Disguise (Leiden, 2015). An important, richly contextualised, study that is yet to be published is A.R. Wright, ‘William Cave (1637–​1713) and the Fortunes of Historia Literaria in England’, PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2018. E.g. Marchand, German Orientalism; Quantin, Christian Antiquity; Wallnig, Critical Monks; Van Miert, Emancipation; Touber, Biblical Philology. See also Scriptural Authority and Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Golden Age, eds. D. van Miert et al. (Oxford, 2017); D. Levitin, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science: Histories of Philosophy in England, c.1640–​ 1700 (Cambridge, 2015). The debate primarily concerns the extent to which the Republic of Letters lived up to its ideals of transconfessional and transnational cooperation. Seminal recent interventions include: A. Grafton, ‘A Sketch Map of a Lost Continent: The Republic of Letters’, Republics of Letters: A Journal for the Study of Knowledge, Politics, and the Arts, 1 (2009), https://​arcade.stanford.edu/​rofl/​sketch-​map-​lost-​continent-​republic-​letters; Gelehrte Polemik: Intellektuelle Konfliktverschärfungen um 1700, eds. K. Bremer and C. Spoerhase (Frankfurt, 2011); Between Scylla and Charybdis: Learned Letter Writers Navigating the Reefs of Religious and Political Controversy in Early Modern Europe, eds. J. de Landtsheer and H. Nellen (Leiden, 2011); V. Keller, ‘Painted Friends: Political Interest and the Transformation of International Learned Sociability’, in Friendship in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times, eds. M. Sandidge and A. Classen (Berlin, 2011), 661–​92; C. Pal, Republic of Women: Rethinking the Republic of Letters in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 2012); D. Van Miert, ‘Trommius’s Travelogue. Learned Memories of Erasmus and Scaliger and Scholarly Identity in the Republic of Letters’, Early Modern Low Countries, 1 (2017), 51–​70; id. ‘What was the Republic of Letters? A Brief Introduction to a Long History (1417–​2008)’, Groniek, 204 (2016), 269–​87; Hardy, Criticism; D. Stolzenberg, ‘The Holy Office in the Republic of Letters: Roman Censorship, Dutch Atlases, and the European Information Order, circa 1660’, Isis, 110 (2019), 1–​23; id., ‘A Spanner and His Works: Books, Letters, and Scholarly Communication Networks in Early Modern Europe’, in For the Sake of Learning, ed. Blair and Goeing, 1:157–​72. See further K.L. Haugen, ‘Controversy, Competition, and Insult in the Republic of Letters’, History of Humanities, 1 (2016), 399–​407.

8 Levitin the path of specific issues or questions across Europe,19 but seeks to investigate the structural conditions of early modern scholarship by adopting a comparative perspective.

A Comparative Approach

As is well known, historical comparatism is fraught with methodological difficulties. Most notably, one can always ask: why compare any historical phenomena x and y, when both are self-​contained topics of inquiry that may not have been directly connected? But even with this danger in mind, comparison seems a particularly useful tool for the historian of scholarship. The ancient traditions inherited by early modern Europeans may not have presented themselves in exactly the same terms everywhere, but they had a sufficiently large core content to justify comparison. Humanism –​by which we do not mean any kind of ‘philosophy’, but solely the intellectual practices associated with the studia humanitatis –​may initially have been an Italian phenomenon; but, as noted above, there is now no doubt about its pan-​European survival and flourishing through the sixteenth, seventeenth, and even eighteenth centuries. By that point, all European locales had inherited the same or a very similar set of texts and interpretative conventions.20 But this in turn leads one to search for the subtle differences in their use across national and confessional boundaries, and then to wonder whether those differences and modulations may help explain some if not many of the contours of European intellectual change. In my own work, I have recently attempted to provide a comparative overview of this type for the way in which confessionalisation impacted on erudition in various national and confessional spaces between 1500 and 1700.21 Jean-​Louis Quantin has done something similar in a rich account of the ‘European Geography of Patristic Scholarship in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’.22 But we can also find inspiration for our approach in other fields of early modern intellectual history. An excellent model can be seen in some

19 20 21 22

E.g. A. Ossa-​Richardson, The Devil’s Tabernacle: the Pagan Oracles in Early Modern Thought (Princeton, 2013). For recent scholarship on Eastern Europe, see the chapters devoted to the early modern period in A Handbook to Classical Reception in Eastern and Central Europe, eds. Z. Martirosova Torlone et al. (Chichester, 2017). Levitin, ‘Confessionalisation and erudition’. J.-​L. Quantin, ‘A European Geography of Patristic Scholarship in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 27 (2020), 300–​31.

Introduction

9

recent work in the history of science and philosophy. For example, it has been shown that the mid-​seventeenth century saw the merging of medical and mathematical approaches across Europe in slightly different configurations, and that this did not occur in all cases as a result of direct cross-​influence.23 In the history of philosophy, comparison has also shed new light on the relationship between physics and metaphysics in France and the Dutch Republic in the seventeenth century.24 The historical turn in the history of scholarship leaves it perfectly positioned to adopt similar approaches. By its very nature, comparative analysis invites the combination of social, economic and institutional contextualisations with more intellectualist ones. One may ask, for example, how the interpretive transformation of a particular Europe-​wide question regarding the classical tradition (e.g. the proto-​‘experimentalism’ of the Hippocratic texts; or the extent to which the Targums supported Christological exegesis of the Old Testament) occurred differently in separate locales. What were the material differences that shaped developments in each place (e.g. patterns of education, access to the print market, availability of scholarly resources, the effects of censorship)? In turn, how might an analysis of those differences help explain the path along which specific ideas evolved? Methodological programmes can often take on a degree of hyperbole, so we should be clear that what we are promising is designed to be complementary to other approaches to the history of scholarship. We are certainly not advocating that everyone drops what they have been doing and adopt only a comparative approach. Contextualised studies of individual scholars remain a prime desideratum. Indeed, one pines for detailed monographs on some of the major scholars whose names appear in the following chapters, among them Claude Saumaise, John Lightfoot, Anne Dacier, Theodorus Janssonius van Almeloveen, Johann Jakob Wettstein, and many others.25 Nor is there any 23 24

25

D. Bertoloni Meli, ‘The Collaboration Between Anatomists and Mathematicians in the mid-​17th Century. With a Study of Images as Experiments and Galileo’s role in Steno’s Myology’, Early Science and Medicine, 13 (2008), 665–​709. M. Dobre, Descartes and Early French Cartesianism: Between Metaphysics and Physics (Bucharest, 2017); A. Strazzoni, Dutch Cartesianism and the Birth of Philosophy of Science: From Regius to ’s Gravesande (Berlin, 2019); Physics and Metaphysics in Descartes and in his Reception, eds. D. Antoine-​Mahut and S. Roux (New York, 2019). For a recent study of Dacier, see R. Wyles, ‘Ménage’s Learned Ladies: Anne Dacier (1647–​ 1720) and Anna Maria van Schurmann (1607–​1678)’, in Women Classical Scholars: Unsealing the Fountain from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century, eds. R. Wyles and E. Hall (Oxford, 2016), 61–​77. With serendipitous timing, S. Castelli, Johann Jakob Wettstein’s Principles for New Testament Textual Criticism: A Fight for Scholarly Freedom (Leiden, 2020) was published just as this volume was going to press.

10 Levitin reason to abandon single-​nation studies, as long as they are conducted with appropriate sensitivity to the transnational context. Nonetheless, we hope that the adoption of a comparative approach both continues the historicisation of the history of scholarship and opens up new avenues of inquiry. With that aim in mind, our perspective is driven by the sense of intellectual disciplinarity as it existed in the early modern period itself.26 Of course, classical scholarship for its own sake already existed. But there were no ‘Classics’ faculties in the early modern universities. Moreover, much of what might be called ‘classical reception’ was conducted not by disinterested scholars but by those who had some kind of instrumental connection to one the other university faculties: the arts faculty attended by undergraduates, or the ‘higher’ faculties of theology, medicine, and law.27 At the same time, no episode in the history of scholarship can be reduced to instrumental ends. A comparative perspective is particularly useful when it comes to the immensely complex task of untangling the intentions behind various philological and interpretative moves made by early modern thinkers when they approached ancient texts. The questions raised by such a perspective vary greatly. What was the effect of access to universities, the Latin print market, or any other material or institutional component on the way in which ancient texts and ideas were deployed in the service of the evolving aims of men and women of letters? How did their conscious allegiance to, or membership of, the traditional intellectual disciplines –​all of which were derived from antiquity and medieval Europe –​change in response to new intellectual developments? For example, did a new development such as the rise of the ‘experimental philosophy’ imply the abandonment of a recognised ‘traditional’ disciplinary field (natural philosophy or learned medicine)? How important was the role of emulation and a sense of national or confessional backwardness in stimulating investment in the resources required for erudition or scientific competence? Were individual men or women of letters aware of the constraints that access to resources 26

27

On early modern disciplinarity, see further History and the Disciplines: the Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, ed. D.R. Kelley (Rochester [NY], 2001). It is remarkable how many general surveys still imply that early modern knowledge was pre-​disciplinary. It is a great regret of the editors that the final volume cannot include a section on Law. Nonetheless, we would like to express our deepest thanks to Felix Waldmann and Alain Wijffels for their contributions to the conference held at All Souls College, Oxford in May 2019 from which this book has emerged. A seminal recent publication in this field is Fabrizio Lomonaco’s New Studies on Lex Regia: Right, Philology and Fides Historica in Holland between the 17th and 18th Centuries (Bern, 2011); see also Reassessing Legal Humanism and its Claims: Petere Fontes?, eds. P.J. du Plessis and J.W. Cairns (Edinburgh, 2016).

Introduction

11

placed on them in comparison with their foreign counterparts? To what extent were scholarly initiatives driven by individuals, and to what extent did they rely on collaboration? Finally (and most generally), in insisting on the need to integrate the history of scholarship with fundamental questions about early modern European intellectual culture, this volume seeks to continue the process by which the intellectual culture of the period c.1550–​1750 is given its own historical identity, rather than being assigned an awkward place between the ‘Renaissance’ and the ‘Enlightenment’.

This Volume

As is so often the case, it is useful to outline what we are not trying to do. First of all, we are not aiming for any kind of comprehensiveness. (There are more than enough ‘handbooks’ and ‘companions’ doing the rounds, and we have no intention of adding to the pile.) Rather, we are trialling an approach to the history of scholarship, one that foregrounds the interpretative tool of comparison, whether temporal, geographical, cross-​confessional, or otherwise. Inevitably, some chapters offer a broad sweep, while others focus on more specific case studies: we make no apologies for this variety of scope, which is surely necessary for any field to thrive. Nor is there a comprehensiveness of subject matter. A volume offering comparative approaches to all the different sub-​topics in the history of early modern scholarship would have stretched to several thousand pages. Rather, our contributors –​almost all of them early-​career scholars –​have applied the comparative method either to topics that have been most debated in the recent literature (not least chronology and the relationship between theology and erudition), or, conversely, which were particularly important to early modern men and women of letters but have not traditionally been the subject of major studies in the history of scholarship (e.g. metrology and medicine). In the same vein, many of the chapters focus not just on the Latin and Greek texts that one would encounter in modern ‘Classics’, but also a rather broader set of textual traditions, not least late antique and Hebraic. One absence is Arabic scholarship. This is not because it was not an important component of early modern scholarship, but, on the contrary, because it has recently been subject to brilliant investigation of the type we are here advocating.28 28

Indeed, this volume may fruitfully be read alongside Teaching and Learning of Arabic, eds. Loop et al. See also the major recent contribution, R. Jones, Learning Arabic in Renaissance Europe (1505–​1624) (Leiden, 2020).

12 Levitin Chapter 1, by Floris Verhaart, certainly falls into the ‘broad sweep’ category. Verhaart argues that in the decades around 1700, scholarship on the pagan literary classics was characterised by two competing approaches. On the one hand, we find scholars who believed the focus of all research on these texts should be textual criticism and showed little interest in moral considerations. Their opponents, however, were just as convinced that ancient learning had its place in the new century, but placed emphasis on the potential moral edification that reading the classics could offer. The first approach was dominant among scholars in the Dutch Republic and is usually referred to as the Dutch School of Criticism. The second school was perceived by contemporaries as distinctively French and had many adherents in France. These national characteristics were in part the result of large socio-​economic shifts that affected institutional pedagogy. Because the adherents of the French School were not primarily interested in the verbal and stylistic qualities of these texts, they were at the forefront of a hugely successful movement in the eighteenth century to popularise and adapt Latin and Greek literature for a broader audience. The innovations of the Dutch School lay in a professionalisation of classical philology as this discipline became increasingly independent from theology, as well as a separation of beauty and morality that would be further developed in eighteenth-​century thought on aesthetics. Verhaart’s sweeping synthesis will no doubt stimulate much debate; its commitment to developing a comparative perspective on the practice of classical scholarship at a specific point in time provides a perfect launch pad for this volume. Chapter 2, by Karen Hollewand, discusses varying methods of dealing with the descriptions and discussions of sexuality that feature extensively in classical literature. Despite their championing of a return to the original ancient texts, most early modern humanists believed obscene passages should be excised, ignored, or toned down, even when expressed by well-​respected writers. However, not all humanist scholars agreed with this ‘expurgation of the classics’. Hollewand offers a comparative outline of the early modern expurgation of the sexually obscene. Despite the widely supported idea that classical literature should be expurgated, scholars’ attitudes to sexual passages varied: between full and ruthless expurgation and a very specific focus on all things sexual there existed a broad spectrum of approaches. She goes on to examine the works of three idiosyncratic scholars who focused almost exclusively on the sexual side of the classics. The publications of Antonio Beccadelli (1394–​1471), Antonio Vignali (1501–​59), and Hadriaan Beverland (1650–​1716) show striking similarities in the content and audience of their texts and the trouble into which their sexual studies landed them.

Introduction

13

Philipp Nothaft’s chapter spotlights what is now well established as one of the most exciting areas of early modern scholarship: chronology. Like Hollewand, he offers a comparison that ranges across both time and place. His story begins with an account of the first public controversy in the annals of chronological scholarship, which exploded in 1488, when Paul of Middelburg –​a renowned mathematician and astrologer based at the ducal court in Urbino –​sparked outrage in his native Low Countries for allegedly denying that Jesus Christ died on a Friday and rose from the dead on the following Sunday. Paul’s exegetical ‘heresy’ was to gain a new lease of life in the mid-​seventeenth century, when a young Danish scholar named Villum Lange developed similar ideas in his De annis Christi (Leiden, 1649). Upon joining the University of Copenhagen as a professor of mathematics and astronomy, Lange’s views got him embroiled in a public dispute with the Hebraist and Lutheran bishop Hans Wandal. Nothaft’s chapter offers a comparative examination of these two learned controversies, focusing in particular on the scholarly methods, assumptions, and tools Paul of Middelburg and Lange employed in arriving at their respective conclusions. In doing so, it provides an illuminating case study of both the malleability and continuity of chronological scholarship across time periods and confessional contexts. Cesare Pastorino provides a major synoptic account of the early modern study of ancient systems of measurement, a subject that was of great importance in the period, attracting the attention of some of the leading minds. Interest in the study and precise determination of Roman, Greek and Hebrew measures extended to several different domains. Sometimes, it was practised by scholars with narrower antiquarian concerns for the reconstruction of classical and biblical knowledge. However, it also often coexisted with unexpected, more current agendas from a broader set of disciplines and practices. Present-​day interests were, for instance, relevant to proponents of monetary reform who found useful material and examples while studying ancient units of weight. The precise determination of Roman and Greek measures was also crucial for humanist-​trained physicians who tried to replicate and correctly prepare drugs according to the recipes of the Hippocratic Corpus and Galenic pharmacological texts. Civic officers and scholars attempting to improve contemporary unit systems also paid close attention to the literature and tradition of the antiquarian treatises de ponderibus et mensuris. The determination of ancient units of length spurred similar antiquarian concerns among early modern architects and cartographers. Pastorino’s overview delineates a composite cultural environment in which very different disciplines often shared subjects and practices of investigation, in a constant interaction between the philological and critical study of ancient texts and material culture, and the

14 Levitin testing and refinement of acquired knowledge on concrete and practical cases. This commonality of methods was put to the service of different interests and needs, which were in turn shaped by local and historical constraints. The tradition of metrological scholarship was launched properly by Guillaume Budé, but the comparative approach reveals just how multifaceted was his intellectual legacy in this regard. Among several examples, Pastorino examines Georg Agricola’s medical and pharmaceutical use of metrology; Johannes Kepler’s use of it for ‘civic antiquarian’ purposes; and Edward Brerewood’s application of metrological scholarship to biblical studies. Chapter 5, by Michelle Pfeffer, turns to a subject that famously straddled the disciplinary boundaries between natural philosophy, metaphysics, medicine, and theology: the human soul. Pfeffer’s focus is on the issue of whether the natural immortality of the soul was known to the Biblical Hebrew, best known though William Warburton’s Divine Legation of Moses (1738–​42). As she shows, the topic was a contested one much earlier; moreover, by the middle of the seventeenth century it was a staple of university disputation. Through a comparative study of the prominent Dutch Arminian theologian Simon Episcopius and the great English Hebraist John Lightfoot, she shows that the issue became embroiled in confessional dispute, but also that the way the matter was treated was heavily impacted by the specific context in which it was discussed: polemic, university disputation, treatises on covenant theology, or books devoted to the soul itself. In line with other important recent research, she highlights the centrality of typological arguments to seventeenth-​century exegesis and erudition. The next section begins with Jetze Touber’s ‘Sacred Medicine in Early Modern Europe’. This investigates ‘medicina sacra’ (professional expertise applied to the medical issues that arise in the Bible) through the subtle modifications of the motivations and the methods which shaped the way ancient knowledge was made to bear on the topic over the early modern period. He asks the questions: how was the appeal to ancient and modern authorities inflected differently in medicina sacra issuing from Catholic southern Europe and Protestant northern Europe? To what extent did medicina sacra reflect evolving relations between the social presence of medicine, on the one hand, and the authority of historical texts, sacred and pagan, on the other? And how did these evolving relations square with increasingly diverse representations of canonical antiquity in natural philosophy? His survey begins with the seminal text on this subject, Francisco Valles’s De iis quae scripta sunt physice in libris sacris, sive de sacra philosophia of 1587, and extends as far as Richard Mead’s Medica sacra of 1751. Using the exemplary case of leprosy, he examines the approaches of writers in the Catholic tradition (Moles, Uberte de la Cerda, Bardi) and those

Introduction

15

who were either Reformed or Lutheran (de Mey, Bartholin, Vogler, Mead). He shows that any division between those of the Roman persuasion characterized as slavishly wedded to the authoritarianism of their Church, and the freedom of thought associated with Protestantism broadly understood, is simplistic. Rather, each instance of medicina sacra needs to be understood in the full institutional and social context of the two traditions. Chapter 7, Ian Maclean’s ‘The reception of Hippocrates by physicians at the end of the seventeenth century: a comparative study’ investigates the continuing presence of the Hippocratic corpus in the early modern period in a broad range of contexts: its philological tradition; the logical and interpretative problems it posed; the influence of the Aphorisms in practical medicine and as a genre of writing; practices of observation; the accumulation of case histories and the nosology deriving from other Hippocratic texts (Epidemics, Prognostic and Airs, waters, places) in the wake of Baconian natural philosophy and experimentalism; and the various schools of medicine that developed in the course of the seventeenth century, some of which claimed descent from the Coan doctor. The figures of Thomas Sydenham, Giorgio Baglivi, Friedrich Hoffmann and Herman Boerhaave, representing four different national traditions of medicine, are then examined as examples of early modern embodiments of Hippocratism. From the evidence of these medical thinkers, it is argued that the ancients-​moderns dichotomy is not helpful in determining their theories and methods. Maclean argues that for each of these important physicians, their Hippocratism did not impede the free exercise of their scientific enquiries, but led them to be harmoniously and profitably in touch with their classical roots. The final section, devoted to theology, begins with a chapter by Jan Machielsen that investigates the role played by the important and mysterious sect of the Essenes in Catholic historiography. Starting in 1520s Leuven, Catholic scholars and theologians attempted to use the history of the Essenes to defend the apostolic origins of monasticism. They did so with a great variety of tools and techniques, all of which threw up methodological issues on how best to evaluate evidence, questions about identity, knowability and faith, as well as a whole set of anxieties about the fact that these supposed early monastics might have been Jews (as, of course, they were). The conversation is charted by Machielsen all the way through to the eighteenth century, and encompasses titans of post-​Trindentine Catholicism such as Roberto Bellarmino and Cesare Baronio, as well as a host of less famous but no less interesting figures. Machielsen’s comparisons are both chronological (later Catholics felt they could do without the Essenes) and geographical, revealing

16 Levitin a complex interaction between Rome and the borderlands that remains to be explored further. Timothy Twining’s chapter homes in on the publication and reception of Richard Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678), which has long been viewed as a seminal moment in early modern biblical scholarship. However, our understanding of the precise nature of his achievement in this work is being rapidly refined. Where scholars once discussed Simon’s work chiefly in relation to Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-​politicus (1670), it is increasingly recognised how far his ideas were instead indebted to an entirely different tradition of biblical scholarship, represented above all by the work of Jean Morin, Louis Cappel, and Brian Walton. But as Twining reminds us, this new appreciation of Simon’s work still has to confront the consequences of Jacques-​Bénigne Bossuet’s decision to ban the work in 1678. Rather than being seen as an erudite and original contribution to understanding the origin and history of the Bible, Simon’s book became stamped with a reputation for deviance and heterodoxy that made it extremely difficult for contemporaries openly to acknowledge its significance and fully absorb its findings. Twining presents a new account of the publication of the Histoire in the Dutch Republic and its immediate reception in France, the Netherlands, and Germany. He shows that only this comparative perspective can reveal the full implications of Bossuet’s decision, and the way in which Simon’s biblical criticism came to be viewed by his contemporaries. By paying special attention to the role played by Pierre Bayle and his Nouvelles de la République de Lettres (1684–​1687) –​notably in comparison with its French and German counterparts –​Twining also sheds new light on the early history of the learned journal. This allows him to bring into question current accounts of the late seventeenth-​century ‘Republic of Letters’, especially those that still insufficiently account for the role and significance of confessional division. The final chapter, by Dmitri Levitin, also looks at biblical scholarship and touches on Simon. His focus, however, is on New Testament scholarship. He provides a narrative account of pan-​European debates between c.1680 and 1720 concerning the formation of the canon of the New Testament. Although his individual sections focus on particular confessional spaces –​Catholic, English, Reformed, and Lutheran –​he argues that one of the most important benefits of a comparative approach is that it allows us to chart the way in which emulation across national and confessional boundaries could shape scholarship and the conclusions it generated. He examines the works of, inter alios, Richard Simon, Louis Ellies Du Pin, Henry Dodwell, John Ernest Grabe, John Mill, William Whiston, Jean Le Clerc, Jacques Basnage, Johannes Ens, and Christoph Matthäus Pfaff. Each of them read and responded to the works of their predecessors, attempting to adapt their findings and conclusions to their

Introduction

17

own scholarly and theological ends. Nor were lay scholars excluded from this process. Like the contribution by Twining, Levitin’s chapter uses a comparative perspective to explore how confessional and theological issues remained central to the Republic of Letters in the decades around 1700, without necessarily stifling scholarly innovation.

Acknowledgements

It gives the editors great pleasure to acknowledge the financial assistance they received from All Souls College, Oxford in organising the conference at which earlier versions of all these papers were heard and discussed, and for help they received from the College Staff and Librarians during the conference itself. They should also like to thank their distinguished friends and colleagues who took part in the conference as discussants and animateurs: Nadine Akkerman, Natasha Bailey, Robin Briggs, Marcello Cattaneo, Wolfgang Ernst, Scott Mandelbrote, Will Poole, Jenny Rampling, Anne-​Marie Roos, Justin Stover, Keith Thomas, Felix Waldmann and Alain Wijffels.

pa rt 1 Secular Classical Scholarship

∵

­c hapter 1

National Traditions in Scholarship

The French and Dutch Schools of Classical Scholarship at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century Floris Verhaart 1

Introduction

The purpose of this volume is to offer a comparative approach to the history of scholarship, which takes into account different social, institutional, economic, and political contexts. One way of doing this is by comparing two identifiable strands of scholarship in their institutional and political contexts. That national context was a helpful way of considering developments in scholarship was something of which seventeenth-​and eighteenth-​century observers were clearly aware can easily be gathered from the titles and organisation of review journals (see below). Here, I shall distinguish two different approaches to the secular literature of ancient Greece and Rome in France, England, and the Dutch Republic. The first approach had a text-​critical and philological focus and flourished in the Dutch Republic and among those who stood in close contact with peers in the United Provinces. The second was associated with France and focused on the moralising potential of classical literature. In this essay, I shall give a concise description of the two approaches within the context in which they thrived. My focus in this essay will be on the period 1670–​1715, a time when tensions between the Dutch Republic and France ran particularly high and led to several wars. It will be argued that Dutch scholars’ obsession with what they saw as proper Dutch scholarship as opposed to the shortcomings of French learning was both a reflection of political sensibilities of the time as well as long-​term developments that affected academic life during the period under review. It will also be demonstrated that socioeconomic circumstances affected the way scholarship developed in both countries.1

1 This chapter is a precis of the main arguments and conclusions of my monograph: Floris Verhaart, Classical Learning in Britain, France, and the Dutch Republic, 1690–​1750 (Oxford, 2020).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004462335_003

22 Verhaart 2

Connecting European States and Scholarship: The Problem of Defining National Awareness in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries

The use of the adjective ‘national’ requires some nuance and clarification. It is by no means my intention to argue that scholars operating in European states in the early eighteenth century had a sense of national identity in the present-​ day meaning of those words. In his classic account of the origins and development of nationalism, Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson described a nation as a demarcated ‘political unity’ that is imagined as a ‘horizontal comradeship’ that exists independently of a ‘monarch or royal dynasty’.2 Such a unity, imagined or otherwise, is hard to find in the early eighteenth century and it is usually argued that nationalism in its present form only began to develop in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.3 There are further factors that may make it seem strange at first sight to connect scholarship with a geographical entity, such as France or the Dutch Republic. Dutch universities, for example, were highly internationalized institutions where students from many parts of Europe were taught by a body of professors that was equally cosmopolitan. Claude Saumaise (1588–​1653) and Johann Georg Graevius (1632–​1703) taught at Leiden and Utrecht respectively, but the first was born in France and the latter in Saxony. Jacob Perizonius (1651–​1715) was born in Groningen and may have had the very Dutch-​sounding vernacular surname Voorbroek, but his family had its roots in the County of Bentheim in the Holy Roman Empire. Granted, the words patrie, patria, and vaderland were widely used in writings from this age, but they had a much vaguer meaning and referred to a ‘place of birth or origin’ rather than a fully developed political unity and could be a town or region as well as a country. The Amsterdam medic and scholar David van Hoogstraten (1658–​1724) wrote a brief poem about Rotterdam that reads as a definition of what he saw as his patria: De Patria sua Stat vetus & totum fama celebrata per orbem Urbs, & de Rottae nomine nomen habet. Illa mihi patria est.4 2 B. Anderson, Imagined Communities. Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn (London and New York, 2006), 5–​7. 3 See e.g. E. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality (Cambridge, 1992), 9. 4 David van Hoogstraten, Poëmata. Editio ultima, prioribus longe auctior (Amsterdam: G. onder de Linden, 1728), 221.

National Traditions in Scholarship

23

On his patria The old city stands, its fame celebrated across the world and it takes its name from the Rotte. That is my patria. Last but not least, the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were the age of the Republic of Letters, an ideal and concept that promoted the exchange of knowledge, regardless of any potential barriers created by differences in confession or geographical background.5 Despite these reservations, there is abundant evidence that geography was a category which shaped the way scholars at the turn of the eighteenth century conceived of developments, trends, and traditions in scholarship. A notable example is contemporary review journals. Many of these had titles like Bibliothèque angloise, the first volume of which appeared in 1717, and the Bibliothèque germanique, which was modelled on its English counterpart and was first published in 1720. The man behind the Bibliothèque angloise was Michel (or Michael) de la Roche (fl. 1710–​31), who in the preface to the first volume informed his readers that he aimed to discuss books published in Britain in Latin or English.6 The purpose was to give readers an impression of the literary and scholarly developments and trends in this country and the subtitle of the journal is therefore very significantly Histoire littéraire de la Grande-​Bretagne. Even in journals that did not focus on publications issued in one particular geographical region it was common to discuss books from a country collectively. One possible explanation might be that editors would receive several books at once for review from their foreign contacts. More important, however, is the fact that such collective reviews often attempt to make

5 On the Republic of Letters see e.g. H. Bots and F. Waquet, La république des lettres (Brussels and Paris, 1997); Marc Fumaroli, La république des lettres (Paris, 2015). 6 Michel De la Roche, Bibliothèque angloise ou Histoire littéraire de Grande Bretagne, vol 1 (second ed.; Amsterdam: De Coup, 1729) fol. *2v, *3r-​v: ‘Quelques-​uns de mes Amis me proposerent […] d’entreprendre un Journal en François des Livres Anglois ou Latins, qui se publient ici, & de le faire imprimer en Hollande, parc que nos Libraires Anglois n’ont que très peu de Commerce dans les Païs étrangers. […] On peut dire en genéral que les Livres Anglois ne sont guère connus hors de cette Isle, & ceux qu’on traduit de tems en tems en François, ou dont les Journalistes parlent, ne suffisent pas pour donner une juste idée de l’état où les Sciences s’y trouvent aujourd’hui, ni pour satisfaire la curiosité du Public. De sorte que le dessein, où je suis, de rendre compte, non seulement des Livres nouveaux à mesure qu’ils paroissent, mais aussi de quelques-​uns de vieille date & fort curieux, dont les Journalistes n’ont rien dit jusques-​ici, ne sera pas desagréable, si je ne me trompe, aux Personnes qui aiment les belles Lettres.’

24 Verhaart generalisations about the direction scholarship and literature had taken in a country. In a long article in the Bibliothèque choisie in 1706, Jean Le Clerc discussed recent editions of Greek poets published in England, beginning with a couple of general observations.7 He claimed, for example, that the climate for research on the classics had significantly improved during recent years; according to him this was mainly due to the excellent knowledge of philosophy and the use of reason, which allowed the English to focus on practical application rather than blind admiration for classical antiquity.8 In the past the situation had been dreadful, as the English had only been interested in the uncritical accumulation of knowledge, which had turned them into grammarians, Le Clerc’s term for anyone who failed to connect classical knowledge with other subjects.9 It is therefore appropriate and by no means anachronistic to discuss scholarship in terms of ‘national’ traditions, as long as we keep in mind that this adjective does not refer to any nation state in the modern sense, but refers to scholarly methods and traditions associated by contemporaries with individual early modern European states. 3

A ‘National Approach’ or ‘School’?

Closely connected with the issue of geography as a recognizable category for contemporaries to think about and describe scholarly developments is the extent to which such developments can then be captured in what we would describe as a unified school of thought. The clear-​cut description of a set of interests and similarities in approach and methodology as a school is, of course, to an extent owed to the historiography of scholarship after the eighteenth century. In this respect, a particularly important role was played by German classicists and linguists in the nineteenth century. Scholars such as Lucian Müller (1836–​1898) and Theodor Benfey (1809–​1881) wrote rather disparagingly about the altholländische Philologie or the holländische Schule, partly in an effort to emphasize the accomplishments of contemporary

7 Jean Le Clerc, Bibliothèque choisie, 28 vols (Amsterdam: Wetstein, 1703–​19), 6:238–​96. 8 Ibid., 238–​40. 9 Ibid., 240: ‘En un mot, par la lecture de l’Antiquité, ils [i.e. the English] étoient devenus Grammairiens, mais nullement plus honêtes gens, ou plus judicieux, que les autres; faute de joindre la Philosophie à la Philologie.’

National Traditions in Scholarship

25

German scholarship.10 Müller admitted that ‘the nationality principle is ill-​ suited to scholarship,’ mostly because so many scholars from outside the Republic taught at Dutch universities and had also received their education at universities abroad.11 He believed, however, that the work of these scholars –​ such as Johann Friedrich Gronovius (1611–​1671), the aforementioned Graevius, and David Ruhnken (1723–​1798) –​fitted so beautifully within trends among Dutch-​born scholars both in terms of focus and method that such a ‘national’ approach was justified.12 It was not just later generations that thought about the aforementioned elements in connection with the United Provinces; contemporaries recognized them as such, too. An example is how Richard Bentley (1662–​1742) was perceived by contemporaries, for example in the pamphlet Some Account of Horace his Behaviour during his Stay at Trinity-​College, in Cambridge, published in 1712 by William King (1663–​1712), a poet and publicist who as one of the Christ Church Wits had been involved in attacks on Bentley in favour of Charles Boyle (1674–​1731) and continued to ridicule him after the Phalaris controversy. King’s pamphlet followed the publication of Bentley’s edition of Horace (1711) and satirized him as a godless, greedy, and pedantic critic. King outlines how Bentley belonged to the Dutch faction both in politics and scholarship and suggests that the Cambridge scholar should consider emigrating: As he grew daily more unwieldy, so he fell into the Dutch Faction, and was extremely pleased with a Book I had then by me, but is since lost, which was an Edition of his Odes and Epodes, in a fair Character, with a Translation on the other side into Dutch Prose. It might be very Elegant for ought I know, being not much conversant in that Language; all that I can remember of it is O Nata mecum Consule Manlio. Whan Mijn Heer Manlius Bourgour-​Maester waes. [Od. 3, 21, 1] I fancy it might not

10

Lucian Müller, Geschichte der klassischen Philologie in den Niederlanden (Leipzig, 1869), 23; Theodor Benfey, Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft und orientalishchen Philologie in Deutschland seit dem Anfange des 19. Jahrhunderts mit einem Rückblick auf die früheren Zeiten (Munich, 1869), 255. 11 Müller, Geschichte, 8: ‘das Nationalitäts-​Princip in der Wissenschaft übel angebracht ist.’ 12 Ibid.: ‘Die fremden Gelehrten, die in Holland einen Wirkungskreis fanden, haben meist wie Gronov, Graevius, Ruhnken, Wyttenbach die geeignete Anregung, die bestimmende Richtung ihrer Laufbahn ganz oder theilweise erst auf dortigen Universitäten gefunden, alle aber haben sich as Lehrer in der Manier des Unterrichts, ausserdem im Betriebe der Wissenschaft, nach Objecten sowohl als nach Methode, gleichmässig dem fortlaufenden Entwicklungsgange eingereiht.’

26 Verhaart be improper for Horace to take a Journey to Amsterdam, to see what Improvements he can make of himself in Holland.13 In another piece written by King, A True and Impartial Account of the Differences between the Master and Fellows (1711), on the tensions between Richard Bentley as Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and the Fellows of this college, reference is made to Bentley’s ‘Dutch Eulogia’ or the praise his work received in the United Provinces.14 Like his colleagues in the Dutch Republic, Bentley flirted with the idea of applying the same text-​critical methods to sacred texts as he had done to secular and pagan texts. In 1721, he published his Proposals for Printing a New Edition of the Greek Testament, in which he first sanctimoniously declared that ‘in the Sacred Writings there’s no place for Conjectures or Emendations,’ only to add that he would include ‘any thing’ he had ‘to suggest towards a Change of the Text’ in the Prolegomena to his edition.15 Conyers Middleton (1683–​1750), one of Bentley’s many other opponents at Cambridge, attacked him in a pamphlet, suggesting that Bentley would ‘mangle and alter’ the sacred writings ‘with as little Ceremony as he has done the Profane’.16 Strikingly, an important part of Middleton’s attack refers to an oration by the ‘Dutch Orator and old Friend of his Peter Burman,’ in which the Dutch professor seemingly denounces the studia humanitatis: a quotation from this oration about the alleged inability of textual critics to keep their hands off Scripture figures prominently on Middleton’s titlepage.17 As Bentley and his allies were quick to point out, however, the Oratio in studia humanitatis was ‘writ in Lucian’s manner, a thorough Irony and Jeer’ and Burman’s views were therefore exactly the opposite of what Middleton thought they were.18 Although they themselves may have occasionally misinterpreted the meaning and intention 13 14

William King, Useful Miscellanies (London: Lintott, 1712), 39. For a fuller discussion of King’s attacks on Bentley’s character and scholarship, see Verhaart, Classical Learning, 101–​6. 15 Richard Bentley, Proposals for Printing a New Edition of the Greek Testament and St. Hierom’s Latin Version (London: Knapton, 1721), 4. 16 Conyers Middleton, Remarks, paragraph by paragraph, upon the proposals lately publish’d by Richard Bentley (London: J. Roberts, 1721), 5. 17 Ibid., 16. The full title of Burman’s oration was Oratio in humanitatis studia (Leiden: Luchtmans, 1720). The quotation on the titlepage of Middleton’s pamphlet is ‘Doctus criticus & adsuetus urere, secare, inclementer omnis generis libros tractare, apices, syllabas, voces, dictiones confodere, & stilo exigere, continebitne ille ab integro & intaminato Divinae Sapientiae monumento crudeles ungues? Petri Burmanni Orat. Lugd. Bat. 1720’ (p. 14 of the original). 18 Bentley, Proposals, 36. For a fuller discussion of this clash between Bentley and Middleton, see Verhaart, Classical Learning, 123–​7.

National Traditions in Scholarship

27

of the writings of Dutch scholars, these examples make clear that King and Middleton associated Bentley’s work with scholarly practice in the United Provinces and knew that many of his intellectual allies could be found there. Bentley’s Dutch sympathies, however, were not just of a scholarly nature, as he was a prominent Whig at Cambridge while King and Middleton –​at that stage of his life –​were Tories. In the early 1710s the Whigs and Britain’s Dutch allies were in favour of continuing the war against France, but the Tories, who, in 1710 had come to power, tried to bring about peace with France. Such interconnectedness of politics and scholarship is also clear in how Dutch scholars perceived French scholarship. 4

Pride and Anxiety: Factors that Contributed to the Way Scholarship Was Practised in the United Provinces

Now that we have established that contemporaries were aware of geographical trends and differences in scholarship and touched upon the viability of discussing such trends in terms of a recognisable school or approach, it is time to look at the factors (political, institutional, socio-​economic and otherwise) that influenced those differernces. My aim here is not to be exhaustive, but rather to indicate and suggest some of the circumstances that shaped scholarship in France and the United Provinces in the early modern period. I shall begin with the latter. First of all, there is clear evidence for the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that the position of the traditional faculty of arts was under increasing pressure. At the University of Harderwyk, in Guelders, where Theodorus Janssonius van Almeloveen (1657–​1712) taught Greek and history, the proportion of those who studied at the faculty of arts dropped from 38.4% in 1650–​74 to 4.2% in 1725–​49 (see Figure 1.1).19 The causes of the decline were several. In the first place, this faculty became increasingly divided into a literary and philological part, which traditionally played the role of a preparation for theology, and a philosophical and mathematical part. This development went so far that, judging from the matriculation entries given by students at the University of Groningen, the faculty of arts was less and less seen as a comprehensive concept. Whereas the other faculties are still mentioned with one,

19

The figures on which this graph is based can be found in W. Frijhoff, La société néerlandaise et ses gradués, 1575–​1814 (Amsterdam, 1981), 41.

28 Verhaart uniform designation (‘theology,’ ‘medicine,’ etc.), arts is called anything from humanities to mathematics.20 Within this split situation, the ‘scientific’ part began to behave increasingly like one of the higher faculties.21 Its philological counterpart, however, was sometimes made virtually redundant by the faculty of theology, when professors began to teach the languages needed to study the Bible and Church Fathers themselves.22 The second development was the general erosion of the public lectures that had made up an important part of the teaching offered by Dutch universities in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Instead, more expensive private lectures became the backbone of a student’s education. These usually took place at the professor’s home and were divided into full and half lectures, taught four or five and one or two times per week respectively.23 Students could also ask a professor to organize privatissima, a series of sessions in which a professor taught about a topic of the student’s choice. Needless to say, this was only an option for the richest among the students. These lectures usually had to be paid for upon graduation, and although the only examples we have of the prices paid date from the second half of the eighteenth century, there are quite a few recorded instances of students who did a moonlight flit as soon as they had received their much desired testimonia.24 As students were increasingly expected to rely on private lectures, many of them tried to ‘make their purchases’ as efficiently as possible and tended to skip the introductory arts courses in favour of the courses offered at the more advanced faculties.25 The decline of the public lecture also reinforced an ongoing development in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: a growing proportion of students in tertiary education came from the upper classes of society. As a consequence, many textual critics teaching at universities complained about a lack of commitment to studying antiquity. Pieter Burman the Elder (1668–​1741) mentioned in a speech on the duties of a professor of classical studies pronounced in 1715 he believed it was better to skip this particular grievance of his: the ‘laziness and negligence’ of these students was apparently widely known and taken

20 Ibid., 40. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 41. Frijhoff offers Theodore Scheltinga (1706–​1780) in Harderwijk as an example of this phenomenon. 23 J. Roelevink, Gedicteerd verleden. Het onderwijs in de algemene geschiedenis aan de Universiteit te Utrecht (Amsterdam and Maarssen, 1986), 133. 24 Ibid. The prices mentioned (in 1756) are 30 guilders for a full lecture course and 15 guilders for half lecture courses. 25 Ibid., 30.

29

National Traditions in Scholarship 60 50 40

Arts Law

30

Medicine 20

Theology

10 0

1650-74

1675-99

1700-24

1725-49

­f igure 1.1  Proportion of students per faculty at the University of Harderwijk (in percentage of the total)

for granted.26 Things only got worse as the eighteenth century progressed. Lodewijk Caspar Valckenaer (1715–​1785) was a professor of Greek at the university of Franeker and made a significant contribution to knowledge of the texts and fragments of Greek tragedies. In a speech delivered in the 1740s and entitled De rerum Belgicarum vicissitudine (On the Vicissitude of the Dutch State) he gave vent to his frustrations with the ‘brats of the rich and powerful’. Spoilt by the ‘silly indulgence of their mothers,’ these men only came to university to ‘walk around with an air of loathing towards ordinary citizens’ and as soon as they feel they have learned enough they move on to a job in the administration. Their ‘body may be well trained for very useful dances,’ he remarked cynically but their ‘mind’ remained ‘almost empty’.27

26 Pieter Burman, Orationes, antea sparsim editae, et ineditis auctae, ed. N. Bondt (Amsterdam: P.G. van Balen, 1759), 281. 27 Lodewijk Caspar Valckenaer, Oratio de prisca et nupera rerum Belgicarum vicissitudine (Franeker: G. Coulon, 1749), 27: ‘Non pauci divitum et Potentum filioli, a teneris fatua matrum indulgentia corrupti, mittebantur in Academias Belgicas. Postquam cuti bene curata, suo fastu quodam arrogantes, civium cum fastidio plateas per aliquot annos nitidi perambulaverant, derepente titulis amplis, etiam (proh pudor!) a nostro ordine hominum, honestati, muneribus et civitatibus regendis admovebantur; corpus quidem utilissimis saltationibus exercitati, sed mentis paene vacui; cui vix ulla certe veteris, aut historiae Patriae scientia instructi, nulla rerum Europaearum, nulla humanitatis notitia, nulla rerum civilium, nulla iuris et aequitatis.’

30 Verhaart The position of the faculty of arts also came under pressure due to rivalry from external institutions, especially in the United Provinces and France. In the United Provinces the rivalry came from the so-​called ‘illustrious school’ (Illustere School or Athenaeum Illustre). Examples of such schools were founded in Deventer (1630), Amsterdam (1632), and Rotterdam (1681). The idea underlying the foundation of such institutions was that pupils who had left school (triviale school) were not yet ready in terms of their moral and intellectual development to go to university. In the case of Amsterdam, the city council concluded in 1629: [The Burgomasters] have laid before the Council the manifold complaints submitted to them, both by the heads of the schools and by other private individuals, that the children who attend the Latin school here in most cases leave for university at too early an age, before having grasped the fundamentals of philosophy which are required to proceed with their studies. And due to their youth, and because they are beyond the reach of their parents, some of them are subject to no authority whatsoever and fall into debauchery.28 University towns, and Leiden in particular, also had a bad reputation regarding student behaviour and the citizens of Amsterdam therefore felt that they should try to keep their offspring close to home until they considered them old and mature enough to send them to university. Caspar Barlaeus (1584–​1648) refers to this consideration in a letter to Arnoldus Buchelius (1565–​1641) in which he tells him about his new job as one of the institution’s first professors (together with Gerard Vossius (1577–​1649)).29

28

29

Vroedschapsresoluties, Gemeente-​archief Amsterdam, archive no. 5025, dd. 31 Dec 1629 (quoted in Gedenkboek van het Athenaeum en de Universiteit van Amsterdamm 1632–​1932, eds. H. Brugmans, J.H. Scholte, and Ph. Kleintjes (Amsterdam, 1932), 25; translated in Dirk van Miert, Humanism in an Age of Science: The Amsterdam Athenaeum in the Golden Age, 1632–​1704, trans. Michiel Wielema, with Anthony Ossa-​Richardson (Leiden and Boston, 2009), 40). Barlaeus to Buchelius, 31 Dec 1630 (Epistolae no. 162), in Epistolarum liber. Pars prior et pars posterior (Amsterdam: Blaeu, 1667): ‘Amstelodamenses Scholam illustrem erigere jam serio parant, eo consilio, ut dimissos scholis suis trivialibus juvenes Philosophiae literarumque studiis instrui current, nec necesse habeant cruda studia & annos consilii expertes in Academiam protrudere. […] Mores insuper studiosorum & convictorum usque adeo in pejus degenerant, ut non ad scholas sed tabernas ac popinas missi videantur.’

National Traditions in Scholarship

31

A second aim for the illustrious school was to provide an opportunity for ‘lifelong learning’ avant la lettre. Those who had attended university in the past or were simply interested in one or more of the topics discussed in the praelectiones were welcome to attend these. Athenaeums such as the one in Amsterdam thus contributed to the gentrification of the education in classical culture, since merchants, regents, and other members of the local elite seem to have been well represented.30 The University of Leiden, which had the sole right to offer higher education, protested against what it saw as the introduction of a rival in the field. It was fobbed off with the promise that all the teaching at the Athenaeum would have a strictly preparatory character.31 Regarding the contents of and spirit in which education was offered by the Athenaeums, we will take a look at the Mercator sapiens, sive Oratio de coniungendis mercaturae et philosophiae studiis (‘The wise merchant or discourse on uniting the study of [or ‘zeal for’] commerce and philosophy’). This oration was pronounced by Barlaeus at the official inauguration of the Amsterdam Athenaeum in 1632 and is therefore an ideal means to find out how this institution wanted to present itself to the world and how those involved in its foundation conceived of its role. The title Mercator sapiens is a reference to the way in which he thought he could help an important group within the society of Amsterdam, by demonstrating to its merchants how they could integrate classical wisdom in their lives. The aim of his argument was to show that there is a wonderful interaction between commerce and the study of literature and wisdom, that the care to augment one’s possessions does not obstruct the meditations of the mind, nor the other way round, but that they cooperate in excellent ways, and that according to me the merchant will be happier, the more splendidly he is able to philosophize.32 Barlaeus then mentions a considerable number of ancient authorities, ranging from Homer and Aristotle to Cicero and Tacitus, in order to exemplify how

30 31 32

van Miert, Humanism in an Age of Science, 142–​7. Ibid., 40–​3. Caspar Barlaeus, Mercator sapiens. Oratie gehouden by de inwijding van de Illustere School te Amsterdam op 9 januari 1632, ed. S. van der Woude (Amsterdam, 1967), 29: ‘Illud ostendam: optimum esse mercaturae cum sapientiae ac litterarum studiis commercium, nec augendae rei curam mentis contemplationibus, nec has illi obesse, verum optimis rationibus inter se conspirare, mercandi et philosophandi facultatem, ut tanto mihi felicior sit futurus mercator, quanto philosophari poterit luculentius.’

32 Verhaart their writings can help to become a better, more virtuous merchant. One such ‘lesson’ is taken from Cicero: It is truly important when buying and selling to consider nothing as useful that is not honest at the same time and not to have less esteem for a clear conscience than for private gain. It is also truly important, even if the deceit is rather well concealed, not to wish to deceive, and to be sincere and earnest even if it causes us damage. Cicero deals with these subjects with the utmost conscientiousness in his De officiis and he wants all business to be free from any falsehood thus showing us an admirable example of virtue. He strictly emphasizes those most sacred formulations of a bygone era: ‘it is becoming that good men behave themselves towards each other in a good way’ [De officiis iii.15] and ‘all things should be judged according to the right and good and in good faith’.33 Cicero’s wise words are connected to the observation that nothing can seem useful unless it is also good. For the highest good has to contain all good things by definition and utility is therefore also part of it.34 As so often, Barlaeus’s conception of classical learning is very much framed in opposition to a different kind of learning, namely the pedantry of those who find it necessary ‘to recite the battles of the Lapiths’ or ‘hurl out a dialectical reasoning in a military camp’.35 The knowledge that Barlaeus is talking about here is thus explicitly connected with and relevant to the contemporary world, not the kind of bookishness mocked in these examples. 33

34

35

Ibid., 36–​7: ‘Iam vero in emptione et venditione quanti est, nihil utile putare, quod non simul honestum sit, nec privatis commodis postponere recti conscientiam, quantum est, etiam si fraus occultior sit, non fallere velle, vel sui damno in contractibus sincerum ac veracem esse. Ac de his summa relligione in Officiorum libris disputant Cicero, ac admirabilem virtutis speciem ob oculos ponens, ab omni fuco alienas esse vult negotiations, rigideque urget illas veteris aevi sanctissimas formulas: Inter bonos bene agier oportet, omnia ex aequo et bono metienda, et fide bona.’ The quotations from Cicero are actually Cicero’s quotations from the laws of the Twelve Tables. Ibid., 37: ‘Nihil illi [sc. Ciceroni], nihil Panaetio ac Antipatro, priscis philosophis, utile visum, quod non simul honestum esset, nihil honestum, quod non etiam utile. […] Si enim ad virtutem aut virtutis actionem nati sumus, omnino sequitur, illud ipsum, quod honestum est, summum bonum esse, et cum summi boni ratio nullum in se bonum desiderari patiatur, etiam utile in se includat necesse est.’ Ibid., 29: ‘Equidem ita semper statui, operose illos ineptire, qui in foro Lapitharum pugnas recitant, in castris dialecticum torquent enthymema, in sacris regnorum imperiorumque momenta exaggerant, in mensis super Hecubae aut Andromaches fato singultiunt, in scholis iis exercitationibu fatigant adolescentulos, de quibus ad senatum referri expediat.’

National Traditions in Scholarship

33

With the help of the city’s Athenaeum Illustre the teachings of the ancients could be conveniently integrated into the busy working lives of the citizens of Amsterdam. According to Barlaeus, the teaching offered would allow them to find new energy after hard work, consolation if they were sad, and, if they had settled an expectedly lucrative deal, the knowledge they received at the Athenaeum would protect them against hubris.36 The way in which the classics were dealt with at institutions like the Athenaeum Illustre was thus very much in the tradition of the practical utility of ancient knowledge for contemporary life.37 It provided a structure that was open to those outside the academic circle and could help them in their interest in education and scholarship. By doing so, it created a strong tension in terms of scholarly outlook between itself as an institution and the universities of the Dutch Republic. All of these factors help explain a sense of urgency among academics in the United Provinces to define clearly the topic of their research and emphasize the independence of their field with regard to other research domains (see §7). There were, however, also numerous factors that allowed Dutch scholars to maintain a relatively technical, text-​critical approach to classical, pagan texts. First of all, the co-​existence of illustrious schools and universities created a division of labour and may have been a reason why the vast majority of university professors in the Dutch Republic felt little need to popularize their subject: this demand was simply fulfilled by others and they could therefore focus on publications for their scholarly peers.38 A second factor was the strongly developed publishing industry in the United Provinces that was both willing and able to bring out technical works of philology and textual criticism. Benefitting from its excellent international connections through its ports and good roads as well as from an advanced economic infrastructure, Dutch publishers began to dominate the European booktrade and were decisive trendsetters.39 Ludolf Küster (1670–​1716), a philologist 36

Ibid., 48: ‘Vos vero viri nobilissimi, spectatissimi, sive cives; sive advenae estis, animis, linguis illustri huic gymnasio favete. Erit hic, ubi perfuncti negotiis, animum componetis, ubi afflicti solatium petetis, ubi inopinato lucro aucti mentem temperabitis, ab insolenti laetitia, ubi audaciae in exponendis mercibus occursabit prudens timor, timorem moderabitur fiducia, fiduciam scientia, scientiam recti conscienia.’ 37 van Miert, Humanism in an Age of Science, 35–​40; Willem Frijhoff, ‘Het Amsterdamse Athenaeum in het academische landschap van de zeventiende eeuw,’ in Athenaeum illustre. Elf studies over de Amsterdamse Doorluchtige School, 1632–​1877, eds E.O.G. Haitsma et al. (Amsterdam, 1997), 60, 65. 38 Roelevink, Gedicteerd verleden, 60–​6. 39 On the economic importance and modernity of the Dutch Republic, see J. de Vries and A. van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure and Perseverance of the

34 Verhaart from Westphalia who spent much of his working life in the Low Countries, wrote to Richard Bentley in 1707 that one of the reasons why he wanted to stay in the United Provinces was his conviction that printers there were much more interested in publishing works in Latin and Greek: Moreover, if I stay here in Holland, then at least there will be no lack of publishers, either Dutch or German, who would eagerly take me on to help with various authors. I am doubtful I would get such an opportunity in England. For there are way fewer publishers there accustomed to printing Greek and Latin books than in this region. 40 This perception would remain more or less unchanged during the rest of the century. In 1776, Rijklof Michaël van Goens (1748–​1806), a man of letters based at Utrecht wrote to Johann David Michaelis (1717–​1791) in Göttingen that he had read and enjoyed the work of a number of German scholars; the only drawback was that so much of it was in German, a language with which many in other countries were not very familiar.41 Michaelis replied that this should not be blamed on these scholars themselves. Unlike their Dutch counterparts, German booksellers were hardly interested in Latin publications. Michaelis added that he would love to publish a number of Latin dissertations written by his father Christian Benedikt Michaelis, since he believed they would be useful for his students. It was very hard, however, to find a bookseller willing to

40

41

Dutch Economy, 1500–​1815 (Cambridge, 1997); J. Luiten van Zanden, ‘The “Revolt of the Early Modernists” and the “First Modern Economy”: An Assessment,’ Economic History Review 55 (2002), 619–​41; W.D. Smith, ‘The Function of Commercial Centers in the Modernization of European Capitalism: Amsterdam as an Information Exchange in the Seventeenth Century,’ Journal of Economic History 44 (1984), 985–​1005. I would like to thank Ian Maclean for these references. See also Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, The Bookshop of the World: Making and Trading Books in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven and London, 2019), 266–​93. Kuster to Bentley, Amsterdam, 7 Jan 1707, in The Correspondence of Richard Bentley, ed. James Henry Monk, 2 vols (London, 1842) (ep. 115), 1:249: ‘Praeterea, hic in Hollandia manenti non defuturos saltem bibliopolas, vel Hollandos, vel Germanos, qui operam meam in variis auctoribus collocandam, cupide conducturi essent: quam opportunitatem an in Anglia nacturus essem, dubium fore. Multo enim pauciores illic esse bibliopolas, qui libros Graecos et Latinos imprimere soleant, quam in hac regione.’ van Goens to Michaelis, 13 Dec 1776, Koninklijke Bibliotheek kb 130 D 14 P 5: ‘Je suis un peu fâché de ce que la plupart de ceux que je distinguerois le plus, n’aient publié que des Ouvrages en langue allemande: objection qui n’en est pas une pour moi, mais qui ne laisseroit pas d’avoir quelque poids auprès d’une grande partie de la nation, à qui les livres allemands & la langue même est peu familiére.’

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undertake the project of printing these works, whereas they were all too eager to print material in the vernacular.42 The ability of Dutch publishing firms to support text-​critical projects was, moreover, partly owing to the fact that many of them were recognized as university printers. Pieter Burman, for example, printed practically all of his works with two printers: Willem van de Water (fl. 1689–​1713), who was Utrecht’s university printer from 1699 until 1728, and Samuel Luchtmans (1685–​1757), who likewise printed for the university as well as the city of Leiden. The role of academiae typographus represented a reliable source of income through the printing of orations, disputations, and theses.43 They therefore had the financial stability to work on more specialized publications. Although the United Provinces were seen by Voltaire as the ‘magasin de l’univers,’ it has been argued that domestic consumption was ‘the real engine of growth of the Dutch book industry’.44 This brings me to another factor that is likely to have enabled the continued high level of specialism in Dutch scholarship: the existence of a domestic audience that had the appropriate training to appreciate these publications. Despite the increase of the proportion of students from a privileged background, the proportion of students who described themselves as pauperes, students from the lower social classes exempt from paying tuition fees remained relatively stable at around 20% from the 1680s onwards.45 Once these students, many of whom became ministers, had finished their education they continued to be important for the preservation of a classical education in their country, as they either taught at, led, or enjoyed considerable authority over many schools both in the cities and countryside.46 42

Michaelis to van Goens, 30 Dec 1776, Koninklijke Bibliotheek kb 130 D 14 P 3*: ‘Quod Germanica lingua, non Latina, utuntur scriptores Germani, non ipsis imputandum est, sed bibliopolis. Hi plane nolunt Latina imprimere. Id ego quoque aegre ferens experior. Percupidus in usum auditorum meorum, magis etiam cupidorum, patris mei dissertationes, valde ab illo notis manuscriptis locupletatas, edendi, quibus vix quisquam auditorum meorum carere posset, ac valde mediocre poscent pretium, nullum invenio bibliopolam, opus percipientem, cum non quadruplo me sed plusquam decuplo solicitent ad scripta germanica edenda.’ 43 Pettegree and der Weduwen, Bookshop, 183–​9. 44 For the attribution of this epithet to Amsterdam and by extension to the United Provinces by Voltaire in a letter to the marquise de Bernières (7 Oct 1722), see Le magasin de l’univers: The Dutch Republic as the Centre of the European Book Trade, eds. C. Berkvens-​ Stevelinck, H. Bots, P.G. Hoftijzer, and O.S. Lankhorst (Leiden, 1992), x. On the importance of the domestic market for Dutch booksellers, see Pettegree and der Weduwen, Bookshop, 11–​13. 45 H. Bots, I. Matthey, and M. Meyer, Noordbrabantse studenten, 1550–​1750 (Tilburg, 1979), 24. 46 Frijhoff, La société néerlandaise, 277–​9.

36 Verhaart An important circumstance in this respect was that, unlike many other countries, the United Provinces had a job market that was relatively favourable for university graduates. In the case of ministers, for example, it has been calculated that during the late seventeenth century the demand for ministers exceeded the number of ordinands with the exception of Utrecht, Guelders, and Drenthe.47 This was at least partly caused by a boom in the creation of new permanent posts as their number rose from 830 in 1600–​1604 to 1555 in 1710–​1714.48 5

Factors at Play in France

Although scholarship in France and the Dutch Republic followed different directions in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that had not always been the case. Joseph Scaliger (1540–​1609) and Isaac Casaubon (1559–​ 1614) both had a French Huguenot background and so had one of Isaac Vossius’ mentors in Leiden, Claude Saumaise, which is why Dirk van Miert has written about the “French connection” with regard to the intellectual influences on the work of Isaac Vossius.49 Of particular importance was a network of Protestant pastors and scholars revolving around the academy of Saumur that consisted of, among others, Louis Cappel (1585–​1658), Samuel Bochart (1599–​1667), and Moyse Amyraut (1596–​1664).50 There were important and obvious political causes for the curtailment of this (Protestant) textual criticism, such as the persecution of Huguenots in France and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, which led to the conversion or exile of many Protestant scholars. Philological and text-​critical knowledge also went out of fashion in France. Contemporaries pointed to the rise of new knowledge paradigms, such as Cartesianism, since Descartes had been rather hostile to erudition, at one point insisting on ‘the difference there is between the sciences and simple bits of knowledge that you can acquire without any sensible discourse, such as languages, history, geography, and, generally speaking, everything that is 47 48 49 50

Ibid., 273–​7. Ibid., 396 (appendix 11). D. van Miert, ‘The French Connection: From Casaubon and Scaliger, via Saumaise, to Isaac Vossius,’ in Isaac Vossius (1618–​1689) between Science and Scholarship, ed. E. Jorink and D. van Miert (Leiden, 2012), 15–​24. F. Laplanche, ‘Tradition et modernité au XVIIe siècle. L’exégèse biblique des protestants français,’ Annales 40 (1985), 463–​88; B. Barret-​Kriegel, La défaite de l’érudition (Paris, 1988), 248–​9; B. Guion, ‘Le savoir et le goût: être philologue dans la France classique,’ Littératures classiques 72 (2010), 63–​84.

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only derived from experience’.51 As early as 1657, Ismael Bouilliau (1605–​1694) observed that the age of philology was making way for the age of philosophy and mathematics: By the way, here [in France] the study of philology and textual criticism has come to a halt. For this reason, a fellow countryman of mine, as the excellent Gronovius told me, rightly said that the age of philology and textual criticism has ended and the age of philosophy and mathematics has followed it.52 Despite such comments, we will see how many philologists in the Dutch Republic introduced elements taken from modern philosophy and the natural sciences in their conception of the textual critic’s work (§ 7). Philology also received a bad press following the scandal and shock in France surrounding the publication of Richard Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (first printed in 1678) and Histoire critique du Nouveau Testament (first printed in 1689) and their author’s subsequent fall from favour with political and religious authorities.53 Another circumstance and striking difference with the United Provinces is the way in which the Querelle des anciens et des modernes played out. As we will see in §8, in the United Provinces the Querelle was seen in ‘national’ terms, since moderns such as Charles Perrault (1628–​1703) and Antoine Houdar de La Motte (1672–​1731) were seen to promote French culture at the expense of other literary traditions, both ancient and contemporary. In France itself, meanwhile, the moderns focused much of their criticism of ancient writings on moral aspects.54 An example is Houdar de La Motte’s 51

52

53 54

René Descartes, La recherche de la vérité par la lumière naturelle [1701], in Oeuvres de Descartes, eds Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, 12 vols (Paris, 1897–​1910), 10:502: ‘[J]‌e désire que vous remarquiez la différence qu’il y entre les sciences et les simples connaissances qui s’acquièrent sans aucun discours de raison, comme des langues, l’histoire, la géographie, et généralement de tout ce qui ne dépend que de l’expérience seule.’ Boulliau to Heinsius, 12 April 1657, in Sylloge epistolarum a viris illustribus scriptarum tomi quinque, ed. Pieter Burman, 5 vols (Leiden: Luchtmans, 1727), 5:596 : ‘Caeterum apud nos (i.e. in France) Philologiae ac critices studia cessarunt. Quapropter quidam concivis, ut mihi retulit optimus Gronovius, recte dixit saeculum Philologicum ac criticum abiisse, Philosophicum vero ac Mathematicum successisse.’ A. Hunwick, ‘Richard Simon (1638–​1712): Sketch of Life and Career,’ in Richard Simon, Critical History of the Text of the New Testamen, ed. and trans. A. Hunwick (Leiden, 2013), xxv–​xxxvi. See also Timothy Twining’s chapter in this volume. See on this point also L.F. Norman, The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France (Chicago, 2011), 113–​30.

38 Verhaart Discours sur Homère, first published in 1714 as an appendix to his adaptation of Homer’s Iliad. His view on Homeric Greece was that: These times, qualified as the heroic age, will appear to be the kingdom of the most unjust and basest passions and especially the triumph of avarice. The commanders are no less greedy than the soldiers. The sack of Troy is always the Greeks’ most powerful incentive for valour. Homer himself sometimes speaks of gold with a certain admiration, which clearly indicates that the lack of luxury in his time was less a mark of virtuous simplicity than of coarseness and ignorance.55 One of the leading figures among the ancients, Anne Dacier (1645–​1720), responded to the Discours with her Des causes de la corruption du goût (1715), in which she defended Homer’s moral message –​and thus a moral reading of Homer –​by claiming that the poet depicted vice as a negative example: He [Houdar de la Motte] does not really think about it, and he confuses certain vicious characters that Homer presents to us in the Iliad to incite us to avoid vice with the age [that Homer describes]. Has anyone ever claimed that in times of great innocence there are not any wicked people, driven by their passions to commit crimes?56 Some of Dacier’s intellectual allies, such as Jean Boivin (1663–​1726), took a slightly different line of defence against the ‘moral’ attacks of Homer’s detractors and argued that the poet simply depicted the age on which he wrote, the implication being that scholars and interpreters of the Iliad should give readers the means to understand that past age: ‘The point is not to know whether the

55

56

Antoine Houdar de la Motte, Discours sur Homère (Paris: Prault, 1754), 42–​3: ‘[C]‌es temps qualifiés d’héroïques paraîtront le règne des passions les plus injustes et les plus basses, et surtout le triomphe d’avarice. Les chefs ne sont pas moins avides de butin que les soldats. Le pillage de Troie est toujours plus puissant aiguillon de la valeur des Grecs: et Homère lui-​même parle quelquefois de l’or avec une certaine admiration, qui marque bien que le défaut de luxe venait moins, dans son temps, d’une simplicité vertueuse, que de grossiereté et d’ignorance.’ Anne Dacier, Des causes de la corruption du gout (Amsterdam: Humbert, 1715), 98: ‘Il [i.e. Houdar de La Motte] n’y pense pas, & il confond tres mal à propos certains caracteres vicieux, qu’Homere nous presente dans l’Iliade pour nous porter à fuïr le vice, il les confond avec ces temps. A t-​on jamais prétendu que dans les temps de la plus grande innocence il n’y ait point eu d’hommes méchans, que les passions ayent portez à commettre des crimes.’

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morals Homer depicts are good or bad, but only whether the morals during his age or the age of the Trojan were as he depicted them and whether he has accurately depicted him as they were at the time’.57 In other words, the arguments employed by moderns and ancients in France suggest that two approaches to the literature of the ancient Greco-​Roman world were reinforced: a tendency to read ancient texts from a moral perspective and a stronger tendency than the Dutch critics to provide information, e.g. historical contextualization, that made these works more accessible to the non-​specialist reader. These two elements may seem contradictory. Drawing moral lessons from texts that were written many centuries earlier suggests a belief in the continuity of human nature and the continued applicability of moral precepts. Contextualization, however, implies specific circumstances and change through time that needs to be overcome through explanation and clarification. The paradox is explained, however, by the fact that this contextualization should be seen as a form of popularization and making these texts accessible as will become clear below when we look at the comments of Charles de Sainte-​Maure, duc de Montausier (1610–​1690) on a series of editions of classical texts he helped was to initiate, the Collectio ad usum Delphini (see § 9). Whereas the Querelle was viewed in geographical terms in the Dutch Republic (see § 8), it was seen in moral terms in France, at least with an eye to the effect on the study of ancient texts.58 As we will see, French scholarship placed a strong emphasis on accessibility of editions, which was closely connected with readers from a privileged socioeconomic background who had some classical training, but not enough to read classical Latin and Greek literature completely without help. The obvious factor at play in this case was the gentrification of French education and, by extension, of the study of antiquity. As pointed out in the previous section, the proportion of students from the social upper classes also grew in the Dutch 57

58

Jean Boivin, Apologie d’Homère et Bouclier d’Achille (Paris: Jouenne, 1715), 65: ‘Il ne s’agit pas de savoir si les moeurs qu’Homère peint, sont bonnes ou mauvaises, mais seulement, si de son temps, ou du temps de la guerre de Troie, les moeurs étaient telles qu’il les a peintes, et s’il les a bien représentées telles qu’elles étaient alors.’ Boivin in fact realised the geographical implications of the moderns’ arguments, which focused so strongly on contemporary French customs and morality. See e.g. Apologie, 47: ‘Ne pouvoir souffrir dans les hommes d’un siècle ou d’un pas éloigné du nôtre, un caractère différent de celui des hommes du siècle présent, ou du pays où nous vivons, c’est ne pouvoir souffrir l’air étranger dans un étranger; c’est vouloir qu’un Turc, un Indien, un Chinois pensent et agissent comme nous, n’aient aucun des défauts de leur nation, et aient toutes les vertus de la nôtre. Pour moi ce qui me plaît dans un Chinois, c’est l’air chinois, ce sont les manières chinoises: et je saurais très mauvais gré à un peintre, qui s’étant engagé à me faire le portrait de l’empereur de la Chine, me l’aurait peint habillé à la française.’

40 Verhaart Republic, but not to the extent that it fundamentally changed the nature of how the classics of Greco-​Roman antiquity were read and taught. Research by Laurence Brockliss, Dominique Julia, and Willem Frijhoff has shown that both secondary and tertiary education became increasingly elitist in early modern France.59 According to Brockliss, a vital reason for this was that the number of scholarships (bourses) was gradually reduced as a consequence of rapid inflation during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and of the need for educational institutions to economize by cutting the number of bourses. Bourses that did survive often provided inadequate support because their rate did not keep pace with inflation.60 Some colleges were rich enough to take into account inflation, but their bourses, too, increasingly came to be treated as the rightful preserve of the social and intellectual elite, despite efforts from government authorities to counteract abuses. The economic factor of inflation went hand in glove with a much less favourable view of the desirability for social climbers. A past of internal strife –​the trauma of the wars of religion (1562–​1598) and the civil wars of the mid-​seventeenth century –​instigated a changing attitude towards the indigent student and intellectual, who was increasingly seen as a threat to the social order.61 At the same time, ideas of what it meant to be a nobleman changed in France, as the conception of an aristocrat’s expected conduct increasingly shifted from the martial sphere to ideals of civilized and polite behaviour.62 Classical antiquity influenced this trend in at least two ways. Aristocrats were expected to be well informed about classical literature and culture, and the manuals that prescribed their behaviour were based on ancient models. For instance, the hugely popular Nouveau traité de la civilité (first published in 1671) by Antoine de Courtin (1622–​1685) contains many implicit and explicit references to Cicero’s work. An example is how Courtin emphasizes the importance of pudeur and retenue, his translation of the classical concept of verecundia: ‘We should consider what Cicero said an unchanging maxim, namely that without shame and restraint there can be nothing praiseworthy or respectable’.63 59 60 61 62 63

L.W.B. Brockliss, ‘Patterns of Attendance at the University of Paris, 1400–​1800,’ Historical Journal 21 (1978), 503–​44; D. Julia and W. Frijhoff, École et société dans la France d’Ancien Régime, quatre exemples: Auch, Avallon, Condom et Gisors (Paris, 1975). Brockliss, ‘Patterns of Attendance,’ 534–​5. Ibid., 536–​7. M. Tebben, ‘Revising Manners: Giovanni Della Casa’s Galateo and Antoine de Courtin’s Nouveau traité de la civilité,’ New Readings 13 (2013), 26. Antoine de Courtin, Nouveau traité de la civilité qui se pratique en France, parmi les honnestes gens (Paris: Iosset, 1671), 167: ‘[I]‌l faut tenir pour une maxime constante, ce que dit Ciceron; que sans la pudeur & la retenuë, il n’y a rien de loüable, il n’y à rien d’honnête.’

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The developments towards a more classically aware aristocracy took place in tandem with French attempts to centralize and standardize the country’s administration during the seventeenth century, and so also entailed the professionalisation of the nation’s ruling elite. Building on previous policy from the days of Henri iv and Richelieu, Louis xiv insisted that the country’s bishops should be well educated and have an advanced training in theology. As a result, the proportion of representatives from France’s old noble families in the top ranks of the clergy, which had dropped from 58.8 percent in 1516 to 5 percent between 1624 and 1643, then began to rise again after 1685, reaching 57.4 percent of the bishops in 1725. These noble clergymen were, however, much more qualified for their position than their predecessors from the sixteenth century.64 The seventeenth century also witnessed what Robert Harding called ‘social centralization’.65 Two factors were at play. The first was a growing involvement in court politics because of increased pressure on the nobility to put themselves at the service of the state. As a consequence, the aristocracy was faced with a bigger necessity to educate themselves, since they had to compete with other social classes that tried to climb the social ladder through education. Absolutism thus formed a driving force behind an increasingly educated aristocracy as young noblemen were prepared for government service.66 Furthermore, as Norbert Elias argued in The Court Society, the growing importance of the court as a hub of administration and sociabilty also went hand in hand with the increasing importance of etiquette. In other words, if you wanted to be a successful courtier you had to conform to a complicated set of rules regarding not just civilized, but also educated behaviour.67 In tandem with these developments were the foundations of boarding schools by religious orders, especially the Jesuits. Many of these schools catered for pupils from the social elite by offering separate accommodation. This meant that the education these boys would formerly have received at home could now be transplanted into the establishment of the college, since As Courtin himself indicated, he was thinking of Cic. Off. 1.148: ‘Cynicorum vero ratio tota est eicienda; est enim inimica verecundiae, sine qua nihil rectum esse potest, nihil honestum.’ 64 M.E. Motley, Becoming a French Aristocrat: The Education of the Court Nobility, 1580–​1715 (Princeton, 1990), 105–​6; M. Péronnet, ‘Les évêques de l’ancienne France,’ 2 vols (PhD diss., Université de Paris iv, 1977), 1:456–​65; 2:1440–​41 (table 59). 65 R.R. Harding, Anatomy of a Power Elite: The Provincial Governors of Early Modern France (New Haven, 1978), 171–​90. 66 O. Ranum, ‘Courtesy, Absolutism, and the Rise of the French State, 1630–​1660,’ The Journal of Modern History 52 (1980), 426–​51. 67 Motley, Becoming a French Aristocrat, 7–​8.

42 Verhaart these pupils were often secluded from the allegedly negative influence of the lower classes, could bring their servants and private tutors with them, and could start socialising with peers from a similar background in order to build up a professional network.68 It was not just the noblesse de robe that was affected by this trend, as a decent grounding in Latin grammar also came to be deemed useful for the noblesse d’épée. A case in point is the education of the Condé branch of the House of Bourbon. These men were all trained to become military commanders, but they also made an effort to make sure their sons would be properly educated in reading and writing Latin. Louis de Bourbon (1621–​1686), a direct cousin of Louis xiv, achieved great success in the battles of Rocroi in 1643 and Freiburg in 1644. He chose to oppose the royal forces in the civil wars of the Fronde (1648–​53) and in 1652 he even took service with the Spaniards, which is the reason why his son Henri Jules (1643–​1709) received most of his education in the Spanish Netherlands. At the age of seven the boy received his first private tuition from Pierre Bourdelot (1610–​ 1685), who taught him Latin grammar from the work of Johannes Despauterius, gave him daily writing assignments, and in combination with some classical literature made him read Giovanni della Casa’s Galateo on the rules of etiquette.69 In December 1653, Henri Jules moved to Namur where at the instigation of his father he was put in a class with other school children at the local Jesuit college, although he had accommodation of his own where he could live with his servants. Like many educators in early modern Europe the Jesuits believed in the positive effects of competition between peers and pupils were therefore ranked according to their performance at school. It was hoped this would also work for young Henri Jules. The boy clearly struggled with Latin and sent his father a letter with a writing assignment in March 1654. He complained that his assignment had only allowed him to rise three places in the class ranking.70 The assignment (thème) itself gives us a fascinating glimpse of the skills of an average young nobleman after three years of Latin education.71 Henri Jules 68 69 70 71

Ibid., 99–​104. Bourdelot to Henri de Bourbon, Prince de Condé, 1 Feb 1651 (quoted in H. Chérot, Trois éducations princières au XVIIe siècle (Lille, 1896), 120–​22. Henri Jules to his father, Louis de Bourbon, Prince de Condé Chérot, March 1654 (quoted in Chérot, Trois éducations princières, 161). Quoted in Chérot, Trois éducations princières, 162: ‘Cum calamitates, quibus Christiani in tota Europa afficiuntur, mecum attente reputo ac jesus nominis hostes tranquillam agere vitam ac post multas victorias omnibus sese voluptatibus permittere video, nullam hujusce diversitatis (praetor nimias Christianorum libidines et vitam vitio deditam, a qua ipsi Barbari horrent) causam esse arbitror. Homines utcunque litteris tincti Regna virtute aedificata vitiis eversa fuisse sciunt. Nonne Romani imperii potentiam, statim atque

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claimed that he had made just one mistake, but there are plenty, such as the wrong form of the genitive (Jesus instead of Jesu), spelling mistakes (caecidit instead of cecidit), and pleonasms (magis inconstantius). Nevertheless the boy’s Jesuit teachers must have had at least some educational talents, since later assignments show his competence in Latin had improved significantly.72 The increased involvement of the aristocracy in education had an impact in two opposing directions. The members of the social elite may have become more erudite and better educated, but they also had a much more practical view of the goal of learning than the ‘humanist literati’ of the sixteenth century. Even Max Weber already realized how this reshaped education to become more focused on relevance and promoted the importance of French, particularly in the eighteenth century.73 These were the gens de qualité with mediocre skills in Latin about whom Montausier wrote to Anthonie Heinsius in his letter on the aims of the Collectio ad usum Delphini, as we will see in § 9. 6

The Dutch School of Criticism

In the previous sections, I have described factors that shaped and influenced philology and textual scholarship in France and the United Provinces. In the following sections, we will look at the effect of these factors on scholarship. The dominant current in scholarship in the United Provinces has been dubbed the Dutch School of Criticism.74 It was characterized by three main elements. First, Dutch scholars focused their attention predominantly on Latin writings as far as pagan literature from antiquity was concerned. Johann Georg

72 73

74

libidines vitiaque propagate sunt, multum concidisse legimus? Eadem nocte, qua Rex Balthazar Regni magnates laute exciperet, hostis vi urbem expugnavit, trucidavit cives; et cum eodem impetus Palatium sibi comparasset, nec opinantes invitatos media in aula occupavit, ferro, caecidit, interfecit regem et eum pedibus conculcatum proprio sanguine suffocari vidit. Sed sicut fortuna nihil magis inconstantius sit et nihil fragilitatem magis quam homo obliviscatur, victores illi Regna in deteriorem statum prolabi viderunt, cum libentius omnibus vitiis vacaverunt.’ See the examples quoted in Chérot, Trois éducations princières, 165, 168. See e.g. the suggestion of Max Weber, ‘Politics as Vocation,’ in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans. H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (Abingdon, 1948), 93: ‘The transformation of our educational system in the seventeenth century was partly determined by the fact that the court nobles as professional politicians displaced the humanist literati and entered the services of the princes.’ See much more recently Motley, Becoming a French Aristocrat, chs two (Language and Letters) and three (The Academy). K.L. Haugen, Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 67–​8, 75–​ 6, 135–​6.

44 Verhaart Graevius admittedly edited works by a couple of Greek authors, more specifically Hesiod, Lucian, and Callimachus, but his true interest lay in Latin prose authors, especially Cicero. Many others, however, such as Graevius’ protégé Pieter Burman and his friend Joan van Broekhuizen, did not edit a single Greek author. The only exception was Lambert Bos, who was professor of Greek at the University of Franeker from 1704 and whose inaugural oration was entitled De eruditione Graecorum per colonias eorum propagata (The Learning of the Greeks and its Promotion through their Colonies). The second characteristic was a focus on grammatical, text-​critical, and stylistic issues in ancient texts, although we do find some differences as to how broadly grammar is interpreted in commentaries and other academic publications. On one end, we find someone like Richard Bentley, whose methods and ideas were closely aligned with his peers in the United Provinces. Bentley, notoriously, remarked that providing his readers with any historical context and explanations was of the least importance in the kind of material that he offered.75 On the opposite side of the spectrum, we find someone like Jacob Perizonius, who while attaching similar importance to philological issues, had a much more comprehensive understanding of the skills involved in tackling textual problems. In an academic oration pronounced at Leiden University on the occasion of his taking up the chair of eloquence and history, Perizonius complained about the disdain many felt towards philology and textual criticism. Alluding to a commonplace that goes back to the work of Suetonius, he made a distinction between grammatici and grammatistae: the first were highly learned interpreters of texts, while the second group consisted of grammar teachers and narrow-​minded nitpickers, who were only interested in obscure textual problems.76 The combination of a lack of interest in historical and moral issues paired with a focus on text created a continuous atmosphere of tension between these textual critics and theologians. Theologians were concerned about the alleged immorality of philologists and also feared they might apply their textual criticism to the text of the Bible.77 In return, the philologists were afraid that theologians would prescribe what they were or were 75 76

77

Richard Bentley, Q. Horatius Flaccus, ex recensione & cum notis atque emendationes Richardi Bentleii (Cambridge: s.n., 1711), fol. ***2r. Jacob Perizonius, Orationes XII varii et praestantioris argumenti in gratiam cultorum elegantiarum litterarum collectae (Leiden: Langerak, 1740), 83. For this distinction in Suetonius’ work, see Suet. Gram. et rhet. 4: ‘Sunt qui litteratum a litteratore distinguant, ut Graeci grammaticum a grammatista, et illum quidem absolute, hunc mediocriter doctum existiment.’ On the alleged immorality of grammarians and philologists, see the satirical essay by G. Walch, ‘De Nugis & Bellis Grammaticorum,’ in Miscellanea Lipsiensia ad incrementum

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not allowed to work on. Burman in particular took a belligerent tone in his work and referred to the pervicax theologorum natio.78 Finally, with regard to their methodology, the Dutch critics tended to prefer conjectures over manuscript evidence. The work of Daniel Heinsius, Johann Friedrich Gronovius –​especially his Observationum libri tres (1639) –​and the aforementioned Graevius are particularly good examples. For Perizonius, it was a given that there were ‘no codices so old or so unblemished that they had not been deformed by various errors’.79 Even the works of beloved and well-​studied authors, such as Livy, Tacitus, and Suetonius, were still full of corrupted passages that needed the attention of a textual critic who ex ingenio et coniectura could emend them. To Perizonius there was no difference in this respect between texts with a sacred or religious character. In his oration on the uses of the Greek and Latin languages he used the example of the Decretum Gelasianum, which contains a list of books that are commended or should be rejected or considered apocryphal. Among the authors mentioned was the fifth-​century Christian poet Sedulius who had written ‘in heroic verses’ (versibus heroicis). However, in the manuscript tradition the reading was versus haereticos (‘heretical verses’). The implication, according to Perizonius was that if it had not been for the intervention of level-​headed textual critics, poetry could have been completely banned from the Christian tradition.80 7

Relationship between the Natural Sciences and Scholarship: The Schola Hemsterhusiana

From the 1720s onwards, a central role in scholarship in the Dutch Republic was played by Tiberius Hemsterhuis (1685–​1766) and his students, in particular David Ruhnken (Ruhnkenius) (1723–​1798) and Lodewijk Caspar Valckenaer (1715–​1785). The direction they gave to philology has come to be known as the Schola Hemsterhusiana.81 Hemsterhuis had been a student of Perizonius and rei litterariae edita, ed. J.F. Buddeus (Leipzig: Sumptis haeredum Lanckisianorum, 1716), 1:48. 78 Burman, Orationes, 91. See in the same collection also 245 (tenacissima theologorum gente); 246 (vulgari theologorum turbae). 79 Perizonius, Orationes, 85: ‘Nonne constat satis inter Eruditos omnes, nullos jam esse Codices ita antiquos, ita sinceros, quin variis sind faedati mendis?’ 80 Ibid., 86. 81 On the Schola Hemsterhusiana, see J. Gerretzen, Schola Hemsterhusiana: De herleving der Grieksche studiën aan de Nederlandsche universiteiten van Perizonius tot en met Valckenaer (Nijmegen, 1940); E. Hulshoff Pol, Studia Ruhnkeniana: Enige hoofdstukken over leven en

46 Verhaart succeeded Lambert Bos as professor of Greek at Franeker in 1717. In 1740, he took up a professorship in the same language at the university of Leiden. Thanks to the efforts and influence of Hemsterhuis, scholars in the Republic began to give much more consideration to Greek studies. Hemsterhuis himself edited an impressive number of Greek authors, both church fathers and pagan authors, among them Xenophon, Lucian, and Chrysostom, while his pupil Ruhnken worked on the Homeric hymns, Hesiod, and Callimachus among others. Like their predecessors, these scholars were particularly interested in the linguistic and stylistic elements of the literature of the ancient world. Hemsterhuis himself revived the concept of analogy, originally used in classical antiquity itself to study language.82 He saw it as a God-​given principle: For God, the supreme maker of things, has placed a certain principle, an analogical frame of mind as it were, in all human beings. Not only can human actions be arranged and examined according to this frame of mind, but also whatever we say with our mouth, whatever we do with our hands, body, and mind. This internal principle of analogy has been placed in all of us. Without it, we do or say nothing that has any grace. 83 While Hemsterhuis’ description of analogy emphasized its divine origin, Valckenaer no longer refers to God in relation to this concept, as he wrote about ‘observations that we have so far elicited from the internal nature of languages, relying on the similarity of examples, which we call analogy’.84 This concept was used by Hemsterhuis and his students in an attempt to trace back

82

83

84

werk van David Ruhnkenius (1723–​1798) (Leiden, 1953); J. Noordegraaf, The Dutch Pendulum. Linguistics in the Netherlands 1740–​1900 (Münster, 1996), 23–​55. G. Hassler, ‘ “Analogy”: The History of a Concept and a Term from the 17th to the 19th Century,’ in History of Linguistics 2005. Selected Papers from the Tenth International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences, ed. D.A. Kibbee (Amsterdam/​ Philadelphia, 2007), 156–​8. Tiberius Hemsterhuis, ‘Lectio publica de originibus linguae graecae,’ in Letterkundige naoogst, ed. J.H. Halbertsma, 2 vols (Deventer, 1845), 2:325: ‘Infixum est scilicet omnibus hominibus a summo rerum auctore Deo principium aliquod tanquam forma analogica, ad quam expediantur et explorentur non tantum actiones humanae, sed et quidquid ore profertur, quidquid manibus, quidquid corpore menteque agitur. Hoc principium analogiae internum omnibus est infixum: sine eo principio nil quod gratiam habet agimus, nil dicimus.’ Lodewijk Caspar Valckenaer, Observationes academicae (Utrecht: Paddenburg, 1790), 21: ‘Observationes, quas huc usque ex interiore linguarum indole, similitudine exemplorum, quam nos analogiam vocamus, subnixi eruimus […].’

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the structure and development of the Greek language to five reconstructed verbs ἄω, ἔω, ἴω, ὔω, and ὄω.85 It was a theory that enjoyed much popularity and authority until the early nineteenth century, when it began to lose its attraction under the influence of new models, mostly advanced by German scholars.86 As we have seen Burman and his allies had fought a turf war with contemporary theologians about the definition and demarcation of these respective fields. Such tensions continued throughout the eighteenth century. A good example is Valckenaer’s Oratio de sacra novi foederis critice, a literatoribus, quos vocant, non exercenda (1745). The title of this oration suggests that the speaker believed that those specialising in the study of the Belles Lettres and the pagan literature of the ancient world should not apply their textual criticism to the study of the New Testament. Valckenaer’s argument was, however, highly ironic and he devoted much attention to pointing out how contemporary editions of the New Testament to which the orthodox Reformed theologians in his age attached so much authority strongly relied on the text-​critical work of earlier generations of scholars, including Erasmus (1466–​1536), Robert Estienne (1503–​1559), and Theodore Beza (1519–​1605).87 Any doubts about the tongue-​in-​cheek intent of Valckenaer are dispelled when we realize he himself published Observationes philologicae on the Gospel of Luke (1751), the Acts of the Apostles (1752), and the First Epistle of St Paul to the Corinthians (1752). In 1784, he published a corollarium to his oration in which he explained how in his view textual critics had made very important contributions to contemporary knowledge of the Bible.88 In the preceding section, I pointed out how those who could be categorized as ‘Dutch critics’ seemed to care little about the moral lessons that might be drawn from reading classical literature. The one exception to this rule was Hemsterhuis who, when succeeding Burman in Leiden in 1740, devoted his oration to demonstrating how the study of the literae humaniores could be morally edifying (Oratio de literarum humaniorum studiis ad mores emendandos virtutisque cultum conferendis). Hemsterhuis’s interest in the moral aspects of classical pagan literature was, however, strictly subservient to his interest 85 86 87 88

Hemsterhuis, ‘Lectio publica,’ 324–​70. For an illustration of the decline of this approach’s popularity, see Benfey, Geschichte, 255–​8. He concludes his discussion with the words ‘es wäre Papierverderb, wenn wir diesen Unsinn weiter verfolgen wollten’ (p. 258). Lodewijk Caspar Valckenaer, Oratio de sacra Novi Foederis critice, a literatoribus, quos vocant, non exercanda (Franeker: Coulon, 1745), 13–​14; 36–​7. For a fuller analysis of this oration, see Gerretzen, Schola Hemsterhusiana, 208–​10. Lodewijk Caspar Valckenaer, ‘Corollarium ad orationem de critica,’ in Ti. Hemsterhusii orations … L.C. Valckenari tres orations … (Leiden: Luchtmans and Honkoop, 1784), 317–​23.

48 Verhaart in language. An example is the Oratio de linguae Graecae praestantia, ex ingenio Graecorum et moribus probata (1720), in which as the title indicates, moral considerations served to demonstrate the excellence of the Greek language. Similarly, much more consciously and clearly than previous generations, Hemsterhuis and his pupils considered how they could implement trends in recent philosophy in their work. Ruhnken described this for his teacher Hemsterhuis: Knowing the ancients was not enough for him; he combined Leibniz with Plato, Locke with Aristotle, and other thinkers with others still. As a consequence, if you discussed ancient philosophy with him, you would think he only read ancient philosophers, but if you discussed modern philosophy, you would think he only read those.89 The desire to keep abreast with new developments in current knowledge paradigms was also closely connected with a tendency to see one’s own text critical and linguistic research in relation to the sciences, in particular mathematics and anatomy. Hemsterhuis’s Cartesianism and interest in mathematics has, for example, been connected with his obsession with precision and his defense of the reliability of knowledge acquired by philologists. In undated private notes, now held in the Leiden University Library, he wrote: We do not know a singular thing (saek), but all the knowledge we obtain through study etcetera, exists in knowing the proportion that exists between one thing and another. All of mathematics exists in the proportions and is therefore set (vast). We humans cannot reach any further.90 Valckenaer set out his views in the aforementioned Observationes academicae: To avoid any confusion, it seems necessary in the meantime to make this clear in advance: when we say something in our field of scholarship is 89 David Ruhnken, Elogium Tiberii Hemsterhusii. Editio secunda castigatior (Leiden: Luchtmans, 1789), 35: ‘Nec satis habebat [sc. Hemsterhusius] veteres cognosse, sed cum Platone Leibnitium, cum Aristotele Lockium, cum aliis alios conjungebat, ut, qui sermones cum illo de veteri philosophia contulisset, nihil nisi veteres, qui de recentiore, nihil nisi recentiores, legisse putaret.’ 90 Hemsterhusiana, Leiden University Library bpl 503: ‘Wij kennen niet eene saek, maer al ons kennis, die wij door study etc. verkrijgen bestaet in ’t kennen van de proportie, die ‘r is tusschen saken en saken –​de gansche mathesis bestaet in de proporties en is darom vast, verder kunnen wij menschen niet komen.’

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certain and its truth very well established, then we only declare it has the highest degree of probability and plausibility, beyond which one can reach only in a few sciences. […] We do not aspire here to the kind of merit that we thrust these thoughts upon others as if they were divinations or the statements of an oracle. We do not envy those learned in the sciences their merit of objectively existing truth. We have become acquainted with the extent to which ‘true’ differs from ‘probable’ and ‘plausible’ from the ‘highest degree of plausibility’. Mathematically speaking, there is nothing in this particular field that we treat as certain or settled.91 Such reflections on the differences between mathematical and ‘moral’ certainty and the idea that history and philology could only reach the latter had a long and eventful history in the seventeenth century.92 In the eighteenth-​ century Dutch Republic, discussions on the reliability of historical knowledge had been given impetus by the work of Jacob Perizonius, one of Hemsterhuis’s professors at Leiden. In his De fide historiarum contra pyrrhonismum (On the reliability of historical facts against Pyrrhonism, 1702), Perizonius had demonstrated how the existence and history of Rome could perhaps not be proved with a mathematical degree of certainty, but could certainly be determined on the basis of the existence of the current city of Rome, its bishops, the Holy Roman Empire and further established facts.93 The influence of empiricism can be seen in the focus of developing an annotandi consuetudo, a habit to gather as much empirical data from texts in notebooks so that they could later be used for analysis through analogy.94 91

Lodewijk Caspar Valckenaer, Observationes academicae, 285–​6: ‘Id interea in antecessum, ne quem fallat sui animi cogitatio, videtur praeponendum, nos, quando quid dicimus in nostro studiorum genere certum et veritatis exploratissimae, summum tantum indicare probabilitatis et verissimilitudinis gradum, ultra quem in paucis scientiis licet procedere. […] Eam hic laudem non adfectamus, ut haecce cogitata tanquam veriloguia et oracula obtrudamus. Eam hercule laudem realium, ut sese venditant, scientiarum doctoribus non invidemus. Nos didicimus, quid verum a probabili, quid verisimile distet a summo verisimilitudinis gradu. Mathematice loquendo, nihil est, in hoc certo genere, quod nos tractamus certum, nihil exploratum.’ 92 J.-​ L. Quantin, ‘Reason and Reasonableness in French Ecclesiastical Scholarship,’ Huntington Library Quarterly 74 (2011), 401–​36 (esp. 418–​26). I would like to thank Dmitri Levitin for referring me to this article. 93 Jacob Perizonius, Oratio de fide historiarum contra pyrrhonismum historicum (Leiden: Verbessel, 1702), 14–​15. On the influence of scepticism on eighteenth-​century scholarship, see A.M. Matytsin, The Specter of Skepticism in the Age of Enlightenment (Baltimore, 2016), 233–​63. 94 Anecdota Hemsterhusiana, ex schedis MSS., in bibliotheca Lugduno-​Batava servatis, collegit, disposuit et edidit Jacobus Geel (Leiden, 1825), xx-​i: ‘Certos nimirum habuit

50 Verhaart A driving force behind the growing influence of empiricism in Dutch academic life was the work of physicians and anatomists, such as Herman Boerhaave. It is therefore striking to see how Hemsterhuis described his research as the study of the corpus linguae.95 These were scholars who took pride in ‘observing’ (spectare) the ‘most minute connections (ligamenta) and fibres (fibrillas) in this beautiful body’.96 The perceived similarity between the work of anatomists and textual critics did not just reflect the self-​awareness of these scholars with an eye to their own methods; it allowed them to proclaim the importance of their research and the validity of those methods. In the preface to his edition of Euripides’ Phoenissae, Valckenaer expressed surprise at people who mocked philologists’ close study of minute details in texts and languages. After all, what they did was very similar to the kind of work anatomists did when they tried to understand the exact anatomy of the eye. Only the object of research was different!97 Of course, Dutch scholars working on ancient literary texts did not just look at other fields for inspiration; those who operated in other fields also used methods that were very similar to or even derived from the Dutch text-​ critical tradition. The clearest example was the study of Roman law within the context of the so-​called Dutch Elegant School of legal humanism.98 Textual criticism served a very important practical purpose in the study of ancient legal texts in the United Provinces, since its legal system was partly based on Roman law. An eminent representative of this tradition, the jurist Cornelis van Bijnkershoek, used grammaticus as a term of authority in his Opuscula varii argumenti (1719), itself mostly a discussion of text-​critical issues in the Corpus Hemsterhusius Adversariorum libros, Historiae gentium, literarum et philosophiae, Antiquitati, Geographiae, Mythologiae, aliisque doctrinae generibus destinatos[.]‌’. 95 Hemsterhuis, ‘Lectio publica,’ 329, 350. 96 Lodewijk Caspar Valckenaer, Callimachi elegiarum fragmenta, cum elegia Catulli Callimachea (Leiden: Luchtmans, 1799), 20: ‘[I]‌am iuvenis et vir in hoc Linguae formoso corpore minutissima ligamenta, fibrillas ipsas, attentus spectavi.’ 97 Lodewijk Caspar Valckenaer, Εὐριπίδου Φοίνισσαι. Evripidis tragoedia Phoenissae (Franeker: Brouwer, 1755), xiii: ‘Qui Criticos veluti minuta tractantes operose rident, homines venusti miror equidem cur Anatomici non reprehendant sedulitatem, corporis humani minutissima quaeque ligamenta (particularum eadem est propemodum in linguis ratio) prae ceteris partibus oculo considerantis philosopho.’ 98 I would like to thank Ian Maclean for drawing my attention to the context of legal humanism in the Dutch Republic and for kindly sharing his unpublished paper on the topic with me: ‘The Thesauruses of Otto and Meerman as Publishing Enterprises: Legal Humanism in its last phase, 1725–​1780.’ On the Dutch Elegant School, see G.C. van den Bergh, Die holländische elegante Schule. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte von Humanismus und Rechtswissenschaft in den Niederlanden, 1500–​1800 (Frankfurt, 2002).

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iuris, as he claimed anyone who could not understand the correctness of his emendations was clearly no grammaticus.99 He did have an important reservation. In his view, many scholars and academics had a tendency to interfere in specialisms that were not their own. Philosophers were particularly prone to doing so, since in their view ‘whatever is connected with the contemplation of wisdom’ is part of their expertise. Grammarians, however, should likewise be careful to stick with grammatical issues and refrain from trying to tackle the intricacies of other disciplines. This is the habit of philosophers in particular. They ridicule those skilled in the individual fields of learning with some pretended excuse, thinking that whatever can be classified under the consideration of wisdom belongs to them. Not much different are the grammarians, who, not content to explain the grammatical elements of each discipline, tackle those very disciplines and seem to triumphantly carry off the professors in those disciplines as their prisoners.100 In the rivalry between the disciplines, the tendency to focus on text-​critical issues among the so-​called Dutch critics was very much appreciated by some practitioners of other disciplines as it kept the boundaries between different objects of study clear. 8

The Dutch Obsession with French Scholarship

Of the forty-​three years from the start of the Franco-​Dutch War in 1672 to the signing of the last of the treaties of the Peace of Utrecht in 1715, France and the United Provinces were at war for twenty-​eight years. Even a cursory reading of the correspondences and writings of Dutch scholars reveals a striking hostility towards what they saw as particular French trends in scholarship.

99

Cornelis van Bijnkershoek, Opuscula varii argumenti (Leiden: van der Linden, 1719), 22. On van Bijnkershoek, see B. Sirks, ‘Bijnkershoek as Author and Elegant Jurist,’ Tijdschrift voor Rechtsgeschiedenis 79 (2011), 229–​52. 100 van Bijnkershoek, Opuscula, 235: ‘Philosophorum in primis ea ratio est; ludificantur illi, praetexto nomine, singularum artium peritos, ad se pertinere, suo jure, rati, quicquid in Sapientiae contemplationem cadit. Prope ad hos accedunt Grammatici, qui non contenti Grammaticalia cujusque Disciplinae explicare, ipsas Disciplinas aggrediuntur, earumque Professores sibi in triumphum ducere videntur.’

52 Verhaart The first grievance expressed by our circle of Dutch literary figures and scholars was the advance of French. Unlike their English and French peers, for whom it became increasingly common in the seventeenth century and eighteenth centuries to publish in the vernacular, especially in writings of a popularising nature, those involved in the study of secular Latin and Greek literature in the United Provinces wrote almost exclusively in Latin. The exceptions were men like David van Hoogstraten and Joan van Broekhuizen, who were interested in contributing to the Dutch literary tradition and published poems in the vernacular. A small number of Burman’s orations and pamphlets were translated into Dutch and ocassionally other European languages such as English or written in the vernacular if they were believed to be of interest to a lay audience.101 The increase of the use of French at the expense of Latin in international scholarly communication was seen by Dutch scholars as a form of cultural imperialism. In a letter to Joan van Broekhuizen, Jacob Perizonius complained about François Charpentier’s De l’excellence de la langue françoise (1683) in which the author gave the impression that ‘the French language being as it were common to all nations would stand the test of time and must be preferred to Latin’.102 In his oration De usu et praestantia linguae graecae (1686), the Amsterdam professor Petrus Francius warned the French themselves were promoting the use of their language in order to enhance their own power and influence in Europe: Why do we not learn French instead of Latin and Greek? Would not our philosophers love that: they would be able to rush into the citadel of wisdom with one jump as it were and attack the yoke of all arts and sciences with one blow, since all these obstacles and impediments would have been removed. The French would love it too. By translating every kind of Greek and Latin authors into their language and –​which is even worse –​ by explaining those authors in French, they attempt to divert people from the Latin and Greek authors and scatter and spread their French tongue across all of Europe, as a vanguard of their political power. However, the 101 E.g. the aforementioned Oratio in humanitatis studia, which was translated into Dutch as Pieter Burmans Redenvoering, tegen de Beschavende Geleertheid (Leiden: Luchtmans, 1720). In the following year, it was translated into English: An Oration by Mr. Peter Burman against the Studies of Humanity (London: J. Roberts, 1721). 102 Jacob Perizonius to Joan van Broekhuizen, Leiden 14 Dec 1693 in Jani Broukhusii Epistolae selectae, ed. J.A. Worp (Groningen, 1889), 112: ‘Tum an habeas, vel noveris librum Charpenterii, scriptum ni fallor, per occasionem statuae regiae, quo ille linguam Francicam quasi jam communem omnium gentium, et secula laturam, Latinae praeferendam contendit.’

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philosophers will never overthrow this study of languages and literature and erase it from people’s minds. Nor will the French ever succeed in their goal. Let them violate the structure of letters, let them remove the origin of words, let them comment on and translate whoever they like; they will never achieve that Latin and Greek perish, but not French.103 Concern about cultural expansion is also tangible in what Dutch scholars wrote about French approaches to and debates on Latin and Greek texts. As can be expected from people who made a living out of teaching ancient texts, Dutch scholars were appalled by Charles Perrault’s promotion of contemporary authors and writings in the Querelle des anciens et des modernes. In another of his orations, De perfecto et consummato oratore (1689), Francius mocked Charles Perrault for putting contemporary Parisian lawyers and speakers on a par with Cicero.104 Perrault found the attack serious enough to respond in an open letter, published by the Mercure galant in 1690.105 Dutch scholars, however, did not see the cause of the moderns primarily as a call to appraise contemporary discoveries and art, but rather as a covert attempt to promote French culture. In a letter Perizonius wrote: ‘I read Perrault’s Parralèles des anciens et des modernes, in which he much prefers today’s writers over the ancients, as long as they are French’.106 An important role in the tensions between French and Dutch scholarship was played by Joan van Broekhuizen. Van Broekhuizen is hardly known today even 103 Petri Francii Orationes in unum collectae (Amsterdam: Wetstein, 1692), 107–​8: ‘Quin pro Latina et Graeca Gallicam Linguam addiscimus? Quam cuperent hoc nostri Philosophi, ut, obstaculis hisce et impedimentis amotis, uno quasi saltu in arcem Sapientiae irrumperent, et omnium Artium ac Scientiarum jugulum uno ictu impeterent! Quam hoc cuperent Galli, qui omne genus scriptorum, Graecorum et Latinorum in suam linguam transfundendo, et eosdem, quod pejus etiamnum, Gallicis Commentariis illustrando, a Latinis ac Graecis scriptoribus homines avocare, et per omnem Europam Gallicanum suum sermonem, tanquam praecursorem Imperii sui, spargere ac disseminare conantur! Sed nec Linguarum ac litterarum hoc studium pervertent unquam Philosophi, et ex animis hominum eradicabunt: nec scopum unquam suum atingent Galli. Confundant litterarum structuram; tollant vocabulorum Origines, illustrent, convertant, quos velint, Latina ut intereat Lingua et Graeca, ut non et intereat Gallica, sane perficient nunquam.’ 104 Ibid., 156–​207. 105 Charles Perrault, ‘Lettre de Mr. Perrault à Mr. Menage,’ Mercure galant, dedié à Monseigneur le Dauphin (March 1690), 33–​65. 106 Jacob Perizonius to Joan van Broekhuizen, Leiden 14 Dec 1693, in Jani Broukhusii Epistolae, 110: ‘[L]‌egi Perralti Parallela Anitquorum Hodiernorumque ingeniorum, in quibus hodiernos scriptores, modo sint Galli, longe praefert veteribus.’ On the Querelle des anciens et des modernes in the United Provinces, see e.g. Lieke van Deinsen, Literaire erflaters: Canonvorming in tijden van culturele crisis, 1700–​1750 (Hilversum, 2017), 46–​53, 57–​62.

54 Verhaart among historians of scholarship, and his own scholarly output was modest.107 For Broekhuizen the fight against French expansion was not merely a scholarly one. Although scholarship and poetry were his passions, he served as a soldier and officer in the Dutch army from 1672 until 1697, when he retired and eventually moved to Amstelveen just south of Amsterdam. His extensive correspondence comprises many letters sent from army bases during the Franco-​Dutch War (1672–​78) and the Nine Years’ War (1688–​97).108 Involvement in these wars led him to recommend warmly a book on the violence and injustices committed by the French against the Grand Alliance in a letter to Graevius.109 From a scholarly perspective, the forgery of another soldier-​scholar, François Nodot’s seemingly complete edition of Petronius’ Satyricon, came to symbolize the failings of contemporary French scholarship: Indeed, if this way of dealing with the ancient authors can or must be tolerated, then I expect that soon some Frenchman will patch together the fragments of the ancient historians in the same manner for us. That project will contribute much –​besides an easy and uninterrupted reading –​to the digging up of the antiquities and origins of many nations, in the investigation of which many have toiled. I have no doubt that soon we will have a complete version of Lucilius –​whom I love –​as long as someone can be found who believes he has a good feel for Lucilius’ talent. Cicero had once said: ‘Oh, the times! Oh, the customs!’ But that was long ago. Nowadays we live with other habits. And yet –​please let this stay between us –​I attach more value to the shitty sheets written by Caius Mattiacus than to the newfangled dishes of the French. 110 107 Joan van Broekhuizen has been the subject of just one scholarly article: J.A. Worp, ‘Joan van Broekhuizen,’ Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal-​en Letterkunde 10 (1891), 40–​113. 108 See e.g. his letters to Graevius from Mons in present-​day Belgium where he was stationed during 1677–​78 (Jani Broukhusii epistolae, 26–​31). 109 van Broekhuizen to Graevius, Amsterdam 1 July 1689, in Jani Broukhusii epistolae, 71: ‘Prodiit hic libellus cui titulus Fecialis Gallus, in quo multa bona de injustitia, violentia, etc. armorum Gallicorum, praesertim contra Germaniam et Caesarem.’ The book referred to is Fecialis Gallus (s.l.: s.n., 1689). 110 van Broekhuizen to Graevius, Amsterdam, 6 Jan 1693, in Jani Broukhusii epistolae, 101–​ 2: ‘Profecto si haec ratio tractandi scriptores antiquos ferri potest, aut debet, expecto ut mox Gallus aliquis ad eundem nobis modum consarcinet reliquias veterum Historicorum; quae res, praeter lectionem facilem ac non interruptam, multum conferet ad eruendas multarum gentium cum antiquitates, tum vero et origines, in quibus indagandis hactenus est frustra sudatum. Nec dubito quin brevi Lucilium, quem amo, integrum simus habituri, modo inveniatur, aliquis qui se sapere credat ad Lucilii genium. Dixerat o mores! o tempora! Tullius olim. Sed olim. Hodie aliis modis vivitur. Et tamen (quod inter nos pereat) pluris apud me sunt Caji Mattiaci Volusiana, quam istae novantiquae Gallorum epulae.’

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Van Broekhuizen’s anti-​French sentiments were such a well-​known part of his views that David van Hoogstraten alluded to them in a dedicatory poem in an edition of Van Broekhuizen’s Dutch poetry: ‘Even though no French cock can suffer it [i.e. your glory], moved by preposterous envy, or observe it with patient eyes’.111 Van Broekhuizen was a close friend and mentor to Pieter Burman the Elder and advised him on a wide range of scholarly matters, in particular text-​critical problems, and gave him recommendations for further research and reading.112 In a letter from January 1700, for example, he enumerated a large number of publications by Schoppe, Boeckler, and Naudé that could help Burman develop as a classical scholar and teacher.113 A letter of 22 December 1695 contained recommendations for interesting correspondences by famous scholars, an interest of Burman’s that would ultimately lead to his publication of the Sylloge epistolarum a viris illustribus scriptarum in 1724.114 The two also shared an aversion to French scholarship. A great example of Burman’s views in this respect is a letter to Richard Bentley from 1709 in which he enquires about the Englishman’s forthcoming edition of Horace and urges him to make haste with it since [i]‌t would show that those fat volumes of [André] Dacier’s have not bene­ fitted Horace at all, but have rather provided us with remarkable arguments for the worthlessness and failing erudition among the French, who patiently allow that again and again they are served reheated food and last century’s corrupted delicacies.115

111

112 1 13 114 115

‘Caius Mattiacus’ was the pseudonym of an obscure poetaster from Utrecht who mocked Broekhuizen in his writings (Jani Broukhusii epistolae, 102n1). ‘Shitty sheets is my translation of ‘Volusiana,’ a reference to the poet Volusius, author of Annales written in verse, which Catullus dismissed as ‘cacata carta’ (‘shitty sheets’) in Catullus 36. David van Hoogstraten, ‘Ter nagedachtenisse des heeren Joan van Broekhuizen,’ in J.V. Broekhuizens gedichten, ed. D. van Hoogstraten (Amsterdam: G. onder de Linden, 1712), 57: ‘Al kan ‘t geen Fransche haen gedogen,/​Door averechtse nydt bewogen,/​Noch aenzien met geduldige oogen.’ See e.g. Joan van Broekhuizen to Pieter Burman, 19 Jan 1696, in Jani Broukhusii ad Petrum Burmannum Epistolas, ed. J.A. Worp (Groningen, 1893), 24–​6. van Broekhuizen to Burman, 26 Jan 1700, in Broukhusii ad Burmannum Epistolas, 54–​7. van Broekhuizen to Burman, 22 Dec 1695, in Broukhusii ad Burmannum Epistolas, 17–​22. Burman to Bentley, 24 July 1709, Bentley Correspondence, 1:380–​1: ‘Quare quid caussae quaeso, Vir Reverende, est, quod tamdiu exspectatum premere pergas Horatium, et nos ejus desiderio tabescere patiaris, cum ille, si exierit, solus docere poterit, aliter catulos, aliter sues olere; et nihil spissa illa Dacierii volumina Flaccum juvisse, sed potius insignia nobis argumenta ignaviae et deficientis eruditionis apud Gallos praebere, qui sibi recoctos cibos, et prioris seculi corruptas delicias, iterum apponi tam patienter ferunt.’

56 Verhaart A sense of Franco-​Dutch scholarly competition is also clear in the works of Hemsterhuis and his students. In the oration he pronounced when becoming professor of Greek in 1741, Valckenaer discussed what he saw as the reasons behind a perceived lack of interest in Greek literature in his age, and put the blame squarely on the French: You, France, who alone once seemed to be the elegant judge of Attic delights, once the pregnant mother and wet nurse of the highest intellects, once the fertile parent of the better literature, once the severe opponent of nonsense, how much have you degenerated, forced into obscure scarcity by scornful idleness towards tasteful minds!116 9

Popularisation, Morality, and Historical Context: The ‘French Approach’

What was so wrong with how the French dealt with classical literature that it became a target of scorn for scholars in the United Provinces? For the first part of the answer, it is helpful to look at the edition André Dacier had published of Horace’s work (first issued 1681–​1689), which, as we saw above, was mocked by Burman. In the preface, Dacier explained how, initially, he intended to publish a ‘small number of observations in Latin on poorly understood passages in Horace’s work’. Friends, however, convinced that such a work would be ‘useless’ (inutile), because readers would need to look through other works in order to address any questions they might have. Dacier’s edition therefore provided its reader with ‘everything necessary for the understanding of an author’.117 116 Lodewijk Caspar Valckenaer, Oratio inauguralis De causis neglectae literarum Graecarum culturae (Franeker: Coulon, 1741), 10: ‘Tu, quae sola videbaris elegans venerum Atticarum spectatrix, Gallia, olim foeta summorum ingeniorum mater et altrix; olim foecunda meliorum literarum propagatrix; olim severa nugarum adversatrix; fastidiosa elegantium ingeniorum ignavia, ad quantulam paucitatem redacta quantum degenerasti!’ 117 André Dacier, Les oeuvres d’Horace, traduites en françois, avec des notes, et des remarques critiques, 5th ed., 10 vols (Hamburg: Vandenhoeck, 1733), 1:fols *2r-​*3r: ‘J’avois resolu de ne donner au public qu’un petit nombre de Remarques en Latin sur quelques passages d’Horace qui ont été mal entendus, ou dont l’on na point touché les difficultez. Mais quelques personnes de mes amis à qui je communiquay ce dessein, crûrent que cét ouvrage seroit inutile, parce que ceux qui le liroient, n’y trouvant point l’éclaircissement de tous leurs doutes, seroient obligez de chercher dans d’autres Livres, & que beaucoup de gens seroient rebutez par l’incommodité qu’il y a de se servir de plusieurs volumes en même temps. Il estoit impossible de ne pas demeurer d’accord d’une verité dont on est convaincu tous les jours par sa propre experience. Je leur avoüay donc que je m’estois

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Furthermore, the vernacular played a key role, since a translation into French was included and the commentary on Horace was written in the same language.118 The purpose was to make the publication accessible and useful for as wide an audience as possible: ‘They [i.e. my friends] added that these kinds of works of textual criticism are always more successful when they are accessible for everyone, even the ladies, whose approval often gives no less satisfaction than the support of the learned’.119 The focus on accessibility and usefulness for readers who were not professional scholars is a striking feature of many French publication projects on the literature of the ancient world during the period under review. It should be seen against the background described in §5 of greater involvement of the French aristocracy in learning in return for a more pragmatic approach to ancient literature. One of the best known examples is, of course, the Collectio ad usum Delphini, published between 1670 and 1730. One of the initiators of the project, the duc de Montausier gave a detailed explanation of the aims and intended readership to the diplomat and statesman Anthonie Heinsius (1641–​1720): There is a huge number of people, among them persons of high standing and especially high-​ranking princes, who touch so lightly upon ancient literature in their studies and make such little progress in it, either due to their own insouciance or the negligence of those who instruct them, that they stop studying before they are able to properly understand the ancient authors. Yet, a few years later, when they have become more sensible, they would like to read them, but then they are put off by the difficulty of doing so, as it takes a lot of effort to leaf through all the commentator and they often are little wiser after doing so. It has been my conviction that in order to remedy this inconvenience, it was necessary to accommodate the weakness and laziness of readers and give them authors explained in such an accessible way by means of a continuous gloss for the poets and in general footnotes that are emphatically so clear and so easy to understand that they leave no difficulty even for the least

plaint souvent moy-​mesme de ce que l’on ne pouvoit trouver en mesme lieu tout ce qui est necessaire à l’intelligence d’un Auteur, & sur cét aveu ils me presserent d’entreprendre des Commentaires entiers.’ 118 Ibid., fol. *3r. 1 19 Ibid., fol. *3v: ‘Ils [i.e. mes amis] ajoûterent que ces sortes d’Ouvrages de Critique reüssissent toûjours mieux lorsqu’ils sont à l’usage de tout le monde, & des Dames mesmes, dont l’approbation bien souvent ne donne pas moins de plaisir que les suffrages des Savans.’

58 Verhaart intelligent people. Thus, when the Dauphin will have finished his education and feel like reading one of the ancient authors, he will only need to pick up whichever volume he wants and will easily understand it without any further help. The general public will benefit too, for there are many people who will need it more than he does.120 Besides the desire to be accessible and comprehensive, French publications also tended to emphasize the moral aspects of studying the ancient world. By far the most influential examples in this respect are the historical writings of Charles Rollin (1661–​1741). His Histoire ancienne and Histoire romaine were among the international bestsellers of the eighteenth century. In the preface of the Histoire ancienne, Rollin remarked that what mattered in the study of ancient history was not really to memorize facts or understand the customs of the Assyrians, Egyptians, or Greeks; ‘what is important is to draw moral lessons from all the events that happened in the past’.121 As he emphasized, again with reference to the omnipresent focus on utilité, students at the collèges in particular would benefit from works that left out obscure text-​critical issues and facts ‘of little importance’ and were instead full of ‘thoughts’ and ‘principles’

120 Montausier to Heinsius, 15 May 1676. Quoted in Volpilhac-​Auger (ed.), La collection Ad usum Delphini: l’Antiquité au miroir du Grand Siècle (Grenoble, 2000), 334–​5: ‘Il y a une infinité de personnes, entre autres les gens de qualité et principalement les grands princes, qui étudient si légèrement et font un si petit progrès dans les lettres ou par leur libertinage ou par la négligence de ceux qui les enseignent, qu’ils cessent d’étudier avant que d’être capables de bien entendre les anciens auteurs et qui pourtant quelques années après étant devenus plus raisonnables les voudraient bien lire, mais ils en sont rebutés par la difficulté, y ayant beaucoup de peine à feuilleter tous les commentateurs et après l’avoir fait en recueillent souvent peu de fruit. J’ai cru que pour remédier a cet inconvenient, il fallait s’accommoder à la faiblesse et à la paresse des lecteurs et leur donner les auteurs expliqués d’une manière si aisée par le moyen d’une glose perpétuelle sur les poètes et des notes généralement surtout si claires et si faciles qu’elles ne laissent aucune difficulté aux gens même les moins intelligents. Ainsi quand Monseigneur le Dauphin sera hors des mains de ceux qui l’enseignent, et qu’il aura envie de lire quelqu’un des anciens auteurs, il n’aura qu’à se charger la main de celui qu’il lui plaira et sans autre assistance il l’entendra aisément. Le public en profitera, car il y a beaucoup de gens qui en auront plus de besoin que lui.’ 121 Charles Rollin, Histoire ancienne des Égyptiens, des Carthaginois, des Assyriens, des Babyloniens, des Mèdes et des Perses, des Macédoniens, des Grecs, 13 vols (Paris: Estienne, 1730–​1738), 1:20: ‘Peu importe de savoir qu’il y eu un Alexandre, un César, un Aristide; que l’empire d’Assyrie a fait place à celui de Babylone. […]Ce qui importe, c’est de tirer une leçon de morale de tous les événements qui se sont accomplis.’

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that would ‘elevate the soul’ and would inspire readers with ‘great and noble sentiments’.122 The most notable defender of these ideas on classical literature and history in the Dutch Republic was Jean Le Clerc (1657–​1736). A professor of Hebrew, belles lettres, and philosophy at the Remonstrant Seminary of Amsterdam, Le Clerc became the unofficial representative of French cultural influence. It made him the object of mockery among scholars in the United Provinces, many of whom only referred to him by the nickname gallulus (‘little Frenchman’).123 In his scholarly reviews, the Ars critica, Parrhasiana, as well as the prefaces and introduction of some of the editions of classical authors for which he was responsible, Le Clerc had painted an unflattering image of the kind of textual study the Dutch critics cherished so much. According to him, the study of the Belles Lettres was in a state of decadence and although a decrease in the availability of patronage could partly be blamed, the défauts personnels of scholars were the main cause.124 Their focus on text-​critical problems made scholarship very easy for the professional student of classical texts himself, but failed to meet the needs of a reader who might want to know more about the text he or she was reading rather than just the grammatical, stylistic, and text-​critical issues: By the way, nothing is easier than what some consider the absolute pinnacle of the art of textual criticism: nibbling at some syllables here and there, mentioning the various readings of the manuscripts and, when a suitable occasion presents itself, pour forth a collection of stuff that was already brought together a while ago, while observing a deep silence where the readers most need the help of someone to explain the text. In my view there have been quite a few among the textual critics –​and there still are –​who exult in that type of conjectures and prattle only about ancient manuscripts, but are unable to understand all of it or even properly formulate a coherent discourse from beginning to end.125

122 Charles Rollin, Traité des études: De la manière d’enseigner et d’étudier les belles-​lettres, 4 vols (Paris: Estienne, 1726–​28), 3:avertissement. 123 For more on the way Le Clerc was depicted as an outsider and representative of French culture, see F. Verhaart, ‘L’anglois a autant de civilité que le hollandois: Jean Le Clerc, Pieter Burman and the Strategic Use of Stereotypes in the Republic of Letters,” De Zeventiende Eeuw 29 (2013), 64–​80. 124 [Jean Le Clerc], Parrhasiana, ou pensées diverses sur des matiéres de critique, d’histoire, de morale et de politique, 2 vols (Amsterdam: Schelte, 1699–​1701), 1:223–​262. 125 [Jean Le Clerc], preface to C. Pedonis Albinovani Elegiae III, et fragmenta cum interpretatione et notis Jos. Scaligeri, Frid. Lindenbruchii, Nic. Heinsii, Theod. Goralli et aliorum

60 Verhaart Rather than focusing on such grammatical trifles, the study of antiquity should be about moral and philosophical lessons that can make the reader a better human : The purely grammatical knowledge of antiquity helps nothing. It leaves pride, anger, envy, and other passions that are the biggest obstacles to peace of mind. […] But if you fathom out the moral of the ancients, then you find a thousand excellent lessons in it to preserve your calm of mind, which is the most desirable thing in this life.126 Furthermore, Le Clerc reveals himself as someone whose loyalty lay with the higher faculties rather than the arts curriculum. The study of Latin and Greek authors should simply serve as an introduction to ‘higher studies’: The classics are a meagre field of study, if they only serve to understand antiquity, without making any use of the insight that you can draw from them, both for religion and other disciplines. What difference would it make to fill your head with words, stories, opinions, and customs, if it did not make you more sensible, more prudent, and more committed to the truth of religion? One can only see this field of study as an introduction and ornament to other more elevated fields of study, such as philosophy, law, politics, and theology.127

(Amsterdam: Schelte, 1703), sig. *4r: ‘Alioqui nihil est facilius, quam, quod nonnulli putant esse Artis Criticae summum apicem, hic illic syllabas quasdam admordere, memorare varias lectiones Codicum mss. et congesta dudum collectanea, commoda occasione data, effundere; ceterum altum silentium servare, ubi maxime Interpretis opera indigent Lectores. Equidem puto non paucos fuisse, esseque etiamnum, inter Criticos, qui triumphant in id genus conjectaneis, nec nisi Codices antiquos crepant, at omnia interpretari, seriemque orationis probe evolvere non possent.’ 126 Jean Le Clerc, Bibliothèque choisie, 22:14: ‘La connaissance purement Grammaticale de l’Antiquité ne guérit rien; elle laisse au fonds du Coeur l’orgueil, la colère, l’envie & les autres passions les plus opposées à la tranquilité de l’esprit […] Mais si on penètre bien la Morale des Anciens, on y trouve mille excellentes leçons, pour conserver le calme d’esprit, qui est la chose la plus souhaitable en cette vie.’ 1 27 Ibid., 4:22–​3: ‘Les Belles Lettres sont une pauvre étude, si elles ne servent qu’à entendre l’Antiquité; sans que l’on fasse aucun usage des lumières, que l’on en peut tirer, aussi bien pour la Religion, que pour les autres Sciences. A quoi serviroit-​il de se remplir la tête de mots, d’histoires, d’opinions & de coûtumes; si l’on n’en devenoit plus raisonnable, plus prudent & plus attaché à la vérité de la Religion? On ne peut regarder cette étude, que comme une étude qui sert d’introduction, & d’ornement aux autres plus relevées; telles que sont la Philosophie, la Jurisprudence, la Politique & la Théologie.’

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Although based in the United Provinces, Le Clerc’s assault on scholarship focused solely on textual criticism was very common among French intellectuals. Pierre Daniel Huet (1630–​1721), for example, believed philology had ‘degenerated into a lowly and obscure field of study,’ only interested in manu­ scripts and different readings of ancient texts.128 Although scholars active in France were not as explicitly anxious about scholarly rivalry from the Dutch Republic, scholars working in the United Provinces were often the target of mockery among French writers. In a work that compared the qualities and shortcomings of Livy and Thucydides, the Jesuit writer René Rapin (1621–​1687) compared his own work with an edition of Livy’s work published by Johann Friedrich Gronovius who taught at Leiden: Without trying to flatter myself, I do a better job of bringing out the spirit of Livy in, for example, this little work than Grononovius does in the latest edition he has made of this author in Amsterdam in 1665, which contains a long and exact history of the manuscripts of this historian, of the editions that have been made over time, and of all those who through their notes, corrections, reflections, and text-​critical remarks have worked on restoring and improving his text.129 The ‘wrong’ way of studying antiquity had a negative effect on university education and attracting the interest of potential students, Le Clerc argued. In his Parrhasiana, he tells the anecdote of a rich gentleman who wanted his son to study at university. He was subsequently told, however, that a university education could make one very ‘pedantic and proud.’ He therefore decided to have a look at two institutions of higher education himself and was appalled at the behaviour of the professors and their students, who he believed were charlatans

128 Huetiana, ou Pensées diverses de M. Huet, évêque d’Avranches (Paris: J. Estienne, 1722), 63–​4: ‘Mais enfin cette occupation dégénéra en une étude basse et obscure, dont tout le mérite consistait à rechercher et à recouvrer les meilleurs manuscrits, à les conférer, et à en remarquer soigneusement les diverses leçons.’ 129 René Rapin, La Comparaison de Thucydide et de Tite-​Live. Avec un jugement des défauts et des beautés de leurs Ouvrages (Paris: Muguet, 1681), fol. iir-​v: ‘[S]‌ans faire le vain, je fais mieux sentir l’esprit de Tite-​Live, par exemple, en ce petit ouvrage, que ne fait Gronovius par la dernière édition qu’il a faite à Amsterdam de cet auteur l’année 1665 qui contient une histoire longue et exacte des manuscrits de cet historien, des éditions qu’on en a faites dans la suite des temps, et de la liste de tous ceux qui ont travaillé, par leurs notes, par leurs corrections, par leurs réflexions, et par leurs critiques, à le rétablir et à l’augmenter.’ The edition referred to is Titi Livii Historiarum quod extat, cum perpetuis Gronovii et variorum notis, ed. J.F. Gronovius (Amsterdam: Elzevier, 1665).

62 Verhaart and seemed more interested in gossip. He therefore concluded his son could better be educated by learning from life than attending a university.130 10

Conclusion

What this essay has sought to demonstrate is the existence –​recognisable to contemporaries –​of two approaches to classical texts in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. These consist of a more technical, text-​critically oriented approach in the Dutch Republic and a more popularising and moralising approach in France. I have contextualized these approaches in order to explain that they reflected and were intertwined with the political tensions between France and the United Provinces, but were also shaped by local circumstances and developments in these two states. My argument is partly a methodological one: surprisingly little has been done so far with social, institutional, and statistical information we have about the environment in which early modern research and education on ancient Latin and Greek literature took place. Using such information can give us a much better appreciation of what early modern scholars have to say in sources that historians of scholarship do normally use, such as letters, orations, and commentaries. Although it has not been my purpose to be exhaustive and complete in this respect, such information gives important clues as to why text-​critical philology was able to thrive –​despite numerous pressures –​in the Dutch Republic in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while it went in decline in France during the same period.

Acknowledgements

An earlier draft of this chapter was presented at ‘Beyond Ancients and Moderns,’ a conference organized by the editors of this volume at All Souls College, Oxford, on 19 and 20 May 2019. The author would like to thank the editors as well as the other participants at the conference, especially Scott Mandelbrote, for their very helpful feedback, as well as the anonymous reviewer for Brill. 130 Le Clerc, Parrhasiana, 1:252–​3: ‘Il crut que son fils se formeroit assez, par les affaires mêmes de la vie; sans s’embarasser d’une Science, qui ne lui paroissoit qu’une pure charlatanerie.’

­c hapter 2

Sex and the Classics

The Approaches of Early Modern Humanists to Ancient Sexuality Karen Hollewand In 1489, Desiderius Erasmus (c.1466–​1536) sent a copy of the comedies of Terence to one of his friends. In the accompanying letter, he explained why he gifted this ancient text to his (now unknown) acquaintance. He praised the Roman playwright for his pure, polished, and elegant style, his wit and charm, and advised his friend to learn Terence’s work by heart. To his recommendation Erasmus added a warning: his friend should ignore the ‘ignorant and malevolent dwarfs’ who argued that it was sinful for a Christian to study the work of this pagan writer because ‘these plays contain nothing but lechery and immoral love-​affairs between young people, which cannot but corrupt the reader’s mind.’ He rebuked this denunciation by pointing out that those ‘fools and goats’ did not understand that ‘this kind of literature is entirely suitable –​ nay, was invented –​for the purpose of showing up men’s vices. For what are comedies but the artful slave, the love-​crazed youth, the suave and wanton harlot, the cross-​grained, peevish, avaricious old man? These characters are depicted for us in plays, just as in a painting, so that we may first see what is seemly or unseemly in human behaviour and then distribute affection or rebuke accordingly.’1 His contemporary Juan Luis Vives (1493–​1540) did not share Erasmus’ appreciation of Terence’s comedies. In his book on education, published in 1531, Vives discussed the problems presented by the writings of Ovid, Catullus, Martial, and other classical poets. He argued that ‘obscene passages should be wholly cut out from the text, as though they were dead, and would infect whatever they touched. Does the human race, forsooth, suffer an irreparable loss, if a man cast the noxious part out of an unclean poet, and if he does to a book, what he would not hesitate to do to his own body, if necessary?’2 Getting rid 1 Desiderius Erasmus, Letter 31, 1489, addressee unknown. Translations from R.A.B. Mynors and D.F.S. Thomson (transl.), W. K. Ferguson (annot.), The Correspondence of Erasmus. Letters 1 to 141, 1484 to 1500, vol. 1 (Toronto, 1974), 59. 2 Juan Luis Vives, De Tradendis Disciplinis, bk. iii (Antwerp, 1531). Translation from Foster Watson, Vives, on education: a translation of the De Tradendis Disciplinis of Juan Luis Vives (Cambridge, 1913), 128.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004462335_004

64 Hollewand of the entire works of certain ancient poets, who were ‘slaves to evil passions and tainted with vice’, would be an even better solution, Vives concluded, not only for the benefit of young readers but also for the community as a whole: ‘So many writings of so many philosophers and holy writers have been lost, would it then be a crime if Tibullus or the Ars Amandi of Ovid perished? Whoever will undertake this expurgation will do a great service not only to his contemporaries and to posterity, but also to poets and poetry itself.’3 The vulgar terms, obscene descriptions, and sexual poems that frequently featured in the works of ancient writers were often removed, altered, or, at the very least, firmly rejected by early modern humanists. These scholars engaged in what might be termed the expurgation of the classics: they deliberately got rid of words, passages, or whole works because of their pagan and/​or sexual nature. How to use or edit the classics to fit into a Christian framework was the subject of ongoing debate in this period, with some arguing that scholars should only be inspired by classical thinkers, relying on their own Christian views to guide the content and style of their writings, while others promoted complete imitation of classical models, despite their pagan character.4 Regardless of their general perspective on how to approach the ideas and writings produced in the pagan past however, the majority of early modern humanists chose to excise or alter obscene passages in their editions, translations, and commentaries of classical writings. Scholars like Marc-​Antoine Muret (1526–​1585), Joseph Justus Scaliger (1540–​1609), and Tanaquil Faber (1615–​1672) ignored, toned down, or excused the parts of Greek and Roman texts that explicitly discussed sex, even when encountered in the works of well-​respected writers.5 3 Vives, De Disciplinis, bk. iii, 292, trans. Watson, Vives: on education, 128. For more on the expurgation of Terence, see Ursula Potter, ‘ “No Terence phrase: his tyme and myne are twaine’; Erasmus, Terence, and Censorship in the Tudor Classroom’, in The Classics in the Medieval and Renaissance Classroom, eds. Juanita Feros Ruys, John O. Ward, and Melanie Heyworth (Turnhout, 2013), 365–​90. 4 Expurgation is defined here as the act of deliberately removing words, passages, or works because of their irreligious or sexual content, style, or vocabulary. The term has been adopted from Expurgating the Classics: editing out in Greek and Latin, eds. Stephen J. Harrison and Christopher Stray (London, 2012). For more on the debate on how to edit the classics, see Charles Fantazzi, ‘Imitation, emulation, Ciceronianism, anti-​Ciceronianism’, in Brill’s encyclopaedia of the Neo-​Latin world, eds. Philip Ford, Jan Bloemendal, and Charles Fantazzi (Leiden, 2014), 144–​56; Laurel Carrington, ‘Impiety compounded: Scaliger’s double-​edged critique of Erasmus’, in Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook 22 (2002), 57–​67; Ciceronian controversies, ed. Joann Dellaneva, trans. Brian Duvick (Cambridge, MA, 2007). 5 For more on early modern expurgation, see Expurgating the Classics, eds. Harrison and Stray; Karen E. Hollewand, The Banishment of Beverland. Sex, Sin, and Scholarship in the Seventeenth-​Century Dutch Republic (Leiden, 2019), 124–​44.

Sex and the Classics

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That early modern humanists were often troubled by the irreligious or explicitly sexual passages that featured in the works of certain ancient authors has not gone unnoticed. In studies on humanist scholarship, Renaissance erotica, and the reception of ancient ideas in the (early) modern period historians have commented on the different approaches to the sexual side of the classics.6 In publications on the reception of classical writers known for the obscene features of their works in particular the expurgation performed by teachers, translators, and editors, when dealing with for example Catullus, Martial, Ovid, Horace, Lucretius, or Virgil, has been a topic of discussion.7 However, only a handful of scholars have looked at the expurgation of obscenities from a broader point of view, outlining and connecting the methods and motivations adopted by various scholars at different times and places when confronted with the inappropriate elements of classical works. Paula Findlen’s paper in Lynn Hunt’s groundbreaking The Invention of Pornography highlighted the connection between humanism, politics, and pornography in Renaissance Italy and the topic is also touched upon in the landmark collection of papers on the expurgation of the classics edited by Stephen Harrison and Christopher Stray.8 Yet there are still many questions to be answered regarding the practice of expurgation in early modern Europe, especially when it concerns the removal of the vulgar, erotic, and pornographic features of ancient texts. This paper aims to make contribution to the historiography of humanist scholarship by offering, first, a general outline of the early modern expurgation of the sexual; and second, by focusing on three extraordinary men who authored obscene works: Hadriaan Beverland (1650–​1716), Antonio Vignali (1501–​1559), and Antonio Beccadelli (1394–​1471). In my book on the banishment of Beverland, I have argued that one of the main reasons why this young scholar was exiled from the relatively tolerant Dutch Republic in 1679 was his 6 See e.g. Alastair J. Blanshard, Sex: vice and love from antiquity to modernity (Chichester, 2010); David O. Frantz, Festum voluptatis: a study of Renaissance erotica (Columbus, 1989); Éros et Priapus: érotisme et obscénité dans la littérature néo-​latine, eds. Ingrid A.R. de Smet and Philip Ford (Geneva, 1997); Bette Talvacchia, Taking positions: on the erotic in Renaissance culture (Princeton, NJ, 1999). 7 To name just a few excellent examples: Alison Brown, The return of Lucretius to Renaissance Florence (London, 2010); Julia Haig Gaisser, Catullus and his Renaissance readers (Oxford, 1993); L.B.T. Houghton and Maria Wyke, Perceptions of Horace: a Roman poet and his readers (Cambridge, 2009); John P. Sullivan, Martial, the unexpected classic: a literary and historical study (Cambridge, 1991); David S. Wilson-​Okamura, Virgil in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 2010). 8 Paula Findlen, ‘Humanism, Politics and Pornography in Renaissance Italy’, in The Invention of pornography: obscenity and the origins of modernity, 1500–​1800, ed. Lynn Hunt (New York, 1993), 49–​108; Expurgating the Classics, eds. Harrison and Stray.

66 Hollewand fascination with all things sexual.9 In his studies Beverland concentrated on the ancient past so as to demonstrate the universal power of lust in human nature; at the same time, he criticized the gross discrepancy between the official restriction of sex to marriage and the actual sexual behaviour of men and women in his contemporary society. His solution to the problem of lust was as simple as it was radical in the late seventeenth century: he advocated sexual liberty for the educated men of the higher ranks of society, who could responsibly enjoy the unavoidable sin. It is clear that Beverland stood out amongst his humanist colleagues, who favoured expurgation or, at the very least, did not approve of his daring studies. Nonetheless, I want to show here that while Beverland might have been a unique case, he was not the only humanist who adored the sexual side of the classics. Other learned men, such as Antonio Beccadelli, Giovanni Della Casa (1503–​56), Niccolò Franco (1515–​70), Ferrante Pallavicino (1615–​44), Antonio Rocco (1586–​1653), and Antonio Vignali were similarly inspired by the pagan past to discuss lust, sexual acts, and the outlook on all matters obscene in their own societies. While the texts they composed and the historical contexts which provoked them to write about sex varied greatly, this paper argues that, to better understand the expurgation of, as well as the singular focus on, the sexual side of the classics, it is valuable to proceed comparatively. The reason for this is partly historiographical. The different approaches of early modern scholars to sex in the classics, from the expurgation of the sexual epigrams of Martial in a vernacular translation to the promotion of the sexual act with the support of classical references in a pornographic dialogue, have primarily been studied in isolation. These individual studies have revealed however that while early modern scholars dealt with this sensitive subject in different ways, their aims and approaches were often similar. By adopting a broader view, the alignment of these motives and methods towards sex in the classics can be explored further. Taking a step back allows us to recognize that there are interesting parallels between the perspectives of early modern classical scholars with regards to their subject, audience, and contemporary society. The general expurgation of ancient texts will be contrasted here with the singular focus on sex in the publications of three scholars: Beverland, Vignali, and Beccadelli. Publishing their poetry, dialogues, and scientific treatises in Italy and the Dutch Republic in the early fifteenth-​, sixteenth-​, and late-​ seventeenth centuries, while residing at court, presiding over a newly founded literary academy, and studying at a renowned university, the dissimilarities 9 Hollewand, Banishment, especially 124–​68, 206–​27.

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between these learned men may seem to rule out a meaningful comparison. Yet their texts point to a familiar pattern, showing that when exposing the sexual side of the classical world, humanist scholars were inspired by the same aims and adopted similar approaches over a long period of time. Discussing the three men’s works side by side brings to light the striking similarities in the content and audience of their texts. All three authors were determined to expose the truth about the universal power of sexual lust and to challenge the ‘hypocrites’ who denied that sex dominated human nature. In all three cases, their intended audience was small: they were writing not for society at large but their own communities, which consisted exclusively of scholarly and elite men. In addition, they all got into great trouble after the publication of their sexual studies: their writings became well known far beyond the boundaries of their learned circles and they paid a high price for the fame of their obscene works. Comparing the exceptional texts composed by Vignali, Beverland, and Beccadelli will therefore not only shed a new light on early modern approaches to classical works, but will also provide us with a better understanding of normative attitudes to sex and obscenities outside the learned world in this period. 1

The Expurgation of the Classics

In early modern Europe sexual relations outside the bonds of marriage were prohibited on the basis of Christian doctrine. While not a small number of men and women did engage in premarital relations, adulterous affairs, or prostitution, the regulations of Protestant and Catholic churches and the laws of early modern states strictly forbade these sinful acts and held that transgressors should be prosecuted and punished. In line with the prohibition of all sexual acts that were extramarital and not directly aimed at procreation, obscene writings were often censured by secular and religious authorities.10 Included were the works of Roman and Greek authors, which were considered suspicious due to the liberal attitude to sex that generally characterized 10

For more on the regulation of sexual behaviour and obscene publications, see e.g. Faramerz Dabhoiwala, The origins of sex. A history of the first sexual revolution (London, 2012); The Invention of pornography, ed. Hunt; James Grantham Turner, Schooling sex: libertine literature and erotic education in Italy, France, and England, 1534–​1680 (Oxford, 2003); Manon van der Heijden, Huwelijk in Holland: stedelijke rechtspraak en kerkelijke tucht, 1550–​1700 (Amsterdam, 1998), 30–​76; Inger Leemans, Het woord is aan de onderkant. Radicale ideeën in Nederlandse pornografische romans 1670–​1700 (Nijmegen, 2002), 13–​32, 147–​72; Lotte C. van de Pol, The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (Oxford, 2011).

68 Hollewand ancient cultures and that had resulted in a great number of explicit texts. At the Council of Trent, for example, it was decided that ‘books which professedly treat of, relate, or teach lascivious or wanton subjects, since regard must be had not only of faith, but of morals also, which are wont readily to be corrupted by the reading of such books, are absolutely prohibited’. The Council made an exception for certain classical works, which could be permitted ‘by reason of the elegance and propriety of their language’, yet these texts needed to be adapted before they could be presented to a Christian audience.11 This raises the question how early modern scholars dealt with the obscene elements of the classical texts they studied, in accordance with the guidelines set by secular and religious authorities as well as their own moral compasses. The countless editions, commentaries, and translations of ancient writings published in the sixteenth-​and seventeenth centuries show that a large number of humanists, if not the majority, agreed that pagan obscenities should be adapted or avoided and thus opted for expurgation. Obscenity was of course not the only pagan characteristic of the classics: impious ideas on religion, the cosmos, and human nature needed to be dealt with as well. These features were likewise disregarded or reinterpreted by translators, editors, and commentators to appropriate the texts for the early modern Christian context.12 Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura, for example, was usually defined as dangerous since it presented irreligious views on the mortality of the soul, the materiality of the universe, and the intervention of the divine in human dealings.13 The work was therefore often expurgated: classical scholar Tanaquil Faber, for example, stated in the preface of his edition of Lucretius published in 1675 that there were many things in the work which he ‘could not safely express’.14 In addition to this, in his commentary Faber avoided the most obscene part of Lucretius’ work, the end of Chapter iv, and explained his choice in an 11

12

13 14

For the guidelines of the Council of Trent, established in Session xxv ‘On the Index of Books, and the Catechism, Breviary, and Missal’ and in the ‘Ten Rules Concerning Prohibited Books Drawn Up By The Fathers Chosen By The Council Of Trent And Approved By Pope Pius’, see Canons and Decrees of the Council of Trent, ed. and transl. Theodore Alois Buckley (London, 1851) 253–​4, 284–​9, qu. 286. Stephen J. Harrison and Christopher Stray, ‘Introduction’, in Expurgating the Classics, eds. Harrison and Stray, 1–​8; Étienne Wolff, ‘La Censure’, in La collection Ad usum Delphini: l’Antiquité au miroir du Grand Siècle, ed. Catherine Volpilhac-​Auger (Grenoble, 2000), 163–​71; Gaisser, Catullus, 77, 109–​45, 156–​92, 273; René Veenman, ‘Martialis en het ‘Bataafse oor’, in Voortgang 15 (1995), 7–​37. For more on Lucretius, see: Philip R. Hardie, Lucretian receptions: history, the sublime, knowledge (Cambridge, 2009); Brown, Return. Tanaquil Faber, Titi Lucretii Cari. De rerum natura libri sex (Cambridge, 1675), Ad Lectorem, v, General Comment 472.

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accompanying note: ‘if I have been a little briefer in expounding these matters I did so prudently and knowingly, since I realised that the whole business [of sex] is so constituted that no one has required a commentator to understand it.’15 Faber did not need to explain these lines of the text since his readers would have no trouble understanding this part, as, apparently, sex had not changed. This naturalistic, transhistorical dimension made the expurgation of obscene texts of particular interest when discussing the general editing of the classics by early modern scholars. The rejection of the religious flaws of ancient texts created no real problems for expurgators: their audience was usually well aware of the pagan character of the writings in question and did not really need to be convinced of the superiority of the Christian faith. While Christian morality was often seen as an impediment to the study of the classics, many scholars argued that by editing these works the ideas of pagan writers could be made applicable and useful. Platonism, which became popular among early modern scholars in its Christianized Neo-​Platonic form, is a prime example.16 Yet sex was different: the same urges, fantasies, and pleasures that had captured the minds of pagan writers also appealed to readers in early modern times. When it came to purely religious features it was possible to frame the classical authors as proto-​Christians who had simply not yet been exposed to the Gospel, or their errors could be used to strengthen Christian ideas. Obscene fragments posed a different kind of threat and scholars therefore often opted for a different approach. They removed these parts of a work, altered the original text, or distanced themselves from the passage in question and refrained from discussing the sexual nature of human beings and the characterization of sex as a sin in the Christian religion altogether. 2

Motives and Methods

Taking the Christian framework as their starting point, early modern scholars who studied Greek and Roman material often did not feel the need to explain 15

16

Ibid., 499: ‘in quibus explicandis si paulo brevior fui, prudens sciensque feci, qui viderem, ita comparatum esse totum illud negotium, ut ad illius intelligentiam nemo interprete opus habebat’. See also David J. Butterfield, ‘Contempta relinquas: anxiety and expurgation in the publication of Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura’, in Expurgating the Classics, eds. Harrison and Stray, 95–​114. Jan Bloemendal and Henk J.M. Nellen, ‘Philology: Editions and Editorial Practices in the Early Modern Period’, in Brill’s encyclopaedia of the Neo-​Latin world, 185–​206; Brown, The return, 4–​5; Valery Rees, ‘Ficino and Neo-​Platonism’, in Brill’s encyclopaedia of the Neo-​ Latin world, 603–​15; James Hankins, Plato in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols (Leiden, 1990).

70 Hollewand why they excised or altered sexual passages in their editions, translations, and commentaries. When they did state their motives for expurgation, those generally fell into three categories. First, some humanist scholars argued that certain classical writers were falsely accused of composing obscene texts, claiming that the supposed sexual passages misrepresented the writer to whom they were attributed. They stated, often in the preliminary paratexts of their publications, that previous editors of a manuscript had misunderstood the meaning of a passage and had therefore wrongly pointed out an obscene connotation. Alternatively, these scholars argued that certain predecessors had focused on texts which were uncharacteristic of an ancient writer’s views and style, for instance because he had written them during his youth or in imitation of others. They legitimised their expurgation of the text by pointing out that the obscenities revealed in preceding editions of a work were based on a misunderstanding of the original text and context. These editors thus ‘saved’ the author in question from false accusations of perversity, underlined the true significance of the text in question, and upheld or restored the reputation of the writer and the work.17 Exemplary of this first category are the views of Italian humanist Pierio Valeriano Bolzani (1477–​1558), who argued in his lectures on Catullus, given at the University of Rome in the early 1520s, that the writings of this Roman poet were anything but indecent. The poems of Catullus are infamous for their expressions of love and erotic feelings, yet Valeriano argued that Catullus was a model of literary and moral excellence. Catullus set ‘a limit to pleasure, since emerging from the whirling depths of the passions at times he pulls himself together and prudently embraces fortitude, justice, and temperance…’.18 The poet also ‘chastises vice, criticizes evil ways, and attempts to alter mankind from imitating the wicked men he chastises in his poetry.’19 Commenting on Catullus’ poems 2 and 3 Valeriano refuted any obscene interpretation. These 17

18

19

For more on this subject see Gaisser, Catullus, 156–​92, 273; Gail Trimble, ‘Catullus and ‘comment in English’: the tradition of the expurgated commentary before Fordyce’, in Expurgating the Classics, eds. Harrison and Stray, 143–​62; James Morwood, ‘ “From out the schoolboy’s vision”: expurgation and the young readers’, in Expurgating the Classics, eds. Harrison and Stray, 163–​74. Pierio Valeriano Bolzani, Vatican City, Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 5215, fols 22r-​23r: ‘quum modum voluptatibus statuit, quum e pertubationum voraginibus emergens sese interdum colligit et fortitudinem, iustitiam, et temperantiam prudenter amplexatur …’. For more on Valeriano and Catullus, see Gaisser, Catullus, 117, 134–​6. Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 5215, fol. 18r: ‘Prodest dum vitia carpit, malos mores exsecratur, et mortales omnes a sceleratorum quos carminibus proscindit imitatione conatur avertere.’

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two famous poems about Catullus’ girl and her sparrow had often been the topic of discussion, with scholars arguing that the sparrow in the poem indicated Catullus’ penis.20 Valeriano characterized this connotation as repellent, unnecessary, and impossible. For example, he pointed out that the death of the sparrow in poem 3 could not have referred to Catullus’ impotence since he was still a young man when he wrote these poems.21 Valeriano was not the only commentator on Catullus who discarded the obscenity of this Roman poet based on the perception of Catullus’ virtuous nature. Marc Antoine Muret, who published his edition of Catullus in 1554, stated in relation to poem 28, in which the sexual mistreatment of the poet by a certain Memmius is described, that Catullus did not speak about his own person in this verse but was merely imitating the voice of someone else. Catullus, who was a member of a good family and a man of decent character, would not have endured the obscenities described in the poem, Muret argued, and if he had, he would not have been so stupid as to record the events in his own verses.22 The second and most important reason for the expurgation of classical writings from all things obscene was the adaptation of a pagan text to a Christian framework. With no grounds to deny the sexual nature of a text, many humanists agreed that profoundly explicit passages needed to be altered before they could be read by a chaste audience. Classical writers had lived in a pagan world, without God, the Bible, or Christian doctrine, and had therefore approached sexuality from a very different moral point of view. In order for their writings to be morally right, useful, and enjoyable to Christian readers, obscene words and sexual verses needed to be changed.23 A well-​known example of this Christianization of classical texts is Erasmus’ reinterpretation of Virgil’s second Eclogue in the early sixteenth century. The text describes the love of shepherd Corydon for the boy Alexis, but as Erasmus was of the opinion that this description of homosexual passion could corrupt young readers, he argued that it was necessary to alter the content of the story to be fitting and useful in a Christian context. If teachers would explain to their students that the poem did not connote anything obscene and instead would argue that the great power of friendship between two men was the subject of the poem, the text would not provide a threat to the good virtues of the adolescent readers. 20 21 22 23

For a good overview of debates on Catullus, his girl, and his sparrow, see Gaisser, Catullus, 305–​42. Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, Vat. Lat. 5215, fols 45r-​46r. Marc Antoine Muret, Catullus et in eum commentarius (Venice, 1554), 35–​6. Harrison and Stray, ‘Introduction’, 1–​8; Wolff, ‘La Censure’, 163–​71; Gaisser, Catullus, 77, 109–​145, 156–​92, 273; Veenman, ‘Martialis’, 7–​37.

72 Hollewand By removing an imperfection from an otherwise perfect source, as Anthony Grafton has put it, Erasmus consciously altered the original meaning of the text.24 The third reason for expurgation was a personal dislike for the obscenity of classical texts. Some scholars seemed to have only excised the obscenities of the classical writer of their choice to avoid prosecution and censorship or to please a particular patron, yet others censored their works with great gusto, underlining their strong aversion for the perversities of the ancient world. In his edition of Catullus, Tibullus, and Propertius published in 1577, Joseph Justus Scaliger vehemently rejected the obscenities he encountered in the works of these three poets.25 He explained that he had skipped those passages which ‘chaste ears cannot endure. For it is neither for me to touch them nor anyone else who has any modicum of chastity.’26 His expurgation of the manuscript seems to have been primarily motivated by his personal distaste for explicit texts: he omitted whole poems, changed obscene words, and disputed the sexual connotation of certain passages. In the Castigationes, added to his edition, Scaliger shared his wish that editing these classical texts had not been necessary at all: if only ‘the ancients themselves had taken some account of chastity and not handed themselves down to mankind in so many disgraceful writings.’27 Similar to the varied motivations for the expurgation of the classics, the methods of expurgation differed. Deselection was a first approach: scholars removed words, passages, and even whole sections of a text in their editions. This most drastic method completely ignored the presence of obscenities in the original manuscript(s) and presented the reader with a chaste and Christian edition. When editing the classics, scholars could not avoid selecting certain writers, manuscripts or texts, but in the case of the expurgation of the obscene they made a deliberate choice to avoid, ignore, or hide sexual passages that were part of the chosen writings. In the previously discussed commentaries of Catullus by Valeriano and Scaliger, words, verses, and sometimes

24

Desiderius Erasmus, De ratione studii (Rotterdam, 1512), 139–​42; Publius Virgilius Maro, Eclogues, II; Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the text: the traditions of scholarship in an age of science 1450–​1800 (London, 1991), 38. See also Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton, 2014), 123–​4. 25 Joseph Justus Scaliger, Catulli, Tibulli, Propertii nova editio (Paris, 1577). Added to this works were his Castigationes. See also Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 2 vols (Oxford, 1983, 1993), 1:61–​79. 26 Scaliger, Catulli, Tibulli, 3v, trans. Gaisser, Catullus, 190. 27 Scaliger, Castigationes, 44, trans. Gaisser, Catullus, 190.

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whole fragments of the text were removed.28 Joseph de Jouvancy (1643–​1719), who published an edition of the satires of Juvenal in 1685, also expurgated his work in this fashion. He made sure that there was no confusion regarding his approach: the title of his edition stated that he had ‘expurgated all obscenities’. For example, true to the caption, he cut out the majority of Satire 1.2 without any explanation, offering his reader only the first 27 lines of the text and leaving out the more explicit verses.29 Likewise Louis Desprez (fl. 1675–​91), in the preliminary text of his Ad usum Delphini edition of Juvenal and Persius published in 1684, stressed that: ‘On the advice of a heavenly and divine oracle, and on the instruction and order of the wise men whom I have named by deference, we have separated what was precious from what was base, and expunged the obscenities.’30 The second method that is prevalent in expurgated editions is alteration. In the preface of his 1660 translation of the satires of Juvenal, Robert Stapylton (c.1605–​69) stated that ‘though the greatest scholars have made use of Juvenal’s authority… there [also] sprung up a Sect of formall Stoicks, that for a few wanton words (all they could make sense of) cast Juvenal out of their hands…’. Although Stapylton argued against the ‘Stoic’ denunciation of the Roman writer, he did distance himself from certain parts of Juvenal’s satires and carefully altered the obscene language of the original text. ‘I have added language so well-​qualified, that (I am confident) the third sort of accusers will never inform against this Juvenal for Immodesty. And if, when I took off his obscenity, I could have set on the full perfections of his pen, my industry had been crowned to my wish.’31 In an edition of Horace’s Satires, published by the aforementioned Desprez as part of the Ad usum Delphini series in 1691, sexual words 28

29 30

31

For editions of the Ad Usum Delphini in which parts of the texts were expurgated, see e.g. those of Martial (Vincent Collesson, M. Valerii Martialis epigrammatum libros xv (Paris, 1680)), Lucretius (Michel Dufay, T. Lucretii Cari De rerum natura libri sex (Paris, 1680)), and Horace (Louis Desprez, Quinti Horatii Flacci Opera (Paris, 1691)). See also Wolff, ‘La Censure’, 163–​71. Joseph de Jouvancy, D. Junii Juvenalis Satyrae, omni obscoenitate expurgatae, cum annotationibus (Turin, 1685), 253–​7. The Latin text of Horace’s Satire i.2 is given up to the words nil medium est (lines 28–​134). Louis Desprez, D. Junii Juvenalis et A. Persii Flacci Satyræ (London, 1700), Preface, sig. A4v: ‘At nos Oraculi coelestis ac Divini monitu, atque ex Sapientum, quos honoris causam nominavi, Virorum praecepto ac mandato, pretiosum à vili secrevimus, obscoena de medio expunximus.’ The wise men Desprez refers to are the editors of the Ad usum Delphini editions of the classics: Charles de Sainte-​Maure, Duke of Montausier, and Pierre Daniel Huet. Robert Stapylton, Mores Hominum. The Manners of Men, Described in Sixteen Satyrs, by Juvenal (London, 1660), ‘The Dedicatory’, B2r-​v.

74 Hollewand were at times replaced by an asterisk. In Satire 1.2, in which Horace decried a woman with ‘depugis, nasuta, brevi latere ac pede longo est’, Desprez only noted her long nose, short waist and long feet, not her small behind.32 Rejection was the third method of expurgation: scholars published, commented on, or translated the text in its entirety but rejected its sexually explicit contents in the accompanying texts. A good example can be found in the preface of Achilles Statius’ (1524–​81) edition of Catullus, printed in 1566. Since he was the secretary to the Pope, Statius felt he was required to justify his focus on Catullus. In his preface he strongly refuted the obscenity found in the poems, excused his edition by pointing out that Saint Jerome had approved of the writings of Catullus, and argued that he had only concentrated on this ancient model to support his studies of the style and metre of biblical poems and psalms.33 In 1615 English scholar Thomas Farnaby (c.1575–​1647) published a complete translation of Martial’s epigrams from Latin to English, yet felt the need to point out to his readers that even though he did not expurgate his text, he had not immersed himself in, nor extensively commented upon, the sexual content of certain poems, since ‘the interpreter… must not add oil to the flames’.34 Classical scholar Denis Lambin (1520–​72) would have agreed with him. In his commentary on Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura he did not refrain from explaining the ideas of this pagan philosopher to his readers, yet he made sure to distance himself from his subject. In the preface of the work he stated that the De Rerum Natura simply repeated Epicurus’ impious philosophy and, in the same way, he was merely a transmitter of Lucretius’ views.35 3

Vignali, Beccadelli, and Beverland

The expurgation of the classics from all obscenities was incorporated in early modern editions of ancient texts in a wide variety of ways. The prominence of sex in ancient literature was a public secret, as commonly known as it was hidden by most humanists. Yet the obscene features of Greek and Roman culture were not ignored across the board. Classical writings inspired the creators of obscene prints, paintings, and pornography, in which one encounters ancient 32 33 34 35

Louis Desprez, Quinti Horatii Flacci Opera (Paris, 1691), 526. See also Wolff, ‘La Censure’, 165. For more on Statius see Gaisser, Catullus, 169–​77. Thomas Farnaby, Val. Martialis Epigrammatωn libri (London, 1615), Ad lectores, sig. A4v: ‘Interpretem certe: neque oleum flamae addere’. Denis Lambin, Titi Lucretii Cari De rerum natura libri sex (Paris, 1563), ‘Address to Charles ix’, A3r. See also, Butterfield, ‘Contempta relinquas’, 99–​104.

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vocabulary and concepts, classical myths and characters. For example, in the erotic writings of Pietro Aretino (1492–​1556) and Nicolas Chorier (1612–​1692) there are many direct references and indirect allusions to classical customs and pagan writings.36 Throughout the early modern period humanist scholars were at times attacked because of their alleged adoration of explicit classical texts. It is possible that their expurgation of these writings was encouraged by the commonplace of the depraved humanist scholar, who hid his debauched desires behind the disguise of learning.37 However, a small group of humanists actually fit this description to a tee, since they concentrated on sex in the classics in particular.38 Antonio Beccadelli, Antonio Vignali, and Hadriaan Beverland are three examples of classical scholars who did not shy away from the topic but dealt with the prominence of sex in ancient culture and classical literature, as well as in their own contemporary societies, head on. Antonio Beccadelli, also known as ‘Il Parmonita’, was born in Palermo. After studying and practicing law, he dedicated his life to classical literature and poetry, serving as a poet and scholar at the courts of different Italian rulers. Beccadelli composed his infamous Hermaphroditus in 1425–​6. In direct imitation of the Priapeia, the work consists of seventy short poems that combine classical references with contemporary observations, written to entertain, ridicule, and excite its audience. The verses featured sodomy and prostitution, described male-​female, male-​male, and female-​female sexual acts, and discussed the insatiable lust of women.39 Jacopo Antonio Pietro Vignali di Buonaggionti was born in Siena. We know little about his personal life, except that he was one of the founders of the Accademia degli Intronati, the Academy of the Stunned or the Dunderheads, established in Siena in 1525, one of the oldest literary academies in Italy. Vignali criticised classical scholarship as well as present-​day politics in his 36

37 38 39

For more on this subject, see Findlen, ‘Humanism’, 49–​108; Talvacchia, Taking positions, 50–​64; Karel A.E. Enenkel, ‘Neo-​Latin erotic and pornographic literature (c.1400-​c.1700)’, in Brill’s encyclopaedia of the Neo-​Latin world, 487–​501; Ingrid A.R de Smet & Philip J. Ford, ‘Préambule’, in Éros et Priapus, eds. Smet and Ford, vii-​xvi; Turner, Schooling sex, 1–​30, 165–​220. See Enenkel, ‘Neo-​Latin erotic and pornographic literature’, 488–​90; Findlen, ‘Humanism’, 86–​93; Frantz, Festum voluptatis, 9–​42. As well as the works in n. 36 above, see Daniella Coppini, ‘The comic and the obcene in the Latin epigrams of the early fifteenth century’, in The Neo-​Latin epigram: a learned and witty genre, eds. Susanna de Beer, Karel A.E. Enenkel, David Rijser (Leuven, 2009), 83–​102. See Antonio Beccadelli, Hermaphroditus (Bologna, 1425); Holt N. Parker, ‘Introduction’, in Antonio Beccadelli, The Hermaphrodite, ed. and transl. Holt N. Parker (Cambridge, 2010), i-​xlv; Findlen, ‘Humanism’, 83–​7; Enenkel, ‘Neo-​Latin erotic and pornographic literature’, 491–​501.

76 Hollewand satirical La Cazzaria (The Book of the Prick), published in 1531. In this obscene dialogue, full of allusions to ancient works and ideas, two classical scholars discuss local government, humanist culture, and libertinism. Arsiccio, based on Vignali himself, tries to persuade his friend Sodo, modelled after Vignali’s friend Marcantonio Piccolomini, to study sex: not only was it a natural and necessary part of human nature, but women also preferred to share their bed with an informed scholar. The conversation continued along these lines, with Arsiccio teaching Sodo all about the act and the sexual body, but also touching on other topics. A large part of the dialogue is for example devoted to a story that touches on a political conflict between Big Cocks and Little Cocks, Ugly Cunts and Beautiful Cunts, Assholes and Balls: an allegory of Sienese politics at the time that discussed government, rebellion, and civil war in a ridiculous manner yet with a serious undertone.40 Hadriaan Beverland was born in the Dutch Republic. He developed his humanist erudition as well as his obsession with sex at the universities of Franeker, Leiden, Utrecht, and Oxford. In 1679 he published his De Peccato Originali in which he defined sexual lust as the original sin. He argued that Adam and Eve had had sexual relations in the Garden of Eden and that due to the Fall, human nature became dominated by sexual lust. In De Stolatae Virginitatis Iure, also published in 1679, he concentrated on the lust of women, advising his male readers on how to deal with the sexual urges of their daughters, wives, and mistresses. Both of these works were only previews of the larger thesis he was completing at the time: in his three-​volume ‘De Prostibulis Veterum’ he planned to discuss his sexual argument in much greater detail.41 The vast differences between these men are immediately apparent. First, their obscene writings were not printed years or decades but rather centuries apart: Beccadelli’s Hermaphroditus was printed in 1425, Vignali’s La Cazzaria was published in 1531 (after first circulating in manuscript), and the first and second editions of Beverland’s De Peccato came out in 1679. Thus, we can hardly compare the contexts of creation and the intellectual settings of the scholarship of these three men. When composing the Hermaphroditus, Beccadelli was a student of law and the classics in different Italian cities and his obscene

40

41

See Antonio Vignali, La Cazzaria (Venice, 1531); Ian F. Moulton, ‘Introduction. The Greatest Tangle of Pricks There Ever Was: Knowledge, Sex, and Power in Renaissance Italy’, in Antonio Vignali, La Cazzaria, ed. and transl. Ian F. Moulton, La Cazzaria: the book of the prick (New York, 2003) 1–​70; Findlen, ‘Humanism’, 86–​94. See Hadriaan Beverland, De Peccato Originali (Leiden, 1679); idem, De Stolatae Virginitatis Iure (Leiden, 1679); idem, ‘De Prostibulis Veterum’, Library of the University of Leiden, bpl 204; Hollewand, Banishment, 20–​42, 228–​40.

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poems can often be directly connected to his life at the time: he praised his friends, attacked his enemies, and, more generally, his familiarity with the different courts and academic life in Siena, Florence, and Bologna inspired him. And while the work is abundant with classical references, one can also discern clear traces of the influence of contemporary, comic-​realistic Italian poetry in his lines.42 A different Italian context provoked Vignali to write his obscene and political dialogue in the 1520s: it was written for the learned men of his academy. As Moulton put it on the first page of his English translation, La Cazzaria was a ‘product of a hyper-​intellectual, religiously sceptical, intensely masculine community’.43 In addition, the text is characterized by its connection to politics: it reflects on conflicts in Sienese politics and sketches the political instability at the time.44 Also Beverland’s De Peccato can be directly connected to his academic circle, yet the wider context of his work was, again, very different. Still a student at the University of Leiden at the time, the text is characterized by traditional sources, the classics and the Bible, but it also reflected on the contemporary scholarly and social setting. The intellectual context of the Dutch Republic was exceptional, as is also argued by Floris Verhaart’s contribution to this volume, and, as I have argued elsewhere, it inspired the study of the sexual, due to the relative freedom of publishing, the toleration of divergent ideas, and the advances in anatomical scholarship in the small state.45 The number of Dutch scholars choosing a sexual subject is conspicuous, from Reinier de Graaf (1641–​1673), who published detailed studies of the male and female genitalia, to Bernard Mandeville (1670–​1733), who voiced his radical ideas on prostitution in philosophical treatises.46 In addition to the scholarly setting, the Dutch landscape was defined by urban societies that were, in turn, characterized by sexual freedom. Young men and women often engaged in premarital sex, pornographic novels became bestsellers, and prostitution was widespread, 42 43 44 45 46

Parker, ‘Introduction’, in Beccadelli, The Hermaphrodite, ed. and trans. Parker, xxii–​xxviii. Moulton, ‘Introduction’, Vignali, La Cazzaria, ed. and trans. Moulton, 1. Ibid., 6–​12; Findlen, ‘Humanism’, 91–​2. See Karen E. Hollewand, ‘Eggs, Sperm, and Desire: Sex and Science in the Dutch Golden Age’, in Journal for Eighteenth-​Century Studies 42 (2019), 415–​32. For more on the sexual studies of De Graaf and Mandeville, see Reinier de Graaf, Regnier de Graaf on the Human Reproductive Organs: an Annotated Translation of ‘Tractatus de Virorum Organis Generationi Inservientibus’ (1668) and ‘De Mulierum Organis Generationi Inservientibus Tractatus Novus’ (1672), trans. Harry D. Jocelyn and Brian P. Setchell (Oxford, 1972); Bernard Mandeville’s A Modest Defence of Publick Stews: Prostitution and Its Discontents in Early Georgian England, ed. Irwin Primer (New York, 2006).

78 Hollewand especially in the second half of the seventeenth century.47 One can perceive a clear connection in Beverland’s writings to the relatively tolerant intellectual setting and the sexual liberty that characterized the Dutch Republic at this time. A second significant difference between the writings of Beccadelli, Beverland, and Vignali was the type of work they published, and the genre they chose to express their views. One does not have to read beyond the first five pages of their texts or to discuss their styles in detail to note the dissimilarities. Vignali composed a Platonic dialogue in Italian, adopting a classical and humanist form but discussing contemporary figures and settings. Beverland published a scholarly treatise, written in difficult Latin and dominated by references to classical literature and the Bible, and presented his reader with a firm argument on sexual lust, original sin, and human nature. Beccadelli’s Hermaphroditus consists of seventy poems, written in Latin, that vary greatly in content and style: they are anecdotal, praise his friends, describe certain sexual acts, or consist of an epigraph. 4

The Dominance of Lust

Despite the significant differences between Beccadelli, Vignali, and Beverland and their publications, a meaningful comparison can be drawn between them and their writings: not only were these learned men experts in classical literature, but it is also the case that the three of them decided to apply their knowledge of ancient texts in works that were not primarily focused on the Greek and Roman past. Examining their use of the classics in relation to their singular focus on all things obscene, it becomes clear that Beverland, Beccadelli, and Vignali, and their De Peccato, Hermaphroditus, and La Cazzaria, are actually more similar than one might expect. The first, and possibly most conspicuous, parallel in the writings of the three scholars is their portrayal of the importance, or even the dominance, of sexual lust in human nature. They used their knowledge of the classics, and filled their works with references to ancient myths, characters, writers, and texts, to demonstrate that sexual urges guided human behaviour in the past and the present. Regardless of the denial or rejection of this truth by Christian churches, secular leaders, or humanist scholars, sex ruled all. This insistence on 47

For more on these topics, see Heijden, Huwelijk; Pol, Het Amsterdams Hoerdom; Herman Roodenburg, Onder Censuur: Kerkelijke Tucht in De Gereformeerde Gemeente Van Amsterdam, 1578–​1700 (Hilversum, 1990), 105–​24, 230–​320.

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the overpowering influence of sexual feelings and the aim to expose the truth about the universal sexual nature of all persons are also common features of early modern pornographic writings. Yet the works of Beccadelli, Beverland, and Vignali stand out due to their learned point of view, their humanist character, and the continuous connection that exists in their texts between the classical past and the early modern present. Pointing out both well-​known and obscure sexual connotations in the Bible as well as classical literature, Beverland concentrated on human history in general, and the Greek and Roman past in particular, so as to display the universal power of sexual lust: ‘Nothing is therefore more ordinary among Greek and Latin authors, classical and vulgar, old and more recent, so that the rhetoricians of a later age –​in fact even of modern times –​do not disdain these statements in the highest tribunal’.48 From the naked depictions of emperors to the obscene works of poets, Beverland described the many sexual aspects of ancient and early Christian culture, concentrating on the obscene passages that his more responsible colleagues austerely tried to avoid. He stated in the dedication of his work on the lust of women that ‘no negligence of mine can any longer suffer the further belittling of a benefit, which tender years, so prone to obedience, have hidden from publication…’.49 Yet his approach to (ancient) sexuality also set him apart from the relatively small group of humanists who did not expurgate their editions of the classics. Beverland’s studies of sex and the obscene were bold, unapologetic, and developed in great detail: he did not distance himself from his subject matter but aimed to describe sex in all its shapes and forms. Societies, whether ancient or contemporary, pagan or Christian, should come to terms with the inevitable and dominant presence of sexual lust in human nature, he argued: ‘Since the real progeny of God and His true offspring could not remain chaste, then how could we miserable little people, conceived by the incentive of the flesh and stung by its intricate prickle, avoid so many Scyllas and Charybdes.’50 At the start of La Cazzaria, Arsiccio explained to his friend Sodo why he should start studying sex, since: 48

Hadriaan Beverland, De Peccato Originali (Leiden, 1679), 61: ‘Ita nihil tralatitius apud auctores Graecos & Latinos, classicos ac proletarios, veteres & recentiores, ita ut posterioris aevi dicta, etiamnum in sublimi tribunali non respuant Declamatores.’ 49 Hadriaan Beverland, De Stolatae Virginitate Iure (Leiden, 1679 [1680]), Dedication to Ulrik Huber: ‘tandem beneficium, quod propalare dissimulat ad obedientiam prona teneritudo, diutius detrectare negligentia non passa fuit…’. 50 Beverland, De Peccato, 53–​4: ‘Cum vera Dei progenies, sobolesque sincera non potuerit se castam servare, qui miselli nos homunciones, stimulo carnis concepti, & nodoso aculeo pisti, possimus tot Scyllas atque Carybdes effugere.’

80 Hollewand besides law, you also profess knowledge of literature in the vernacular and in Latin, as well as philosophy –​which is nothing other than the knowledge of natural things. Since the cock and cunt are both natural things, and fucking is the most natural thing in the world and necessary to our existence, it seems to me a great shame that you are ignorant of these things, especially since common, stupid people believe that students ought to know everything –​no matter how trivial –​whether it applies to their profession or not.51 Like Beverland, Vignali emphasized that sex was an unavoidable and natural affair, an integral part of every society, something that should not be dismissed as sinful and dishonourable but should be openly discussed. ‘It may be shameful and disgraceful to start talking of indecent things like fucking and buggery and to fill your mouth with cocks, cunts, assholes, and such, but it still does not please me that if such things come up you don’t know how to discuss them.’ Arsiccio argued that ‘no matter how ugly and vulgar a thing is, it is more vulgar and ugly not to be knowledgeable about it.’52 Thus the main character of the book intended to devote all his studies to the sexual act in the future, since any scholar that wanted to understand the natural world should start by looking at the sexual body, reproduction, and carnal pleasure. In his argument on the importance of experience and observation in scholarship, turning against the power of age-​old academic traditions and received opinions, Vignali similarly turned against the expurgation of the classics. He observed that the sexual act was not present ‘in the works of any ancient or modern authority, but nonetheless the cock, the cunt, and the asshole are things that are handled and used every day. It does not seem credible that anyone should be so foolish not to understand this for himself.’53 He even suggested that students should learn all about sex during their education, since learned men of the elite needed to be ready to ‘talk now of law, now of love, now of philosophy, now of buggery, now of fucking …’.54 Beccadelli’s work likewise argued that the truth should be exposed. In his Hermaphroditus he mixed allusions to and citations from classical sources with many contemporary references, not only to entertain his audience but also to make a point. He exposed the sexual foundation of classical scholarship and emphasized the inherent tension that plagued the humanist enterprise: the 51 Vignali, La Cazzaria, trans. Moulton, 75–​6. 52 Ibid., 75. 53 Ibid., 82. 54 Ibid., 81.

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adoration of a pagan culture by Christian scholars, who risked their own morality and religion by studying the words and ideas of irreligious Greek and Roman authors. Beccadelli denounced contemporaries who ignored sex in their studies of the ancients. Addressing a friend, Oddo, who denounced his poems due to their obscenity, one of his verses stated: ‘What was fitting for the Marcuses, the Maruses, the Pedones, in short everyone, do you think is shameful for me? Let me make my mistakes in the company of these great poets and you believe what you like with the crown, Oddo.’55 Beccadelli did not excuse his subject but invited readers to learn more about sex, using classical literature as a guide. This is part of the dedication of his book, the first verse of the Hermaphroditus: I follow the example of the learned poets of old, who, it is clear, composed trifles and, it is evident, lived modest lives, even if their pages were full of obscene jokes. The lazy crowd fails to notice this, who have no care to look to the ancients but whose only care has been given to their belly. Their ignorance will pick at my trifles too: So be it –​the learned will not reproach me. You read them, Cosimo, and don’t give a toss for the rude rabble. Follow with me the men who live forever.56 When discussing the prominence of sexual lust in the classics, human nature, and their contemporary societies, Vignali, Beverland, and Beccadelli blamed the clergy in particular for attempting to hide, ignore, or reject this truth. In response to an attack on his Hermaphroditus by Franciscan and fellow-​scholar Antonio da Rho (c.1398-​c.1453), Beccadelli retorted by pointing out his opponent’s hypocrisy: ‘to return to you, most sacred priest, as rumour has it [you are] the one who recently circulated those foul and obscene verses against me, then how is it, I ask you, that you did not abstain from dirty words, you who are not a youth but of mature years, not a layman but a monk, not motivated by a spirit of playfulness but by malevolence?’57 In his La Cazzaria Vignali disclosed his anti-​clericalism on various occasions. Arsiccio hated clergymen with a 55 Beccadelli, The Hermaphrodite, i.xx, trans. Parker, 27. See also Findlen, ‘Humanism’, 83–​7; Enenkel, ‘Neo-​Latin erotic and pornographic literature’, 491–​501. 56 Beccadelli, The Hermaphrodite, i.i,trans. Parker, 7. 57 Beccadelli to Antonio da Rho, 1431, in Beccadelli, The Hermaphrodite, trans. Parker, 161.

82 Hollewand passion, since they pretended to be ignorant about sex. For example, he voiced his ideas on the dismissive stance of the Catholic Church when discussing sodomy, which was considered a sin of violence against God. Arsiccio denounced the clergy as hypocrites: in their all-​male and supposedly chaste communities they knew all about sodomy, he argued, yet: They want us to give up buggery, so that it may belong entirely to them, and make us take up again the cunts they have rejected and disdained. And they go on arguing that it is better to fuck your mother, your sisters, your nieces, and daughters –​and fuck them in the most vicious way possible –​as long as it is a cunt you are fucking and you are not buggering anyone. And they justify this by saying it is because when you fuck someone up the ass you waste human seed, and thus human generation may be diminished … Stupid cows! They can’t see that they themselves contradict it completely.58 Beverland blamed the clergy of the Dutch Reformed Church for founding and maintaining the deceitful attitude to sex that characterized his contemporary Dutch society. Even those clergymen who considered themselves part of the ‘community of the elect’, the most conservative members of the Dutch Reformed Church, were corrupted by lust, Beverland argued.59 ‘Even now traces of the corrupt flesh and of the first fall burgeon in the elect. For they are made of flesh and have members made of flesh and are to that extent also vexed by their titillation.’60 He condemned the orthodox clergymen, whom he, like Beccadelli and Vignali, often referred to as

58 Vignali, La Cazzaria, trans. Moulton, 89. 59 Since the foundation of the Dutch Reformed Church in the second half of the sixteenth century debates about the nature of the church had divided the Dutch clergy, with some defining the Reformed Church as the ‘community of the elect’ and adopting strict doctrine and rigorous discipline, while others favored a more liberal and inclusive church. When Beverland published his De Peccato in 1679, the debate had flared up once again due to heated discussions between supporters and critics of the influential orthodox theologian Gisbertus Voetius (1589–​1676). See Andrew C. Fix, Fallen angels: Balthasar Bekker, spirit belief, and confessionalism in the seventeenth century Dutch Republic (Dordrecht, 1999), 16–​22; W.J. van Asselt, Voetius (Kampen, 2007), 64–​9; Cornelis Graafland, Van Calvijn tot Barth: oorsprong en ontwikkeling van de leer der verkiezing in het gereformeerd protestantisme (The Hague, 1987). 60 Beverland, De Peccato, 14–​15: ‘Scintillae carnis corruptae primaeque labis pullulant etiamnum in electis. sunt enim & σαρκικοὶ, habentque membra carnea adeoque eorum titilatione etiamque vexantur.’

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hypocrites, for continuing to maintain that living a chaste life was actually possible.61 5

For the Learned

The second parallel between Beverland, Beccadelli, and Vignali can be found in the immediate context of the publication of their writings. Despite their emphasis on the universal power of sexual lust, they wrote their books for a particular audience: their own learned communities. While most pornographic publications in the early modern period could be characterized as popular and commercial, the works of Beccadelli, Vignali, and Beverland were written by and for the learned. As Paula Findlen described it: only men of wit, honour, and social prominence were thought capable of flirting with this type of dangerous subject without contributing to vice.62 Beccadelli’s disregard for the opinions of the common people is exhibited in the very first verse of his Hermaphroditus (quoted above). He dismissed the ‘lazy crowd’, who were ignorant and had no care for the ancients, and stated that he was certain that the learned would not reproach him.63 In a letter to his friend Poggio Bracciolini (1380–​1459), he discussed his audience in a similar fashion: [My book] has finally come into the hands of men of the greatest learning, who I am sure will by no means condemn its playfulness, especially since they know that many learned, serious, and venerable men, both Greek and our own Latins, have written such things … there is a tradition that so many orators and men of the highest rank have enjoyed and practiced the cultivation of this type of literature that I swear I don't know who hasn't enjoyed and practiced it!64 Likewise, Vignali wrote La Cazzaria for private circulation in his own learned circle, describing events and characters that his close colleagues, members of the Accademia degli Intronati, should recognize immediately. La Cazzaria might have been obscene, crude, and ridiculous, but it was also sophisticated, witty, and intellectual. He commented satirically on contemporary politics, 61 For more on Beverland’s relationship with (Dutch) theologians, see Hollewand, Banishment, 68–​79. 62 Findlen, ‘Humanism’, 90. 63 Beccadelli, The Hermaphrodite, i.i, trans. Parker, 7. 64 Beccadelli to Poggio, April 1426, in The Hermaphrodite, trans. Parker, 114–​25.

84 Hollewand turning against political authority and corruption, and painted a particular portrait of humanist culture, with classical scholars, obsessed with sexual lust, filling their libraries with sexual writings. Vignali had actually never intended for the work to be published and his text was characterized by inside jokes, nicknames, and sexual connotations that could only be understood by his learned friends.65 Beverland also published his studies to present his views on sex and sin to the educated men of the elite who could engage in a truthful discussion about sexuality. For possible other readers of his work, he obscured his argument under a thick blanket of complex Latin and vague references. As he stated himself: ‘I have decided to provide neither light for the blind, nor speech to the deaf or wisdom to the stupid. It only serves my purpose to please rare and civilised ears and be approved by them..’66 Uncultured readers of his work might object to his views on sex, sin, and liberty but even if they would stir up a fuss, he was determined not to discuss his ideas with these inferior men: ‘And since a drunk man tends to recover through sleep, then why would not I endure this rage and insane madness with a tranquil mind, since I hardly tend to be hurt by speech full of abuse and I listen to the barking of little puppies untroubled.’67 Despite their firm statements on their intended audience, the obscene writings of Vignali, Beverland, and Beccadelli quickly became infamous. A couple of years after its publication Beccadelli’s work was publicly burned, Vignali’s dialogue was well-​known in and outside Italy by the late sixteenth century, and when Beverland was on trial, a Dutch summary of his work was printed.68 The authors at first seem, or at least feign to be, surprised by the notoriety of their writings and quickly point out, first of all, that they did not mean for this to happen: they did not write for the unlearned and uneducated. Secondly, they stressed that they did not write or print their works for financial gain. In a letter to his friend and fellow humanist Jacobus Gronovius, written just after the publication of his De Peccato but before his arrest, Beverland stated that: ‘The young printers wish this (book) to be forbidden, so that their profit 65 Frantz, Festum voluptatis, 10, 42; Vignali, La Cazzaria, trans. Moulton, 2, 7. 66 Beverland, De Peccato, 155: ‘verum nec lumen coeco, nec sermonem surdo nec sapientiam bruto propinare constitui. Me tantum raris & quidem Atticis juvat auribus placere & probari.’ 67 Ibid., 162: ‘Et cum homo ebriatus somno sanari soleat, nonne rabiem & phreniticum furorem aequo tollerem animo, cum maledicta oratione vulnerari vix soleam, latratusque minutorum catellorum securus exaudiam.’ 68 Parker, ‘Introduction’, in Beccadelli, The Hermaphrodite, ed. and trans. Parker, x–​xvi; Moulton, ‘Introduction’, Vignali, La Cazzaria, ed. and trans. Moulton, 7–​8; Hollewand, Banishment, 41.

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might increase. “It is praised, if first it wrecks a ship.” I hate people who are only focused on profit.’69 After his arrest, he became even more frustrated and stated in a letter to his friend Jacob de Goyer (1651−1689), that ‘the stupid herd believes in investing their strength not in their erudition but in their wealth. I resent how often I see that the learned beg for money and pieces of silver like beasts … I do not doubt that if all honourable men became acquainted with supporting themselves with bread and polenta instead of the insult of wealth (like Dodwell in England), adorned with the scanty persistence of frugality, they would actually be able to debate with the gods themselves.’70 Also Vignali expressed a clear distaste for scholarship driven by gain, stating in his La Cazzaria: ‘If anyone devotes himself to study because he needs to earn his bread, you know he will never achieve anything worthwhile because studying should be a delight and not a necessity…’.71 6

Exile and Apology

A third similarity between the three men concerns the aftermath of the publication of their studies: their obscene writings got them into great trouble. This is true for Beccadelli and Beverland, yet harder to determine with certainty in the case of Vignali. Not long after the publication of his book Vignali left Siena. Some scholars have argued that his departure was primarily connected to the changing political situation in the city, which was occupied by the Imperial troops of Charles v (1500–​1558) in the mid-​1530s.72 Other historians 69

Hadriaan Beverland to Jacobus Gronovius, 1 June 1679, Epistolae Tullianae Letter 3: ‘Optant τυπογράφων παιδες, ut eorum glisceret lucrum, illum interdictum iri. Si quid naufragio dedit, probatur. Syrtis, si quid naufragio dedit, probatur. Odi lucripetas.’ The quotation in this letter was adopted from Petronius’ Satyricon (93). The Epistolae Tullianae collection consists of letters sent by Beverland to different friends between 1679 and 1685. It is preserved in the Library of the University of Leiden, bpl 204. Henceforth this collection will be referred to as et. For more on the et collection, see R. de Smet, ‘Epistolae Tullianae. Brieven van Hadriaan Beverland’, in De Gulden Passer, 64, 65, 68 (1986, 1987, 1990), 83–​124, 70–​101, 139–​67. 70 Hadriaan Beverland to Jacob de Goyer, November 1679, et 21: ‘Quae assentatio effecit ut bruta illa Armenta putaverint virtutem non in eruditione sed in divitiis consistere. Indignor quoties video doctissimos a bestiis το χρυσιον και τ’ἀργύριον mendicare … Certe si didicissent viri boni pane et polenta contra fortunae insultus se tueri (ut in Anglia Dodwellus) iam patientia parcae frugalitatis ornati, ipsis etiam diis controversiam facere potuissent.’ 71 Vignali, La Cazzaria, trans. Moulton, 118–​19. 72 Moulton, ‘Introduction’, Vignali, La Cazzaria, ed. and trans. Moulton, 19.

86 Hollewand have concluded that Vignali did not flee for political reasons but went into exile due to the notoriety of his La Cazzaria.73 It is unclear if the publication of his obscene dialogue determined his life and career. All that we know is that Vignali worked as a secretary at different courts in Italy, Spain, France, and Germany until his death and that the small number of writings he published after his La Cazzaria were quite conventional.74 In the case of Beccadelli it is clear that he soon started to regret printing his poems. In a letter to Archbishop Bartholomeo della Capra (1365–​1433), written only a year after the publication of the poems, he confessed that it was ‘an indecent book to be sure’ but hurried to add that it contained ‘the sort of indecency in which the greatest orators, the most holy poets, the most serious philosophers, men of self-​restraint, and indeed Christians have indulged themselves.’75 After initial success and praise, his work was increasingly attacked for its sexual nature: by the late 1420s the book itself and effigies of Beccadelli were burned in various Italian cities and he was berated by friends and foes. He responded to the commotion by defending himself in two different ways. First of all, he turned to the ancients, as we have already seen. He argued that like Martial, Virgil, Catullus, and Ovid he should not be judged for his poetry: just as in their cases, his life and his verses were separate entities. In the letter to Della Capra, he stated, quoting Catullus, that: ‘indeed, “It is right that a proper poet be pure himself. But there is no need for his verses to be.”, something that with your learning you must know full well.’76 Also in a letter to Antonio da Rho, he touched on the topic: ‘you in your erudition know full well that poetic license allows us to play around with jokes and witticisms…’.77 Secondly, Beccadelli dismissed his book as a ‘work of youth’, composed when he ‘was still of a tender age, when one has greater license to joke and sin’.78 In the end, after it had been denounced by many and he was threatened with excommunication, Beccadelli surrendered. In 1425, looking for an influential patron, he had dedicated the Hermaphroditus to his powerful contemporary Cosimo de’ Medici (1389–​1464), praising Cosimo’s erudition and stating that he had composed the work as ‘something for you to read to a guest after lunch, Cosimo’.79 Ten years 73 74 75

Findlen, ‘Humanism’, 87. Moulton, ‘Introduction’, Vignali, La Cazzaria, ed. and trans. Moulton, 58–​9. Beccadelli to Bartholomea della Capra, no date, in Beccadelli, The Hermaphrodite, trans. Parker, 139–​42. 76 Ibid. The quotation comes from Catullus, Poem 16. 77 Beccadelli to Antonio da Rho, 1431, in The Hermaphrodite, transl. Parker, 155–​63. 78 Beccadelli to Antonio da Rho, 1431, and to Bartholomea della Capra, no date, in The Hermaphrodite, trans. Parker, 139–​42, 155–​63. 79 Beccadelli, The Hermaphrodite, i.xliii, transl. Parker, 57.

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after the publication of his obscene book, he printed a recantation of the original dedication, in which he dismissed his work and asked for Cosimo’s pardon. ‘I am now ashamed that I taught various filthy acts and impious ways of Venus, which nature shuns’, he stated: ‘Forgive me. Alas, I myself now recognize my offense’.80 In the aforementioned letter to Da Rho, he had already admitted that: ‘No one dislikes the Hermaphroditus more than I do, and the author is the first to be bored by and regret both the publication and the reading of it –​not because I did anything wrong by playing around at that age but because the age I am now instantly revolts against any indecency and sensuality and calls for serious habits and a serious manner of expression.’81 After his revocation, with the help of influential friends, Beccadelli secured places at different courts.82 Almost immediately after their publication, Beverland’s studies on sex and sin were criticised by religious and secular authorities in the Dutch Republic. Like Beccadelli, Beverland pointed to his young age when he got in trouble. When he first appeared before the Academic Court in Leiden, on 15 November 1679, he asked the judges to treat him in a fatherly manner and to refrain from punishing him too harshly. He attempted to use his alleged youth to his advantage: the documents of his trial show that he lied about his age (he claimed to be 27 years old while at the time he was 29) in order to be judged more favourably.83 As he explained to a friend: ‘The only option left for me is the innocence of youth. If I cannot incite pity with this, the prospects are bad.’84 It did not make a difference: after a short trial the Academic Court of the University of Leiden censored his publications and banished him from the provinces of Holland and Zeeland. At the time Beverland did not seem too bothered by his harsh punishment and shattered reputation, as he wrote on the day of his release that he was mostly ‘glad about the fame of my name now at last.’85 But after almost two decades in England, he decided to print a large apology. 80 81 82 83

84 85

Beccadelli, Recantation in The Hermaphrodite, trans. Parker, 125–​7. Beccadelli to Antonio da Rho, 1431, in The Hermaphrodite, trans. Parker, 155–​63. Parker, ‘Introduction’, in Beccadelli, The Hermaphrodite, ed. and trans. Parker, xvi-​xxii; Findlen, ‘Humanism’, 83–​7. This is stated in the documents concerning Beverland’s trial by the Academische Vierschaar, which are kept in the National Archive of the Netherlands (Vierschaar der Universiteit te Leiden, Crimineele klachtboeken. 1631–​1810, part 13, Litt. E, 1647–​1695, fols 115r-​116v). Beverland to Bernard van Deynse, November 1679, et 23: ‘Sola haec nostra aetas innocentiae esset patrocinium. Quod si haec mea innocentia eorum expugnare non possit misericordiam, submittam eorum vigori.’ Beverland to Dionysius Rechstood, December 1679, et 33: ‘Gaudeo nunc demum celebritate nominis.’ The sentence is an adaptation of a passage from: Pliny the Younger, Epistulae, ix.i.23.

88 Hollewand In the preface of his De Fornicatione Cavenda Admonitio, printed in different editions in London in 1697 and 1698, Beverland confessed that: ‘When after sixteen years a German showed me my little book On Original Sin and read it out to me, I could hardly express my shock that I had once presumed to put such calamities to paper… I abhor the obscenity of my style and the even more obscene contents.’86 In the work Beverland advised his readers to desist the pleasures of sex: ‘those who heed my words may proceed, not perhaps to entirely put aside the vices of nature, but at least to not cultivate them any further.’87 However, due to the detailed descriptions of sexual acts and the satirical style of the work, he did not manage to convince his contemporaries that he had truly had a change of heart. He spent the rest of his life in exile in England and died, poor and paranoid, in London in 1716.88 7

Conclusion

The Hermaphroditus, La Cazzaria, and De Peccato represent three particular early modern genres and were published in different centuries. Yet the similarities between the obscene writings of Beccadelli, Vignali, and Beverland are conspicuous. First and foremost, the authors focused on the dominance of lust and aimed to expose the truth about sex: no one could avoid or deny the universal power of sexual desire. Secondly, their texts were written for a specific learned audience, their own academic circle of humanist scholars, and were therefore characterized by many references to classical works as well as inside jokes and other (in)direct links to their contemporary intellectual, social, and political contexts. Thirdly, all three writers got into trouble and were, in the end, driven into exile or felt obligated to recant or apologize for the sexual works they had published as young men. Together with the texts of other humanist scholars, such as Giovanni Della Casa, Antonio Rocco, Niccolò Franco, Ferrante Pallavicino, who likewise chose sex as their primary subject, the notorious writings of Beverland, Beccadelli, and Vignali were exceptions to the rule. In line with secular laws and religious regulations, which restricted all sexual activity to marriage and procreation, defined sex as sinful and criminal, and censured obscene publications, the 86

Hadriaan Beverland, De Fornicatione Cavenda Admonitio (London, 1698), Dedication, sig. A3v, trans. R. de Smet, ‘Hadrian Beverland’s De Fornicatione Cavenda: an adhortatio ad pudicitiam or an ad impudicitiam?’, in Éros et Priapus, eds. Smet and Ford, 113–​39, at 121. 87 Beverland, De Fornicatione, Dedication, sig. A3v. 88 Hollewand, Banishment, 20–​42, 228–​40.

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majority of humanist scholars made an effort to avoid the sexual side of the classics in their editions, commentaries, and translations. In their expurgation of classical literature, which was based on a genuine dislike of explicit writings, the aim to Christianize a pagan text, and/​or the wish to safeguard the reputation of an ancient idol, they rejected the sexual interpretation of a certain work, altered words or sentences to make its obscenity disappear, or ignored sexual terms and passages altogether. One of the aims of this paper has been to underline that attitudes to sexual passages in classical literature varied greatly: between full and ruthless expurgation and a very specific focus on all things sexual there existed a broad spectrum of approaches. There is much more to say about the early modern expurgation of the classics with regards to obscene texts; for example, it would be worthwhile to study and compare in which particular learned and historical contexts texts were either heavily expurgated or hardly touched at all or to look at the varieties in expurgation according to genre. The life and works of Vignali, Beccadelli, and Beverland, and also other humanists who chose to focus on sex in the classics, deserve more attention. It would be interesting to study the tension in their writings between the goal to entertain and ridicule on the one hand and the aim to produce serious critiques and commentaries on their contemporary societies on the other. What sexual acts featured predominantly in their writings, did they print their texts to educate, amuse, or berate their humanist colleagues, and what was the connection, in style, content, and criticism, between these humanist works and their more literary, pornographic, and popular counterparts? What this paper has attempted to show is that by studying the works of expurgators like Scaliger, Desprez, and Faber on the one hand and the obscene writings of Beccadelli, Vignali, and Beverland on the other, we not only gain a better understanding of their contributions to humanist scholarship, but we also get a better sense of normative approaches to sex in the field of classical learning and in the early modern world as a whole.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reader from Brill for their notes and to pay tribute to the participants of the Beyond Ancients and Moderns conference that took place at the University of Oxford in 2019, thanking the organizers Dmitri Levitin and Ian Maclean in particular for their comments.

pa rt 2 The Arts

∵

­c hapter 3

‘Three Days and Three Nights in the Heart of the Earth’

Chronological Debates over the Period of Christ’s Rest in the Tomb in the Fifteenth and Seventeenth Centuries C. Philipp E. Nothaft 1

‘On the Third Day He Rose Again’

‘Synecdoche’, wrote Quintilian during the earliest days of Christianity, ‘has the power to vary the discourse, enabling the hearer to understand many things from one, the whole from the part, the genus from the species, the consequences from the antecedents, and vice versa’.1 How knowledge of this rhetorical device could serve as an aid in biblical exegesis was demonstrated three centuries later by Augustine of Hippo, who inter alia applied it to the prophecy Christ pronounces in Matthew 12:40: ‘For as Jonas was three days and three nights in the whale’s belly [cf. Jonah 1:17]; so shall the Son of man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth’ (kjv). The problem was as follows: from the Gospel accounts of Jesus’s last days, it was commonly understood that his crucifixion took place on the sixth day of the week, the day before Sabbath (Matthew 27:62; Mark 15:42; Luke 23:54; John 19:14, 31, 42). He was buried as the evening approached (Matthew 27:57; Mark 15:42) and lay in the tomb throughout the following Sabbath, which lasted from sunset to sunset. The tomb was found empty by dawn the next day, which was the first day of the week (Matthew 28:1; Mark 16:2, 9; Luke 24:1; John 20:1, 19). Even if one assumed that the resurrection happened at the very end of the preceding night, this time frame encompassed no more than two full periods of night-​time (Friday/​Saturday and Saturday/​Sunday) and one full period of daylight (Saturday morning to evening). How, then, could it be claimed that Christ fulfilled his own prediction of remaining dead for three days and three nights?

1 Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, vol. 3, Books 6–​8, trans. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, Mass., 2002), 435 (8.6.19).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004462335_005

94 Nothaft As Augustine argued repeatedly in his writings,2 the answer could be found by reading Matthew 12:40 per synecdochen: Jesus may have only lain in the grave during the final hours of Friday, but this Friday taken as a whole included both the afternoon of the crucifixion and the preceding night. Similarly, the Sunday of the resurrection encompassed a full day and night, even as Christ had already risen by dawn. The three days and three nights mentioned by Christ himself were accordingly meant to represent, by way of reverse synecdoche (totum pro parte as opposed to pars pro toto), the end of the first 24-​hour day, the complete second day, and the beginning of the third one. Whereas a naive reading of Matthew 12:40 implied that he was going to remain dead for 72 hours, the application of synecdoche showed that Jesus’s own words were in complete harmony with the maximum of 36 hours one could infer from the accounts the evangelists had given for his burial and resurrection. In working their way around Matthew 12:40, later Christian exegetes were guided not just by Augustine and the Gospels, but also by the established liturgy of their Church, whose celebration of Good Friday and Easter Sunday left only one complete day and at most two nights between Christ’s death and resurrection. Their stance was determined, moreover, by the combined authority of the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, and the Athanasian Creed, which all proclaimed that Christ rose again ‘on the third day’, in this following the letter of numerous New Testament passages (Matthew 17:22, 20:19; Mark 9:30; Luke 9:22, 24:7, 21; 1 Corinthians 15:4; Acts 10:40, 13:30). Had he lain in the tomb for a 72-​hour period, his resurrection would have followed on the evening of Monday, the fourth day from his death, making nonsense of a whole web of Christian scripture, dogma, and tradition. As we shall see in what follows, this web proved insufficient to protect the triduum of Christ’s sepulchral rest from the scrutiny of two maverick exegetes, who tackled this question 160 years apart and in different confessional contexts.

2 Augustine of Hippo, De doctrina Christiana 3.35(.50), ed. Klaus-​Detlef Daur and Josef Martin (Turnhout, 1962), 110–​11; idem, De consensu evangelistarum 3.66, ed. Franz Weihrich (Vienna, 1904), 356–​8; idem, De trinitate 4.6(.10), ed. William John Mountain and François Glorie (Turnhout, 1968), 173–​4; idem, Epistulae 102.34, ed. Klaus-​Detlef Daur (Turnhout, 2009), 30. See also Jerome of Stridon, Commentarii in Iona 2.1, in Commentarii in prophetas minores, ed. Marcus Adriaen (Turnhout, 1969), 393–​4.

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95

An Offensive Apology

It is perhaps no accident that the first scholar to challenge the scholarly consensus on the triduum was not a theological chair-​holder, but a Dutch astrologer by the name of Paul of Middelburg (1446–​1534), who earned his keep in the services of the dukes of Urbino.3 What Paul brought to the debate besides his widely praised mathematical abilities was a solid knowledge of Greek and Hebrew as well as a truculent temper worthy of his famous godson, the great Julius Caesar Scaliger.4 Paul’s original role at the Urbinese court of Federico da Montefeltro had been that of personal physician, although he evidently also provided astrological services and was to dedicate some of his published prognostications to Federico and his son and successor Guidobaldo. Between 1483 and 1486, Paul was engaged in a pamphlet war against Giovanni Barbo, protonotary apostolic at the papal curia, after the latter had publicly disparaged one of his annual predictions.5 Around the same time, Paul fell out with his senior colleague Jakob of Speyer, who had been Montefeltro’s court astrologer since the 1460s and who apparently sided with Barbo in the aforementioned dispute.6 Paul’s talent for making enemies followed him around when he paid a visit to the Low Countries and his alma mater, the University of Leuven, during 3 For biographical information on Paul of Middelburg, see Bernardino Baldi, Le vite de’ matematici, ed. Elio Nenci (Milan, 1998), 355–​95; Demetrio Marzi, La questione della riforma del calendario nel Quinto Concilio Lateranense (1512–​1517) (Florence, 1896), 12–​16, 39–​53, 233–​50; Dirk Jan Struik, ‘Paulus van Middelburg (1445–​1533)’, Mededeelingen van het Nederlandsch Historisch Instituut te Rome 5 (1925), 79–​118; Patrizia Castelli, ‘Gli astri e i Montefeltri’, Res Publica Litterarum 6 (1983), 75–​89, at 79–​83; C. G. van Leijenhorst, ‘Paul of Middelburg’, in Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, 3 vols. (Toronto, 1987), 3:57–​8; Fernand Hallyn, ‘Paul de Middelbourg, astrologue et astronome’, in Esculape et Dionysos: mélanges en l’honneur de Jean Céard, ed. Jean Dupèbe, Franco Giacone, Emmanuel Naya, and Anne-​Pascale Pouey-​Mounou (Geneva, 2008), 367–​74. 4 Julius Caesar Scaliger, Exotericarum Exercitationum Lib. XV De Subtilitate ad Hieronymum Cardanum (Frankfurt/​Main, 1576), 807. 5 Baldi, Le vite, ed. Nenci (n. 3), 364; Stephan Heilen, ‘Paul of Middelburg’s Prognosticum for the Years 1484 to 1504’, in From Māshāʾallāh to Kepler: Theory and Practice in Medieval and Renaissance Astrology, ed. Charles Burnett and Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum (University of Wales, Trinity Saint David, 2015), 231–​78, 235–​6; Heilen, ‘Astrology at the Court of Urbino under Federico and Guidobaldo da Montefeltro’, in De Frédéric II à Rodolphe II: astrologie, divination et magie dans les cours (XIIIe–​X VIIe siècle), ed. Jean-​Patrice Boudet, Martine Ostorero, and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani (Florence, 2017), 313–​68, at 345–​7. 6 Heilen, ‘Astrology’ (n. 5), 348–​56.

96 Nothaft the summer of 1484. As far as the extant documentation allows us to discern, trouble began to brew when Paul participated in a private discussion involving several high-​ranking prelates, which addressed the date of Easter, the historical date of the Passion, and the duration of Christ’s stay inside the tomb. Whatever the precise comments Paul made at this occasion, they were interpreted as denying that Christ died on a Friday or rose from the dead on a Sunday. More than just that, Paul was taken to have asserted that the sepulchral rest had stretched over four days, from Monday to Thursday.7 One of his listeners, an elderly cleric named Adriaan de Hooffsche,8 was so incensed by what he heard that he began to voice his dismay in public, claiming that Paul’s statements were offensive to pious ears and contrary to the liturgy and ordinances of the holy Church. At the occasion of two subsequent visits to Leuven, in the summer of 1487 and early 1488, Paul became aware that rumours to this effect had also begun to spread at his former university. To make matters worse, he discovered that De Hooffsche had sent an accusatory letter to several of Paul’s former benefactors. This letter, or so Paul later claimed, gave the fraudulent impression of stating the official opinion of Leuven’s faculty of theology, making it seem as if the astrologer from Middelburg had been subjected to institutional censure.9 Paul reacted to this act of aggression with a printed Epistola apologetica addressed to the University of Leuven and its community of scholars, which was dated 27 February 1488. The tone of the letter was as eloquent as it was acidulous, as Paul made his main accuser, Adriaan de Hooffsche, the target of a plethora of colourful epithets.10 Aside from heaping scorn on his enemy and defending his own chronological stance, Paul ended his letter with a salvo of complaints directed at his native Low Countries, which he described as 7 8

9 10

All we have to rely on for these events is Paul’s own account in Paul of Middelburg, Epistola apologetica ad doctores Lovanienses (Leuven, 1488 [not before 27 Feb.]), sigs. A2r–​5v and passim. In what follows, I shall abbreviate this publication as EpApol. From Paul’s Epistola, it is learned that de Hooffsche had made his fortune as a merchant in Bruges before enrolling to study theology in his sixties. Paul also alleges that he had recently become a citizen of Middelburg. See EpApol, sigs. A2r, Dv, D5v–​6v, D7r, D8v–​Er. The man’s first name (Adrianus) and his status as priest are revealed by Thomas Basin in Contra errores et blasphemias Pauli de Middelburgo, ms Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 3658, fols. 3r, 4r, 27r–​v (praef.; bk. 1, c.1, 12). Adriaan’s full name is given as Adrianus Hoeffsche Westcapellis in a marginal annotation to the Epistola apologetica in Stuttgart, Württembergische Landesbibliothek, Inc. 4o 11150, sig. A2r. See the account in EpApol, sig. A2r–​3r, A4v–​5v. Further allusions to the content of De Hooffsche’s letter and occasional quotes from it appear ibid., sigs. Dv–​2v, D4r–​v, D6v, D8v. Connoisseurs of vituperative Latin may appreciate the following sample: agaso, asellus, asinus, bubulcus, cuculus, graculus, homuncio, lepidum caput, loripes, lues pestifera, hypocrita, noctua cristata, sycophanta.

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anti-​intellectual and lawless, a region populated by morons and craftsmen, and one ‘in which only drunkenness is celebrated as the highest virtue’.11 Among the readers who took exception to these remarks was Thomas Basin (1412–​1490), a former bishop of Lisieux who lived in exile in Utrecht. Irritated by the number and magnitude of Paul’s doctrinal errors, Basin proceeded to adorn his copy of the Epistola apologetica with a multitude of harshly critical annotations (postillae) and circulated the result among his friends.12 One of them passed Basin’s critique on to Paul of Middelburg in Urbino, who reacted by addressing to Basin a defensively worded letter, in which he accused the French prelate of misrepresenting his true position.13 Basin refused to concede any territory. Not only did he send a letter in response,14 but he subsequently expanded it into a lengthy treatise Contra errores et blasphemias Pauli de Middelburgo. His plans to have this work printed were cut short only by his death in 1490, at the age of 78.15

11

12 13 14 15

EpApol, sig. E5v: ‘Nos vero de primo gratias deo omnipotenti […] agemus […] quod in Middelburgo oriundi et glacialis oceani barbara Zelandie insula et, si fas sit dicere, vervecum in patria aut cerdonum regione nati, in qua ebrietas sola ut virtus summa laudatur, uberrime dei optimi benignitate id consecuti sumus, ut externi et itali plura nobis sponte offerendo donabunt quam concives nostri a nobis auferre et usurpare poterunt’. A handwritten copy of the Epistola apologetica complete with Basin’s postillae in the margins appears in ms Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, 300, fols. 246v–​60r. This manuscript will hereafter be cited as M. The letter is preserved in M, fols. 260r–​4v, where it is entitled Epistola magistri Pauli de Middelburgo ad archiepiscopum Cesariensem in qua malam opinionem quam habuit de scriptis suis partim submovet. Preserved as Epistola responsiva archiepiscopi Cesariensis ad epistolam precedentem in M, fols. 264v–​90r. The master copy of this work is ms Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 3658 (100 fols.), which contains annotations from Thomas Basin’s own hand. In what follows, I shall refer to this manuscript as Contra errores. For further information, see Jules Quicherat, ‘Thomas Basin, sa vie et ses écrits’, Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes 3 (1841–​1842), 313–​76, at 374–​5; idem, Histoire des règnes de Charles VII et de Louis XI par Thomas Basin, 4 vols. (Paris, 1855–​1859), 4:105–​22; Léopold Delisle, ‘Fragments inédits de l’Histoire des Louis xi par Thomas Basin, tirés d’un manuscrit de Goettingue’, Notices et extraits des manuscrits de la Bibliothèque Nationale et autres bibliothèques 34, no. 2 (1895), 89–​117, at 95; Demetrio Marzi, ‘Nuovi studi e ricerche intorno alla questione del calendario durante i secoli XV e XVI’, in Atti del congresso internazionale di scienze storiche (Roma, 1–​9 Aprile 1903), 12 vols. (Rome, 1904–​1907), 3:637–​50, at 641–​2; Stefano Caroti, ‘La critica contro l’astrologia di Nicole Oresme e la sua influenza nel Medioevo e nel Rinascimento’, Atti della Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Memorie della Classe di Scienze morali, storiche e filologiche, 8th ser., 23 (1979), 545–​685, at 653–​5; Bernard Guenée, Entre l’église et l’état: quatre vies de prélats français à la fin du Moyen Âge (Paris, 1987), 430–​34.

98 Nothaft Another frontline in Paul’s public quarrels was declared by a one-​time friend of his, the Leuven professor Peter de Rivo (c.1420–​1499), whose Opus responsivum ad Epistolam apologeticam M. Pauli de Middelburgo appeared in print in 1489.16 Following a scathing letter of response from Urbino,17 Peter added to the two treatises that made up the Opus responsivum a Tercius tractatus, printed in 1492.18 Paul not only penned a second letter of response,19 but produced a chronological treatise in 24 books, now lost. In a polemical letter he addressed to the university in 1494, Paul openly alleged that Peter had worked behind the scenes to prevent the work from circulating in Leuven.20 Paul wrote to his rival once again in 1497,21 but this was apparently not enough to provoke another response from the aging Peter, who died in 1499. While Paul of Middelburg’s bellicose nature no doubt contributed to the backlash he faced in 1487/​88 and the following years, it is not enough to explain how he first came to develop his provocative views concerning Christ’s triduum. According to the Epistola apologetica and some other writings he directed at opponents in its wake, he had first begun to inquire into the chronology of Christ’s death and resurrection after some disturbing conversations with Jews in Italy, who mocked the Christian faith for failing to satisfy its own prophecies. Paul was particularly fond of mentioning an exchange he had had with a certain rabbi, who had used Jesus’s words in Matthew 12:40 to argue that his promise of staying in the grave for three days and three nights had never come true. As this rabbi allegedly pointed out to him, writers on medicine agreed that it was necessary to wait 72 hours before a deceased person could be declared dead. From this vantage point, there was no guarantee that

16

17 18 19 20 21

Peter de Rivo, Opus responsivum ad Epistolam apologeticam M. Pauli de Middelburgo de anno, die et feria dominicae passionis (Leuven, [1489]). On Peter’s life and career, see Serena Masolini, Petrus de Rivo (ca. 1420–​1499): Portrait(s) of a Louvain Master (Ph.D thesis, ku Leuven, 2016); Matthew S. Champion, Serena Masolini, and C. Philipp E. Nothaft, Peter de Rivo on Chronology and the Calendar (Leuven, 2020), xvii–​xxv. The Opus responsivum is discussed ibid., lxvi–​lxxiv. This letter survives in M, fols. 290v–​301r. Peter de Rivo, Tercius tractatus de anno, die et feria dominicae passionis atque resurrectionis (Leuven, 1492). See Champion, Masolini, and Nothaft, Peter de Rivo on Chronology (n. 16), lxxiv–​lxxxiv. The second letter was printed as part of Paul of Middelburg, Paulina de recta Paschae celebratione et de die passionis Domini nostri Iesu Christi (Fossombrone, 1513), sigs. I5v–​K8v. This tome will hereafter be cited as Paulina. M, fols. 301r–​6r. M, fols. 306r–​8v.

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Christ had ever been dead before the sepulchre was found empty, casting serious doubt on the veracity of the resurrection story.22 Impressed by these and other arguments, Paul devoted the bulk of his Epistola apologetica to the methodical subversion of any proof a theologian might have used to confirm the orthodox position, according to which Matthew 12:40 had to be taken per synecdochen. One reason Paul was so seemingly keen on biting the exegetical bullet had to do with the known difficulties surrounding the calendrical date of Christ’s Passion. According to the standard reading of the pertinent Gospel passages, the crucifixion happened on a Friday that either coincided with or directly preceded the feast of Passover, this being 15 Nisan in the Jewish calendar. An attempt to verify this by means of calendrical or astronomical tables showed that such a combination of data was unobtainable in ad 34, even though this was by far the most widely cited year of the crucifixion (the assumption being that Jesus was born in 1 bc or ad 1 and lived to the age of 32 or 33). Reactions to this chronological problem in Paul of Middelburg’s time varied. Some authors used astronomical arguments to move the crucifixion to ad 33, realizing that this year had the Passover full moon fall on a Friday, albeit on 3 April rather than 25 March. Others wished to stick closer to ecclesiastical tradition and were therefore tempted to argue that the Jewish and Julian calendars had undergone changes since antiquity that explained why 25 March could have been both a Friday and 15 Nisan in ad 34. An argument of the latter type had been advanced in 1471 by the aforementioned Peter de Rivo, who reiterated it in his Opus responsivum directed against Paul’s theses.23 Paul of Middelburg found neither alternative attractive, but instead proposed a new solution, one that found its justification in ancient Christian literature. One of the texts Paul brought up in this context were the so-​called Acts of the Council of Caesarea, a spurious late antique document quoting the opinions of the second-​century bishop Theophilus of Caesarea.24 Most 22 23 24

See Paul’s letters to Thomas Basin and Peter de Rivo in M, fols. 261r–​v, 299r–​v, as well as EpApol, sigs. A6v–​8v; Paulina, sigs. Ar–​B2r (ii.1.1). For more on Peter de Rivo’s chronological position, see Champion, Masolini, and Nothaft, Peter de Rivo on Chronology (n. 16), which contains an edition of his Dyalogus de temporibus domini nostri Ihesu Christi (1471). Immo Warntjes, The Munich Computus: Text and Translation; Irish Computistics between Isidore of Seville and the Venerable Bede and its Reception in Carolingian Times (Stuttgart, 2010), lxv(n. 167); Alden A. Mosshammer, The Prologues on Easter of Theophilus of Alexandria and [Cyril] (Oxford, 2017), 100–​103, 135, 141–​144; Luciana Cuppo, ‘Felix of Squillace and the Dionysiac Computus II: Rome, Gaul, and the Insular World’, in Late Antique Calendrical Thought and its Reception in the Early Middle Ages, ed. Immo Warntjes and Dáibhí Ó Cróinín (Turnhout, 2017), 138–​81, at 153–​6; Dáibhí Ó Cróinín, ‘Archbishop

100 Nothaft fifteenth-​century readers would have known of this text from the fragments included in the Venerable Bede’s De temporum ratione (725), an influential guide to the subject of Easter reckoning. The key passage, which appeared in Bede’s discussion of the crucifixion date, claimed that ‘the Lord suffered [starting] from 22 March, on which night he was delivered to the Jews, and resurrected on 25 March’ (Passus namque dominus ab xi kal. Apr., qua nocte a Iudaeis est traditus, et ab viii kal. Apr. resurrexit).25 A sober reading of this passage indicated that Theophilus placed the crucifixion on 23 March, although he included the previous night in the duration of Jesus’s suffering. Paul claimed to have found a different version of the same passage, one that skipped the phrase qua nocte a Iudeis traditus est and thus suggested that Theophilus had really meant to place the crucifixion on 22 March. This seemed to agree with the astronomical situation in ad 34, which had the full moon on 22 March, as demanded by the temporal nexus between the crucifixion and Passover. At the same time, it required a complete abandonment of conventional chronology as far as the Passion week was concerned. According to what Theophilus of Caesarea’s words conveyed to Paul’s mind, the Last Supper had taken place on a Sunday (21 March), followed by the crucifixion on a Monday (22 March) and the Resurrection on a Thursday (25 March).26 Paul was under no illusion that it would take some exegetical heavy lifting to get this radical idea off the ground. One of the most obvious counters to his position was drawn directly from the Passion narrative in each of the four Gospels, which referred to the day of the crucifixion as Parasceve (Matthew 27:62; Mark 15:42; Luke 23:54; John 19:14, 31, 42), a term commonly understood to mean the day of preparation for the Sabbath and hence a Friday. Paul sought to remove this obstacle by insisting that the word used in the original Greek, παρασκευή, denoted no more than a ‘day of preparation’, which could be applied to the eve of any feast day, Sabbath or otherwise. He had a similar rejoinder ready for those who thought that the expressions prima sabbati (Matthew 28:1) or una sabbati (Luke 24:1; John 20:1) used by the Latin text in reference to the morning of the resurrection necessarily had to denote the first day after a Sabbath. According to Paul, the word σάββατον, as used in the Bible, often functioned as a generic term for a ‘day of rest’, regardless of the day of the week on which it fell. Support for this reading seemed to come from Mark’s James Ussher (1581–​1656) and the History of the Easter Controversy’, ibid., 309–​51, at 318–​20. 25 Bede, De temporum ratione, c. 47, in Opera didascalia, ed. Charles W. Jones, 3 vols. (Turnhout, 1975–​1980), 2:432 (ll. 106–​7). 26 EpApol, sigs. A3v–​4v.

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Gospel, which had the plural una sabbatorum in place of una sabbati (16:2). Paul insisted that una sabbatorum was the correct translation also in the case of Matthew (28:1), where the Greek text Ὀψὲ δὲ σαββάτων, τῇ ἐπιφωσκούσῃ εἰς μίαν σαββάτων implied nothing more than that the resurrection occurred on ‘one of the feast days’, that is, on one of the seven days of unleavened bread. The same held true for the parallel passage in Luke (24:1) and John (20:1), whose words the Latin translator had evidently rendered in a misleading way.27 His bold decision to question the accepted meaning of the sacred text forced Paul to engage in some depth with the origin and authority of the Vulgate, which was directly challenged by his interpretation of the resurrection account. He tackled the problem head on, by declaring it safe to criticize the common Latin text, all the more so since St Jerome could not have been responsible for the translation ascribed to him. Not only had this particular text been in use before Jerome’s time, but the saint’s own letters portrayed him as a critic who sought to replace it with his own translation.28 Among the examples Paul brought up in this context was the aforementioned opening of Matthew 28:1, where the Vulgate rendered Ὀψὲ δὲ σαββάτων as Vespere autem sabbati. Jerome rejected this interpretation in his letter to Hebidia, in which he noted that the correct Latin equivalent of ὀψέ would have been sero (‘late’) rather than vespere, which confirmed that the evangelist had meant to indicate that Christ rose from the dead late at night rather than in the evening.29 Drawing on his own knowledge of both Greek and Hebrew, Paul strengthened Jerome’s critiques by adducing several further examples where the Vulgate failed to convey the intended meaning of the original text and was hence to be treated with caution.30 The self-​assured biblical humanism that spoke from these passages owed much to the fact that Paul had spent the past decade of his life in Italy, where scholars had long begun to go ad fontes with regard to Sacred Scripture and doubts about Jerome’s authorship of the Vulgate had already been raised by Lorenzo Valla (d. 1457).31 To those north of the Alps who saw in the method of 27 28

29 30 31

EpApol, sigs. B6v–​C2r. EpApol, sigs. C2r–​4r. On the background, see Eugene F. Rice, Jr., Saint Jerome in the Renaissance (Baltimore, MD, 1985), 173–​89; Cornelia Linde, How to Correct the Sacra Scriptura? Textual Criticism of the Latin Bible between the Twelfth and Fifteenth Century (Oxford, 2012), 57–​104. EpApol, sig. C2v. For the referenced passage, see Jerome of Stridon, Epistulae 120.4.3, ed. Isidor Hilberg, 2nd ed (Vienna, 1996), 482–​3. EpApol, sigs. C4v–​6v. Paul added yet more examples and arguments in his letter of response to Thomas Basin, for which see M, fols. 261v–​2r. John Monfasani, ‘Criticism of Biblical Humanists in Quattrocento Italy’, in Biblical Humanism and Scholasticism in the Age of Erasmus, ed. Erika Rummel (Leiden, 2008),

102 Nothaft the humanists a slippery slope towards doctrinal error, Paul’s Epistola apologetica was bound to confirm some of their worst fears. They are expressed rather clearly in Thomas Basin’s comprehensive dissection of Paul’s Errores et blasphemias,32 in which he underlined repeatedly how Paul’s attempts to justify his position had caused him to run afoul of the sententia communis of the entire Church and its saintly teachers. By inventing a whole range of novel arguments against this consensus, or so the exiled bishop warned his addressee, Paul ran the risk of being regarded and perhaps even condemned as a heretic.33 As Basin saw it, his opponent’s only option was to retract his previous arguments and admit to their futility, even more so as they had revealed his lack of competence in theological matters. Alluding to Paul’s training and background as a physician, Basin reminded him of the old Horatian proverb according to which medicine was the remit of physicians, whereas smiths were best served by minding their smithy. The same, he implied, was true for physicians with regard to theology.34 This accusation of ultracrepidarianism was seemingly confirmed by the blind-​spots Basin had identified in Paul’s intellectual edifice. One example he presented in some detail concerned a scene at the end of Luke’s Gospel, where Jesus appeared to two of his disciples on the street to Emmaus, interrogating them about the events that had transpired. The answer given him by Cleophas confirmed what everybody already knew: that ‘to-​day’, the Sunday of the resurrection, had been ‘the third day since these things were done’, meaning the crucifixion (Luke 24:21).35 By contrast, Paul’s hypothesis of a three-​night long stay in the grave would have necessitated shifting the moment of the resurrection 15–​38; Annet den Haan, Giannozzo Manetti’s New Testament: Translation Theory and Practice in Fifteenth-​Century Italy (Leiden, 2016). On Valla’s doubts, see Sebastiano Garofalo, ‘Gli umanisti italiani del secolo XV e la Bibbia’, Biblica 27 (1946), 338–​75, at 350–​51; Jerry H. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ: New Testament Scholarship in the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ, 1983), 50–​51; Rice, Saint Jerome (n. 28), 175–​6; Mariarosa Cortesi, ‘Lorenzo Valla, Girolamo e la Vulgata’, in Motivi letterari ed esegetici in Gerolamo, ed. Claudio Moreschini and Giovanni Menestrina (Brescia, 1997), 269–​89, at 278–​9. 32 See n. 15 above. 33 For the charge of heresy, see esp. Basin, Contra errores, bk. 1, c. 6, fols. 15v–​16r; bk. 1, c.16, fols. 33r–​5r. 34 Basin, Contra errores, bk. 1, c. 6, fol. 17r: ‘Et cum arte medicum et phisicum te profitearis, pocius tibi consuleremus, ut in hiis que illius artis et professionis sunt incumberis, tractacionem sacrarum atque divinarum scripturarum illis elaborandam relinqueres, qui dono scientie huiusce scripturarum a Deo accepto solidius et securius id efficere possunt, iuxta vetus illud proverbium “Quod medicum est medici, tractent fabrilia fabri” ’. The quote stems from Horace, Epistulae, ii.1.115–​16. 35 Basin, Contra errores, bk. 1, c. 4, fols. 11r–​12r.

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from the third day to the fifth, given that the night following Christ’s death already belonged to the second day.36 To Basin’s mind, the absurdity of this consequence went to confirm the reliability of the consensus of the Fathers and the established custom of the entire Church, whose role in biblical exegesis he likened to that of observed custom in the interpretation of civil law.37 He continued to emphasize the twin values of custom and consensus when taking Paul to task for his rash attempts to deprive the common Latin translation of the Old and New Testament of its authority. Unwilling to debate Paul on a technical level, by following him into the unfamiliar terrain of Hebrew and Greek philology, Basin admonished his opponent to consider the inconveniences that follow if our holy scripture were revealed to be, as you assert, corrupt or falsified in some [place]. How will we fulfil the Saviour’s command ‘Repent and believe the Gospel’ [Mark 1:15] if the truth of the Gospels is called into doubt or, what is worse, their falsehood and corruption is affirmed and revealed? We will not know whether our belief in God is catholic and orthodox or rather heretical and treacherous, whether we have been rightly or badly baptized and introduced to the Lord our Saviour. For we derive the truth and certainty of all these things from the divine scriptures, and most especially from the holy Gospels and apostolic letters, which one will not be able to deem holy and divine if their authority is loosened by a corruption or falsehood in some [place]. And through this, the certainty of our entire faith will be weakened and put at risk.38 According to Basin, the purpose of Scripture was to ground correct doctrine, which implied that minor discrepancies between different translations of the holy text were not in themselves a cause of concern. A translation adequate to 36 Basin, Contra errores, bk. 1, c. 5, fols. 13v–​14r. 37 Basin, Contra errores, bk. 2, c. 7, fol. 63r–​v. 38 Basin, Contra errores, bk. 2, c. 9, fol. 68v: ‘Video ergo, o Paule, que inconvenientia inde sequantur, si nostra sacra scriptura, quemadmodum tu asseris, corrupta seu falsata in aliquo deprehensa fuerit. Quomodo implebimus salvatoris preceptum, ‘penitemini et credite evangelio’, si in dubium evangeliorum veritas revocetur vel, quod deterius est eorum falsitas et corruptio affirmetur et deprehendatur? Nesciemus si catholice et orthodoxe, an potius heretice et infideliter, in Deum credamus, si rectene an prave in domino salvatore nostro iniciati et baptizati sumus. Horum enim omnium veritatem et certitudinem ex divinis scripturis, et potissime ex sacris evangeliis et apostolicis litteris, accipimus, quarum si ex corrupcione vel falsitate in aliquo resolvatur auctoritas, sacre et divine existimari non poterunt. Et per hoc vacillabit et periclitabitur tocius nostre fidei certitudo’.

104 Nothaft the purposes of the Church had to conform to the sense, but not necessarily to the letter of the original. He also insisted that the Roman Church, which had been led from its earliest days by a succession of popes skilled in the Greek language, would never have tolerated a translation of the New Testament that failed to reflect the original sense of the Gospels. The translation currently in use, whoever might have been its author,39 had been endowed with authority by its continuous use in the Church, which meant that it was the text to be followed in doctrinal matters. To go against this consensus, as Paul had done, was tantamount to making common cause with the Manicheans of antiquity.40 Basin conceded that in cases where different codices contained different Latin renderings of a particular passage, it could be legitimate to go back to the Greek text to establish the correct version. Yet to want more and use Greek manuscripts to challenge an unanimously attested reading that was followed by all Latin churches was, according to his words, an excess of presumption and temerity.41 Paul of Middelburg, for his part, was well aware that he had to tread carefully. In the letter that prompted Basin’s treatise, the Dutch astrologer vehemently rejected the allegation that he had attempted to demonstrate the truth of an alternative crucifixion date or a literal triduum. His goal had much rather been to show that the established view on the chronology of Christ’s death and resurrection was an article of faith that had to be accepted without the possibility of rational proof.42 The years following the publication of the Epistola apologetica saw him paddle backwards, if only by a few inches. He realized that a more palatable solution to the chronological ‘Passion problem’ could be achieved if one accepted that Christ was born not in ad 1, but in ad 3. Paul’s second letter to the University of Leuven, which he wrote on 14 September 39

While Basin argued in extenso for Jerome’s authorship, this was not essential to his argument. See Basin, Contra errores, bk. 2, c.15–​21, fols. 81v–​98r. 40 Basin, Contra errores, bk. 2, c.11, fols. 70v–​73v. On the Manicheans, see ibid., bk. 1, c. 6, fol. 15v; bk. 2, c.11, fol. 72v. 41 Basin, Contra errores, bk. 2, c.12, fos. 75v: ‘Fatemur quidem, si in diversis ecclesiis reperirentur verba eciam in codicibus emendatis vario modo translata et quasi in pari numero et eiusdem ponderis et autoritatis ecclesiarum, quod posset inquiri veritas ex Grecis exemplaribus emendatis. Sed ubi talis diversitas non occurrit, sed una eademque littera per omnes ecclesias Latinas invenitur, nedum in Romana ecclesia, nimie presumptionis et temeritatis est, etiam si aliud in Grecis codicibus invenitur, velle nostram translationem dampnare’. See also ibid., bk. 2, c.13, fols. 77v–​8r. 42 M, fols. 260r–​61r. See also EpApol, sigs. A5v–​6r, E4r, and Paul’s first letter to Peter de Rivo (M, fols. 297r–​298v). Thomas Basin and Peter de Rivo both questioned his sincerity on this point. See Basin, Contra errores, bk. 1, c.1–​2, fols. 4r–​8v; ibid., bk. 2, c. 8, fol. 65r–​v; Peter de Rivo, Tercius tractatus (n. 18), sigs. av–​a2r.

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1494, already contains early signs of this re-​evaluation.43 A fully developed version of his new chronology, which placed the crucifixion on Friday, 30 March ad 36, was finally made available to the public in 1513 in the second part of Paul’s 800-​page Paulina de recta Paschae celebratione et de die passionis Domini nostri Iesu Christi, which toned down some of his earlier views, albeit without admitting to any error. In addition to the position he had outlined in the Epistola apologetica, Paul now offered an alternative solution, which embraced the traditional days of the week for the crucifixion and resurrection, but made the far-​fetched suggestion that the Sabbath of Christ’s rest in the sepulchre might have been doubled in ways akin to the Roman habit of doubling the sixth day before the Kalends of February in a leap year.44 What he did maintain, despite Basin’s vehement objections, was his view that the common Latin translation of the Bible was in parts corrupt and certainly not the work of St Jerome.45 3

A Desire to Innovate

The controversy that erupted in the Low Countries in 1488 may have caused Paul some sleepless nights,46 but it had no visible impact on his career in Italy, where his opinions on the triduum apparently did not raise too many eyebrows.47 When he published his final word on the issue in 1513, his opponents Basin and Petrus de Rivo had been dead for decades. Paul, on the other hand, 43 44 45

46

47

See n. 20 above. Paulina, sigs. C8v–​D6v (ii.2.2). Paulina, sigs. B6r–​C7r (i.1.2–​i i.2.1). For Paul’s biblical criticism, see also Humphrey Hody, De bibliorum textibus originalibus, versionibus Graecis & Latina Vulgata: Libri IV (Oxford, 1705), 452. The fact that Paul had already made many of the same points in his Epistola apologetica calls for a revision to the timeline of Vulgate criticism in Rice, Saint Jerome (n. 28), 177–​8. As perhaps indicated by Paul’s tendency to refer to his own chronological research as lucubrationes (‘nocturnal studies’). See, for instance, his 1494 letter to the University of Leuven, which reports on two dream visitations Paul had received in a single night from Mercury and St John Chrysostom: M, fols. 301r–​6r (Ad prestantissimos Lovaniensis gymnasii doctores almamque studiosorum achademi matrem Pauli de Middelburgo alumni in sancti Iohannis Crisostomi oraculum lucubratio). Paul emphasized the more positive reception of his ideas in Italy in his letter of response to Thomas Basin. See M, fol. 262r: ‘Sicque, pater reverendissime, quamvis magna sis dignitate insignatus, in hac tamen parte qua hereticum me appellas tibi non cedam, quando iam quosdam eorum qui in Ytalia eruditi habentur ab his studiis meis non abhorere, sed rationibus meis acquiescere animadverti, qui Pentateucum meum, in quo de his disputo diligentius, perquirere et sine invidia examinare dignati sunt’.

106 Nothaft had served as the bishop of a small diocese, Fossombrone, for nearly 20 years. In February 1514, Pope Leo x summoned him to Rome to serve as his right hand in planning and implementing a reform of the ecclesiastical calendar, which was supposed to take place in the context of the Fifth Lateran Council.48 By the time he died, in December 1534, Pope Paul iii had reportedly regarded him worthy of a cardinal’s hat.49 This is not to say that the Middelburgian Paulina changed many minds on the subject. Four years after their appearance in print, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples published his De triduo Christi (1517), in which he presented a new way of bolstering the orthodox Friday-​to-​Sunday chronology of Christ’s death and resurrection, but without ever referring to Paul’s divergent view.50 Erasmus of Rotterdam was at least aware of Paul’s criticism of the Vulgate, placing a reference to it in the prefaces to the fourth and fifth editions of his Greek New Testament (1527 and 1535).51 In 1531, he even defended his reputation in a letter to Agostino Steuco: ‘I think that Paul is in no way inferior to Reuchlin in sharpness of intellect and superior to him in the knowledge of the mathematical disciplines’.52 Yet there is no sign that he took his views on the triduum seriously. What appears to have been the common stance among Catholic exegetes was expressed very succinctly in the first volume of the Annales ecclesiastici, where Cesare Baronio briefly complained that Paul’s opinion, if true, would pervert the whole oeconomia of the Church. ‘But away with this sort of fanciful commentary, lest it strike against the ears of God’s Church for any longer!’53 48

See the letter dated 16 February 1514 in Pietro Bembo, Epistolarum Leonis Decimi Pontificis Max. nomine scriptarum libri sexdecim ad Paulum Tertium Pont. Max. Romam missi (Venice, 1535), sig. M5r. On the background, see Marzi, La questione (n. 3). 49 Baldi, Le vite, ed. Nenci (n. 3), 393. 50 See the introduction and the edition of De triduo Christi in Sheila M. Porrer, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and the Three Maries Debates (Geneva, 2009), 51–​61, 256–​314. 51 Desiderius Erasmus, Opera omnia emendatiora et auctiora, 10 vols. (Leiden, 1703–​1706), 6: sig. **4v. 52 Desiderius Erasmus to Agostino Steuco, 27 March 1531, in The Correspondence of Erasmus, vol. 17, Letters 2357 to 2471, trans. Charles Fantazzi (Toronto, 2016), 316, ll. 85–​7 (Epp 2465). For the Latin text of this letter, see Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, vol. 9, 1530–​1532, ed. P. S. Allen, H. M. Allen, and H. W. Garrod (Oxford, 1938), 207, ll. 82–​84. For the background, see Ronald K. Delph, ‘Emending and Defending the Vulgate Old Testament: Agostino Steuco’s Quarrel with Erasmus’, in Biblical Humanism (n. 31), 297–​ 318. References dismissive or critical of Paul of Middelburg appear in Agostino Steuco, Recognitio Veteris Testamenti ad Hebraicam veritatem (Venice, 1529), fols. 3v, 8r, 141r. 53 Cesare Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, vol. 1 (Rome, 1588), 194: ‘Sed apage eiusmodi fabulosum commentum, nec diutius aures Ecclesiae Dei obtundat’. Baronio’s criticism is mentioned in John Rainolds, Censura librorum apocryphorum veteris testamenti, adversum Pontificios, inprimis Robertum Bellarminum, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1611), ii, cols.

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It was not until the late 1640s, when a young scholar from Denmark by the name of Villum Lange (1624–​1682) published his chronological investigations into Christ’s life, that the hypothesis of a literal triduum gained another, albeit rather brief, lease of life. Born in 1624 in the town of Helsingør, Lange finished his university education in 1643 with a physico-​medical disputation. His graduation was followed by several years of travelling abroad, with recorded stints in Oxford, Paris, and Leiden.54 Lange was no older than 25 when he published his first book, a stunningly erudite 436-​page investigation of matters chronological with the simple title ‘Two Books on the Years of Christ’ (De annis Christi libri duo).55 In its broad thematic range, which encompassed both Old and New Testament chronology, and its heavy reliance on quotations in Greek, Hebrew, and Arabic script, De annis Christi had the outward appearance of a formidable effort to add new insights to the discipline-​defining chronological syntheses produced by Joseph Scaliger and Dionysius Petavius, both of whom were a frequent target of Lange’s criticisms. One area where he discerned room for improvement in their respective works was the treatment of the Jewish calendar, whose history was still waiting to be fully unravelled. When Paul of Middelburg approached the chronology of Christ’s last days during the 1480s, he was already in a position to draw on relevant source texts in Hebrew and even Aramaic, yet the calendar they described was in all fundamental aspects identical to the fixed computational scheme Rabbanite Jews had been using since the tenth century.56 As a result of his exposure to these sources, Paul

54

55

56

26–​27 (§128). I owe the latter reference to Kirsten Macfarlane, Hugh Broughton (1549–​ 1612): Scholarship, Controversy and the English Bible (D.Phil thesis, University of Oxford, 2017), 75. Niels Nielsen, Matematiken i Danmark 1528–​1800: bidrag til en bibliografisk-​historisk oversigt (Copenhagen, 1912), 125–​6; C. O. Bøggild Andersen, ‘Lange, Villum’, Dansk Biografisk Leksikon, 2nd ed., 27 vols. (Copenhagen, 1933–​1944), 13:596–​8; H. A. Hens, ‘Lange, Villum’, in Dansk Biografisk Leksikon, 3rd ed., 16 vols. (Copenhagen, 1979–​1984), 8:505–​6; Gustav Scherz, ‘Briefe aus der Bartholinerzeit’, Centaurus 7 (1961), 157–​96, at 158–​61; Gustav Henningsen, ‘Witchcraft in Denmark’, Folklore 93 (1982), 131–​7, at 136. Villum Lange [Wilhelmus Langius], De annis Christi libri duo; primus varios variarum Gentium annos & tempora exponit; secundus, in duas divisus partes, priori Epochas nobiliores, quae Christi Domini paßionem antecedunt; posteriori ipsum Dominicae Nativitatis & Passionis demonstrat (Leiden, 1649). See the second and third part of Paul of Middelburg, Paschalis supputationis ratio triplici lingua, Greca scilicet, Hebraica Chaldaicaque conscripta et in Latinum versa per magistrum Paulum de Middelburgo, missa domino Johanni, abbati Middelburgensi, as preserved in M, fols. 314v–​20r, and the extensive discussion of the Jewish calendar in idem, Paulina, sigs. Mr–​O8v (ii.8–​9). For Christian awareness of the Jewish calendar prior to Paul of Middelburg, see C. Philipp E. Nothaft, Medieval Latin Christian Texts on the Jewish Calendar: A Study with Five Editions and Translations (Leiden, 2014).

108 Nothaft assumed that the date of Passover in the year of Christ’s death could be calculated using criteria identical to those employed in the contemporary Jewish calendar, which included the postponement of feast days to avoid their coincidence with certain days of the week (in the case of Passover: Monday, Wednesday, Friday). Subsequent chronologers, not the least of them Joseph Scaliger, continued to think along similar lines, attributing to the Jews of Jesus’s day a cyclical lunar calendar with fixed lengths for individual months and years.57 In the first part of De annis Christi, Lange laid out a radically different vision of Jewish calendrical practice prior to the destruction of the Second Temple. Pitting himself against the opinions of scholars such as Scaliger, Petavius, Samuel Petit, and Gerardus Vossius, Lange insisted that the ancient biblical calendar had been empirical and variable in nature as a result of being based on the visibility of the new moon crescent.58 Lange’s ideas in this regard depended to a large degree on John Selden’s study De anno civili & calendario Veteris Ecclesiae seu Reipublicae Judaicae (1644), which had broken new ground by distinguishing between Rabbanite and Karaite traditions.59 Selden’s most significant addition to the list of available sources consisted in the Aderet Eliyahu (‘Cloak of Elijah’), an essential work of Karaite halakhah by Elijah ben Moses Bashyazi of Adrianople (d. 1490). From the excerpts included in De anno civilis, Lange learned that the Karaites took a particularly meticulous approach to reckoning months based on the visibility of the new crescent. If for whatever reason the Moon was not spotted on the evening of the 30th day, the ancient Rabbanite practice would have been to wait for the following evening to begin the new month, irrespective of whether the Moon then became visible before or after sunset. By contrast, Elijah ben Moses taught his followers that a distinction had to be made. If by the 31st evening the Moon was already far enough removed from the Sun to have become visible during daytime, it

57

For Scaliger’s views regarding the Jewish calendar, see Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, vol. 2, Historical Chronology (Oxford, 1993), 177–​92, 326–​9, 420–​24, 646–​8, 652; C. Philipp E. Nothaft, ‘A Sixteenth-​Century Debate on the Jewish Calendar: Jacob Christmann and Joseph Justus Scaliger’, Jewish Quarterly Review 103 (2013), 47–​73. 58 Lange, De annis Christi (n. 55), 110–​28. 59 John Selden, De anno civili & calendario Veteris Ecclesiae seu Reipublicae Judaicae, Dissertatio (London, 1644). On Selden’s study of the ancient Jewish calendar, see the magisterial account in G. J. Toomer, John Selden: A Life in Scholarship, 2 vols. (Oxford, 2009), 2:626–​43.

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became necessary to reverse one’s decision and make the previous 30th day the first day of the new lunar month.60 Lange, who saw in the Karaites the direct successors to the ancient Sadducees, was convinced that this rule held the key to one of the most troubling inconsistencies in the New Testament. The three synoptic Gospels portrayed the Last Supper as a Passover meal, which urged the conclusion that the Jewish date of Christ’s death was 15 Nisan (Matthew 26:17–​19; Mark 14:12–​16; Luke 22:7–​15). Against this apparent consensus stood certain passages in John (18:28, 19:14, 31), whose letter implied that the Jews in Jerusalem gathered to eat the Passover only on Friday evening. One way to make sense of this discrepancy, which Lange himself accepted,61 was to assume that Jesus and his disciples had celebrated Passover one day ahead of the rest of Jerusalem’s Jewish population. This solution to the problem was indeed widespread, even if there was no consensus as to the reasons motivating Jesus’s action. Paul of Middelburg, like others before him, had seized upon the postponement rules of the modern Jewish calendar, which made it impossible for 15 Nisan to fall on a Friday. According to Paul’s findings, the rule of postponing the feast was not an original part of the Law, but had its roots in the Second Temple period, which is why Jesus ignored it, causing him to anticipate Passover relative to his Jewish environment.62 A different calendrical explanation had been offered quite recently, in 1644, by the French Hebraist Louis Cappel, who argued that some groups among the Jews followed a calendar based on conjunctions, which was bound to place the beginning of the month of Nisan one day earlier than the calendar of those Jews who waited for the first appearance of the new crescent.63 60 Lange, De annis Christi (n. 55), 404–​5, quoting Selden, De anno civili (n. 59), 62. See also Magdi Shamuel, ‘The Karaite Calendar: Sanctification of the New Moon by Sighting’, in Karaite Judaism: A Guide to its History and Literary Sources, ed. Meira Polliack (Leiden, 2003), 591–​629, at 613. 61 See the detailed discussion in Lange, De annis Christi (n. 55), 385–​423. 62 Paulina, sigs. D8v–​E6r (ii.3), Xv–​3v (ii.14). On the history of this argument, see C. Philipp E. Nothaft, Dating the Passion: The Life of Jesus and the Emergence of Scientific Chronology (200–​1600) (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 212–​222, 227–​230; Nothaft, Medieval Latin Christian Texts (n. 56), 482–​5; Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg, ‘I have always loved the Holy Tongue’: Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 214–​22; Anthony Grafton, ‘Edward Lively, Cosmopolitan Hebraist’, in Labourers in the Vineyard of the Lord: Scholarship and the Making of the King James Version, ed. Mordechai Feingold (Leiden, 2018), 82–​104, at 83–​6. 63 Louis Cappel, ΕΠΙΚΡΙΣΙΣ ad amicam se inter & Joh. Cloppenburgum epistolicam collationem [etc.] (Amsterdam, 1644), 52–​60.

110 Nothaft Lange preferred Cappel’s explanation over those given by other chronologers, but also modified it to bring it into closer alignment with the available sources. The postulated difference between calendars, he argued, was indeed a factor in the first century, but this was a difference between Karaites and Rabbanites, who both used visibility-​based calendars. Lange put this hypothesis to the test by applying it to ad 33, which was the year of Christ’s Passion according to his own chronology. In the year in question, the Rabbanite Jews, or Talmudici, would have stepped outside to look for the new crescent on the eve of 19 March, but without making an actual sighting. This much could be inferred from the astronomical data, which showed that the true conjunction at the meridian of Jerusalem had only occurred shortly after previous noon, leaving an insufficiently large time window before sunset for the Moon to become visible. The Rabbanite calendar accordingly would have marked Thursday, 19 March as the final day of the lunar month and the following 20 March as 1 Nisan. By late afternoon on 19 March, however, the interval since the last conjunction was already long enough for the Moon to be seen even during the final hours of daylight, which from a Karaite point of view would have justified declaring 19 March as 1 Nisan. As a result of this difference in approach, 14 Nisan, the day of preparation for the Passover meal, would have come to fall on Wednesday (1 April) in the Karaite calendar, but on Thursday (2 April) in the Rabbanite one. Lange seized on this constellation to argue that Jesus and his disciples must have followed the Karaite calendar. As a result, they ended up celebrating the Last Supper on the eve of Thursday, whereas the other Jews mentioned in the Gospel of John were Rabbanites who only assembled for their Passover meal on the following evening.64 On a conventional chronology, the resulting picture would have looked rather incongruous. After all, Lange’s argument led to the conclusion that the crucifixion happened on a Thursday rather than a Friday. Yet the Danish scholar believed that the Karaite calendar not only solved the discrepancy concerning the Jewish date of Christ’s death, but also served to confirm his independently formed opinion according to which the time interval between crucifixion and resurrection had included one night more than conventionally admitted. His reason for believing so was, unsurprisingly, the mention of ‘three days and three nights’ in Matthew 12:40, which Lange argued could be read per synecdochen only if each of the three days and nights were accounted for separately, either whole or in part. The correct chronology of the triduum

64

See Lange, De annis Christi (n. 55), 402–​6, for the main argument. The crucifixion year and the relevant astronomical data are discussed ibid., 406–​15.

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accordingly went like this: Christ died on a Thursday afternoon and was buried around the tenth hour, still during the day. The two remaining hours of this day could be counted synecdochically as representing a full daylight period. There followed the first night (Thursday/​Friday), the second day (Friday), the second night (Friday/​Saturday), the third day (Saturday), and finally the third night (Saturday/​Sunday), at the end of which Christ rose from the dead.65 Lange presented this argument unfazed by the fact that a vast corpus of patristic writers played by a different tune. More than simply ignoring the opposing voices of Augustine, Jerome, and many others, he tried to argue that the early Church had held a view identical to his own. His chief witness in this regard was Theophilus of Caesarea, whom the Acts of the Council of Caesarea quoted as placing the resurrection on the fourth day from the beginning of his suffering. Lange knew this text from Bede’s De temporum ratione, which in Johann Herwagen’s 1563 edition was accompanied by extensive glosses ascribed to the monk Byrhtferth of Ramsey (d. c.1020). From the glossator’s indignation over Theophilus’s ‘absurd’ chronology, which seemingly made Christ’s sepulchral rest extend from 22 March to 25 March, Lange drew a conclusion that had already been advanced by Paul of Middelburg: that the bishop of Caesarea was a bona fide second-​century witness to the additional full day between crucifixion and resurrection.66 It is interesting to observe that, despite this and several other obvious points of convergence between De annis Christi and Paul’s Paulina, Lange tended to quote the bishop of Fossombrone only when he sought to refute his views, for instance on the harmonization of the Passion chronology and the year of the crucifixion.67 His failure to acknowledge Paul as a precursor on the interpretation on Matthew 12:40 seems slightly puzzling, although it may be that Lange was irritated by Paul’s attempt to deny that Christ’s resurrection happened on a Sunday. Lange had in fact come to realize that a literal take on Matthew 12:40 was feasible without shattering too much glass in chronological terms. All one had to do was move the crucifixion from Friday and Thursday, which could be 65 Lange, De annis Christi (n. 55), 375–​83. Lange’s basic objection that an extra 24-​day was needed to account for the third night already appears in EpApol, sig. D2v; Paulina, sig. A5v (ii.1). 66 See Lange, De annis Christi (n. 55), 383–​4, quoting the gloss in Patrologiae cursus completus […] Series Latina, ed. J.-​P. Migne, vol. 90 (Paris, 1862), col. 493 (which reprints the 1563 edition). On the source text, see Michael Gorman, ‘The Glosses on Bede’s De temporum ratione Attributed to Byhrtferth of Ramsey’, Anglo-​Saxon England 25 (1996), 209–​32; Michael Lapidge, ‘Byrhtferth of Ramsey and the Glossae Bridferti in Bedam’, Journal of Medieval Latin 17 (2007), 384–​400. 67 Lange, De annis Christi (n. 55), 395–​8, 406.

112 Nothaft done by interpreting the term Parasceve as referring not to a specific day of the week, but to 14 Nisan, the day before the Passover.68 Unlike Paul of Middelburg, who liked to present his arguments as an apologetic rampart against the Jews, Lange offered relatively little insight into the deeper motivations that drove his project. If anything, his principal impetus appears to have been a desire to make a name for himself in the Republic of Letters, which could be done by knocking some of its greatest heroes, such as Joseph Scaliger and Dionysius Petavius, off their respective pedestals. In the introduction to the relevant part of his book, Lange went even further and chastised the entire community of Protestant scholars for their failure to read Scripture as literally as intended. As much as these colleagues liked to proclaim their close adherence to the sacred text and berate Catholic scholars for their looseness in this area, a look at their actual practice revealed that they were sometimes guilty of the same sin as their ‘papist’ counterparts. For who is there among the Lutheran [Augustanae Confessionis] or Reformed writers who, when he arrives at that passage in Matthew, where it is stated that the Son of man shall be in the heart of the earth for three days and three nights, does not follow this vulgar opinion, which asserts that the Saviour was buried on Friday close to the eventide, but rose again on Sunday morning? Yet this way Scripture is being plainly contradicted. For with all their explanations they are unable to produce more than at most two nights and two days during which Christ was in the heart of the earth. Of the third day or third night they cannot even produce a single minute. Should one instead [say] that two nights and two days are three nights and three days? What is uttering a falsehood, if not this? Two and three are certainly not the same.69 68 Lange, De annis Christi (n. 55), 374: ‘Incidit vero Parasceve Paschatis semper in xiv Nisan, sive xiv mensis I’. 69 Lange, De annis Christi (n. 55), 354: ‘Quis enim est, vel ex Augustanae Confessionis, vel ex Reformatis scriptoribus, qui cum ad eum locum Matthaei veniat, ubi dicitur, filium hominis mansurum in corde terrae tres dies & tres noctes, non vulgarem illam opinionem sequatur, quae asserit, die quidem Veneris circa vesperam Servatorem fuisse sepultum, die vero Solis mane surrexisse? At sic Scripturae aperte in os contradicitur. Neque enim omnibus suis explicationibus plus producere possunt, quam duas ad summum noctes, & duos dies, quibus Christus in corde terrae fuerit. Tertii diei, aut tertiae noctis, ne vel unicum minutum proferre possunt. At ergóne duae noctes & duae dies, sunt tres noctes & tres dies? Quid est falsum dicere, si hoc non est? Sane duo & tres non sunt idem’.

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Lange’s brash attack on the ecumenically shared understanding of Matthew 12:40 and the Passion chronology did not long remain without an adequate response. The first to give it was Hans Wandal (1624–​1675),70 son of the Danish bishop Hans Iversen Wandal (bishop of Viborg, 1617–​1641), who after three years of study at the universities of Strasbourg and Basel had recently relocated to Leipzig, where his historico-​theological diatribe against De annis Christi appeared in mid-​1651.71 In the preface to his work, Wandal railed against the attitudes of today’s authors, whose novelty-​seeking and passion for glory drove them to oppose established wisdom in favour of their own idiosyncratic ideas. It was the same ‘untimely aspiration to innovate in sacred matters’ that had evidently infested the mind of Villum Lange,72 who had misused his God-​given scholarly talent in a vain attempt to contradict the consensus of the entire Christian Church, despite its solid scriptural foundations.73 Wandal made sure to underline that he was not alone in his opinion, but that he had discussed the matter with some of Germany’s best theologians, in particular those in Strasbourg and Leipzig. He alleged that everybody he had managed to talk to took offense at Lange’s mistakes, which added more weight to his own decision to publish a full refutation.74 The first chapter of Wandal’s riposte began with an extended philological meditation on 2 Timothy 2:22, where the Apostle exhorted his readers to let go of their νεωτερικὰς ἐπιθυμίας. Wandal questioned the standard interpretation of the phrase as denoting ‘youthful lusts’, arguing that it was rather meant to 70

For biographical data, see Bjørn Kornerup, ‘Wandal, Hans’, Dansk Biografisk Leksikon, 2nd ed. (n. 54), 25:98–​100; Jens Glebe-​Møller, ‘Wandal, Hans’, Dansk Biografisk Leksikon, 3rd ed. (n. 54), 15:270–​271. 71 Hans Wandal [Johannes Wandalinus], De feria Passionis et triduo mortis Domini & Servatoris nostri Jesu Christi, nec non aliis quibusdam ad Historiam & Chronologiam Sacram pertinentibus, Diatribe historico-​theologica, novis ac paradoxis opinionibus Wilhelmi Langii, libro de Annis Christi contentis, opposita (Leipzig, 1651). Lange’s De annis Christi found another vocal critic in Reinhold Franckenberger, a professor of history at the University of Wittenberg, who sought to rehabilitate Joseph Scaliger’s chronological system. See Reinhold Franckenberger, Dissertatio chronologica pro Chronologiae Scaligerianae veritate […] Et non tantum scholiis necessariis verum etiam brevi contra Clarissimi Dn. Wilhelmi Langii de Annis Christi tractatum nuper editum Appendice aucta (Wittenberg, 1652), 61–​ 144, esp. 100, 124–​7, 131–​3. 72 Wandal, De feria Passionis (n. 71), sig.):(3r: ‘Cum non ita pridem in librum Wilhelmi Langii, quem de Annis Christi scripsit, inciderem, eam ibi intempestivam circa sacra novandi affectationem animadverti, quam summopere omnibus pietatis & divinae sapientiae studiosis devitandam esse, Sacrae Scripturae praeceptis, & clarissimorum Antiquitatis luminum monitis, dudum edoctus et persuasus fueram’. 73 Wandal, De feria Passionis (n. 71), sig.):(3r–​v. 74 Wandal, De feria Passionis (n. 71), sig.):(3v.

114 Nothaft castigate a novelty-​seeking disposition or a desire to innovate. Among the modern victims of this disposition was Villum Lange, whose book deserved to be subjected to the same critical scrutiny and censure that he himself had wanted to apply to the Republic of Letters’ brightest minds.75 Provoked by Lange’s claim that his deviant opinion was also that of the early Church, Wandal padded out the eighth and penultimate chapter of his work with a long list of authorities in support of the orthodox position, from Ignatius of Antioch to Theophylact of Ohrid.76 Against this solid consensus seemed to stand the Caesarean Acts quoting bishop Theophilus, but a careful examination of the surviving fragments cast plenty of doubt on both their authority and authenticity, not to mention the fact that their actual content could be interpreted to agree with the conventional chronology.77 Wandal accordingly concluded from his survey of the patristic literature that, contrary to what Lange had tried to suggest, his particular way of applying Matthew 12:40 to the chronology of Christ’s death and resurrection had ‘crossed the mind of none of the ancients’.78 Ultimately more important than the testimony of the Fathers were some of the very simple and effective linguistic counters Wandal was able to level against Lange’s interpretation of Matthew 12:40, in particular his views on the chronological significance of the phrase ‘three days and three nights’. Against Lange’s insistence that each of these three days and nights had to be counted separately, Wandal offered a brilliant multi-​layered argument according to which the ‘days and nights’ in the relevant context were the sign of a Hebraism. What really lurked behind the expression was the biblical ‫יום ולילה‬ (‘day and night’), which, similar to ‫‘( ערב ובקר‬evening and morning’), was commonly used in the Hebrew scriptures to signify the 24-​hour duration of the civil date—​what Greek writers usually called νυχθήμερον. Once this affinity was recognized, it became possible to return to the traditional understanding of Matthew 12:40, according to which Christ announced that his rest in the grave was going to take place over three consecutive days in the Jewish calendar, but not that its duration would equal their total combined length.79 The reading

75 Wandal, De feria Passionis (n. 71), 1–​10. 76 Wandal, De feria Passionis (n. 71), 122–​35. 77 Wandal, De feria Passionis (n. 71), 65–​75. 78 Wandal, De feria Passionis (n. 71), 123: ‘Unanimis eorum consensus luculenter ostendet, falsum esse, quod asserere non erubescit Langius […]. Contrarium potius omnibus patescet, illam nimirum, quae hodiernae Ecclesiae est, etiam vestutae fuisse sententiam; Langianum autem commentum nemini Veterum in mentem venisse’. 79 Wandal, De feria Passionis (n. 71), 51–​62.

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per synecdochen, as it had already been practiced by Jerome and Augustine, was hence successfully restored and fortified. 4

Conclusion

No one will be surprised to hear that Paul of Middelburg and Villum Lange wrote their quixotic attacks on the conventional understanding of Christ’s triduum under significantly different circumstances—​biographical, confessional, institutional, and otherwise. Questions concerning the authorship and reliability of the Latin Vulgate, which had added much fuel to the debate between Paul of Middelburg and Thomas Basin, had lost nearly all of their bite in the Lutheran theological milieu of the mid-​seventeenth century from which Villum Lange and Hans Wandal both emerged. In a similar vein, even Lange’s fiercest opponents would have been happy with Paul’s suggestion that the chronology of Christ’s Passion and the issue of the triduum were best discussed by going ad fontes, and that the admission fee to this discussion was a solid knowledge of Hebrew and Greek. In contrast to Basin 160 years before him, Hans Wandal did not accuse his opponent of defending ideas that were dangerous to the faith. As he underlined at the beginning of his diatribe, one’s knowledge of the precise date on which an event such as Christ’s Passion occurred had no immediate bearing on one’s ability to believe in its historical truth or salvific function.80 Far from seeking to make an enemy for life, Wandal closed his book with a personal message, in which he cordially encouraged Lange to write a rebuttal, all while assuring him that the foregoing critique of his ideas was driven not by animosity or envy, but by simple love of truth.81 The conciliatory tone of Wandal’s public response to De annis Christi becomes more readily understandable if one considers the tender age that united the two scholars, which came with the plausible expectation that their paths were going to cross again in the foreseeable future. When Paul of Middelburg wrote the Epistola apologetica, he was already in his early forties, but still a young man compared to his principal opponents: Peter de Rivo and Adriaan de Hooffsche were both in their sixties when the scandal erupted, while Thomas Basin was steadily approaching the ripe old age of 80. If Paul’s case fits the familiar pattern of the youthful rebel ready to take on a sclerotic establishment, the same is certainly not true of Lange and Wandal, who shared 80 Wandal, De feria Passionis (n. 71), 8. 81 Wandal, De feria Passionis (n. 71), 154–​5.

116 Nothaft not only a year and month of birth (January 1624), but also a similar social standing, finding themselves at the very beginning of their respective academic careers. With this background in mind, it appears likely that each man’s decision to pen an opinionated and highly technical treatise on the chronology of Christ’s Passion was rooted at least in part in an expectation that the result was going to boost one’s academic market value. This expectation was certainly realistic in the case of Hans Wandal, who very soon after the publication of his diatribe left Leipzig to return to his native country. Wandal’s first teaching post after his arrival in 1651 was reportedly handed to him at the intercession of Danish chancellor Christen Thomesen Sehested, to whom he had addressed the work’s dedicatory preface.82 In 1652, he was ready to join the University of Copenhagen as professor of Hebrew. He acquired the theological doctorate in 1657 and served as rector of the university for nearly two years from 1659 to 1661. In 1668, Wandal was elected bishop of Zealand, the foremost diocese in the Lutheran church of Denmark. He died in office in 1675. Lange, too, found his academic home in Copenhagen, where he first began to lecture in astronomy in 1651. From April 1656 to October 1658, Lange tutored the heir to the Danish throne, the later King Christian v, whose father Frederick iii happened to be the dedicatee of De annis Christi. From 1660 to 1680, Lange’s professorial chair was managed by a succession of professores vicarii, as the main incumbent served as a High Court Judge in Jutland.83 If his controversial views on the triduum did not decisively help his career plans, they certainly did not pose a significant hindrance. The contextual chasm that separates Villum Lange from Paul of Middelburg is clearly rather large, but there still remains some connecting tissue that can make for an illuminating comparison. When Paul first burst onto the scene, chronology had yet to emerge as a learned discipline in its own right. And yet, many of the ingredients that would enable the field to flourish between 1550 and 1650 were already in place in the 1480s. Not only did Paul use astronomical calculations to investigate the age of the Moon at the time of the crucifixion, but he adduced source texts in Hebrew and Aramaic to shed light on the calendrical practices of Jews in the Second Temple period. It is by no means a coincidence that the first ever use of Hebrew type in a book printed in the Low Countries was occasioned by the Epistola apologetica, which offered Hebrew 82 83

For this and other steps in Wandal’s career, see the biographical articles cited in n. 70. See Helge Stjernholm Kragh, ‘Georgius Frommius (1605–​1651) and Danish Astronomy in the Post-​Tychonian Era’, Acta Baltica Historiae et Philosophiae Scientiarum 3, no. 1 (Spring 2015), 45–​68, at 50, and the literature cited in n. 54 above.

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proof texts for the postponement rules of the Jewish calendar. In addition to these, it contained three Hebrew quotations from the Book of Psalms, which supported Paul’s critique of the Vulgate.84 Villum Lange did not practice biblical philology in the same iconoclastic manner and, writing in a post-​Reformation context, no longer had to worry about the authority of the received Latin translation. What he maintained in relation to his precursor Paul was the emphasis on Hebrew source texts, which seemed to promise a new solution to an age-​old puzzle. Perhaps driven by his desire to find fame as the first scholar to have applied John Selden’s discovery of the Karaite calendar to the much-​debated question of Christ’s death date, Lange rushed to publish what he hoped would be viewed as the definitive answer. As Wandal’s intervention would very soon show, however, Lange’s edifice was torn down all too easily by linguistic arguments. In spite of this failure, the debates surrounding the triduum deserve their place in the wider history of chronological scholarship, whose defining themes include the emergence of heterodox conclusions from honest attempts to extricate the Bible from its own contradictions.85 84

See Adri K. Offenberg, ‘The First Use of Hebrew in a Book Printed in the Netherlands’, Quaerendo 4 (1974), 44–​54, and n. 56 above. 85 On the heterodox potential of biblical chronology, see most recently Anthony Grafton, ‘Isaac Vossius, Chronologer’, in Isaac Vossius (1618–​1689) between Science and Scholarship, ed. Eric Jorink and Dirk van Miert (Leiden, 2012), 43–​84; Grafton, ‘Spinoza’s Hermeneutics: Some Heretical Thoughts’, in Scriptural Authority and Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Golden Age: God’s Word Questioned, ed. Dirk van Miert, Henk Nellen, Piet Steenbakkers, and Jetze Touber (Oxford, 2017), 177–​96; Benjamin Fisher, ‘God’s Word Defended: Menasseh ben Israel, Biblical Chronology, and the Erosion of Biblical Authority’, ibid., 155–​74; C. Philipp E. Nothaft, ‘Josephus and New Testament Chronology in the Work of Joseph Scaliger’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition 23 (2016), 246–​51; Dirk van Miert, The Emancipation of Biblical Philology in the Dutch Republic, 1590–​ 1670 (Oxford, 2018), ch. 7 and 8.

­c hapter 4

The Early Modern Study of Ancient Measures in Comparative Perspective A Preliminary Investigation Cesare Pastorino In the early modern period, the study of ancient weights and measures had particular importance and significance. In an account of the seventeenth-​century Oxford scholar, orientalist and astronomer John Greaves, Zur Shalev has given an excellent depiction of this special status. It is well known that Greaves had an intense interest in ancient measures–​an ‘obsession with ancient metrology’. Both his Pyramidographia and Discourse of the Romane Foot were informed by the attempt to devise reliable metrological standards, based on the precise measurement of ancient monuments and archaeological relics such as the Great Pyramid of Giza, or the funerary altar for Cn. Cossutius Cladus.1 However, Greaves’s metrological obsessions were far from exceptional. As Shalev put it, The study of weights and measures was in fact a central preoccupation of antiquarians, theologians, and natural scientists in the early modern period, to an extent that is still largely ignored by modern scholarship. The list of central figures who devoted full tracts to the subject –​from Budé through Mariana and Scaliger to Newton, to name but a few –​could amount to an introduction to early modern scholarship.2 Shalev mentions antiquarians, theologians and natural philosophers. In fact, interest in the precise determination of Roman, Greek and Hebrew measures overlapped a large set of intellectual domains. Predictably, it incorporated scholars with antiquarian concerns for the reconstruction of classical, biblical or Near Eastern cultures. However, it also coexisted with unexpected, and still largely unexplored, more current agendas, from a broader group of disciplines and practices. Present-​day interests were, for instance, relevant for jurists 1 John Greaves, Pyramidographia (London, 1646) and A Discourse of the Romane Foot (London, 1647). See Zur Shalev, ‘Measurer of All Things: John Greaves (1602–​1652), the Great Pyramid, and Early Modern Metrology’, Journal of the History of Ideas 63 (2002), 555–​75. 2 Ibid., 567–​8.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004462335_006

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interpreting ancient legal documents, Roman law and the Corpus juris civilis. It is probably not by chance that several important early modern scholars of metrology like Budé, Portius, Alciati and Paetus were jurists. Also, proponents of monetary reforms would often find useful material and examples while studying ancient units of weight. The precise determination of Roman and Greek measures was also crucial for humanist-​trained physicians who tried to replicate and correctly prepare drugs according to the recipes of the Hippocratic Corpus and Galenic pharmacological texts. Furthermore, civic officers and scholars attempting to improve contemporary unit systems paid close attention to the literature and tradition of the antiquarian treatises de mensuris et ponderibus. The determination of ancient units of length spurred similar antiquarian concerns among early modern architects, geographers and cartographers. This variety of interests is well summarized by a late source, Johann Caspar Eisenschmid, a mathematician and cartographer from Strasbourg. In his De ponderibus et mensuris of 1708, a text long regarded as authoritative until the nineteenth-​century advances of metrology, Eisenschmid stressed the importance of the precise knowledge of ancient measures for ‘theologians, lawyers, physicians, and those who study the ancient texts of philosophers, historians, poets, and especially geographers, architects and writers of agriculture’.3 This quick description already shows an interesting duality. Early modern historical metrology was an established field of investigation. The genre de mensuris et ponderibus identified a coherent tradition of canonical authors, texts, issues and methods. However, at the same time, this commonality of interests and practices was put to the service of often quite different goals and needs. These complex multidisciplinary efforts have hardly been investigated as a whole. In the nineteenth century, founders of modern historical metrological studies like August Böckh and Friedrich Hultsch were well aware of their early modern predecessors and gave significant consideration to this tradition. For instance, Böckh favourably referred to the work of Eisenschmid, and made frequent reference to the research and result of early modern authors.4 While judging it ‘entirely outdated’, Hultsch nevertheless provided a brief outline of earlier metrological literature, signalling important early modern authors and titles. If many of them were relevant only for historical purposes, he stated, 3 Praefatio ad Lectorem, in Johann Caspar Eisenschmid, De ponderibus et mensuris veterum Romanorum, Graecorum, Hebraeorum (Strasbourg, 1708). On Eisenschmid, see Gottlob Kirschmer, ‘Eisenschmid, Johann Caspar’, Neue Deutsche Biographie 4 (1959), 419 (online ed.); url: https://​www.deutsche-​biographie.de/​pnd102463441.html. 4 August Böckh, Metrologische Untersuchungen über Gewichte, Münzfüsse und Masse des Alterthums in ihrem Zusammenhange (Berlin, 1838), 3.

120 Pastorino others could still furnish interesting examples or be cited for concrete details.5 More recent treatments have been limited. If Roberto Weiss delineated this area in pioneering research, economic historian Harald Witthöft is the author whose work has best identified this tradition as an independent genre in recent times.6 Nevertheless, we still lack a full analysis and mapping of its ramifications in the various disciplines and sub-​fields in which it developed. Such analysis and investigation will also have to consider the role of specific factors related to the social and institutional contexts in which early modern metrological research developed in practice. For the purpose of this discussion, this essay will focus on three authors belonging to this tradition: Georg Agricola, Johannes Kepler and Edward Brerewood. These authors are representative of three different approaches to the study of ancient measurements, i.e. those developed in medicine, practical mathematics, and biblical studies respectively. While the works of the three authors under consideration certainly belonged and contributed to the same genre de mensuris et ponderibus, they actually took on different characteristics in the various disciplines. Above all, these studies were the result of very different motivations. A preliminary discussion of these three cases can help to highlight the dualism referred to earlier, and to begin to observe how the early modern study of ancient measures was shaped by local, cultural and intellectual constraints. But before turning to these men, it is necessary to outline briefly the general characteristics of this tradition, starting with the figure of Guillaume Budé.

5 Friedrich Hultsch, Griechische und römische Metrologie (Berlin, 1882), 14–​20. ‘Die frühere metrologische Literatur der neueren Zeit ist jetzt vollkommen antiquirt. Indess kann von einer Zusammenstellung der Hauptwerke, da sie bisweilen noch wegen einzelner Angaben angeführt werden müssen und die meisten wenigstens von historischem Interesse sind, nicht wohl abgesehen werden’ (14). 6 Roberto Weiss, ‘The Study of Ancient Numismatics During the Renaissance (1313–​1517)’, The Numismatic Chronicle 8 (1968), 177–​87; and id., The Renaissance Discovery of Classical Antiquity (Oxford 1969), especially ch. 12, ‘The Study of Ancient Numismatics’, 167–​79. Harald Witthöft, ‘Maß und Gewicht’, in Der Neue Pauly, eds. Hubert Cancik, Helmuth Schneider (Antike), Manfred Landfester (Rezeptions-​ und Wissenschaftsgeschichte) (http://​ dx.doi.org/​10.1163/​1574-​9347_​dnp_​e1502650); and Harald Witthöft, ‘Georg Agricola über Mass und Gewicht: In der Antike und in seiner Zeit’, in Agricola –​3. Rundbrief, Agricola-​ Forschungszentrum (Chemnitz, 2000), 3-​18. Also, for the role of antiquarian metrology in the discussion of standards of measure in the late early modern period, see Peter Kramper, The battle of the standards: Messen, Zählen und Wiegen in Westeuropa 1660–​1914 (Berlin and Boston, 2019), ‘Die antiquarische Tradition der Metrologie und der Erdumfang’, 154–​63.

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The Tradition de mensuris et ponderibus

Very often, authors of treatises de mensuris et ponderibus referred to the French humanist Guillaume Budé (1467–​1540) as the first scholar who defined their field. In 1515, Budé published his monumental and complex monograph on Romain coinage, De asse. This work and its erudite digressions have long defied modern readership.7 However, Budé’s treatise was certainly studied and approached in the sixteenth century and later and was invariably quoted and referred to by subsequent literature. Especially, De asse established the notion that the proper identification and assessment of weights and measures needed to combine the philological study of ancient texts with the critical assessment and physical evaluation of material culture–​the weighing of coinage, in this instance. Budé described his methods very clearly while comparing Roman and Greek coins. As Luigi-​Alberto Sanchi has properly noted,8 Budé’s philological work was integrated by substantial knowledge of ancient coins as concrete material objects: In producing this research, in order to evaluate everything as accurately as possible, I kept by me a small scale with minimal weights and quite a few old gold and silver coins. Previously, they had no such purpose at all but, served to delight me with wonder at the sight of antiquity. I decided to weigh the most exquisite of them with a diligence, I believe, worthy of ancient bankers … Thus, I placed on my scale any coin that seemed to me to bear the sure signs of the ancient era, with a worn banker’s mark or stamp, erased by age and obscured by the rust of time … the weighing of these pieces and others on my little scale confirmed to me the truth of what I had advanced on the faith of Pliny and which is confirmed

7 Guillaume Budé, De asse et partibus eius libri quinque (Paris, 1515). See for instance the comment by Richard Cooper in ‘Collectors of Coins and Numismatic Scholarship in Early Renaissance France’, in Medals and Coins from Budé to Mommsen, eds. Michael H. Crawford, C.R. Ligota, and J.B. Trapp (London, 1990), 5–​23; (12): ‘[De asse] is long, incurably rambling and difficult to approach’. Since the time of its publication, De asse has lacked proper study or an edition until the work of Luigi-​Alberto Sanchi, who has recently published a critical edition and French translation of books i-​i ii of the 1541 version of De asse: Guillaume Budé, De asse et partibus eius/​L’as et ses fractions. Édition critique du texte de 1541 et traduction française, ed. Luigi-​Alberto Sanchi (Geneva, 2018). I here follow Sanchi’s translation. Also, quotes of Budé’s Latin text are given with reference to Sanchi’s edition. 8 Sanchi, De asse, ‘Introduction’, xl: ‘Si le De Asse se fonde avant tout sur l’examen philologique de textes variés, son objet même implique une connaissance non superficielle des monnaies antiques, notamment romaines, également en tant qu’objets matériels.’

122 Pastorino by Plutarch and Appian, namely that the Attic drachma is of the same weight as the Roman denarius.9 Remarkably, for Budé, knowledge of coins crucially included their weighing and measurement. Knowledge of ancient coins and weights could only be produced ‘ratione et experimento, id est libra docente’. With Budé, the balance became a tool for philologists.10 In short, as Richard Cooper has summarized, the approach of Budé was consistent throughout his investigation: ‘drawing on primary sources for names of coins; working out their relationship one to another; weighing surviving examples in order to assess their value in modern terms’.11 This inquiry clearly defined for the first time what Peter Berghaus (in his ‘Foreword’ to the fundamental work of Dekesel), identified as one of the two fundamental ways of numismatics, ‘the monetary and metrological history’.12 After Budé, many authors followed similar strategies and examples, forming a long-​lasting antiquarian and empirical tradition that still needs to be reconstructed. Again, Eisenschmid’s treatise is useful for showing the extent of this tradition. In the early eighteenth century, he recalled the ‘very learned men who, from more or less two hundred years, after the reborn studies of ‘letters’ and ‘good arts’, entirely applied themselves to this work… among others, Barbaro, Budé, Alciati, Agricola, Portius, Caenalius, Paetus’.13 Eisenschmid mostly referred to an early group of humanists. Other authors would add to this tradition, including, among others, Pirro Ligorio, Jean Bodin, 9

Ibid., 260–​5: ‘Ego cum hæc proderem, quo magis exacte omnia perpenderem, libellam et ponduscula in conspectu habui nomismataque antiqua aurea argenteaque satis multa, iampridem ut minime in hunc usum parata, sic admiratione uisendæ antiquitatis in deliciis habita. Eorum lectissimum quodque expensare institi diligentia, ut arbitror, nummulariorum æmula […] Vt igitur unumquodque certissimam prisci æui notam habere uidebatur, charactere uel collybo detrito uel uetustate fugienti et æui situ obscuro, ita in libella a me statuebatur […] cum horum aliorumque nummorum pondus ad libellam exigerem, id esse uerum deprehendi quod auctore Plinio diximus et ex Plutarcho et Appiano comprobatur, drachmam scilicet Atticam denarii Romani pondus habere’. On Budé’s measures see also Sanchi, De asse, xl-​xli, and 266–​9, 410–​13, 436–​9. 10 Sanchi, De asse, 437. 11 Cooper, ‘Collectors’, 12. 12 The other being of course the ‘reproduction of ancient coins as witnesses for the iconography of rulers in the ancient world’. Peter Berghaus, ‘Foreword’, in C. E. Dekesel, Bibliotheca Nummaria: Bibliography of 16th Century Numismatic Books: Illustrated and Annotated Catalogue (Crestline, Ca, and London, 1997), iii. 13 Eisenschmid, De ponderibus et mensuris, Praefatio ad Lectorem: ‘…doctissimi quidam viri jam ante ducentos plus minus annos, post renata literarum bonarumque artium studia, totos sese huic operæ applicuerunt: hinc nata illustria Barbarorum, Budeorum, Alciatorum, Agricolarum, Portiorum, Caenalium, Paetorum, reliquorum, nomina’.

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Juan Bautista Villalpando, Juan de Mariana, Willebrord Snell, Johannes Kepler, Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc, Marin Mersenne and John Greaves. All these scholars would have recognized their debt to Budé’s mergence of philological study and empirical approach. Eisenschmid did so already in the title of his work, where he stated that his disquisition was based on ‘ancient testimonies and arguments’ but also on ‘recently produced trial and calculations’. In words that entirely resonate with Budé’s tenets, describing his study of ancient Greek weights, Eisenschmid stressed how his work derived ‘both from the evidence from ancient writers, and from trials on Greek coins’: ‘tum per Scriptorum veterum testimonia, tum per experimenta in nummis Graecis’.14 2

Georg Agricola, Philology, and Medical and Apothecary Metrology

The sixteenth-​century German humanist Georg Agricola is of course now well known for his work on mineralogy and mining, and particularly for his treatise De re metallica. However, in the early modern period, he was also well recognized as a foundational and canonical author of the tradition De mensuris et ponderibus.15 This aspect of Agricola’s scholarship is very poorly understood today. With the exception of the ground-​breaking work of Harald Witthöft, the bulk of Agricola’s corpus on antiquarian metrology is in dire need of further study.16 Agricola’s texts on historical metrology were extensive and influential and represented a crucial junction of the development of tradition De mensuris et ponderibus. Following the steps of Budé, his studies of ancient measures combined the philological analysis of ancient writers with experimentation and measurement.

14 Eisenschmid, De ponderibus et mensuris, 3v. 15 See his initial publication, the Libri quinque de mensuris et ponderibus (Basel, 1533) and the collected edition of metrological works, Georg Agricola, De mensuris et ponderibus Romanorum atque Graecorum lib. v. De externis mensuris et ponderibus lib. ii. Ad ea, quae Andreas Alciatus denuo disputavit de mensuris et ponderibus, brevis defensio, lib. i. De mensuris, quibus intervalla metimur lib. i. De restituendis ponderibus atque mensuris lib. i. De precio metallorum et monetis lib. iii. (Basel, 1550). For a modern edition of Agricola’s metrological works, see Georg Agricola, Ausgewählte Werke. Schriften über Maße und Gewichte (Metrologie), vol. 5 (Berlin, 1959). 16 See Harald Witthöft, ‘Georg Agricola über Mass und Gewicht der Antike und des 16. Jahrhunderts–​ als Arzt, Humanist und Ökonom’, in Historia socialis et oeconomica. Festschrift Wolfgang Zorn zum 65. Geburtstag, eds. W. Conze, H. Kellenbenz u. H. Pohl (Stuttgart, 1987), 338–​69; and Witthöft, ‘Georg Agricola über Mass und Gewicht’, 3–​18.

124 Pastorino Agricola’s interests in ancient weights and measures certainly stemmed from his training and activity as a learned humanist physician. Later on, other motivations became relevant for his metrological investigations: in particular, considerations related to assaying, monetary theory and the production of coins, as was natural for the mining and minting context in which Agricola operated. This is for instance the case for Agricola’s treatment of the systems of weights of metallurgists that he discusses at the end of book vii of his De re metallica. It is worth noting that Agricola develops that extensive discussion by employing Roman measures and divisions of weight, adapting the modern units of the various German cities to the ancient ones.17 Also, his treatise De precio metallorum et monetis, published in his collected edition of metrological works of 1550, was centred around questions of minting, alloying, and more generally monetary policies.18 However, Agricola’s medical and apothecary interests were the true stimulus for his investigations of ancient measures. This is particularly true for his ground-​breaking work and entry point in the early modern metrological tradition, the Libri quinque de Mensuris & Ponderibus of 1533, a perfect example of this type of medical and pharmaceutical metrology. As Owen Hannaway has reminded us, Agricola was, first and foremost, a humanist.19 He was one of the first graduates of the University of Leipzig to receive formal training in ancient Greek, after the introduction of the study of Greek and of humanistic teaching at the university by distinguished humanists and Greek scholars like Richard Croke and Petrus Mosellanus. A crucial moment of Agricola’s career was his shift to medical studies in 1522 and his training in Italian universities (maybe Bologna and Padua). Remarkably, Agricola was part of the group of editors that the Italian physician Giovanni Battista Opizzoni assembled to work on the Aldine edition of the Greek manuscripts of Galen in Venice. In 1525, we find Agricola working on the final corrections to Galen’s text.20 As Lorenzo Perilli reminds us, he ‘was also to edit 17 18 19 20

See Agricola’s discussion in book vii of De re metallica (Basel, 1556), 198–​207; Engl. transl. De re metallica, eds. Herbert. C. Hoover and Lou H. Hoover (London, 1912), 253–​65. De precio metallorum et monetis lib. iii. (Basel, 1550); German modern edition in Agricola, Ausgewählte Werke, 5:337–​435. Owen Hannaway, ‘Georgius Agricola as Humanist’, Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992), 553–​60. See for instance Lorenzo Perilli, ‘A Risky Enterprise: The Aldine Edition of Galen, the Failures of the Editors, and the Shadow of Erasmus of Rotterdam’, Early Science and Medicine 42 (2012), 446–​66, at 456–​7, and note 18, with Casembroot’s letter to Erasmus there quoted: ‘Georg Agricola, a young admirer of yours, also greets you; he is responsible for the correction of Galen for the Asolanus’ (Epist. 1594, in Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, ed. P. S. Allen (Oxford, 1926) 6:142: ‘Salutat quoque et Georgius Agricola,

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the works of Hippocrates in 1526’ for the same publisher.21 It is then clear that Agricola had a close, philological understanding of ancient Greek medical texts. Moreover, his interests were also spurred by his everyday medical practice. After his return to Saxony, Agricola was employed as a physician and apothecary in the flourishing mining town of Joachimsthal.22 In his first treatise on ancient metrology, the Libri quinque de Mensuris & Ponderibus of 1533, he declared his status of medicus already from the title page. In book i on Roman measures, Agricola emphasized the practical dimension of his studies: If I believe that a knowledge of weights and measures is very useful to all scholars of literature, so that they can gain a proper understanding of [ancient] authors, it is especially so for physicians; and in fact, if I consider the matter a little more closely, I believe that in their case is not only useful for the understanding of the excellent art, but almost indispensable for the correct practice of it.23 The crucial question was the proper interpretation of Latin and Greek measures in ancient medical texts and recipes. In particular, Agricola referred to the two Galenic cognate treatises De compositione medicamentorum secundum locum and De compositione medicamentorum per genera, often quoting them in Greek from volume ii of the Venetian editio princeps. The question of the proper composition of medicaments was fundamental: Medicine is based on very precise, fixed measures, and definite and certain weights; and if an error occurs, which I wish would never happen, this will always result in some bodily harm, if not the greatest risk to life… if a doctor, whether out of ignorance or negligence, or even malice, exceeds the normal level or weight, especially with purgatives, then he is doing patients considerable harm, or even procuring them death. If he

21 22 23

iuuenis tui nominis studiosus cum primis: is est praefectus castigando Galeno apud Azulam’.). Ibid., 457. See Agricola, Ausgewählte Werke, 5: ‘Allgemeine Einführung’. Georg Agricola, Georgii Agricolae Medici Libri Quinque de Mensuris & Ponderibus (Paris, 1533), 9: ‘Cum bonarum literarum studiosis omnibus mensurarum & ponderum cognitionem ad authores recte intelligendos utilem esse censeo, tum maxime medicis, Quibus tamen acrius aliquanto & attentius rem considerans, non modo ad artem suam praeclaram illam percipiendam utilem invenio, sed ad rite exercendam prorsus necessariam […]’ (my translation).

126 Pastorino prescribes a lower dosage, it is less harmful to their health, but often still bad for the patient.24 In his treatise, Agricola was advocating for medicine and pharmacy as learned humanist practices. His polemical target were the ignorant quacks and itinerant sellers: If a merchant cheats his customers, authorities can punish him with a fine. On the other hand, the itinerant sellers of drugs, who pretend to be doctors, can kill with impunity everywhere and by every means: instead of being stopped, they fill the markets of the prosperous Italian cities with their screams … it is no wonder that these uneducated sellers, among so many others, are unaware of the age-​old rational use of weights and measures by Greeks and Romans.25 Drug sellers cobbled new medicines together without any rationale, in complete ignorance of ancient remedies: Their writings clearly reveal [their ignorance], because in them are present the greatest mistakes. This is also because, given that they do not understand the book of remedies of ancient authors, they turn to prepare medicaments themselves, so that we are now at the stage in which, not only the skilful and experienced persons, who are allowed to do that in moderation, but also the most unskilful person, with not experience, produce new [medicines] daily and without caution, while the remedies of the ancients remain completely neglected.26 24

Ibid., 9–​10: ‘Habet nanque medicina mensuras exactas & statas, ac definite certáque pondera, in quibus si quis error acciderit, qui velim nunquam accideret, is semper cum aliquo corporum nocumento, nonnunquam verò cum summo vitae periculo contingere solet […] Medicus si vel inscitia, vel negligentia, vel maleficio, modum sive pondus excedit, praesertim in medicinis purgantibus, aegrotum magno afficit incommodo, aut omnino interficit: si verò diminuit ea, quàmvis minori fiat valetudinis iactura, non raro tamen & tum nocet aegrotanti.’ 25 Ibid., 10: ‘Sed mercatorem emptores decipientem Magistratus poena multant. Circumforaneis pharmacopolis, qui se pro medicis ingerunt, & his & alijs modis ubique homines impune […] necare licet: tantum verò abest ut arceantur, ut in florentissimis Italiae urbibus fora ipsorum clamoribus perstrepant […] Verum nihil mirum pharmacopolas istos indoctos inter caetera permulta mensurarum & ponderum Romanorum & Graecorum rationem priscam ignorare […].’ 26 Ibid., 10–​11: ‘scripta illorum, in quibus videmus eos foedissimè lapsos, manifeste produnt. Hinc partim factum, ut quia veterum libros de medicamentis conscriptos non

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Agricola’s methodology was a remarkable combination of philological precision and empirical procedures. He explicitly mentioned the necessity of relying on ancient authorities, but also of conducting trials and experiments to determine the weight of substances. The list of ancient sources was of course impressive (Figure 4.1). However, Agricola suggested at the beginning of book iii, this analysis of sources was a relatively simple task; the actual empirical work of weighing things and substances was more complex and difficult: The task that we have to undertake in this book will be far more difficult, because it is of two kinds. For it will not only be a matter of the extent in which our view is substantiated by testimonies of the [ancients] writers, but by experience itself [sed experientia ipsa], which has turned out to be a matter of controversy.27 Moving from texts to things caused difficulties, because ‘the things that we measure are quite numerous and varied’. Dry substances differ from wet ones, and each category has large variations within. At the same time, the right comprehension of the weight of substances is necessary to disentangle subtle philological meanings. For instance, Agricola stated, when the Romans referred to ‘librae’ and ‘unciae’, they sometimes meant them as measures of capacity, and sometimes of weight. So, the ‘librae et unciae mensurales’ (of capacity) were always fixed and did not change with the substance being measured. However, this was not the case for their ponderal equivalent (the ‘librae et unciae ponderales’), which corresponded to a different weight ‘depending on the different dry and liquid substances’.28 Proper assessment of the weight of substances was then a necessary complement of philological analysis and interpretation. In fact, it was never just a matter of philology: these distinctions were crucial at the stage of the practical preparation

27

28

intelligerent, animum ad medicamenta converterint componenda, adeò ut nunc eò ventum sit, ut non solertes viri solum et experientes, quibus modice liceret, id agant, sed inertissimus quisque et nullius experientiae quotidie utatur novis, à se temere excogitatis, veterum inventa male neglecta iaceant.’ Ibid., 144: ‘Quem verò laborem in hoc libro exhauriemus, is quia duplex difficilior futurus est. Etenim non agendum tantum erit quò sententia nostra confirmetur scriptorum testimonijs, sed experientia ipsa, si quid inciderit controversum, magna ex parte discutiendum […].’ Ibid., 69: ‘Librae & unciae mensurales certae & immobiles mensuris semper manent, ponderales variae sunt pro varietate tam aridorum quam liquorum.’

128 Pastorino

­f igure 4.1  Agricola’s list of sources, De mensuris & ponderibus (reissue of 1550)

of medicaments. The correct quantity of an ingredient in a recipe could only be provided when the measured substance was properly identified and assessed. In conclusion, Agricola’s first treatise on metrology was the work of a humanist but also of a physician and apothecary, claiming the public, professional necessity of combining the philological study of ancient measures with the accurate and precise determination of the weight of substances. It was not

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by accident that, when he paid his tribute to his precursors, Budé, Portius and Alciati, he underlined how they were certainly very famous and very learned scholars, but also jurists (viri clarissimi & doctissimi & jurisconsultissimi).29 In fact, Agricola added, notwithstanding their qualities, they did not come to an agreement on the exact determinations of those ancient measures: ‘on the Roman sextarius, which is almost the foundation of the entire knowledge of measures, they had very different opinions’.30 Agricola brought something new to their discussion: the study of sources and texts from Galen and the medical tradition, but also the concrete competence and empirical methods of a medicus. 3

Johannes Kepler, Practical Mathematics, and Civic Antiquarian Metrology

The metrological work of Johannes Kepler represents a quite different take on the study of ancient measures in the early modern period. Like in the case of Agricola, Kepler’s discussion was also firmly based on the humanistic study of ancient sources. However, his studies of ancient measures can only be understood in the context of his public activities as an imperial and district mathematician in the cities of the Holy Roman Empire. Despite Kepler’s great fame, his metrological interests have been neglected and nearly forgotten.31 As mentioned, they pertain to his civic duties as a professional mathematician. His early reflections on this issue date to 1605, when the Elector of Cologne, archbishop Ernst von Wittelsbach, consulted him about a plan for the reform of measurement units in the city, inspired by the ideas of Simon Stevin.32 Also, toward the end of his life, while he was in Ulm in 1627 with the main goal of publishing his Rudolphine Tables, Kepler 29 30 31

32

Ibid., 12. Ibid.: ‘de sextario Romano totius cognitionis mensurarum quodam quasi fundamento senserunt diversissima.’ The true exception to this rule is again the work of Harald Witthöft. See Harald Witthöft, ‘Johannes Kepler Über Messen Und Wiegen –​Metrologische Aspekte Einer Geistigen und Materiellen Kultur in Zeiten Des Wandels (1605–​1627)’, in Struktur Und Dimension. Festschrift Für Karl Heinrich Kaufhold Zum 65. Geburtstag, eds. Hans-​Jürgen Gerhard and Karl Heinrich Kaufhold (Stuttgart, 1997), 111–​37; and Harald Witthöft, ‘Maß Und Gewicht in Johannes Keplers ‘Messekunst Archimedis’ (1616). Metrische Kommentare Zur Maßgeschichte von Linz Und Oberösterreich’, Mitteilungen Des Oberösterreichischen Landesarchivs 19 (2000), 177–​230. Witthöft, ‘Johannes Kepler’, 115.

130 Pastorino was asked by the local officials to adjust and calibrate the system of measures of the city. Kepler dutifully complied and produced his results for the town officers. A remarkable outcome of this work was the so-​called ‘Ulmer Kessel’, a bronze vessel used as a standard to calibrate the local units of length, volume and weight. This object was built according to Kepler’s directions and plans by a local metalworker, Hans Braun, and is still preserved in a local museum.33 These brief notes already suggest the background of Kepler’s interest for ancient measurement systems, that is to say his work on applied and practical mathematics. However, Kepler’s most remarkable study of metrology and ancient measures dates to his time in Linz, in upper Austria, between 1612 and 1626. Kepler reached Linz after the death of his patron Rudolf ii. There, he was employed as the district mathematician and teacher in the district school.34 Kepler’s discussion of ancient measures is developed in a little studied treatise, the Messekunst Archimedis, written in German and published by the author in Linz in 1616.35 From a modern standpoint, this work is very peculiar. Scholars have heretofore considered it as simply a German popularisation of a different text, the Stereometria doliorum vinariorum, also published in Linz in 1615.36 The Stereometria was a sophisticated mathematical work, spurred by the practical problems of the Visierkunst, the art of Austrian and German town officers responsible for gauging the volume of a barrel of beer or wine. Notwithstanding its practical justification, the Stereometria was a text in Latin, intended for skilled and learned mathematicians. In it, Kepler employed ground-​breaking and revolutionary mathematical techniques for tackling the calculation of complex volumes and shapes. However, the Messekunst Archimedis was a rather distinct project, intended for a quite different readership. It considered several of the mathematical issues discussed in the Stereometria. However, its tone was didactic, complex mathematical demonstrations were omitted, and the text even included a little mathematical dictionary, the first of its kind, translating difficult Latin mathematical terms into plain German. As Harald Witthöft has suggested, if the Latin Stereometria was an exercise pertaining to 33 Hans-​ Joachim von Alberti, Maß und Gewicht: geschichtliche und tabellarische Darstellungen von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Berlin, 1957), 58–​60. 34 See Max Caspar, Kepler, 2nd Engl. edn (New York, 1993), 212–​13. 35 Johannes Kepler, Außzug auß der Uralten Messekunst Archimedis […] (Linz, 1616). 36 Johannes Kepler, Nova Stereometria Doliorum Vinariorum, In Primis Austriaci, figurae omnium aptissime: Et Usus In Eo Virgae Cubicae compendiosissimus & plane singularis. Accessit Stereometriae Archimedeae Supplementum (Linz, 1615); English translation: Johannes Kepler, Nova Stereometria Doliorum Vinariorum. New Solid Geometry of Wine Barrels, ed. Eberhard Knobloch (Paris, 2018).

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the ‘artes liberales’, the German Messekunst Archimedis was a text conceived in the context of the ‘artes mechanicae’.37 It was addressed to and prepared for the group of townsmen and officers who, in the end, were Kepler’s patrons: as Max Caspar noticed, the work was dedicated to the ‘mayors, judges and counsellors’ of the upper Austrian cities, for the use of the ‘judicious tradesmen, skilled artisans and craftsmen’ of the same communities.38 The extensive appendix of the Messekunst Archimedis is quite remarkable; its ten chapters are, in Witthöft’s words, ‘a very unusual treatise of historical metrology’.39 Why did a self-​standing antiquarian treatment of classical measures appear in a text addressed to town officers, merchants and artisans? Kepler’s investigation was in fact an example of the use of an antiquarian analysis to address pressing contemporary issues; particularly, the chaotic and sorry state of the local systems of units and weights of the German states and cities. Early modern Europe presented an astounding variety and multiplicity of local units.40 In this respect, the systems of units of the ancients, and particularly the ones in use in the Roman empire, seemed to provide a template of simplicity and rationality. Several authors attempted to recover this lost coherence, trying to find the links between the Roman and contemporary systems.41 In the

37 Witthöft, ‘Johannes Kepler’, 118, 121. 38 Caspar, Kepler, 236. My translation. ‘Herrn Burgermeistern Richtern und Rhätender…’, ‘vernünfftiger Kauffleute Freykünstler und Handwercker …’ Kepler, Messekunst Archimedis, preface, i. 39 Kepler, Messekunst Archimedis, 93–​ 113. ‘Ein sehr seltener metrologisch-​ historischer Traktat’, Witthöft, ‘Johannes Kepler’, 112. 40 See for instance Ronald Edward Zupko’s comments on pre-​metric systems of units in Revolution in Measurement: Western European Weights and Measures since the Age of Science (Philadelphia, 1990), 3–​4: ‘Characterized generally by confusion and complexity, and dominated largely by custom and tradition, pre-​metric weights and measures evolved usually on local or regional bases and were geared to needs profoundly different from those of the modern world, or even those of ancient Roman civilization where Roman standards served as a unifying link throughout the Mediterranean world … After the turn of the millennium metrological growth and proliferation set in and gathered rapid momentum during the Later Middle Ages due to economic development, commercial competition, demographic growth, increased urbanism, taxation manipulations, transportation refinements, technological progress, territorial expansion, and the continuous impact of custom and tradition. Tens of thousands of new units were introduced and hundreds of thousands of local variations emerged from the Atlantic seaboard to central and eastern Europe.’ 41 This was for instance the case of one of Kepler’s sources, Juan Bautista Villalpando, and of Willebrord Snell. See Witthöft, ‘Johannes Kepler’, and Fokko Jan Dijksterhuis, ‘The Mutual Making of Sciences and Humanities: Willebrord Snellius, Jacob Golius and the Early Modern Entanglement of Mathematics and Philology’, in The Making of the Humanities.

132 Pastorino appendix of the Messekunst Archimedis, Kepler used this exact strategy. In fact, his main assumption was that the modern units of weight in Linz derived by the ancient Roman units of weight, the Assarius and Libra. Kepler was intellectually well equipped for an investigation of that sort, and his antiquarian interests are not surprising. In a series of essays, Anthony Grafton has pointed out how humanist and antiquarian concerns informed many aspects of Kepler’s research. Kepler received a fully humanist education in the preparatory colleges of the university of Tübingen. As Grafton has well shown, he never abandoned these interests. For instance, ‘the six stately volumes of Kepler’s correspondence, those macaronic monuments, half Latin and half German, half mathematical and half unintelligible, to the folly and grandeur of the German baroque mind, contains dozens of discussions of passages from the Bible and the classics’. Also, ‘Kepler’s astronomical work constantly refers and responds to earlier texts’ and often includes ‘digressions about problems in the early history of the exact sciences’. Kepler had a lifelong interest in ancient chronology, to which he was introduced in his student years by his teacher Michael Mastlin.42 It was then entirely appropriate that, also in the case of metrology, his constant interests in the classics and the ancients would shape his reflections. At the same time, and differently from Agricola, his reliance on antiquity was mediated by more recent metrological authors. While the appendix of the Messekunst Archimedis examined in detail the relationships between ancient measures, trying to explain them in terms of contemporary ones, most of the discussion developed through Kepler’s analysis of secondary sources from the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In this respect, Kepler’s appendix can in fact be used almost like a Rosetta Stone of sixteenth-​century metrological literature. He refers to all the authors in the canon of treatises De mensuris et ponderibus, starting from ‘Gulielmus Budaeus’, ‘Georg Agricola’, and ‘Leonardi de Portis’, but also including more recent authors like ‘Paetus’, ‘Bodinus’, and especially Kepler’s favourite source, ‘Johannes Baptista Villalpandus’. In fact, it was by following Juan Bautista Villalpando that Kepler (incorrectly) found out that the apothecary units in Linz corresponded to Roman

42

Volume II: From Early Modern to Modern Disciplines, eds. Rens Bod, Jaap Maat and Thijs Weststeijn (Amsterdam, 2012), 73–​92. Anthony Grafton, ‘Kepler as a Reader’, Journal of the History of Ideas 53 (1992), 561–​72, 563, 568; and Anthony Grafton, ‘Chronology, Controversy, and Community in the Republic of Letters: The Case of Kepler’, in Worlds Made by Words: Scholarship and Community in the Modern West (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 114–​36.

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weights, and in particular that the apothecary pounds of Linz were equivalent to the ‘librae ponderales’ of the Romans. Kepler’s fascination for the identification of objects as reliable standards of units, not unlike in the case of the Ulmer Kessel, played a part in this mistake. His argument was based on the study of one particular object, the so called ‘Congius of Vespasianus’, or Congius Farnese, a possibly counterfeit Roman vase belonging to the collection of Cardinal Farnese in Rome. The Congius had attracted and would attract the attention of many antiquarians before and after Kepler, including Villalpando, Luca Peto, Nicolas Fabri de Peiresc, Pierre Gassendi and John Greaves.43 The Congius Farnese was a key object, because according to the inscription on its exterior, it contained exactly ten Roman librae.44 Therefore it could be used as a standard from which one could derive the equivalence of librae in terms of contemporary units. Following Villalpando, Kepler assumed that the Romans had fixed and standardized the content of the vase to ten ‘librae ponderales’ of spring water.45 In the apparatus of his treatise In Ezechielem explanationes,46 Villalpandus had depicted the Congius, providing its precise measures in a copperplate (Figure 4.2). Also, Villalpando had produced an estimate of its volume and furnished the volume of a cube with equal capacity. In this way, Kepler was able to replicate the measurements of Villalpando, weighing a cubic volume of spring water in Linz having the exact volume of the Congius. Remarkably, Kepler was able to establish that the weight of water was almost identical to that of ten apothecary pounds of the Linz system of units, confirming his hypothesis of a correspondence between the units of weight in Linz and the Roman ones.47 Kepler’s antiquarian treatise in the Messekunst Archimedis was published about eighty years after Agricola’s early work on ancient weights and

43

A useful starting point for the antiquarian investigation of the Congius Farnese is the discussion in John Greaves, A Discourse of the Romane Foot, and Denarius (London, 1647), 91–​2. For a nineteenth-​century perspective on the Congius, see Friedrich Hultsch, Griechische und römische Metrologie (Berlin, 1862), 95–​7. 44 This is for instance reported by Greaves, A Discourse, 13: ‘The Congius contain[s]‌ x librae, or pounds, as it is manifest by that exquisite standard in Rome, with this inscription…’ See also Hultsch, Metrologie, 96. 45 See Kepler, Messekunst Archimedis, 97. 46 Jerónimo de Prado and Juan Bautista Villalpando, Hieronymi Pradi et Joannis Baptistae Villalpandi e Societate Jesu in Ezechielem explanationes et apparatus urbis, ac Templi Hierosolymitani: commentariis et imaginibus illustratus. Opus tribus tomis distinctum (Rome, 1596–​1604), vol. 3, Apparatus urbis ac templi Hierosolymitani (1604). 47 Kepler, Messekunst Archimedis, 97–​8.

134 Pastorino

­f igure 4.2  Congius of Vespasianus, in J. B. Villalpando, Apparatus urbis ac templi Hierosolymitani, 1604; 501–​2

measures. In that period, historical metrology had progressed and evolved into a well-​defined field, and become the privileged territory of antiquaries like Villalpando, who brought the initial suggestions of Budé to their necessary consequences by measuring, weighing and experimenting on objects in order to derive and give evidence for the precise relations between ancient units. As described before, Kepler’s motivations were practical. His patrons pushed him to study metrology with the aim of reforming, standardizing and recalibrating the local systems of units. These were applied and urgent tasks, with great relevance for everyday trade and commerce. At the same time, Kepler addressed them as an antiquarian, turning to the example of the ancients for inspiration, but relying on an already solid set of more recent secondary sources in the flourishing tradition De mensuris et ponderibus. This body of evidence allowed him, in part, to take previous philological work on primary sources for granted and build on it to solve different problems and questions.

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Edward Brerewood: Biblical Scholarship and Antiquarian Metrology

The final author considered in this preliminary survey of early modern antiquarian metrology is the English antiquarian and mathematician Edward Brerewood (c.1565–​1613). His De ponderibus, et pretiis veterum Nummorum appeared in 1614, just two years before the publication of Kepler’s MesseKunst Archimedis.48 It relied on many of the same canonical authors who were also referred in Kepler’s work. Brerewood’s text belonged to the same genre of treatises De mensuris et ponderibus, but also was representative of a very different thread of that tradition: the investigation of ancient measures in the context of biblical antiquarian studies. In part, the temporal coincidence of publication with the MesseKunst Archimedis was accidental. De ponderibus was published posthumously by Brerewood’s nephew, Robert Brerewood, after the death of his uncle in 1613. The text was dedicated to Thomas Egerton, Baron Ellesmere and Lord Chancellor, in his quality of Chancellor of the University of Oxford. This connection is important, because, before becoming the first professor of astronomy at the newly founded Gresham College in 1597, Edward Brerewood developed his career in Oxford. In fact, he was an alumnus of Brasenose College, something that associated him to both his nephew and to Chancellor Egerton. Also, Robert Brerewood and Thomas Egerton were further associated by the fact that they both had matriculated at Brasenose, and then continued their career in the law in London. Edward Brerewood was born in Chester c.1565, to a family of rich merchants. He entered Oxford in 1581, graduated ba in 1587 and became ma in 1590. As already mentioned, he remained in Oxford until 1597, when he moved to Gresham College.49 Information on his life is scarce, and evidence about his scholarly interests must be inferred from his publications, ‘in astronomy, logic, theology and linguistics’,50 that were however all posthumous. Not surprisingly, Brerewood’s most popular work was not De ponderibus, but his Enquiries touching the diversity of languages and religions in the chief parts of the world,

48 49 50

Edward Brerewood, De ponderibus, et pretiis veterum nummorum (London, 1614). Thompson Cooper and Anita McConnell, ‘Brerewood, Edward (c.1565–​1613)’, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), https://​doi.org/​10.1093/​ref:odnb/​3335. Mordechai Feingold, The Mathematicians’ Apprenticeship: Science, Universities and Society in England, 1560–​1640 (Cambridge, 1984), 69; for a list of Brerewood’s works see John Ward, The Lives of the Professors of Gresham College: To Which Is Prefixed the Life of the Founder, Sir Thomas Gresham … (London, 1740), 75–​6.

136 Pastorino also published in 1614, an historical analysis of the distribution and evolution of world languages and religions.51 De ponderibus was the first full examination of ancient metrology and numismatics published in England after the brief discussion by Cuthbert Tunstall in the appendix to his De arte supputandi of 1522.52 As a nineteenth-​century commentator rather ungenerously underlined, ‘if remarkable for nothing else, [it] deserves at least to be noticed, as the first attempt of an Englishman to draw up a system of ancient weights and money for himself’.53 In fact, it is correct to say that Brerewood’s analysis constituted a coherent metrological analysis of ancient Hebrew, Greek and Roman coins. Unlike the works of Agricola and Kepler, it did not rely on empirical evidence, but was mainly based on textual analysis of a very wide range of classical and biblical sources. Brerewood also relied on some crucial, more recent authors. Apart from the canonical texts from the tradition De mensuris et ponderibus of Budé, Portius and Agricola, Brerewood often quoted two interesting Spanish –​and Catholic –​authors, that is to say the numismatist Antonio Agustín and the famous biblical scholar Benito Arias Montano.54 A focus of De ponderibus was the interpretation and analysis of biblical passages concerning coinage and measures. This feature was certainly prominent and evident for early modern readers. As late as the eighteenth century, the antiquary William Smith singled out De ponderibus for exactly this reason: ‘I have heard this book much commended for the Account it gives of the Hebrew Money, and the Sums given and collected toward the Building of the Temple at Jerusalem’.55 In fact, Brerewood’s colourful examination of the expenses for the construction of Temple of Solomon stands out among the drier expositions of ancient sources on coinage; especially, it gives a good sense of his main intention, that 51 52 53 54

55

Edward Brerewood, Enquiries Touching the Diversity of Languages and Religions: Through the Chiefe Parts of the World (London, 1614). Tunstall’s appendix was mainly a short compilation derived from Budé’s De asse. In Cuthbert Tunstall, De arte supputandi libri quattuor Cutheberti Tonstalli (London, 1522). Robert Hussey, An Essay on the Ancient Weights and Money, and the Roman and Greek Liquid Measures, with an Appendix on the Roman and Greek Foot (Oxford, 1836), 3. Brerewood likely referred to Agustín’s dialogues on medals, which had a first Spanish edition in 1587 and were subsequently translated in Italian in 1592 (Antonio Agustín, Dialogos de medallas, inscriciones y otras antiquedades (Tarragona, 1587)). Also, Brerewood quoted from Arias Montano’s Antiquitatum Iudaicarum of 1593 (Benito Arias Montano, Antiquitatum Iudaicarum libri IX … adiectis formis aeneis (Leiden, 1593)). Incidentally, these references show that at least parts of Brerewood’s treatise were composed after those dates. William Smith, Literae de Re Nummaria (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1729).

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is to say the antiquarian interpretation of the biblical text.56 In his analysis of the Temple, Brerewood signalled a puzzling anomaly in a passage from the first book of Chronicles, ‘concerning the vast Number of Talents of Gold and Silver left by David, to Solomon, for the Building of the Temple’. This money far exceed the Treasures of the greatest Monarch, and the Wealth and Riches of all Princes of whom History has made mention; those immense Heaps of Money and Gold, which Sardanapalus consumed in the Flames, together with himself, excepted.57 Also, Brerewood continued, the building of the Temple did not require, Such an immense Quantity of Gold or Silver; nay, not so much if the Walls and Pavements of the whole Temple had been to be made of solid Silver, nor if a whole golden Bed, and the inward Wainscotting of the Walls inlaid with Gold would have required; nor if all the Furniture had been made of Money.58 Brerewood declared that he had checked these statements carefully: ‘I have considered the dimensions of the Temple as diligently as I could, and compared the solid Bulk and Masse, and all Accounts being taken, and found the Provisions exceeded the Ways [Solomon] was to employ them’.59 The reason of this anomaly in the biblical text, Brerewood explained, was due to the wrong interpretation of the Hebrew word usually translated as ‘Talent’. In fact, Brerewood suggested, the Hebrew term employed in Chronicles did not univocally identify such a unit. Moreover, ‘it may easily be discovered by the Writings

56

See Brerewood, De ponderibus, ­chapter 6: Consideratio. De Auri & Argenti Numero a Davide relicto Solomoni, pro Templi fabrica. This chapter is translated in Smith, Literae, 188–​90. I follow Smith’s translation. 57 Brerewood, De ponderibus, 16: ‘omnes omnium Monarcharum thesauros et opulentiam lònge superat, quorum ulla in historijs mentio, si aceruos Saradanapali, secum uno flammis traditos solum excipiamus.’ 58 Ibid.: ‘Neque profecto tantam auri argentique immensitatem, illud opus postulabat. Quin potius, si ex solido argento fuissent integri templi parietes & pavimenta: Si ex auro solido lectum integrum, & praeter interiorem parietum caelaturam; Omne quodcunque interius supellectile eius fuisset conflatum.’ 59 Ibid., 17: ‘Consideravi enim quam potui diligentissime Templi dimensiones, & cum ea auri & argenti mole in solidam Massam conflata, comparavi, & calculis subductis, hanc supra illam multum excrevisse reperij.’

138 Pastorino of the Ancients, that the Name of a Talent had various Acceptations amongst them, and sometimes only signified a small Sum’.60 This rationalistic attitude to the study of coins and measures in the Bible was reminiscent of similar ones by authors like Juan Bautista Villalpando and Benito Arias Montano. Brerewood’s approach can be understood as part of what Peter Miller has described as the ‘antiquarianization’ of biblical scholarship, that is to say the intellectual attempt to apply the antiquarian methods initially developed to study Roman and Greek texts and antiquities to the analysis of the Bible itself.61 Brerewood’s philological work on sources had more than a family resemblance with the one conducted by Agricola years before in his metrological studies. However, Agricola had very little to say about biblical measures, while Brerewood focused on them not only when he studied Hebrew units, but also when he considered Greek or Roman coins. This focus on material aspects of the biblical account was driven by the attempt, in Miller’s words, ‘to prove, by the most sophisticated methods available, that sacred history was historical’. This aim ‘encouraged scholars to recruit the evidence of history, philosophy, archaeology, and geography to the service of the sacred, all confirming the triumph of Christianity’.62 Sacred antiquarian metrology was a key component of this effort: its actual features and ramifications still need to be fully described and investigated. Brerewood, together with contemporaries like Villalpando and Arias Montano, was laying its groundwork, in much the same way as Budé and Agricola had done a few generations before, for the case of classical metrology. Also, as Miller suggests, in the context of antiquarianisation, the role of scholarly apparatuses became crucial. Between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries, metrological studies appeared to complement biblical editions and critical studies. This was particularly the case in the Polyglot Bibles, which usually included ‘dictionaries, maps, engravings and explanatory discourses designed to help the fledging student of oriental languages’.63 For instance, Arias Montano’s Biblia Regia presented a short treatise on biblical measures, titled Thubal-​cain, sive de mensuris sacris, and then reprinted in 1593 together with other technical aids in the Antiquitatum Iudaicarum Libri ix

60 61 62 63

Ibid.: ‘Praeterea, & nominis Talenti variam fuisse apud Antiquos notionem, & interdum exiguam aliquam summam designasse ex veterum scriptis facile elicio.’ Peter N. Miller, ‘The “Antiquarianization” of Biblical Scholarship and the London Polyglot Bible (1653–​57)’, Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001), 463–​82. Ibid., 464. Ibid., 466.

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(this was in fact one of Brerewood’s privileged sources).64 Similarly, as already seen in the discussion of Kepler, Juan Bautista Villalpando’s monumental interpretation of Ezekiel included a full volume of apparatuses. It is, then, not surprising that Brerewood’s treatise itself was subsequently inserted in the apparatus of Brian Walton’s Biblia sacra polyglotta (London, 1653–​57). Also, in 1685, Edward Bernard’s investigations on metrology were included in Edward Pococke’s Commentary on the Prophecy of Hosea.65 The cases of Brerewood and Bernard are also useful to introduce the particular role that the University of Oxford played in the development of seventeenth-​century English antiquarian metrology. Almost all of the major English scholars who worked on ancient measures in that period –​Edward Brerewood, John Greaves, Edward Bernard and Obadiah Walker –​belonged to that environment.66 Several factors intersected to create this favourable milieu: the general growing importance of antiquarian studies in England, the consolidation and establishment of scholarship on near-​eastern languages and ancient manuscripts and, not least, the interests in ancient mathematical and astronomical texts: it is important to remember that Brerewood, Greaves and Bernard were all professors of astronomy, between Oxford and Gresham College.67 While open to outside influences, it is also clear that the scholarship of these authors shared features that can only be explained considering their institutional affiliations. A proper study of their metrological works will need to address these local determinants. 5

Preliminary Conclusions: Discipline Formation in Comparative Perspective

In a useful introduction to the notion of disciplinarity, Donald R. Kelley has defined some of the ‘softer’ characteristics that show evidence of a disciplinary 64 65 66 67

Benito Arias Montano, Biblia Sacra, Hebraice, Chaldaice, Graece et Latine, vol. viii (Antwerp, 1569–​72), 12–​23; Antiquitatum Iudaicarum Libri IX (Leiden, 1593), 113–​40. Edward Pococke, A Commentary on the Prophecy of Hosea (Oxford, 1685). Bernard would subsequently expand and publish his treatise independently as De mensuris et ponderibus antiquis libri tres (Oxford, 1688). The exception to this rule is Richard Cumberland: Essay Towards the Recovery of the Jewish Measures & Weights (London, 1685). For instance, an interesting window on this peculiar Oxonian culture is given in the ‘Letter of Dr. Edward Bernard Professor of Astronomy in Oxford to Dr. Edward Pocock Regius Professor of the Hebrew Tongue in the same University’, introducing Bernard’s metrological appendix in Pococke’s Commentary on the Prophecy of Hosea.

140 Pastorino status. According to Kelley, general ‘marks of disciplinarity’ should for instance include ‘a characteristic method, specialized terminology, a community of practitioners, a canon of authorities, an agenda of problems to be addressed’.68 The discussion of ancient weights and measures that developed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe comprehended all of these features. Treatises de mensuris et ponderibus emphasised debts to and connections with previous authors, often referring to a stable and relatively small group of authorities and texts. Almost invariably, later scholars credited Guillaume Budé as the author who first defined their field. The approach that Budé championed –​a philological attitude, the use of rational metrological reconstructions, and the actual testing and physical evaluation of material evidence, like coins or ancient standards of measures –​had a surprising longevity and was still followed by scholars well into the eighteenth century. In sum, these historical examinations constituted a coherent and unitary genre and scholarly tradition. However, a closer look to these texts shows many ramifications and often very different motivations behind their scholarly pursuits. If the core methods of inquiry were stable and established, the reasons behind those explorations could vary considerably, depending on cultural contexts and local determinants. The previous preliminary surveys of the cases of Georg Agricola, Johannes Kepler and Edward Brerewood confirm these conclusions. As their works well show, these three authors undoubtedly belonged to a common tradition in the genre de mensuris et ponderibus. Their treatises shared many features, such as references to a common canon of metrological authors, the use of close philological reading of ancient sources, and –​in the cases of Agricola and Kepler –​of empirical evidence to confirm and validate historical and philological assessments. Also, it is obvious to say that they all contributed to a common and shared body of knowledge on ancient measures. At the same time, these authors shaped and constructed their antiquarian investigations in peculiar forms, for their own quite different agendas: in the cases I have examined, this produced what I respectively called examples of medical and apothecary metrology (Agricola), civic metrology (Kepler) and biblical metrology (Brerewood).69 Other studies should integrate and 68 69

History and the Disciplines: The Reclassification of Knowledge in Early Modern Europe, ed. Donald R. Kelley (Rochester, NY, 1997), 1. Incidentally, medical antiquarian metrology, together with subject matters like ‘accounts of the origins of medicine, the history of particular medicinal ingredients or remedies, or of ancient outbreaks of disease, biographies of ancient physicians, accounts of ancient medical practices such as incubation, and descriptions of ancient diet and physical culture’, represents a further example of a topic belonging to what Nancy Siraisi has called

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enrich this preliminary sketch, as it is evident that the early modern analysis of ancient measures spanned several disciplines including, among others, jurisprudence, medicine, biblical exegesis, practical mathematics, antiquarian architecture and cartography. In particular, they should consider the hypothesis that antiquarian jurisprudence and the study of Roman law in figures like Guillaume Budé, Leonardus Portius and Andrea Alciati had a crucial role in the birth of this genre. Moreover, further research will necessarily need to address the professional and institutional contexts in which these investigations developed, and the role that national, religious and confessional differences had in shaping this tradition. For instance, to what extent did metrological investigations provide a neutral intellectual ground for biblical scholars operating on both sides of the Catholic-​Protestant divide in the sixteenth and seventeenth century? Did scholarly apparatuses and metrological data travel freely among early modern confessions or, instead, introduce problematic and controversial evidence? As shown before, the example of Brerewood and his use of sources like Agustín, Arias Montano and Villalpando, seem to point to the former. However, this possibility will need to be tested on a wider group of authors and texts. In general, these are examples of questions that will necessarily need to guide further comparative research on the early modern study of ancient measures. Acknowledgements I would like to thank the editors of this volume and the participants of the Beyond Ancients and Moderns conference at the University of Oxford in May 2019, especially William Poole, for their helpful comments. The writing of this article was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) as part of my project The “Weight of Things. Quantification of Matter and the Exchange of Technical and Learned Knowledge in Early Modern Europe” (project number: 339935097).” ‘medical antiquarianism’. See Nancy G. Siraisi, ‘Styles of Medical Antiquarianism’, in Antiquarianism and Intellectual Life in Europe and China, 1500–​1800, eds. Peter N. Miller and François Lous (Ann Arbor, 2012), 207–​21.

­c hapter 5

The Pentateuch and Immortality in England and the Dutch Republic The Confessionalization of a Claim Michelle Pfeffer In The Divine Legation of Moses (1738–​ 1741), the English cleric William Warburton (1698–​1779) famously set out to demonstrate the divine origins of Mosaic religion in response to the challenge posed by the ‘deist’ claim that there were no eternal promises in the Pentateuch.1 Warburton’s tactic was bizarre and counterintuitive. He began by conceding the deist reading, arguing that there were indeed no promises of a future life in the Mosaic dispensation. However, for Warburton this actually distinguished the Israelites from all other ancient peoples, and the fact that their nation flourished even without this doctrine was evidence of the divine nature of the Mosaic laws. Warburton was especially concerned with countering John Toland and William Coward, both of whom had claimed that Moses never mentioned the immortality of the soul. Toland had done so to support the assertion that Moses was an impostor, and Coward as part of his materialist denial of the immortality of the soul.2 The idea that this claim about immortality and Moses represented a specifically deist or even ‘Spinozist’ reading of the Old Testament has persisted in recent scholarship.3 But while deists certainly made these claims, they were not the first, nor the only, interpreters of the Old Testament to do so. The few studies that refer to the history of Warburton’s argument tend to jump from Spinoza to Toland to Warburton, or from John Spencer and John Marsham to Toland 1 William Warburton, The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated, 2 vols. (London, 1738–​ 1741), 1:6–​7. 2 Ibid., esp. 416; John Toland, ‘Origines Judaicae’, in Dissertationes Duae, Adeisidaemon et Origines Judaicae (The Hague, 1709), 156–​7; William Coward, Second Thoughts Concerning Human Soul (London, 1702), 264–​6. 3 Paolo Rossi, The Dark Abyss of Time: The History of the Earth and the History of Nations, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Chicago, 1984), 238; Frank E. Manuel, The Broken Staff: Judaism through Christian Eyes (Cambridge, MA, 1992), 185–​6; Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 96; Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–​1750 (Oxford, 2001), 611.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004462335_007

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and Warburton.4 However, as I show in this chapter, the claim was an ancient one, with patristic precedent. While it was rendered toxic by association with religious radicalism in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, its roots lie not in the innovations of radical outsiders, but in debates over typological exegesis and covenant theology. When early modern churchmen responded to attacks on the immortality of the soul, they defended the doctrine in part by drawing on a repertoire of Old Testament passages that were said to support it. Genesis 2:7, for example, seemed to imply that when Adam was created, the formation of his body was different from that of his soul. Several Psalms suggested that the principal and most noble part of humanity was the immortal, rational soul (e.g., Psalm 19:7). Ecclesiastes 12:7 implied that the soul could be separated from the body and returned to God upon bodily death. Another oft-​repeated argument revolved around Exodus 3:6 and Matthew 22:32. Responding to the Sadducees’s denial of the resurrection, Christ pointed out that if God was called the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in Exodus, and if God is the ‘God of the living’, then Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob must be in some sense still living. For those who found themselves desperately defending the immortal soul, therefore, the Old Testament could be a powerful aide.5 Yet the tendency of historians to focus on these defensive, vernacular works, at the expense of scholarly, Latinate approaches to the matter, has hidden the fact that this view of the Old Testament was not unanimously held. This was because it was rather difficult to argue that the Old Testament, and the Pentateuch in particular, unambiguously described future rewards and punishments, to say nothing of the immortality of the soul. Appended to obedience to the ten commandments, for example, were not promises of eternal life in heaven, but guarantees of health, many offspring, and long life on earth. This is, after all, the general view of modern Old Testament scholars, and the lack of a standard Jewish answer until the post-​Exile era—​when the Pharisees triumphed over the Sadducees on the question of the resurrection—​meant that arguments for both sides were available in Jewish writings.6 Thus, while Maimonides listed

4 Rossi, Dark Abyss, 237; John Gascoigne, ‘The Wisdom of the Egyptians and the Secularisation of History in the Age of Newton’, in The Uses of Antiquity: The Scientific Revolution and the Classical Tradition, ed. Stephen Gaukroger (Dordrecht, 1991), 203. 5 For a representative English example, see Thomas Wadsworth, Antipsychothanasia, Or, The Immortality of the Soul Explained and Proved by Scripture and Reason (London, 1670). 6 Casey Deryl Elledge, Resurrection of the Dead in Early Judaism, 200 BCE–​C E 200 (Oxford, 2017); Hans Walter Wolff, Anthropology of the Old Testament (London, 1974); Louis Finkelstein,

144 Pfeffer the resurrection of the body as one of the thirteen principles of Jewish faith, Joseph Albo denied that the resurrection and the immortality of the soul were fundamental to Jewish law.7 Throughout the early modern period the claim that the Pentateuch contained no explicit mention of eternal life became divisive only within the bounds of inter-​confessional polemic. My discussion here will sketch out the fortunes of this claim in England and the Dutch Republic. I approach the topic through a comparison of the positions offered by leading early modern scholars in these national contexts, focusing especially on the Dutch Arminian theologian Simon Episcopius (1583–​1643) and the eminent English Hebraist John Lightfoot (1602–​1675). Both scholars presented arguments on the matter in university disputations in the 1610s and 1650s respectively, and both altered their claims in works published in other contexts. As we will see, in the sixteenth century the issue became confessionalized, and this lasted well into the seventeenth century, but the differences between the opposing parties were not as great as their representatives implied. The intellectual context in which the issue was discussed (confessional polemic, disputation, works on covenant theology, or texts debating the immortality of the soul) impacted how the matter was treated. What proved important were approaches to typology, as well as the relative threat of Socinianism and Anabaptism, which was more or less at the forefront in different contexts. In this sense the chapter has benefited from recent work which has made space for discussion of the confessional aspects of early modern scholarship without the usual assumptions of religiously motivated suppression of erudition.8 But first it is necessary to discuss how the issue became more difficult to navigate in the sixteenth century, and for that we must turn to those infamous early modern offenders, the Anabaptists and Socinians.

‘The Beginnings of the Jewish Doctrine of Immortality’, in Freedom and Reason: Studies in Philosophy and Jewish Culture in Memory of Morris Raphael Cohen, ed. Salo Baron (Glencoe, IL, 1951), 354–​72. 7 Steven Nadler, Spinoza’s Heresy: Immortality and the Jewish Mind (Oxford, 2001), chap. 3. 8 Jean-​Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the 17th Century (Oxford, 2009); Nicholas Hardy, Criticism and Confession: The Bible in the Seventeenth Century Republic of Letters (Oxford, 2017); Confessionalisation and Erudition in Early Modern Europe: An Episode in the History of the Humanities, eds. Nicholas Hardy and Dmitri Levitin (Oxford, 2019).

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145

The Confessionalization of a Claim

Warburton’s claim that the Mosaic dispensation contained no promises of future rewards and punishments was aired over thirteen hundred years earlier, when Augustine of Hippo came head-​to-​head with the fourth-​century Manichaean Faustus of Mileve. When Faustus attacked the Old Testament scriptures in c.400ad, he maintained that they contained no hint of eternal life and offered no more than a poor and fleshly inheritance. Augustine responded by conceding that the promises of the Old Testament were indeed temporal. However, these promises were ‘figures’ of eternal life.9 While the ‘carnal people’ thought only of temporal blessings on earth, the spiritual and holy men who lived in these times (namely, the patriarchs and the prophets) understood from these temporal promises to expect a future state.10 Augustine’s answer to Faustus became a standard dogmatic line in scholastic theology, where the issue was discussed under the broader question of the differences between the Old and New Testaments. Aquinas, for example, when discussing whether the old law was distinct from the new, claimed that the former contained only temporal promises while the latter offered spiritual and eternal ones. However, he acknowledged, some biblical Hebrews, guided by the Holy Spirit, nevertheless looked to a future and eternal state.11 Peter Lombard, Bonaventure, and later medieval thinkers argued in much the same vein.12 The claim also enjoyed the continued support of early Reformers. For Luther, in the Old Testament God was ‘promissor bonorum temporalium’. The prophets understood the ‘spiritual’ meaning of the promises, but the people understood them only carnally.13 Melanchthon, too, when discussing the differences between the Old and New

9

Augustine, ‘Contra Faustum’, in Nicene and Post-​Nicene Fathers, Series I, ed. Philip Schaff, trans. Richard Sother, 14 vols. (New York, 2007), 4:1–​2. See also Augustine, ‘Expositions on the Book of Psalms’, in Nicene and Post-​Nicene Fathers, Series I, 8:73:3. 10 Augustine, ‘Contra Faustum’, 4:2; 6:9. For typology in patristic writings, see Jean Daniélou, From Shadows to Reality: Studies in the Biblical Typology of the Fathers (London, 1960); James S. Preus, From Shadow to Promise: Old Testament Interpretation from Augustine to the Young Luther (Cambridge, MA, 1969). 11 Aquinas, Summa theologica, i–​i i, q. 107, a. 1. See also Aquinas, Super Epistolam B. Pauli ad Hebraeos lectura, 8–​2:392; 8–​2:401. 12 Peter Lombard, Libri iv Sententiarum, iii d. 40 c.3: ‘diversa sunt promissa: ibi terrena, hic caelestia promittit’; Bonaventure, Commentary on the Sentences, iii d. 40 a. un. q. 1 ad 5. For discussion of some of these issues in late medieval writings, see Preus, Shadow to Promise, esp. 123–​4. 13 Ibid., 158–​60.

146 Pfeffer Testaments, saw that the former promised ‘material things’ like wealth and the land of Canaan, while the latter promised eternal life ‘more clearly’.14 It was in the context of mounting fears of Anabaptism in the later sixteenth century that the suggestion that the Old Testament contained only temporal promises took on a more toxic sheen. When Huldrych Zwingli wrote in opposition to the Anabaptist notion of baptism by faith, he drew attention to similarities between circumcision and baptism to support the practice of infant baptism. Anabaptists rejected the argument and maintained that Christians should not cite the Old Testament as a directive for their conduct. Only the New Testament was binding.15 The Reformed response was decisive. Zwingli’s 1527 refutation of the Anabaptists argued that the difference between the Old and New Testaments was not one of content, but instead one between umbra and lux clarius lucet.16 In response, Anabaptists argued that circumcision and baptism could not be compared because the covenants connected to them were different. The clear divergence between the old and new covenants was that the former contained only temporal promises.17 They were countered in the early 1530s by Heinrich Bullinger, who wrote on the unity of the Testaments.18 After John Calvin’s first debates with the Anabaptists over the Old Testament in 1536–​1538, during his first period in Geneva, he added an entirely new section to the second edition of Institutio Christianae Religionis (1539) on the similarity between the Testaments.19 Here Calvin mocked the Anabaptists, who ‘think of the people of Israel just as they would do some herd of swine, absurdly imagining that the Lord gorged them with temporal blessings here, and gave them no hope of a blessed immortality’.20 To Calvin, the differences between the promises offered in the Old and New Testaments lay ‘only in respect of clearness of manifestation’.21 The law and the prophets provided the Jews with the 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

Kenneth Hagen, ‘From Testament to Covenant in the Early Sixteenth Century’, The Sixteenth Century Journal 3 (1972), 1–​24, at 14. Hans-​Jürgen Goertz, The Anabaptists, trans. Trevor Johnson (London and New York, 1996), 51–​6. Hagan, ‘Covenant’, 20. J. Wayne Baker, ‘Church, State, and Dissent: The Crisis of the Swiss Reformation, 1531–​ 1536’, Church History 57 (1988), 144; William Klassen, Covenant and Community: The Life, Writings, and Hermeneutics of Pilgram Marpeck (Grand Rapids, 1968), 126, 556. Heinrich Bullinger, De Testamento seu foedere Dei unico et aeterno (Zurich, 1534). Anthony G. Baxter, ‘John Calvin’s Use and Hermeneutics of the Old Testament’ (Ph.D. Diss., University of Sheffield, 1987), 104–​5. The section in question (Book 4, Chapter 16) was successively expanded in new editions until 1559. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Peabody, MA, 2008), 2.10.1. Ibid., 2.9.4.

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hope of immortality, as Romans 1:2 made clear, and it did so through temporal promises, which were ‘types’ of eternity.22 In his Psychopannychia (1542), which aimed to refute the ‘thousands’ of Anabaptists who denied the soul’s immortality, Calvin marshalled scores of biblical passages which purportedly revealed the immortality of the soul as a doctrine contained in both the Old and New Testaments.23 But in all this Calvin still acknowledged that the Old Testament patriarchs saw the light of immortality only ‘from afar, as if under a cloud or shadow’.24 The language used by all these writers was typological. Although Protestant reformers critiqued allegorical readings of scripture and rejected the quadriga, they did not discard the typological idea that the law, through shadows and ‘types’, prefigured the coming of Christ and the gospel.25 This principle was, after all, ‘woven into the fabric of the New Testament’.26 Calvin, like later covenant theologians, ascribed the same doctrine to the Mosaic covenant as he did to the covenant of grace revealed in the gospel. In other words, Christ was the theme of the Old Testament.27 For Calvin, although many of the types in the Old Testament were accessible to the biblical Hebrews, much was ‘unlocked’ only by the arrival of Christ.28 But when it came to the types of eternal life in the old covenant, the hidden promise of a future state was understood and expected of ‘all who consented to the covenant’.29 As Augustine and others had already argued, ‘in the earthly possession which the Israelites enjoyed, they beheld, as in a mirror, the future inheritance which they believed to be reserved for them in heaven’.30

22 23 24

Ibid., 2.10.2, 2.10.3. John Calvin, Psychopannychia (Strasbourg, 1542). Ibid., 339: ‘Quia enim, veluti sub nube & umbra, eminus lucem prospiciebant’. Translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 25 Richard Muller, Post-​Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, 4 vols. (Grand Rapids, 2003), 2:469–​82. 26 Hardy, Criticism and Confession, 130. 27 J.V. Fesko, ‘Calvin and Witsius on the Mosaic Covenant’, in The Law is Not of Faith, eds. Bryan D. Estelle, J.V. Fesko, and David van Drunen (Phillipsburg, 2009), 25–​43. 28 Douglas Judisch, ‘A Translation and Edition of the Sacrorum Parallelorum Liber Primus of Franciscus Junius: A Study in Sixteenth Century Hermeneutics’, 2 vols. (Ph.D. diss., University of St Andrews, 1979), 1:139–​41. For Calvin’s approach to typology more generally, see Richard Muller, ‘The Hermeneutic of Promise and Fulfillment in Calvin’s Exegesis of the Old Testament Prophecies of the Kingdom’, in The Bible in the Sixteenth Century, ed. David C. Steinmetz (Durham and London, 1990), 68–​82. 29 Calvin, Institutes, 2.10.23. 30 Augustine, ‘Contra Faustum’, 2.11.1.

148 Pfeffer Already we can see at least two questions in play. (1) Did the Old Testament explicitly promise eternal life and future rewards and punishments? (2) Regardless of any explicit promises, did the biblical Hebrews believe in a future state? As we have seen, it was common for theologians to answer ‘no’ to the first question. Some preferred to distinguish between the Pentateuch and the rest of the Old Testament, and suggested a gradual revelation of the doctrine. This amounted to the claim that while the Mosaic dispensation was silent on the issue, the Psalms and the writings of the prophets showed that later Hebrews possessed more information than their earlier ancestors. This had patristic precedent: Eusebius and Cyril of Alexandria had both argued that David was the first to teach the promise of a future life, while Moses handed down nothing on these things.31 Although the issue became cloudier in the sixteenth century, it was difficult to argue against such texts as 2 Timothy 1:10, which explained that Christians were saved by grace, and that this truth was revealed only through Christ, ‘who abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel’.32 This critical verse suggested that humanity’s prospects of eternal life were not clearly known until the advent of Christ. Hebrews 8:6 similarly suggested that the new covenant in Christ was ‘established upon better promises’ than the old. When it came to whether or not the biblical Hebrews believed in or expected future rewards and punishments, things were more difficult to establish. However, Hebrews 11:13 suggested that the patriarchs ‘died in faith, not having received the promises, but having seen them afar off, and were persuaded of them’. Many, then, answered ‘yes’ to the second question, though with caveats about the ‘carnal’ Hebrews and those who did not consent to the covenant. Therefore, while it was a common assertion amongst defenders of the immortal soul that both the Old and New Testaments equally demonstrated a future state and the soul’s immortality, many theologians disagreed. When Socinians published extensively on these issues in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, they again raised the profile of these questions and made them considerably more controversial. Today Socinians are mostly associated with antitrinitarianism, but an often overlooked yet similarly dangerous aspect of Socinian thought was their mortalism.33 Many 31 Eusebius, Commentaria in Psalmos 1.6. pg 23:80; Cyril of Alexandria, On the Psalms 1. pg 69:720. 32 All biblical citations are from the Authorised Version. 33 Major studies of Socinianism mention mortalism in passing: Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge, 2010); John McLachlan, Socinianism in Seventeenth-​ Century England (Oxford, 1951); Earl Morse Wilbur, A History of Unitarianism: Socinianism and its Antecedents (Boston,

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Socinians seem to have been convinced of the soul’s natural mortality by the mortalist undertones they found in their reading of the Old Testament. Lelio Socinus, who was influenced by the Italian Anabaptist and mortalist Camillo Renato (c.1500–​1575), emphasized the resurrection—​not the immortality of the soul—​in his only surviving work on eschatology.34 His nephew, Fausto Socinus (1539–​1604), argued at more length about the problematic nature of post-​Reformation eschatology, which jettisoned purgatory but held onto the immortal soul. When he left Italy and resettled in Poland in 1579, Socinus joined the Polish Brethren, who were at the time located primarily in Raków. In a surviving epitome of a Colloquium held there in 1601, Socinus cited 2 Timothy 1:10 to argue that it was only through Jesus Christ that immortality was made known.35 In Pro Racoviensibus responsio (1581), a response to Jacobus Palaeologus’s Defensio verae Sententiae de magistratu politico (1580), Socinus claimed that the old and new covenants differed markedly from each other, and cited Hebrews 8:6 in support. There was no mention of the promise of eternal life in the old covenant; at most the law contained a shadow of future goods.36 Likewise, in a letter to the antitrinitarian Erasmus Johannes (c.1540–​ 1596) written in 1590, Socinus claimed that Ezekiel 18 was not a reference to eternal life because the writer was not aware of a future state.37

34

35

36

37

1945). For more detail, see the work of George H. Williams, cited below, and Stephen Snobelen, ‘Isaac Newton, Socinianism and “The One Supreme God” ’, in Socinianism and Arminianism: Antitrinitarians, Calvinists and Cultural Exchange in Seventeenth-​Century Europe, eds. Martin Mulsow and Jan Rohls (Leiden, 2005), 241–​98; Stephen Snobelen, ‘Socinianism, Heresy and John Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity’, Enlightenment and Dissent 20 (2001), 88–​125. See also Diego Lucci, John Locke’s Christianity (Cambridge, 2021), esp. chap. 4. George Williams, ‘Socinianism and Deism: From Eschatological Elitism to Universal Immortality?’, Historical Reflections 2 (1975), 265–​90, at 277–​8. For Lelio Socinus and Renato, see George H. Williams, ‘Camillo Renato (c.1500?–​1575)’, in Italian Reformation Studies in Honor of Laelius Socinus, ed. John A. Tedeschi (Firenze, 1965), 103–​83. ‘Epitome of a Colloquium Held in Raków in the Year 1601’, in The Polish Brethren: Documentation of the History and Thought of Unitarianism in the Polish-​Lithuanian Commonwealth and in the Diaspora, 1601–​1685, ed. and trans. George H. Williams (Montana, 1980), 101–​4. This text was reproduced in Jan Hoornbeck, Socinianismus confutatus, 3 vols. (Leiden, 1644), 3:505–​22. Fausto Socinus, Ad Iac. Palaeologi librum, cui titulus est, defensio verae sententiae de magistratu politico, &c. Pro Racoviensibus responsio (Amsterdam, 1656), 107: ‘[I]‌d evidenter demonstrat, quod in Veteris Foederis promissis nulla aeternae vitae sit mentio’; ibid.: ‘Umbram enim habens Lex futurarum bonorum’. His biblical citations for the Mosaic law are Ex. 23, Lev. 26, Deut. 27–​8: see ibid., 108. Fausto Socinus, Fausti Socini Senensis opera omnia in duos tomos distincta, 2 vols. ([Amsterdam], 1656), 1:437–​8.

150 Pfeffer When Socinus died in 1604, an authoritative systematization of Socinian thought was offered by Johann Völkel (c.1565–​1618), who was baptized into the Socinian church in 1585 after studying theology at Wittenberg. Völkel’s De vera religione (1630) argued at length about the lack of explicit notice of eternal life in the Old Testament. He claimed that the promises of the Mosaic religion were only temporal, and cited Hebrews 8:6 to support his contention that the promise of eternal life was not in the old covenant.38 Moses enumerated promises for obedience, but never mentioned eternal life as one of them.39 Instead, the promises were earthly, transient, and momentary (terrena, fluxa, momentaneaque).40 Important to Völkel were instances of Jews who did not believe in future rewards and punishments. The obvious example was that of the Sadducees, who were especially notable because they claimed to draw their beliefs only from the Mosaic law.41 No one before Christ ventured to suppose that the law contained eternal life.42 Yet there was nothing stopping the Hebrews from developing an expectation of a future life from the light of nature. Indeed, even the gentiles were able to grasp the hope of immortality through reason alone.43 Throughout the sixteenth century, therefore, the claim that the promises of the Old Testament were temporal rather than eternal was increasingly confessionalized. By the early seventeenth century it was strongly associated with the spectre of religious heterodoxy, whether Anabaptist or Socinian. This is despite the fact that the so-​called religious ‘radicals’ were in fact not saying anything on the matter that was too dissimilar from their Reformed rivals, as we will see in more detail below.

38

Johann Völkel, De vera religione (Raków, 1650), 2/​19:31–​2: ‘Promissa porro Mosaicae religionis, omnia hujus vitae commoda omnemque terrenam felicitatem continebant’; ibid., 3/​11:56: ‘apparet, promissionem [vitae sempiternae] istam in prisco illo foedere factam minime fuisse’. 39 Ibid.: ‘Aliter enim nec novum Testamentum melius, nec in melioribus promissis constitutum esse, jure dici potuisset. Rem autem plane, ut dicimus, ita se habere, inde perspicuum est, quod Moses de industria dataque opera antiqui illius foederis promissa enumerans, nullam vitae sempiternae mentionem facit’. 40 Ibid. 41 The classic references are Josephus, Ant. Jud., 18.2 and Josephus, Bel. Jud., 2.8.14. 42 Völkel, De vera religione, 3/​11: 62: ‘Ex quorum numero hoc, quo de agimus, nequaquam esse hinc patet, quod antequam Christus illud explicaret, nemo unquam extitit; qui vel suspicari auderet, tale quid illo comprehendi’. 43 Ibid., 3/​11: 63: ‘Nihil enim prohibet, quo minus etiam illa a quopiam sperentur, quorum nulla ei sit facta promissio: cum externas quoque gentes quandam immortalitis spem animis suis concepisse compertissimum sit…Tanta enim est humani ingenii capacitas atque solertia, ut cum homines natura immortalitatis sint apperentissimi…’.

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Arminianism and Hebraism in the Dutch Republic

Socinian approaches to Old Testament promises were particularly influential on Arminian theologians in the Dutch Republic.44 Jacobus Arminius (1560–​1609) argued that the commands and promises of the Mosaic law were carnal and corporeal, and directed at an earthly inheritance.45 However, this did not mean that the patriarchs were exempt from eternal life, or that they did not expect it; on the contrary, they received in faith the promises made in Genesis 3:15 concerning the descendants of Eve.46 These ideas were extended by Arminius’s student, Simon Episcopius, who was the most influential Remonstrant of the 1610s. Episcopius attended the University of Leiden from 1600, receiving his ma in 1606.47 Statutes required students to study philosophy, catechesis, and Latin, but Episcopius also studied Hebrew and Greek, which were considered the cornerstones of the theology curriculum.48 Episcopius attended the lectures of Arminius as well as those of Arminius’s Reformed rival Franciscus Gomarus (1563–​1641). By the time Episcopius returned to Leiden in 1610 after a brief period studying Hebrew in Franeker, his status amongst Arminians had grown considerably, even as Arminianism itself became increasingly controversial.49 After Arminius’s death, his follower Conrad Vorstius (1569–​1622) was appointed his successor, but Contra-​Remonstrants issued such protests that the Curators of Leiden University instead hired moderate representatives from

44

For the influence of Socinians on Arminians more generally, see Kęstutis Daugirdas, ‘The Biblical Hermeneutics of Socinians and Remonstrants in the Seventeenth Century’, in Arminius, Arminianism, and Europe: Jacobus Arminius (1559/​60–​1609), eds. Theodoor Marius van Leeuwen, Keith D. Stanglin, and Marijke Tolsma (Leiden, 2009), 89–​113; Carl O. Bangs, ‘Arminius and Socinianism’, in Socinianism and its Role in the Culture of the XVIth to XVIIIth centuries, ed. Lech Szczucki (Warsaw-​Łódź, 1983), 81–​4. 45 Jacobus Arminius, ‘Disputationes Publicae de Nonnullis Religionis Christianae capitibus, ab ipso compositae’, in Opera theologica (Leiden, 1629), 271: ‘Discrimen inter Legem quatenus per Mosem data est, & Vetus Testamentum appellatur, & Evangelium qua Novi Testamenti nomine venit, tertium est in materia mandatorum & promissionum. Promissiones enim in V.T. plaeraeque corporales fuerunt & terrenam haereditatem veteri homini convenientem, spondentes’. 46 Ibid., 272. 47 Mark A. Ellis, Simon Episcopius’ Doctrine of Original Sin (New York, 2006), 32. 48 Keith Stanglin, Arminius on the Assurance of Salvation: The Context, Roots, and Shape of the Leiden Debate, 1603–​1609 (Leiden, 2007), 36–​7; F.G.M. Broeyer, ‘Theological Education at the Dutch Universities in the Seventeenth Century: Four Professors on their Ideal of the Curriculum’, Dutch Review of Church History 85 (2005), 115–​32, at 118–​19. 49 Ellis, Episcopius’ Doctrine, 33–​4.

152 Pfeffer both sides: Jean Polyander and Episcopius.50 Episcopius remained in Leiden until he was fired after the Reformed success at the Synod of Dordt (1618–​1619), after which he lectured at the Remonstrant Seminary in Amsterdam from 1628 until his death. In his capacity as theology professor at Leiden, Episcopius taught in public and private disputations, which were compiled and printed after his death.51 It was here that Episcopius’s ‘Socinian’ leanings first became particularly apparent, and this was grist to the mill of his Reformed opponents, one of whom prompted an official investigation into his teaching on account of the claims that were made in a public practice disputation (as opposed to a public disputation pro gradu) under Episcopius’s moderation. The disputation in question took place on 7 May 1616, and saw one Peter Geesteranus defending theses ‘De convenientia & discrimine veteris & Novi Testamenti’, with Episcopius as praeses.52 Although this was not the case in all university contexts, Keith Stanglin has argued that private and public theological disputations in Leiden were nearly always written by professors in this period.53 While we lack the original argumentation of Episcopius’s disputations, the theses survive, and in this disputation the agreements between the law and gospel were covered before the differences. A key distinction lay ‘in speciali materia’ of the promises. The promises of the law concerned temporal and earthly happiness, and these certainly prefigured heavenly beatitudes.54 Yet the gospel introduced a better hope (melior spes), and great promises that the law was ignorant of (lex omnem ignoraverit). These included the absolute remission of sins, the gift of the holy spirit, and the awaited eternal life in heaven.55 For this Episcopius 50

Peter T. van Rooden, Theology, Biblical Scholarship and Rabbinical Studies in the Seventeenth Century: Constantijn L’Empereur (1591–​1648), trans. J.C. Grayson (Leiden, 1989), 22. 51 Simon Episcopius, ‘Disputationes Theologicae Tripartitae, Olim in Leydensi, tum publice, tum privatim duobus Collegiis habitae’, in Opera theologica, ed. Stephanus Curcellaeus, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1650), 2/​2:386–​460. 52 Simon Episcopius, ‘Disputationes theologiae, Publice olim in Academia Leydensi habitae’, in Opera theologica, 2/​2:401–​3. 53 Keith Stanglin, The Missing Public Disputations of Jacobus Arminius: Introduction, Text, and Notes (Leiden, 2010), 13, 43–​100. In Leiden this was less likely to be the case for disputationes publicae pro gradu. See also Ku-​ming (Kevin) Chang, ‘From Oral Disputation to Written Text: The Transformation of the Dissertation in Early Modern Europe’, History of Universities 19 (2004), 129–​87. 54 Episcopius, Opera theologica, 2/​2: 401: ‘Legis enim promissiones beatitudinem colestem praefiguranes, temporales & terrena felicitate fuerunt’. 55 Ibid., 2/​2:401: ‘Evangelium vero melioris spei introductio vocatur: Heb. 7.19. & 8.6. promissa continere dicitur maxima & pretiosa, 2 Pet. 1.4. plenariam nimirum peccatorum remissionem (cum lex omnem ignoraverit:) Luc. 1.77. Act. 13.38. Spiritus S. copiosam donationem, Joh. 4.23. vitamque aeternam aliquando in coelo degendam, 2 Tim 1.10’.

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cited the laws laid out in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 27–​8, as well as the typological ideas presented in 2 Timothy 1:20 and Hebrews 10:1. The Israelites ‘firmly believed in the divine promises, which contained types and shadows of heavenly things’.56 But whether they had a clear understanding of what the types and shadows actually signified was something that Episcopius for the time being left for others to investigate.57 We can see here a similarity to Socinian ideas. Kęstutis Daugirdas, writing about Episcopius’s reading more generally, has shown that Episcopius read a number of Socinian works after being made professor at Leiden, including Völkel’s De vera religione.58 Episcopius had also already been accused of Socinianism while at Franeker.59 Now his 1616 disputation unsettled one particular attendee: Festus Hommius (1576–​1642), a Reformed minister in Leiden. After becoming aware of the theses, Hommius warned the Burgomasters of Leiden and the Curators of the university that Episcopius was spreading Socinianism amongst the students.60 An investigation was called, and a few days later, on 9 May, Episcopius and Hommius were summoned to the city hall. Hommius declared that what was particularly at issue was the fifth thesis, ‘in speciali materia promissorum’, and its suggestion that the promises of the New Testament were better than those of the Old. Episcopius responded by pointing out that these were the very words of scripture in Hebrews 8:6. The promises of eternal life were in some ways present in the old covenant, but they were veiled by shadows.61 In any case, the arguments had been borrowed from propositions of Arminius.62 Hommius then asserted that what was more suspicious was the claim that these types were not understood by all the believers described in the 56

Ibid., ‘Deinde qua crediderunt firmiter promissis divinis, quae typos & umbras rerum colestium continebant’. 57 Ibid., ‘An vero fides haec in omnibus & singulis (Prophetas enim & alios nonnullus excipi volumus) conjunctam sibi habuerit notitiam & scientiam claram atque apertam typorum & umbrarum, quod videlicet typi atque umbre essent rerum earum que nobis nunc apparent, & in Christo postmodum evenerunt, disquiri permittimus’. 58 Daugirdas, ‘Biblical Hermeneutics’, 100, 108ff; Kęstutis Daugirdas, Die Anfänge des Sozinianismus: Genese und Eindringen des historisch-​ethischen Religionsmodells in den universitären Diskurs der Evangelischen in Europa (Göttingen, 2016), 450–​63. 59 Ibid., 441–​3. 60 The episode has recently been described in ibid., 450–​6. Key primary sources include Jacobus Trigland, Ontrouwe des valschen Waerschouwers (Amsterdam, 1616); Philipp van Limborch, Historia vitae Episcopii (Amsterdam, 1701), 55–​78; Gerard Brandt, Historie der reformatie en andere kerkelyke geschiedenissen in en ontrent de Nederlanden, 4 vols. (Amsterdam, 1674), 2:25. 61 Brandt, Historie, 2:236. 62 Daugirdas, Sozinianismus, 452.

154 Pfeffer Old Testament. Episcopius denied that this claim was ever made, reading from the theses themselves that ‘all the faithful who were under the Old Testament, had indeed some knowledge of the types and shadows; but that it was obscure and but small’. This was indeed in the theses, but Episcopius’s next claim, that the prophets had ‘clear and naked perceptions of them’, was not made as explicitly there.63 Thanks to the intervention of the Curators, the investigation ended without a fierce conflict, but Hommius afterwards continued to study the theses closely. When they met again, Episcopius claimed that he had studied Socinian books and therefore knew that there was no Socinianism in his theses; after all, he asserted, Socinians believed that the Old Testament did not contain even images of eternal life. Hommius sarcastically responded by claiming that he certainly did not know Socinian writings as well as Episcopius seemed to. The Curators eventually released the two, exhorting them to live in mutual charity for the sake of the university’s reputation. But the next day, unbeknownst to Episcopius, they invited Hommius privately to present his proofs for the Socinianism of Episcopius’s teachings, and soon after a number of polemics appeared that accused Episcopius of Socinianism.64 The fact that this same question on the relationship between the Testaments had been disputed several times in Leiden in the preceding years allows us to see where Episcopius followed or deviated from his earlier colleagues. From 1596–​1609, disputations at the Leiden theology faculty were organized in a series that aimed to take students through the key elements of theology over one to three years. Six of these series or cycles took place in these years under the moderation of the theology professors.65 In the first repetition, a student under the supervision of Lucas Trelcatius defended theses ‘De similitudine et discrimine veteris et novi testamenti’ on 9 December 1598.66 The student was none other than Hommius himself, and the fact that Hommius had disputed the topic during his studies probably suggests that he later considered himself well-​prepared for an altercation with Episcopius on the issue. In the disputation the theses offered the same line of argument that Hommius was to take nearly two decades later: both the Old and New Testaments promised the same things: one spirit of adoption, one faith, and the inheritance and hope of eternal life (haereditas, et spes vitae aeternae).67 The Anabaptists, not the Socinians, 63 Brandt, Historie, 2:236. 64 Daugirdas, Sozinianismus, 453–​6. 65 Stanglin, Public Disputations, 14–​17. 66 Disputationum Theologicarum repetitarum…de veteris et novi testamenti similitudine & discrimine (Leiden, 1598). It also appears in a later collection of the first repetition, Compendium theologiae thesibus in academia Lugduno-​Bat. (Leiden, 1611), 137–​42. 67 Compendium theologiae, 138.

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were the explicit foil here; they erred by saying that the hope of the fathers in the Old Testament was limited to earthly goods only.68 The Old Testament used obscure language for this doctrine. The heavenly inheritance was offered under the guise of earthly goods, such as the land of Canaan; compared to the onerous and obscure types of the Old Testament, the New Testament delivered the doctrine more plainly.69 Yet it was nevertheless clear that the patriarchs aspired to eternal beatitudes, and for this a number of supporting verses were offered.70 The issue was discussed again in the third repetition of the cycle, when Gomarus presided over a disputation on 28 May 1603, ‘De Legis & Euangelii, hujusque diversorum statuum comparatione’.71 As was typical, the disputation declared that the law was the doctrine of works while the gospel was the doctrine of faith.72 It then claimed that in the Old Testament God promised eternal life for perfect obedience.73 Importantly, the patriarchs recognized the heavenly promises that were hidden under earthly ones.74 The law and the gospel had ‘the same target and end, namely eternal life’.75 This last phrase also appeared in a disputation moderated by Arminius under the fourth repetition, on 19 October 1605, ‘De Legis & Euangelij Comparatione’.76 Although these theses acknowledged, like those in 1598 and 1603, that eternal life was in some ways promised in both the law and the gospel, they also argued that the promises in the Old Testament were chiefly fleshy (carnalis) and about an earthly inheritance, which suited the ‘old man’ (Heb. 10:1).77 The promises in 68

Ibid.: ‘Errat itaque impurus ille Seruetus cum Anabaptistis qui spem Patrum in V. T. solis terrenis bonis limitatam afferuit’. 69 Ibid., 140. 70 Ibid., 139. 71 The question did not appear in the second repetition (according to the list provided in Stanglin, Public Disputations, 591–​2), but this cycle was far shorter than the others: it ran only from 1601–​1602 and included only 24 disputations (the first repetition, meanwhile, included 63). 72 Franciscus Gomarus, Disputationum theologicarum decima-​septima, de Legis & Euangelii, hujusque diversorum statuum comparatione (Leiden, 1603), sigs R2v, R3r. Petrus Clignetus was the respondent. For a list of topics in the original cycle, see Donald Sinnema and Henk van den Belt, ‘The Synopsis Purioris Theologiae (1625) as a Disputation Cycle’, Church History and Religious Culture 92 (2012), Appendix A. 73 Gomarus, De Legis & Euangelii , sig. R2v: ‘Prior promittit vitam aeternam, sub conditione legis implendae: posterior proponit salute gratis, per gratiam Dei, sola fide accipiendam’. 74 Ibid., sig. R3v. 75 Ibid.: ‘fuit et est idem scopus, et finis, nempe vita aeterna’. 76 Syntagma disputationum theologicarum, in Academia Lugduno-​Batava quarto Repetitarum (Rotterdam, 1615), 188–​97; Arminius, Opera, 270–​4. 77 Ibid., 270–​1.

156 Pfeffer the gospels, meanwhile, were spiritual and about a heavenly inheritance.78 In another disputation on the same topic under Arminius on 19 March 1608, the same arguments were offered.79 As a theology student, Episcopius would have likely attended some of these disputations, and perhaps even participated as an opponent. As might be expected, he was influenced by Arminius’s arguments. He copied nearly all of the comparisons that Arminius had made between the law and the gospel; at times the wording was identical. But while Arminius was strategically silent about the actual beliefs of the Hebrews and their understanding of the types, Episcopius hinted that the question was up for debate. The theses Hommius defended in 1598 suggest a genuine interpretative disagreement with Episcopius on the question. But why, if Episcopius said not much more than Arminius on the subject, did he suddenly elicit such anger from Hommius in 1616? The context of the Remonstrant disputes provides an answer. While the Dutch Republic was accustomed to religious diversity and was fairly tolerant, Calvinism had gained a stronghold in the northern provinces through the immigration of Reformed French refugees and the arrival of Calvinist books.80 The conflict between Gomarus and Arminius in the early seventeenth century was not confined to academic theologians, but was played out in poems, plays, and vicious pamphlets.81 From 1608–​1618 their difference of opinion developed into virtual civil war.82 The years surrounding the contested disputation were particularly busy for Hommius, a key Contra-​ Remonstrant leader at the time. He had been attacked by the polemicist Bernardus Dwinglo in three pamphlets in 1616, and in the same year was one of the scribes at the ‘secret synod’ of Contra-​Remonstrants.83 In 1615, along with 78

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81 82 83

Ibid., 270: ‘mandata enim ejus pleraque carnalia fuerunt, continentia Chirographum contrarium nobis: promissiones vero plaeraeque corporales, & terrenam haereditatem, veteri homini convenientem, spondentes: Euangelium vero spiritualia & promissionem haereditatis coelestis’. This disputation was not published in the seventeenth century, but can be found in Stanglin, Public Disputations, 233–​43. Henry Kamen, The Rise of Toleration (New York, 1967), 24–​9, 86–​110; Peter Y. De Jong, ‘Rise of the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands’, in Crisis in the Reformed Churches: Essays in the Commemoration of the Great Synod of Dort, 1618–​1619, ed. Peter Y. De John (Grand Rapids, 1968), 9; W. Stanford Reid, ‘The Transmission of Sixteenth Century Calvinism’, in John Calvin, His Influence in the Western World, eds. W. Stanford Reid and Paul Woolley (Grand Rapids, 1982), 50. Freya Sierhuis, The Literature of the Arminian Controversy: Religion, Politics and the Stage in the Dutch Republic (Oxford, 2015), esp. chap. 2. van Rooden, Theology, 21. Christine Kooi, Liberty and Religion: Church and State in Leiden’s Reformation, 1572–​1620 (Leiden, 2000), 146; Erik A. de Boer, ‘De Causa Ecclesiae Campensis or: How Four Local

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two others, Hommius published The Further Advice Concerning the Conference at Delft (Naerder advijs over de conferentie tot Delff gehouden), which examined Remonstrant pleas for toleration and ultimately rejected them, partly because the Remonstrants requested not just toleration, but also to be allowed to preach and publish their views. Moreover, it was made clear that the Remonstrants had no good answers as to whether or not they differed from their opponents on more than just the Five Articles of Remonstrance (1610). That this is what was at stake for Hommius is supported by his Specimen controversiarum Belgicarum, published in 1618 in expectation of the Synod of Dordt, in which he argued that the ‘so-​called major issue of predestination served as a smokescreen meant to conceal the promotion of some version of Socinian theology’.84 The Specimen listed 37 articles of faith, specifying for each where the Remonstrants departed from orthodoxy and citing specific passages in Remonstrant works. Considering the passion with which Hommius pursued Episcopius in 1616, it is unsurprising to see at that Article xxv, ‘De abrogatione Legis Ceremonialis & de Convenientia V. & N. Testamenti’, Hommius complained that, ‘contra hunc Articulum’, the Remonstrants claimed that in the Old Testament there were no promises of eternal life.85 Naturally, he cited Episcopius’s 1616 disputation, but he also included references to Arminius’s disputations and a number of passages from Episcopius’s other disputations.86 For example, in a private disputation under Episcopius ‘De Foedere Veteri’, it was argued that the promises in this covenant were carnal, temporal, and for the present life, even if eternal life was figured therein.87 Hommius also cited similar passages from two Remonstrants who had done damage to their reputations by reissuing Socinian works: De officio hominis Christiani, published by Heinrich Welsing in 1610, and De auctoritate sanctae scripturae, published

Ministers Ended up on the National Agenda’, in More than Luther: The Reformation and the Rise of Pluralism in Europe, eds. Karla Apperloo-​Boersma and Herman J. Selderhuis (Göttingen, 2019), 317–​18. 84 Aza Goudriaan, ‘The Synod of Dordt on Arminian Anthropology’, in Revisiting the Synod of Dordt (1618–​1619), eds. Aza Goudriaan and Fred van Lieburg (Leiden, 2010), 81. This is Goudriaan’s translation; the original is Festus Hommius, Specimen controversiarum Belgicarum (Leiden, 1618), sig. **2r-​v: ‘non tantum merito suspicentur, sed omnino etiam arbitrentur, plausibilem illam de Praedestinatione controversiam, quinque illis Articulis expressam, prophasin tantum esse, sub qua Socinianismum (aliquantulum forte interpolatum aut incrustatum) in Reformatas hasce Ecclesias introducere conentur’. 85 Hommius, Specimen, 96. 86 Ibid., 96–​8. 87 Episcopius, Opera theologica, 2:450. Hommius also cited two further public disputations: ‘De veteri foedere’ and ‘De promisso justificationis’, at Opera, 2:420 and 435.

158 Pfeffer by Vorstius in 1611.88 It seems likely that the Hommius/​Episcopius controversy, then, was not merely about Episcopius’s claims about the Old Testament per se, but rather Hommius’s search for evidence that the Remonstrants were espousing opinions that went beyond the five points of the Remonstrance. Episcopius, convinced that Festus had misquoted him, replied in Optima Fides Festi Hommii (1618) and charged Hommius with citing his private and public disputations as they were copied down by divinity students, which would inevitably be inaccurate. Episcopius listed several articles with misquotations, including Article xxv. He pointed out that while Hommius quoted him as saying ‘Promissa vero omnia V.T. sunt carnalia & temporalia’, what he actually said was ‘Promissa vero omnia fere sunt carnalia & temporalia’.89 This defence, however, fell on deaf ears. When followers of Gomarus called the Synod of Dordt, which ultimately condemned Remonstrant positions, Hommius’s book set the terms of the discussion.90 While the issue did not make it into the Canons of Dordt, ‘De Veteri et Novo Testamento’ was one of the disputations in Synopsis purioris theologiae (1625), a new cycle of disputations which aimed to be a unified Reformed voice after Dordt.91 Here it was argued that the Law, like the gospel, promised eternal life, even if it was ‘put forth as something to be viewed in terms of earthly benefits’.92 André Rivet, the praeses, was clear that the idea that the Israelites were like swine who lived for earthly pleasures without hope of immortality was to be rejected.93 This was no doubt a reference to the passage in Calvin’s Institutes cited above. A later theology disputation ‘De foedere’ at Leiden in 1647, under the great Hebraist Constantijn L’Empereur (1591–​ 1648), offered similar arguments. When it came to the substance of the promised goods, both Testaments were 88 Hommius, Specimen, 96–​8. For Vorstius’s Socinian sympathies, see Daugirdas, ‘Biblical Hermeneutics’, 94–​5. 89 Simon Episcopius, Optima fides Festi Hommii (Leiden, 1618), sig. A4r. Hommius had indeed misquoted the theses. But note that both were talking here about one of Episcopius’s private disputations, rather than the 1616 public disputation: see Episcopius, Opera theologica, 2:450. 90 Goudriaan, ‘Synod of Dordt’. 91 Dolf te Velde (ed.), Synopsis Purioris Theologiae/​Synopsis of a Purer Theology: Latin Text and English Translation: Volume 1: Disputations 1–​23, trans. Riemer A. Faber (Leiden, 2014), 574–​602. For the Synopsis Purioris Theologiae, see Sinnema and Belt, ‘Synopsis’, as well as Keith Stanglin, ‘How Much Purer is the Synopsis Purioris Theologiae (1625)? A Comparison of Leiden Disputations Before and After Dordt’, Church History and Religious Culture 98 (2018), 195–​224. 92 te Velde, Synopsis, 585, 587. It was also asserted in the disputation ‘De Evangelio’ that the Law offered the promise of eternal life no less than the gospel, but with the difference that the Law had the condition of perfect righteousness. See ibid., 573. 93 Ibid., 591.

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in agreement: both offered justification, resurrection, and eternal life.94 Daniel 12:2 (‘And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt’) was called on for support. The church under the Old Testament was guided by earthy goods to a heavenly inheritance.95 Yet God’s people under the Old Testament expected resurrection and eternal life, as Genesis 17:7 made clear (‘And I will establish my covenant between me and thee and thy seed after thee in their generations for an everlasting covenant…’).96 Although L’Empereur was a leading Hebraist, the disputation did not draw on his deeper knowledge of Hebrew. This is perhaps unsurprising for, as Peter Van Rooden has argued, L’Empereur’s published disputations in general cited Hebrew words in a wholly traditional manner.97 L’Empereur saw himself as a theologian first and foremost, and the disputations themselves were held in the theology faculty while he was professor of theology. The Reformed and Arminian professors discussed above did not draw on their Hebrew skills when addressing this question either, assuming that the surviving theses can be taken as representative of the now lost argumentation of the disputations. When L’Empereur briefly addressed the issue in his edition of Middot (1630), his arguments were unchanged: ‘Abraham with Isaac and Jacob accepted the promises about the land of Canaan in such a way that they expected a heavenly inheritance because of them, even though that was hidden in shadow’.98 Early modern Christian Hebraists hailed from a number of confessions, and confessional allegiances often stimulated exegetical and theological conclusions. L’Empereur was a key Reformed leader in the Dutch Republic, and in this case his confessional loyalties held sway. The power gained by Contra-​Remonstrants after Dordt probably prompted the exiled Arminians, including Episcopius, to choose their words carefully in their confession of 1621. When treating the Old Testament and eternal life

94 95 96

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‘De foedere’, in Disputationes Theologicae Octodecim (Leiden, 1648), 73: ‘Deinde in substantia ipsa sive promissis bonis, omnino duo illa Testamenta congruunt. Haec autem bona pertinent ad justitiam; vel resurrectionem; ac, quae eam consequitur, vitam aeternam’. Ibid., 77: ‘sub V.T. Ecclesia adhuc puerilis, adminiculo & typo terrenorum beneficiorum ad coelestem haereditatem ceu manu ducebatur’. Ibid., 75: ‘Ad secundum vero quod attinet: resurrectionem & vitam aeternam sibi promissam [Dan 12:2] expectarunt [Hebr 11:35] V. T. confoederati, ut vel Abrahami solum exemplum demonstrat. Nam illud foedus, Ero Deus tuus [Gen 17:7], ita describitur ab ipso Deo [Exodus 3:6], quod post mortem ipsam duret…Et promissionem foederis de terra Canaan [Gen 15:7], ita acceperunt veteres, Abrahamus, Isaac, Iacob, David, &c. ut vi illius promissionis vitam aeternam expectarent’. van Rooden, Theology, 214–​15. Cited in ibid., 151.

160 Pfeffer in Chapter 8.9, all that was claimed was that God opened the door of salvation ‘and the way of immortality to them [all sinners], even as it was prefigured many ages before under various types, figures and shadows of the Old Testament’.99 Despite this relative silence, the idea that the Old Testament did not explicitly promise eternal life remained widespread amongst Arminian theologians. The Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius (1583–​1645), another Remonstrant well familiar with Socinian works, held similar views to Episcopius on the matter.100 In De veritate religionis Christianae (1627) Grotius claimed that in the Mosaic Covenant, Moses promised nothing to the Jews besides good in this life, fruitful land, plentiful storehouses, victory over enemies, and a long and heathy life. ‘All, beyond this, is either hidden in mysterious darkness, or discoverable only by learned disquisition and abstruse reasoning’. This was why the Sadducees, who followed only the laws of Moses, denied future rewards and punishments.101 In a letter to Gerardus Vossius in late 1620, Grotius argued that in the law of Moses, mention of eternal life was only made through shadows.102 When Christ rebutted the Sadducees in Matthew 22:32, he did so ‘not with direct words, but with inferences’.103 However, like Episcopius, Grotius acknowledged that this did not apply to the rest of the Old Testament—​the writings of the prophets were a different case altogether.104 Episcopius himself was more forceful in his posthumously published Institutiones theologicae (1678), based on the lectures he delivered at the Remonstrant Seminary from 1634 onwards. Here Episcopius was clear that there was no promise of eternal life in the laws of Moses, nor any indication of an eternal reward.105 He claimed that his views on the matter had been drawn 99 100 101 102 1 03 104 105

Mark A. Ellis (ed.), The Arminian Confession of 1621 (Oregon, 2005), 72–​3: ‘Deus…ostium salutis aeternae, viam que immortalitatis pandere ipsis voluerit: prout id ipsum multis ante seculis sub variis typis, figuris, & umbris veteris Testamenti’. For Grotius and Socinianism, see Jan-​ Paul Heering, Hugo Grotius as Apologist for the Christian Religion: A Study of his Work De veritate religionis christianae (1640) (Leiden, 2004). Hugo Grotius, De veritate religionis christianae (1627), 51. The translation is Spencer Madan (trans.), An English Translation of the Six Books of Hugo Grotius, on the Truth of Christianity (London, 1814), 53. Hugo Grotius to Gerardus J. Vossius, Nov/​Dec 1620, in Briefwisseling van Hugo Grotius, ed. P.C. Molhuysen (The Hague, 1936), 2:37–​8: ‘In Mosis lege…aeternae vitae non fieri mentionem nisi per umbras’. Ibid.: ‘Christi auctoritate, qui Sadducaeos non verbis directis, sed ratiocinando refellit’. Ibid.: ‘In Mosis lege (non dico in veteri Testamento: nam de prophetis, praesertim posterioribus, res longe alia est) aeternae vitae non fieri mentionem nisi per umbras’. Simon Episcopius, Institutes theologicae: privatis lectionibus Amstelodami traditae, in Opera theologica, 1:52: ‘in tota lege Mosaica nullum vitae aeternae praemium, ac ne aeterni quidem praemii indicium vel vestigium extat’.

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from the writings of the Rabbis (ex scriptis rabbinorum), but unfortunately cited no particular works.106 Episcopius further argued that this conclusion was confirmed by the New Testament, because when Christ defended the resurrection of the dead against the Sadducees he did so not from the law but from God’s general promise that he would be the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.107 Moreover, the disagreement amongst the Jews concerning a future state suggested that the law provided nothing clear about eternal life. The Sadducees, for example, were certain that a future state was not promised in the laws of Moses but had crept in through Kabbalah.108 Episcopius’s stronger stance in these lectures makes sense in light of their location—​a confessional seminary, rather than public disputations at the Leiden theology faculty, which we should remember were open to the public—​and the context: a period of relative freedom for Arminianism, as compared to the highly charged 1610s. Before we move to the fortunes of this debate in England, it is worth making a further brief comparison to the similar arguments that were offered by members of the Jewish community in Amsterdam in the first half of the seventeenth century. This community was composed largely of conversos from the Iberian Peninsula, Jews forced to convert to Christianity by the Inquisition in the late fifteenth century, who were then able to revert to Judaism in more tolerant Amsterdam.109 The Jewish community was not cut off from its Christian neighbours, and so when in 1624 the Portuguese-​born converso Uriel da Costa (c.1583/​4–​1640) argued that the Mosaic law made no mention of immortality or future rewards and punishments he drew the attention of Jews and Christians alike.110 For da Costa, the law repeatedly said ‘do good so that it 1 06 Ibid. 107 Ibid., 53: ‘Quod et Servator noster non obscure innuit, cum resurrectionem mortuorum colligit Mat. Xxii. non ex promisso aliquo legi addito sed ex generali tantum illo promisso Dei, quo se Deum Abrahami, Isaaci, et Jacobi futurum spoponderat: quae tamen illa collectio magis nititur cognitione intentionis divinae sub generalibus istis verbis occultatae aut comprehensae, de qua Christo certo constabat, quam necessaria consequentia, sive verborum vi ac virtute manifesta, qualis nunc et in verbis Novi Testamenti, ubi vita aeterna et resurrectio mortuorum proram et puppim faciunt totius religionis Christianae, et tam clare ac diserte promittuntur ut ne hiscere quidem contra quis possit’. 108 Ibid. 109 Much has been written on the history of Jewish communities in the Dutch Republic. In English, see Miriam Bodian, Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam (Indiana, 1997); Daniel M. Swetschinski, Reluctant Cosmopolitans: The Portuguese Jews of Seventeenth-​Century Amsterdam (Liverpool, 2004); and the essays in The Dutch Intersection: The Jews and the Netherlands in Modern History, ed. Yosef Kaplan (Leiden, 2008). 110 Uriel da Costa, ‘Exame das tradições phariseas’, in Uriel da Costa: Examination of Pharisaic Traditions, eds. and trans. H.P. Salomon and I.S.D. Sassoon (Leiden, 1993), 316. For

162 Pfeffer go well with thee and with your children after thee’.111 More dangerously, da Costa used this argument to undermine the doctrine of the soul’s immortality. For example, da Costa maintained that Genesis 3:19 (‘…for dust thou art, and unto dust thou return’) revealed that man was created mortal and subject to death.112 In contrast with many of the writers discussed above, da Costa was not interested in the differences between the Old and New Testaments, and given his re-​conversion to Judaism upon his arrival in Hamburg in 1614, this is not particularly surprising. Instead, Da Costa wanted to identify discrepancies between the Torah and the Oral Tradition, the latter of which he viewed as a corrupt fable. Before emigrating with his family, da Costa studied Canon Law at Coimbra intermittently between 1600 and 1608, served as secretary to the archbishopric of Coimbra, acted as treasurer to the church of São Martinho de Cedofeita, and took minor orders, receiving the tonsure.113 While da Costa may have come to his views about the scriptures and immortality by taking seriously some claims about the Old Testament made in passing by his rivals in the 1610s and early 20s, he needed to look no further than the classics of Christian theology for claims about the Pentateuch and immortality, texts to which he had ready access as a converso.114 For the most part the above debates took place in theological mode, even though the question of immortality—​and the immortality of the soul in particular—​had been discussed at length in philosophy faculties after the Fifth

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responses to da Costa, see Sina Rauschenbach, ‘Mediating Jewish Knowledge: Menasseh ben Israel and the Christian Respublica litteraria’, The Jewish Quarterly Review 102 (2012), 561–​88. For interaction between the Jewish community and its Christian neighbours, see Yosef Kaplan, An Alternative Path to Modernity: The Sephardi Diaspora in Western Europe (Leiden, 2000), 30–​7. Da Costa, Exame, 330. Ibid., 313. H.P. Salomon and I.S.D. Sassoon, ‘Introduction’, in Uriel da Costa, 4–​7. While da Costa claimed that all he knew of Judaism came only from the scriptures, it is now clear that he and his mother were ‘Marranos’, Jews who continued to practice Judaism in secret after their forced conversion to Christianity. I.S. Revah, Uriel da Costa et Les Marranes de Porto (Paris, 2004), esp. 513–​29. Da Costa first aired his claims publicly while living in Hamburg in a 1616 broadside (now lost) that he sent to the leaders of the Spanish-​Portuguese Jewish congregation in Venice. When the celebrated preacher and scholar Leon Modena rebutted da Costa’s theses in Magen ve-​sina (‘Shield and Buckler’), he advocated for the necessity of the Oral Tradition by asking ‘where [in the Laws of Moses] do we find clearly set out the survival of the soul, posthumous reward and punishment, paradise and Gehenna, resurrection, etc.?’ As has been argued, this concession was further fodder for da Costa, who had not included discussion of immortality in his original broadside but went on to make it a key focus of his larger treatise. See Salomon and Sassoon, ‘Introduction’, 28.

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Lateran Council in the early sixteenth century. In contrast to the theologians discussed above, da Costa was disputing specifically about the immortality of the soul rather than the theological question of the difference between the Testaments or covenants. Da Costa knew that in discussions of the former a philosophical perspective was called for, even if he thought that scripture offered more important and compelling proofs.115 The question of the soul’s immortality was, after all, absent from theological discussions of the differences between the Testaments; the unstated assumption was that if the Hebrews did not believe in the immortal soul or in future rewards and punishments, then they were in the wrong. However, for da Costa, the law’s silence on the issue proved that the Hebrews believed in the mortality of the soul, and were right to do so. Da Costa argued that philosophy could not demonstrate the soul’s immortality. He noted that while Aristotle posited an incorporeal soul, he affirmed that it could not exist without a body. Although one of da Costa’s opponents, Samuel da Silva, attacked his skill in philosophy, da Costa defended himself by pointing out that the two of them had attended Coimbra together, and that da Costa still had his lecture notes with him. As he proudly declared, ‘I study Aristotle too!’116 After facing excommunication and several years of public condemnation, da Costa wrote an autobiography, Exemplar humanae vitae, before shooting himself in 1640. Tellingly, when an anonymous ‘eminent citizen’ discovered the Exemplar, they sent it to none other than Episcopius, whose nephew Philipp van Limborch (1633–​1712) published it in 1687.117 Although Episcopius continually affirmed the immortality of the soul, the ‘citizen’ clearly recognized similarities between the two men’s approaches to the issue.118 What all this suggests is more openness on this issue outside of Reformed orthodoxy. The Reformed insistence on the presence of eternal life in the Old Testament makes sense in light of the increased tendency in the late sixteenth 1 15 Da Costa, Exame, 346. 116 Ibid., 362–​5. 117 The Exemplar was first printed as an appendix to Philipp van Limborch’s De veritate religionis Christianae amica collatio cum Erudito Judaeo (Amsterdam, 1687). It was published in Dutch at the same time, reprinted in Latin in Basel in 1740, and translated into English as The Remarkable Life of Uriel Acosta (London, 1740). For the Exemplar being sent to Episcopius, see the introduction to Remarkable Life, 94. Notably, Van Limborch also argued that the Old Testament did not mention an afterlife, and promised only earthly rewards: see Peter van Rooden and J. W. Wesselius, ‘The Early Enlightenment and Judaism: The “Civil Dispute” between Philippus Van Limborch and Isaac Orobio De Castro (1687)’, Studia Rosenthaliana 21 (1987), 140–​53. 118 For Episcopius on the immortality of the soul, see Ellis, Episcopius’ Doctrine, 113, 153–​5; Episcopius, Institutes theologicae, chap. 5.

164 Pfeffer and early seventeenth century for Reformed theologians to claim that the types of the Old Testament were so clear that the patriarchs and Hebrew people understood them. For example, Franciscus Junius, Arminius’s predecessor in the Leiden theology chair, was clear about the intelligibility of Old Testament types. For Arminius, meanwhile, the Jews were not able to understand anything specific about Christ from the types.119 The Reformed position on the Pentateuch and immortality was nevertheless forged in the fires of inter-​ confessional polemic. As we have seen, Calvin was willing to acknowledge that the message of eternal life in the Old Testament was far from explicit. When later in the century the famous Dutch covenant theologian Herman Witsius (1636–​1708) was even more concerned with the Socinians, he argued that God promised eternal life through his first covenant with Adam. It is not surprising, Witsius claimed, that we find no explicit mention of this in the Old Testament, for Moses only ‘sparingly’ described the terms of the covenant, as it was soon to be replaced by another.120 3

Socinianism, Mortalism, and Hebraism in England

In 1552, the Forty-​Two Articles of the English Church already addressed the Anabaptist threat by explicitly maintaining that the Old Testament was not contrary to the New, for in both eternal life was offered to humankind. It was wrong, therefore, to suggest that ‘the old Fathers did look only for transitory promises’. This formulation was retained in the Thirty-​Nine Articles. Nonetheless, the claim that eternal life was not in the Pentateuch nevertheless proved influential in England, where Anabaptism, Socinianism, and Arminianism also gained ground partly as a result of migration and close commercial ties with the Low Countries.121 Socinianism arrived in England through a number of channels, but particularly through the Racovian Catechism, based on Socinus’s manuscripts and compiled by Völkel and others. It was printed in Raków in 1605 and in England in 1609. To the question of whether promises of eternal life were contained in the laws of Moses, the text answered ‘no’. But did this mean that the Hebrews did not believe in the doctrine? Well, nothing stopped them from hoping for eternal life, considering how desirable it

1 19 Hardy, Criticism and Confession, 129–​30. 120 Herman Witsius, The Oeconomy of the Covenants, between God and Man [1677], trans. anon., 2 vols. (New York, 1804), 1:82–​6. 121 McLachlan, Socinianism, 30.

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was.122 The German Socinian Joachim Stegmann (1595–​1633) advanced similar ideas in his Brevis disquisitio (1633), which was translated into English by John Biddle (1615–​62) and published in London in 1653.123 As suggested above, the claim that the Old Testament did not contain promises of eternal life was useful for supporting mortalism, which had been available in England at least since the publications of William Tyndale and John Frith in the 1520s and 1530s.124 The mortalist work of General Baptists, Muggletonians, and other mid-​century mortalist sects were important in spreading these ideas in the 1640s and 1650s.125 Moreover, the claim that the Old Testament contained no explicit mention of eternal rewards and punishments was relatively easy to find in writings on covenant theology and theological works that did not expressly counter Anabaptism or Socinianism.126 However, in more polemical contexts tensions were high. The biblical commentator Henry Hammond (1605–​1660), who had Arminian sympathies but was concerned with responding to the threat posed by Brevis disquisitio, argued that not only the resurrection but also the immortality of the soul could be proved ‘by the testimony of the Law’.127 The Reformed clergyman Francis Roberts (1609–​1675), citing the Racovian Catechism, attacked the ‘vanity of the Socinian Errour’ that eternal life was never promised under the Old Testament.128 In Cambridge in the 1650s, as in Oxford, Reformed orthodoxy was briefly re-​established.129 It was 1 22 The Racovian Catechisme (Amsterdam, 1652), 113. 123 Bryan Ball, The Soul Sleepers: Christian Mortalism from Wycliffe to Priestley (Cambridge, 2008), 78–​80. 124 For early English mortalism, see Norman T. Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton (Cambridge, MA, 1972), chap. 1. 125 The Baptist George Hammon published several mortalist works in the 1650s, which claimed that the immortal soul was not in the Old Testament, including A Discovery of the Latitude of the Loss of the Earthly Paradise by Original Sin (London, 1655). The second edition of Richard Overton’s mortalist tract, Man Wholly Mortal, appeared in the same year. See also John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton, A Transcendent Spiritual Treatise (London, 1652) and John Reeve, A Divine Looking Glass (London, 1656), both of which cited several Old Testament passages to argue for the mortality of the soul. 126 See, for example, John Ball, A Treatise of the Covenant of Grace (London, 1645), 10; John Bisco, The Glorious Mystery of Gods Mercy: Or, A Precious Cordiall for Fainting Soules (London, 1647), 192; Herbert Thorndike, An Epilogue to the Tragedy of the Church of England (London, 1659), 81. 127 Henry Hammond, Annotations on the New Testament (London, 1653), 107. 128 Francis Roberts, Mysterium & Medulla Bibliorum (London, 1657), 843, see also 884–​5, 1130. Similar concerns and arguments were raised in Thomas Blake, Vindiciae foederis (London, 1658), 219–​21 and Anthony Burgess, A Treatise of Original Sin (London, 1658), 452–​3. 129 Nicholas Tyacke, ‘Religious Controversy’, in History of the University of Oxford: Volume IV Seventeenth-​Century Oxford, ed. Nicholas Tyacke (Oxford, 1997), 597.

166 Pfeffer in this context that the issue was disputed in Cambridge in 1655, in an anti-​ Socinian disputation under the moderation of John Lightfoot. Lightfoot matriculated from Christ’s College, Cambridge in 1617, and proceeded to ba in 1621 and ma in 1624.130 According to the cleric George Bright (d. 1696), while at Cambridge Lightfoot excelled in Greek and Latin, but ‘neglected’ his Hebrew.131 This was soon rectified when in 1626 Lightfoot became chaplain to Sir Rowland Cotton, a keen Hebraist who encouraged Lightfoot to rapidly improve his language skills.132 A few years later, while working closely with the collections at Sion College in London, Lightfoot wrote his first study of Talmudic and Jewish customs, Erubhin, or, Miscellanies Christian and Judaicall (1629). In the 1640s Lightfoot served in the Westminster Assembly of Divines, where his by now immense Rabbinical knowledge proved useful on numerous occasions.133 From at least 1653, Lightfoot was involved in the production of Brian Walton’s Polyglot, perusing drafts and providing Walton with lexicons and manuscripts.134 Lightfoot was also involved in, among other projects, the preparation of Matthew Poole’s Synopsis Crticorum.135 He was appointed master of Catharine Hall, Cambridge in 1643, and was made Vice-​Chancellor of the university in 1654. By this time Cambridge University Library held a considerable array of Hebraica.136 In the 1660s in particular, Cambridge was a hub for a group of Hebraists working on a Latin translation of the Mishnah.137 As Lightfoot’s notebooks show, he often read over both Talmuds.138 During this 130 The fullest biographical account of Lightfoot is John Pitman’s ‘Preface to the Octavo Edition’, in The Whole Works of Rev. John Lightfoot, ed. John Pitman, 13 vols. (London, 1825), 1:v–​cvi. Lightfoot was one of the most eminent Hebraists and rabbinical scholars of the seventeenth century, but he has been remarkably understudied. 131 George Bright, ‘Some Account of the Life of the Reverend and Most Learned John Lightfoot’, 43–​62 in Whole Works, 1:45. 132 Ibid., 46–​7. 133 Chad Van Dixhoorn, ‘Reforming the Reformation: Theological Debate at the Westminster Assembly, 1643–​1652’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Cambridge, 2005); Chad Van Dixhoorn (ed.), The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly, 1643–​1652, 5 vols. (Oxford, 2012), vol. 1. 134 ‘Letters to and from Dr. Lightfoot’, in Whole Works, 13:348–​64. 135 Ibid., 439–​43. 136 Stefan C. Reif, Hebrew Manuscripts at Cambridge University Library: A Description and Introduction (Cambridge, 1997), 7–​15. 137 David S. Katz, ‘The Abendana Brothers and the Christian Hebraists of Seventeenth-​ Century England’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 40 (1989), 28–​52. 138 John Strype, ‘An Appendix or Collection of Some More Memorials of the Life of the Excellent Dr. John Lightfoot, Most of Them Taken from Original Letters, or MSS. of His Own’, in The Works of the Reverend and Learned John Lightfoot D.D., ed. George Bright, 2 vols. (London, 1684), 1:xiii.

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period Lightfoot published the multi-​volume Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae (1658–​1671), which as we will see discussed the beliefs of the biblical Hebrews at great length. As a Christian Hebraist, Lightfoot was interested in Jewish texts for their ability to aid Christian exegesis. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he was not studying them with a view to converting the Jews: for Lightfoot the Jews would not ultimately be converted.139 Lightfoot was also concerned with countering heterodox sects, and in his work he censured Millennialists, Anabaptists, Arians, and Socinians, denouncing popery, Quakerism, and Socinianism in particular as heresies.140 In 1655, on account of the illness of his colleague John Arrowsmith (1602–​ 1659), Lightfoot served as moderator to a divinity disputation that addressed whether ‘Vita aeterna promissa fuit sub Veteri Testamento’. While the theses and argumentation have unfortunately not survived, Lightfoot’s Latin determination on the question has. Here Lightfoot was concerned with combatting the implications that Socinians had drawn from these debates.141 A second question disputed alongside this was also directed against a key Socinian doctrine: ‘Status Integritatis fuit status Immortalitatis’.142 For Lightfoot, by maintaining that eternal life was not promised under the Old Testament, Socinians were ‘Sadducising’.143 The respondent, Theophilus Dillingham (1613–​1678), later Master of Clare Hall and Archdeacon of Bedford, composed 32 lines of verse relating to the question.144 Serving as opponents to the disputation were other heavy-​weight scholars, including Ralph Cudworth, Regius Professor of Hebrew and Master of Clare Hall, Cambridge at the time.145 Cudworth was a well-​suited opponent: he had Arminian sympathies, and had read 139 Jace R. Broadhurst, What is the Literal Sense?: Considering the Hermeneutic of John Lightfoot (Eugene, or., 2012), 11; Chaim Eliezer Schertz, ‘Christian Hebraism in 17th-​ Century England as Reflected in the Works of John Lightfoot’ (Ph.D., diss., New York University, 1983). 140 Schertz, ‘Christian Hebraism’, 35. Lightfoot, ‘Creed of the Sadducees’, in Whole Works, 7:286–​7: ‘The great heresy abroad, in one party, is Popery…The great heresy abroad, in another party, is Socinianism…And I must be excused, if I take Quakerism to be a directful heresy’. 141 John Lightfoot, ‘Determinatio’, in Whole Works, 5:402. 142 For the Socinian idea that Adam was created mortal, see Mario Biagioni, The Radical Reformation and the Making of Modern Europe (Leiden, 2016), 65–​9; Mark A. Herzer, ‘Adam’s Reward: Heaven or Earth?’, in Drawn into Controversie: Reformed Theological Diversity and Debates Within Seventeenth-​Century British Puritanism, eds. Michael A.G. Haykin and Mark Jones (Göttingen, 2011), 162–​82. 143 Lightfoot, ‘Determinatio’, 405. 144 Theophilus Dillingham, Status integritatis fuit status immortalitatis (Cambridge, 1655). 145 John Hall, Cambridge Act and Tripos Verses, 1565–​1894 (Cambridge, 2009), 151.

168 Pfeffer Episcopius’s works by the following decade at the latest.146 Referring to the arguments submitted in confirmation of the question by the respondent, and those in rebuttal offered by Cudworth and others, Lightfoot suggested that the latter had the more difficult task. This was because the promise of eternal life shone throughout the whole Old Testament. Lightfoot structured his determinatio around three main Socinian claims. The first was that there was no mention of eternal life in the Old Testament, especially in the law. Here Lightfoot specifically cited the arguments of Völkel. Lightfoot conceded that eternal life was more clearly revealed under the New Testament, but this did not mean that the promise was not clearly revealed in the Old. Immortality was offered under the Jewish covenant, just more obscurely and as if in a dull whisper (obscurius et quasi languidiore susurro). The Jews were, in any case, still able to recognise the promise. The key difference between the Old and New Testaments was that in the latter it was revealed that eternal life was also available to the gentiles.147 The second Socinian claim was that in the New Testament the revelation of immortality was ascribed only to the gospel. In response, Lightfoot cited 1 Peter 1:10–​12 and Hebrews 8:8–​9. The former suggested that the prophets foretold of the grace that would come to them through Christ, and the latter that the Jews of the Old Testament were expectant of a new covenant. It was true, Lightfoot argued, that the final and most noble disclosure (summa et nobilissima detectio) of eternal life was reserved for Christ, but if the Jews studied the prophets closely, and had the help of the spirit, they could have grasped the hope of a future state. Finally, the Socinians claimed that the disciples did not recognise the death and resurrection of Christ as a foreshadowing of eternal life, and this suggested that the Jews had no knowledge of the promise. In response, Lightfoot distinguished between the time of the law of Moses (which extended to the death of Malachi), and the time of the Pharisees. In the latter, the Jews were more interested in the vanities of the Pharisees, and so lost touch with true tradition, and this explained why the disciples, educated under the Pharisees, were ignorant of Christ’s death and resurrection. But this did not mean that the same was true of the Hebrews under Moses.148 It was absurd to

146 Dmitri Levitin, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science (Cambridge, 2015), 511–​12. Cudworth would come to explain that the meaning of 2 Timothy 1:10 was that while the Jews believed in the immortal soul, they wrongly believed in the transmigration of souls: Ralph Cudworth, True Intellectual System (London, 1678), 568. 147 Lightfoot, ‘Determinatio’, 406–​9, 411. 148 Ibid., 407–​13.

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think that God had guided the Israelites for three and a half thousand years, and yet revealed nothing of eternal life.149 Like Episcopius, Lightfoot was more cautious on this issue in a pedagogical and polemical context than he was elsewhere. In his sermons and commentaries, Lightfoot was less reticent to acknowledge that the revelation of eternal life in the Old Testament was, in fact, severely limited. For example, in a sermon on Exodus 20:12, ‘The Blessings of Long Life’, Lightfoot claimed that Christ proved the resurrection to the Sadducees in Matthew only ‘by an obscure collection or deduction’ from the laws of Moses. Christ would never have done this ‘had there been plain and evident proof’.150 In fact, the promises given to Israel in the law were ‘promises temporal, or of things concerning this life’. This was clear from Exodus 20:12, as well as Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, which only referred to ‘temporal and bodily things’.151 Lightfoot was, apparently, now ‘Sadducising’ himself. Although he cited Hebrews 8:8–​9 in his Determinatio, Lightfoot now cited Hebrews 8:6, which maintained that the gospel was established on better promises. And, he argued, ‘[i]‌f the promises of the law had been heavenly promises, there could not have been “better promises” ’.152 In a curious one-​page document, Promissiones Diviniae, quae Judaicae Ecclesiae…Breviter Collectae ex Prophetis (undated), Lightfoot listed several promises, but again all were temporal.153 In the laws of Moses there was ‘[n]‌o mention of eternal life, joys of heaven, salvation, or everlasting glory’, and this is the reason that the Sadducees denied the world to come.154 In Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae, much of Lightfoot’s discussion of this question centred around the origins and beliefs of the Sadducees. Lightfoot offered two main accounts of their origins. The first held that Zadoc birthed the Sadducean heresy when he misinterpreted the teachings of his master, Antigonus Socheus, mistakenly thinking that he had taught that there were no future rewards or punishments.155 This account was drawn from Maimonides.156 But after reading more of the work of the second-​century Rabbi Nathan, Lightfoot decided that 149 Ibid., 405: ‘Quam absurdum et monstro simile sit, cogitare Deum, per ter millenos et quingentos pluresque annos, ecclesiam sub vera eaque severa religione exercuisse, nulla interim vitae aeternae exhibita vel promissione vel mentione?’ 150 John Lightfoot, ‘The Blessings of Long Life’, in Whole Works, 7:393. 151 Ibid., 7:392. 152 Ibid., 7:393. 153 John Lightfoot, ‘Promissiones Diviniae, quae Judaicae Ecclesiae…Breviter Collectae ex Prophetis’, in Whole Works, 2:444. 154 Lightfoot, ‘Long Life’, 7:392. 155 John Lightfoot, ‘Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae’, in Whole Works, 11:74. 156 The source is Maimonides, Pirkei Avot, 1.3.

170 Pfeffer the Sadducean sect did not arise until long after Zadoc’s death.157 The heresy itself had been around long before this, in the days of Ezra, and stemmed from a misreading of Ezekiel 37.158 Moreover, the Sadducee’s denial of a future state, based on the claim that ‘Moses was of the same opinion’, was in some ways understandable, as Moses only ‘obscurely’ gestured towards this article of faith.159 Why was eternal life not fully revealed in the Pentateuch? Lightfoot’s view was that God was content to delay its full revelation because he had actually already given the Hebrews heavenly promises, long before the laws of Moses. In fact, they were promised to Adam on his first day, at around 3pm. For this Lightfoot leaned on Moses’s reference to ‘the cool of the day’ in Genesis 3:8, and Paul’s claim in Titus 1:2 that eternal life was promised before the world began.160 To Lightfoot, the Old Testament was composed of numerous ‘types and shadows’, and for the most part the Jews misunderstood the meaning of the types.161 However, the knowledge that God revealed to Adam enabled the Hebrews to understand that the temporal promises of the law pointed to things eternal. Earthly promises were used because the Israelite church was in its infancy, and therefore found it easier to be sensible of earthly things than of spiritual things.162 By explaining the revelation of eternal life in this way, Lightfoot’s emphasis in his published work on the temporal rewards of the Pentateuch was not in contradiction to his more reserved claims in his determinatio. Moses mentioned only temporal promises, but this did not mean that the Hebrews had no knowledge of future rewards and punishments. This was, after all, an analogous position to that adopted in the Westminster Confession of Faith (1647), which Lightfoot was involved in composing.163 But even if 157 Lightfoot, ‘Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae’, in Whole Works, 8:486–​8. The source is Avot de-​Rabbi Natan, chap. 5. 158 Lightfoot, ‘Horae Hebraicae et Talmudicae’, 8:490. 159 John Lightfoot, ‘A Sermon preached at Hertford Assize, March 27, 1699’, in Whole Works, 6:250. 160 Lightfoot, ‘Long Life’, 7:395–​6; John Lightfoot, ‘A Sermon preached upon Exodus, xx.11’, in Whole Works, 7:378–​9; John Lightfoot, ‘Harmony and Chronicle of the Old Testament’, in Whole Works, 2:74. 161 For a discussion of Lightfoot’s views on typology and allegory, see Broadhurst, Literal Sense, 160–​95. Lightfoot never clearly explained his understanding of typology, so his views must be gathered from the ways in which ‘type’ and ‘figure’ are used throughout his work. He justifies typological interpretations on the grounds that ‘he found a correspondence’: see ibid., 188. 162 Lightfoot, ‘Long Life’, 7:397–​8. 163 The Humble Advice of the Assembly of Divines…Concerning a Confession of Faith (London, 1646), 15–​17, 32.

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Lightfoot’s views as presented in his determination were not wholly inconsistent with what he claimed in other contexts, it is nevertheless clear that when Lightfoot specifically addressed Socinianism he took a more cautious stance, even citing different biblical passages as evidence in different contexts. The continued importance of the question to English theological pedagogy over the next few decades is evident from the fact that in 1671 another Cambridge disputation addressed whether eternal life was known under the Mosaic law.164 Oxford disputations also addressed the issue in 1669, 1671, and 1674.165 While the theses and argumentation of these disputations have not survived, it is likely that they were stimulated by the Harmonia Apostolica (1669) by the theologian George Bull (1634–​1710). Bull’s book, which boasted the imprimatur of the Archbishop of Canterbury Gilbert Sheldon,166 noted that there was much doubt about whether the Old Testament contained any promises of eternal life.167 Bull began by distinguishing between the covenant at Mount Sinai, and the writings of Moses, the hagiographers, and the prophets. While there was no ‘clear or eloquent promise of eternal life’, there were at best indications of a future life in Psalms, Daniel, and Ezekiel.168 We know that Bull was in general influenced by Grotius and Episcopius.169 One modern commentator has suggested that Bull’s claims about the immortality and the Pentateuch meant that Bull had ‘wittingly or not, imported into England, and disseminated, some of the key propositions of Socinian doctrines’.170 However, as a comparison with Lightfoot’s views (and those offered by other theologians above) suggests, one did not have to be a Socinian to argue that the Pentateuch did not explicitly contain eternal promises. In one of his defences, Bull claimed that ‘if this be Socinianism, Sadduceeism, or blasphemy, then (I shudder as I write the words) have the inspired writers of the New Testament…

1 64 Hall, Act and Tripos Verses, 165: ‘Vita aeterna innotuit Judaeis sub lege Mosaica’. 165 Bod. ms nep/​supra/​Reg Qb [Register of Congregation 1659–​69], fol. 176r; nep/​supra/​Reg Bd [Register of Congregation, 1669–​80], fols. 203r, 43v. 166 However, this was granted only after Bull had failed to get the approval of the Reformed Vice-​ Chancellor of Oxford Robert Saye in the mid-​ 1660s; see Tyacke, ‘Religious Controversy’, 606–​7. 167 George Bull, Harmonia Apostolica (London, 1670), 215–​ 16: ‘Primo quaeritur an in V. Testamento nullum omnino exstet vitae aeternae promissum? De eo enim a nonnullis dubitatur’. 168 Ibid.: ‘clarum ac disertum aeternae vitae promissum’. 169 See Robert Nelson, The Life of George Bull (London, 1713), passim; Stephen Hampton, Anti-​Arminians: The Anglican Reformed Tradition from Charles II to George I (Oxford, 2008), 68–​9. 170 Ibid., 75–​6.

172 Pfeffer put Socinianism, Sadduceeism and blasphemy before us in many passages’.171 Again like Lightfoot, Bull was clear that the absence of eternal life in the Mosaic Law did not mean that the Jews did not believe in immortality. On the contrary, God ensured that the Jews would not ‘remain in the letter of the law’ by providing a ‘tradition’ of a future state, handed down from the patriarchs, that would ‘flourish even under the law’, and be ‘explained and confirmed by the preaching of the prophets’. Clearly, then, ‘the existence of the soul after the death of the body was believed by the oldest of the Jews’.172 On this matter Bull influenced leading figures such as John Tillotston, Sheldon’s successor as Archbishop of Canterbury.173 As Tillotson put it: ‘[t]‌he Promises and Threatnings of the Law were only of temporal good and evil things’.174 But this did not mean that the Jews did not expect a future state: on the contrary, the light of nature ‘suggested [it] to them’, albeit in ‘a wavering and uncertain’ way.175 Similar sentiments appeared in the work of scholars such as Humphrey Hody. Hody claimed that the doctrine of the immortal soul was not a necessary article of faith amongst the Jews, and this was demonstrated by the Sadducees, who despite their denial of this doctrine were admitted as ‘true Israelites’, and played important roles in the temple.176 Similarly, Jeremy Taylor argued that the promises of the Mosaic law were only of temporal blessings in this life, and that whatever spiritual blessings were promised within these were kept obscure and dark, and were understood by very few. This explained why the Sadducees, ‘a considerable Sect in that Church’, denied a future state.177 These views were in line with recent developments in scholarship. John Marsham and John Spencer had concluded that the Hebrews were philosophically primitive and had derived their rites from the Egyptians.178 As is often overlooked, both also claimed that the Hebrews did 1 71 George Bull, Examen Censurae, trans. various (Oxford, 1843), 206–​7. 172 Ibid., 213–​14. 173 Hampton, Anti-​Arminians, 61–​3. 174 John Tillotson, Several Discourses of Death and Judgement, and a Future State, 9 vols. (London, 1697), 4:115–​16, 125. 175 Ibid., 125. See also John Tillotson, ‘Sermon I. Of the Nature of Faith in General’, in Sermons, ed. Ralph Barker, 12 vols. (London, 1703), 12:2. 176 Humphrey Hody, The Resurrection of the (Same) Body Asserted (London, 1694), 54, 89, 93–​4. 177 Jeremy Taylor, Antiquitates Christianae, or, The History of the Life and Death of the Holy Jesus (London, 1675), xlvii–​xlviii. See also Richard Kidder, The Christian Sufferer Supported (London, 1680), 45, 73. 178 See now Dmitri Levitin, ‘John Spencer’s De Legibus Hebraeorum (1683–​ 85) and “Enlightened” Sacred History: A New Interpretation’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 76 (2013), 49–​92.

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not fully understand immortality. Spencer, for one, claimed that the mystery of immortality was declared obscurely to the Hebrews, and under the veil of earthly things; it was left for the Messiah to bring forth life and immortality clearly.179 Marsham was more forceful about Hebrew ignorance: ‘post-​mortem conditions little troubled them’.180 For Spencer and Marsham, Hebraic primitiveness highlighted ‘God’s need to operate in historical time through divine condescension’.181 Yet for the physician William Coward, Hebraic primitiveness instead meant that the Hebrews were not contaminated by heathen philosophy, and therefore should in fact be trusted. When Coward published mortalist and materialist views about the human soul in the early 1700s, he argued that ‘the generality of the Jews, nay, I may say universally, were of the Opinion, That Man would die and never live again, especially the Sadduce[e]‌s’.182 Like da Costa, Coward was interested first and foremost in disputing the immortality of the soul, so he also brought a philosophical perspective to bear on the question. Yet it was Coward’s claims about the biblical Hebrews that incensed his old Oxford friend William Nicholls, who responded in volume five of his Conference with a Theist (1703). Here Nicholls spent many pages arguing that the immortality of the soul and the existence of future rewards and punishments were key parts of Jewish dogma. Notably, Nicholl’s arguments came not from the Pentateuch, but from Samuel (the account of the witch of Endor), Maccabees (the account of the mother and her sons who died for their faith) and later Jewish writers like Maimonides and Rabbi Levi.183 In a polemical atmosphere where mortalists like Coward were drawing on scholarship about the Old Testament to undermine the immortality of the soul, theologians like Nicholls were careful to defend the ‘orthodoxy’ of ancient Hebrew belief.

179 John Spencer, De legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus (The Hague, 1686), 1:16: ‘Mosis erat rerum coelestium umbras tantum & lineas quasdam obscuriores describere: vitam & immortalitatem in clarem lucem proferre, opus erat soli Messiae reservatum’. 180 John Marsham, Chronicus canon Aegyptiacus, Ebraicus, Graecus et disquisitiones (London, 1672), 217: ‘De statu post Mortem illi minus erant solliciti’. This translation is Dmitri Levitin’s in Ancient Wisdom, 163. 181 Dmitri Levitin, ‘From Sacred History to the History of Religion: Paganism, Judaism, and Christianity in European Historiography from Reformation to “Enlightenment” ’, The Historical Journal 55, (2012), 1139. 182 Coward, Second Thoughts, 395. 183 William Nicholls, Conference with a Theist, Part V (London, 1703), 228–​41.

174 Pfeffer 4

Conclusion

We can draw three broad implications from the story told in this chapter. The first is that the centrality of typological argument to this issue demonstrates that typology remained important to theologians and exegetes long after the Reformation. Even Socinians relied heavily on typological interpretation when they addressed the matter. Different ideas about the clarity of Old Testament types were central to how theologians answered the question of Hebrew belief. While we now know that Protestant exegetes typically ‘smuggled’ a rich variety of interpretive strategies into the literal sense, studies of the steady persistence of typology in post-​Reformation exegesis are lacking.184 By tracing the fortunes of a particular typological interpretation in sixteenth and seventeenth-​century Protestant exegesis, this essay begins to fill this gap. Further insights into the survival of typology into the eighteenth century could be gathered by studying the extensive debate over Warburton’s Divine Legation, in which typology remained central.185 Secondly, although it had patristic and even Calvinist precedent, the spectres of heterodoxy and the religious ‘other’ made the claim about the Old Testament and eternal life far more pressing. The claim was made more controversial through its newfound association with Anabaptism and Socinianism in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, even if its Arminian adoption helped it to return to the mainstream in England in the later seventeenth century. But closer inspection reveals that scholars and theologians on both sides were largely in agreement about the main question. The difference between the views presented by Calvin, Völkel, Gomarus, Arminius, Episcopius, Hommius, Lightfoot, and Bull was, on balance, not all that great. They all agreed, though some argued more strongly than others, that the Pentateuch did not explicitly promise eternal life. The difference between the old and new covenants was a constant theme of the New Testament, so it was difficult to maintain that they were the same in every respect. The related assertion that the Hebrews had no knowledge or belief in a future state was undoubtedly more contentious, but a hard stance on this is relatively difficult to find. Even for Völkel, the obscureness of the types notwithstanding, the Hebrews found the truth about immortality through the light of nature. Even Toland, though 184 For useful overviews about the wealth of hermeneutic strategies used by Protestants, see the contributions in Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c.1530–​1700, eds. Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith, and Rachel Willie (Oxford, 2015), chaps. 7–​15. The continued importance of typology is emphasised in Hardy, Criticism and Paul. J. Korshin, Typologies in England, 1650–​1820 (Princeton, 1982). 185 See, for example, Robert Lowth, A Letter to the Right Reverend Dr. Warburton (London, 1760).

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he was clear that Moses did not teach the immortality of the soul, did not claim that the Hebrews themselves had no knowledge of a future state. In this sense, Toland’s claim about Moses and immortality was not heterodox per se—​and it was certainly not simply a ‘deist’ claim. It was the anti-​clerical uses to which Toland put the idea that caught Warburton’s eye. Coward, on the other hand, was adamant that the Hebrews did not believe in the immortality of the soul, and this idea, alongside the materialist conclusions he drew from it, in some senses made him the more dangerous of the two. What this suggests is that the dangers lay primarily in the uses to which claims about the Old Testament and eternal life were put, and the theological systems within which such claims were implanted. Finally, although da Costa, Coward, and Toland were definitely heterodox, and certainly used the Pentateuch’s supposed lack of eternal promises for heterodox ends, the basic idea did not originate with them. As has been argued in other contexts, ‘deist’ arguments were often recycled from orthodox scholarship.186 This is demonstrably the case for Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke, who in ‘A Letter, occasioned by one of Archbishop Tillotson’s Sermons’ followed on from Tillotson’s suggestions regarding Hebrew belief in eternal life with a discussion of how the immortality of the soul did not prevail among the Jews until they became ‘acquainted’ with Greek philosophy.187 Yet this story cannot be reduced to a teleological narrative in which religious heterodoxy stimulated innovative scholarship while ‘orthodox’ scholars merely toed the outdated party line. While talk of ‘self-​defeating scholarship’ has become increasingly common, we cannot assume that deism was the telos of the story. Warburton’s unconventional but highly influential scholarly response to deism suggests that claims such as this which acquired radical, anti-​clerical meaning, could also later be defused. 186 For some examples of this argument, see Jonathan Sheehan, ‘Sacred and Profane: Idolatry, Antiquarianism and the Polemics of Distinction in the Seventeenth Century’, Past & Present 192 (2006), 35–​66; Richard Serjeantson, ‘David Hume’s Natural History of Religion (1757) and the End of Modern Eusebianism’, in The Intellectual Consequences of Religious Heterodoxy, eds. Sarah Mortimer and John Robertson (Leiden, 2012), 267–​95. 187 Viscount Bolingbroke, ‘A Letter, Occasioned by One of Archbishop Tillotson’s Sermons’, in The Works of Lord Bolingbroke, 4 vols. (Philadelphia, 1841), 3:526–​7. Bolingbroke was referring to the sermons collected in John Tillotson, Sermons sur diverses matières importantes, ed. J. Barbeyrac (Amsterdam, 1718).

pa rt 3 Medicine

∵

­c hapter 6

Sacred Medicine in Early Modern Europe Jetze Touber The importance of the classical tradition for medical knowledge in early modern Europe has been acknowledged, and studied, for a long time. Deference to the authority of a range of ancient medical authors, gravitating around the Hippocratic and Galenic corpora, was an essential feature of academic medical education throughout the period, even into the nineteenth century. During the past decades historical studies have reconnected the early modern appeal to the classical medical heritage with supposedly ‘modern’ developments, such as anatomical investigation and pharmaceutical experimentation, in ever more sophisticated ways. We know now that re-​use of ancient medicine and philosophy in early modern European medical scholarship was in no way static or uniform.1 Moreover, beyond the technical content of medical knowledge, the ‘self-​fashioning’ of medical professionals as accomplished scholars, as historians and rhetoricians, has also increasingly been the focus of attention.2 Practitioners of learned medicine were fully engaged in philological and antiquarian studies, in fields far beyond what we would deem properly ‘medical’.3 A good number of medical scholars were distinguished citizens of the Republic of Letters, or at least active in a medical counterpart to the Republic of Letters.4 1 E.g. Andrea Carlino, La fabbrica del corpo. Libri e dissezione nel Rinascimento (Turin, 1994); Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomical Renaissance: The Resurrection of the Anatomical Projects of the Ancients (Aldershot, 1997); Hiro Hirai, Le concept de sémence dans les théories de la matière à la Renaissance: de Marsile Ficin à Pierre Gassendi (Turnhout, 2005); Dmitri Levitin, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science: Histories of Philosophy in England, c.1640–​1700 (Cambridge, 2015) 252–​313; and the contribution of Ian Maclean to this volume. 2 Notably in the works of Nancy G. Siraisi: ‘Anatomizing the Past: Physicians and History in Renaissance Culture’, Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000), 1–​30; ‘History, Antiquarianism, and Medicine: The Case of Girolamo Mercuriale’, Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003), 231–​52; ‘Oratory and Rhetoric in Renaissance Medicine’, Journal of the History of Ideas 65 (2004), 191–​ 201; History, Medicine and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning (Ann Arbor, 2007). 3 Peter Burke, ‘Images as Evidence in Seventeenth-​Century Europe’, Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003), 273–​96; Nancy G. Siraisi, ‘Historiae, natural history, Roman antiquity, and some Roman physicians’, in Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe, eds. Gianna Pomata and Nancy G. Siraisi (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 325–​54. 4 Ian Maclean, ‘The Medical Republic of Letters before the Thirty Years War’, Intellectual History Review 18 (2008), 15–​30.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004462335_008

180 Touber Much less well explored are attempts by academically trained scholars to relate medical knowledge to the textual traditions of the Christian religion: a commentary tradition which I denote with the term medicina sacra.5 This seems to have been a typically early modern phenomenon, with works which positioned the medical arts vis-​à-​vis the Bible appearing across Europe. In these endeavours, medical scholarship needed to be aligned with the sacred authority of Scripture. This resulted in intricate constructions which combined the historical traditions of biblical exegesis, the erudition of medical humanism, and the immediate professional concerns of the medical authors in question, including topical discussions such as the epistemological status of anatomical dissection and the theory of matter pertinent to the study of life. This paper examines the intellectual, social and institutional conditions in which attitudes toward the relationship between medicine and the Bible developed and evolved between 1575 and 1750. A comparative approach will expose the varying purposes and results of attempts to align the Graeco-​Arabic medical corpus with biblical history. After some preliminary considerations of terminology and historiography, a survey of the protagonists of early modern medicina sacra will introduce the subject matter. A diachronic sampling will then suggest the extent to which ancient textual sources retained their value in the analysis of the medical content of the Bible. Finally, this inquiry will turn to the social, institutional and intellectual contexts which conditioned the various ways in which scholarly engagement with ancient texts served to embed medicine in the sacred orders of nature and society. The aim is to illustrate how the field of early modern medicine saw a persistent coexistence of the ancient and the modern, even though their mutual relation was never stable. 1

Medicina sacra: Preliminaries

Before examining the individual contributions to medicina sacra, the subject matter requires some preliminary demarcation and historiographical 5 An exception is Francisco Valles, whose De iis, quae scripta sunt physice (1588) has drawn the attention of several historians: Ann Blair, ‘Mosaic Physics and the Search for a Pious Natural Philosophy in the Late Renaissance’, Isis 91 (2000), 32–​58; Kathleen M. Crowther, ‘Sacred Philosophy, Secular Theology: the Mosaic Physics of Levinus Lemnius (1505–​1568) and Francisco Vallés (1524–​1592)’, in Nature and Scripture in the Abrahamic Religions: Up To 1700, eds. Jitse M. van der Meer and Scott Mandelbrote, (Leiden, 2008) i:397–​428; Bernd Roling, ‘Der Bibel als Summe der Naturwissenschaften: Die “Philosophia sacra” des Franciscus Vallesius’, in Hermeneutik, Methodenlehre, Exegese: Zur Therie der Interpretation in der Frühen Neuzeit, eds. G. Frank and S. Meier-​Oeser (Stuttgart-​Bad Canstatt, 2011), 265–​86.

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contextualisation. First of all, the term medicina sacra in itself requires elucidation. There are many different early modern intellectual pursuits for which the term medicina sacra might be appropriate. It could refer to the construal of a spiritual counterpart to the medical art. Such was, for instance, the Theologia medica (1635), published by the Jesuit Maximilian van der Sandt (1578–​1656) in Cologne. This work is geared toward combatting the epidemic of heresy, both by fostering healthy devotion and by taking precautions against contagious heterodoxy.6 Here the ‘medical’ is a metaphor for the spiritual mindset required to maintain a sound Christian community. Another possibility was to reflect on the art of medicine as an element in divine providence, and in the order of salvation. This is what the French physician Michel Baldit did in Speculum octagonum (1666).7 Baldit went to great pains to defend the medical art against misiatri, those who hated medicine. Each of the eight chapters (and two ‘appendices’, added at the beginning) underscore the involvement of divinity in the physical and mental sanity of human beings. Baldit mentions the divine origin of the efficacy of materia medica, the piety of medical practitioners, and the many saints who intercede on behalf of the sick. The book is an appeal to embrace the medical art as a divinely ordained pursuit. At the same time Baldit gives the impression of having compiled his meditation as a votive offering to the Holy Virgin after himself having been cured of a loss of voice. In 1665, a year before publication of his Speculum octagonum, he suddenly discovered that he was unable to speak. He prayed in silence to the Virgin Mary, after which he regained his speech. The ‘sacred’ in this case referred to the divine origin, and sanction, of the human art of healing. What I examine in this paper is not the use of medicine as a metaphor, nor the divine endorsement of medicine, but the application of medical expertise to sacred history. Whatever the intention of such an ­exercise –​to lend biblical lustre to the medical art, to facilitate the exegesis of thorny biblical passages, to emphasise the natural reality laying behind the biblical narrative –​the subject was medical expertise, and the object was the Bible. Thus, I use the term medicina sacra to refer to commentaries on the biblical texts composed by physicians (or theologians doubling as medical scholars). Some works, such 6 Maximilian van der Sandt, Theologia medica (Cologne, 1635). It would therefore not seem quite accurate to see Van der Sandt as a follower of Francisco Valles in legitimizing the art of medicine by appealing to the Bible. Cfr. Bernd Roling, Physica sacra: Wunder, Naturwissenschaft und historischer Schriftsinn zwischen Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Leiden, 2013), 284–​6. 7 Michel Baldit, Speculum sacro-​medicum octogonum. In quo medicina octo ex angulis, veluti totidem fontibus à primo & in primum salientibus, sacra repraesentatur (Lyon, [1666]).

182 Touber as De iis quae scripta sunt physice in libris sacris (1587) by Francisco Valles (1524–​92), and Sacra Physiologia (1655) by Johannes de Mey (1617–​78), have a broader scope than human health and disease, and shade into general natural-​ philosophical commentaries on Scripture. Others, such as Enarrationes, de aegrotis, et morbis in Evangelio (1620) by Guillaume Ader (c.1567–​c.1638) and De morbis in sacris literis pathologia (1642) by Vicente Moles (dates unknown), concentrate solely on human illness in the Bible, or even in one part of the Bible. The common denominator of all these instances of medicina sacra is that they discuss physical phenomena occurring in the biblical narrative, and predominantly issues of health, from the point of view of medical scholarship. Also, they have an encyclopaedic setup: the works are structured in brief sections, and disposed according to some ordering principle, but there is no obvious hierarchy or linear development in the single topics. The chronological arc of this paper runs from the late sixteenth to the mid-​eighteenth century. It is delimited by two major contributions to medicina sacra: the aforementioned De iis quae scripta sunt (1587), produced by Valles at the court of King Philip ii; and a publication by Richard Mead (1673–​1754), entitled Medica sacra (1751), which appeared in Georgian England. The former is a sizeable text, known as the first work in which a medical professional engaged with medical issues occurring in Scripture.8 The latter is a relatively slim volume (in length, about a half to a quarter of the other instances), and one of the first book-​length discussions of biblical health and disease to have been translated into the vernacular. Mead would seem to mark an end point, or at least a change in the way in which this kind of work was conceived. Taking medicina sacra produced during this century-​and-​a-​half as a black box, marked by the Spanish Valles at the beginning, and the English Mead at the end, our expectations of the content of the black box would probably be informed by the development in intellectual history known as the Scientific Revolution, and the concomitant upheavals in biblical interpretation. This expectation would be strengthened by the observation that up to 1650, published works of medicina sacra were produced in Catholic Southern Europe. After that, medicina sacra as defined above was confined to Protestant Northern Europe. This seems to correlate with a transition taking place in the course of this period –​observed, for example, by Peter Harrison –​where Catholic allegorical readings of both nature and Scripture became stagnant and fixed, while

8 Owsei Temkin, ‘Guillaume Ader and his Contribution to Biblical Medicine’, Bulletin of the Institute of the History of Medicine 5 (1937), 247–​58.

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Protestants’ literalism provided fertile ground in both hermeneutics and natural philosophy.9 This, then, is the expected thesis which a brief inquiry into medicina sacra of the seventeenth century should put to the test. Were Catholic practitioners of medicina sacra, the successors of Valles, trapped in a cul-​de-​sac of self-​ confirming allegoresis, reading bodily phenomena and somatic experiences from within a network of ancient textual references, both biblical and classical? Were Protestant medici sacri, the predecessors of Mead, liberated from this network, viewing the flaky skin, festering wounds and temporary insanities occurring in the Bible as natural events, hermeneutically neutered by comparison with our day-​to-​day experiences as vulnerable sinners? To put it bluntly: were the ‘ancient’ Catholic medical scholars superseded by ‘modern’ Protestant medical scholars? Leaving aside confessional peculiarities, it is pertinent to consider the chronology in the reception of the ancients in medical scholarship. Nancy Siraisi devoted her History, Medicine and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning (2007) to the close connections between medical and historical knowledge in the early modern period. She set out to demonstrate the commitment of Renaissance medical scholars to historical narrative, biographical writing, antiquarian studies, and humanist scholarship in general. Throughout the fifteenth to mid-​seventeenth centuries, professional success in medicine was often a result of proficiency in the classics. Notably, court physicians were engaged as much in writing erudite studies as they were in curing the relatives of their prince. Siraisi also notes that after the mid-​seventeenth century, a major change in European intellectual life changed humanist medical scholarship definitively. The overlapping intellectual scope of Renaissance medical and historical scholarship gave way to increasing specialisation. The historical interest of medical scholars shifted from ‘historical medicine’, to the history of medicine. It also became a more private pursuit.10 Supposedly, changes in the method and content of natural inquiry invited a new stance vis-​à-​vis the classical heritage in medical expertise, practitioners taking this heritage less as a component of an extensive knitwork of interconnected signs or symbols, and more as the documentary residue of past physical experience. We should see this reflected in the way medicina sacra took shape. 9

Peter Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Modern Science (Cambridge, 1998), 92–​120. Also Eric Jorink, Het “Boeck der Natuere”: Nederlandse geleerden en de wonderen van Gods Schepping, 1575–​1715 (Leiden, 2006), 267–​359; Ricardo J. Quinones, North/​ South: The Great European Divide (Toronto, 2016), 16–​52. 10 Siraisi, History, Medicine and the Traditions, 261–​8.

184 Touber At the same time, another dimension should be taken into account. Ann Blair’s thoughts on early modern ‘Mosaic physics’ (2000) point in another direction. Blair claimed that ‘Mosaic physics’, comprising attempts to harmonise the Book of Nature with the Word of God, was an innovation of the late sixteenth century. Deriving natural philosophy directly from Scripture, and especially from the first five books of the Bible, denoted not antiquated erudition but rather allegiance to one of the new rivals to Aristotelian scientia: Neo-​ Platonism, Stoicism, or Epicureanism. It was a way to justify philosophical innovations by embedding them in a unitary knowledge system which was in harmony with the Bible, the most authoritative textual tradition available. Blair considers such an enterprise to have been a defence of particular schools of natural philosophy against theologians critical of philosophy in general.11 Again, if Mosaic philosophy, and by implication the more narrowly conceived medicina sacra, were really offshoots of innovation in natural inquiry, involving the newly revived schools of philosophy, this should be apparent in the development of medicina sacra in the course of the early modern period. The following are the questions which will drive this inquiry: how was the appeal to ancient and modern authorities inflected differently in medicina sacra issuing from Catholic Southern Europe and Protestant Northern Europe? To what extent did medicina sacra reflect evolving relations between the social presence of medicine, on the one hand, and the authority of historical texts, sacred and pagan, on the other? And how did these evolving relations square with increasingly diverse representations of canonical antiquity in natural philosophy? 2

Medici sacri

I begin by offering a brief overview of what was actually contained in the black box of medicina sacra between 1580 and 1750. I will look first at the works published before 1650, which appeared in Spain and Italy.12 Then I turn to medicina sacra issuing from northern Europe in the period after 1650. 2.1 Medicina sacra before 1650 It seems natural to start in the Spanish kingdoms, where Francisco Valles enjoyed his stellar career. In general, Spanish history of science has been 11 12

Blair, ‘Mosaic Physics’. In this paper I do not discuss Guillaume Ader, Enarrationes, de aegrotis, et morbis in Evangelio (Toulouse, 1620), since it treats only the New Testament.

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heavily determined by entrenched historical stances. Debates have focuses on two periods: the celebrated ‘Spanish medical humanism’ during the reign of Philip ii on the one hand, and a much contested ‘Spanish Enlightenment’ after the establishment of the Bourbon dynasty in the eighteenth century on the other. The period in between, the seventeenth century, has been neglected by historians of science and medicine. The engagement of seventeenth-​century Spanish scholars and philosophers with the classical tradition, experimental science and new philosophy remains underexamined.13 During the ‘medical humanism’ of the sixteenth century Spanish medical scholars produced critical editions and commentaries of classical texts. The high point of Spanish medical humanism came with the successive generations of Cristóbal de Vega, Fernando Mena and Francisco Valles, scholars of the University of Alcalá de Henares near Madrid, who edited and commented on Aristotle and the Hippocratic corpus.14 The same period saw the introduction of anatomical dissections in medical education, on the model of Vesalius. This was stimulated by Pedro Jimeno, himself a pupil of Vesalius, who occupied the chair of medicine in Valencia. In the 1550s Jimeno introduced the practice of anatomical dissection at Alcalá, which was witnessed by Valles.15 It was Valles who laid the groundwork for early modern medicina sacra.16 In 1587 he published De iis quae scripta sunt physice in libris sacris, sive de sacra philosophia. This was a running commentary on the Bible, discussing issues pertaining to medicine and natural philosophy, with each chapter headed by the biblical verses to which that chapter was dedicated.17 The emphasis was heavily on medical phenomena occurring in the biblical narrative. Tellingly, Valles inserted a long exposition concerning the divine institution of the art of healing, occasioned by Sirach 38:1: ‘Honour the physician for the need thou hast of him: for the most High hath created him’. The chapters vary considerably in 13 14 15 16 17

William Eamon and Víctor Navarro Brotóns, Más allá de la Leyenda Negra: España y la revolución científica = Beyond the Black Legend: Spain and the Scientific Revolution (Valencia, 2007). Ana Isabel Martín Ferreira, El humanismo médico en la Universidad de Alcalá (siglo XVI) (Madrid, 1995), 58–​64. José M. López Piñero, ‘The Vesalian Movement in Sixteenth-​Century Spain’, Journal of the History of Biology 12 (1979), 45–​81; Bjørn Okholm Skaarup, Anatomy and Anatomists in Early Modern Spain (London, 2016), 19–​20, 117–​119. For Valles and his De iis, quae scripta sunt physice, see Crowther, ‘Sacred Philosophy’; Roling, ‘Der Bibel als Summe’. Francisco Valles, De iis, quae scripta sunt physice in libris sacris, sive De sacra philosophia, liber singularis (Turin, 1587). I have consulted the second edition, published together with Levinus Lemnius, De plantis sacris, and François La Rue, De gemmis: Franciscus Valles, De iis quae scripta sunt physice in libris sacris, sive de sacra philosophia (Lyon, 1588).

186 Touber length: the fatal intestinal disease of Joram (ii Chronicles 21) takes up about a page and a half, while the question whether music can induce prophecy (prompted by Eliseus, in ii Kings 3) amounts to thirty-​five pages. De iis quae scripta sunt physice in libris sacris went through several editions, and was cited by every scholar who subsequently considered natural phenomena occurring in Scripture. The history of medicine and science in Spain after Philip ii is deeply marked by the vexed question whether –​and if so, when –​a ‘Spanish enlightenment’ occurred. Debate revolves around foreign and native stimuli, respectively, to Spanish participation in scientific investigation, from about 1670 onwards. In medicine the focus has been on the acceptance of Harvey’s theory of the circulation of blood, and concomitant methodological and theoretical changes, especially experimentalism and mechanism. In question is the abandonment of the ‘university-​stagnant medical scholasticism’ with its ‘prevailing medical system—​Galenism’, by so-​called novatores.18 The period between c.1600 and c.1670, roughly coinciding with the reigns of Philip iii and Philip iv, is a somewhat barren period in Spanish intellectual history, having attracted little more than passing attention from historians.19 Consequently, we lack awareness of the very period in which a textual, academic medicine, supported by anatomical examination, was transformed into a medicine based on experimental demonstration and iatromechanics. It is therefore of interest both to the intellectual history of seventeenth-​century Spain, as well as to the history of international European scholarship in general, to discover that it was in this period that two Spanish physicians composed works of medicina sacra, contributing to a discussion which included participants from other parts of Europe reputed to be more in the vanguard of intellectual development. Moreover, this discussion was at once very textual in a classical way, and yet nuanced in its potential to apply new transgressive methods of inquiry. Two Spanish scholars followed in the footsteps of their renowned compatriot Francisco Valles. Both found themselves in the uppermost regions of the medical professional hierarchy. Vicente Moles was, like Valles before him, a personal physician to the king, Philip iv, and professor of medicine in Alcalá de Henares. He was a native of Valencia, where he studied philosophy, then 18 José Pardo-​ Tomás and Àlvar Martínez-​ Vidal, ‘Medicine and the Spanish Novator Movement: Ancients vs. Moderns, and Beyond’ in Mas allá de la Leyenda Negra, eds. Navarro Brotóns and Eamon, 323–​44. 19 Miguel López Pérez, ‘Spanish Paracelsus Revisited and Decontaminated’, Azogue 7 (2010–​ 13), 339–​65.

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moved to Alcalá de Henares for four years to study theology, before changing course to medicine. Luis Granjel, Spanish historian of medicine, ranged Moles among the first generation of ‘post-​Renaissance’ medical scholars.20 The second figure, Marcelino Uberte de la Cerda Ballaguer (dates unknown), was born into an aristocratic family near Saragossa. He held chairs of anatomy and medicine in Alcalá (1625–​7) and Saragossa, and practised in the primary medical institution of the latter city, the Hospital of Nuestra Señora de la Gracia.21 Both Moles and Uberte produced medical commentaries on the Bible, comparable with Valles’s work. Moles published his De morbis in sacris literis pathologia in 1642, as a complement to his Philosophia naturalis sacrosancti corporis Christi, which had appeared three years before. The earlier work was a medical meditation on the body of Christ. In it, Moles reflected on questions such as ‘did Christ suffer from being compressed in the tight space of the womb for nine months?’, ‘was the first motion of Christ’s heart a dilatation or a contraction?’, and ‘was dentition as painful for Christ as it was for other children?’. It followed the course of Christ’s life from conception to death. The latter work, De morbis in sacris literis pathologia, covered the whole of the Bible, and was structured differently, running through a sequence of seventy-​two disorders. In it one finds, for instance, chapters on afflictions of the skin (scars, rash, scabies, pimples), mental issues (delirium, dizziness, rage, lunacy), and defects of the voice (stammer, mutism, hoarseness, snoring).22 Despite its different structure, Moles’s book was, very much like Valles’s, an encyclopedic collection of natural phenomena in the Bible, discussed from the perspective of a medical scholar. Uberte’s Medicina sacra (1645) was, even more than Moles’s De morbis sacris, modelled on Valles’s De iis quae scripta sunt.23 Like his illustrious predecessor, Uberte followed the order of the biblical books, and placed a quotation from the Bible at the head of each chapter. He was also focussed on medical issues, albeit more narrowly. Moreover, where Valles drew predominantly on medical authorities from antiquity and the Arabic Middle Ages, Uberte was much more liberal in citing recent medical authors, especially Iberian scholarship.

20 21 22 23

Luis S. Granjel, ‘Noticia sobre la obra de Vicente Moles’, Clínica y Laboratorio 69 (1960), 234–​9. More generally, not much has been published on either Moles or Uberte. Àlvar Martínez-​Vidal and José Pardo-​Tomás, ‘Anatomical Theatres and the Teaching of Anatomy in Early Modern Spain’, Medical History 49 (2005), 251–​80. Vicente Moles, Philosophia naturalis sacrosancti corporis Christi (Antwerp, 1639); Vicente Moles, De morbis in sacris literis pathologia (Madrid, 1642). Marcelino Uberte de la Cerda, Medicina sacra: in qua loca Sacrae Scripturae quae Philosophiam, aut medicinam redolent medicè & Physicè illustrantur (Saragossa, 1645).

188 Touber Uberte was also the only one who engaged critically with Valles’s work, as we will see below. Almost simultaneously, another work of medicina sacra emerged from the presses in the Republic of Genoa, authored by a former Jesuit and practising physician, Girolamo Bardi (1603–​75).24 While modern historians have served the intellectual culture of early modern Genoa even less well than that of Spain, the Italian peninsula as a whole in this period has attracted much interest because of the Galileo affair and its immediate aftermath. Nor has the medical profession in seventeenth-​century Italy been absent from the interest of historians.25 In fact, whereas Galileo’s condemnation is reputed to have had a disastrous effect on astronomy and mechanics, stifling innovation on a theoretical level, medicine by contrast would seem to have remained unaffected.26 Bardi occupies an interesting position in that respect. Educated to become a Jesuit, he left the order in 1619, apparently because of poor health. Incidentally, this was in the same period in which the Jesuit professor of mathematics and fellow Ligurian, Orazio Grassi (1583–​1654), became the target of Galileo’s mockery, prompted by the former’s lecture on the appearance of three comets in 1618.27 After studying and teaching medicine in Pisa, and returning for a while to his native Liguria to take care of family business, Bardi spent the last decades of his life practising medicine in Rome. He was well connected with both the Jesuit order and the papal court, which set out to repress Galileo’s challenging promotion of the new, geokinetic world system in the 1630s. Nevertheless, Bardi maintained a cordial epistolary exchange with the Florentine mathematician, even after the latter’s condemnation. He openly promoted chemical medicine, and publicly praised the controversial figure of 24

On Girolamo Bardi, see Francesco Cagnetti, ‘Bardi, Girolamo’ in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vi (Rome, 1964), 303–​5; Gian Luigi Bruzzone, Girolamo Bardi (1603–​75) tra filosofia e medicina (Genoa, 2004); Bernd Roling, ‘De asitia: Fortunio Liceti, Estêvão Rodrigues de Castro und die universitäre Aufarbeitung der Magersucht im 17. Jahrhundert’, in Zwischen Konflikt und Kooperation: Praktiken der europäischen Gelehrtenkultur (12.-​17. Jahrhundert), eds. Jan-​Hendryk de Boer et.al. (Berlin, 2016), 191–​211. 25 E.g. Spaces, Objects and Identities in Early Modern Italian Medicine, eds. Sandra Cavallo and David Gentilcore (Oxford, 2008); Maria Conforti and Silvia de Renzi, ‘Sapere anato­mico negli ospedali romani: Formazione dei chirurghi e pratiche sperimentali (1620–​1720)’, in Rome et la science entre Renaissance et Lumières, ed. Antonella Romano (Rome, 2008), 433–​72; Domenico Bertoloni Meli, Mechanism, Experiment, Disease: Marcello Malpighi and Seventeenth-​Century Anatomy (Baltimore, 2011). 26 E.g. Paula Findlen, ‘Science and Society’ in Short Oxford History of Italy: Early Modern Italy, 1550–​1796, ed. John Marino (Oxford, 2002), 166–​87. 27 Mariano Artigas, Rafael Martínez and William R. Shea, ‘New Light on the Galileo Affair?’, in The Church and Galileo, ed. Ernan McMullin (Notre Dame, 2005), 213–​33.

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Tommaso Campanella, the Dominican philosopher who had to endure torture, twenty-​seven years of imprisonment in Naples, and exile in France.28 Bardi is a living example of how innovation and tradition were not mutually exclusive universes in this period, but could operate together in intricate ways. Bardi’s contribution to medicina sacra is less straightforward than those of his Spanish contemporaries. His Medicus Politico-​Catholicus has a rather convoluted set-​up, with chapters, articles, corollaries, digressions and appendices stumbling over each other. At first sight, it would seem that Bardi meant to develop a spiritual metaphor, similar to the Jesuit Van der Sandt’s Theologia medica: book chapters have titles such as ‘On medicine practised by God’, ‘On medicine practised and celebrated by the prophets’, ‘Medicine instituted and practised by Christ’, and so forth.29 The many sections within the chapters, though, called ‘article’ or ‘corollary’, contain disquisitions on medical topics in which Bardi comments on dietetic and pathological phenomena in the biblical narrative, in much the same way as Valles, Moles and Uberte had done before him. Striking in Bardi, and very different from the Iberian medici sacri, is his blunt rejection of Aristotelian theory as the basis for knowledge of nature. ‘I wonder, or rather I am astonished, that the doctrine of Aristotle, so full and stuffed with enormous and egregious mistakes (…) should have taken root so deeply in the hearts of human beings, that it can never be uprooted or eradicated in any way’.30 He was more appreciative of Plato, but he credited Moses with being the ultimate source of all worldly wisdom and philosophy, medical or otherwise. Below, we examine the intellectual tensions which gave rise to Bardi’s idiosyncratic approach to medicina sacra. 2.2 Medicina sacra after 1650 After the mid seventeenth century, a rather different set of contexts came into play. Between 1650 and 1750, works of medicina sacra appeared in the Dutch Republic, Denmark, Germany and England. They were similar in structure and content to the works issuing from the Iberian and Italian peninsulas: their set-​ ups were more or less encyclopaedic, they contained commentaries on physical and medical phenomena referred to in the Bible, and the expositions drew

28

Rodolfo De Mattei, ‘Un medico-​filosofo italiano estimatore di Campanella: Girolamo Bardi’, Atti della Accademia nazionale dei Lincei. Rendiconti. Classe di scienze morali, storiche e filologiche 27 (1973), 49–​58. 29 Girolamo Bardi, Medicus Politico-​Catholicus (Genua, 1643). 30 Bardi, Medicus Politico-​Catholicus, 9: ‘miror, & quidem vehementer miror, quod Aristotelis doctrina tam vastis, & palmaribus erroribus plena, & referta… altas sic in humanis pectoribus radices egerit, ut nullo unquam pacto ab iis possit avelli, & eradicari’.

190 Touber heavily on antique natural philosophy and medical literature. The single chapters treated isolated physical phenomena related in the Bible, following the canonical order of the Bible books rather than any logical sequence. It is remarkable that most of the post-​1650 works of medicina sacra were composed by authors who would seem to fit in with the appetite for knowledge associated with the Scientific Revolution, rather than with the torpor of post-​Tridentine Catholicism. Johannes de Mey, for instance, hailed from Middelburg, a town participating in the sea trade which opened up the Dutch Republic to all continents. As he grew up, the Republic had consolidated its autonomy, and developed a flourishing infrastructure of higher education. The University of Leiden employed renowned professors, recruited to attract students from abroad. The medical faculty was enhanced by an anatomical theatre and a botanical garden. It was the scene of experiments in comparative anatomy and vivisections. In the 1630s, when De Mey received his training in Leiden, William Harvey’s theory of the circulation of blood gained a foothold there.31 De Mey, having studied theology as well as medicine, spent most of his life as a prominent preacher on the isle of Walcheren, ultimately obtaining a professorate at the Latin school of Middelburg. He has been characterised as a ‘closet Cartesian’.32 He was the nephew of Isaac Beeckman, the well-​known interlocutor of René Descartes and uncrowned father of mechanical philosophy.33 De Mey advocated knowledge based on sensory observations, and a theory of nature based on mechanical atomism.34 He was critical of the Catholic church, but also ran into trouble with his own Calvinist church. In short, De Mey was everything but an exponent of the prevailing social order or its knowledge regime, something one might suspect of his Spanish and Italian contemporaries, Moles, Uberte and Bardi. Nevertheless, with his Sacra Physiologia (1655) De Mey followed Valles very closely. The sections run through the Bible, in the order of the biblical passages commented. The single comments are dense, replete with references 31 32 33 34

Willem Otterspeer, Groepsportret met dame I: Het bolwerk van de vrijheid. De Leidse universiteit, 1575–​1672 (Amsterdam, 2000), 326–​72; Harold J. Cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age (New Haven, 2007). L.J. Joosse, ‘Mey, Johannes de’, in Biografisch lexicon voor de geschiedenis van het Nederlands protestantisme v (2001), 367–​9; cf. Jorink, Het “Boeck der Natuere”, 401–​5, who sees De Mey as a forerunner of eighteenth-​century physico-​theologians. Klaas van Berkel, Isaac Beeckman on Matter and Motion: Mechanical Philosophy in the Making (Baltimore, 2013). H. Zuidervaart, ‘Het natuurbeeld van Johannes de Mey (1617–​1678), hoogleraar filosofie aan de illustere school te Middelburg’, Archief [not numbered] (2001), 1–​40.

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to ancient natural philosophy, Stoic and Epicurean as much as Aristotelian and Platonic.35 In fact, as with Valles, the scope is much broader than mere medicine. De Mey commented on the age of the earth, on the celestial bodies and the nature of light, on plant life and animal life in Scripture. But he also discussed the ulcers, fevers and intestinal worms tormenting the biblical characters. De Mey was clearly well read in modern medical literature –​he quoted Jean Fernel extensively, and cited the most famous post-​medieval botanists: Conrad Gesner, Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Ulisse Aldrovandi. He also mentioned approvingly the discoveries of Campanella, Galilei and Descartes. What most stands out, also visually, as they were printed in an extra-​large typeface, are excerpts from ancient poets, including Lucretius’s De rerum natura.36 The famous Danish scholar Thomas Bartholin (1616–​80) also belonged to a medical culture celebrated for being dynamic rather than stagnant. Bartholin was the son of a university professor, Caspar Bartholin (1585–​1629), and a member of an extended family which dominated the University of Copenhagen in the seventeenth century. He studied with Ole Worm (1588–​1654), owner of one of the most renowned collections of natural history and antiquities in early seventeenth-​century Europe.37 Bartholin travelled around Europe, visiting Leiden, Montpellier, Padua and southern Italy. After returning to Copenhagen, he took up the chair in anatomy in 1648. He devoted the rest of his life to anatomical research, especially on the lymphatic system, as well as to fostering his network of contacts. Bartholin was as much a career academic as he was a dedicated scholar.38 His interest in the medical novelties of his days is apparent in an early work of medicina sacra, a book-​length discussion of the wound in the side which Jesus Christ incurred at the hands of the Roman soldier Longinus. Bartholin repeatedly mentioned recent anatomical observations as well as the theory of the circulation of blood in the course of his argument.39 Among his students he counted Nicolas Steno (1638–​86), who famously dissected sharks 35 36 37 38

39

Johannes de Mey, Sacra Physiologia, sive Expositio locorum Sacrae scripturae, In quibus agitur de rebus naturalibus (Middelburg, 1655). Examples at De Mey, Sacra Physiologia, 3–​4, 15, 42–​3, 195, 257. Alain Schnapp, La conquête du passé. Aux origines de l’archeologie (Paris, 1993), 160–​77. V. Meisen, ‘Thomas Bartholin’ in Dansk Biografisk Leksikon, 3rd edn (Gyldendal, 1979–​84), denstoredanske.dk/​index.php?sideId=286552, accessed 4 March 2019; for an example of how Bartholin put his scholarly acumen at the service of family interests, see Bernd Roling, ‘Der Wal als Schauobjekt: Thomas Bartholin (1616–​1680), die dänische Nation und das Ende der Einhörner’, in Zoology in Early Modern Culture: Intersections of Science, Theology, Philology, and Political and Religious Education, eds. K.A.E. Enenkel and P.J. Smith, (Leiden, 2014), 172–​96. Thomas Bartholin, De latere Christi aperto dissertatio (Leiden, 1646), e.g. 17, 33–​4.

192 Touber and suggested that the history of the earth could be read from its layered structure. Like De Mey, Bartholin was at the centre of what would become known as the Scientific Revolution. And again, if his medicina sacra reflects the rather different environment in which he worked, compared with his pre-​1650 southern European counterparts, this may be apparent first of all in a richer set of materials on which he could draw to ponder the implications of the biblical narrative. At first sight, Bartholin’s De morbis biblicis miscellanea medica may seem a continuation of the tradition initiated by Valles, like De Mey’s Sacra physiologia.40 Bartholin combined his excellent mastery of biblical and patristic source texts with classical medical scholarship, histories and modern authors, to share his understanding of pathological elements in the biblical narrative. Yet in some respects his book signals a change of focus. It consists, again, of a series of comments following the sequence of biblical passages commented. But whereas Valles, Uberte and De Mey marked their chapters with a biblical quotation and the relevant verse numbers, Bartholin gave his chapters a title, summarizing the phenomenon discussed: ‘On the limping Jacob’, ‘The wife of Loth has been turned into salt’. The chapters are generally shorter, and also fewer in number than in the previous works discussed (twenty-​seven in total). Nor does Bartholin seem to have aspired to be exhaustive in his treatment of biblical themes. Tricia Ross has recently noted that, when discussing Juan de Pineda’s comments on the disease of Job, Bartholin limited himself to only one of the nine alternative diagnoses proffered by De Pineda.41 Related to this may be the emergence in the text of seemingly unrelated digressions, concerning for instance the standing stones on the island of Sjælland, or the speech delivered by René Moreau at the coronation of Louis xiii of France. The backdrop to these sorties, that is, the ancient sources, sacred and profane, as well as the state of the art of modern commentaries, are present only implicitly. For the well-​informed reader these should probably have been familiar enough. Bartholin’s scholarly virtuosity shone at a remove from the accumulated intertextual legacy which he targeted. The German Valentin Heinrich Vogler (1622–​77) may seem the odd man out among the post-​1650 medici sacri. Little is known about this physician. He studied in Altdorf, practised as a physician in Frankfurt am Main and Oppenheim, and obtained a chair of medicine in Helmstedt. His medicina

40 41

Thomas Bartholin, De morbis biblicis miscellanea medica (Frankfurt, 1672). Tricia Ross, ‘Sacred Medicine and the Bible: Thomas Bartholin’s On Biblical Diseases (1672)’, Early Science and Medicine 24 (2019), 90–​116.

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sacra was published there posthumously, by his relatives. Arguably the intellectual culture from which he emerged, was less energetic than that of De Mey and Bartholin; the university of Helmstedt had the reputation of being a pedestrian and provincial affair. Yet in 1650 Vogler obtained his doctorate in Helmstedt with a dissertation on vertigo under the supervision of Professor Hermann Conring (1606–​81). A prominent advocate of Harvey’s model of the circulation of blood, Conring had studied in Leiden in the same years as De Mey, and had been witness to the anatomical dissections and vivisections performed by Frans de le Boë Sylvius (1640-​1672). Conring was internationally renowned for his varied interests.42 In this case, also, it is interesting to see how medicina sacra plays out against the background of the specific setting in which Vogler worked, and especially how the author enlisted ancient and modern sources for his purposes. Vogler’s De rebus naturalibus ac medicis quarum in Scripturis Sacris fit mentio commentarius, published only belatedly in 1682, having been in preparation at least since 1661, again followed the model of Valles.43 Vogler went through the Bible, commenting passages one by one. His comments went far beyond strictly medical questions to discuss natural philosophy prompted by the details of the biblical narrative. Instructions for how to fan and smother a fire featured next to a reflection on the somatic effects of protracted mourning. All in all, the scope of his erudition is impressive. However, while Vogler pursued the same method we have seen in De Mey, Uberte, Valles, and with some variation in Moles, Bardi and Bartholin, his is the first work of medicina sacra which one might be forgiven for considering reactionary. There are two prefaces: the first addressed to Vogler’s fellow ‘students of sacred physics and medicine’, and the second a general prolegomenon.44 The first preface surveys the history of sacred medicine and physics, tracing it back to the fifth-​century Antiochene Bishop Theodoret of Cyrus. Vogler ends this survey with De Mey, whom he accuses of favouring the ‘new’ over the ‘delightful’. As an example he mentions De Mey’s approving citation of Tommaso Campanella when discussing fevers. Vogler preferred Valles, for all his shortcomings, to De Mey, who indiscriminately paraded novelties. The second preface was a methodological

42

Michaela Triebs, Die Medizinische Fakultat der Universitat Helmstedt 1576–​1810 (Wiesbaden, 1995), 47–​8, 68. 43 Valentin Heinrich Vogler, De rebus naturalibus ac medicis quarum in Scripturis Sacris fit mentio commentarius (Helmstedt, 1682). The first preface of this work had appeared in 1661 as Valentin Heinrich Vogler, Ad sacrae physicae et medicinae in Academia Iulia studiosos programma (Helmstedt, 1661). 44 Vogler, De rebus naturalibus ac medicis, sigs br-​b8v, 1–​8.

194 Touber exposition. Its primary aim was to put up a defense against skepticism, considered by Vogler a depraved philosophical stance, with René Descartes as its principal and subtlest perpetrator. Vogler was not averse to novelties on principle: he repeatedly showed interest in the telescope and the microscope as extensions of the human senses. But the systematic doubt of Descartes seemed to Vogler to lead nowhere. The last medicus sacer to be discussed in this paper is Richard Mead. Throughout his life Mead was heavily influenced by his father, a nonconformist minister who had studied in Utrecht and in Leiden. After an academic tour of Europe, Mead’s medical career in London took off in 1699. He considered himself to be a Newtonian, but professed a version of mechanical chemistry devoid of mathematics. According to his modern biographer, his De imperio solis ac lunae in corpora humana (1704) represented both ‘the last gasp of astrological medicine’ and a version of Newtonian medicine. Mead was also committed to a providential view of disease. His reputation and income grew, and from 1720 he moved into a house in Great Ormond Street, where he distinguished himself as a collector of art, antiquities, and books. An oration he held in 1723 at the Royal College of Physicians celebrated the high status of physicians in ancient Greece and Rome.45 Clearly, Mead was intent on retaining the link to antiquity, even though he articulated ‘the antique’ as a theme in its own right. Mead seems to have continued along the path taken by Bartholin.46 His Medica sacra—​both the Latin version, and the English translation, which is faithful to the original—​is rather short when compared with the previous works; with only fifteen chapters it is shorter, even, than Bartholin’s De morbis biblicis miscellanea medica. Mead also abandoned the order in which the passages commented occur in the Bible. Half of the chapters are still tied to a particular narrative (‘The illness of Job’, ‘The illness of king Saul’), but all of them digress to other biblical passages. Where Mead and Bartholin differ is that Mead kept his distance from the exuberance of Bartholin’s commentary. Mead’s long ‘Praefatio’ is quite clear: his intent was to foster piety, by dispelling biblical extravagancies and impressing a sober interpretation on his readers’ minds.47

45

Anita Guerrini, ‘Mead, Richard’, odnb; Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Richard Mead’s Communities of Belief’ in Christianity and Community in the West: Essays for John Bossy, ed. Simon Ditchfield (Aldershot, 2001), 241–​59. 46 Richard Mead, Medica sacra: sive, de morbis insignioribus: qui in bibliis memorantur, commentarius (London, 1749); Richard Mead, Medica Sacra; or, a Commentary on the Most Remarkable Diseases Mentioned in the Holy Scriptures (London, 1755). 47 Mead, Medica Sacra, i–​xxii.

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Medicina sacra: Cases of Leprosy

To get a sense of the way in which medicina sacra incorporated ancient and modern knowledge, we will concentrate on one particular disease which is mentioned repeatedly in the Bible: leprosy. The purpose is to give a sense of the continuities and discontinuities, as this one biblical affliction was commented upon time and again. In the book of Leviticus two whole chapters, 13 and 14, are devoted to how priests should respond to leprosy (tsaraʻat in Hebrew). The biblical verses depict a disease which eats away at the skin, causes the flesh to rot, the hair to whiten, and the epidermis to flake. There are rather elaborate rules for how to deal with a suspected leper, with expulsion from the community running as a gold thread through the legislation. In further chapters of the Old Testament, various persons are struck with leprosy, often indicated by their skin becoming white as snow: the Syrian commander Naaman (ii Kings 5), king Azariah (ii Kings 15) and king Uzziah (ii Chronicles 26). In the New Testament, conversely, Jesus healed a leper (Mark 1, Matthew 8, Luke 7). The disease invariably featured in all works of medicina sacra that we survey. Discussion of biblical disease created an interesting dialectic, in which several tensions were operative. The biblical narrative was a prophetic, divinely inspired text, and as such reflected divine truth, although in what way it did so, and how this related to extra-​scriptural philosophical and historical knowledge, was a constant subject of debate throughout the early modern period and beyond.48 The narratives of illness and recovery in the Bible, typically frugal in detail, invited elaboration and elucidation based on a medical scholar’s expertise. This meant, first of all, consulting the authoritative texts of ancient medicine: the Hippocratic and Galenic corpora, broader works of natural philosophy and natural history insofar as they touched upon medical issues (Aristotle, Pliny), and an army of minor medical authors (Aetius of Amida, Alexander of Tralles, Paul of Aegina, and many others). This was unproblematic, except where the biblical narrative seemed to contradict, or did not fit, the causal patterns implicated by ancient medicine. Then there were more recent authorities, and increasingly so as the early modern period progressed: Marsilio Ficino, Jean Fernel, Daniel Sennert, to name only a few of the towering figures of early modern medicine. These were the moderns of the art of healing. If ancient medical literature was often in harmony, but sometimes clashed, with narratives drawn from the sacred pages 48

The literature on this is too vast to cite here, but see the various contributions to Scriptural Authority and Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Golden Age: God’s Word Questioned, eds. Dirk van Miert et al. (Oxford, 2017).

196 Touber of the Bible, the same goes for the relation between ancient medical literature and the new landmarks of modern medical scholarship. Finally, there were also the observations and experience of the medical authors and practitioners themselves; again, these often suggested perfect consensus with the findings of authoritative texts, but sometimes created friction. In other words: when discussing a disease such as leprosy, ambitious medici sacri had potential for epistemological deadlock, but also plenty of scope for intellectual manoeuvring between the ancient and the modern. 3.1 The Nature of Leprosy Francisco Valles was the first to dedicate extensive work to the medical implications of biblical narrative. For him, leprosy meant divine punishment. Lepers should not be considered ill, but impure. Valles commented on Leviticus 13, which calls on the Jewish priests to expel patients of leprosy from the community. This implied that leprosy was not really a disease, but a mark of wickedness. It was God who branded sinners by striking them with leprosy. But even pagans, despite not recognizing the divine agent, acknowledged it to be something different from a disease, according to Valles. He drew upon both Hippocrates and Paul of Aegina, to show that there was a natural basis for the moral interpretation of leprosy. According to Hippocrates, leprosy belonged to a family of conditions which arose from an excess of slime, which brought shame, rather than disease. Paul of Aegina made the same point when discussing elephantiasis, a related affliction.49 Valles thus appealed to well-​respected medical authorities of Greek antiquity to justify his moral interpretation of the biblical affliction, giving it a blanket interpretation as a defect of the soul. Vicente Moles, physician to Philip iv, preferred to distinguish two types of leprosy. The Bible itself alluded to this, mentioning the ‘discernment of blood and blood, cause and cause, leprosy and leprosy’ (Deuteronomy 17:8). Moles distinguished between leprosy which resulted from direct divine intervention, and leprosy which was a ‘natural defect’ (‘vitium naturale’). Interestingly, Moles adopted this distinction, not from any medical authority, but from the Jesuit Cornelius a Lapide (1567–​1637), whose Bible commentary had first appeared in 1616.50 An instance of leprosy as divine intervention was the condition which God inflicted on Miriam, the sister of Moses, in punishment for her complaints about Moses’s leadership. Moles steered clear of this ‘extraordinary’ leprosy and quickly moved on to discuss the ‘natural’ variety, relying on Paul of Aegina 49 50

Francisco Valles, De iis quae scripta sunt physice in libris sacris, sive de sacra philosophia (Lyon 1588), 174–​5. Cornelius a Lapide, Commentaria in Pentateuchum Mosis (Antwerp, 1616), 678.

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for a summary definition of the symptoms. Rather than rehearse everything his predecessor Valles had recounted about leprosy, Moles preferred to muse on the experiences with the disease in his own days. Just as Moses had ordered the Jewish priests to banish chronic lepers from the community, in Moles’s own days also, Spanish cities expelled lepers. They were shut away in lazarets and were obliged to make their presence known by clamouring.51 Moles thus chose to focus on the parallel with his own society, introducing Spanish equivalents to ancient terms, such as the words gafedad and mal de san lazaro used by the Spanish to denote leprosy. Moles’s contemporary, the Genovese ex-​Jesuit and physician Girolamo Bardi, further developed the typology of leprosy. There was a difference between the biblical leprosy proper, which had affected the skin as well as the clothes and homes of the Jews of the Old Testament, and the affliction called ‘leprosy’ in his own days, which was much more dangerous since it penetrated straight to the flesh and bones.52 Interestingly, like Moles, Bardi also echoed the comments on Leviticus 13 of a Lapide, the Jesuit exegete. Being a former Jesuit, it is likely that Bardi was aware of a Lapide’s exegetical works, even if he does not cite them. He points out that the ‘modern’ leprosy, which consumes flesh and bones, might be identified with the affliction called albarras by Avicenna, and elephantiasis by the Greeks. Bardi thus relocated the modern, non-​biblical leprosy in the framework of pagan medical scholarship and its Arab continuation.53 Thirty years later, Valentin Heinrich Vogler adopted the same distinction (a biblical disease, limited to the skin but spreading aggressively, on the one hand, and a modern disease, eating away at the flesh and bones, on the other). Vogler referred to the ancient sources in a generic way (‘the Arabs’ and ‘the Greeks’), but also mentioned two modern champions of medical scholarship by name: Girolamo Fracastoro (1478–​1553) and Girolamo Mercuriale (1530–​1606).54 A separation was thus created between ancient ‘biblical leprosy’, existing in the biblical text, and ‘modern leprosy’, featuring in the everyday reality of seventeenth-​century medical practice. Ancient pagan medicine, and newly recognized modern authorities, together perceived as a continuum, served as a scholarly framework for the ‘modern’ variety. Bardi, meanwhile, concurred with Valles that biblical leprosy was a consequence of sin. Like Valles and Moles, Bardi pointed out that the patients of 51 Moles, De morbis in sacris literis, 22–​7. 52 a Lapide, Commentaria, 678–​9. 53 Girolamo Bardi, Medicus Politico-​Catholicus (Genoa, 1643), 80–​1. 54 Valentin Heinrich Vogler, De Rebus Naturalibus Ac Medicis: Quarum In Scripturis Sacris Fit Mentio Commentarius (Helmstedt, 1682), 104–​5.

198 Touber leprosy, with their skin and clothes completely affected, must be removed from their community. But unlike his colleagues, Bardi considered leprosy to be a state of shame and a disease at the same time. This is consistent with the parallel between pastoral and medical care he elaborates throughout his medicina sacra, and which he repeats in the following passage: with reason the Lord threatened those with leprosy, who refused to obey the priests, who are the spiritual physicians… all of which may also be applied with good reason to the worldly physicians, by whom, if trust and obedience are not observed… liberation from any kind of leprosy will not be forthcoming.55 Marcelino Uberte from Saragossa likewise attributed biblical leprosy to sinfulness, even more harshly. Leprosy, according to Uberte, signified filth and sin. It was the Old Testament analogy equivalent of a burdened conscience in the New Testament, and it should be avoided at all cost, as should the company of lepers.56 This is one aspect of the interpretation of biblical leprosy in which the later, Protestant commentators differed. Neither de Mey, the Protestant pastor from the Dutch town of Middelburg who doubled as a medical scholar, nor the Danish anatomist Thomas Bartholin, nor the English physician Richard Mead, attributed leprosy to sin. They cited ancient literature to reflect on contagion and on the segregation of lepers from their communities. De Mey, for instance, consulted Philo Judaeus while grappling with the different treatment of partially afflicted lepers and lepers covered from head to toe. However, for the affliction as such De Mey leaned heavily on the pathological discussion of the famous physician Jean Fernel, borrowing liberally from him, without venturing onto pastoral terrain.57 Bartholin, in turn, reflected on a puzzling injunction, by Aetius of Amida, that lepers must remove themselves from cities and from the sea—​puzzling because, after all, when on a ship out at sea, it would be impossible to distance oneself.58 But the correlation between stubborn 55 Bardi, Medicus Politico-​Catholicus, 78–​9, 81: ‘ratione lepram D.O.M. comminatur iis, qui Sacerdotibus, qui sunt Medici spirituales, obedire nolunt… Quae quidem omnia ad Medicos temporales iusta quidem ratione traduci possunt, quibus si fides non adhibeatur, & obedientia non praestetur… vel neque ab una harum minima liberantur’. 56 Uberte, Medicina sacra, 119, 127. 57 Johannes de Mey, Sacra Physiologia, sive Expositio locorum Sacrae scripturae, in quibus agitur de rebus naturalibus (Middelburg, 1655), 157–​62; the reference is to Jean Fernel, Pathologiae Libri Septem (Venice, 1555). 58 Thomas Bartholin, De morbis biblicis miscellanea medica (Frankfurt, 1672), 39–​42.

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Jews and widespread leprosy was abandoned. Bartholin actually turned it around: he turned to the ethnographical studies of Johann Buxtorf the Elder and Anton Margarita to explain why the Jews of his days were less vulnerable to leprosy than Christians. For De Mey and Bartholin, ancient literature was no less relevant when contemplating the nature of leprosy, than for their predecessors. But rather than corroborate a pastoral morality embodied in the biblical illness narratives, their pagan sources gave substance to the reconstruction of the social reality of disease in its historical setting. 3.2 Diagnosis of Leprosy If the Bible hinted at the existence of varieties of leprosy, it also suggested means to distinguish between those varieties. The biblical text provided a diagnostic protocol. According to Leviticus 13, the Jewish priest must check the skin and hair of the patient. If these were turning white, the patient was irreversibly affected, and had to be expelled. Valles advised his readers to investigate a leprous patient by puncturing their skin with a needle. If a watery liquid welled up from the puncture, instead of blood, the patient was incurable. Valles derived this technique from Avicenna. But Valles suggested that the technique was much older. He quoted a passage from the Byzantine scholar Paul of Aegina, a passage which corroborated Avicenna in this respect—​but for one word. Valles therefore suggested an emendation to the ancient text, which would result in a more sensible reading than the original wording.59 Valles here employed a basic philological operation in order to make the Byzantine text support his contention, and create a plurisecular continuum of diagnostic practice which stretched back at least as far as the late Roman Empire. Valles’s intervention in the medical legacy of antiquity becomes even clearer when we note that he put his faith in the Pentateuch before the medical authorities. Both Avicenna and Paul of Aegina contended that the worst sign was if a leper grew white hair—​worse than the white liquid oozing out after a puncture of the skin. Valles, however, noted that Leviticus 13:10 diagnosed leprosy as fatal, ‘when there shall be a white colour in the skin, and it shall have changed the look of the hair, and the living flesh itself shall appear’. Because of the order of the diagnostic signals in this passage (first a discoloured skin, then whitening hair, and only then the rotting flesh), Valles decided that Avicenna and Paul of Aegina were wrong: the rotting flesh was listed last, and so must be the most important. ‘We have said we would follow the truth’, and therefore 59 Valles, De iis quae scripta sunt, 180–​2.

200 Touber he preferred to follow Moses, rather than the ancient medical authorities, and judged the biopsy a more important sign of an incurable leprosy.60 This echoes a remark from his foreword, in which he clarified his intent to discuss physical and medical issues arising in the Bible: whereas his studies up till then, of Aristotle, Hippocrates and Galen, had dealt with mere human opinion, the study of the Bible amounted to studying truth itself.61 God may not have intended the Bible to teach humankind about the workings of their bodies, but if it incidentally touched upon such topics, it carried the full weight of God’s authority. As with any other ancient text, though, it required the philological and interpretive expertise of human scholars to be of any benefit. Girolamo Bardi, as we have seen, was even more outspoken when it came to the relative credibility of biblical and pagan sources. He devoted the introductory sections of his Political Catholic Physician to castigating Aristotle and, to a lesser degree, Plato. Bardi averred that Moses was more reliable than the two Greek philosophers: ‘in philosophical matters, neither Plato nor Aristotle, but the truth, that is, Moses, should be followed’.62 In fact, Bardi inserted his discussion of leprosy in a chapter entitled ‘the medical art of Moses becomes more visible’. Here is one instance of Bardi attributing to Moses the medical knowledge he himself professed to possess.63 This is a strident rejection of pagan natural philosophy, favouring the Word of God as the ultimate source of knowledge of nature, including bodily health and sickness. It brings to mind the Mosaic philosophy discussed by Ann Blair, who considered it to be a strategy to transcend philosophical strife and subsume a potentially controversial natural philosophy under the safe umbrella of biblical authority.64 For Bardi this may have made sense. We will see below that he walked a narrow path, advocating chemical philosophy in an increasingly repressive intellectual environment. At the same time, however, other practitioners of medicina sacra did not downplay the authority of classical medicine and natural philosophy at all. At the same time as Bardi, Vicente Moles and Marcelino Uberte, working in Alcalá and Saragossa respectively, were unanimous in observing harmony

60 Valles, De iis quae scripta sunt, 182: ‘Nos vero sequuti veritatem dicimus’. 61 Valles, De iis quae scripta sunt, 6–​7: ‘Quare huic lectioni, consecrare senectutem, equum est, putare, scripta esse mihi hactenus Philosophica, ad opinionem, haec autem scribi ad veritatem.’ 62 Bardi, Medicus Politico-​Catholicus, 10: ‘In philosophicis, neque Plato neque Arist. sed veritas idest Moyses est insectandus’. 63 Bardi, Medicus Politico-​Catholicus, 77: ‘Medicina Moysis magis aperitur’. 64 Blair, ‘Mosaic Physics’.

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between the biblical and pagan accounts of the diagnostic symptoms of leprosy.65 The Dutch Johannes de Mey did not consider it to be an issue worthy of discussion: he simply listed the hierarchy of symptoms for diagnosing the gravity of a case of leprosy, referring to Valles as his source.66 Thomas Bartholin and Valentin Heinrich Vogler omitted discussion of the diagnosis and symptoms altogether, which they presumably thought had been sufficiently discussed by their predecessors. Only Richard Mead again mentioned the signs of leprosy, observing that Moses listed them in Pentateuch, that Hippocrates and Avicenna confirmed them, and that Celsus expanded upon them. In Mead there is no sign of conflict either, just harmony. If Mosaic authority fulfilled a function as a safe haven from philosophical strife, in opposition to singular pagan philosophers, only Valles and Bardi seem to have required it. 3.3 Contagion One last issue concerning leprosy provoked broader puzzlement. This was the matter of contagion: particularly the contamination of inanimate matter. Leviticus 14 gives instructions for how to deal with clothes and houses which are contaminated with leprosy. In commenting on Leviticus 14, Valles does not seem to have considered this problematic. He gave a long quotation from Paul of Aegina, who judged leprosy to be as contagious as the plague. Valles then went on to explain how textiles and building materials could be infected by leprosy, as if by a rot, becoming potent sources of the affliction themselves.67 Here Uberte, the practitioner and professor at Saragossa, came into his own. He developed a longwinded argument to reject Valles’s casual appeal to Paul of Aegina in confirmation of Leviticus, while saving the basic premise: what the Bible stated was always true, even if it contradicted what humankind thought they knew was true. The problem was that air could not contaminate houses with leprosy, because leprosy affected living beings, not inanimate things. Houses could become dirty, certainly, but the walls could not putrify. Contagious air, moreover, could not cause dents in the wall nor the colour of the walls to change. And even if contagious air had caused discolouration, the walls should become white if infected with leprosy, instead of red or black. Finally, even if leprosy could somehow attach to a wall, it was unthinkable that it might feed on that wall, and grow. So what was the point of these biblical passages? Uberte concluded they must have recounted a miracle. It was a potent sign, among the rest of the signs, overabundant, by which God warned the Jews 65 Moles, De morbis in sacris literis, 25; Uberte, Medicina sacra, 119–​221. 66 De Mey, Sacra Physiologia, 161–​2. 67 Valles, De iis quae scripta sunt, 189–​94.

202 Touber of their insolence.68 Uberte suggested a different relation between Scripture and the ancient medical authorities from that of Bardi. Rather than favouring the biblical text over the ancient authorities, as Bardi did, the ancient medical knowledge actually served for Uberte as a benchmark, necessary to bring about the recognition of that the biblical narrative was miraculous and unique. De Mey took another approach entirely. Like Uberte, De Mey dismissed the notion that leprosy could spread through the air and contaminate walls, analogous to the plague, as claimed by Paul of Aegina. But De Mey did not resort to miracle. Instead, he suggested that diseases and their properties might have changed through time, from place to place, and from society to society. He quoted Pliny, who had noted that elephantiasis had not been known in Rome before the age of Pompey the Great. Until then, it had been confined to Egypt. In other words, a disease could be peculiar to a certain place and time. Consequently, a particular kind of leprosy, spreading not only among human beings but also to clothes and walls, might have been prevalent among the Jews. De Mey did not follow Uberte in considering the biblical leprosy to have been miraculous, either. Rather, he chose to suspend judgement, keeping open the possibility that the contamination of clothes and walls was due either to divine intervention or to invisible seeds and rotten vapours.69 But while resolving the issue by speculatively historicizing the affliction, he remained within the textual universe of medicina sacra, juxtaposing scriptural narrative and pagan knowledge about nature. It was only Richard Mead who would adopt a more detached position in relation to the ancient texts and the world they described. He first surveyed the extant textual sources. He noted that the Greek and Arab writers offered no corroboration for the supposed infection of houses, and that rabbinical authors considered the leprosy of biblical Jews to be of one kind, contaminating clothes and walls as well as people. Subsequently he offered a physiological explanation for the contagion of clothes and walls. Miasmas, exuded by lepers, lingered about around the fabric of textiles. When worn by others, the miasmas in those clothes would then in turn enter the pores of the skin of the unfortunate victims, and infect them. As for the houses, here Mead resorted to a combination of allegory, microbiology and religious history. If the Bible attributed the leprous infection of a house to God’s intervention, that was merely a common figure of speech in the parlance of the Hebrew Bible. In fact the most likely interpretation of this infection was that of coloured moulds

68 Uberte, Medicina sacra, 123–​6. 69 De Mey, Sacra Physiologia, 164–​5.

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appearing on the walls, mixing and effervescing. The ceremonial legislation of the Jews, including the book of Leviticus, principally had two aims: to root out idolatry and to combat uncleanliness. Therefore, the insalubrious and odorous stains on the walls would have been anathema for the Jewish priests. What Mead offered was a combination of literary contextualisation and common-​ sensical history of the biblical commandments concerning so-​called leprosy.70 4

Ancient and Modern in medicina sacra

The medical discussions of biblical leprosy, as summarised above, do not represent a smooth, linear diachronic development. Our medici sacri repeatedly contemplated the same questions, ruminating on the ancient sources and on the increasing amount of modern interpretation available. They leaned heavily on the classical patrimony (Valles, whose main sources were Hippocrates and Paul of Aegina), or included modern medical insights, even if these were ultimately derived from the same ancient sources (De Mey citing Fernel, Vogler citing Fracastoro and Mercuriale). Some incorporated modern practice and personal observations (Moles with the lazarets of his own day, Mead with the pores in the skin and the moulds on the wall). Others consulted clerical literature (Moles, who utilized the biblical commentaries of Cornelius a Lapide, Bartholin, who appealed to the ethnography of Buxtorf and Margerita). Only in some cases did the divine nature of the biblical text set it aside as a source with a special status, as in Valles and Bardi who preferred Moses to pagan medical scholarship, or in Uberte, who attributed the inexplicable mention of contaminated walls to a miracle expressly wrought by God. In what follows, aspects of the social and intellectual context of the authors will serve to add some contrast to the landscape of medicina sacra. Evidently, every medicus sacer had his own interests to look after and axes to grind. There is no single overarching project or contest they engaged in. However, very roughly two clusters of determinant circumstances can be made out. In the medicina sacra produced before 1650, in Catholic Southern Europe, issues which drove the flow of the arguments revolved around the position of the 70 Mead, Medica sacra, 12–​15, 21–​6. See L. Hunt, et al., The Book that Changed Europe: Picart & Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World (Cambridge, Mass., 2010) and Dmitri Levitin, ‘John Spencer’s De Legibus Hebraeorum (1683–​85) and ‘Enlightened’ Sacred History: A New Interpretation’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 76 (2013) 49–​92, for the contested issue of the motivations and effects of European histories of non-​Christian peoples in the decades around 1700.

204 Touber medical profession in societies cemented by confessional structures. Medicine had to find its place in a social structure dominated by alliances of the political elite and the clerical caste. Both the classical heritage, and novel methods and ideas, needed to fit into the corporate identity medical scholars were carving out for themselves. After 1650, by contrast, in the medicina sacra issuing from Protestant Northern Europe, the dominant issue seems to have been how the Bible could be valorized in an intellectually responsible way. The textual legacies of pagan antiquity and biblical literature were continually confronted with alien input, complicating their hermeneutical resolution. 4.1 Before 1650: Health of the Catholic Body Politic In Spain, medicina sacra shows us how the medical culture, while not following the trail we would recognise as ‘modernizing’, was far from stagnant or backward looking. Francisco Valles, as mentioned before, has been recognised as an exponent of the ‘medical humanism’ flourishing in Spain in the sixteenth century. Specifically, his published commentaries on Hippocratic texts are celebrated scholarly achievements. This did not preclude interest in recent developments: he enthusiastically praised anatomical demonstration, advocating the instruction of medical students through public dissections. He did not envision anatomical dissection as a revolutionary break with the past, but rather as part of a concerted effort to refurbish the classical heritage.71 In his preface Valles presented medicina sacra as another extension of the continuum of scholarship and practice: after having spent so many years expounding the natural philosophy of Aristotle and the medical doctrines of Hippocrates and Galen, he chose to devote his final years to the truth about nature contained in the Bible. It is significant that Valles emphatically posited the existence of truth concerning nature in Scripture, besides other truths: ‘I am convinced, and want everybody to be convinced, that, just like every other doctrine which is true, in the same manner a doctrine on nature is present in the divine books’.72 Simultaneously with his intellectual efforts, Valles was engaged in far-​reaching 71

E.g. Francisco Valles, In Aphorismos & libellum De alimento Hippocratis commentaria (Alcalá 1561); idem, Commentaria in libros Hippocratis De ratione victus in morbis acutis (Alcalá, 1569); idem, In libros Hippocratis De morbis popularibus, commentaria (Madrid, 1577 [i.e. 1578]); cfr. Ana Isabel Martín Ferreira, ‘Las “controvertidas” Controversiae del médico humanista Francisco Vallés: Controversiarum medicarum et philosophicarum libri decem 1556–​1590’, Res Publica Litterarum 19 (2008), 3–​14; Skaarup, Anatomy and Anatomists, 120–​2, as also the contribution of Ian Maclean to this volume. 72 Valles, De iis quae scripta sunt, 6: ‘ego mihi persuado atque omnibus persuasum volo, ut omnem aliam doctrinam, quae vera sit, ita naturalem, in his divinis libris contineri’.

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administrative reforms. Under Philip ii a reorganisation of the medical profession took place. The Spanish king sought to bring practitioners throughout his kingdoms under central control, headed by university educated medical doctors. Valles was heavily involved in this enterprise, in his capacity as a court physician and protomédico.73 As he promoted administrative efforts to consolidate a coherent body of medical practice, he also presented knowledge of nature, health and disease as a coherent body of knowledge, distinct from theological understanding. Thus, in De iis, quae scripta sunt physice he dedicated a long chapter to the dignity of the medical profession. Valles suggested that the work of the physician and of the priest ran parallel. Where God had relegated to the priesthood the office of giving life to the human soul, the medical arts had the task of sustaining the life of the body. Referring to Plato’s Republic, with its tripartite social structure, Valles ranked medical experts among the ruling estate of the wise, inferior only to theologians.74 The ancients were important as ever, imparting indispensable wisdom. The point was that they should be accommodated in a confessional social order which found its legitimacy in the Bible. Vicente Moles and Marcelino Uberte de la Cerda built their medicina sacra consciously on the heritage of Valles. Moles, for one, opened the preface of his De morbis in sacris literis pathologia by invoking the ‘Spanish Galen’, Valles. Uberte, also, in the preface to Medicina sacra referred to Valles as the first example he looked to (followed by Guillaume Ader, first, and then Moles). In both, also, a similar concern is noticeable to establish the medical art as an autonomous domain in a culture dominated by nobility and clergy. If anything, their interests were more circumscribed, more ‘properly medical’ as it were, than those of Valles. As for Moles, we have seen that he distinguished carefully between ‘leprosy’ and ‘leprosy’: a divine intervention, on the one hand, or a natural defect, on the other. He did not feel competent to discuss the former, and restricted himself to the latter, drawing on Paul of Aegina for details. It is remarkable that in the sections discussing single afflictions, Moles often, after introducing a biblical passage, starts his discussion by citing either Cornelius a Lapide or Nicolaus a Lyra, both theologians famous for their biblical commentaries (examples are the sections on impetigo, tumor, delicatio, pimples, hoarseness, tuberculosis, sobbing, defloration, eunuchism, sterility,

73

M.L. Clouse, Medicine, Government, and Public Health in Philip II’s Spain: Shared Interests, Competing Authorities (Burlington, VT, 2011), 43–​74, 127–​40. 74 Valles, De iis quae scripta sunt, 585–​ 606; Roling, ‘Der Bibel als Summe der Naturwissenschaften’, 277–​8.

206 Touber monstrosities, and haemorrhage).75 Only after that initial theological stamp of approval does Moles go on to cite Hippocrates, Galen, Pliny, and so forth. In Uberte it is even more clear that he aspired to further the project of Valles: increasing the understanding of the natural part of biblical truth by drawing on classical insights combined with full awareness of modern practice. He integrated ancient authorities, recent observations, and the discursive wisdom of poets and theologians seamlessly, without condemning or embracing any of the diverse sources on which he drew. A striking example of how Uberte encompassed ancient and modern medicine and combined it with an overarching concern for their acceptance in a Catholic monarchy is his discussion of the growth of the foetus and its relation to Christology. The problem was that there seemed to be anatomical continuity between the mother and the foetus. Mother and child were joined by an umbilical cord with the placenta in between, apparently exchanging body fluid—​including spirit. Uberte notes that the Church Fathers already disagreed about whether the divine body of Christ was fed from the matter of Mary through the placenta. This led to the question of whether the soul of the mother or the soul of the child effectuated the formation of the newborn baby (and consequently also that of Christ). Uberte resolved the conundrum by suggesting that the tangle of veins and membranes between the mother and the foetus did not really constitute material continuity between mother and child. Where the bodily material of the two beings came together, it was rather like scar tissue or a callosity. Therefore, reassuringly, mother and child could be considered materially separate. More interesting than the proposed solution are the reasons for which Uberte delved into this embryological problem. He noted that anatomical dissections disclosed the problematic connection between mother and child in the womb: ‘it appears from anatomical dissections that the foetus in the womb is attached and united with the mother in multiple ways, as it is united by the umbilical cord and by the arteries, and that in such a connection they are not merely adjacent, but continuous through a real junction’.76 It is unclear whether Uberte drew on personal experience, or reported the findings of others. He says ‘Constat ex Anatome’, a term which in early modern parlance could denote the act of opening the body, meaning he could have been present himself.77 But then he goes on to appeal to dissections performed by Galen (‘Hoc affirmat Galenus lib. de dissectione uteri’), and by more recent anatomists (‘Confirmant Anatomici, & noviter Andraeas Laurentius, lib. 8. q. 27’.). 75 Moles, De morbis in sacris literis, 19, 46, 48, 53, 211, 258, 300, 308, 317, 320, 336, 348. 76 Uberte, Medicina sacra, 131. 77 Stephanus Blancardus, Lexicon novum medicum Graeco-​Latinum (Leiden, 1690), 33.

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Did Uberte witness the configuration of the foetus and the placenta in the womb himself? He might have. Saragossa hosted the continuous practice of performing anatomical dissections from the sixteenth century onwards, unlike the main Castilian universities in Alcalá, Salamanca and Valladolid. Throughout the seventeenth century the University of Saragossa and the Hospital of Nuestra Señora de la Gracia collaborated in staging dissections at a specially designed theatre, located on the hospital grounds. In any case, what matters is that Uberte presented dissections in antiquity (Galen) and dissections in his own time (André Du Laurens lived 1558–​1609) as complementary sources of knowledge, pertinent to understanding the humanity of Christ. Uberte represents the continuation in the seventeenth century of the modern, Vesalian anatomical education established in Aragon in the previous century, as well as a strong deference to confessional interests.78 Valles and Moles explicitly posited the art of medicine as existing in parallel with other societal authorities, notably theology and pastoral care. It is impossible to say whether Uberte, also, considered his embryological musings as a specifically medical contribution to understanding Christ, distinct from theological Christology, or rather as an integral part of the latter. In any case, Uberte was also convinced of the utility of medical expertise, both ancient and modern, in understanding certain aspects of the biblical narrative, while at the same time being careful not to trespass on the mystery guarded by the Holy Church (witness the houses contaminated with leprosy, which he considered a miracle, and thus outside the competence of the medical commentator). The same is true of Girolamo Bardi, the Ligurian ex-​Jesuit active in medicina sacra in these same years. Bardi, however, is a special case. He explicitly advocated the iatrochemical current in medicine, thus embracing a controversial novelty at a time when Italian intellectual culture was reeling from the Galileo affair.79 Girolamo Bardi worked in a period of political and cultural upheaval. After 1625, Genoa had to reinvent itself following the short war with Savoy. This provoked an outpouring of textual and visual propaganda in which politics and scholarship could easily mix. In 1636, Anton Giulio Brignole Sale and

78 Skaarup, Anatomy and Anatomists, 165–​85. 79 William B. Ashworth Jr, ‘Catholicism and Early Modern Science’ in God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, eds. David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (Berkeley, 1986) 136–​66; a nice illustration of the hesitation among Italian scholars to take a public stance in any issue which might fall under the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical authorities in Oreste Trabucco, ‘Di là dal nodo. un episodio di autocensura dopo l’affaire di Galileo (con una lettera di M.A. Severino a F. Liceti)’, Galilaeana 10 (2013), 137–​68.

208 Touber Bartolomeo Imperiale renewed the Accademia degli Addormentati, a literary society which was in favour of an autocratic regime. They secured the support of the Jesuits, endorsed the tenets of the Tridentine church, and celebrated the local champion of natural philosophy, Giovanni Battista Baliani (1582–​1666), as an alternative to Galileo. (Baliani was a proponent of experimentation and mathematics, but dismissive of atomism.) It was in this constellation of political and cultural initiatives, irreducible to either modernity or conservatism, that Bardi, the practising physician and former Jesuit, produced his Medicus politico-​catholicus. The tensions inherent in the movement headed by Brignole Sale—​the call for a consideration of novel ideas, with the underlying aim of consolidating the hierarchical power relations in force—​is manifest in the work of Bardi as well. On the one hand he was receptive to philosophical novelties, as witnessed by his dedication to the promotion of chemical medicine. He prepared a Theatrum naturae iatrochymicae rationalis, which never saw the light of day, but of which a prospectus appeared in 1653. On the title-​page, Bardi identified himself as a ‘iatro-​philoeuchymicus’, a medical lover of good chemistry. As we have seen, this came along with a blunt dismissal of the authority of Aristotle in his Medicus politico-​catholicus. In that respect, Bardi certainly gives the impression of being a novator. On the other hand, Bardi put his scholarly work very explicitly in at the service of the ecclesiastical community. Bardi obtained a range of endorsements for his Medicus politico-​catholicus which left little room for doubt about what he considered to be ‘Catholic’. These included his former teacher at the Jesuit college in Parma, Niccolò Cabeo (1586–​1650), as well as a Jesuit from Genoa, Giovanni Battista Noceto (1586–​1682). He dedicated the book to the Genoese Archbishop Stefano Durazzo. More to the point, he distinguished between spiritual medicine and physical medicine, and humbly eschewed any engagement with the former. Bardi embedded his medical scholarship consciously in both an innovative natural philosophy and a Catholic Christian piety. In this sense his work chimes well with the programme of reform of Brignole Sale, whom he invokes explicitly as one of his Maecenases in an excursus on the glories of Genoa.80 If Bardi traced his natural philosophy to Moses instead of Aristotle and Plato, his adherence to the new, chemical theory of matter may have played a role. As Blair has suggested regarding exponents of ‘Physica Mosaica’, the Bible may here be seen as a substitute to the authoritative traditions of natural philosophy. But it is just as likely that like his Spanish peers he 80 Bardi, Medicus politico-​catholicus, 342.

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chose to embed his erudition and expertise, culled from his ancient readings and modern experience alike, within a devout framework suffused with biblical allusions, spurred on by a desire to fuse medical expertise and pastoral authority. 4.2 After 1650: Sane Readings of the Bible Within the medicina sacra produced after 1650 in Northern Europe, the contributions of Johannes de Mey and Valentin Heinrich Vogler may be distinguished from those of Thomas Bartholin and Richard Mead. The former continued the tendency to be exhaustive, resulting in formidably long volumes in quarto format. The latter were more selective, producing slimmer volumes in octavo format that suggest detachment from the source texts. As we saw above, their content also differed in various aspects. Peculiar to De Mey is that he did not practise as a physician, but as a minister. However, this makes him less exceptional than might initially appear. After all, he had a doctorate in medicine rather than theology. Moreover, several of the practitioners who produced medicina sacra had an affinity with theology: Vicente Moles had studied theology in Alcalá de Henares before continuing with medicine; Girolamo Bardi had embarked on a career as a Jesuit before switching to the medical profession; and Richard Mead had grown up as the son of a nonconformist pastor whose house had doubled as a the centre of a local religious community.81 Nevertheless De Mey’s vocation as a minister of the public church may have given him a slightly different perspective as he set out to clarify the reasons for composing a work of medicina sacra. In the preface to the reader, De Mey was not as apologetic about discussing Scripture as his Southern European predecessors had been. Rather, he was apologetic about discussing topics that pertained to natural philosophy. He justified this by claiming that whatever Scripture said which referred to nature had to be as true, as was the Bible as a whole. But this required him to admit only those interpretations which were supported either by sound reasoning or by personal experience (as he did in all philosophy). It was not so much that De Mey claimed for medical expertise a particularly unique relevance for biblical exegesis equivalent in status to that of the theologian. Rather, he claimed that proper medical and natural philosophical knowledge could prevent theological engagement with the Bible from degenerating into the parroting of groundless fables.

81

Granjel, ‘Noticia sobre la obra’, 234; Jordanova, ‘Richard Mead’s Communities’, 246–​53.

210 Touber Somewhat paradoxically, this led De Mey to report the opinions of others rather than making up his own mind. We have already seen how he refrained from judging whether biblical leprosy, which contaminated houses, was miraculous or simply a historical variety of the disease which had since ceased to exist. Typically, in the very first section of the Sacra physiologia, he refrained from developing the biblical narrative of the Creation into a theory of matter, be it based on elements or on particles. Rather, he decried all theories which he considered unfounded, in particular the Stoic monism which equated God with the world. And, interestingly, he asserted that nothing could be known about the beginning of the World, except that it was created in time. The various chronologies encountered across the world gave different starting points: astronomical calculations of the Egyptians went back 100,000 years, those of Chaldeans 783,762 years, those of the Greeks 184,000. No certainty could be had derived from reason, nor from ancient testimonies. De Mey did make an exception for ‘the Sacred history of Moses’, but failed to specify the chronology which the internal biblical evidence suggested. He preferred not to date the origin of the world.82 Even more striking is a brief reference on this subject later in the De Mey’s book. There, he noted the recent suggestion of Isaac de La Peyrère that Genesis 1 relates the creation not of Adam, but rather of people before Adam: That other people have existed before Adam, all over the face of the Earth, in the same way and at the same time as all other living creatures, created at the beginning of the world, not to the knowledge of any of the mortals, many have suspected before, to the demonstration of which some unnamed author has devoted an entire volume this year.83 This is a clear reference to the ‘praeadamite thesis’ of La Peyrère, which appeared in published form in the very same year in which De Mey published his Sacra physiologia.84 De Mey followed up with a brief but efficient summary 82 83

84

De Mey, Sacra Physiologia, 1–​2. De Mey, Sacra Physiologia, 259: ‘Ante Adamum alios fuisse homines, per universum terrarum orbem, eodem modo, & tempore cum reliquis animantibus, initio mundi, nulli cognito mortalium, creatos, multi ante hac suspicati sunt, & hoc anno, integro voumine, author quidem innominatus, demonstrare aggressus est.’. For Isaac de La Peyrère and the praeadamite thesis, see Richard Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère (1596–​1676). His Life, Work and Influence (Leiden, 1987); Anthony Grafton, Defenders of the Text: the Tradition of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450–​1800 (Cambridge, Mass., 1991). 204–​13; Andreas N. Pietsch, Isaac La Peyrère: Bibelkritik, Philosemitismus und Patronage in der Gelehrtenrepublik des 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 2012).

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of La Peyrère’s argument, including the existence of a native population on the American continent, accompanied by elaborate chronological calculations. Predictably, De Mey did not accept the suggestion that the Bible recounted two separate creation stories. But his conclusion was not different from his comment on Genesis 1: no matter which ancient sources one consulted, absolutely nothing could be asserted about the beginning of the world with any certainty. The physical reality reflected both by the Bible and ancient texts receded into the mists of time. In addition to his fondness for novelties, it was De Mey’s reticence to take a stand on these issues which Vogler criticized six years later; disdainfully, he observed that De Mey ‘did not make his knowledge public, so much as copy the opinions of others’.85 These words appeared in a programmatic statement which Vogler published in 1661, entitled Ad sacrae physicae et medicinae in Academia Iulia studiosos programma, (‘Manifesto to those who study sacred physics and medicine at the University of Helmstedt’). It appears that Vogler intended to introduce medicina sacra and physica sacra as more or less institutionalized subjects in the university curriculum. He would thus anticipate the many vernacular disputations issuing from German universities in the eighteenth century, cited by Bernd Roling in his volume on Physica Sacra.86 From the disputations presided over by Vogler, however, it does not seem that any of his students graduated with discussions of medicina sacra.87 Vogler’s aversion to De Mey’s hesitation to take sides in debates is echoed by the diatribe against scepticism added as one of the prolegomena to Vogler’s De rebus naturalibus ac medicis in 1682. In these prolegomena, Vogler briefly surveyed the genealogy of the ‘foolish doctrine’ of scepticism, which he traced back to Heraclitus of Ephesus, to be disseminated only by the founder of the Middle Academy, Arcesilaus, and then systematized by Pyrrho of Elis. Vogler was full of scorn for the ‘profession of ignorance, codified in rules and discipline’. If scepticism had disappeared in late antiquity, it had recently reared its head in the work of René Descartes. The systematic doubt which Descartes posited as the prerequisite of all indubitable knowledge was condemned by Vogler, as it was by many exegetes who feared it would prevent there being any meaningful interpretation of the biblical texts. The significance of scepticism 85

‘non tam suam scientiam declaravit quam alienas sententias exscripsit’, Vogler, De rebus naturalibus ac medicis, sig. b8r. 86 Roling, Physica sacra. 87 Students of Vogler held disputations on topics like arthritis, scabies, tuberculosis, nose haemorrhage, pleurisy: Triebs, Die Medizinische Fakultat, 147, 150, 153, 293–​5, 297–​8, 303. Cf. Ross, ‘Sacred’, 94.

212 Touber for hermeneutics and religious debate in the Reformation has been charted well by Richard Popkin.88 For our purposes it is important to note that Vogler, in his medicina sacra, presented Descartes’s systematic doubt as a new instalment of the ancient ‘sect’ of sceptics. Just as Uberte had reconnected the anatomical observations of André Laurens alongside that of Galen, so Vogler presented the work of Fracastoro and Mercuriale as a continuation of Greek and Arab diagnostics (p. 207 above), and now Cartesian doubt as a revival of ancient Pyrrhonism. De Mey and Vogler followed the general set-​up of Valles’s De iis quae scripta sunt, albeit with a larger emphasis on the meaningful interpretation of Scripture and less concern for the position of the medical scholar in relation to theology. In turn, the works of Thomas Bartholin and Richard Mead may be seen as signalling a less exhaustive –​and more personal –​approach to medicina sacra. In Bartholin’s De morbis biblicis miscellanea this is apparent in a certain disengagement. The preface to the reader already suggests that it was a rather ad hoc production, prompted by the publisher who had asked for a few treatises on biblical diseases as a follow-​up to Bartholin’s earlier work on the healing of the paralytics in the New Testament.89 Even if we have to take that assertion with a pinch of salt, it is the kind of sprezzatura that betrays a different relation to ancient authorities with respect to that of his predecessors –​including a passing reference to a classical authority.90 One example will serve to illustrate how Bartholin seems to have put his erudite bravado before any social, speculative or spiritual teachings. I Kings 1 relates how the aging King David felt cold, and had the company of the girl Abishag to warm him up. Of our medici sacri, only Valles, De Mey and Bartholin commented on this chapter. Valles pondered the warmth of a young girl, and the comparative effect of drinking wine. But he framed these phenomena in a more general discussion of the nature of bodily heat, and the Stoic and Platonic theories of heat.91 De Mey, similarly, took his cue from this passage, in order to develop a wide-​ranging discussion of the economy of heat, breath and spirit in the course of the human life cycle. Along the way he referred to ancient philosophers (Democritus, Hippocrates) as well as modern ones (Ficino, Campanella).92 88

Richard H. Popkin, The History of Skepticism from Erasmus to Descartes (Assen, 1960); most recent expanded edition Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford, 2003). 89 Thomas Bartholin, Paralytici N.T. Medico & philologico commentario illustrati (Basel, 1662). 90 Ross, ‘Sacred Medicine’, 91. 91 Valles, De iis quae scripta sunt, 232–​8. 92 De Mey, Sacra physiologia, 2:31–​7.

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Bartholin, however, took a different approach. He reassured the reader that nothing scandalous had transpired between the king and the girl (as confirmed by Flavius Josephus): the girl only provided warmth for the icy king, as his old age had long since reduced his virility. Similarly, Emperor Barbarossa, when he was at an advanced age, had followed the advice of his Jewish physicians and applied small boys to his belly by way of a compress. Little dogs worked as well. Maimonides, or John Damascenus (an edition of whom was published together with Maimonides), communicated that paralytics benefitted from having adolescent girls lie along their sides. Francis Bacon had asserted that the girls should be anointed with myrrh, but Bartholin judged that the warmth and the sight of a healthy, pretty girl was better than any perfume. The technical explanation was that the warmth of the girl entered the patient’s body through the pores in his skin. If David had lived in Bartholin’s own time, he might have benefitted from a transfusion with the blood of the girl: clever people had been experimenting with that in Italy, Germany, France and England in recent years.93 The way in which Bartholin plays with ancient and modern sources of knowledge here moves away from the grand theological-​political constructs such as Bardi’s and De Mey’s. There was no overarching framework in which Bartholin aligned knowledge modern and ancient, scriptural or pagan. Rather, he surveyed the terrain of biblical history, highlighting noteworthy issues as he went along. Mead’s Medica sacra, finally, was similar in that it does not seem to have been intended to be an all-​encompassing exegesis of the Bible, whether medical, natural philosophical, or otherwise. The book, even slimmer than Bartholin’s, contained a selection of biblical afflictions, most of which had featured in the medicina sacra of previous generations. Yet the tone was decidedly different: the comments are less littered with citations, and more essayistic. A long preface explains the purpose of the exercise. There is a striking symmetry with the earliest of the medici sacri we have discussed: Valles had claimed that, after a life of commenting the classics of natural philosophy and medicine, in old age he had turned to Scripture. Mead, likewise, after fifty years of medical practice, decided to devote the remainder of his life to a useful pastime. In the same way as Valles had exchanged the object of his humanistic methods, substituting the Bible for the pagan classics, Mead also changed activity: leaving medical practice, he abandoned himself to literary studies. Mead also explicitly stated his aim: he hoped that divines, ignorant of the art of medicine, would benefit from his contribution, diminishing the danger of superstition.94 93 Bartholin, De morbis biblicis, 45–​6. 94 Mead, Medica sacra, i–​xix.

214 Touber There was no hint of defending the authority of the medical expert to interpret the biblical narrative here. Nor did the Newtonian Mead need to justify spending his time and intellectual effort on the illness narratives of the biblical texts. Ludmilla Jordanova has attempted to resolve the apparent paradoxical behaviour of the Newtonian exegete by stressing the charity which Mead aspired to exercise by producing this book. Indeed, it was an act of charity, rather than audacity, for a medical expert to comment on sacred Scripture.95 But maybe something else was also at play. If Mead’s reputation was at stake, it was not as a medical scholar, but rather as a literary scholar, a scholar of antiquity.96 If there is one thing which had not changed, since the time of Valles, it was that medical scholars were steeped in the classics, and that ancient wisdom was indispensable—​at least for commenting on the pathologies narrated in the most ancient text available, the Bible. This continuity is confirmed, most strikingly, by another symmetry: when discussing leprosy, both Valles and Mead suggested emendations to the classics. Valles had changed a word in Paul of Aegina to make his diagnostic technique conform to Avicenna’s (p. 199 above). Mead, meanwhile, suggested with Galen that Hippocrates had meant ‘Phoinikíen nouson’ not ‘Phthinikè nouson’ to refer to leprosy: the Phoenician disease.97 The social and intellectual context had shifted dramatically, both between Spain and England, and between 1590 and 1750. But the classics were still the solid ground under the feet of medical scholars, and their erudition and textual skills were still indispensable for medicina sacra. 5

Conclusion

The sampling of medicina sacra does not lend itself to one clear-​cut development in the relation between ancients and moderns in medical scholarship. There was continuity, there were some discontinuities, and there are many idiosyncrasies. Was there an obvious, categorical difference between Protestant Northern Europe and Catholic Southern Europe? The answer is not straightforward. A rather stark confirmation of such a difference would seem to be the chronological distribution of the single works of medicina sacra. After all, before 1650 medicina sacra was dominated by Catholic contributions, after

95 96

Jordanova, ‘Mead’s Communities’. Mead features predominantly as an antiquarian in Joseph M. Levine, The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age (Ithaca, 1991), 164–​73. 97 Mead, Medica sacra, 16.

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1650 by Protestant ones. However, in no way can Catholic medicina sacra be considered a fossilised, frozen enterprise. Valles with his broad-​ranging natural philosophy, Moles who juggled with exegetical literature and medical authorities, the anatomical findings of Uberte, the iatrochemistry of Bardi: all tried in different ways to fit medical scholarship as an authoritative discipline into the confessional society in which they lived and worked. For Valles the ancients were as important as ever, imparting indispensable wisdom. They should be accommodated in a confessional social order which found its legitimacy in the Bible. Bardi similarly took the Mosaic narratives as foundational, from which natural knowledge, both ancient and modern, was derivative, as were other fields. Valles’s compatriots Moles and Uberte differentiated more sharply between the moral dimension of the biblical narrative, the preserve of pastoral authority, and material aspects of the same narrative which operated in a continuum with both ancient and modern medical expertise. For Valles and Bardi the authority of the Bible may have offered sanctuary for their Hippocratism and chemical medicine, respectively. For Moles and Uberte, however, the Bible was a more like a sacred demesne which their profession had the privilege to hold certain parcels of in fief. To some extent, Johannes de Mey’s and Valentin Heinrich Vogler’s medicina sacra can be regarded as continuations of the earlier Southern European projects. Like their Catholic predecessors, De Mey and Vogler still worked within a framework in which the biblical narrative meshed seamlessly with both ancient knowledge and modern insights. However, they broadened and diversified the range of ancient authors they consulted, replaced some ancient authorities with modern ones, and addressed some new concerns. For De Mey the biblical creation narrative and the classical theory of matter became harder to integrate, in a period in which the preadamite thesis even blurred the scope of the first chapter of Genesis for some of his contemporaries. And Vogler worried about Cartesian doubt and anthropocentrism creeping into biblical interpretation. More to the point, a shift in perspective seems to have taken place. De Mey expressly reversed the roles of the guardians of natural and sacred knowledge. He did not justify the engagement of a medical scholar such as himself with the Bible, as Valles and Bardi had done, nor circumvent potential breaches of ecclesiastical authority, as Moles and Uberte had been keen to do. On the contrary, he advocated that divines cultivate knowledge of nature, drawn both from ancient authorities and modern experience. Vogler was less candid about the relation between different societal domains, but his ambition to establish the teaching of medicina sacra in Helmstedt on a permanent basis would seem to corroborate De Mey’s position (despite Vogler’s explicit rejection of

216 Touber De Mey’s approach of the subject). The status of the medical profession seems to have been less precarious in their eyes than a sensible reading of Scripture. Bartholin’s work on biblical diseases exudes a similar confidence in medical learning as the proper source for understanding bodily experiences in the Bible. At the same time, both De Mey and Bartholin were also more outspoken about the temporal distance between biblical history and their own societies. Whereas, for instance, Moles had emphasised the similarity of the treatment of lepers in biblical Israel and in late medieval Spain, Bartholin took for granted the limited accomplishments of the medical art in the age of King David. De Mey pointed to the existence of different diseases in different periods (and consequently, their disappearance). Does the development of medicina sacra show that medicine and history as scholarly pursuits parted ways in the course of the seventeenth century, history being relegated more to the private sphere? If so, the effects of any such trend become noticeable only in the work of Mead, and even then only partially. After all, Mead was still a confident classical scholar, in his public persona as much as in his private occupations. He practiced philological study of the historical texts with apparent ease, just as his distant predecessor Francisco Valles had done. Another similarity between the sixteenth-​century Spanish court physician and the eighteenth-​century English doctor is that both presented their work on the biblical narrative as an activity proper to the final stages of their careers. Contrary to Valles, however, Mead did identify his medicina sacra as a work of literary scholarship, rather than belonging to the same methodological domain as medical scholarship. Finally, then, in Bartholin and Mead we may see medicina sacra coming closer to the personal interests of its authors, with Bartholin exhibiting his scholarly virtuosity and Mead his personal piety. Classical scholarship remained central to learned medicine, insofar as it engaged with the Bible. But the motivations and the methods which shaped the way ancient knowledge was made to bear on medicina sacra drifted and shifted as the early modern period progressed.

­c hapter 7

The Reception of Hippocrates by Physicians at the End of the Seventeenth Century A Comparative Study Ian Maclean 1

Introduction

For a town to be called ‘the Athens of the North’, or a doctor to be called ‘the English Hippocrates’ is clearly a compliment at one level: at another, it is an acknowledgement of submission to a higher and earlier instantiation of the category in question, and an act of veneration of the past. The metaphorical use of a historical person or place as an epitheton ornans in this way (for our purposes, Hippocrates, the greatest doctor) is likely to be very ancient; it certainly became popular in the Renaissance. Aulus Cornelius Celsus was dubbed the ‘Hippocrates Romanus’ by various early modern doctors; by the end of the seventeenth century, a number of other physicians from various nations had earned the title. Thomas Sydenham was ‘the English Hippocrates’, a designation implicitly given to him by Giorgio Baglivi of Italy and Herman Boerhaave of the Netherlands, who themselves came to be called respectively the Dutch and the Italian Hippocrates.1 The French began by honouring Jean Fernel with this identification, followed by Louis Duret, whose commentary on the Greek text of the Coan Prognoses remained popular from the time of its first publication

1 Girolamo Mercuriale, In omnes Hippocratis Aphorismos praelectiones patavinae (1619), ed. Pancracius Marcellinus (Lyon, 1621), 94; Fortunio Liceti, De iis qui diu vivunt sine alimento, 3 pts (Padua, 1612), 3:22. The metaphor can also cross disciplinary boundaries: Galen was called ‘the Homer of medicine’ by Gianfrancesco Brancaleone, De balnearum utilitate (Paris, 1537), sig. b7r, quoted by Vivian Nutton, ‘Hippocrates in the Renaissance,’ Sudhoffs Archiv, Beiheft 27 (1989), 420–​39 (424); Peter Anstey, ‘The creation of the English Hippocrates’, Medical History 55 (2011), 457–​78; Sebastiano Marocchi, De re medica animadversiones: dissertatio inauguralis (Padua, 1838), 10; Roberto Lo Presti, ‘Traditio as the genealogy of truth: Hippocrates and Boerhaave between assimilation, variation and deviation’, Studies in Ancient Medicine, 25 (2010), 475–​522: also in Hippocrates and medical education, eds. H.F.J. Horstmannhoff and C.R. van Tilburg (Leiden, 2010), 475–​522 (481). The earliest attribution of the appellation ‘Romanorum Hippocrates’ to Baglivi is in Philippe Hecquet’s introduction to Baglivi’s Opera omnia (Lyon, 1704), sig. ãã2v.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004462335_009

218 Maclean until the end of the seventeenth century.2 The seventeenth-​century figures of Pierre Chirac and Charles Barbeyrac were cited as candidates for the title of the French Hippocrates in the nationalistic Dictionnaire des sciences médicales of 1825; at some time before Napoleon i’s gift of the bust of Hippocrates to the Salles des Actes of the University of Montpellier, the university adopted a device ‘olim Cous nunc Monspeliensis Hippocrates’ which made the whole medical school a reincarnation of the Coan physician.3 Germany’s first recipient of the title was Bartholomäus Carrichter, a late sixteenth-​century physician; thereafter Georg Friedrich Lorenz (a stern critic of the Aphorisms) was called ‘a new Hippocrates’ by one of his Danish colleagues, and Friedrich Hoffmann of Halle was also acclaimed as a ‘German Hippocrates’ a little later.4 There are no doubt many other examples that could be cited . The veneration in which Hippocrates was held is also made evident by the tendency to attribute the origin and substance of both physiological and 2 Iain M. Lonie, ‘The “Paris Hippocratics”: teaching and research in Paris in the second half of the sixteenth century’, in The medical Renaissance of the sixteenth century, ed. Andrew Wear (Cambridge, 1985), 164; Friedrich Hoffmann, Disputatio inauguralis medica sistens Methodum curandi pestem (Halle, 1708), 31 (Fernel); Joannes Opsopaeus, Hippocrates iusiurandum (Frankfurt, 1587), 743 (Duret). 3 Dictionnaire des sciences médicales: biographie médicale, 7 vols (Paris, 1825), 7:289–​ 91 s.v. Thomas Sydenham (where (2:642–​3) it is also claimed that Sydenham owed all to the Montpellier doctor Guillaume de Baillou: a claim refuted by Anstey, ‘The creation of the English Hippocrates’); before Montpellier, the early medieval medical school of Salerno gave the city in which it was cited the sobriquet ‘Hippocratica urbs’ (or ‘civitas’): Hastings Rashdall, The universities of Europe in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1895), 85; François Granel, Charles Barbeyrac: 1629–​1699, rénovateur de l’Hippocratisme (Causse, 1958); Joachim Telle, ‘Bartholomäus Carrichter: zu Leben und Werk eines deutschen Fachschriftstellers des 16. Jahrhunderts’, in Paracelsus und seine internationale Rezeption in der frühen Neuzeit, eds. Ilana Zinguer and Heinz Schott (Leiden, Cologne and Boston, 1998), 58–​94 (69) quoting Johannes Heskius Cardilucius’s preface to his Neue Stadt-​und Land-​Apotheken zweyter Tomus (Nuremberg, 1673). See also Walter Pagel and Pyarali Rattansi, ‘Harvey meets the ‘Hippocrates of Prague (Johannes Marcus Marci of Kronland)’, Medical History 8 (1964), 78–​84. 4 Joachim Telle, ‘Bartholomäus Carrichter-​ein früher Paracelsist?’, in Paracelsus und seine internationale Rezeption in der frühen Neuzeit, eds. Ilana Zinguer and Heinz Schott (Leiden, Cologne and Boston, 1998), 58–​94; Lorenz, Exercitationum in non nullos minus absolute veros Hippocratis Aphorismos, eorumque rationes, conscriptarum pars I (Hamburg, 1647), sig.)()( 2r (Jacobus Janus); Andreas Karl Grosse, Tractatio philosophico-​medica qua sistitur verum universae medicinae principium (Halle, 1732), 26. Paracelsus, himself a candidate to be the German Hippocrates, considered in the Opus paragranum of 1529–​30 whether he should be called the ‘Lutherus medicorum.’ A (to me) surprising absence from this German Hippocratic pantheon is Georg Ernst Stahl, Hoffmann’s colleague at Halle and the founder of a school of medicine that vigorously rejected Cartesian dualism and mechanism. On his uptake of Hippocrates, see Jürgen Helm, ‘Quod naturae ipsae sint morborum mediatrices: der Hippokratismus Georg Ernst Stahls’, Medizinhistorisches Journal 35 (2000), 251–​62.

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therapeutic medical doctrines to him, even if they are expressed in different terms: there is most notably a ‘Hippocrates chimicus’, a ‘Hippocrates iatromechanicus’ who knew of the circulation of the blood, and, more implausibly, a ‘Hippocrates anatomicus’.5 His name thus transcends, in a certain way, the dichotomy between ancient and modern: he is both, and, perhaps, neither, if what he represents is not a body of doctrine but just a ‘spirit or method’.6 The attributions of modern theories to the Hippocratic corpus pose the question why this sort of validation was sought, why it was associated with infallible truth, and how easily the language of ancient medicine could be translated into modern terms, which I shall address below. There is also an issue of syntactic and semantic clarity. I shall give an example below (pp. 242-​3) of an aphorism and the problems it poses for interpreters; here is another, constituting the first paragraph of In the Surgery, which illustrates how much work has to be done by the reader to make the text explicit.7 As the transmission of the Hippocratic Corpus is principally in Latin, I shall quote it in that language in Janus Cornarius’s translation from the most accessible edition (that of Joannes Antonides van der Linden of 1645): Aut similia, aut dissimilia, a principio, a maximis, a facilimis, ab his quae undiquaque penitus cognoscuntur: quae ex videre, et tangere, et audire licet: quae et visu, et tactu, et auditu, et naribus, et lingua, et intelligentia sentire licet: quae et quibus cognoscuntur, omnibus cognoscere licet.8 The categories similar or dissimilar, [arguments] from what is given originally, from the greatest signs and those which are easiest to recognize, and from those which are altogether known: [evidence] which can 5 See below, pp. 262-​7; Barthold Krüger, Anatomicus curiosus theodidaktos: hoc est: methodus secandi cadavera Hippocratico Democritaea (Brunswick, 1700); also Thomas Rütten, ‘Hippocrates and the construction of ‘progress’ in sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​century medicine’, in Reinventing Hippocrates, ed. David Cantor (Farnham, 2001), 37–​58 (48) (on the fortunes of an anecdote in the Hippocratic letters apparently promoting dissection). Works combining ancient and modern medicine are not uncommon: cf. William Salmon, Synopsis medicinae, or, A compendium of astrological, Galenical, and chymical physick: philosophically deduced from the principles of Hermes and Hippocrates, in three books (London, 1671); Casparus Ignatius Voigt, Tractatus medicus Galeno-​Chymicus, de passione seu affectione hypochondriaca (Prague, 1678). 6 Wesley D. Smith, The Hippocratic Tradition (Ithaca and London, 1979), 20. 7 The titles of Hippocratic works will in most cases be given in English. In this case, there are two Latin versions of the Greek kat’ iētreion: Officina medici and Chirurgiae officina. The latter title comes from the edition of the Opera omnia by Girolamo Mercuriale of 1588; the former from the Foës edition of 1595. 8 On Latin as the language of transmission, see Nutton ‘Hippocrates in the Renaissance’, 428.

220 Maclean be seen, touched and heard, which can be apprehended by all our senses, sight, touch, hearing, the nose, the tongue, and the understanding: things which are known and by which they are known, [deductions] that come from all our sources of knowledge. The Latin translation employs some technical terms of logic, together with other less technical vocabulary. Georg Wolfgang Wedel, to whose construal of this passage I shall return, describes this and similar passages which deal with the rational processes to be applied to evidence by doctors as ‘general oracles’, and it is clear why not only he but others before him saw something delphic in the text.9 Such terse allusiveness which leaves room for constructive interpretation certainly helped the cause of those who argue that Hippocrates cannot err.10 In assessing comparatively the uptake of Hippocrates, it seems appropriate to look in some detail at the various honorands in their national contexts: Lorenz, Sydenham, Baglivi, Hoffmann, Boerhaave. On the last four of these figures, all of them major figures in the field of medicine, there have been recent distinguished studies that in some cases address directly their relationship to the Hippocratic corpus, which will facilitate my task of comparing them.11 Before that, I shall give a brief account of sixteenth-​and seventeenth-​ century Hippocratism, and the development of the discipline of medicine in the seventeenth century. One important context for all this is the continuing status of the Aphorisms as a handbook of practical medicine. For that reason, 9

10

11

Georg Wolfgang Wedel, Propempticon inaugurale de demonstratione hippocratica (Jena, [1689]), sig.):(2r-​v: ‘cum vero sparsim et per totum volumen Hippocratis librorum flosculos tales offendere liceat, ita ut forte integer liber de demonstratione hac exinde condi posset facillimo negotio, praecipuum illum laudabimus, et instar oraculi generalis, quem et Pergamenus [Galenus] citat, explicat et dilaudat non uno loco.’ Janus Cornarius had expressed a similar view in the introductory epistle to his edition of the Opera omnia (Basel, 1546), sig. *4v, referring to Hippocrates’s ‘difficultatem, brevitatem, aenigmatis similem obscuritatem’: see Marie-​Luce Montfort, Janus Cornarius et la redécouverte d’Hippocrate à la Renaissance (Turnhout, 2017), 356. Nutton ‘Hippocrates in the Renaissance’, 433–​4; the source of the claim ‘Hippocrates […] tam fallere quam falli nescit’, which is frequently quoted, is Macrobius, Commentarii in somnium Scipionis, 6. Lorenz, Exercitationum in non nullos minus absolute veros Hippocratis Aphorismos, sig. e2r calls it a ‘vox hyperbolica’. Anstey, ‘The creation of the English Hippocrates’; Raphaële Andrault, ‘What does it mean to be an empiricist in medicine? Baglivi’s De praxis medica (1696)’, in What does it mean to be an Empiricist? Empiricisms in eighteenth-​century sciences, eds. Siegfried Bodenmann and Anne-​Lise Rey (Cham, 2018), 169–​88; Iain M. Lonie, ‘Hippocrates the iatromechanist’, Medical History 25 (1981), 113–​50 (on Friedrich Hoffmann); Lo Presti, ‘Traditio as the genealogy of truth’.

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I shall not only look at the aspects of the Hippocratic corpus that attracted the attention of innovative physicians and natural philosophers, but also the various critiques of Hippocrates as the best source for medical practice. My national eponymous figures will then be investigated, and their differential uptake of the ‘divinus senex’ in the era of experimental science and new medical theories examined. 2

The Hippocratic Corpus and Its Evolution

The Hippocratic Corpus was already seen in Galen’s time as a heterogeneous body of writing, both in terms of genres and content. In the Middle Ages, it was principally known through the Aphorisms, the Prognostics and the Regimen in acute cases, as well as Galen’s commentaries on a number of the works. At that time, little distinction was made between the doctrines of the two great medical names of antiquity, even though a doctor such as the Florentine Taddeo Alderotti (d. 1295) could be dubbed a ‘Hippocratista’ in recognition of the attention he paid to the Aphorisms.12 Just as Pietro d’Abano had orchestrated the conciliation of Galen and Aristotle as authorities, so did he and others establish the harmony of Galenic and Hippocratic medicine. Galen’s commentaries on Hippocratic works were taken to be authoritative; the distinction made in them between works by Hippocrates himself, those by his pupils, and those falsely attributed to him was also generally taken to be uncontroversial.13 Galen’s harmonisation of the various potentially conflicting elements of Hippocratic doctrine –​decretorial days and crises, humours (two in Regimen, 1, four (but not the same four) in Nature of man and Diseases, multiple in On ancient medicine) was also widely accepted.14 The philological phase of the reception of Hippocrates began with Marco Fabio Calvo’s translation of the corpus into Latin in 1525 and the Aldine Greek edition of 1526, which was followed by Janus Cornarius’s edition and translation that appeared at Basel in 1538 and 1546. It was accompanied by editions of other Greek doctors (Aëtius of Amida, Paul of Aegina, Oribasius, Alexander of Tralles, Rufus of Ephesus, and Aretaeus of Cappadocia), and culminated 12 13 14

Gideon Manning and Cynthia Klestinec, ‘Introduction’, in Professors, Physicians and Practices in the History of Medicine, eds. G. Manning and C. Klestinec (Cham, 2017), 4. Nutton ‘Hippocrates in the Renaissance’, 421–​31. See Jole Shackleford, ‘The Chemical Hippocrates: Paracelsianism and Hippocratic Theory in Petrus Severinus’ Medical Philosophy’, in Reinventing Hippocrates, ed. Cantor, 59–​90 (69–​71).

222 Maclean in two dual-​language editions by Girolamo Mercuriale and Anuce Foës, published in 1588 and 1595 respectively. The former work was arranged in four classes according to Mercuriale’s Censura et dispositio operum Hippocratis of 1584, where a division was made between genuine works, works taken down by disciples from memory, works by sons or disciples, and materials in the Corpus that were not genuine.15 The recognition of multiple authorship (together with the gnomic quality of many of the texts) allowed subsequent commentators to explain away contradictions within the Corpus without damaging its authority.16 Foës’s edition was organized into the eight more or less thematic sections suggested by the ancient Hippocratic commentator Erotian (ethics, prognosis, physiology, diet, diseases, surgery, Aphorisms together with the Epidemics, and miscellanea).17 In the course of the seventeenth-​century, Foës’s edition was reprinted, Joannes van der Linden produced a variant Opera omnia based on Cornarius and Foës in an affordable format, and René Chartier published an expensive joint edition of the complete works of Galen and Hippocrates with the backing of the French state between 1639 and 1679, which never gained much currency because of its cost and scarcity.18 The complete works were accompanied into the book market by a plethora of editions of individual texts, mainly the Aphorisms, accompanied by commentaries from the hands of various physicians. These by far outnumbered the commentaries on any other Hippocratic text (Martin Lipenius lists no fewer than 138 in 1679; the next highest number of commentaries on a Hippocratic text is twenty, on the

15

See Nutton, ‘Hippocrates in the Renaissance’, 420, for earlier philological debates, including that between Niccolò Leoniceno and Giovanni Manardi. 16 Smith Hippocratic Tradition, 21–​2 (on Daniel Le Clerc’s Histoire de la médecine of 1696); Otto Tachenius, Hippocrates chimicus (Venice, 1666), preface, sig. *6v: ‘Hippocrates, fulgentissimum Medicinae lumen, Divina sua oracula, aenigmatibus obvelavit, et praecepta, in omnibus doctrinae suae operibus, laconice retulit; adeo ut obscura eius brevitas, et eloquia, a scriptoribus in varios sensus distorta sint, quorum Galenus mira artis solertia, ac venusto ordine, in capita disposuit.’ See also Lonie. ‘Hippocrates the iatromechanist’, 121. 17 Foes was also the author of the valuable Oeconomia Hippocratis, alphabeti serie distincta (Frankfurt, 1588). 18 The English physician John Freind delivered the following negative judgement on Chartier’s edition: ‘Charterius vero ad id, quod susceperat muneris, ita parum attendisse videtur, ut speciosum illud, quod exhibuit, Hippocratis exemplar, sit omnium, editoris non inscitia fortasse, sed incuria saltem mendosissimum’: see Georg Christoph Hamberger, Zuverlässige Nachrichten non den vornehmsten Schriftstellern vom Anfange der Welt bis 1500 erster Theil (Lemgo, 1756), 199. See also Jacques Jouanna, ‘René Chartier éditeur injustement méconnu’, in René Chartier (1572–​1654) éditeur et traducteur d’Hippocrate et de Galien, ed. Jacques Jouanna, Véronique Boudon-​Millet, and Guy Cobolet (Paris, 2012), 51–​80.

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Prognostics).19 They were mainly targeted at the commentator’s local institution. A few such commentaries had a wider impact, and merited repeated printings, notably the very popular edition of the Aphorisms presented by Jan van Heurne, and the Coan prognoses explicated by Louis Duret.20 One of the criteria which led to these works being accorded the honour of being reprinted seems to have been their sound philological content. The commentaries in a pedagogical style based entirely on the concerns of practical medicine were not reissued as often. The dominant interpretations of the Hippocratic corpus were however filtered through the Galenic mesh of commentaries: a clear separation of the two would not happen until the nineteenth century.21 3

Hippocratism in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: The Paris Hippocratics

By the late Renaissance, there was a variety of ‘Hippocratisms’ in Europe.22 These reflected other developments, such as the rise of the case history, the publication of medical observations, and the use of the aphoristic genre in natural philosophy, which are as much to do with the styles, forms and genres of the Hippocratic corpus as with its content.23 In histories of medicine, the earliest of which date from the late seventeenth century, the main characterisation of Hippocrates is as the true voice of ancient medicine, with its practice of acute observation not inflected by any prior expectation or theory; this turns

19 20 21

22

23

Martin Lipenius, Bibliotheca realis medica (Frankfurt, 1679), 36–​40, 207–​8. There were sixteen editions of van Heurne’s Aphorismi graece et latine between 1601 and 1690; four editions of Duret’s Coacae prognoses between 1588 and 1665. Richard J. During, ‘A chronological census of Renaissance editions and translations of Galen’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 24 (1961), 230–​305, nos. 149–​60. An early modern list of the recommended editions of the individual works by Hippocrates is to be found in the preface of Conrad Joachim Sprengell, The Aphorisms of Hippocrates and the sentences of Celsus (London, 1708), x–​xiii. See Nutton, ‘Hippocrates in the Renaissance’, 421, who refers to the Hippocratisms of Paris, Padua, Crato von Crafftheim and Cristobal de Vega, but not that of Cardano, on whom see Nancy G. Siraisi, The clock and the mirror: Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance medicine (Princeton, 1997), 119–​45. According to Lonie ‘The “Paris Hippocratics” ’, 233, the term ‘Hippocratismus’ was first used by the Parisian Maurice de la Corde. See also Nutton, ‘Hippocrates in the Renaissance’, 428–​9. See Gianna Pomata, ‘Sharing Cases: the Observationes in Early Modern Medicine’, Early Science and Medicine, 15 (2010), 193–​236; ead., ‘A Word of the Empirics. The ancient concept of observation and its recovery in early modern medicine’, Annals of Science 68 (2011), 1–​27.

224 Maclean Galen and the Arabic doctors who became influential in the Middle Ages into perverters of the pure original doctrine by their recourse to philosophising, system-​building, and empty verbiage. This narrative, which celebrates modern medicine’s return to the fons et origo of the true medical art, is all-​pervasive in the seventeenth century.24 Advances in surgery are also attributed to the Hippocratic corpus, but these are less relevant to this account of the early enlightenment, and I shall not investigate them further.25 Nor shall I examine the fortunes of the Oath and the related Hippocratic texts on medical ethics.26 That leaves two areas: physiology (principally, the doctrine of the humours) which falls under traditional theoria; and diet and therapeutics, which are parts of practica. The most widely celebrated Hippocratic school was that of Paris. Its members –​Jacques du Bois, Jacques Houllier, Louis Duret, Guillaume de Baillou –​ were all distinguished Greek philologists as well as practising physicians and pedagogues. Their sensitive reading of elements of Hippocratic theory and practice, with special reference to surgery, diagnosis, prognosis, therapy and climatology were all published posthumously: in the case of Baillou, some forty years after his death. In no sense were they anti-​Galenic (they explicitly espoused the doctrine of ‘ratio et experientia’), but they could justifiably be described as ‘post-​Galenic’ in the sense that they did not rely on his commentaries, and forbore from quoting them.27 The text most associated with the Paris Hippocratics is the Coan Prognoses, which Iain Lonie describes as 24 Smith, Hippocratic tradition, 20; Anstey, ‘The creation of the English Hippocrates’. It continues to be influential: twentieth-​century holistic ‘neo-​Hippocratism’ bears many of its elements: see George Weisz, ‘Hippocrates, Holism and Humanism in Interwar France’, in Reinventing Hippocrates, ed. Cantor, 257–​79, and David Cantor, ‘The Name and the Word: Neo-​Hippocratism and Language in Interwar Britain’, in ibid., 280–​301. 25 See Vivian Nutton, ‘Humanist surgery’, in Medical Renaissance, ed. Wear, 75–​99. 26 See Thomas Rütten, ‘Receptions of the Hippocratic Oath in the Renaissance. The prohibition of abortion as a case study in reception’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 51 (1996), 456–​83. I shall also not discuss the connection (already made in the medieval period) between Hippocratic therapies and astrology through the doctrine of critical days and lunar cycles; from it emerged the doctrine of ‘astronodia’, on which see Roger French, ‘Astrology in medical practice’, in Practical medicine from Salerno to the Black Death, eds. Luis Garcia-​Ballester, Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga and Andrew Cunningham (Cambridge, 1994), 33, 39–​40. The role of astrologers in medical practice was emphatically rejected by Renaissance physicians: see François Valleriola, Enarrationum medicinalium libri VI (Lyon, 1554), 368–​78. 27 The influence of the last-​named doctor was not felt in Europe until his works were published posthumously in the mid-​seventeenth century. Baillou pointed out that Hippocrates did not describe all, but only the most significant symptoms: Nutton ‘Hippocrates in the Renaissance’, 433–​4.

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‘an unorganized collection of sentences (‘sententiae’) which describe clusters of signs and symptoms.’28 The Parisians knew that parts of the work had been disparaged by Galen, who approved only of those narratives that offered causal explanations related to humoral theory, climatology and decretorial days. The Parisian approach chose, against Galen, to see even the untheorized elements as constituting a ‘thesaurus’ of medical experience and lore worthy to be mined in order to enrich practical medicine; it embodied a concept of prognosis not just as future-​related, but rather an account of ‘all things that are now, and are to be, and which were before.’29 Houllier even made the strong claim that this and other Hippocratic texts embodied an art that is certain (‘ars certa’).30 4

Hippocrates the Logician

Distinguished medical professors of the first half of the sixteenth century were clear that Hippocrates himself was a ‘truly a rational and systematic physician’ (‘medicus vere dogmaticus’), even if he did not present his works in an explicitly logical way as did Galen, but rather chose to omit what was generally known and speak only of recondite aspects of the art.31 For those wishing to make the case for Hippocrates the rational doctor, there were two paths open: the former was to follow the hint given above that Hippocrates chose not to make his theory and method universally explicit, and from there proceed to deduce or infer the rational or ‘dialectical’ procedures in the corpus. The latter path was the well-​tried scholarly practice of assembling the scattered statements in the Hippocratic corpus about the role of logic and reason in medicine, and organizing them into a coherent whole.

28 Lonie, ‘The Paris Hippocratics’, 162. 29 Lonie, ‘The Paris Hippocratics’, 162–​4. 30 Jacques Houllier, In Aphorismos Hippocratis commentarii septem, ed. Jean Liébaut (Paris, 1582), 3r; cf. Didier Jacot, in Houllier, Coacae praesagia (Lyon, 1576), sig. xx7r (on Hippocrates’s teaching being ‘to oti’, not ‘to dioti’). 31 Giovanni Battista da Monte, Expectissimae in Aphorismos Hippocratis lectiones (Venice, 1553), 10r; also id., Opuscula varia et praeclara (Basel, 1558), 268–​9. On Renaissance Galenism as a rational medical doctrine see Oswei Temkin, Galenism: the rise and fall of a medical philosophy (Ithaca and London, 1973), and Ian Maclean, Logic, signs and Nature in the Renaissance: the case of learned medicine (Cambridge, 2001). Boerhaave and after him von Haller cite Hippocrates as the first Greek systematic physician: Hermann Boerhaave, Methodus studii medici, ed. Albrecht von Haller, 2 vols (Amsterdam, 1751), ‘Medici systematici Graeci: Hippocrates’, 2:814–​17. This sets a recommended order of reading of a selection of texts, with approved commentaries.

226 Maclean The former approach was adopted by Girolamo Cardano (1501–​1576) in his Dialectica, composed in 1562. It forms part of his wider survey of dialectical techniques in Aristotle, Galen, Euclid and Ptolemy, and is a very radical and ambitious account of how Hippocratic logic works. It is a by-​product of the ambitious project Cardano had formed by 1557 to publish commentaries on the whole Hippocratic corpus in 100 books. During his tenure of the chair of medicine in Bologna between 1563 and 1570, he lectured on the Aphorisms, the Epidemics, Prognostics, Nutriment, On the seven-​month child, Regimen in acute disease and Airs, waters, places. Most of these commentaries were published in folio, for the benefit of ‘the erudite, the rich, the nobility’.32 Cardano’s ambition was to supersede Galen as the major interpreter of Hippocrates. His particular interest in the Hippocratic corpus, as in other ancient authors such as Ptolemy, was in prognosis: as Nancy Siraisi puts it, he sought to ‘comprehend the intersection of law and contingency’ in respect of future events. But he was not only a physician who looked on the Aphorisms as a complete and, more surprisingly, well-​ordered guide to practical medicine, but also a specialist in astrological medicine with a particularly strong interest in the doctrine of critical days. He also strove to reconcile Hippocratic teachings with Vesalian anatomy.33 The passage about Hippocrates in the Dialectica reflects Cardano’s self-​ confidence as a logician. His aim is to determine Hippocrates’s technique for discovering the middle term of a practical syllogism (‘inventio medii’) through ‘cognitio’, ‘operatio’ and ‘cognitio in comparationem’, which arises from the similarity or dissimilarity of prognostic signs (the sources of twelve such signs are listed).34 The account is written almost in note form, and is not easy to follow 32

33

34

See Ian Maclean, ‘Cardano and his publishers, 1534–​1663’, in Girolamo Cardano: Philosoph, Naturforscher, Arzt, ed. Eckhard Kessler (Wiesbaden, 1994), 305–​33. It is interesting to compare this publishing strategy, shared with Friedrich Hoffmann, with that of George Ernst Stahl, who chose the inexpensive format of 8vo for his publications, and wrote German versions of them on the grounds of accessibility: see Johanna Geyer-​Kordesch, ‘Stahl –​Leben und seine medizinische Theorie’, in Georg Ernst Stahl (1659–​1734) in wissenschaftshistorischer Sicht, eds. Dietrich von Engelhardt and Alfred Gierer (Halle, 2000), 33–​48 (38). Cardano also suggested a new classification for Hippocrates’s works: Siraisi, Clock and the Mirror, 120. See also ead., ‘Cardano, Hippocrates, and the Criticism of Galen’, in Cardano, ed. Kessler, 131–​51; Alfonso Ingegno, Saggi sulla filosofia di Cardano (Florence, 1980), 209–​ 71; Jackie Pigeaud, ‘L’Hippocratisme de Cardan: étude sur le Commentaire d’Airs, Eaux, Lieux par Cardan’, Res Publica Litterarum 8 (1975), 219–​29. Dialectica, in Opera omnia, ed. Charles Spon, 10 vols (Lyon, 1663), 1:291–​308. The ‘inventio medii’ is a sophisticated late-​medieval logical procedure whose popularizer was Petrus Tartaretus: see Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Simon Blackburn (Oxford, 1994), 251. Here is a simple example of the inventio medii, with ‘disease’ as the middle term to be

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(even the enumerations do not seem to be complete or consistent within the text). It marks the high point of analytical approaches to the Hippocratic corpus, and has no intellectual progeny. The second approach was followed by three physicians with very different agendas and backgrounds: a Galenist, Antonio Ponce de Santa Cruz (1561–​ 1632), professor at the University of Valladolid; Georg Wolfgang Wedel (1645–​ 1721), a polymath and professor at the University of Jena with strong chemical, anatomical and botanical interests; finally, his erstwhile pupil, the radical pietist and anti-​mechanist Georg Ernst Stahl (1659–​1734) of the University of Halle. Ponce de Santa Cruz chose to write a commentary on Regimen 1 which he described as the embodiment of the ‘philosophia Hippocratica’, and suggested that it was very close to the teaching of Avicenna on which he was obliged to lecture as professor at Vallidolid. His claim that this text represents Hippocratic philosophy rests not on its opening radical chapter, which the anti-​Hippocratic Lorenz sees as an argument against the use of the argument from authority in medicine (see below, p. 243), but on Hippocrates’s interest in causation and his use of philosophical terms borrowed from his contemporaries.35 This last point is particularly important to the later generation of thinkers who set out to make Hippocrates the forerunner of chemical or mechanical medicine. Ponce’s aim is less ambitious than this, being an exercise in the reduction of the Hippocratic corpus to traditional Galenic dogmatic medicine which was dominant in Spain at that time.36

discovered or supplied, ‘praeternatural condition of the body’ as the major term and ‘fever’ as the minor term, in the mode barbara: All diseases are preternatural conditions of the body Fevers are diseases Therefore fevers are preternatural conditions of the body. Practical syllogisms contain modals (‘should’ or ‘must’) and can relate to individuals as well as genera. For examples of the problems for diagnosis and prognosis that arise from this form of reasoning, where the middle term is often a remedy, see Ian Maclean, Le monde et les hommes selon les médecins de la Renaissance (Paris, 2006), 40–​2. 35 Lorenz, De notis, sig. A1r, where he assimilates it to the sentiment ‘nullius in verba’. 36 Philosophia Hippocratica (Madrid 1622), 113 (summarized in the index as ‘Hippocrates reprehendit illos qui non inquirunt causas rerum’) and ibid., 4 (on Hippocrates using the philosophical vocabulary of his day). This point is very important when it comes to the claims that Hippocrates is the precursor of chemistry and mechanics in medicine: see below, pp. 233-​5. A modern parallel would be an article arguing that Aristotle foresaw, and would have been able to understand, quantum physics. See Juan Riera, ‘Esfigmologia y galenismo en la obra de Antono Ponce de Santa Cruz (1561–​1632)’, Cuardernos de la historia de la medicina espagnola 11 (1972), 55–​75.

228 Maclean Wedel, a physician with very wide interests and a sophisticated awareness of the contemporary medical scene, proceeds in a way very different to his ex-​ pupil the anti-​Cartesian Stahl. Both start with a declaration of the relationship of medicine to wisdom, which they relate to the well-​known claim in a passage in Decorum that doctors are ‘like Gods’ (‘isotheoi’). Stahl devotes the whole of his Propempticon inaugurale de philosophia Hippocratis of 1704 to a moral reading of this passage, consistent with his opposition to the influence of Cartesian dualism and mechanism in medicine.37 Wedel’s Propempticon inaugurale de demonstratione Hippocratica, written fifteen years earlier, is a systematic extraction of the skeleton of Hippocratic logic from the short statements scattered ‘sparsely and throughout the whole Hippocratic corpus’ whose dominant character reveals Hippocrates’s preference for teaching more by example than by precept.38 Wedel begins with the distinction between knowledge (‘episteme’) and opinion (‘doxa’), and shows that Hippocrates is wary of dialectical argument (i.e. topics) and hypotheses related to the latter. Medical knowledge is conceived as the product of both a priori and a posteriori reasoning (relating to the famous ‘ratio et experientia’ of dogmatic, i.e. Galenic, doctors). Wedel lists the ways of making discoveries from the arguments ‘a simili’, ‘a dissimili’, ‘a principio’, ‘a maximis’, and ‘a facilimis’, and the means of drawing information not only from all the senses and the resources of the human mind, but also what is generally available in the public domain. This section is derived somewhat speciously from the delphic entry in a work about surgery, not medicine proper, already quoted above (219). Wedel shows also that Hippocrates recognizes the role of chance in the medical art, gives some examples of apodictic reasoning ‘ex definitione, postulatis et causis’, and ends by affirming the crucial role in medical practice of ‘epideixis’ (‘indicatio’: the intuitive process that doctors employ to reach therapeutic decisions ‘ex opere, effectu, experientia’).39 Wedel’s ingenious extraction of the logical basis of the Hippocratic 37

38 39

On Stahl, whose pietistic position is worthy of longer scrutiny than can be given here, see Georg Ernst Stahl (1659–​1734) in wissenschaftshistorischer Sicht, eds. Dietrich von Engelhardt and Alfred Gierer (Halle, 2000); Jürgen Helm, ‘ “Quod naturae ipsae sint morborum mediatrices”: der Hippokratismus Georg Ernst Stahls’, Medizinhistorisches Journal, 35 (2000), 251–​62. ‘sparsim et per totum volumen Hippocratis librorum’, quoted above, note 10. See above, note 10, and Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature, 306–​14. Cf. Luca Antonio Porzio, In Hippocratis librum de veteri medicina paraphrases necnon dissertatio logica (Rome, 1681), 163–​82, which deals mainly with Galen’s logic, makes the claim that ‘nullum plane esse inventum’, and but includes the Hippocratic quotation about ‘similia’ and ‘dissimilia’ (see above, p. 219), which it glosses as ‘quae medico consideranda sunt, ut morbum cognoscat, et remedium inveniat.’

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corpus stands in contrast to the other and much more familiar representations of it, to which I now turn. 5

Case Histories, Observations, Environments

Already in the Middle Ages, there were texts which dealt with individual case histories in the form of consilia and consultations. The earliest published collections of these in the Renaissance was the Florentine physician Antonio Benivieni’s De admirandis curationibus et praedictionibus morborum which appeared locally in 1507, and was reprinted in Basel for a wider readership in 1529. It dealt specifically with extraordinary cases whose outcomes may or may not have been affected by spiritual medicine, and is quite unlike the works published after the middle of the century, which were inspired both in form and content by the Hippocratic Epidemics. Iain Lonie has described this as a ‘memorandum book’ without system or organization.40 The case histories covered everything that could be observed about patients and their diseases over the time of its activity in a loose narrative resembling a sequence of diary entries.41 The authors of these accounts –​Amatus Lusitanus, Giovanni Battista da Monte, Jodocus Lommius, Girolamo Cardano, Johann Wier, François Valleriola, Martin Ruland the Elder, Rembert Dodoens, and Pieter van Foreest –​ were in the main municipal doctors, who had an interest in advertising their therapeutic skills (‘felicitas in curando’), but also nursed an ambition through collaborative and accumulative work to bring about a Hippocratic turn in the presentation of medical observations, as Ruland’s title indicates: Curationum empiricarum et historicarum in certis locis et notis hominibus optime, riteque probatarum et expertarum centuriae (1578–​1595).42 These works accompanied

40 41

42

Lonie, ‘The Paris Hippocratics’, 170–​1. The Epidemics are consistent with the various Hippocratic works on prognosis. Ehrenfried Hagendorn, Observationum et historiarum medico-​practicarum centuriae tres (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1698), sig.)(4v: ‘Hippocrate[s]‌omnia, quae aegris accidisse conspexit, et enarrata morbi historia, quid singulis diebus, horis ac momentis aegris acciderit, quidque vel boni vel mali inde subsecutum, memoriae prodidit’. Hagendorn provides also a much longer list of compilers of observations. A popular modern collection of case histories, copiously cited by both Baglivi and Sinapius, was Johann Jakob Waldschmidt’s Praxis medicinae rationalis succincta per casus tradita (Frankfurt, 1690 and Paris, 1691). On early modern reflections on the nature of observation and its relationship to unconscious presuppositions see Maclean, Logic, signs and nature, 337–​8; Lorraine Daston, ‘On scientific observation’, Isis 99 (2008), 97–​110; and Histories of scientific observation, eds. Lorraine Daston and Elizabeth Lunbeck (Chicago and London, 2011).

230 Maclean other compendious projects such as Conrad Gessner’s Historia animalium, which also aspired to descriptions not dependent on theory or doctrine, but were more tolerant of hearsay and unconfirmed reports. Both groups of writers also espoused a view of nature that did not exclude the rare and bizarre, and presaged the Baconian requirement that all of nature, not just nature for the most part, should be the object of study of any natural philosophy.43 At the same time, the approach of the Empirical sect to disease described by Jean de Gorris in his Definitiones medicae of 1564 subtly altered the Galenic view of nosology, and paved the way for diseases to be seen as an physical entities rather than the state of an idiosyncratic human body brought about by humoral changes.44 These observations can be linked also with the rising interest in another of Hippocrates’s texts: Airs waters, places. The association of different physiological and pathological conditions with climate, exposition, prevailing winds, and water supplies was a rich area of empirical research, of which Paracelsus was an early adept; it was also linked to the moral and physical constitutions of populations and the study of divinatory arts. The interaction of soul and body, and other material factors which act on the human being such as region, climate, diet, mode of life, race and sex, came under renewed scrutiny both by physicians and students of physiognomony.45 6

Hippocrates and Natural Philosophy

Case histories and observational techniques are of course at the centre of the new science of the seventeenth century, but the earliest printed record of the uptake of Hippocratic doctrine and method by Francis Bacon, the standard-​ bearer and programmist of collaborative experimentalism, was not encouraging. Written in about 1603, the following passage from the De interpretatione 43 44

45

On ‘nature for the most part’, see Maclean, Logic, signs and nature, 234–​75. Jean de Gorris, Definitiones medicae (Paris, 1564), 350r : ‘Teresis, observatio, Empiricorum vox est, qui quicquid observassent fieri in morbis, teresin vocabant: quorum cum magna haberent copiam, eam omnem athroisma nuncupabant: et ab observatione quidem memoriam, a memoria vero experientiam manare dicebant, et ab ea proxime artem constitui, dum meminibus quid cum quo, quid ante quo, quid post quo observavimus, atque id quidem semper, vel plerumque, vel utrovis modo, vel raro: semper, ut vulnerato corde mortem sequi: plerumque, ut scammonia ventrem purgari ; utrovis modo, ut percussa superiori membrana cerebri mortem sequi; raro, ut vulnerata cerebri substantia salutem contingere.’ Martin Porter, Windows of the soul: the art of physiognomy in European culture, 1470–​1780 (Oxford, 2005).

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naturae (later attributed to the essay Temporis partus masculus) first appeared in Leiden from the Elzevier presses as part of the Nachlass of Francis Bacon edited by Isaac Gruter in 1653: Now it is the turn of Hippocrates to appear, that product and puffer of ancient wisdom. Who would not laugh to see Galen and Paracelsus running to take shelter under his authority –​under that which the proverb calls the shadow of an ass? That fellow has the appearance of maintaining a steady gaze at experience. Too steady! His eyes never shift. They follow nothing. They are sunk in stupor. Then, still but half awake, he snatches up a few idols –​not the monstrous idols of great speculative thinkers, but a slim and elegant variety which haunts the surface of science. These he swallows, and swollen with his diet, half scientist and half sophist, protecting himself according to the fashion of his age, by an oracular brevity, after long delay he brings out a few maxims, which Galen and Paracelsus take for oracles and quarrel with each other for the honour of interpreting. But in truth the oracle is dumb. He utters nothing but a few sophisms sheltered from correction by their curt ambiguity, or a few peasants’ remedies made to sound imposing.46 Bacon’s important insight in this passage is that the Hippocratic style of expression is generally treated as oracular, and requires of those of its readers who wish to cite it as authoritative that they translate it into a quite different idiom in order to make it comprehensible in modern terms. A few years after having written this, Bacon reversed his opinion in the De Augmentis 46

‘Age citetur jam Hippocrates, antiquitatis creatura et annorum venditor. In cujus Viri authoritatem cum Galenus et Paracelsus magno uterque studio, velut in umbram Asini, se recipere contendat, quis non cachinnum tollat? Atque iste homo certe in Experientia obtutu perpetuo haerere videtur, verum oculis non natantibus et inquirentibus, sed stupidis et resolutis. Deinde a stupore visu parum recollecto, Idola quaedam, non immania quidem illa Theoriarium, sed elegantiora ista quae superficiem Historiae circumstant, excipit, quibus haustis tumens et semisophista, et brevitate (de illius aetatis more) tectus, oracula demum (ut his placet) pandit, quorum ii se interpretes haberi ambiunt; cum revera nihil aliud agat, quam aut sophistica quaedam per abruptas et suspensas sententias tradens redargutione subducat, aut rusticorum observationes supercilio donet’: Scripta in naturali et universali philosophia, ed. Isaacus Gruterus (Amsterdam, 1653), 469–​70. The translation is from The Masculine Birth of Time, or Three Books on the Interpretation of Nature, in Benjamin Farrington, The Philosophy of Francis Bacon (Liverpool, 1964), 67–​8. On Paracelsus’s view expressed in the Labyrinthus medicorum errantium of 1538 that Hippocrates represents the high point of medical progress, see Thomas Rütten, ‘Hippocrates and the construction of “progress” ’, 39.

232 Maclean scientiarum. He produced a more positive assessment of Hippocrates, making him the one exception in a general condemnation of earlier medical science, and lamenting ‘the discontinuance of [his] ancient and serious diligence, which used to set down a narrative of the special cases of his patients and how they proceeded, and how they were judged by recovery or death.’47 Bacon now praised Hippocrates’s methodology as appropriate to the new science he envisaged, in that it dealt with more than just the rare and remarkable cases that Bacon accused implicitly some modern collections of case histories of being; and Bacon himself went on to adopt the aphorism as an appropriate form of expression, and to collect natural histories of the kind here attributed to the ‘divine old man’ (‘divinus senex’) in his Sylva sylvarum, that were the harbinger of a collaborative and accumulative enterprise.48 It is possible that Bacon, who showed great interest in the craft knowledge of artisans, found a precedent for this in a celebrated passage of Hippocrates (Regimen i, 13–​24).49 In a more general context than Hippocrates, Bacon also modified the slogan of the medical art (‘ratio et experientia’), calling for a ‘a middle way between experience and dogmas’ (‘via media inter experientiam et dogmata’); his recommendations thus changed the field of investigation, the mode of accumulation of data, and its status in respect of pre-​existing theory.50 47

48

49 50

De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum libri ix (1623) (Leiden, 1645), 305–​6: ‘Primum est, intermissio diligentiae illius Hippocratis, utilis admodum et accuratae, cui moris erat, narrativam componere, casuum circa aegrotos specialium; referendo qualis fuisset morbi natura, qualis medicatio, qualis eventus […] Istam [narrativam] nec rursus tam angustam, ut solummodo Mirabilia et Stupenda (id quod a nonnullis factum est) complectitur.’ Translation in Smith, Hippocratic tradition, 18. Ancient medicine, 12, quoted by Raymond Restaurand, Monarchia microcosmi (n.p., 1657), sig. †††4r: ‘cum prope ad veritatem accedere liceat, multo magis admiranda veniunt, quae sunt ex magna ignoratione eruta, velut probe et recte, non autem fortuito inventa’; id., Le sentiment d’Hippocrate touchant la circulation du corps humain, conforme à celui de Platon, d’Aristote et aux experiences (Lyon, 1675). See also Andrea Rusnock, ‘Hippocrates, Bacon, and Medical Meterology at the Royal Society, 1700–​1750’, in Reinventing Hippocrates, ed. Cantor, 136–​56; Richard Yeo,’Hippocrates’ complaint and the scientific ethos of early modern England’, Annals of Science, 75 (2018), 73–​96, who points not only to the collaborative aspect of Baconianism but also the ‘devotion of a whole life to science’. For Bacon’s strong commitment to medicine, and especially to the issue of longevity, see Benedino Gemelli, ‘Francis Bacon: un riformatore del sapere tra filosofia e medicina’, Cronos 7 (2005), 227–​76. He was even put on a par with Hippocrates by Diderot and d’Alembert for his contribution to dietetics and the conservation of health in the ‘Discours préliminaire’ of the Encyclopédie (see ibid., 269n). I am grateful to Cesare Pastorino for this reference. See Lonie, ‘Hippocrates the iatromechanist’, 149–​50. Redargutio philosophiarum, in Works, eds. J. Spedding, R.L. Ellis and D.D. Heath, 14 vols (London, 1879–​1890), 3:573, cited in respect of Boerhaave by Lo Presti, ‘Hippocrates and Boerhaave’, 504.

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233

Inside the Discipline of Medicine: Chymistry and Mechanics

The ubiquitous adage ‘where the natural philosopher leaves off, there begins the physician’ (‘ubi desinit philosophus, incipit medicus’) which describes the relationship of medicine to natural philosophy takes on a new meaning after the encounter of medical thinking with anatomy, chymistry, zoology and mechanical philosophy.51 In many of these spheres, Hippocrates, who in Barrenness urged all doctors to become students of natural philosophy, emerges as a significant predecessor for one or other theoretical position or experimental discovery, as, for example, the circulation of the blood, notably in the various publications of the French doctor Raymond Restaurand (1627–​ 1682).52 Among the reactions to William Harvey’s revolutionary De motu sanguinis (1628), that of Descartes is particularly significant for medicine, as the source of the analogical application of mechanics and hydraulics to physiology, offering the possibility of seeing the human body as a machine.53 Not only did this transform the anatomical representation of musculature into a system of ropes, levers, pulleys, winding-​drums and spirals, but it also offered new contexts in which to understand the body’s workings in terms of machines and movements of fluids. The case for seeing Hippocrates as a mechanist is expressed most clearly in the writings of Friedrich Hoffmann, which will be examined below (pp. 262–​7). There were also innovations which derived from chymistry. The iatrochemical study of effervescence, fermentation and putrefaction in bodily functions such as digestion was first promoted by Paracelsus and his disciples, who are 51 52

53

On the origin of this ubiquitous phrase, see Charles Schmitt, ‘Aristotle among the physicians’, in Medical Renaissance, ed. Wear, 1–​15 (12). De sterilitate, in Opera omnia (1595), ed. Anuce Foës (Frankfurt, 1624), 683: ‘Conare autem ut te Naturalem Medicum exhibeas, ad hominis habitum et vires respiciendo’, quoted as ‘Conare ut physicus evadas’ by both Friedrich Hoffmann, Tractatio brevis et luculenta de febribus, in Opera omnia, 6 vols (Geneva, 1754), 1:366 and Georg Ernst Stahl, Proemium de requisitis medici, in Collegium practicum (Leipzig, 1732), 32. Cf. Galen’s dictum ‘optimum medicum esse optimum philosophum’, and Nancy G. Siraisi, Avicenna in Renaissance Italy (Princeton, 1987), 232–​3. Restaurand, Le sentiment d’Hippocrate touchant la circulation du corps humain, conforme à celui de Platon, d’Aristote et aux experiences (Lyon, 1675); see also Lonie ‘Hippocrates the iatromechanist’, 135 (on Jean Riolan the Younger), 142–​3 (on Johannes Walaeus and Boerhaave). A general assessment is given in Louis Dutens, Origines des découvertes attribuées aux modernes, 2 vols (Paris, 1766), 1:5. A particularly explicit application of mechanics to medicine is found in Daniel Tauvry, Nouvelle anatomie raisonnée (Paris, 1690). The most famous expression of this view is Julien Offray de la Mettrie’s L’homme machine (Leiden, 1747).

234 Maclean sometimes described as a ‘Hippocratic school’.54 This was followed by other influential figures: Joan Baptista van Helmont, whose Ortus medicinae of 1648 was very influential throughout Europe, Thomas Willis, whose treatise De fermentatione (1659) applied observations taken from distillation to the human body and rejected Aristotelian elemental theory, and Franciscus de le Boë Sylvius, whose nosology was based on the analysis of excesses of acid and alkali in bodily humours, now understood outside the context of Hippocratic-​ Galenic medicine. Otto Tachenius’s Hippocrates chemicus of 1666 was one of the most influential texts which related ancient medicine, and specifically Hippocrates, to chymistry. He argues that Hippocrates chose to express himself gnomically, but that his doctrine of fire and water in Regimen, 1 is the same as modern theories based on the Helmontian theory of acid and alkali as the governing principles of human physiology.55 After Tachenius, Michael Ettmüller in his Leipzig dissertation Medicina Hippocratis chymica of 1670 also mapped modern theories of chymistry on to Hippocratic texts, recognizing that this required a ‘new interpretative procedure’ (’novam quandam interpretandi rationem’). Ingo Müller sees however a major difference between Tachenius’s sincere and earnest attempt to establish Hippocrates as the predecessor of modern chymistry, and Ettmüller’s academic exercise without true commitment to the thesis he is arguing.56 All these figures had to give an account of motive forces and mental and physical animation in human and other animate bodies, from which competing theories developed about the link between soul and body, or spirit (or spirits) and matter. The Galenic triad of animal, natural and vital spirits survives in some accounts; the chymist Joan Baptista van Helmont (1579–​1644) postulated the archeus (a Paracelsian term) as a vital spiritual force that directed the organic processes of the body; René Descartes’s espousal of dualism led him famously to locate the immaterial rational soul in the pineal gland in order to preserve an account of the body’s functioning derived entirely from matter and motion, which came to be seen as the foundation of the medical theory known

54 Quercetanus, De priscorum philosophorum verae medicinae materia (1603) cited by Antonio Clericuzio, ‘The white beard of chemistry’: alchemy, Paracelsianism and the “prisca Scientia” ’, Bruniana and Campanelliana, 14 (2008), 107–​16 (111). 55 James Riddick Partington, A history of chemistry, 4 vols (London and New York, 1961), 2:291–​6; see also Lonie, ‘Hippocrates the iatromechanist’, 149–​50. 56 Tachenius, Hippocrates chimicus; Ettmüller, Medicina Hippocratis chymica [1670] (Leiden, 1671); Ingo W. Müller, ‘Untersuchungen zum Hippokratesverständnis von Otto Tachenius und Michael Ettmüller’, Medizinhistorisches Journal 22 (1987), 327–​41.

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as iatromechanism. Some later physicians such as Georg Ernst Stahl abandoned the Cartesian view of passive matter, and reintroduced a vital power into it.57 When Johannes Doläus came to publish an Encyclopaedia medica dogmatica in Frankfurt in 1691, all these developments in medicine were clearly reflected in his title, which also accorded the status of founders of schools to some of the thinkers involved: Medica Dogmatica: In Qua Omnes Affectus Interni, a Quibus Machina illa divina, sive Corpus humanum affligi unquam observatum fuit, juxta Celeberrimorum in Medicina Antistitum Principia plenarie pertractantur; adeo ut in compendio quodam et uno intuitu tum Veterum, tum Recentiorum, Hippocratis, Galeni, Paracelsi, Helmontii, Willisii, Silvii, Cartesii, et Aliorum Sententiae De Morborum internorum maxime Causis et Curatione perspiciantur. Doläus offered his readers a structure in which to understand the state of modern medicine, and its relationship to the venerated ancient masters of the art such as Hippocrates.58 At the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Doläus’s encyclopaedia, together with the various Bibliothecae produced in Geneva by Daniel le Clerc and Jean-​Jacques Manget, constituted useful guides to the range of medico-​philosophical options that were available to physicians seeking to situate their own thinking in a broader intellectual universe.

57 Maclean, Logic, signs and nature, 243–​4; Desmond Clarke, ‘Descartes’s philosophy of science and the scientific revolution’, in The Cambridge companion to Descartes, ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge, 2006), 258–​85; Georg Ernst Stahl in wissenschaftshistorischer Sicht, passim; Walter Pagel, Joan Baptista van Helmont, reformer of science and medicine (Cambridge, 1982). By 1746, the issue of the ‘vitale principium’, in Germany at least, came to be seen in terms of three hypotheses: ‘stahlianische’ ‘spiritualische’ and ‘mechanische’: see Johann Heinrich Zedler, Grosses Universal-​Lexicon, 68 vols. (Leipzig and Halle, 1731–​54), 49:17–​18. A feature of medical thought connected with mechanism is the attempt to quantify physiological processes, whose first exponent was Sanctorius Sanctorius (1561–​1636): see id., La medicina statica, ed. Giuseppe Ongaro (Florence, 2001). 58 For good modern guides to the state of medical studies at the end of the seventeenth century see Andrew Wear’s contribution to The Western Medical tradition 800 bc to ad 1800 (Cambridge, 1995), 340–​62, and John Henry, ‘The matter of souls: medical theory and theology in seventeenth-​century England’, in The medical revolution of the seventeenth century, eds. Roger French and Andrew Wear (Cambridge, 1989), 87–​113; Roy Porter, ‘The early Royal Society and the spread of medical knowledge’ in ibid., 272–​93. For another contemporary account of schools of medicine, see Waldschmidt, ‘Institutiones medicinae rationalis’, in Opera medico-​practica [1689–​ 95] (Lyon, 1717), 1–​2.

236 Maclean 8

The Aphorisms and Practical Medicine

There are a number of compendious bibliographies from which a picture of the state of Hippocratic studies between 1600 and 1700 can be derived.59 From them, and from the Frankfurt Book Fair Catalogues of the relevant years, it is possible to ascertain that the major scholarly advances by physicians remain accessible through the book trade, and that editions and re-​editions of the Aphorisms by French, German and Italian commentators represent the very great majority of all such publications. Some of these were intended for local pedagogical use, while others were aimed more at qualified physicians, who needed versions of the texts that could act as a vade mecum to practical medicine (i.e. therapeutics). One editor of the Aphorisms at this time referred to them in his title as the ‘ars parva’ of Hippocrates (paralleling that of Galen).60 Their use in this way continued into the eighteenth century, during which the Hippocratic doctrines they contained were glossed with the terminology of modern medicine.61 A slightly eccentric way of characterising this production and mapping its general accessibility is to look at the authors producing works critical of the Hippocratic corpus. There are two such works which date from before 1600, by Girolamo Mercuriale and Luis de Lemos, both only concerned with determining the authentic and spurious parts of the Hippocratic corpus.62 There were some works that expressed doubts as to whether Hippocrates could be right about everything, which produced defences of the Coan physician on specific points of doctrine and practice, and made the claim that his works (any more than those of Galen and Aristotle) could not err or mislead others ‘if they were understood in the right way’ (‘si recte intelligantur’).63 What is 59

Martin Lipenius, Bibliotheca realis medica; Hermann Boerhaave, Methodus studii medici, 2:814–​17; Hippocrates, Opera omnia, ed. Karl Gottlob Kühn, 3 vols. (Leipzig, 1825–​1827), 1:xlii-​ ccv; Hippocrates, Oeuvres completes, ed. Emile Littré, 10 vols. (Paris, 1839–​61), 4:446–​57 (for commentaries on the Aphorisms): G. Maloney, R. Savoie, Cinq Cents ans de Bibliographie Hippocratique (Québec, 1982) (by date); Blas Bruni Celli, Bibliografia Hipocratica (Caracas, 1984) (by author); Gerhard Fichtner, Corpus Hippocraticum: Verzeichnis der hippokratischen und pseudohippokratischen Schriften (Tübingen, 1996) (by work). 60 Hippocratis ars parva sive Aphorismorum sectiones VII, ed. Georgius Morelius (Venice, 1653). 61 Lonie, ‘Hippocrates the iatromechanist’, 119. 62 Mercuriale, Censura et dispositio operum Hippocratis (Venice, 1585); Lemos, Iudicii operum Magni Hippocratis liber unus (Venice, 1585). See also the roughly contemporary essay by Giovanni Costeo, ‘Censura librorum Hippocratis ad excellentissimum Ulyssem Aldrovandum’, in Miscellanearum dissertationum decas primum, ed. Giovanni Francesco Costeo (Padua, 1658), 1–​7. 63 See Abraham Schopffius, Katholu omnium praesidiorum medicorum universalium et topicorum disquisitio (Basel, 1595), esp. 60–​8, 125–​6. He cites (by implication) two Hippocratic

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at issue here is an indefeasible version of the argument from authority, one which was rehearsed in various ways throughout the seventeenth century. It is attacked notably in two texts by the ‘novus Hippocrates’ Georg Friedrich Lorenz (Laurentius) (1594–​1673).64 The former work appeared in 1647 at the author’s expense in Hamburg, a very active centre of practical medicine from various traditions, entitled Exercitationum in non nullos minus absolute veros Hippocratis Aphorismos, eorumque rationes, conscriptarum pars i.65 The latter appeared in 1666 in Lübeck with the title Tractatus de notis Hippocratis in historiis repertis et ad lucem veritatis repurgatis, addressed principally to alleged errors in the Epidemics.66 Both were contributions to polemical exchanges. In the former case, publication was occasioned by the earlier appearance of the Hamburg doctor Bernhard Langwedel’s Thesaurus Hippocraticus, sive Aphorismi Hippocratis in classes et certos titulos ordine dispositi atque succinctis rationibus illustrati, published in 1639. In this work, Langwedel (1596–​ 1656) makes the case for seeing the Aphorisms as a complete compendium of practical medicine, from which his Thesaurus was extracted as a thematically coherent system; it is one of a number of systematisations of the Aphorisms to appear around this time.67 It was attacked in 1647 in an anonymous

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texts (Aphorisms, 1.22, the source of the doctrine ‘contraria contrariis curantur’ and Epidemics, 6.2.17, Hippocrates’s application of the circumstantiae ‘quid’, ‘quando’, ‘quomodo’, ‘quantum’ in practical medicine, and one source of the Galenic theory of ‘indicatio’: see Maclean, Logic, signs and nature, 306–​15); he does this in order to refute the universal (‘katholu’) application of Hippocratic axioms to medical practice. He was opposed by Joannes Munsterus, Discussio eorum, quae ab Abrahamo Schopffio scripta sunt (Frankfurt, 1603) (esp. 15). The specific issue is the use of purgation in putrid fevers. Munster was a pupil of the Paduan professor Alessandrio Massaria, who repeated in his teaching the Macrobian claim of Hippocrates’s infallibility (see above, note 10). Munster also refutes in appendices to his work the views of two of Massaria’s Italian colleagues, Girolamo Mercuriale and Girolamo Capo di Vacca (Capivaccius), which suggests to me that there was disagreement in Padua about the ‘unquestionable’ authority of Hippocrates at this time. See also Gabriel Fontaine, De veritate Hippocraticae medicinae firmissimis rationum et experimentorum momentis stabilita, et demonstrata: seu medicina antihermetica, in quo dogmata medica […] contra Paracelsi, et Hermeticorum placita […] promulgantur (Lyon, 1657), which takes Paracelsus and Paracelsians to be critics of Hippocrates, needing refutation. Exercitationes (Hamburg, 1647); advertised at the Autumn Frankfurt Fair. Reissued in 1653, indicating a poor level of sale. Subsequent parts never appeared. De notis (Lübeck, 1666). There are multiple ingenious chronograms in the De notis text, all of which celebrate the year of its publication. These reveal a quasi-​mystical element in Lorenz’s thought which sits somewhat uneasily with its other features. Thesaurus hippocraticus (Hamburg, 1639). The Thesaurus reorganizes the aphorisms into the following seven classes: the seven ages of man, from infancy to senility, seasons,

238 Maclean defamatory tract entitled Foretius per Bernhardi Langwedelii Thesaurum Hippocraticum […] misere deformatus which accused Langwedel of plagiarising Foës’s and Lygaeus’s commentaries on the Aphorisms in his own account of the Hippocratic work. Lorenz and Langwedel had been engaged for several years in fierce rivalry in Hamburg over which of them was to be given the precedence as the senior figure in various public and professional functions.68 This

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diseases, gynecology, prognosis, diet, and purges. For similar Hippocratic re-​orderings around this date, see Jean Lanay, Aphorismi Hippocratis, graece et latine, in novum ordinem digesti et in sectiones septem distributi (Paris, 1629); Ioannes Ernestus Scheffler, Hippocratis […] Aphorismorum sectiones octo; ex interpretatione A. Foesii: quibus accessit methodus, qua aphorismi, in certum ordinem digesti, et accurate dispositi, exhibentur (Leiden, 1633); Nicolas Fontaine, Aphorismi Hippocratis methodice dispositi (Amsterdam, 1633); Honoré Bicaise, Manuale medicorum, seu synaxis Aphorismorum praenotionum, coacarum, praedictionum Hypocratis secundum propriam morborum omnium nomenclaturam, alphabetico digesta ordine [1535] (Paris, 1637); Johann Tilemann, Synopsis Aphorismorum Hippocratis facili methodo digestorum (Marburg, 1643). Many editions on the Aphorisms were produced in verse, for mnemonic purposes: see Otto Seidenschnur, ‘Beiträge zur Kenntniss medicinischer Gedichte’, Janus: Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Literatur der Medicin 2 (1847), 772–​806. Another pedagogical approach to the Aphorisms, rather than one addressed to practising doctors, is produced at this time by Guido Antonio Albanese, Aphorismorum Hippocratis expositio peripatetica (Padua, 1649). This sets out a scholastic analysis of each aphorism, beginning with definition of terms, and passing to ‘rationes’, ‘dubia’, and ‘conclusiones’. The text makes no reference to the fact that Albanese, who began his teaching career at Padua in 1621, was murdered by a pupil in 1647: see Jacobus Facciolatus, Fasti Gymnasii Patavini ab anno 1571 ad 1756 (Padua, 1757), 350. Gustav Gernet, Mittheilungen aus der älteren Medicinalgeschichte Hamburgs (Hamburg, 1869), 196–​200. Langwedel was a native of Hamburg, and this was seen by Lorenz, an outsider, as a significant benefit when it came to publication, given the cosmopolitan nature of the city with its Baltic and British merchants and its strong contacts with Amsterdam through its Jewish community: see Jonathan Whaley, Religious toleration and social change in Hamburg, 1529–​1819 (Cambridge, 1985). Lorenz had difficulty in getting published: he declared two copiously described works as forthcoming in the Autumn Catalogue of the Frankfurt Fair in 1639, neither of which eventually appeared: ‘[…] de febrium malignarum maculosa trinis libris auctoratus tractatus, ex sensum, rationum, observationum, experientiarum, conjecturarum, doctrinarum, judiciorum, autoritatum, scientiae et conscientiae, consono Veritatis unisono, ernatus; sacrosanctae Trinitati primitiarum more olim sacratus; nunc emaculatus, oblatus, rude donatus, legatus in publicum: Perspicillo, Mercurio, Laurentiae, Patientiae, Sibyllae et Lucinae, Medicaeis praelatus, Impensis haeredum Thomae Schüreri; ibo et videbo, sive perspicillum jatro diagnosticum aegris rite examinandis morbis recte dignoscendis, historiis perfecte formandis, necessarium: partim ex publicis et manuscriptis libris, partim meditationibus ac observationibus propriis, oculate et cogitate illustratum.’ One manifestation of the rivalry of the two doctors is Lorenz’s decision to declare in the Autumn Catalogue of 1639 these two forthcoming publications which never appeared, and which indicate both his commitment to experimental science and his prolixity. He paid himself for the publication of the Exercitationes in 1647. His Defensio venaesectionis (Hamburg, 1647) drew a hostile

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conflict led Langwedel to assume that Lorenz was the author of the defamatory pamphlet, which Lorenz strongly denied. Langwedel’s riposte was an equally defamatory satirical dialogue written (or rather ‘overheard’) by Langwedel against Lorenz, entitled Colloquium Romano-​Hippocraticum inter Marforium et Pasquinum, in quo Pasquini res gestae proponuntur, et calumniae clandestinae ac viperinae deteguntur. Auscultante Bernhardo Langwedelio. This led to a spate of invective and apologetics from both sides, mostly declared in the Frankfurt Book Fair Catalogues, including a formal denunciation by Lorenz of Langwedel’s act of plagiarism with the ironic title Monochordum Foresio-​ Lygaeo Langwedelianum, in quo ob admirabilem horum autorum concentum et harmoniam ostenditur, Berhardum Langwedelium […] omnia ex commentariis Foresii et Lygaei in suum Thesaurum Hippocraticum aut transcripsisse, aut animas Foresii ac Lygaei in corpus Langwedelii transmigrasse. In veritatis gratiam et Foresii et Lygaei honorem adornatum, auscultantibus Foresio et Lygaeo, admirante J. F. Laurentio.69 The two doctors cite both German and non-​German commentaries, as one would expect from internationally-​trained graduates in a major medical centre.70 Both Langwedel and Lorenz obtained their doctorates at Padua, but of the two, only Langwedel shows the characteristic naturalism (that is, the clear separation of a medical and philosophical approach to nature from a theological one) of the Paduan medical school, in which the teaching of Hippocrates traditionally had a privileged place.71 Lorenz’s citation list is more extensive than his rival’s, and from it he quotes extensively. For his part, Landwedel

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riposte from the prominent local Jewish doctor Benedictus a Castro, Monomachia sive certamen medicum (Hamburg, 1647). A full bibliography of both the Latin and German components of this exchange is to be found in Lorenz’s Liecht und Recht (Rostock: s.n., 1651). See also Hans Schröder, Lexicon der hamburgischen Schriftsteller, 8 vols. (Hamburg, 1866), 4:386–​8, s.v. Langwedel, and Johannes Mollerus, Cimbria literata, 3 vols (Copenhagen, 1744), 2:460–​3, s.v. Laurentius. Thesaurus hippocraticus, sig.)(3v-​)(4r, for a list of prominent doctors in Germany, the Netherlands, Italy France and Spain. Langwedel’s Hippocratis Defensio contra quoscunque petulcos ejusdem obtrectatores ac calumniatores (1647) (Amsterdam, 1661), 9–​11, is addressed to all the Academies of Europe A clearer national bias is found in Johann Conrad Dieterich, ‘Anteloquium’, in Iatreum Hippocraticum iuxta ductum Aphorismorum concinnatum (Giessen, 1655), 21, where a preference for Cornarius’s Latin translation of Hippocrates is proudly expressed. On Paduan naturalism, see Ian Maclean, ‘Naturalisme et croyance personnelle dans le discours médical à la fin de la Renaissance’, Journal of the Institute of Romance Studies 6 (1998), 177–​92. See also Giuseppe Ongaro, ‘La medicina nello studio di Padova et nel Veneto’, in Storia della Cultura Veneta dal primo Quattrocento al concilio di Trento, 3 vols. (Vicenza, 1981–​6), 3:75–​134.

240 Maclean declares a preference for those who eschew Galenic prolixity –​the ‘asiatici dicendi modus’ –​and a predilection for the aphoristic style, borrowing the description of its benefits from the distinguished Dutch physician Jan van Heurne: ‘a verbal property of succinctness, a concise refinement of maxims, a venerable antiquity of language and a commendable dignity of linguistic formulation’ (‘pressa verborum proprietas, concisa sententiarum subtilitas, veneranda sermonis antiquitas et commendabilis artificii dignitas’).72 At one point in the polemic, Lorenz chose to publish his anti-​Hippocratic riposte to the Thesaurus Hippocraticus, entitled Exercitationes in nonnullos non absolute veros Hippocratis Aphorismos, eorumque rationes conscriptae, in which criticisms of various of the Hippocratic Aphorisms drawn from a vast array of commentators were cited at length. These could not have been produced in the short period of time after the inception of the polemical exchange, but would have been composed over the long period of rivalry between the two doctors.73 Lorenz must have had access to a very rich library of modern and not so modern books. The title of his work recalls that of Julius Caesar Scaliger’s peripatetic diatribe against Girolamo Cardano’s De subtilitate (the Exercitationes exotericae of 1557), which was used a set text for teaching orthodox Aristotelianism in some German universities at this time.74 Lorenz’s work is written in the context of two claims: that medicine is an uncertain art, and that there is no such thing as a completely accomplished doctor (not even Hippocrates). These two 72

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Thesaurus hippocraticus, sig.)(8r, cites Antonio Musa Brasavola, Franciscus Vallesius, and Girolamo Cardano as examples of prolix commentators. Cf. Girolamo Mercuriale, Censura et dispositio operum Hippocratis (Frankfurt, 1585), 12–​14 (on the brevity, concision and gravity of Hippocratic writing). In the Hippocratis Defensio, 55, Langwedel claims that the medical Faculty of Padua gave a special place in its teaching programme to the Aphorisms. The van Heurne passage is also quoted in the dedication to Hippocrates’s Opera omnia, ed. Johannes Antonides van der Linden (Leiden, 1665), sig. *6v. See also Maclean, Logic, signs and nature, 113–​14. A good example of Lorenz’s prolixity and his clichés are to be found in De notis, sig. A2r. Laurentius says as much in his letter to Thomas Bartholin of 21 Aug 1663: see Thomas Bartholin, Epistolarum medicinalium centuria IV (Copenhagen, 1667), 547. Ian Maclean, ‘The interpretation of natural signs: Cardano’s De Subtilitate versus Scaliger’s Exercitationes’, in Occult and scientific mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Brian Vickers (Cambridge, 1984), 231–​52; Kristian Jensen, ‘Protestant rivalry –​metaphysics and rhetoric in Germany c.1570–​1620’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 41 (1990), 24–​43; Pierre Lardet, ‘Les ambitions de Jules-​César Scaliger latiniste et philosophe (1484–​1558) et sa réception posthume dans l’aire germanique de Gesner et Schegk à Leibniz et à Kant’, in Germania latina, Latinitas teutonica. Politik, Wissenschaft, humanistische Kultur vom späten Mittelalter bis in unsere Zeit, eds. Eckhard Kessler and Heinrich Kuhn (Munich, 2003), 157–​94; Simone de Angelis, Anthropologien. Genese und Konfiguration einer ‘Wissenschaft vom Menschen’ in der frühen Neuzeit (Berlin and New York, 2010), 158–​93.

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claims are reinforced by the allegation of an Aristotelian proposition from the Eudemian Ethics, that ‘the refutation of false opinions is a road to the discovery of truth’, which is made to support the Lutheran proposition that certain knowledge is unattainable by humans, who without divine aid can aspire only to the truth that can be obtained negatively, through the demonstration of error.75 Two epigraphs appear on the emblem on the titlepage, which portrays a crowing cock roosting on a triangular pedestal: ‘not bound to swear by the opinions of any master’ (‘nullius addict[us] iurare in verba magistri’ (quoting from Horace’s Epistles, i.1.14, as later the Royal Society of London will famously do) and a sentence from Julius Caesar Scaliger’s Exercitationes exotericae, 106: ‘nothing is more infelicitious that those minds that tenaciously argue that our forebears knew everything’ (‘nihil infelicius est iis ingeniis quae mordicus [tenent]: maiores nihil ignorasse’)76 These proclaim Lorenz to be clearly on the side of the moderns, and one of the liminary poems, by his friend the Danish royal physician Jacobus Janus, goes further by associating him explicitly with various recently published works of Baconian experimental philosophy.77 But 75

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De notis, sig. A2r: ‘veritatis enim inventio est falsarum opinionum refutatio’ (Eudemian Ethics, 1217a16). There is another similar proposition attributed to book one of the Topics (‘pro veritate enim aequum est, quenquam sua decreta tollere et removere, atque veritatis retinendae causa nostra etiam dogmata evertere’) whose source in Aristotle I was unable to locate. The cock could be reference to the Aesop fable ‘the cock and the jewel’, which was traditionally interpreted as a criticism of the materiality of the cock’s desires, but it could also be understood as a plea for a practical approach to life. The design is almost certainly that of Lorenz himself; in the case of the De notis, it is explicitly so (‘aut. inv.’), and makes allusion to the saying ‘magis amica veritas’, on which see Leonardo Taran, ‘Amicus Plato sed magis amica veritas: From Plato and Aristotle to Cervantes’, Antike und Abendland 30 (1984), 93–​124 and Maclean, Logic, signs and nature, 191ff. Bartholin points out in his letter to Lorenz of 1 December 1663 (Epistolarum centuria, 550) that Hippocrates himself was a ‘veritatis amator’ in this sense. Exercitationes, sig. )()(2r-​v: Mente repurgata Bacon Verulamius, ausu Magnum opus Organicum nobiliore dedit. Instaurans Artem Naturae, indagine mira, Experimentali, constituensque Novam Historiis bene suffultam, testantibus ipsis Sensibus, ut pateant, quae latuere diu. Ventorum exemplo ostendens, Vitaeque Necisque Historiis, causas, eruere atque modum. The works referred to were all available in continental editions, declared at the Frankfurt Fair: Novum organum scientiarum (Leiden, 1645); Historia ventorum (Leiden, 1638), and Historia vitae et mortis (Leiden, 1637). Ironically, the author of another liminary poem is

242 Maclean the ‘D[eo] O[ptimo] M[aximo] A[djuvante]’ of the titlepage and the prefatory material, which is deeply impregnated with expressions of personal piety and the claim that all human knowledge is derived from the deity, gives the work a specifically Lutheran inflection. Lorenz mixes quotations from the Bible with those from fellow physicians in a way which would have been abhorrent to the Italian masters of the Paduan medical school at which he was trained. His Exercitationes thus bear the mark of a specifically Lutheran alliance of theology and natural philosophy, that can be found elsewhere in the writings of experimentalists from the same part of the world such as Johann Daniel Major of Kiel.78 Lorenz’s dedication to the Senate of Hamburg is preceded by a passionate expression of submission to God, and an affirmation of the imperfection of human reason and philosophy that does not invalidate the pursuit of truth, but condemns it to being little more than a pis aller, completely dependent on revelation by the divine will.79 The demonstration of the errors of individual aphorisms is undertaken systematically. First the aphorism is quoted, as in this example: ‘Eunuchs do not get gout’ (‘Eunuchi podagra non laborant’: Aphorisms, 6.28). Thereafter the flaws are revealed as contradictions by ‘ratio’, ‘observatio’, ‘autoritas’, ‘autor’ (Hippocrates’s self-​contradiction), ‘curatio et medica relatio’. These are all supported by quotations from commentators (up to twenty-​six in some cases are cited) who show that the aphorism although ‘expressed in absolute terms’ (‘absolute positus’), ‘is not absolutely true’ (‘absolute verus non est’).80 The aphorism is rephrased to take into account the flaws that have been revealed: in this case, the aphorism becomes: Eunuchi podagra non laborant, nisi aut a parentibus podagricis vel lue venerea infecti, aut epidemica ac contagiosa podagra infecti, aut ob

78 79

80

Helvicus Dietericus, whose brother’s Iatreum Hippocraticum, in which he is thanked, will later be attacked by Lorenz. See Ian Maclean, ‘The beginnings of the Academia Naturae Curiosorum 1652–​1687, and the character of German intellectual life’, in The Worlds and Networks of Higher Learning, eds. Anja-​Silvia Goeing, Mordechai Feingold and Glyn Parry (Leiden, 2020), 82-​98 (89-​92). As is the efficacy of all medical practice: ‘ex dictis patet Deus sanare medicus curare aegrotos’, De Notis, sig. A2v, quoted from Hippocrates, Epidemics, 6.5.1. This is often related to the commonplace claim that the physician is ‘the minister of nature’ or ‘the servant of the art’ (Epidemics, 1.11). This is made more explicit in Exercitationes, sig. a2v, where the aphorisms are said to be ‘minus universales, minusque absolute veri, et non semper veri, non in omni loco veri, non in omni causa veri, non in omni tempore veri, non in omni aetate et sexu veri’; see also De notis, sig. A1v-​2v, referring to medicine as ‘ars infinita’, on which see also Maclean, Logic, signs, and nature, 128–​39.

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herniam podagrici effecti, aut natura dispositi, ac simul otio, crapulae, ingluviei, et veneri minus dediti fuerint. Eunuchs do not get gout, unless they are infected by parents with gout, or venereal disease, or afflicted with epidemic or contagious gout through a hernia, or predisposed to gout by nature, though at the same time less given to inactivity, drunkenness, gluttony and sex. The accumulation of qualifications renders the aphorisms practically useless as medical maxims; for Lorenz, they all represent at best ut plurimum truth.81 At various points, Lorenz refers to probability, not in the old peripatetic sense of the weight of the best and greatest number of judgements in favour of a given proposition, but as a measure of frequency.82 This contrasts with his practice of reviving the old sense of ‘probable’ by disauthorising Hippocrates (who, according to Lorenz, himself disqualified the use of the argument from authority in the opening paragraph of Regimen, 1) by citing other authorities: a point not lost on Langwedel, who remarks upon it, as well as recognizing in his turn that the Aphorisms often have limited applicability.83 Langwedel is happy to concede that Hippocrates’s doctrine is based on variables relating to place, season, the age and sex of the patient, and the nature of the disease, and that in many cases, Hippocrates deploys conditional particles and those that limit by approximation, exception, domination, or distinction (‘ut plurimum’, ‘potissimum’, ‘fere’, ‘praecipue’, ‘ad summum’, ‘magna ex parte’, ‘difficulter’, ‘maxime’, ‘nisi’). But according to him, this does not detract from the usefulness of the Aphorisms as a guide to practice.84 It also reflects a general problem of medical

81 82 83

84

On another aspect of the expansion of this aphorism, see Ian Maclean, ‘Evidence, logic, the rule and the exception in Renaissance law and medicine’, Early Science and Medicine 5 (2000), 227–​57. Exercitationes, 13, 43; see also Maclean, Logic, signs, and nature, 181–​8. The same usage can be found both in the Epidemics and the Aphorisms: ibid., 183. Exercitationes, sig. a 4r: ‘moveri non debemus Hippocratis fama et authoritate’ (quoted from Galen). On the Regimen, 1 citation, see De notis, sig. A1r. In his Defensio venaesectionis, 45–​6, Lorenz is careful to qualify his use of named contemporary authorities: ‘Harveo et Helmontio in tantum subscribo, ut nolim eorum opinionum in totum esse defensor.’ Colloquium Romano-​Hippocraticum [1648] (Amsterdam, 1661), 40. Hippocratis defensio, 10: ‘Hippocrates enim optime novit, Aphorismos suos non esse omnes limitatos, sed exceptionis apti, atque subjectis individuis aegrotantibus, secundum temperamentorum, partium affectarum, caussarum et reliquarum circumstantiarum varietatem ac diversitatem, esse applicandos, uti ex particulis distincitvis in quamplurimum Aphorismis appositis manifeste elucescit’; ibid., 20 (on ‘humorum doctrina ex Liber

244 Maclean reasoning that had been set out in many of the Renaissance commentaries on Galenic doctrine. Medicine is an ‘ars conjecturalis’, and its characteristic modes of reasoning are not logically tight.85 There is a more significant historical divergence between the tracts of Langwedel and Lorenz over the issue of conciliation. The former explicitly defends the practice of reconciling apparent conflicts in a writer’s doctrine by the use of logical contextualisation or semantic manipulation, and cites Daniel Sennert as a much respected recent example, who set out to harmonise the writings of Galen and Paracelsus by such a practice.86 Lorenz on the other hand subjects everything to the rule of truth, and argues that the presence of any error in a proposition entails its falsity.87 There can be no doubt that the publication of Lorenz’s attack on Hippocrates, which the author paid for himself, was motivated by his polemical exchange with Langwedel, but the Exercitationes in in nonnullos non absolute veros Hippocratis Aphorismos, with their copious quotations and devastating anti-​ Hippocratic critique, none the less provided ammunition to others wishing to question the exalted status of the greatest physician of antiquity, whose record of accumulated medical lore obviously could not take account of much that had subsequently been discovered or experienced, not least through developments in the field of anatomy.88 It seems as though Lorenz had wanted to believe in the infallibility of the writings of the ‘divinus senex’, and felt in some sense betrayed as a practising doctor by his discovery of their erroneous content; and he specifically objected to those (notably Franciscus Vallesius) who

de humoribus’): ‘medico consideranda humorum impetus, cognata species, regio, mos, aetas, tempus, constitution morbi, excessus, defectus, somnus, vigilia et multa alia’; see also ibid., 35–​6 for the quotation given in the text. 85 Lorenz, De notis, sig. A1v chooses to quote on this point Leonardus Botallus, ‘Commentarioli duo alter de medicis, alter de aegroti munere’ [1565], in Opera omnia (Leiden, 1660), 7: ‘difficilis, incerta, immo quidem et infinita […] medicina est, in conjecturis tota reposita, cum circa fluxilia, quae variis momentaneis mutationibus sunt subdita, prorsus versetur.’ See also Maclean, Logic signs and nature, 128–​203; Cardano, Contradicentia medica, 1.3.20, in Opera omnia, 8:360 on medicine as an ‘ars coniecturalis’. 86 Hippocratis Defensio, 37–​8. 87 De notis, sigs A1v-​A2v. Hippocrates’s promotion of the use of reason in medicine in On ancient medicine is referred to by both Lorenz (ibid.) and Langwedel, Hippocratis defensio, 15–​17. Cardano, Opera omnia, 3:390, had made the difference between these approaches very clear in the sixteenth century, when speaking of the difference between his De subtilitate and his Contradictentia medica: ‘admirabitur forsan aliquis, quod in contradicentium libris aliter senserim. Sed ubi opiniones antiquorum sequi propositum fuit, hic vero dicere veritatem.’ 88 Exercitationes, sig. c2v (a list of those who had made medical discoveries).

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regarded Hippocratic writings as oracles.89 From the point of view of this article, this rejection of hermeneutic or other strategies that could preserve the reputation of past thinkers marks an important step towards the new philosophical and medical order of things. Later in his career, Lorenz took steps to make his work better known. He sent a copy of it (together with an apologetic work he published about his own practice of venesection) to the Parisian physician Guy Patin at some point before June 1663, who received it courteously; and in August of the same year, he wrote a letter about it to the prominent Danish physician Thomas Bartholin, who replied in an equally courteous manner, implicitly chiding Lorenz for his wholly negative approach to Hippocrates, but urging him none the less to continue his work on the Aphorisms.90 This he did in 1666 by taking public exception to two other works on Hippocrates, this time produced by Johann Conrad Dieterich, a philologist from the University of Giessen, who had attacked the detractors of Hippocrates and praised the aphoristic genre without naming Lorenz.91 Lorenz also went on to publish his Tractatus de notis Hippocratis in 89

Lorenz expresses his dismay to Bartholin at the noxious effect on patients of slavish adherence to the Aphorisms: Epistolarum centuria, 548. Both Exercitationes, sigs b2r-​4v and De notis, 40 lists the several ways of excusing the historical Hippocrates of errors in works attributed to him: Exercitationes, sig. c2v: ‘Transeat quoque Macrobii vox hyperbolica Hippocratem nec fallere nec falli posse. Transeat cum caeteris scilicet erroribus Vallesii vox maledica: pereat qui Hippocratis oracula perstrinxerit.’ On Macrobius, see above, note 10. This latter quotation from Franciscus Vallesius’s commentary on Prognostic, which Bartholin also cites in his reply to Lorenz: Epistolarum centuria, 550. On the doctrine that ‘Hippocrates never errs’ see Nutton ‘Hippocrates in the Renaissance’, 433–​4. Cf. also Hippocrates’s admission of his own fallibility in Epidemics, 5.27 (recorded also in Celsus, De medicina, 8.4.3–​4). Vallesius was one of the most important commentators on a range of Hippocratc texts of his generation; these appeared between 1567 and 1590, and were frequently reprinted. Some Renaissance physicians (Alessandro Massaria and his pupil Joannes Munster, Discussio eorum, quae ab Abrahamo Schopffio [in libro Katholu omnium praesidiorum medicorum universalium] scripta sunt (Frankfurt, 1603), 15 defend Hippocrates (as well as Aristotle and Galen) as infallible, prudently adding the hermeneutic escape clause ‘si recte intelligantur.’ 90 See Guy Patin, Correspondance complète et autres écrits, ed. Loïc Capron, https://​www .biusante.parisdescartes.fr/​patin, letter to Georg Friedrich Lorenz, 4 June 1665 (citing his knowledge of Lemos and Mercuriale, his recommendation of their more measured approach, his desire to obtain for various works referred to by Lorenz, and his hope that Lorenz would publish the second part of his Exercitationes). Bartholin, Epistolarum centuria, 550, suggests that the defence of the Aphorisms as ut plurimum maxims is adequate, and cites Matthias Naldius’s suggestion in his commentary published in Rome in 1657 that the targeted readership of the Aphorisms was not physicians but those seeking medical guidance who had no recourse to physicians. 91 Dieterich, Iatreum hippocraticum (see note 70) and Aphorismi Hippocratis illustrati [1656] (Ulm, 1661); the former declared in the Autumn Catalogue of 1661 and the Spring

246 Maclean historiis repertis et ad lucem veritatis repurgatis, a work on mistakes made in the Epidemics by both omission and commission, possibly prompted by the appearance of a work by Pedro de Castro in which aphorisms were extracted from that work for the use of practising doctors.92 There are several codas to Lorenz’s Exercitationes. The first is found in Marchamont Nedham’s Medela medicinae: a plea for the free profession and a revolution of the art of physick, which appeared in London in 1665. Written in English, it is a simultaneously an attack on the university-​trained doctors of the London College of Physicians, and a defence of their Helmontian rivals who support the use of chymical therapies. Hippocrates (together with all physicians of the ancient world) is impugned by the modernist Nedham as a dreamer who does not deserve the status of oracle; but there is no philological component to the attack, which is clearly motivated by institutional rivalry. It provoked a number of ripostes, all aimed at a local market.93 A second coda is provided by Michaël Aloysius Sinapius, a learned Hungarian physician, who wrote a set of unconventional essays entitled Absurda vera sive paradoxa

92 93

Catalogue of 1662, the latter in the Autumn Catalogue of 1661; both reissued in 1682. The former work is an alphabetical philological study of the Hippocratic corpus in succession to Anuce Foës’s Oeconomia Hippocratis of 1595, and related also to the frequently republished Lexicon medicum graeco-​latinum associated with the name of Bartolommeo Castelli. In his ‘Anteloquium’ to the Iatreum Hippocraticum, 7–​14 Dieterich had listed Hippocrates’s detractors, but quoted also their praise for the Aphorisms, defended the aphoristic genre for its mnemonic usefulness, and specifically attacked the incursion of theology into medical study. Together, this might suggest that he had seen Lorenz’s Exercitationes, even though he does not name them; in any case, Lorenz felt moved to write a Responsa ad Obiecta: contenta in Anteloquio ad Jatreum Hippocraticum primae editionis Joh. Cunradi Dieterici, which he published together with a new Exercitationum medicarum in nonnullos Hippocratis aphorismos minus absolute veros olim conscriptarum defensio (Lübeck, 1666), the latter work being dedicated on its title page to Guy Patin. de Castro, Imber aureus Sive Chilias Aphorismorum, Ex Libris Epidemiōn Hippocratis, eorumq[ue] Francisci Vallesii Commentarius extracta (Ulm, 1661). Medela medicinae (London, 1665), attacked by Robert Spratling, Medela ignorantiae,or a just and plain vindication of Hippocrates and Galen from the groundless imputations of M.N. (London, 1665); John Twysden, Medicina veterum vindicata (London, 1666); George Castle, The chymical Galen (London, 1667). The investment of four entrepreneurial London publishers in the polemic shows it to have been seized on as a profitable venture. See Andrew Cunningham, ‘The transformation of Hippocrates in seventeenth-​century Britain’, in Reinventing Hippocrates, ed. Cantor, 91–​115 (97–​102); Dmitri Levitin, Ancient wisdom in the age of the new science: histories of philosophy in England, c.1640–​1700 (Cambridge, 2015), 274–​8, for an account of the institutional context of Nedham’s work and its relationship to the work of van Helmont.

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medica which first appeared in Warsaw in 1693.94 They were reprinted by the influential international publishers Cramer and Perachon in Geneva, who declared the book at the Frankfurt Fair in the Spring of 1697. The third of Sinapius’s essays has the title Tractatus de falsitate, vanitate et incertitudine Aphorismorum Hippocratis: this clearly echoes Henricus Cornelius Agrippa’s De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum et artium atque excellentia verbi Dei declamatio invectiva of 1530. Sinapius’s omission of Agrippa’s reference to the pre-​ eminence of the Word of God is significant: in contrast to the work of Lorenz, this essay is not pietistic, and explicitly dissociates itself from any link with theology: ‘our medicine is not an article of faith’, as Sinapius puts it, but ‘a matter of open disputation between different theories.’95 One scholar has called this essay the origin of the ‘anti-​Hippocratic movement of the end of the seventeenth century’, but this is an implausible claim, as it certainly did not found a movement.96 It seems to have been driven by a number of motivations: negatively, the weakness of the ut plurimum formulations of the Aphorisms, their embodiment in a Hippocratico-​Galenic system of medical thinking that is not defeasible (given the presence of the variables of place, season, age of patient and the nature of disease), the fact that they are out-​of-​date and erroneous, and the dangerous treatments they sanction. Sinapius also denounces modern anti-​ Galenic ‘neoterici’ whom he names, for claiming that they are the continuators of Hippocratic doctrines.97 These strictures go hand in hand with a clear commitment to hermetic medicine and iatrochemistry in the Paracelsian mode.98 Sinapius goes further than Lorenz in that he accuses the Aphorisms of being not

94 95

96 97

98

See the excellent article by Sylvain Matton, ‘Michaël Aloysius Sinapius et l’alchimie’, Chrysopœia 7 (2000–​2003), 467–​507 (here 469). Sinapius’s dates are not known. Castle’s work shows that even Galen could be reclaimed as a predecessor of the moderns. Tractatus de falsitate, vanitate et incertitudine Aphorismorum Hippocratis (Geneva, 1697), Præfatio ad Lectorem, sig. †4v: ‘medicina enim nostra non est articulus fidei, sed licet Helmontio contra Galenum, Galenicis contra Cartesium, Cartesio contra Paracelsum etc. pro et contra rationes suas proferre.’ Tiberius von Györy, ‘Sinapius der Urheber der antihippokratischen Bewegung am Ende des XVII. Jahrhunderts’, Archiv für die Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik 6 (1913), 132–​43. Tractatus de falsitate, vanitate et incertitudine Aphorismorum Hippocratis, sig. †5r-​v. The works of the ‘neoterici’ mentioned are Tachenius, Hippocrates chimicus; Ettmüller, Medicina Hippocratis chymica; Franciscus de le Boë Silvius, Opera medica (Geneva, 1691); Thomas Willis, Opera medica et physica (Lyon, 1676): Descartes, Principia philosophiae (Amsterdam, 1644); id., Le monde (Paris, 1664). According to Matton, Sinapius is referring here to Hippocrates, De prisca medicina, 15, cited by Joan Baptista van Helmont, Blas Humanum, in Ortus medicinae (Lyon, 1655), 52, 118a. Ibid., Dedication to the citizens of the Republic of Berne, sigs †2–​3.

248 Maclean only fuzzy or inapplicable but also simply wrong. His tract is powerfully anti-​ authoritarian, and explicitly allies itself with the ‘libertas philosophandi’ that could be found in even more radical forms elsewhere in Europe at this time.99 It is written in the invective genre, which accounts for its allegation (very rare in this context) of the playwright Molière, with his scathing satire of doctors, who figures as a kindred spirit.100 Unlike Lorenz, with his access to a very well-​ stocked library, the itinerant Sinapius’s tract does not contain a plethora of references to the full range of Hippocratic commentaries. He relies on Johannes Doläus’s Encyclopaedia for an account of the dominant schools of seventeenth-​ century medicine, and Doläus’s friend the Marburg professor Johann Jakob Waldschmidt to supplement the modern case histories Sinapius records from his own direct experience.101 One possible incitement to the production of the essay is the compendious Commentary on the Aphorisms produced in Vienna in 1680 by the Court physician Paul de Sorbait (1624–​1691); Sinapius, the ‘doctor vagabundus’, certainly visited Vienna where de Sorbait practised, and refers to him at one point by name.102 Sorbait’s explicit Catholic piety (similar, but not identical to, Lorenz’s submission to providence and the Godhead), his strong disapproval of any medical writer who attacked the writings of the ‘divinus senex’, and his clear acceptance of the authoritative status of the Hippocratic corpus could well have provoked Sinapius to produce his caustic diatribe.103 Sinapius’s tract provoked at least two responses. The former was not much more than an approving paragraph in a work by the iatrochemical Leiden professor Jacobus Le Mort (1650–​1718) entitled Fundamenta nova-​antiqua theoriae medicae, chymicae nobilioris experientia suffulta. This appeared in 1700, 99

100

101 1 02 103

On the history of this term, see Ian Maclean, ‘The sceptical crisis reconsidered: Galen, rational medicine and the libertas philosophandi’, Early Science and Medicine 11 (2006), 247–​74. Cf. Baruch Spinoza, Tractatus theologico-​politicus continens dissertationes aliquot, quibus ostenditur libertatem philosophandi non tantum salva pietate, et reipublicae pace posse concedi: sed eandem nisi cum pace reipublicæ, ipsaque pietate tolli non posse (Hamburg, 1670). Tractatus de falsitate, vanitate et incertitudine Aphorismorum Hippocratis, fol. †4r: ‘non pauci mori solent juxta Aphorismorum, idque methodice et in forma (prout suo loco ait Comicus Molier)’, referring to L’Amour médecin, act 2 scene 5 (M. Bahys): ‘il vaux mieux mourir selon les règles que de réchapper contre les règles.’ Johannes Doläus, Encyclopaedia Medica Dogmatica; Johannes Jacobus Waldschmidt, Opera medica practica. Tractatus de falsitate, vanitate et incertitudine Aphorismorum Hippocratis, 89. Paul de Sorbait, Commentaria et controversiae in omnes libros aphorismorum Hippocratis (Vienna, 1680) (over a thousand pages long). This publication accompanied de Sorbait’s Praxeos medicae, published in the same year at the expense of the author. It is to the latter work that Sinapius refers.

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and was somewhat unusually reprinted speculatively in Venice by Johannes Gabriel Hertz two years later.104 It was written to promote Paracelsian and Helmontian iatrochemistry, and attacked not only Hippocratico-​Galenic medicine but also the usefulness of anatomy (described as a ‘doctrina cadaverosa’) to medical studies. It provoked a savage epistolary refutation from the Roman physician Matteo Pallilio, a close friend of Giorgio Baglivi, with whom he conducted experiments on animals.105 The letter, entitled De vanitate obtrectatorum Hippocratis et Galeni, was addressed to Baglivi and dated 25 October 1702. Baglivi had it printed in his Opera omnia of 1704, together with thirteen other letters which enhanced the authority and good judgement of his writings.106 Pallilio claims to be writing as the spokesperson of Baglivi.107 Sinapius is only mentioned once, in a curt dismissal at the beginning of the letter: Le Mort is the real target of the letter.108 Pallilio provides a strong defence of Hippocrates and the ‘right’ sort of iatrochemistry (that discussed by Angelo Sala, Fabrizio Bartoletti and Otto Tachenius, and practiced by Robert Boyle). He singles out for praise a number of modern doctors, whether anatomists, iatromechanists, iatrochemists or practici.109 He patriotically claims that Italian physicians and natural philosophers were pioneers in all these fields; he attributes, for example, the discovery of the circulation of the blood to Andrea Cesalpino, not Harvey. Giorgio Baglivi had made the same assertion in his De praxi medica of 1696, and was as uncritically patriotic in his claims about Italian culture and scholarship in a letter to his Florentine colleague Lorenzo Bellini dated 11 July 1698.110 Pallilio characterises the discipline of medicine as a ‘republic, not a monarchy,

1 04 Fundamenta nova-​antiqua theoriae medicae, chymicae nobilioris experientia suffulta. 105 The Baglivi correspondence from the Library of Sir William Osler, ed. Dorothy M. Schullian (Cornell, 1974), 297–​8, 389–​90. 106 Epistolae clarorum virorum quorum judicio et autoritate Georgii Baglivi, opera confirmantur, xiv, in Opera omnia, 676–​86. Baglivi was informed on 31 May 1699 by his Parisian correspondent Nicolas Andry of the unpopularity of Hippocrates in Parisian medical circles: see Giorgio Baglivi, Carteggio (1679–​1704) conservato nella Waller Collection presso di University Library di Uppsala, ed. Anna Toscano (Florence, 1999), no. 16, 52–​6. 107 Opera omnia, 682: ‘tecum [i.e. Le Mort] loquitur non Pallilius, sed Baglivus ipse sub Pallilij nomine.’ 108 Ibid., 676: ‘a primo [libello: that of Sinapius] me vanitas, ne dicam impudentia tituli illico rejecit; nihil enim, quod ad rectam medendi rationem pertineret, aut rem medicam posset illustrare, contineri sum arbitratus.’ 109 Ibid., 679–​80: Sydenham, Duret, Martianus and Mercuriale are named as Hippocratists; Redi and Malpighi as anatomists, Borelli and Bellini as iatromechanists, and Baglivi as the practical doctor. 110 Baglivi correspondence, 388: ‘[Italia] litterarum est domina; Parens quoque Anatomes, Mecanices, Praxeos solidae. Matheseos. Chymiae. Botanices et omnium in omni aevo

250 Maclean and certainly not a tyranny’, in which all its parts collaborate; perhaps for this reason, he acknowledges the excellence of a group of French, English and Dutch physicians and natural philosophers.111 It is worthy of note that Pallilio had access to the two books he attacks and to the list of medical authors he names, which were available in Rome shortly after their appearance in print. This demonstrates that in the lands of the Inquisition, it was not difficult to find out what was going on in the north of Europe and obtain copies of recent publications. The controversy did not end with Pallilio’s letter: an equally invective reply was produced by Hendrik Snellen, one of Le Mort’s pupils, in 1705, on behalf of his teacher.112 This shows that the debate about Hippocrates had been transformed into an excuse to attack or defend contemporary physicians. 9

European Embodiments of Hippocrates

To show that the prominent physicians who were each celebrated as a national Hippocrates represent different national traditions is not a straightforward task. In their day, as we have seen, they had access without exception to nearly all the available current literature on the Hippocratic corpus, and a good selection of relevant past publications.113 Positively, their allegiances could be as much to teachers and patrons, or inspiring physicians (e.g. Paracelsus, Harvey, bonarum artium.’ In the De praxi medica, 197 [271] he alleges that Sydenham obtained his method of treating and describing diseases from the ancient Roman doctor Caelius Aurelianus. It is worthy of note however that on his titlepages, Baglivi lists his foreign honours (frs, membership of the Leopoldina) but not his Italian ones, suggesting that he didn’t altogether believe in Italian pre-​eminence. 111 Ibid., 685: ‘medicina respublica est, non autem monarchia, multo minus tyrannis; iccirco singulas ejus partes mutuo sese illustrant, confirmant, augent et devinciunt’; this irenic image of a scholarly republic contrasts with the hostile version painted by Pierre Bayle, Dictionnaire historique et critique (Rotterdam, 1696), s.v. Catius. The physicians named in the letter are Septalius, Baillou, Tulp, Lommius, Paaw, Hotton, Ruisch, Commelin, Bidloo and Paul Hermann. 1 12 Theoriae mechanicae physico-​medica delineatio, in qua damnosa ejus opera praecepta ad rationis et experientiae lancem revocantur, ac practice emenantur (Leiden, 1705). Both Le Mort’s and Snellen’s books were reviewed in the Acta Eruditorum. Philippe Hecquet’s preface to Baglivi, Opera omnia, sig. ãã2r-​v gives an account of the controversy. 113 There is as yet no single study of the operation of the second-​hand market after 1650. A snapshot of what medical books were available is provided by such booksellers as by Simon Paulli, Historia literaria, sive dispositio omnium librorum omnium facultatum ac artium secundum materias, in usum philobibliorum congesta (Strasbourg, 1671), 65–​94, and the ‘Catalogus librorum medicorum’ in Catalogus librorum qui in bibliopolio Danielis Elzevirii venales extant (Amsterdam, 1674), 1–​60; for a later period, see Theophilus Georgi’s various editions of his Buecher-​lexicon (from 1742).

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van Helmont, Descartes, Willis) or academic institutions (e.g. Padua, the Royal Society) as to their nation. Negatively, they may embody antipathy towards a given national tradition, such as that which appears at times to pertain between some of the Italians and some of the French.114 The religious contexts in which they wrote and of which they were conscious were very different, but not all of these contexts figured in their mental horizons. These medical writers did not all take up the same sections of the Hippocratic Corpus, and they chose to emulate different features of its various styles (e.g. case histories, aphorisms). They may not all have been equally aware of the full implications of the intellectual commitments they made to philosophical positions of their age, such as theories of certainty, tolerance of approximation and error, and prevailing anatomical, mechanical and chymical doctrines. All this means that there are variables arising from the milieu in which they wrote, as well as their intellectual ‘habitus’, choices and predispositions. They are also highly productive authors, who each have merited extensive studies in their own right. I am not here attempting to give a complete account of their achievements; what I shall set out to do is to highlight their specific uptake of Hippocratism. My questions will be the following: from which philosophical background in terms of method, theory and logic did they emerge? What is their institutional allegiance? Which schools of natural philosophy and medical thought are dominant in their work? Did they take sides in the debate opposing ancients to moderns? To what degree do they develop their own medical system? Do they look upon Hippocrates as more than a ‘spirit and method’, and, if so, which Hippocratic texts are most important to them, and how did they translate them into modern terms for their own uses? What is their religious context, and does it impinge on their reception of Hippocrates? 9.1 Thomas Sydenham (1624–​1689) Sydenham came from a well-​to-​do Dorset puritan family of parliamentarian persuasion; like his brothers, he took an active part in the Civil War, and seems to have retained his political and religious beliefs even after the Restoration. His war service was followed by a conventional training at Oxford in the arts course, in ancient languages, and in Galenic medicine, during which time he met Robert Boyle and other members of the Oxford group of physiologists.115 By far his most important interaction, as Peter Anstey has recently shown, was 114 See Françoise Waquet, Le modèle français et l’Italie savante: conscience de soi et perception de l’autre dans la République des Lettres (1660–​1750) (Rome, 1989). 115 On this group, see Robert G. Frank, jr., Harvey and the Oxford physiologists (Berkeley, LA and London, 1980).

252 Maclean with the medically-​trained empirical philosopher John Locke, who both contributed to his writings and helped publicize his achievements in Europe.116 It is not clear to what degree Locke is the source of Sydenham’s learned references to ancient texts, although most modern historians presume that the philosopher’s input in this regard is considerable.117 He was duly licenced by the London College of Physicians, but he operated as a doctor outside that institution, of which he never became a member. He made little use of anatomy, was a critic of ‘hypotheses based on the speculations of philosophy’, and suggested that medical knowledge was ‘not to be learned by going to universities’, but should be acquired through apprenticeship.118 Whether because of his own preference or the impediment imposed on him by his parliamentary past, he practised his medicine among the poor rather than on individuals of the Anglican gentry. This afforded him the opportunity to study disease using the Hippocratic model he perceived in the Epidemics, that is, by composing natural histories of diseases which were reputed to reveal ‘the Phaenomena of every disease, without pressing any Hypothesis for his Service.’119 His descriptions were disease-​centred rather than patient-​centred, and contributed to the movement towards diseases being seen as entities rather than discrasia. Although clearly aware of both iatrochemistry and iatromechanics, Sydenham did not engage closely with either school; nor did he speculate on the vexed question of the relationship of matter to spirit, mind to body, except in terms of therapy.120 His was an individual rather than collaborative enterprise. He aimed at producing, outside the context of any existing ancient or modern body of doctrine, a new classification of diseases (analogous to that ‘done by Botanical Writers in their Herbals’) to replace the nosology inherited from the ancients. Sydenham did not employ neologisms, but attempted to use commonly accepted terms. He focused on epidemic diseases, which he saw as 1 16 Anstey, ‘The creation of the English Hippocrates.’ 117 Levitin, Ancient wisdom, 292. 118 Genevieve Miller, ‘ “Airs, waters, and places” in history’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 17 (1962), 129–​40; Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–​1680 (Cambridge, 2000), 448–​63 (448). 119 See the preface to Observationes medicae circa morborum acutorum historiam et curationem (London, 1676), sig. (a)3r-​v: ‘porro autem in scribenda quaecunque morborum Historia, seponatur tantisper oportet quaecunque Hypothesis Philosophica, quae scriptoris judicium praeoc[c]‌upaverit; quo facto tum demum morborum Phaenomena clara ac naturalia, quantumvis minuta, per se accuratissime adnotentur.’ This preface serves as the introduction to his Opera medica, printed in Geneva by de Tournes in 1696, from which subsequent quotations are taken. 120 Kenneth Dewhurst, Dr Thomas Sydenham (1624–​1689): his life and original writings (London, 1966), 46–​7, 53–​4.

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being linked to certain seasons and years, and caused by different constitutions of the air: but, unlike their ‘immediate (i.e. sensorially perceptible) and conjunct causes’ and their symptoms, their fundamental causes were not part of his nosological description, as he looked on such inner workings, functions and structure of the body as unknowable, a view consistent with his Calvinist beliefs (which are not, of course, unique to Calvinism).121 For him, mathematical exactness was not an issue: medicine was not (yet) a science, relying as it did on data that was true only for the most part (‘hos epi to polu’), although it was a legitimate domain in which to accumulate knowledge.122 This view was consistent with his Baconian aim to collect sensory information, and took him beyond the medical aspirations of the Empirics, in that the heads of description he employed permitted the accumulation of a body of data (‘matters of fact’) that could aspire inductively to a rising degree of certainty and would in turn guide the treatment of the disease through the process of ‘indicationes curativae’.123 For Sydenham, disease itself was nature’s response to a corporeal disorder, and it was thus appropriate to turn to nature to find a way to combat it. This is very close to Hippocrates’s concept of nature and his anti-​theoretical theory, as Sydenham himself pointed out in the preface to his Observationes medicae of 1676: Hippocrates, that Romulus of physicians who can never be praised enough, moreover laid down a solid and unshaken basis to the art of medicine, namely ‘nature is the physician of disease.’ He applied this by delivering the phenomena of every disease, and by categorising them without calling any hypothesis to his aid, as is clear in his books On diseases and On affections. He likewise left us some rules drawn from the observation of nature’s method of promoting or removing diseases, as

121 Baglivi, De praxi medica, 206 [286] quotes approvingly the following passage from the preface of Sydenham’s Opera medica, 22: ‘atque ut impossibile plane est, ut Medicus eas morbi causas ediscat, quae nullum prorsus cum sensibus habent commercium, ita neque est necesse, abunde enim sufficit, ut sciant unde immediate oritur malum, talesque ejus effectus atque symptomata, ut inter hunc aliumque morbum hujus non dissimile, valeat accurate distinguere.’ See also Levitin, Ancient wisdom, 290–​5. 122 Opera medica, 18: ‘licet non semper et ubique, frequentissime tamen, kai hos epi to polu’: this shows that Sydenham knew (or borrowed from Locke) the Greek scholastic terminology for ut plurimum judgements. 123 Ibid., 11 (a long quotation from Bacon, De augmentis scientiarum, 2, in Works, ed. Spedding, 1:501). On ‘gradus certitudinis’, see Ian Maclean, ‘Degrés de certitude: Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes’, Montaigne Studies 26 (2014), 207–​24. For reference to ‘indicationes curativae’, see Sydenham, Opera omnia, 16,20, 27. See also Levitin, Ancient wisdom, 255–​6, 290.

254 Maclean are his Prognostics, Aphorisms and other writings of this kind. The theory of this divine old man is nothing other than the exact description of nature.124 I believe that this passage shows that for Sydenham, Hippocrates (who is the only figure he adduces as an authority) was more than window-​dressing: he may have been known to him in the original Greek (either directly, or through Locke), and was a very real inspiration, and a model of observational method and healing. As Kenneth Dewhurst and Peter Anstey have argued, Sydenham’s claim to be entirely free of theoretical speculation is not in fact true; but it is true that being wholly disengaged from Galenic medical philosophy, and uncommitted to any modern medical schools, he was able to portray himself as lying outside the forms of rational discourse that in his time were governing the discussion of physiology and therapy.125 How this relates to his position among virtuosi practising Baconian experimental philosophy is clear: it is less easy to determine how it relates to his religious environment and beliefs, although the service of the poor could be taken to be an expression of Christian duty, given his puritan roots and personal piety. Andrew Cunningham and Robert Martensen see his medicine, perhaps reductively, as ‘highly politicised’, and its adoption a ‘political act’ characteristic of those gentry from ‘non-​Royalist backgrounds’ committed to ‘the puritan programme of preparing for the Apocalypse.’126 Seen in a European context, Sydenham’s religious commitment is less overt than that found elsewhere: unlike some of 124 Opera medica, 16–​17: ‘Medicorum ille Romulus, nunquam satis laudatus Hippocrates, qui hanc Arti Medicae insuper struendae solidam ac inconcussam substernens basin, viz., νούσων φύσιες ҆ιητροί, [Ep. 6.5.1] i.e. Naturae morborum mediatrices, id egit, ut morbi cujuslibet Phaenomena aperte traderet, nulla Hypothesi adscita, et in partes per vim adacta; ut in ejus libris de Morbis, de Affectionibus, etc. videre est. Regulas etiam quasdam tradidit, ex observatione methodi istius, qua utitur natura tam in morbo provehendo, quam in eodem amoliendo, natas; cujusmodi sunt Coacae Praenotiones, Aphorismi, et reliqua id genus […] illa Divini senis θεωρία […] nihil [erat] aliud quam exquisita naturae descriptio […].’ Sydenham quotes the Hippocratic locus about nature the physician from Regimen, 1.15 and 1.39, without giving its source. Cf. Locke’s description of Sydenham’s physick as ‘nicely to observe the History of Diseases, in all their Changes and Circumstances […] a Work of Time, Accurateness, Attention and Judgment leav[ing] less room for Subtlety and Dispute of Words’; Letter to Dr Thomas Molyneux, 20 Jan 1693, in Dewhurst, Sydenham, 179. On Francis Glisson’s use of the dictum ‘νούσων φύσιες ι҆ ητροί’, see Levitin, Ancient wisdom, 404–​7. 125 Dewhurst, Sydenham, 60–​7; Anstey, ‘English Hippocrates’; also G.G. Meynell, A bibliography of Dr Thomas Sydenham (1624–​1689) (Folkestone, 1990), 31. 126 Robert L. Martelsen, ‘Hippocrates and the Politics of Medical Knowledge in Early Modern England’, in Reinventing Hippocrates, ed. Cantor, 116–​35; Andrew Cunningham, ‘Thomas

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his Lutheran counterparts, Sydenham does not intersperse his medical writings with biblical quotations, and does not overtly state the coincidence of his puritan beliefs with his intellectual commitments, on the limits of human knowledge, for example. 9.2 Giorgio Baglivi (1668–​1707) Baglivi was born in Croatia and received a humanist education there from the Jesuits. While still young, he moved to Lecce, assumed the name of his adopted father, and moved in pious circles, with whom he remained in contact all his life. He received his medical education at the universities of Salerno, Padua, Bologna, and possibly Naples; it was followed by practical experience in hospitals in Padua, Venice, Florence and Bologna, and anatomical research, using animals, which culminated in the publication of some international best-​sellers. In 1691, he became the assistant of Marcello Malpighi, the most celebrated Italian experimental physiologist and anatomist of his day, to whose position as papal doctor he succeeded in 1694, becoming two years later Professor of Anatomy at the Sapienza in Rome. That was also the year that he began his very successful publishing career with an ambitious book entitled De praxi medica ad priscam observandi rationem revocanda libri duo, which is the work I shall discuss here.127 This is a programmatic survey of medicine and medical teaching in Italy, with recommendations of radical reform, together with a significant element of therapeutics.128 He kept in touch with a strong Sydenham: epidemics, experiment and the “good old cause” ’, in Medical revolution, eds. French and Wear, 164–​90. 127 I have used the edition of De praxi medica in Giorgio Baglivi, Opera omnia medico-​ practica, 6th edn (Lyon, 1704). There is an English translation that appeared in the same year: The Practice of Physick, reduc’d to the Ancient Way of Observations containing a just parallel between the Wisdom and Experience of the Ancients and the Hypothesis’s of Modern Physicians (London, 1704). There are a large number of co-​publishers which indicates, I believe, a shared risk rather than a long press run. The significant names in this group are Midwinter and Leigh, who acted as a consortium from 1698 to 1704, and whom their contemporary bookseller John Dunton described as doing a ‘topping business’ (Henry R. Plomer, Dictionaries of the printers and booksellers who were at work in England, Scotland and Ireland, 1557–​1775 (London, 1977), 204). The first reference in the following footnotes is to the Latin edition; the second [in square brackets] to the English edition. On Baglivi’s publication history, see Ian Maclean, Episodes in the life of the learned book (Leiden and Boston, 2020), 264–​76. 1 28 There was some contemporary criticism of the therapies he recorded and his anatomical studies: see Edward Strother, Criticon febrium (London, 1718), 91–​2, and the French doctor Philippe Hecquet, on whom see L.W.B. Brockliss, ‘The medico-​religious universe of an early eighteenth-​century Parisian doctor: the case of Philippe Hecquet’, in Medical revolution, eds. French and Wear, 191–​221 (197–​8).

256 Maclean circle of progressive Italian doctor friends (including Luca Tozzi of Rome and Naples, and Lorenzo Bellini and Francesco Redi of Florence). National and international honours followed in the form of invitations to join various Italian academies, membership of the Royal Society of London in 1698 and the German Leopoldina in 1699. His access to the international world of medical studies was more or less unencumbered.129 The frontiers erected by the Roman Inquisition to prevent the free circulation of books were very porous, and in Italy, it was even possible to get a licence to import and own works on the Roman index, or known to have been written or published by Protestants.130 This licence was obtained for Baglivi in 1691 by his patron Marcello Malpighi, and his contact with the Florentine book impresario Antonio Maglibechi ensured that he learned about and obtained books from the Protestant north.131 There were still confessional and inquisitorial issues, but by comparing the correspondence of Marcello Malpighi from the 1660s with that of his assistant Giorgio Baglivi thirty years later, they seem to be more easily resolved at the end of the century. In the 1660s, Malpighi’s letters show him to be more worried about censorship and the Inquisition than his assistant was in the 1690s; and Baglivi’s correspondence, which includes clear evidence that he was a pious Catholic, also evinces his determination to be in contact with the Protestant medical world, to declare his allegiance to contemporary doctors, and to continue his investigations into nature without fearing that he would might find himself in trouble over such potentially theologically sensitive topics as Cartesianism or the nature of matter.132 129 He planned, but was probably not able to undertake, a peregrinatio medica to the Netherlands and to England, but certainly travelled around Italy in the period 1688–​92 thanks to a munificent patron. 130 Bernwald Schmidt, Virtuelle Böchersäle. Lektür und Zensur gelehrter Zeitschriften an der römischen Kurie, 1665–​1765 (Paderborn, 2009); Ulrich L. Lehner, ‘Introduction: the many faces of the Catholic Enlightenment’, in A companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe, eds. Ulrich L. Lehner and Michael Print (Leiden and Boston, 2010), 1–​61; Marco Cavarzere, ‘Commercio librario e lettori nel seicento italiano: i cataloghi di vendita’, Rivista di storia del Cristianesimo 9 (2012), 363–​84; Hannah Marcus, ‘Bibliography and Book Bureaucracy: Reading Licenses and the Circulation of Prohibited Books in Counter-​ Reformation Italy’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 110 (2016), 433–​57, and the bibliography cited there. 131 See Baglivi correspondence, letters 14 (on the licence), 16, 18, 115, 124, 129, 140, 141, 164, 169. 132 There are excellent editions of the voluminous correspondence of Malpighi (The correspondence of Marcello Malpighi, ed. Howard Adelman, 5 vols. (Ithaca and London, 1975)) and of Baglivi (notes 105 and 106). See also Paula Findlen, ‘Science and society’, in The short Oxford history of Italy: early modern Italy 1550–​1796, ed. John Marino (Oxford, 2012),

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Baglivi had received a conventional arts course training, and he made not infrequent use of his knowledge of scholastic logical procedures in the De praxi medica.133 He was conventional also in his mode of expression: he had a declared dislike of neologisms, and was content to stick with Galenic and Hippocratic terminology in his medical writing, averring that nature has her own idiom, and that Hippocrates was the very voice of nature.134 He subscribed to the Galenic dogmatic pairing of ‘ratio et experientia’, and saw the debate between ancients and moderns, and rational doctors and empirics, as otiose.135 In his Tractatus de fibra motrice, he expressed two further strictures in the form of epigraphs: from Hippocrates (Laws, 5), he quotes the view that medicine is an art for initiates, and from Aretaeus (On acute diseases, 2.2), he asserts the primacy of experience.136 He was thus no supporter of that aspect of ancient Methodism which suggested that medicine only required a cursory training and very few precepts, nor of Empirical medicine divorced from rational analysis. He dissociated himself from all such academic labels, but retained Hippocrates as his cynosure: he referred to a wide range of his works with considerable frequency (there are no less than 172 substantial references to Hippocrates in Baglivi’s Opera omnia of 1704).137 Baglivi is also happy to accept parts of Hippocratic theory that are doubted by others (the doctrine of critical days, the doctrine of climate’s effect on health, the relationship between seasons and diseases, and the doctrine of the sympathy between various bodily parts). For him, the citation of the Coan was not just window-​ dressing or lip-​service or a vague ideal model of observational practice.138 He

1 33 134 135

136 137 138

166–​87, who makes the point the whereas Galileo’s condemnation stifled research in astronomy and mechanics, it left the practice and theory of medicine unaffected. De praxi medica, 175 [227–​9]. Ibid., 2 [3]‌(referring to the ‘novas fingendi voces libido’); ibid., 165 [207]: ‘[oportet] idioma quo [natura] ipsa loquitur diligenter addiscere’; ibid., 2 [2]: ‘naturae non hominis voce loquitur Hippocrates.’ De praxi medica, 10–​12 [19–​24]. Lester S. King, The background of Herman Boerhaave’s doctrines (Leiden, 1965), 16–​17, argues that Baglivi resolved the ancient-​modern divide by dividing medical theory from medical practice and attributing better theory to the moderns, and better practice to the ancients. See also Levitin, Ancient wisdom, 289. Tracatus de fibra motrice (Lyon, 1703), sig. a4r: ‘Sacra sacris hominibus communicanda profane vero nefas, prius quam scientiae mysteriis initiati sunt’; ‘Bonus magister experientia est: opus est vero, et ipsam facere, imperitia namque timoris causa est.’ Ibid., 4 [7]‌. De praxi medica opens appropriately with the famous and uncontroversial Hippocratic topos ‘Medicus naturae Minister et Interpres’ (derived from Epidemics, 1.11 and 5.6.1). Ibid., 13[7]‌, 34ff. [66ff.]. But he disapproves of the doctrine of the four humours, which he blames on Galen: ibid., 218 [312]. He is posthumously credited with urging that the Epidemics be translated into aphorisms: Hippocratis librorum epidemiorum nucleus per

258 Maclean also strongly supports the aphoristic genre as the best way to communicate medical ideas.139 All this is consistent with his disapproval not only of system-​building and hypothesising, but also the use of conjectures and dialectic in medical discourse. Unusually for a Paduan-​trained physician, he cites a theological authority (St Gregory of Nyssa) to make his point.140 Disapproval of loose forms of argument and presupposition did not mean for him that medicine is a science; it must aspire to the truth, but has most often have to be satisfied in terms of evidence with ‘verisimilia’ and ‘probabilia’.141 We may sense here an affiliation to the position of Sydenham, whom Baglivi praises as the physician among the moderns who has come closest to Hippocrates’s powers of observation and description of phenomena.142 He also shares Sydenham’s doubts about the limits of human knowledge, arguing that the fundamental structures of the the body would never be known (‘nos latet, aeternumque latebit minima illa’), and declaring himself sceptical of the ability of humans to achieve objective reasoning, since our temperament or emotional nature drives us into error (‘compellit nos in errores’).143 His ideas about medical education, set out in

139

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aphorismos digestus, Baglivio suadente (Frankfurt, 1708). On this encouragement, see Tractatus de fibra motrice, 6 (‘Animadversiones in practicen novam’, ii). De praxi medica, 32–​3, [63–​4], 118–​19 [117–​19], where the four advantages of using aphorisms over the compendious and extended systematic presentation of medical doctrine are set out, and aphorisms are said to be like metal mirrors that had been repeatedly polished to reflect nature as it is (‘tanquam speculum ex metallo, quod imagines tunc repraesentare valet, cum optime expolitum fuerit’). Tribute is paid to their use by both Hippocrates and Bacon. Ibid., 169 [216]: ‘unde non immerito D. Gregorius Nyssenus Omnibus perspicuum est, ait, argutias pares in utramque partem vires habere, tam ad eversionem veritatis, quam ad accusationem mendacii, quo fit ut ipsam veritatem quando tali arte profertur habeamus suspectam ut plurimum, quasi istius solertia, mentis nostrae oculos perstringit, et a veritate avertat’; quoted from a secular source (Nicephorum Gregoras, Byzantina historia, 10.8). Various medical writers (Vallesius, Argenterius, Massaria, Mercatus, Capivaccius) are accused of the misuse of dialectics: ibid., 126 [135]. There is also a long section on the misuse of comparison and analogy: ibid., 18–​21 [34–​38]. The adjectives ‘verus’, ‘verisimilis’ and ‘probabilis’ and their comparatives are frequently used in the work; the English translator does not always translate them in the same way, using ‘plausible’, ‘’likely’, ‘probable’, ‘less certain’: ibid., [3]‌, [8], [45], [146], etc. These modify facts or propositions; they do not include the products of dialectical argument, condemned by Gregory of Nyssa, above. Ibid., 129–​30: ‘Thomas Sydenhamius artis nostrae ornator et ornamentum, qui sepositis opinionum commentis ad observationes prorsus se dedit, et a prima aetate ad extremum usque senium, cum natura cohabitavit; qua ratione demum probabiliorem de febrium indole hypothesim, curationem patefecit.’ Ibid., 10 [6]‌, 133 [151].

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the second book of the De praxi medica, also are related to Sydenham’s view, already cited, that it should be looked on as an apprenticeship, although Baglivi did not propose, unlike Sydenham, to omit university book-​learning altogether.144 There are other very powerful influences in Baglivi’s work. The strongest after Hippocrates himself is probably Francis Bacon, from whose Novum Organum he took the structure of the De praxis medica (there is a ‘pars destruens’ with idols and ‘impedimenta’, and a ‘pars praeparans’ looking to the future of the discipline). Other Baconian imports are the technique of accumulating data under ‘heads’, the process of induction, the correct use of analogy, and the rise through degrees of certainty to general ‘regulae’.145 He salutes the progress that had been made in the knowledge of animate bodies by ‘principia geometrico-​mechanica’ and ‘experimenta physico-​mechanica et chymica’,146 but attacks what he sees as a wrong application of chemical principles to bodily processes derived from hastily performed experiments.147 In one often quoted passage which has led him to be dubbed an arch-​iatromechanist, Baglivi develops an extended parallel between the fabric of the human body and various machines, comparing the jawbones and the teeth to shears, the arteries and veins to hydraulic tubes, the heart to a wedge, the lungs to bellows, and the muscles to levers; but as Raphaële Andrault argues, the passage which follows modifies this comparison by pointing out its limited value to therapeutics and its failure to account for the minima or smallest particles of the body.148 Baglivi certainly believes anatomy and comparative zoology to be

144 Ibid., 177–​81 [231–​4]. Baglivi, ibid., 15 [26–​7], 21–​2 [41–​2] casts doubt on the usefulness of the arts course (except mathematics) in medical education, but this is more a polemical point made to stress the need for the application of judgement based on experience and craft knowledge. 145 On the uptake from Bacon, see esp. 8 [40], 171–​6 [220–​7]. There are other echoes of Bacon elsewhere: the inclusion of nature erring in the study of nature (ibid., 183–​4 [245]), the impact of the discoveries of gunpowder and the compass (ibid., 167 [211]). 146 Ibid., 122–​3 [127–​29] on the development of scientific method (frequency and repeatability of experiments, etc.) which leads Baglivi to the conclusion that ‘theoria recentiorum multo certior est theoria Galenicorum: illius namque fundamenta jacta sunt in experimentis sedulo et coacervatim factis e naturalis philosophiae pene depromptis; morborumque causas, et symptomata, non per incertas coniecturas, sed per mathematicam veritatem, tanquam per radios solis delineat et demonstrat.’ Yet medicine still lags behind the progress made in the theory of other sciences. See Andrault, ‘What does it mean to be an empiricist in medicine’, esp. her comments on Baglivi’s acceptance of hydraulics and chymistry. 147 Ibid., 130 [144]. 148 Ibid., 126 [135]; Andrault, ‘What does it mean to be an empiricist in medicine’, 176–​80.

260 Maclean a potent field for new discoveries, and praises the use of the microscope.149 He was also a strong proponent of Sanctorius Sanctorius’s ‘medicina statica’; he published in 1704 his own Canones de medicina solidorum ad rectum statices usum in an edition of Sanctorius Sanctorius’s work.150 It may also be that from Sanctorius’s earlier work entitled Methodi vitandorum errorum (1603), he borrowed both the appreciation of the many variables –​age, sex, climate, season, manner of life, and so on –​that make it difficult to evaluate the functionality (or dysfunctionality) of the human body, and the establishment of conclusions from data by a ‘sufficient enumeration of parts’, which may not be consistent with the ‘entire’ or ‘simple’ enumeration of parts required by Baconian induction.151 These components demonstrate the importance of mathematics to Baglivi’s work. He believes that he had obtained a divine warrant for their use from the fact that God constructed the world ‘by number, weight and measure’; this makes it legitimate to proceed from the Galenic stress on medical qualities to a consideration of quantities.152 For all this, he remains, like Sydenham, opposed to the dogmatic pursuit of fundamental (as opposed to immediate) causes, which he believes to be beyond the reach of human reason and perception.153 He even implicitly criticises Sydenham, who is among his most quoted and praised authors, for proceeding to a taxonomy of diseases on the analogy of botany, which Baglivi saw as premature.154 In De praxi medica, Baglivi divides his discipline into ‘medicina prima’, which investigates the phenomena and the immediate causes (but not the ‘occult causes’) of diseases by taking histories and interpreting syndromes of signs; and ‘medicina secunda’, which is concerned with therapies. This leads 149 Ibid., 134 [152–​3]. He criticises Cardano for bothering to comment on the erroneous anatomy of Mundinus: ibid., 29 [55–​6]. 150 De medicina statica libri octo (Rome, 1704). In 1700, Baglivi had published De statice aeris et liquidorum per observationes barometricas et hydrostaticas ad usum respirationis explicata as part of the first edition of his De fibra motrice et morbosa (Perugia, 1700). 151 On versions of induction, see De praxi medica, 18 [35], 21 [40] 174 [225]. The rueful exclamation ‘utinam singuli morbi duo vel tria signa infallibilia haberent’ (ibid., 273 [199]) could have been borrowed from Sanctorius’s Methodi vitandorum errorum; there is a direct reference to Sanctorius’s statics in ibid., 24 [48]. See also ibid., 68 [not included in the English translation] for another reference to Sanctorius. On Sanctorius’s methods and his doctrine of sufficient enumeration, see Maclean, Logic, signs and nature, 162, 167–​9. 152 De praxi medica, 19 [36]: ‘humanum corpus in structura aeque, ac effectibus a tali structura pendentibus, numero, pondere, et mensura procedit: Ita volente summo rerum Conditore Deo.’ The reference is to Wisdom 11:20–​21. 153 Ibid., 204–​17 [281–​93]. 154 Andrault, ‘What does it mean to be an empiricist in medicine?’, 175; Sydenham, Opera medica, 12.

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him in the last section of his book to propose a way of transcending the division of the discipline into empirics and rational doctors by the creation of a ‘rational empirical sect’. Not only ‘queen reason’ is needed in the search for medical knowledge, but also both individual and collective ‘experience’: in respect of the latter, he cites with some frequency an approved list of doctors whose observations and commentaries he trusts, including Luca Tozzi and some less well known Italians, the Paris Hippocratics, Sydenham, Waldschmidt (the only German), Lommius, Tulp, Lazare Rivière and Nicolas Chesnau.155 This shows him to have a desire to promote the medical figures of his adopted nation, but not to exclude the results of work done elsewhere in Europe. The physiological investigation of the patient is for him not as an end in itself, but is conceived as first stage towards the treatment of disease; the sequence that a doctor should follow through diagnosis and prognosis should lead to a broad approach to therapeutics, including, unusually, the use of patent medicines.156 He takes from Galenic medicine the concept of ‘indicatio’, by which a rational doctor intuits the correct course to follow in respect to the timing, frequency and quantity of therapies.157 This marks his preference for practice over theory, which is expressed also in his support of his contemporary Luca Tozzi, an editor of the Aphorisms, whose commentary Baglivi helped to promote.158 Tozzi is one of a number of Italian doctors promoted in this work for their espousal of what Andrault has called ‘Hippocratic methodism’ (that is, the application of the ancient Methodist school’s doctrine of looseness and constriction (‘laxum’ and ‘strictum’) to the understanding and treatment of the processes governing the solid and fluid parts of the body).159 Baglivi’s Hippocratism is thus beyond a fashionable piece of self-​labelling; his approach to the discipline 155 De praxi medica, 204–​17 [281–​293] refers to the Galenic causes known as ‘procatarctica’ and ‘proegumena’ before discussing the ‘causae proximae’, which can be ascertained from the two above-​named causes, material products in the body such as stones, excreta and retenta, those things that alleviate or worsten the disease in question, the mutation of the disease itself, pulse and respiration, and accompanying symptoms. All of this information is derived from the senses. See also De praxi medica, 170 [216–​7]. The list names five French, six Italian, one Dutch, one German and two English doctors, as well as one medieval physician (Velasco de Taranta). The Italian doctors and experimentalists Tozzi, Borelli and Bellini, who are part of the ‘Patriae et Medicinae gloria’ are praised also in ibid., 19 [36]. 156 Patent medicines are named in ibid., 60 [78]: cf Sydenham, Opera medica, 26. The therapies are not just based on the principle ‘contraria contrariis curantur’: see De praxi medica, 227 [328]. 157 On ‘indicatio’, see Maclean, Logic, signs and nature, 306–​14. 158 Baglivi correspondence, letters 35 and 37. 159 Andrault, ‘What does it mean to be an empiricist in medicine’, 187–​8.

262 Maclean of medicine, marked as it was by a commitment to quantification and mechanism, still allowed him to make full use of the Hippocratic corpus as a reservoir of privileged observations and case histories. We have seen that Baglivi makes occasional reference to theological texts, but it would be fair to say that his is a secular version of medicine; this becomes very clear in his chapters on mental illness, in which the thorny issue of the relationship of the rational soul to the body, and their mutual interactions, is discussed without reference to theology.160 He even refers at one stage to the fundamental tenet of Paduan naturalism (that theology and medicine should not be mixed), although it is not expressed in the blunt terms that Pietro Pomponazzi and Giovanni Battista da Monte used, but is rather attributed to Bacon.161 9.3 Friedrich Hoffmann (1660–​1742) Hoffmann received his university education in Jena, under the tutelage of the iatrochemist and anatomist Georg Wolfgang Wedel, whose account of Hippocratic ‘philosophy’ has been discussed above (pp. 228–​9). Before his appointment in 1693 as the first professor of medicine and natural philosophy at the University of Halle, Hoffmann was a municipal doctor in Minden and Halberstadt, and visited the low countries and England, where he formed the acquaintance inter alios of Sydenham, Boyle and Boerhaave. Apart from a spell of several years as the royal doctor in Berlin, he remained in Halle, acquiring a European-​wide reputation and foreign honours such as Fellowship of the Royal Society. He was a prolific author of medical books and dissertations, of which the most important from the point of view of this study are Fundamenta medicinae ex principis naturae mechanicis (1695), Dissertatio medica de medicina Hippocratica mechanica (1719) and Medicina rationalis

160 De praxi medica, 147–​55 [177–​89]; on this general problem, see Johanna Geyer-​Kordesch, ‘Passions and the ghost in the machine: or what not to ask about science in seventeenth-​ and eighteenth-​century Germany’, in Medical revolution, eds. French and Wear, 145–​63. 161 De praxi medica, 169 [215]: ‘quantum obfuerit historiae naturali in genere, ejusdem incremento, Platonem Philosophiae suae inseruisse Theologiam, sive de rebus philosophicis per ideas abstractas, et theologicas judicasse, Aristotelem logicam etc. inter caeteros longe conqueritur cl[arissimus] Verulamius. Ita in re nostra; cum elapso saeculo dialectices doctrina summopere floruisset, Medicique de historia et curatione morborum, per austeras illius leges disseruissent.’; cf. Giambattista da Monte, In nonum librum Rhasis […] expositio (Venice, 1554), 31: ‘Nihil autem existimo deterius in philosophia [et medicina] posse contingere quam cum e[is] theologiam commiscere’: and Pietro Pomponazzi, quoted by Bruno Nardi, Studi su Pietro Pomponazzi (Florence, 1965), 27n: ‘phisica non sunt commiscenda cum theologia.’

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systematica (6 vols. 1718–​34).162 His most important academic interactions in Germany were with his Halle colleague Georg Ernst Stahl (1659–​1734), who, like Wedel, wrote on Hippocratic ‘philosophy’, as we have seen. At Halle, Hoffmann lectured on clinical medicine, anatomy, surgery, physics, and chymistry, while Stahl, as second professor, taught theoretical medicine, physiology, pathology, dietetics, pharmacology, and botany. They developed fundamentally opposed medical models –​Stahl’s version of vitalism as opposed to Hoffmann’s iatromechanism –​which, along with their diametrically opposed personalities, eventually led to a bitter estrangement. Both were actively involved in the practical pietism expressed through acts of charity that was promoted by their University.163 Hoffmann also corresponded with Leibniz in the late seventeenth century, and acknowledged his debt to Leibniz’s idea of nature, but did not accept the idea of cosmological ‘pre-​established harmony’, that Leibniz had linked in various of his works to the Hippocratic topos ‘sympnoia panta’ (‘all things in sympathy’) from Nutriment, 23 and Regimen, 1.4.164 Hoffmann was clearly very well versed in traditional logic, but he did not extend his use of it to his very many dissertations and other systematic works, which refer instead to the demonstrative methods of mathematics, physics, and geometry, under which logic is subsumed.165 Hoffmann’s works,

162 Lonie, ‘Hippocrates the iatromechanist’, 134–​ 50, gives a thorough account of the Dissertatio of 1719. I shall refer to the Medicina rationalis systematica below as mrs, and indicate the section, chapter and paragraph, as does Lonie. The edition I have used is from vol. 1 of Opera omnia physico-​medica (Geneva, 1748). For the Fundamenta medicinae ex principis naturae mechanicis, I have used the Halle edition of 1695. 163 Hoffmann compares their systems in his posthumously published Commentarius de differentia inter ejus doctrinam medico-​mechanicam: et Georgii Ernesti Stahlii medico-​ organicam (Frankfurt, 1746). Francesco Paolo de Ceglia, ‘Hoffmann and Stahl. Documents and reflections on the dispute’, History of universities, 22 (2007), 98–​123, shows that this had been published before, with a different title. 164 E.g. La Monadologie, ed. Emile Boutroux (Paris, 1892), 177 (para. 61). See also Karl Edouard Rothschuh, ‘Studien zu Friedrich Hoffmann (1660–​1742): I. Hoffmann und die Medizingeschichte. Das Hoffmannsche System und das Aetherprinzip’, Sudhoffs Archiv 60 (1976), 163–​193; ‘ii. Hoffmann, Descartes und Leibniz’, ibid., 235–​270. 165 Fundamenta, sig.)(4r-​v; mrs, proleg. 2.9: ‘theoria medica vera est rationalis et demonstrativa explicatio rerum, quae in historiis morborum continentur […].’ The Scholium that follows glosses ‘methodus’ as ‘rationalis ac demonstrative effectuum per causas explicatio fit, si quis ex indubiis principiis, ceu primis veritatibus apta et syllogistica connexione incognita deducit: explicat more geometrarum, qua in demonstrationibus suis uti consuescunt.’ See also ibid, proleg. 8.1; on Hoffmann’s reasoning ‘more geometrico’, see Lonie, ‘Hippocrates the iatromechanist’, 115. Hoffmann cites Wisdom 11:20–​21, as does Baglivi, to give divine warrant to the investigation of nature through mathematical quantity and proportion: see Fundamenta, sig.)(4r.

264 Maclean like those of Baglivi from whom he derived many insights, are written in tightly organized sections broken down into numbered paragraphs relying on ‘distinctiones’ and resembling aphorisms or precepts.166 These are distributed under three heads: physiology, pathology and therapeutics (subsuming semiotics and diet).167 In the case of many elements of the first two heads, the recent progress made by experimentalism in anatomy by Vesalius and natural philosophy (mechanics and chymistry) by Descartes, Willis, Bohn, Boyle and others allowed him to argue that clear progress had been made in those domains, invalidating the doctrines of the ancients;168 but the humoral nature of bodily functions, the diagnostic part of pathology and all of therapeutics still depended in Hoffmann’s opinion to a large degree on the insights of the modern world’s medical forebears, among whom Hippocrates was paramount.169 He expresses his admiration for a group of modern European doctors (including of course Sydenham), among whom there are a number of Germans, indicating the pride he has in his own nation; interestingly, this list does not include his tutor Wedel, presumably because of his enthusiasm for the iatrochemists such as van Helmont of whom Hoffmann did not approve.170 Hoffmann is rightly seen as a committed iatromechanist who sought explanations of the states and processes of bodily solids and fluids through the analysis of matter and motion alone, matter being assisted by what in traditional Galenic medicine were called animal spirits, and in his terminology came to be known as ‘aether’ and ‘nervous fluids’ (‘fluida nervorum’).171 But while resisting the arguments put forward by Stahl to argue the case for seeing matter as not purely passive, he did not feel the need frequently to cite Descartes, from whom he derived his mechanism (perhaps not surprisingly, as Descartes was persona non grata in pietist Halle).172 He found the warrant for

166 See Fundamenta, sig.)(4v, on the need for ‘firma et stabilia praecepta’, and the issue of combinations (e.g. of symptoms). 167 For citations from Baglivi, see ibid., 118n, 133n, 137n, 144–​5. 168 Fundamenta, sig.)(3v-​4v. Rothschuh, ‘Hoffmann, Descartes, Leibniz’. 169 On ‘generalised humoralism’ and the process of concoction, crisis and expulsion of morbid matter in diseases, see Lonie, ‘Hippocrates the iatromechanist’, 118–​19. 170 mrs, preface, and Proleg. 1.5–​6; see also Lonie, ‘Hippocrates the iatromechanist’, 116. 171 Rothschuh, ‘Hoffmann und die Medizingeschichte. Das Hoffmannsche System und das Aetherprinzip’. Aether is a material substance in Hoffmann’s system. 172 Rothschuh, ‘Hoffmann, Descartes, Leibniz’, 237; Hoffmann, Commentarius de differentia inter eius doctrinam medico-​mechanicam, et Georgii Ernesti Stahlii medico-​organicam (Frankfurt, 1746).

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his commitment to modern chymistry and physics in Hippocrates’s advice to doctors in Barrenness ‘to be sure to turn yourself into natural philosophers.’173 Hoffmann knew the Hippocratic corpus intimately, as his account of it in his Medicina rationalis systemica (1.1.4) clearly shows, and he did not endorse it wholesale. Against the general chorus of unqualified approval of Hippocratic observational techniques and case histories, Hoffmann asserts in several places that he did not admire them, and in the case of prognostics, found them to be incomplete, inadequate, and not infrequently wrong.174 But his admiration for other parts of the Hippocratic corpus –​Epidemics, Aphorisms, Regimen i, Airs, Waters, Places, Places in Man, Nature of Man, Breaths, Nutriment –​is manifest. The question therefore arises whether by invoking Hippocrates, he was just ‘putting a classical façade on to a building’, as Ingo Müller has argued, or was committed to declaring that the roots of his mechanism resided substantially in the works of the ‘divinus senex’, as Lonie maintains.175 Lonie concedes that Hippocrates did not express the version of mechanism which equates the human body to a machine or an automaton, and that nowhere is there a clear quantification of mechanical principles beyond statements about addition and subtraction, but he argues vigorously that Hippocrates was a significant source for Hoffmann’s mechanical reasoning in relation not only to his assumptions about quantification and anatomy, but also bodily nature (the principle of motion that equates in a Galenic system to the concept of innate heat) as seen through the key concept of circulation of fluids, and the notion of health as humoral equilibrium, expressing itself in therapeutics through the doctrine of ‘contraria contrariis curantur’ (‘things are cured by their opposites’).176 173 De sterilitate, in Opera omnia, ed. Anuce Foës (Frankfurt, 1595), 675: ‘Conare ut physicus evadas’; quoted by Hoffmann, Tractatio brevis et luculenta de febribus, in Opera omnia, Geneva: apud Fratres de Tournes, 1754, 1.366, and Fundamenta, sig.)(3v-​)(4r: ‘tota medendi scientia sine rerum naturalium philosophia trunca et debilis est’; this ‘scientia’ is not founded on ‘meris speculationibus’, but is one whose ‘mathematica methodus’ ‘satagit demonstrare et firmare.’ See also above, p. 233. 174 Lonie, ‘Hippocrates the iatromechanist’, 133; Opera omnia, 1.xxxi (praefatio auctoris); ‘rarius [regulas prognoscitcas] respondere, sed maxima ex parte fallere.’ The same point is made by Lorenz: see above, pp. 242-​3. 175 See Ingo Wilhelm Müller, ‘Klassische Fassade oder ernsthafter Hippokratismus? Zur Funktion von Zitaten antiker Autoren bei Friedrich Hoffmann (1660–​ 1742)’, Medizinhistorisches Journal 22 (1987), 62–​79, who describes Hoffman’s engagement with Hippocrates as ‘bloss rhetorischer Schmuck, den Versuch, der eigenen Medizin eine klassische Fassade zu verleihen.’ Lonie, ‘Hipporates the iatromechanist’, 135 (whence the metaphor of a building). 176 Ibid., 146, 149; Lonie gives the source of the doctrine ‘opposites are the cure of opposites’ as Breaths, 1, cited in mrs Proleg. 4.11: ‘medicinam […] esse additionem eorum quae deficiunt et subtractionem eorum, quae abundant.’

266 Maclean Hoffmann’s uptake from the Hippocratic corpus in all these areas required him to engage in inventive interpretative activity. In the case of circulation, he refers to the ‘vestiges and indications of the circulation of the blood that the great Hippocrates left in his writings but which he was not able to reveal in a completely explicit manner because of the undeveloped study of anatomy of his time (my italics).’177 For the principles of motion in the body, Hoffmann relies on an oracular comment in Epidemics, 6.5 about ‘things which are contained, things which contain, and things which give impulse’, and cites also a passage in Places in Man which draws from him the almost oxymoronic gloss: ‘By these words, Hippocrates loosely indicates (‘subindicat’) in the clearest possible way […].’178 These and other examples are given in Lonie, who argues strongly that Hoffmann valued them as shadowy precedents, because he wanted to retain Hippocrates as the representative of a tradition of practical medicine which Hoffmann saw as true and valuable, and of which his own work was a renewal. But the hermeneutic work required to make them consistent with the medicine of his day also lends weight to Müller’s descriptions of them as more window-​dressing than proper sources of doctrine. Francesco Paolo de Ceglia has argued that Hoffmann does not (any more than Stahl) involve his religious convictions in his medical pronouncements, and that in both cases, we are dealing with figures ‘who behaved like physicians and pietists, not like pietist physicians.’179 This comment has to be seen in the context of Hoffmann’s indication that he does not support Cartesian-​inspired occasionalism, and dissents from Leibniz’s metaphysical commitment to the concept of pre-​established harmony, which, as we have seen, the German philosopher said that he had found adumbrated in Hippocrates.180 This dissent 177 ‘vestigia quidem et indicia circuli sanguinis [quae] magnus Hippocrates in monumentis suis reliquit attamen propter anatomes id temporis incultum studium, res non satis perfecte detegi potuit’; mrs 1.1.6, quoted by Lonie, ‘Hippocrates the iatrochemist’, 141. This can be compared with Tachenius’s derivation of modern chymistry from the oracular references to fire and water in Regimen 1: see above, p. 234. 178 Ibid., 145; ‘Hippocrates quibus verbis clarissime subindicat […]’, quoted from mrs 1.1.16. A demonstration that the meaning ascribed to these passages is the result of interpretative activity is given by Lonie, ‘Hippocrates the iatromechanist’, 141, where he shows that in order to refute Harvey, Jean Riolan the Younger was able to cite the same passages from Hippocrates as those cited by Hoffmann in Harvey’s defence. 179 de Ceglia, ‘Hoffmann and Stahl’, 123. Pietism has been linked to Calvinism and Puritanism, and this invites comparison with the religious views of Sydenham and Boerhaave: see Stephanie Retzlaff, Observieren und aufschreiben: zur Poetologie medizinischer Fallgeschichten (1700–​1765) (Leiden and Boston, 2018), 19–​20. 180 Rothschuh, ‘Hoffmann, Descartes, Leibniz’, who points out also that Hoffmann did not invoke such concepts as the neo-​platonic world soul.

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does not mean that Hoffmann was inconsistent in his praise of the ‘divinus senex’, simply that he was selective in his uptake from him (he was almost alone, as we have seen, in not extolling Hippocrates’s powers of observation). Hoffmann’s commitment to modern anatomy, physics and chymistry may have been consistent with his theological convictions, but they are not explicitly underpinned by them, except in the most perfunctory way.181 Like Baglivi, his discussion of the soul-​body relation is couched in secular terms.182 Hoffmann may well have had the same view as other Lutheran natural philosophers of the day about the limitations of human perception and reasoning powers, but is happy, apparently, to leave them unexpressed. His various systematic texts have thereby something of the feel of a modern medical manual about them. 9.4 Herman Boerhaave (1668–​1738) I come finally to Boerhaave, who was eight years younger than Hoffmann, and a few months younger than Baglivi, both of whom he seems to have read assiduously, but neither of whom appears in his list of approved modern authorities (‘recentiores’).183 Boerhaave undertook the usual arts course, excelling in ancient languages, and planned initially to become a Calvinist pastor like his father, but chose in the end to devote himself to medicine, obtaining his doctorate in Harderwijk in 1693. He was appointed to a teaching post in medicine at Leiden in 1701, and entitled his florid inaugural lecture Oratio de commendando studio Hippocratico. He was subsequently to accumulate various chairs at that university (in anatomy, botany, practical medicine and chemistry), to initiate clinical medicine, attracting numerous English, Scottish and German disciples to Leiden, and to be duly proclaimed as a result the ‘teacher of all Europe’ (‘communis Europae praeceptor’).184 He kept abreast of modern developments in iatromechanism and iatrochemistry, and his enthusiasm for anatomy was expressed in the edition he produced with a colleague of Vesalius’s complete works.185 After his death in 1738, two of his pupils ensured 181 See Lonie, ‘Hippocrates the iatromechanist’, 136, citing mrs 1.1.5. An exception is found in his disputation on demonology: Disputatio inauguralis de potentia diaboli in corpora (Halle, 1703). 182 See Propempticon inaugurale de animae ac corporis commercio (Halle, 1695). The only citations are from Hippocrates, Descartes, Bacon, and Borelli. 183 Methodus studii medici, 2.633–​4 (Hoffmann), 636 (Baglivi). 184 John H. Zammito, The gestation of German biology: philosophy and physiology from Stahl to Schelling (Chicago and London, 2018), 362. Smith, Hippocratic tradition, 23–​7, records that he called the medicine at Leiden a ‘Hippocratic school.’ 185 See Ian Maclean, ‘Vesalius as authority: from the first publications to the Opera omnia of 1725’, in Towards the authority of Vesalius, eds. Erika Gielen and Michèle Goyens (Turnhout, 2018), 23–​48; Rothschuh, ‘Hoffmann, Descartes, Leibniz’.

268 Maclean his enduring fame and influence: between 1742 and 1771, the Dutch Imperial physician Gerard van Swieten published five volumes of commentaries on Boerhaave’s Aphorismi de cognoscendis et curandis morbis (first published in 1708) based on notes he had taken from his lectures, and the Swiss professor of medicine at Göttingen Albrecht von Haller oversaw in 1751 a new and expanded edition of his Methodus studii medici, twenty-​six years after its first authorised appearance. To prepare himself for his medical studies, Boerhaave read in sequence the monuments of ancient medicine, beginning with the whole Hippocratic corpus. This allowed him in his Oratio de commendando studio Hippocratico, to sketch the now familiar history of medicine, in which its auspicious beginnings are said to be thrown off course by Galen and the Arabs, until the renewal of the virtues and doctrines of Hippocrates, its fons et origo. The specific doctrines which Boerhaave mentions concern the appreciation of the variable factors affecting the human body such as age, sex, mode of life, and diet, and the effect on health of the seasons, the quality of air, and the difference in climate and regions. Like Sydenham, but unlike Baglivi and Hoffmann, he does not give precise references when he alludes to Hippocrates. The need for caution, good judgement and prudence in diagnosis and treatment is stressed; this implies craft knowledge, and the intuitive response to questions of therapy known through the ‘res indicatae’. As Roberto Lo Presti has pointed out, Boerhaave somewhat unusually also stresses Hippocrates’s benevolence and moral rectitude.186 To these virtues must be added the freedom to investigate everything without prior assumptions or prejudices, and the ability to perceive and then give an account of what has been observed briefly in simple (even if sometimes sibylline) language, marrying ‘Laconic terseness with Attic perspicuity.’ Lo Presti observes that Boerhaave makes much of Hippocrates as a natural philosopher who gave his subordinates the task of collecting particulars and providing their master with information; this enables Boerhaave to represent Hippocrates as ‘the prototype of the perfect Baconian medical scientist.’187 In the modern world, the gamut of Hippocratic virtues (except perhaps Baconian collaboration) are for Boerhaave most strikingly to be found in the figure of Sydenham, ‘the light of England, the Phoebus of the medical art, whose name I would blush to mention without prefacing my remarks with praise […] the very image of a Hippocratic man.’188 As well as these accomplishments, the 1 86 Lo Presti, ‘’Hippocrates and Boerhaave’, 491, 494–​7, 509. 187 Ibid., 496: for an example of Boerhaave’s expression of approval of Bacon, see the Sermo academicus de comparando certo in physicis (Leiden, 1715), 49. 188 Oratio de commendando studio hippocratico (Leiden, 1721), 27: ‘Inter recentiores de medicinae usu scriptores, paucos, si ulli sunt, Veterum perfectionem attigisse dolendum, quum

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achievements of modern anatomists and natural philosophers, whether ‘mechanici’ or ‘chemici’ are to be put to use. The ‘recentiores’ who deserve mention include the English, the Italians, the Danish, the French and one or two local figures (among them Christiaan Huyghens, Antoni van Leeuwenhoek and Charles Drelincourt, whose post Boerhaave inherited). We have encountered all of these points, and most of the names, before, in the work of Baglivi and Hoffmann.189 Boerhaave expresses in his Oratio a description of good practice and sound doctrine that he was able, through the fame of Leiden and his own pedagogical skills, to transform into an orthodoxy. In the Methodus studii medici, Hippocrates is said to be the first of the ‘systematic physicians’ who should be read; Boerhaave prescribes the sequence in which to read him, beginning with the Aphorisms (having omitted the corrupt texts and interpolations identified by Galen, Houllier and Vallesius) and thereafter the Precepts. The copious notes give further guidance to other works and commentators. In her study of Boerhaave, Rina Knoeff has claimed that historians of science and medicine stressed the mechanical aspects of his medicine, but have not paid sufficient attention to Boerhaave’s Calvinism, in which, she argues, his natural philosophy and chymistry as well as their uses in medicine and methodology are rooted. In particular, Boerhaave’s ideas on the divine nature of fire, the chemical theory of menstrua and the idea of seminal principles demonstrate that Boerhaave presented a Calvinist picture of the world in which the wisdom of God and the care he extends to his creation can be seen in the powers peculiar to every creature. Nature is not a category existing outside the realm of God, but is included in it. The path to proper medical practice is through the attentiveness to nature that Hippocrates, van Helmont and Sydenham show in an exemplary quasi-​religious fashion, and not by the exercise of the corrupt faculties of the human intellect.190 Scientific enquiry as manifested by

reliquas artis medicae partes cum Gloria eos exornasse, atque priscorum, inventa, longe superasse exsultemus. Unum eximium habeo Thomam Sydenham, Angliae lumen, Artis Phoebum, Cujus ego nomen sine honorifica praefatione memorare erubescerem: quem quoties contemplator, occurrit animo vera Hippocratici Viri species, de cujus erga Remp. Medicam meritis nunquam ita magnifie dicam, quin ejus id sit superatura dignitas.’ 189 Ibid., 28, 35; De usu ratiocinii mechanici in medicina (1703) (Leiden, 1703), 13, 15. The oration opens with a definition of mechanists: ‘qui corporum vires, ex mole, figura et velocitate, vel assumtis, vel deprehensis observatione, calculo aestimant Geometrico, Mechanici appellantur.’ See also Cunningham, ‘Thomas Sydenham and the “Good Old Cause” ’, 189, on Boerhaave’s four ‘peaks’ of medical progress (Hippocrates, Bacon, Sydenham and Newton). 1 90 On following nature ‘the ultimate manifestation of God’s will’, see Lo Presti, ‘Boerhaave and Hippocrates’, 498–​500.

270 Maclean the advances made in natural philosophy in his time can investigate the laws of nature, but has very clear limits, which Boerhaave comes more and more to acknowledge. In a late oration, the Sermo academicus de honore medici, servitute of 1731, Boerhaave avers that Hippocrates, who modestly declares himself to be no more than a layman (‘idiota’), is right to assert that human beings, who believe too readily in their powers of reason, only seems to possess knowledge; the ‘particula minutissima’ of the body and its marvellous operations and processes will always lie beyond the reach of their senses. It is a good thing if medical students acquire a grounding in anatomy, mechanics, hydrostatics, hydraulics, physics and chymistry, but even with these accomplishments, all that they will be able to do is to process information ‘by observing, recording, and making distinctions, and only reaching conclusions from these mental operations.’191 Their honour as doctors will reside in being the servants and ministers of nature. We have met very similar sentiments to these before, in both Lutheran and Roman Catholic writing; if there is anything specifically Calvinist in them, it resides in the intimate relationship that Boerhaave posits between nature and God.192 10

Conclusion: Early Modern Hippocratisms

As has already been averred, the Hippocratic Corpus was not distinguished from Galenic medicine in the Middle Ages. The philological phase of its study began with the Greek editions of the sixteenth century, and was largely completed by 1600, a date which also marks the passing of the era of conciliation as a means of preserving the authority of ancient texts.193 A century later, a more refined historicist approach had brought about a new awareness in medical history tinged with Whiggishness that is clearly expressed in William Heberden’s Introduction to the study of physic of 1741. For him, the ancients had no proper appreciation of chymistry, their materia medica was not effective, they rarely dissected a human body, and their physiology was no more that ‘a heap of wild notions’.194 Hippocrates suffered from this critique much less than other ancient figures, and his work was adjusted to match the advances in 1 91 On the exercise of reason following, not preceding, the collection of data, see ibid., 491–​2. 192 Boerhaave, Sermo academicus de honore medici, servitute (Leiden, 1731), 36: ‘observando, recordando, comparando, ex his solis ratiocinando’; Rina Knoeff, Herman Boerhaave: Calvinist chemist and physician (Amsterdam, 2002), esp. 193–​7. 193 Maclean, Logic, signs, and nature, 212–​13. 194 Cited by Cunningham, ‘Transformation of Hippocrates’, 109.

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natural philosophy that came about in the course of the early modern period. The new approach to nosology which, it has been argued, began with the work of Girolamo Fracastoro adumbrated the concept of disease as an ontological entity; this was compatible with the revelant Hippocratic texts (although not explicitly stated in any of them), and became associated with the Hippocratic practice of diagnosis.195 The Hippocratic Corpus also survived the impact of the experimental philosophy of Francis Bacon, who himself adopted the Hippocratic literary genres of the aphorism and the case history, and whose view that the proper study of science was the whole of nature, not just nature for the most part; like the approach adumbrated in the various major Hippocratic texts, this would be a collaborative venture marked by the cautious processing of information through rising degrees of certainty, and the rejection of ut plurimum reasoning. In Dmitri Levitin’s words, ‘Hippocrates emerges as a middle ground between the Empirics and the speculators.’196 All this led Boerhaave, as Lo Presti has pointed out (see above, p. 268), to represent Hippocrates as ‘the prototype of the perfect Baconian medical scientist.’ The rise of chemical medicine through the work of Paracelsus, van Helmont and others came to have its roots attributed to the Hippocratic Corpus, as did the iatromechanicism derived from the work of Descartes and his disciples. The accompanying preference for the ‘mos geometricus’ of argumentation over scholastic dialectics was also grounded by physicians in the same hospitable, if sibylline, Hippocratic writings. Their terminology had, it is true, to be adapted to express the insights of early modern doctors, but this hermeneutic process was readily engaged in by seventeenth-​century and early eighteenth-​century medical thinkers and pedagogues. Finally, the Hippocratic approval of craft knowledge in Regimen i, and of the acquisition of expertise through experience gained by consorting with established masters of the trade of medicine struck a welcome chord with the generation of physicians who wanted to ally the benefits of 195 Maclean, Logic, signs, and nature, 24–​5; Vivian Nutton, ‘The seeds of disease: an explanation of contagion and infection from the Greeks to the Renaissance’, Medical History 27 (1983), 1–​34; id., ‘The reception of Fracastoro’s theory of contagion: the seed that fell among thorns’, Osiris 2nd series, 6 (1990), 196–​234. There is an interesting history of the term ‘diagnosis’ that remains to be written; one of its earliest appearances in the early modern world as part of the triad ‘diagnosis, prognosis, therapy’ is found in Coacae praenotiones interprete et enarratore Ludovico Dureto (Paris, 1588), 164. 196 Levitin, Ancient wisdom, 289; see also ibid., 293–​4 for a critique of Harold Cook’s view (in The decline of the old medical regime in Stuart London (Ithaca and London, 1986), 185) of Hippocrates as the model of Baconian empiricism; and David Cantor, ‘Western Medicine since the Renaissance’, in The Cambridge Companion to Hippocrates, ed. Peter Pormann (Cambridge, 2018), 362–​83.

272 Maclean experimental science with an approach to medical learning which gave prominence to apprenticeship and clinical experience.197 The weakness of aphoristic presentation –​that it could not reasonably be expected to cover every circumstance, and presented therefore a generalisation that did not work in every case –​was however noted; the Hippocratic Corpus as a source of practical medical precepts had its vociferous, if not very numerous, critics. Galen did not fare as well, and was vilified as over-​dogmatic and theoretical. But the notion of rational medicine as the combination of ‘ratio’ et ‘experientia’ that was attributed to his writing did survive, as well as his humoralism, his strong support of ‘indication’ as the approach to therapeutics to be adopted by learned physicians, the flexibility of his logic, and his approach to therapy through the doctrine of ‘contraria contrariis’.198 All of these features of the ‘habitus’ that were once attributed to Galen could be, and were, traced back to the Hippocratic Corpus; but the Hippocratic ‘habitus’ was seen as radically different, as it allegedly eschewed theorising altogether, and stuck to descriptions of disease based on acute observation. Moreover, some Hippocratic doctrines relating to season, climate, and region were compatible with modern experimental science, as was the description of the role of the medical doctor as a cautious empirical therapist rather than an active contributor to progress in natural philosophy, although this modest assessment clearly did not apply to Harvey and the physiologists of the second half of the seventeenth century. My survey of Hippocratism ended with a consideration of four national ‘Hippocrateses’: Sydenham, Baglivi, Hoffmann and Boerhaave. This was undertaken in the spirit of Harold Cook’s comment that ‘while we have learned an enormous amount about how local cultures shaped medicine, there is now a growing desire to discern the relationships among local knowledges, and how best to understand the apparent universalism of scientific knowledge.’199 All of my national figures had a very extensive knowledge of the Hippocratic Corpus. Sydenham, whose publications were well known to the others, was the oldest member of this group by more than thirty years. He was celebrated by all three as a modern Hippocrates on account of his powers of observation, his cautious approach to nosology, his production of natural histories of diseases, and his

1 97 See Regimen, 1.13–​24; Lonie, ‘Hippocrates the iatromechanist’, 149–​50. 198 For attempts to describe the ‘habitus’ of Galenic medicine, see Temkin, Galenism; Maclean, Logic, signs and nature. See also Vivian Nutton, ‘Renaissance Galenism 1540–​ 1640: flexibility or irrelevance?’, in Brill’s Companion to the reception of Galen, eds. Petros Boras-​Vallianatos and Barbara Zipser (Leiden and Boston, 2019), 472–​86. 199 Harold J. Cook, ‘The history of medicine and the Scientific Revolution’, Isis 102 (2011), 102–​ 8 (108).

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avoidance of theory. His writings struck a very powerful chord with the whole European medical community, and strongly reminded them of the Coan doctor whose writings he himself may have known intimately in the original Greek. Baglivi, Hoffmann and Boerhaave all paid tribute to him for very much the same reasons. They celebrated him, but at the same time they all evinced pride in the national traditions of medicine from which they had emerged. Sydenham himself had praised the natural philosophers of England (but did not celebrate its medical institution, the College of Physicians); Baglivi, as well as suggesting radical reforms to the teaching of medicine in Italy, recorded his admiration of Luca Tozzi (although in Boerhaave’s Methodus, his commentary on the Aphorisms is described as a ‘vast and unreadable work’: ‘vastum et aegre legibile opus’); Hoffmann’s German bias is seen in his approval of the work of the little-​known Sigismund Grass; Boerhaave paid a handsome tribute to his predecessor as professor in Leiden, Charles Drelincourt.200 All four authors use their allegiance to Hippocrates to distinguish themselves from the ‘base Empirics’ of their day. Their images of Hippocrates are further coloured by their preferences for aspects of iatrochemistry and iatromechanism, and their institutional allegiances. For Baglivi, these were marked not only by his practice as a Roman physiologist and anatomist and the secular approach to medicine of his alma mater Padua, but also his adherence to experimental science through his mentor Malpighi and his membership of the Royal Society. His invocation of Hippocrates was, it seems to me, sincere and knowledgeable; the writings of the Coan were most influential in his approach to therapy. Hoffmann’s institutional setting was very different. His adherence to Cartesian iatromechanism was inflected by his affiliation to a pietist university and his intellectual interaction with Leibniz and Stahl. He remained an eclectic in his approach to medical theory, as he clearly stated in the introduction to his Medicina Rationalis Systemica, but Hippocrates was for him more than a fashionable piece of window-​dressing. Like Tachenius, he saw himself as the renewer of an ancient medical tradition which he set about translating into modern terms.201 Boerhaave also made Hippocrates his guiding light, but Wesley Smith’s characterisation of Hippocratism at this time as more ‘a spirit and a method rather than a body of doctrine’ is most appropriately applied to him.202 One absence in the work of all four doctors is close study of the Hippocratic texts on prognosis, which had clearly appealed more 200 Sydenham, Opera omnia, 10–​11; note 158, above; Boerhaave, Methodus studii medici, 2:1099; Hoffmann, mrs Proleg.1.5; Boerhaave, Oratio de commendando studio hippocratico, 27. 201 mrs Proleg. 1.6 ‘De medicina eclectica.’ 202 Smith, Hippocratic Tradition, 20.

274 Maclean to their sixteenth-​century predecessors. All four doctors came out of well-​ defined and explicit religious contexts, and appear to have held strong religious beliefs. It is worthy of note that Hippocrates was accused of atheism in the lifetime of Hoffmann and Boerhaave, but was strongly defended by Daniel Wilhelm Triller; there is no indication that any of my quartet of doctors gave any credence to this accusation.203 Personal religious convictions seem not to have affected the expression of their medical theories in three of the cases, but Knoeff’s alignment of Boerhaave’s Calvinist beliefs with specific doctrines suggests that these played a significant role in his thinking. In all four cases, no problem was encountered in uniting the wisdom of the ancients as seen in the Hippocratic corpus with modern scientific theories and personal religious convictions. From the evidence of these medical thinkers, it is difficult to see a strong division between ancients and moderns (indeed it was explicitly denied by one of them).204 As representatives of the medical intellectual milieu of Europe in the early Enlightenment, their Hippocratism did not impede the free exercise of their scientific enquiries, but led them to be harmoniously and profitably in touch with their classical roots. 203 This accusation is found in Nicolaus Hieronymus Gundling, Otia, 3 vols (Leipzig, 1706–​ 7), 2:3; its refutation is by Daniel Wilhelm Triller, Hippocrates atheismi falso accusatus (Rudolfstadt, 1719). See also Alain Mochu, ‘La rumeur du médecin athée’, La lettre clandestine 8 (2010), 317–​58. 204 See above, note 135.

pa rt 4 Theology

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­c hapter 8

What’s in a Name?

Essenes, Therapeutae, and Monks in the Christian Imagination, c.1500–​1700 Jan Machielsen The Essene is the great enigma of Hebrew history. Admired alike by Jew, by Heathen, and by Christian, he yet remains a dim vague outline, on which the highest subtlety of successive critics has been employed to supply a substantial form and an adequate colouring. An ascetic mystical dreamy recluse, he seems too far removed from the hard experience of life to be capable of realisation. j.b. lightfoot, Bishop of Durham (1828–​1889)1

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Introduction

There can be few fictitious encounters more inventive and improbable than the one set in the city of ‘Cosmopolis’ on the island of ‘Utopia’ during ‘a generall meeting of many famous learned Men of all Religions.’2 Two of the three men meeting at the side lines of this Davos for early modern religious controversialists were, indeed, famous. Had the encounter been real they would have instantly recognized each other. Cardinal Robert Bellarmine even had a painting on the wall of his study of his ‘learned adversary’, the Cambridge divine William Whitaker.3 The third participant, the imaginary rabbi Michaes, had recently converted from Judaism to Christianity but could not decide ‘whether to embrace the Catholike fayth, or Protestancy.’ In this fantasy spun by a Jesuit 1 Joseph B. Lightfoot, St. Paul’s Epistles to the Colossians and to Philemon: A Rev[ised] Text with Introductions, Notes and Dissertations (London, 1875), 82–​3. 2 John Clare, The Converted Iew or Certaine Dialogues Betweene Micheas a Learned Iew and Others, Touching Divers Points of Religion, Controverted Betweene the Catholicks and Protestants (s.l., 1630), sig. a2r. 3 James Brodrick sj, Robert Bellarmine: Saint and Scholar (London, 1961), 84.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004462335_010

278 Machielsen polemicist, Michaes set a challenge for the Protestant Hector and Catholic Achilles to prove whether the Roman faith had ‘ever altered since the Apostles tymes’. Bellarmine unsurprisingly proved victorious and Whitaker ‘entring into greate intemperance of words, against the Church of Rome’ departed. Michaes converted to Catholicism and entered the priesthood.4 It was Michaes who introduced the subject of the Essenes. Bellarmine had rejected a parallel between heretical and monastic movements, both of whom were named after their founders: ‘Touching those names of Franciscans, Bernardins, Benedictans, &c. It is so cleare, that these names are not imposed for change of Fayth, but only for institution of several degrees of a vertuous, and religious life.’ Michaes, drawing on the authority of Philo and Josephus, submitted the example of the Essenes, a Jewish sect which flourished during the Second Temple period (2nd century bce–​1st century ce) ‘to whom God vouchsafed many spiritual favours and consolations’ in support of the Roman cardinal’s argument. The Essenes were ‘[h]‌appy men: since he is most fit to walke upon the hight of celestial contemplation; who liveth in the vale of a voluntary humility, retyrednes, and mortification; in whom the fyre of the spirit doth ever extinguish the fire of the flesh and sensuality.’ Yet, Michaes argued, their life of contemplation did not mean that they ‘instituted a Fayth, and Religion different from that of Moyses’, just as the various monastic orders did not follow a faith different from that of Christ.5 John Clare, the English Jesuit who most likely authored this imaginary debate, was no Bellarmine, although he likely had known that towering figure of Counter-​Reformation scholarship personally.6 Clare, speaking through Bellarmine and Michaes, sought to refute a standard Protestant accusation against Catholic monasticism—​its forest of religious orders reeked of sectarianism. The Swiss Reformer Pierre Viret, for instance, denounced the ‘sects of perdition’, which multiplied every day ‘like vermin’.7 Such charges, of course, 4 Clare, The Converted Iew, sig. a2r-​v. 5 Clare, The Converted Iew, 46. 6 T.M. McCoog, ‘Clare, John (c.1579–​1628), Jesuit’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). Clare spent the period 1614–​20 at the Venerable English College in Rome. Bellarmine was close to the English Jesuits. In 1627, its rector was the first to give evidence during the Roman inquest into Bellarmine’s canonization: Vatican City, Archivio Apostolico Vaticano, Congregazione dei Riti, ms 2603, fol. 1r. McCoog cites Jesuit testimony which disputes Clare’s authorship of The Converted Iew, but such denials need to be taken with a grain of salt. 7 Pierre Viret, De La Vraye Et Fausse Religion, touchant les voeus et les sermens licites et illicites … Item de la moinerie, tant des juifs que des paiens et des turcs et des papistes ([Geneva], 1560), 554, 555: ‘se multipient de iour en iour, comme la vermine qui s’engendre l’une de l’autre’; ‘sectes de perdition.’

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conveniently turned the tables back on the papists. Catholic controversialists, notably Bellarmine, had pointed to Protestant division as proof that heresies inevitably fractured into new sects.8 Yet the charge of monastic sectarianism also stemmed from the Protestant belief that all true Christians are saved by the same means—​through sola fide or faith alone—​and that hence monastic austerities had no value. That criticism inevitably extended beyond the differences between religious orders to monasticism itself. Luther argued that all Christians had to abide by Scripture and denounced the ‘inconceivable blindness’ of those who confess they ‘go further than Christ and live a loftier and more perfect life.’9 What makes John Clare’s use of the Essenes striking is that the Essenes were more often marshalled in defence of this much wider issue. The predominant Catholic line, articulated by Bellarmine and others, was that the Essenes were not followers of the ‘Fayth and Religion … of Moyses’ but early Christians, who guarded the apostolicity of monasticism from Protestant assault. As Martin Luther’s denunciation already suggests, the Protestant assault on monasticism was foremost theological, as well as—​in Luther’s case—​ personal. The former Augustinian friar dedicated his 1522 De votis monasticis to the father he had unjustly defied to enter the monastic life seventeen years earlier.10 Monasticism’s historical origins interested Luther surprisingly little. Only in passing did he describe St Antony (c.251–​356ce) as ‘the very father of monks and the founder of the monastic life.’11 Despite some hefty theological forays early on, it was principally on historical terrain that Catholics chose to respond.12 While some humanists had already busied themselves with the question of the origins of monasticism, this chapter argues that this concern was new, one that had not concerned the Church Fathers, let alone the medieval Church. Thomas Aquinas, in his defence of monasticism, never

8

9 10 11 12

A particular apt example of such polemics is Bellarmine’s response to the Lutheran Book of Concord of 1580, presented by the printer as a specimen of the forthcoming De controversiis: Robert Bellarmine, Iudicium … de libro, quem Lutherani vocant, Concordiae (Ingolstadt, 1586). Martin Luther, ‘The Judgment of Martin Luther on Monastic Vows’, in Luther’s Works: The Christian in Society, ed. James Atkinson, vol. 44 (Philadelphia, 1966), 254. Luther’s fascinating preface is not included in the English translation: Martin Luther, De votis monasticis … Iudicium (Basle, 1522), sigs a1v-​a3v. Luther, ‘The Judgment of Martin Luther on Monastic Vows’, 253. E.g. Johann Dietenberger, Contra temerarium Martini Lutheri, de votis monasticis iudicium (Cologne, 1525).

280 Machielsen even considered it.13 In addition, the chapter will demonstrate that, while the Catholic arguments in favour of apostolicity may appear to compete with each other for sheer implausibility, the Protestant reading of history was equally shaped by dogma. At the heart of this confessional debate—​which is fundamentally about classical reception—​lies a question that remains unsettled to this day: the vexed question of the elusive identity of the Essenes. For a group of sedentary ascetics, the Essenes have proved surprisingly difficult to pin down. Scholarly controversies about their putative identification with the Qumran community that produced the Dead Sea Scrolls continue and strangely echo the early modern debate charted in this chapter.14 The Essenes were listed by the Jewish historian Josephus as one of the three main sects of the Second Temple Period.15 Their absence from the New Testament, unlike the rival Pharisees and Sadducees, sparked the Christian imagination. To complicate matters, early modern Christians debated not only the ‘real’ religious beliefs of the Essenes—​whether they were Jews, Christians, Christian monastics or even (eventually) ‘Judaizing pagan philosophers’—​they also disagreed on who should be counted among them.16 The Jewish philosopher Philo was not only a rare historical witness (alongside Josephus and Pliny the Elder) for the Essenes, he was also the sole source for the existence of another group of ascetics living near his hometown of Alexandria.17 The theory that these so-​called therapeutae were part of the Essene tradition has had defenders well into the twentieth century.18 This chapter will argue that the merger of

13

Thomas Aquinas, Liber contra impugnantes Dei cultum et religionem, trans. John Procter and Joseph Kenny [accessed 12 February 2019]. 14 This identification, made shortly after the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the late 1940s, has been under considerable strain: Matthew Black, The Essene Problem (London, 1961). For a restatement and refinement of the original theory, see: Joan E. Taylor, The Essenes, the Scrolls, and the Dead Sea (Oxford, 2015). 15 Josephus, Jewish War, 3.119; Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 18.11. 16 Johannes Joachim Langius, ‘Duae dissertationes historico-​criticae de Therapeutis et Essaeis’, in Dogma sanioris philosophiae primarium de immortalitate animae humanae (Hamburg, 1725), 99–​166. 17 The sources for the Essenes are usefully collected and excerpted in Géza Vermès and Martin Goodman, eds, The Essenes According to the Classical Sources (Sheffield, 1989). 18 The view that the therapeutae were off-​shoots of the Essenes was still advocated by as eminent a scholar as Géza Vermès: e.g. Géza Vermès, ‘Essenes and Therapeutae’, in Post-​ Biblical Jewish Studies (Leiden, 1975), 30–​36; and the discussion in Appendix A of Emil Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, 175 BC-​A D 135, eds. Géza Vermès, Fergus Millar, and Matthew Black, rev. ed., 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1979), 2:591–​7.

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these two Jewish sects was—​ironically enough—​the product of early modern Christian sectarianism. In that sense, the Essenes are more than Lightfoot’s ‘great enigma of Hebrew history’ but one of Christian history as well. While Catholics also had other arguments up their sleeve, the confessional controversies about the apostolicity of monasticism thus significantly tracked the debate about the Essenes and therapeutae, as part of the wider rediscovery and reception of Philo’s writings. Philo’s account of the therapeutae, in his De vita contemplativa, existed in a strange and, at times, strained relationship with the religious identity of its author. The Essenes, too, operated within an unusually charged atmosphere, like a particle in a shifting magnetic field. Although they existed at the intersection of Christianity, Judaism and the classical world, the Essenes in the early modern mind were never liminal figures, nor were they a Jewish-​Christian hybrid. They were either radically Christian—​Christ’s closest disciples after the apostles—​or radically not. Early modern Christians were discussing ideas fundamental to their confessional identities amidst the attracting or repelling impulses of their anti-​ Jewish biases. Scholars have long emphasized the destabilizing impact of historicizing the early Church that followed the recognition of, for instance, the Last Supper as a Passover Seder, but they have traditionally associated this historical turn with the early Enlightenment. In a pivotal essay, Dmitri Levitin has deconstructed this neat narrative, which had its origins with the Enlightenment philosophes themselves. Levitin shows that the transformation from historia sacra to history of (comparative) religion began much earlier and that the process ‘to replace philosophy with history as the handmaiden to theology’ was generally propelled by orthodox, confessional motives, rather than heterodox ones.19 The lynchpin in this revised chronology was the Huguenot scholar Joseph Scaliger, who in his Opus de emendatione temporum (1583, 2nd ed. 1598) repeatedly showed how ignorant the Fathers had been of the earliest history of their Church.20 Scaliger argued that Philo and his near-​contemporary

19 20

Dmitri Levitin, ‘From Sacred History to the History of Religion: Paganism, Judaism, and Christianity in European Historiography from Reformation to “Enlightenment” ’, The Historical Journal, 55/​4 (2012), 1160. The margins of Isaac Casaubon’s copies of the works of his friend Joseph Scaliger offer striking visual testimony of this. They abound with references of the ‘errores Eusebii’ variety: e.g. Joseph Scaliger, Opus novum de emendatione temporum in octo libros tributum (Paris, 1583), 251 (London, British Library, 582.l.9); Joseph Scaliger, Elenchus trihaeresii Nicolai Serarii (Franeker, 1605), 127 (bl, C.79.a.4).

282 Machielsen Josephus deserved greater credence, as eye witnesses to the age of the apostles.21 This chapter takes these insights one step further and applies them to the debate over the origins of monasticism and the roles that Philo, the Essenes, and the therapeutae play in them. It argues that the turn towards history—​at least where this debate is concerned—​was initiated not by Protestants but by Catholic scholars, and that the historiography of early monasticism has a surprisingly clear and (less surprisingly) Catholic starting point. Yet the fortunes of Christian readings of either or both Jewish sects fluctuated considerably over time, with the ascetic therapeutae also finding a welcome home in late-​ seventeenth-​century England. What follows, then, is not a straightforward history of Protestant scepticism triumphing over Catholic credulity. Vituperate confessional debates during the sixteenth century, culminating with Jesuit attacks on the second edition of Scaliger’s Opus de emendatione temporum (1598), gave way to intra-​confessional conflicts during the seventeenth century, followed in the eighteenth century by their appropriation by religious radicals for attacks on orthodoxy, rather than in its defence. Throughout, the central focus of this chapter will remain on how Christians of all stripes engaged with the Essenes and therapeutae: the ways they offered new readings, put forth new arguments, and revived old ones. For these purposes, with all due respect to Ranke’s famous injunction, it is not helpful—​ indeed, it is immaterial—​to decide what the therapeutae (and the Essenes) ‘really’ were. Our judgement of the rightness or wrongness of particular arguments would undermine the validity of our present endeavour because it ignores the fact that all judgements, including our own, are historically constituted. At the same time, this study will demonstrate the contingency of the debate surrounding the ‘real’ identity of the therapeutae in particular, which caused them at particular moments in time to be identified in terms of something other than themselves, whether as Essenes or as Christians. Charting this debate will reveal its underlying structures, and while these proved difficult to dislodge and will, at times, give this study a real sense of déjà-​vu, their origins were not inevitable. This historicizing realization that these readings were the opposite of inescapable, based partly on Christian sectarian impulses, partly on accidental (mis-​)readings of ancient texts, does not challenge the arguments put forth for identifying the therapeutae as Christians or Essenes but it does indirectly dispute the need for any alternate identity. 21

The seminal work here, foundational for the modern history of early modern scholarship, is Anthony Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 2 vols (Oxford, 1983–​1993).

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283

Therapeutae, Essenes, and the Origins of Monasticism in Patristic Scholarship

What makes a monk a monk? For Luther, as we already noted, it was the nature and contents of their vows which defined the essence of monasticism and which transformed convents into ‘brothels of Satan’.22 Luther’s rejection of vows transformed the issue into one of theology, rooted in the Reformer’s understanding of sola fide. Perpetual vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience went beyond what Christ had demanded. Worse, as only God could provide the strength needed to realize them, making such a vow ‘blasphemes and despises God.’23 Catholics understandably foregrounded a different aspect of monasticism which effectively privileged history over theology: community life. Accordingly, they fell back on the shared lives of poverty, chastity, and obedience led by Christ and the apostles, imperfect though their austerities may have been by the standards of later monasticism.24 As we shall see, Robert Bellarmine’s final line of defence, his last proof for the apostolicity of monasticism, were the apostles themselves, as described in the Book of Acts.25 What defined monasticism thus inevitably dictates its origins and locates its origins closer to or further away from the time of the apostles. The emphasis on a monastic rule, or a collection of precepts, caused Pierre Viret, Calvin’s colleague in Geneva, to date its foundation to the followers of St Benedict (c.480–​ c.547) ‘who were the first who began to create sects.’26 This definitional problem partly accounts for the general chronological haze which surrounds the opening chapters of even modern histories of early monasticism. These generally start in early fourth-​century Egypt but note that by this time the monachos or monk had already become a recognized fixture of the Egyptian countryside.27 Athanasius’s Life of St Antony provided a convenient literary starting point 22 23

Luther, ‘The Judgment of Martin Luther on Monastic Vows’, 260. Martin Luther, ‘An Answer to Several Questions on Monastic Vows’, in Luther’s Works: The Christian in Society, ed. Robert C. Schultz, vol. 46 (Philadelphia, 1967), 147. 24 See, in particular, the description of the apostles living together and having things in common in Acts 2:42–​7. The observation that Jesus meant to send his disciples into the world, rather than out of it, is the starting point of G.R. Evans, The I.B. Tauris History of Monasticism: The Western Tradition (London, 2016), 1–​3. 25 Roberto Bellarmino, Disputationes … de controversiis christianae fidei, adversus huius temporis haereticos, 2nd edn (Ingolstadt, 1588), vol. 1/​2 , col. 438 (controversia v, bk. 2, chap. 5). 26 Viret, De La Vraye Et Fausse Religion, 545: ‘qui sont des plus anciens qui ont commencé à faire sectes.’ 27 See the opening reference of Marilyn Dunn, The Emergence of Monasticism: From the Desert Fathers to the Early Middle Ages (Malden, MA, 2000), 1–​2. James E. Goehring, ‘The Origins of Monasticism’, in Ascetics, Society, and the Desert: Studies in Early Egyptian

284 Machielsen for such histories of monasticism, also because it spawned a genre of lives of ascetic pioneers, such as Palladius’s Lausiac History. Athanasius described how Antony was the first to move to the desert, which ‘was colonized by monks’ under his leadership.28 Jerome pushed the story slightly further back with his Life of Paulus the First Hermit (or Paul of Thebes), an older contemporary, who lived in the Egyptian desert for an even more implausibly long period of time.29 Digging beyond these ostensibly clear ‘firsts’, however, the chronological blurriness re-​emerges. Reading either Vita shows clear predecessors. St Antony, for instance, entrusted his sister to a group of ‘faithful virgins’ before embarking on his life of asceticism.30 Other testimony provided by the Fathers and embraced by early modern Catholics suggested much earlier dates. Elsewhere, Jerome described John the Baptist as ‘the prince of monks’, an honour also bestowed on him by Chrysostom.31 Jerome was reluctant to trace monasticism back to Elijah in the Old Testament but others, notably Cassian and Sozomen, were not.32 The chronological muddle, with its tension between antiquity and novelty, is perhaps best illustrated by Jerome’s famous letter on virginity to Paula’s daughter Eustochium. There, Jerome introduces the figures of Paul, Antony, and John the Baptist as examples of one type of monasticism—​that of the anchorites who live in the desert by themselves—​but the relationship between them was exceedingly complicated to the point of being non-​ sensical: ‘Paul introduced this way of life; Antony made it famous, and—​to go farther back still—​John the Baptist set the first example of it.’33 In his Life of Paulus the First Hermit, Jerome similarly considered Elijah to be ‘more than a monk’ while John ‘began to prophesy before his birth.’34 Protestants, as we shall explore further below, came to realize that the Church Fathers were unreliable witnesses for the early history of the Church. What they did not recognize (although I will argue that Joseph Scaliger came Monasticism (Harrisburg, PA, 1999), 13, similarly begins by rejecting neat origin myths that start with St Antony. 28 Athanasius, Life of St. Antony, 3.14. 29 According to Jerome, Paul was 113 years old and had been living off a divinely-​delivered half loaf of bread for sixty years when Antony sought him out: Jerome, Life of Paulus, 7.10. 30 Athanasius, Life of St. Antony, 1. On this point, see Goehring, ‘The Origins of Monasticism’, 13–​35. 31 The claim was more often attributed to Chrysostom: e.g. Petrus Sutor, De vita Cartusiana libri duo (Cologne, 1609), 245, though I have not been able to locate the passage in the Church Father’s writings. 32 Jerome, The Life of Paulus, 1; John Cassian, The Monastic Institutes, i.1; Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History, i.12. 33 Jerome, Letters, 22.36. 34 Jerome, Life of Paulus, 1.

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close) was that the subject of the apostolicity of monasticism also did not really concern the Fathers much. This was partly because they were still working out its precise contours, but it also reflects their perception, rightly or wrongly, of asceticism as a timeless and valid part of Christian practice. At a time when the monastic figure was replacing the martyr as the exemplar of Christian sanctity pur sang, they were debating what monasticism should look like: what made a monk a monk.35 Jerome, for instance, in his letter to Eustochium, denounced the development of a third ‘very inferior and little regarded’ type who lived together in groups of twos and threes that ‘do exactly as they choose.’36 In other words, this process of codification—​defined, of course, by the development of monastic rules—​obscures the fact that monasticism was at the same time both new (in its adoption of rules) and old (in its embrace of asceticism), which makes later attempts to press the Fathers into service as historical witnesses largely moot. The Christian appropriation of the therapeutae as monastics might be held up against this argument. Contrary to expectations, the Essenes and the therapeutae traversed the patristic period virtually in parallel, with only two minor exceptions, which as we shall see, cannot really be counted as such but would prove significant later. That their merger would have to wait until the sixteenth century may seem surprising given that one of the principal arguments later advanced in favour of the identification of the therapeutae as Essenes was the opening line of Philo’s De vita contemplativa, which introduced both sects as representatives of two distinct and idealized modes of living: I have discussed the Essenes [Ἐσσαίων πέρι διαλεχθείς], who persistently pursued the active life and excelled in all or, to put it more moderately, in most of its departments. I will now proceed at once in accordance with the sequence required by the subject to say what is needed about those who embraced the life of contemplation.37 These opening lines can be straightforwardly read as representing the Essenes, who were well-​known for labouring on the land and practising crafts, as the representatives of the ‘active’ or practical life.38 Philo’s incipit likely alluded to 35

Pak-​Wah Lai, ‘The Monk as Christian Saint and Exemplar in St John Chrysostom’s Writings’, Studies in Church History, 47 (2011), 19–​28. 36 Jerome, Letters, 22.34. 37 Philo, The Contemplative Life, 1. I have used the Loeb edition when no further bibliographical details are provided. 38 E.g. Philo, Every Good Man is Free, 76.

286 Machielsen a lost preliminary treatise on the Essenes—​not his youthful Every Good Man is Free which also discussed the group.39 The De vita contemplativa then introduced the therapeutae as representing the opposite ideal, not a life of communal labour but one of mostly solitary contemplation. Philo’s treatise on this community includes an etymology of their name—​they were therapeutae, either because they were healers of souls or because they were worshippers—​ but it never again mentions the Essenes by name after the opening line.40 For a number of contextual reasons a second reading of this passage, associated in particular with Scaliger and examined later, would emerge during the early modern period, which reads this line as referring to different types of Essenes: active or practical ones versus passive, theoretical, or contemplative ones—​that is, the therapeutae, ‘those who embraced the life of contemplation.’ There is no good evidence that any of the Church Fathers had arrived at this reading or identification. Eusebius, who would Christianize the therapeutae in his Ecclesiastical History, explicitly identified the Essenes as Jewish in his Praeparatio Evangelica, drawing on Philo’s Every Good Man is Free.41 The principal sort-​of-​but-​not-​really exception was Epiphanius of Salamis (c.315–​ 403), whose potted description of the therapeutae as Christians was drawn from Eusebius’s account which we shall examine next. In the Panarion or The Refutation of All Heresies, Epiphanius introduced the therapeutae as Jessaeans, and the De vita contemplativa as On the Jessaeans.42 The Bishop of Salamis claimed that these early Christians were called thus either for Jesse or Jesus. The most probable foundation for this elaborate fantasy is the opening words of Philo’s treatise: Ἐσσαίων πέρι, which Epiphanius then spun into Jessaeans.43 39

For the very credible thesis that this work has been lost, see Bacchisio Motzo, ‘Un’opera perduta di Filone’, Atti della R. Accademia delle Scienze di Torino 46 (1911), 860–​80, and the passing reference in Joan E. Taylor and Philip R. Davies, ‘The So-​Called Therapeutae of “De vita contemplativa”: Identity and Character’, The Harvard Theological Review 91 (1998), 9. See also the argument developed by Conybeare that the De vita contemplativa was part of Philo’s Apology for the Jews against Apion, which the philosopher tried to read aloud to the Emperor Caligula: Philo, About the Contemplative Life: Or the Fourth Book of the Treatise Concerning Virtues, ed. Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare (Oxford, 1895), 283–​4. 40 Philo, The Contemplative Life, 2. 41 Eusebius, Praeparatio evangelica, 8.xi-​x ii. 42 Epiphanius, Panarion, trans. Frank Williams, 2nd ed. (Leiden, 2009), 126 (29.4.9–​5.1). 43 Aline Pourkier, L’Hérésiologie chez Epiphane de Salamine (Paris, 1992), 441, suggests that Epiphanius was working from memory and had been struck by the opening lines of Philo’s treatise when reading it. This solution, which strikes me as persuasive, is alluded to in passing in David T. Runia, Philo in Early Christian Literature: A Survey (Assen, 1993), 229, who concludes that ‘the wily bishop keeps us guessing.’

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Although this solution suggests some familiarity on the part of Epiphanius with Philo’s De vita contemplativa independent of Eusebius, the subsequent discussion reveals no further engagement with that treatise. Elsewhere in the Panarion, the bishop treated the Essenes as a sect of Samaritans, much to the astonishment of even early modern Catholic editors.44 Although it may have drawn on a version of the Essene name then, Epiphanius’s etymological fantasy still applied only to the therapeutae. The same sort of approach must be taken for the second exception: a rather barbarous and partial (or at least now fragmentary) Latin translation of the De vita contemplativa that Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare has plausibly dated to the fourth century ce.45 The elaborate title of the manuscript, De statu Essaeorum, id est Monachorum, qui temporibus Agripp[a]‌e Regis Monasteria sibi fecerunt (On the State of the Essenes, That Is, of the Monks Who in the Times of King [Herod] Agrippa Built Monasteries for Themselves) seems to be the product of still more elaborate embellishment. The opening line itself was also significantly garbled: translating a past Greek participle (διαλεχθείς) as a Latin future one (disputurus) effectively transformed a conclusion (‘I have discussed the Essenes’) into an introductory promise.46 Yet, as with Epiphanius, it is worth noting that even in the Latin manuscript, the therapeutae as Essenes travelled on a separate path, divorced from Philo’s descriptions of the Essenes, let alone those written by others.47 While these elaborations by Epiphanius and the anonymous Latin translator rendered the therapeutae Essenes in name only, they would prove significant in the sixteenth century. Given their separate travels, the therapeutae thus received their Christian treatment considerably earlier than their Essene counterparts. In his Ecclesiastical History, Eusebius (263–​339) went to great lengths to identify this group of ascetics as members of the Christian church established at Alexandria by the Apostle Mark. In his De vita contemplativa, Philo described a group of ascetics, male and female, that could be found ‘in many places in the inhabited world’ but ‘especially round Alexandria’, with ‘the best’ travelling to a low-​lying

44 Epiphanius, Panarion, 10.1.1–​2; Epiphanius, Sancti Patris Nostri Epiphanii Constantiae, sive Salaminis in Cypro … opera omnia, ed. Denis Petau, 2 vols (Paris, 1622), 2:22–​3. Petau’s notes are paginated separately. 45 Philo, About the Contemplative Life, ed. Conybeare, 144–​45. The surviving copies cut off mid-​way through Philo, The Contemplative Life, 42. Conybeare describes the Latin as ‘too barbarous’ for Jerome. See also the passing reference in Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, 175 BC–​A D 135, 2:596. 46 See the full text in Philo, About the Contemplative Life, ed. Conybeare, 146. 47 The Old Latin version was paired only with the Quaestiones et Solutiones in Genesin.

288 Machielsen hill above Lake Mareotis.48 There, they lived together but in separate houses, each of which possessed a sanctuary, cell, or closet [μοναστήριον; monastērion], where they spent most of their waking hours engaged in solitary study, prayers, and devotions (‘… all alone in their cell, without speaking, not daring to go out, not even looking out of their windows,’ as the Huguenot pastor Jacques Basnage later put it).49 They would fast for extended periods of time but every seven days they would come together for a general (though gender-​segregated) assembly and a collective meal.50 On special occasions, likely the feast of Pentecost, they also joined together for the singing of hymns.51 Although he was not the first Christian to value Philo’s writings, Eusebius’s interpretatio christiana was breaking new ground.52 Accordingly, he leavened his quotations from Philo with pre-​emptory denunciations of the obstinacy of would-​be sceptics. He also conveniently omitted passages, such as their obedience to the laws of Moses, that more clearly identified the therapeutae as Hellenistic Jews.53 Crucially, however, he did not identify Philo as a Christian but implied that the ‘extraordinarily philosophic’ nature of the asceticism appealed to the Platonic philosopher.54 Philo, thus, constituted a valuable bridge between Alexandrian Judaism and Christianity. His value for Christians would remain that of an outsider looking in, a role which could be amplified or belittled according to individual or confessional needs.55 Jerome, clearly inspired by Eusebius’s interpretation, would introduce Philo’s testimony twice in his De viris illustribus. In his portrait of Mark, he implied that Philo, the ‘most 48 Philo, The Contemplative Life, 21–​22. 49 Jacques Basnage de Beauval, Histoire des Juifs, depuis Jesus-​Christ jusqu’à présent, 9 vols (The Hague, 1716), 2:559: ‘seul à seul dans leur Cellule, sans parler, sans ôser sortir, ni même regarder par les Fenêtres.’ Cf. Philo, The Contemplative Life, 25. Loeb renders μοναστήριον as ‘closet’ which given its intended function (including study) does not seem overwhelmingly plausible, amusing though the idea of ascetics dwelling in closets might be. 50 Philo, The Contemplative Life, 30, 34, 37. 51 Philo, The Contemplative Life, esp. 84. For the identification of this feast with Pentecost, see: Philo, About the Contemplative Life, ed. Conybeare, 306–​7. 52 For the Alexandrian Christians who preserved Philo to which Eusebius was heir, see David T. Runia, ‘Philo and the Early Christian Fathers’, in The Cambridge Companion to Philo, ed. Adam Kamesar (Cambridge, 2009), 210–​30. 53 Philo, The Contemplative Life, 64. 54 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, ii.xvi.2. 55 For a discussion of Philo christianus, see David T. Runia, ‘Philo and the Early Christian Fathers’, in The Cambridge Companion to Philo, ed. Kamesar, 210–​30. But note the important corrective in Sabrina Inowlocki, ‘Eusebius of Caesarea’s Interpretatio Christiana of Philo’s De Vita Contemplativa’, Harvard Theological Review, 97 (2004), 307, 320. The tradition had limited currency in the early modern period, which will be discussed at the appropriate moment.

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learned of the Jews’, had been tricked by the Judaizing practices of the early Christian practices into writing his De vita contemplativa ‘as something creditable to his [own] nation.’56 This account also earned Philo his own entry which played up his identity as a philosopher. Jerome reported ‘a proverb among the Greeks’ that ‘either Plato philonized or Philo platonized … so great is the similarity of ideas and language.’57 At the same time, Jerome’s chosen heading unequivocally provided Philo with the cognomen Judaeus—​Philo the Jew—​which would be used well into the modern period.58 Early modern Christians, both Catholics and Protestants, have read Eusebius as unequivocally representing Philo’s therapeutae as the first Christian monastics (even when, as Scaliger did, they set out to refute that reading), and their modern historians have followed suit. Perhaps, such a reading was inevitable. Their ascetism, the reference to the monastērion, and their presence in Egypt, the traditional birthplace of Christian monasticism, excited the imagination of later Christians, including Rufinus who in his Latin translation of the Ecclesiastical History added that Philo’s ascetics were ‘those … who are now in the churches and monastic houses.’59 By the sixth century, a forger masquerading as Dionysius the Areopagite, an early follower of the Apostle Paul mentioned in Acts of the Apostles, penned letters addressed to a monk or therapeutēs.60 Yet, as Sabrina Inowlocki has shown, Eusebius himself never presents them as anything other than Mark’s early followers.61 In Eusebius’s theology, asceticism was so closely tied to Christianity that it was meant to be practised by all Christians, not by the select monastic few.62 While Inowlocki argues that Jerome, writing a generation after Eusebius, was the first to put forth this monastic reading, I would suggest that even then hesitation still abounded. While Jerome was clearly struck by the reference to ‘monasteries’, his interpretation was surprisingly tentative. He only noted that ‘the church of those that believed in Christ at first, was such as now the monks 56 Jerome, De viris illustribus, 8 (Mark). 57 Jerome, De viris illustribus, 11 (Philo the Jew). 58 On the origins of this cognomen, which apparently began circulating slightly before Jerome, see David T. Runia, ‘Philonic Nomenclature’, in Philo and the Church Fathers: A Collection of Papers (Leiden, 1995), 43–​5. 59 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, trans. Rufinus of Aquileia, ii.xvii.2 (Rufinus of Aquileia, History of the Church, trans. Philip R. Amidon (Washington, DC, 2016), 79). 60 See the four letters to the ‘monk’ Gaius: Pseudo-​Dionysius, Pseudo-​Dionysius: The Complete Works, trans. Colm Luibhéid (New York, 1987), 263–​65. 61 Inowlocki, ‘Eusebius of Caesarea’s Interpretatio Christiana of Philo’s De Vita Contemplativa’, 305–​28. 62 Goehring, ‘The Origins of Monasticism’, 15.

290 Machielsen desire to imitate’, a parallel he then backed up, not with a quotation from the De vita contemplativa but with a reference to Acts.63 He never referred to the therapeutae in his many other discussions of monasticism. In his famous letter in praise of virginity to Eustochium, Jerome did once, fleetingly, refer to the Essenes, discussed by ‘Philo, Plato’s imitator,’ and ‘Josephus, the Greek Livy.’64 The passage, a curious and corrupted interjection restored by Erasmus, seems intended to strip both the authors and the Essenes of their Jewishness but does not explicitly identify any of them as Christian.65 As for the therapeutae as monastics, it is difficult to see a clear consensus emerge. Cassian and Epiphanius offered passing endorsements, without apparent first-​hand knowledge of Philo. Moreover, neither attached a great deal of importance to this identification. Cassian referred to the ‘monks’ who followed the ‘holy evangelist Mark … the first patriarch of the city of Alexandria’, sending his readers to Eusebius for more information. Yet, he did so, only in support of a specific point (the singing of psalms).66 Equally transient was Epiphanius’s mention of Philo’s visit to the Christians who ‘entertained’ him ‘at their monasteries’ during ‘Passover’. While Philo may well have met the therapeutae, this story is evidently little more than an embellishment of the Eusebian account.67 By contrast, Sozomen in his Ecclesiastical History was hesitant to adopt his illustrious predecessor’s interpretatio christiana. He identified the therapeutae discussed by ‘Philo the Pythagorean’ (sic) as ‘the most virtuous of the Hebrews’ whose dwellings, regimen, and customs were similar ‘to those we now meet with among the monks of Egypt.’ He admitted that these could be ‘Jews who had embraced Christianity and yet retained the customs of their nation.’ Yet Sozomen also aired the theory that monasticism had emerged during periods of intense Roman persecution—​when many fled into the deserts ‘and they became used to this kind of living.’ He appeared relieved to reach the safe dry land created by the ascetics Antony and Paul.68 This survey of patristic reception suggests that we should approach the thera­peutae and Essenes as if they featured on the letter chart on an optician’s office wall. Our perception of them is refracted through several lenses: those of 63 Jerome, De viris illustribus, 11 (Philo the Jew). Emphasis added. 64 Jerome, Letters, 25.35: ‘A similar description is given of the Essenes by Philo, Plato’s imitator; also by Josephus, the Greek Livy, in his narrative of the Jewish captivity.’ The throw-​ away line follows an idealized description of monastic communal life. 65 Erasmus, The Edition of Jerome, trans. James F. Brady and John C. Olin, Collected Works of Erasmus: Patristic Scholarship, vol. 61 (Toronto, 1992), 191. 66 Cassian, The Monastic Institutes, 2.5. 67 Epiphanius, Panarion, 29.5.1–​3. 68 Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History, i.12–​13.

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the Fathers, those of Protestants and Catholics, and our own. When assessing their early modern reception, it is vital to take heed of all of three. When we do this, four tentative conclusions present themselves. First of all, Eusebius’s factual silence on monasticism makes the fact that he was later read as representing the therapeutae as monks still more salient for our understanding of early modern confessional polemics. Secondly, such acts of reading and misreading, translation and mistranslation were cumulative because even when original sources, such as the De vita contemplativa, were consulted, their reading was structured by subsequent layers of interpretation. Seeing reception both as a product of the present and as the product of layers of past interpretative accretions leads to a third point: we should not assume that in the early modern debate one side (the Protestants) had historical truth on their side. In fact, as we shall see, what we might now regard as the most innovative and least confessionalized identification of the therapeutae was set out by a seventeenth-​ century Catholic scholar, though one with substantial Protestant contacts, while the Christian therapeutae belatedly won Protestant adherents as well. Fourthly, if the reading of the early Fathers set out above—​as unconcerned with the apostolicity of monasticism—​is correct, then this further helps to account for the slippery nature of the source material and the vexed nature of the debate that followed. That said, while we cannot trace the roots of monasticism for the reasons above, we can pinpoint the earliest discussions of its origins in the early modern period with surprising precision. 3

A Gradual Union: The Therapeutae and Essenes Become One, 1513–​c.1590

While other aspects of monastic life, such as the multiplication of different religious orders, had already been defended by Thomas Aquinas, its (possibly apostolic) origins had not attracted much, if any, attention during the Middle Ages.69 The first attempt to write a general history of monasticism and its supposed apostolic origins only emerged in the early sixteenth century. To the extent that any discussion before this time took place it focussed on Carmelite origin myths, as a dispute over precedence among religious orders. The Order of the Blessed Virgin Mary of Mount Carmel had emerged in the Holy Land and arrived in the medieval West following the fall of the Crusader kingdoms. 69

Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologiae of St Thomas Aquinas, trans. by Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 2nd edn (London, 1920), secunda secundae partis, quaestio 188. [accessed 27 October 2020].

292 Machielsen Dominicans in particular poured scorn on the claims of Carmelite upstarts to be descended from the prophet Elijah, and they would soon be joined in their derision by erudite Jesuits.70 Therapeutae and Essenes would soon play an outsized role both within these intra-​Catholic squabbles and in general histories of monasticism. Yet this was a product of gradual rediscovery of ancient texts and a great deal of imagination, rather than the adoption of an already existing patristic or medieval narrative. For very different confessional reasons both Catholics and Protestants became committed to the union of the two Jewish sects. The history of the history of monasticism thus began on 10 April 1513, when the Sorbonne theologian Josse van Clichtove completed his De laude monasticae religionis opusculum during a stay at the famous Benedictine abbey of Cluny. It was dedicated to his erstwhile pupil, Geoffroy d’Amboise who at a young age had succeeded his aristocratic uncle as its abbot. Clichtove’s praise for his pupil’s embrace of ‘the rule and discipline of St Benedict, who is deservedly placed among the first authors and architects of monastic rigour’ again highlights the extent to which competition for antiquity among the religious orders complicated the Catholic narrative.71 Although never mentioned by name, Clichtove’s implicit target was Erasmus, who in his Enchiridion militis christiani (1503) had been critical of contemporary monasticism.72 As the work’s full title already made clear, Clichtove’s first proof of the ‘excellence and dignity of the monastic profession’ was the ‘antiquity of its institution.’73 This was breaking new ground, although as a good Catholic, Clichtove

70

Andrew Jotischky, The Carmelites and Antiquity: Mendicants and Their Pasts in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2002). 71 Josse Clichtove, De laude monasticae religionis opusculum unde ipsa ceperit exordium incrementum et stabilimentum dilucide declarans (Paris, 1513), sig. a2v: ‘sanctissimi patris Benedicti regulam ac disciplinam … qui inter primos monasterialis austeritatis authores et architectos merito collocatur.’ 72 The 1518 preface of the revised edition of the Enchridion can certainly be read as a reply to Clichtove. It addresses the origins of monasticism and includes a brief dismissive mention of the Essenes: Erasmus, The Handbook of the Christian Soldier: Enchiridion Militis Christiani, in Spiritualia, ed. John W. O’Malley, trans. Charles Fantazzi, Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 66 (Toronto, 1988), 20–​22. On Clichtove’s later attacks on Erasmus, see Erika Rummel, Erasmus and His Catholic Critics, 2 vols (Nieuwkoop, 1989), 2:73–​9. Rummel does not mention Clichtove’s earlier De laude monasticae religionis. For Clichtove as an opponent of Erasmus, see Jean-​Pierre Massaut, ‘Josse Clichtove of Nieuwpoort’, in Contemporaries of Erasmus, eds. Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher (Toronto, 1985), 317–​20. 73 Clichtove, De laude monasticae religionis opusculum, fol. 6r: ‘Eluscet autem ipsius monasticae religionis excellentia et dignitas primum ex antiquitate institutionis eius.’

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took steps to obscure this.74 While foreshadowed in the Old Testament, the humanist saw particular signs of the emergence of monasticism around the time of the New Testament, first of all by the Essenes ‘a peculiar sect among the Jews a little before the incarnation of Our Lord.’75 Although Clichtove, who based his description solely on Josephus, praised their poverty, chastity and devotion, he situated the Essenes as the first among other groups of non-​Christian ascetics, including Pythagoreans, Vestal Virgins and Druids, all of whom ‘demonstrated a certain shadow or likeness of monastic observation.’76 These provide the context for the origins of Christian monasticism: Chrysostom’s description of John the Baptist as the prince or first of monks, and the ‘norm, rule, and truth of monastic observation’ observed by Christ and the apostles.77 Only in the next chapter on the founders of religious orders did Clichtove report on the monastic traditions of the Alexandrian Church, founded by St Mark, and related by ‘Philo the Jew, a most learned man [vir dissertissimus] though not belonging to our religion.’78 Although the introduction of Philo appears inspired by Jerome’s De viris illustribus, the overall description of Mark’s supposed disciples—​that is, the therapeutae—​was based only on Eusebius.79 From there, the theologian takes us to the Fathers, and the various monastic founders (Benedict, Dominic, Francis, Bernard).80 Clichtove, then, was aware of the Essenes, whom he saw as Jewish, through Josephus. His access to and knowledge of Philo and the therapeutae were mediated entirely through Eusebius, possibly accessed through his translator Rufinus. Accordingly, Clichtove was not aware that Mark’s disciples might have been therapeutae or, for that matter, Essenes. The two sects, which would shortly be joined together, were discussed in separate chapters. A second humanist account of the origins of monasticism, completed on 5 December 1517 and published as Luther was penning his treatise on monastic 74

In his opening chapter, in addition to the Fathers, he referenced Marsilio Ficino’s De Christiana religione and Aquinas’s Liber contra impugnantes Dei cultum et religionem, neither of which discuss apostolic origins. 75 Clichtove, De laude monasticae religionis opusculum, fol. 7v: ‘peculiarem apud Iudaeos sectam paulo ante adventum domini nostri in carne.’ 76 Clichtove, De laude monasticae religionis opusculum, fol. 8r: ‘quandam religiosae observationis umbram et effigiem ostentabant.’ 77 Clichtove, De laude monasticae religionis opusculum, fols 8v–​9r: ‘observatam ab apostolis monasticae observationis normam, regulam et veritatem.’ 78 Clichtove, De laude monasticae religionis opusculum, fol. 9v: ‘Philo Iudaeus, vir disertissimus licet a nostra religione alienus.’ 79 The discussion bracketed by references to Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History at the beginning and end: Clichtove, De laude monasticae religionis opusculum, fol. 10r-​v. 80 Clichtove, De laude monasticae religionis opusculum, fol. 10v.

294 Machielsen vows, drew on different sources and came to different conclusions.81 In fact, it was likely the first text to present the Essenes as Christian monastics. Polydore Vergil’s much expanded De rerum inventoribus (On the Inventors/​Discoverers of Things, 1521) noted that the origins of monasticism were already much debated in Jerome’s time. Jerome’s mental acrobatics, surveyed above, giving each of the purported founders—​Elijah, John, Antony and Paul—​their due, gave Polydore the excuse to put forth his own theory: Truly I believe (when a matter is ambiguous everyone is free to conjecture) that the institution of the monastic life flowed from the Essaeans or Essenes, as Pliny [the Elder] calls them, whose sect was exceedingly famous among the Jews, to later generations, because in almost every respect they conducted their lives in the way the monks amongst us are accustomed to lead theirs according to the prescripts of the law.82 Polydore’s principal source for the Essenes was Philo, who had discussed them in his youthful Every Good Man is Free. Yet, like Clichtove’s, Polydore’s knowledge of Philo was mediated by Eusebius—​‘Hactenus Philo, apud Eusebium’—​, who, as we saw, had discussed them in his Praeparatio evangelica.83 Polydore used Philo’s idyllic description of the Essenes to take a swipe against the moral standards of contemporary monasticism.84 Neither the therapeutae nor Eusebius’s interpretatio christiana featured in Polydore’s discussion. At the start of the early sixteenth century, then, building blocks were still only being assembled and a coherent narrative of the origins of early monasticism had yet to form, with the Essenes and therapeutae continuing their travels on separate paths. As none of the Fathers had conflated them (with the sort-​of-​but-​ not-​really exception of Epiphanius), their merger had to await the rediscovery and wider dissemination of Philo’s original writings, which remained not only in manuscript but also, for the most part, in Greek. A six-​volume translation of 81

Polydore Vergil, De rerum inventoribus libri octo (Basle, 1525), 105. The first edition was published by Froben in 1521. 82 Vergil, De rerum inventoribus libri octo, 207: ‘Ego vero quando in re ambigua unicuique liberum est coniectare, crediderim institutum monasticae vitae ab Essaeis sive Essenis ita appellat Plinius, quorum secta apud Iudaeos admodum celebris habita est, ad posteros manasse, quoniam illi fere per omnia, eam ducebant vitam, quam inter nos monachi ex praescripto legis agere solent.’ 83 Vergil, De rerum inventoribus libri octo, 208. 84 On Polydore Vergil’s criticism of the Church of his day, see Jonathan Arnold, ‘Polydore Vergil and Ecclesiastical Historiography in His De Inventoribus Rerum IV–​V III’, Studies in Church History, 49 (2013), 144–​55.

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Philo by Lilio Tifernate for Pope Sixtus iv in the 1470s–​80s remained in manuscript, apparently unread.85 Tifernate’s student Raffaello Maffei Volterrano, who had obtained a copy, was the only Italian Renaissance humanist whose opinion of Philo was later deemed worthy by printers to be listed alongside the Fathers.86 The English Catholic John Christopherson had found Philo’s works ‘almost lurking in the shadows’ in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice.87 The first editors and translators of Philo in print were consequently sceptical as to his identity. The Italian Dominican Agosto Giustiniani who published an old Latin manuscript translation of the Centum et duae quaestiones on Genesis (1520) was not completely sure whether its author was the Philo who had been friends with Peter mentioned by Jerome or ‘someone else’ but regardless he was ‘a man pleasing to God and blessed with many spiritual gifts [charismatibus] by the Holy Spirit.’88 In his 1526 Latin translation of Philo’s De mundo, Guillaume Budé was ‘not at all persuaded’ it was written by the Alexandrian Jew on account of its debts to Greek philosophy, notwithstanding Philo’s widely reported Platonism.89 It was not just Jews, then, who, as Joanna Weinberg has demonstrated in two important chapters, became re-​acquainted with Philo’s thought in the sixteenth century, but the Christians who had preserved it as well.90 A seminal moment, both in the early modern reception of Philo and the merger of the therapeutae and the Essenes came with the first edition of 85

Charles L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome (Bloomington, IN, 1998), 213–​14. On Philo in the Quattrocento, see also Charles L. Stinger, Humanism and the Church Fathers: Ambrogio Traversari, 1386–​1439 and Christian Antiquity in the Italian Renaissance (Albany, NY, 1977), 144–​5. 86 Philo, Philonis Iudaei, scriptoris eloquentissimi, ac philosophi summi, lucubrationes omnes quotquot haberi potuerunt, trans. Sigismund Gelenius (Lyon, 1555), sig. *4r. 87 Philo, Philonis Iudaei scriptoris eloquentissimi gravissimique libri quattuor, iam primum de graeco in latinum conversu: de mundi fabricatione; de decem praeceptis; de magistratu, seu principe deligendo; de officio iudicis, trans. John Christopherson (Antwerp, 1555), sig. a3v: ‘quasi in tenebris iacuerant.’ 88 Philo, Philonis Iudaei centum et duae quaestiones, et totidem responsiones morales super Genesim, ed. Agosto Giustiniani (Paris, 1520), sig. a1v: ‘quivis alius, virum fuisse deo gratum multisque charismatibus a spiritu sancto donatum.’ 89 Aristotle and Philo, Aristotelis philosophi nobilissimi de mundo libellus; Philonis Iudaei itidem de mundo libellus, trans. Guillaume Budé (Paris, 1526), fol. 2r: ‘nequaquam eum fuisse mihi persuadeo.’ 90 Joanna Weinberg, ‘The Quest for Philo in Sixteenth-​Century Jewish Historiography’, in Jewish History: Essays in Honour of Chimen Abramsky, eds. Ada Rapoport-​Albert and Steven J. Zipperstein (London, 1988), 163–​87; Joanna Weinberg, ‘Rabbi or Heretic: The Debate over Philo of Alexandria among Jews in Early Modern Europe’, in Philon d’Alexandrie dans l’Europe moderne: Réceptions d’un corpus judéo-​hellénistique, eds. Frédéric Gabriel and Smaranda Marculescu with Joanna Weinberg (Paris, [forthcoming]).

296 Machielsen Philo’s collected works in 1527, in a Latin edition by the young Basle humanist Johannes Sichardt.91 The title page confidently advertised the inclusion of the De vita contemplativa, printed for the first time, under the heading De Essaeis.92 Like other editions, this one was prefaced by Jerome’s life of Philo, which reported that Philo among other works had published one entitled De Iudaeis, which Sichardt amended in the margin to De Essaeis.93 Sichardt was not publishing fresh translations, however, but brought together existing Latin versions, including Budé’s recent translation of De mundo. For the De vita contemplativa he collated two manuscripts of the old Latin version, which we discussed above. Having likened in his preface his extended battles with the corrupted manuscripts to the Labours of Hercules, the bellicose humanist arrived at the contentious issue of the title of the De vita contemplativa. Sichardt recognized the title given by Eusebius—​that is, De vita contemplativa—​but he preferred to follow the consensus of his Latin manuscripts ‘and the beginning of the book itself, where it explicitly prefaces that it will speak on the Essenes.’94 Epiphanius’ testimony is not invoked, but Sichardt suggested a possible scribal corruption of Jerome’s reference to De Judaeis in order to advance his De Essaeis hypothesis. He likely recognized that the full title of the Latin version, involving monasteries and King Herod, was implausible. Nevertheless, while it did not make it onto the title page, it still appeared at the head of the text itself. Although he took the ‘Essenes’ to be Christian worshippers and dedicated the volume to the canons of the abbey church of Fulda, whose manuscript he had used, Sichardt’s position is not overtly Catholic.95 Indeed, writing in the 1520s his confessional affiliation was unclear—​and may even have been so to him as well. At the beginning of the decade he was forced to leave Freiburg for Basle because of supposed Lutheran sympathies, but Basle on account of suspected Catholic ones.96 Similar ambiguities surround the Czech humanist 91 Philo, Libri Antiquitatum; Quaestionum et solutionum in Genesin; De essaeis; De nominibus Hebraicis; De mundo, ed. Johannes Sichardt (Basle, 1527). As the title suggests, this was not quite an Opera omnia. The De mundo translation included was by Budé. 92 Conybeare notes that part of the text had already appeared as part of the 1520 edition of the Quaestiones et solutiones. A lost manuscript page, containing the end of that treatise and the beginning of the De vita contemplativa, had caused Agosto Giustiniani to run both texts together as one: Philo, About the Contemplative Life, ed. Conybeare, 142. 93 Philo, Libri Antiquitatum [etc.], ed. Sichardt, sig. a1v: ‘forte legendum est Essaeis.’ 94 Philo, Libri Antiquitatum [etc.], ed. Sichardt, sig. a2v: ‘ipse libri ingressus, quo se de Essaeis scripturum ex confesso praefatur.’ Emphasis added. 95 Philo, Libri Antiquitatum [etc.], ed. Sichardt, sig. a1r-​v. 96 Guido Kisch, Johannes Sichardus als Basler Rechtshistoriker (Basle, 1952), 8–​9. His conversion to law could be a response to confessionalisation. He ended his days as professor primarius of law at the Lutheran University of Tübingen.

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Sigismund Gelenius who completed a Latin translation of Philo’s Opera omnia shortly before his death. Gelenius, that last survivor of the age of Erasmus, wisely kept his views of Philo, whose Judaism he emphasized, to a minimum.97 About the therapeutae or Essenes he said nothing at all. He did, however, restore the De vita contemplativa title and rendered the work’s opening lines in an ambiguous way that could support both readings.98 The French Catholic humanist Adrien Turnèbe in the first Greek Opera omnia edition was considerably more enthusiastic both of the Christian and Essene readings of the therapeutae, and indeed of Philo’s simultaneous ‘philosophising and theologising’ as well.99 Most of the prefatory material consisted of a lengthy excerpt of Eusebius’s interpretatio christiana.100 Headings in the index, such as ‘Essenes in Egypt’, ‘female Essenes and their customs’, and ‘their hymns for God’, all refer back to the De vita contemplativa.101 Even before Turnèbe, the confessional pressure on the apostolicity—​or not—​of monasticism was growing, as was the corpus of possible sources to be marshalled on either side. Jacobus Latomus, like Clichtove, a critic of both Erasmus and Luther, opened his Libellus … de votis atque institutis monasticis (1530) with a chapter insisting on the antiquity of the institution. The Leuven theologian added to Clichtove’s material (whom he does not cite) the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite, whose authenticity (already questioned by Quattrocento humanists) he defends.102 He also brings in the therapeutae in a way that suggests greater engagement than shown by Clichtove, as he refers to them by their Greek name.103 Latomus’s conclusion to his description 97 Philo, Philonis Iudaei, scriptoris eloquentissimi, ac philosophi summi, Lucubrationes omnes quotquot haberi potuerunt, trans. Sigismund Gelenius, 2 vols (Lyon, 1555), vol. 1, sig. *2v. Gelenius twice presented Philo as a follower of Moses and emphasized his limitations for Christians. 98 Philo, Lucubrationes, trans. Gelenius, 2:744: ‘Postquam de Essaeis disseruimus, qui vitam activam exercent omnibus … ordo postulat ut deinceps dicamus quae dicenda sunt de contemplationi deditis.’ 99 Philo, In libros Mosis de mundi opificio, historicos, de legibus; Eiusdem libri singulares, ed. Adrien Turnèbe (Paris, 1552), sig. α2v: ‘φιλοσοφωντε καἰ θεολογων.’ On this preface, see also John Lewis, Adrien Turnèbe, 1512–​1565: A Humanist Observed (Geneva, 1998), 168–​9. 100 Philo, In libros Mosis de mundi opificio, historicos, de legibus, ed. Turnèbe, sigs α4v–​α6r. 101 Philo, In libros Mosis de mundi opificio, historicos, de legibus, ed. Turnèbe, sig. B3r: ‘[Essaei] in AEgypto’; ‘Essaeae mulieres et earum ritus’; ‘hymni in deum’. 102 Jacobus Latomus, Libellus de fide et operibus et de votis atque institutis monasticis (Antwerp, 1530), sigs E5v–​E6v. On this fifteenth-​century debate, see John Monfasani, ‘Pseudo-​ Dionysius the Areopagite in Mid-​Quattrocento Rome’, in Supplementum Festivum: Studies in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, eds. James Hankins, John Monfasani, and Frederick Purnell (Binghamton, NY, 1987), 189–​220. 103 Latomus, Libellus de fide et operibus, sig. E7v.

298 Machielsen of the therapeutae—​‘So far, Philo the Jew, who lived during the time of the Apostles’—​shows why Catholics valued his testimony.104 Yet despite these protestations the theologian still seems to have accessed him only via Eusebius.105 The Essenes were absent from Latomus’s account, but they were growing in popularity. A strange consensus emerged on the Essene identity of the thera­ peutae, but for two confessionally inflected and hence conflicting reasons. The Essene label, first of all, served Protestants well because it allowed them to explain the therapeutae in terms of something else: they were not Christian monks but Jewish Essenes. This was a strategy of straightforward re-​labelling or re-​categorizing, rather than re-​interpretation. Although Scaliger later claimed ownership of it, the approach was already adopted by the Magdeburg Centuries (1559–​1574). The section on ‘the rites of those who lived a solitary life’ in its first volume, devoted to the first century ce, promised to discuss the Essenes elsewhere under another heading ‘on the sects of the Jewish people.’106 Conversely, the Centuries delayed their discussion of monasticism to the volume covering the fourth century, in which the Essenes—​quelle surprise—​do not feature.107 In his De origine et progressu monachatus (1588), Rodolphus Hospinianus similarly discussed the Essenes safely away from Christianity in his section on ‘On the origin and progress of monasticism among the Jews, Pagans, and Turks.’108

104 Latomus, Libellus de fide et operibus, sig. E8r: ‘Haec ex Philone Iudaeo, qui Apostolorum tempore vixit.’ 105 Or at least, Latomus cites nothing that cannot also be found in Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History. 106 All references to the Magdeburg Centuries are to the British Library copy, 699.m.1–​ 7: [Matthias Flacius et al.], Ecclesiastica historia, integram ecclesiae Christi ideam, quantum ad locum, propagationem, persecutionem, tranquillitatem, doctrinam, haereses, ceremonias, gubernationem, schismata, synodos, personas, miracula, martyria, religiones extra Ecclesiam, et statum Imperii politicum attinet, 13 vols (Basle, 1559–​74 [1564, 1562–​74]), vol. i (1564), bk. 1, col. 248: ‘Ritus eorum qui solitariam vitam egerunt’; ‘supra de sectis populi Judaici’. For the claim that Eusebius was discussing Essenes, see vol. i, bk. 2, col. 18; and vol. ii (1564), col. 124, which similarly insists on the absence of evidence of monasticism in the second century ce and elsewhere points to the continued existence of the Essenes (col. 250). See also the passing sceptical reference to monasticism in the third century in vol. iii (1564), col. 149. 107 [Flacius et al.], Ecclesiastica historia, vol. iv (1562), cols 464–​77. The section opens with the claim that ‘coepit hoc seculo primum Monastice in Aegypto.’ The omission of the Essenes is especially notable because the section does reference Jerome’s discussion of Elijah and John the Baptist (col. 470). 108 Rudolf Hospinianus, De origine et progressu monachatus ac ordinum monasticorum, equitumque militarium omnium libri vi (Zürich, 1588), fol. 1r. Tellingly, the chapter opens with an etymological discussion, starting with the discussion of the therapeutae in Philo’s De vita contemplativa. Having surveyed the material on the Essenes, Hospianian turns to

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For Catholics, by contrast, the expanded category of Essenes provided access to an even greater array of supposedly apostolic monks. The most exhaustive Catholic discussion of the sixteenth century, Matthaeus Galenus’s Origines monasticae (1563), finally brought together this full set of authorities. Its table of contents illustrates how a structure could be assembled out of them. After an etymological discussion, the work’s second chapter ‘demonstrates the true origins of Catholic monasticism out of the book De vita contemplativa or on the Therapeutae by Philo of Alexandria, both the most eloquent and erudite of the Hebrews, and an Apostolic author.’109 Philo’s demonstration was then ‘confirmed’ by Eusebius’s use of Philo, followed by chapters devoted to testimony from Jerome and Epiphanius (the latter now added to the source base). The Jessaean etymology then set the stage for the ‘corroborating’ apostolic evidence by Josephus on the Essenes, followed by the evidence of the (supposedly equally) apostolic Dionysian corpus. Galenus’s work thus illustrates both Catholic efforts to infuse the Fathers with the still greater antiquity of Josephus and Philo, as contemporaries of the apostles, and the way that the same Fathers could act as a glue keeping the therapeutae and the Essenes together. (The old Latin translation published by Sichardt played a supporting role as well.)110 The Origines monasticae also illustrate the allure of the Essenes to early modern Catholic scholars, whose lives were usually more ‘active’ and less contemplative than those led by the therapeutae in their closets. Galenus excerpted some fifteen continuous pages of material from Josephus on the communal practices of the Essenes, which he illustrated in the margins with New Testament references and other Christian material, as well as comments such as ‘this is truly ancient and Christian.’111 Conveniently, Josephus was blamed for any supposed misrepresentations (such as the fact that the Essenes

Eusebius who sought to transform the Essenes into Christians: ‘Philo autem nihil uspiam de Christianis scripsit, nec ullo verbo in tota hac narratione Christianorum mentionem facit, sed duos libros composuit de ea secta philosophorum, quos Essaeos vocant’: ibid., fol. 8r. 109 Matthaeus Galenus, Origines monasticae, seu, De prima ac vera Christianae monastices origine commentarius (Dillingen, 1563), sig. B3r: ‘Ex Philonis Alexandrini Hebraeorum cum disertissimi, tum eruditissimi, et Apostolici scriptoris libro de vita contemplativa, seu de Therapeutis vera Monastices Catholicae origo demonstratur.’ 110 Galenus, Origines monasticae, fol. 53r. 111 Galenus, Origines monasticae, fols 43v–​52r. ‘Hoc vere antiquum et Christianum est’: ibid., fol. 51v. He expands these annotations significantly in the annotated copy he used for a proposed second edition, to be discussed further below: Oxford, Bodleian Library, Don.e.707.

300 Machielsen predated Christianity), a strategy which we shall also observe for Philo. The same approach, giving pride of place to Josephus’s Essenes, was also adopted by Richard Hall in his De proprietate et vestiario monachorum (1585).112 Drawing on Galenus, the Jesuit Antonio Possevino similarly rejected part of Josephus’s account on the Essenes as ‘manifest errors and superstitions.’113 The Jesuit maintained that Josephus had confused ‘the Christian Essenes who converted from the Jews, whom Epiphanius calls Essaeans or Jessaeans’ with ‘his Essenes, especially since during his time the Christians were held for Jews.’114 Scaliger would perceptively observe that the (practical) Essenes made better monks than the theoretical ones (the therapeutae).115 The reception and merger of the Essenes and therapeutae, then, is partly the result of accretions of many different (mis-​)readings over time, but it is also a story of seeing the present in the past. So strong was the Christian lens that even Protestants were willing to entertain or concede the parallel, even when, as we saw, Eusebius never referred to the therapeutae as monks. The Cambridge divine William Perkins described the Essenes as ‘like Popish Monkes and Friers, which did separate themselves from the people, vowing and dedicating themselves to live in perpetuall sanctitie.’116 Scaliger depicted the relationship between Essenes and therapeutae (or as he saw them, practical and theoretical Essenes) as between Benedictines and the more austere and contemplative Carthusians.117 Writing in the late seventeenth century, the Huguenot pastor Jean La Placette compared the therapeutae to the reformed religious orders in the ‘Communion Romaine’, suggesting that they were ‘Observant’ Essenes.118 The parallel also served Protestant purposes. For the most part, Protestants granted the existence of a superficial similarity, either to tarnish Catholicism with Jewish superstition, according to which the Essenes were ‘but an old Jewish Monkery,’ or to highlight the Essenes’ particular excellence compared to 112 Richard Hall, De proprietate et vestiario monachorum aliisque ad hoc vitium extirpandum necessariis liber unus (Douai, 1585), 12–​13. 113 Antonio Possevino, Apparatus sacer ad scriptores veteris novi testamenti; Eorum interpretes, synodos et Patres Latinos et Graecos, 2 vols (Cologne, 1608), 1:968: ‘manifeste erronea sunt, et superstitiosa.’. 114 Possevino, Apparatus sacer, 1:968: ‘Esseni Christiani ex Iudaeis conversi, quos Epiphanius Esseos, sive Iesseos vocat … credibile igitur est, Iosephum confudisse nostros Iesseos cum suis Essenis, praesertim cum eo tempore Christiani pro Iudaeis haberentur.’ 115 Scaliger, Elenchus trihaeresii Nicolai Serarii, 246. 116 William Perkins, A Godly and Learned Exposition of Christs Sermon in the Mount Preached in Cambridge (Cambridge, 1608), 84. 117 Scaliger, Elenchus trihaeresii Nicolai Serarii, 262. 118 Jean La Placette, Traité de l’aumône … Avec une dissertation où l’on prouve que les Thérapeutes ou Supplians dont parle Philon, n’étoient pas Chrétiens (Amsterdam, 1699), 358, 1.

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contemporary monasticism.119 The former Catholic Thomas Bell used the parallel to discredit his erstwhile Jesuit friends. Where the Essenes distinguished themselves by their abstinence, you could meet a Jesuit at any ‘common inne upon the friday at Dover, or other place of arrivall on what day soever; yea, though it be good fryday, they wil eate flesh with you for companie, and so accommodate themselves to the time, as you may worthily deeme them worldelie politikes, and not religious Iesuites as they professe to be.’120 Hospinianus even maintained that Satan, in his efforts to sow division, had introduced both Jewish sects and Catholic monastic orders.121 At the same time, the sixteenth-​century consensus on this concoction of therapeutae, Essenes, and (for Catholics) monastics was a story of blinkers, as well as ways of seeing. Anti-​Jewish biases provided a protective coating. For all the praise heaped on to Philo, he continued to be consistently identified as ‘Philo the Jew’ and his Judaism made him into an unreliable narrator whose testimony could be discounted or excused as prejudiced, whenever convenient. We will observe this more closely in the next two sections of this chapter. Here, we should note that that the legend of Philo as a Christian convert never gained much traction in the early modern period for exactly the same reason: he was more useful as a helpful but conveniently biased observer looking in.122 The closest we get to Philo Christianus is limited discussion of Photius’s assertion in the ninth century ce that the Alexandrian converted to Christianity but left in anger, a story which, if anything, highlights the utility of Philo’s liminal status. When the Spanish Jesuit Juan de Soria asked Baronio’s opinion on Photius’s claim, the church historian was sceptical both in private and in later editions of the Annales.123 119 John Sheffeild, The Hypocrites Ladder, or Looking-​Glasse: Or A Discourse of the Dangerous and Destructive Nature of Hypocrisie, the Reigning and Provoking Sin of This Age (London, 1657), 190. See also Viret, De La Vraye Et Fausse Religion, 518–​20, who also emphasized the influence of Egyptian priests. 120 Thomas Bell, The Survey of Popery Wherein the Reader May Cleerely Behold, Not Onely the Originall and Daily Incrementes of Papistrie, with an Evident Confutation of the Same; but also a Succinct and Profitable Enarration of the State of Gods Church from Adam Untill Christs Ascension (London, 1596), 144–​5. 121 Hospinianus, De origine et progressu monachatus ac ordinum monasticorum, fol. 4r. 122 For the legend of Philo Christianus, see the inventory in Runia, Philo in Early Christian Literature, 3–​7; Inowlocki, ‘Eusebius Interpretatio Christiana’, 320. The older argument set out by Bruns, ‘Philo Christianus’, 141–​5, has been superseded. Only a single fifth-​century pseudo-​gospel identifies Philo as a convert: Runia, Philo in Early Christian Literature, 5. 123 Raimondo Alberici, ed., Epistolae et opuscula pleraque nunc primum ex archetypis in lucem eruta, 3 vols (Rome, 1759–​70), 1:246, 255: Juan de Soria to Cesare Baronio, 17 Dec 1591; Cesare Baronio to Juan de Soria, 15 March 1592. Soria noted that the Jesuits Francisco

302 Machielsen Of course, one can always identify outliers. One French Catholic missed the memo and saw in the Essenes, not monks but anabaptists.124 Yet the equation of Essenes, therapeutae, and monks filtered down into vernacular literature.125 The Essenes also worked their way into Carmelite origin stories, eventually even becoming ‘Elijahians’ (Eliseni).126 When Robert Bellarmine in the mid-​ 1580s surveyed the Protestant and Catholic weaponry on the monastic battlefield, the battle lines were clearly drawn with the therapeutae and Essenes serving on the frontlines. Discussing the six principal arguments in favour of the apostolicity of monasticism, the learned Jesuit began with Athanasius’s life of Antony only to take the reader gradually closer to the age of Christ. His fourth argument was (pseudo-​)Dionysius, whose evidence fundamentally hinged on accepting Eusebius’s interpretatio christiana. His fifth were the therapeutae and the Essenes. The sixth was Scripture itself: the Apostles emerged from Acts as ‘truly the first Christian monks.’127 While this final argument was, of course, the most authoritative, it was also, for Protestants, more easily discounted, so pride of place was really given to the therapeutae and Essenes. Bellarmine, beginning with Philo, noted the Protestant strategy of re-​categorizing the therapeutae as Essenes: ‘the Magdeburgians … admit that Philo wrote this, but that he did not speak about Christians but about Essenes, who were a sect of Jews altogether similar to our religion.’128 As for his own attitude to the therapeutae/​Essenes concoction, Bellarmine held out two solutions which the Jesuit both deemed ‘probable.’ It was possible that Josephus and Philo were not speaking of the same people and that the ancient sect of the Essenes were Jews, but others—​Bellarmine mentioned Galenus by name—​held that Josephus had confused Christians or ‘Jessaeans’ with ancient Jews.129 As we shall see in the next section, to safeguard Torres and Petrus Canisius had reported the claim but provides no references. Baronio expressed scepticism both of the late date and Photius’s reliability. 124 Gabriel Du Préau, De vitis, sectis, et dogmatibus omnium haereticorum (Cologne, 1569), 158. 125 Paolo Moriggia, Historia dell’origine di tutte le religioni che sin’ad hora sono state al mondo (Venice, 1569), fols 6–​8. The author’s description of the Essenes ends with a reference to Lake Mareotis as ‘their’ primary home and the birthplace of hermits. 126 Tomás de Jesús, Libro de la antiguedad, y sanctos de la orden de nuestra Señora del Carmen y de los especiales Priuilegios de su Cofradia (Salamanca, 1599), 20. For the etymology, see Juan de Cartagena, De sacra antiquitate ordinis B. Mariae de Monte Carmelo tractatus duo (Antwerp, 1620), 124–​5. 127 Bellarmino, Disputationes, vol. i/​2, col. 438: ‘vere primi fuerunt Monachi Christiani’. 128 Bellarmino, Disputationes, vol. i/​2, col. 437: ‘Magdeburgenses … fatentur Philonem haec scripsisse, sed eum non esse loquutum de Christianis, sed de Essenis, quae erat secta Iudaeorum omnino similis nostris religionibus.’ 129 Bellarmino, Disputationes, vol. i/​2, cols 437–​8.

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the therapeutae as monks, Cesare Baronio would drive a wedge between them and the Essenes, which that Protestant ‘Achilles’ Joseph Scaliger then sought to mend. This debate produced both some of the most original thinking and some of the worst insults seen in the history of early modern scholarship. 4

A Closer Look and a Painful Divorce: Cesare Baronio, Joseph Scaliger, and Some Vicious Jesuits

We have observed so far that the Essenes and therapeutae were brought together by the fertile Christian, especially Catholic, imagination which saw in their ascetic practices proof for the existence of monasticism during the apostolic period. Yet, as we also saw, this merger was at the same time the product of (mis-​)readings and interpretations, which though they accumulated over time, can nevertheless be traced back to the opening lines of Philo’s De vita contemplativa. As Philo could also be read, at least as plausibly, as introducing the two sects, despite their asceticism, as representing two opposite—​active and passive—​modes of life, close comparisons inevitably posed problems. In their conflict over the Essenes as Christian monastics, Cesare Baronio and Joseph Scaliger explored two possible solutions, in pursuit of their juxtaposed hypotheses. Where Baronio contrasted differences in practices to hesitantly divorce Christian therapeutae from Jewish Essenes, Scaliger focussed on the name and etymology of the Essenes to keep the two sects together as Jews. These two approaches, etymological and comparative, mediated by scholars’ attitudes towards Philo, would form the organizing principles of the debate going forward. Neither men, however, found salvation in the solutions that they put forward. Cesare Baronio discussed the Essenes in his Annales ecclesiastici (1588–​1607), exactly where one would expect: as part of his discussion of the Alexandrian church founded by the Apostle Mark. Joseph Scaliger’s attack on the Annales was based on Baronio’s over-​reliance on the ‘hallucinating’ Eusebius who had introduced Philo’s therapeutae in precisely that context.130 Baronio had indeed been deeply influenced by the early Greek Church historians, even if he deemed them all heretics.131 Most of this Alexandrian discussion, which 130 On ‘Eusebii hallucinationem’, see e.g. Joseph Scaliger, Opus de emendatione temporum, 2nd ed. (Leiden, 1598), sigs γ5v, γ6r. 131 On Baronio’s reliance on Eusebius, see the brief comment in Eric W. Cochrane, Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago, 1981), 470–​1, and Baronio’s ‘Ordine prefissosi dal Baronio nello scrivere la Storia Ecclesiastica’ in Generoso Calenzio, La vita

304 Machielsen Baronio—​for reasons known only to himself—​placed in 64ce, was given over to discussing the contrasting testimony of Philo and Josephus on our merged group of Essenes. The Protestants who ‘pursue the monastic institution with hatred’ forced Baronio to return to the original sources, for they claimed that ‘Philo did not speak about Christians, but that he composed a history on the Jewish sect of the so-​called Essenes. Josephus [in the Antiquities] demonstrates that they existed before the time of Christ, since he reports that Herod bestowed some favour on them.’132 As I have argued elsewhere, Baronio’s solution to this difficulty could be read as sacrificing Josephus (and the Essenes) to save Philo’s thera­ peutae for the Church.133 His other solution, which we already glimpsed above, was the creation of different types of Essenes and would prove popular among Protestants and Catholics alike. While this sacrifice of Josephus likely reflects his personal view, this does not fully capture the argumentative position—​worthy of a contortionist—​that the church historian ended up taking. Indeed, Baronio’s argumentative structure is immediately striking and puzzling. Scaliger’s friend Isaac Casaubon was not wrong when he observed in his manuscript notes that Baronio did not have ‘full confidence’ in his position.134 Yet the argument set out, which takes us through a range of options, was clearly intentional. Baronio’s manuscripts reveal some last-​minute changes but no whole-​sale revisions. He was not working out his own position in public. Rather, he offered a range of options, none of which he forcefully rejected, for the reader to choose from. Baronio’s Annales, in general, can be read as a form of Catholic consensus-​building.135 In this context, it is noteworthy that Philo’s therapeutae (even though ultimately Christian) are referred to as Essenes throughout. Indeed, the manuscript version of the Annales even referred to Philo’s De vita contemplativa as De Essenis, perhaps a legacy of

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133 134 135

e gli scritti del cardinale Cesare Baronio della Congregazione dell’Oratorio (Rome, 1907), 909–​13 (document no. 7), which features Eusebius at the top of this list. Cesare Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 12 vols (Rome, 1588–​1607), 1:598: ‘Monachorum instituta odio prosequantur … non de Christianis locutum esse Philonem, sed de ea Iudaeorum secta historiam contexuisse, quae Essenorum dicta esset, quam Iosephus ante Christi tempus extitisse demonstrat, cum de Herode agit his nonnihil favente.’ Jan Machielsen, ‘Sacrificing Josephus to Save Philo: Cesare Baronio and the Jewish Origins of Christian Monasticism’, International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 23 (2016), 239–​45. Bodleian Library, Oxford, ms Casaubon 3, fol. 16: ‘Scaliger quaestionem decidit, quidquid perstricte frontis homines blaterant. Ipse Baronius plenam fiduciam non habet contrarium affirmandum.’ Jan Machielsen, ‘An Aspiring Saint and His Work: Cesare Baronio and the Success and Failure of the Annales Ecclesiastici (1588–​1607)’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 2 (2017), 233–​87.

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Sichardt’s edition.136 Baronio’s reconciliation strategy was to gradually narrow the Essenes to a particular Christian subset, constituted by the therapeutae. The starting point of Baronio’s argument was thus to take as expansive a view as possible, using arguments of silence as a form of land-​reclamation. The Essenes could not have existed before Christ, or the Scriptures would have mentioned them: It is clearly a matter worthy of wonder. How could it be that when mention is made in the Gospel of all other Jewish sects, indeed of the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Galileans, and the Herodians; that truly, all memory of the Essenes, whose way of life could appear to be worthy of admiration before all others, would remain exceedingly covered up in silence?137 Josephus’s silence on the Alexandrian Essenes (i.e. the therapeutae) in his defence of Judaism in Against Apion was used in a similar fashion: Josephus the Jew refutes and fights in those two most eloquent books with all his powers the calumnies against the Jews collected by Apion. He at once very boastfully publicizes anything of nobility or worth on his people from all the ancient authors he had been able to hunt down, even from the most hidden of places. Did he nevertheless remain silent on that most celebrated way of life of all, that of the Essenes, when their so famous school would have been accessible to Alexandria, where Apion usually lived?138 Similarly, the pagan authors who lived before Christ had praised pious men from all over the world, even the Brahmins of India: ‘truly, on the Essenes who

136 Compare Vatican City, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana [bav], Vat.lat.5684, fol. 383 with Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 1:597. 137 Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 1:599: ‘Admiratione plane digna res est: quidnam sit, quod cum in Evangelio de ceteris omnibus Iudaeorum sectis habetur mentio, nempe de Pharisaeis, Sadducaeis, Galilaeis, et Herodianis; de Essenis vero, quorum vitae institutio videri poterat prae ceteris admiratione digna, omnis memoria silentio prorsus obvoluta remanserit?’ 138 Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 1:599: ‘Iosephus Iudaeus duobus illis disertissimis libris, quibus calumnias in Iudaeos ab Apione congestas, totis viribus nisus impugnat atque refellit; simulque quidquid nobile dignumve de gente sua ex quibuscumque antiquis scriptoribus venari potuisset, ex abditissimis etiam locis gloriose admodum in medium profert; tamen de Essenorum instituto omnium celeberrimo tacuit, cum eorum gymnasium tam celebre apertum esset Alexandriae, ubi Apio degere consuevit?’

306 Machielsen easily surpass all the foresaid, and who were placed plainly right before the eyes of everyone in the centre of the earth, you will not find even a word.’139 More explicitly than other defenders of the interpretatio christiana, Baronio’s strategy was to exploit the silences in the historical record. Silence suggested that they were Christians. When they were mentioned, their subsequent absence indicated a vanishing act, suggesting either their conversion to Christianity or a secret Christian identity all along. Given the real opportunities posed by silences, this made the actual testimony, particularly that of Josephus, quite inconvenient at times. The second part of Baronio’s strategy therefore was to concede, at least for the moment, part of the territory which had first been gained. Josephus’s revelation that the Essenes existed before Christ was one such problem. Baronio relented, without quite conceding: ‘Truly, we do not fight hard to deny that there existed Essenes before Christ.’140 They may have existed previously under Herod: ‘For the writings of Josephus,’ he insisted in a late manuscript addition, ‘have no memory of them before then.’141 Baronio alternated between these strategies, setting up a cycle in which he gained ground only to later (sort of) concede it. Accepting the existence of older Essenes, he argued from silence that they were the most likely of all the Jewish sects to convert to Christianity because ‘we truly have never read that the Essenes ever made the least amount of trouble either for the Lord or His apostles and disciples.’142 The same practice also caused him to divorce inconvenient Essenes (discussed by Josephus) from those described by Philo: ‘for the more ancient Essenes, who are described by Josephus, somewhat differ from those situated by Philo so that it appears that while the latter came forth out of the former, they are nevertheless not identical to them.’143 Even then, inconveniences in Philo’s account could be glossed over as the Judaizing practices of early Christians. Proceeding, as per usual, from silence, he deduced that the 139 Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 1:599: ‘de Essenis vero, qui praedictos omnes facile antecellerent, quique plane ob oculos omnium essent in medio terrae constituti, nec verbum quidem habuisse reperies.’ 140 Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 1:599: ‘Verum nec in his contentiosum funem trahimus ut negemus ante Christum fuisse Essenos.’ 141 Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 1:599; bav, Vat.lat.5684, fol. 384: ‘nulla enim antiquior apud Iosephum de eis habetur memoria.’ The discussion of Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, 13.171–​72, suggests that the Essenes may have already existed in the second century bce, however. 142 Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 1:599–​600: ‘De Essenis vero, quod aliquando vel Domino, vel eius Apostolis atque discipulis vel minimum negotii fecerint, nusquam legitur.’ 143 Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 1:600: ‘nam antiquiores Esseni, qui a Iosepho describuntur, ab his qui a Philone sunt positi, nonnihil differunt, ut appareat hos ex illis provenientes, non tamen eosdem esse cum illis.’

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converts drawn to joining the therapeutae must have included pagans, while Josephus’s ‘slacker’ [remissiores] Essenes were clearly Jews.144 Their difference in location, with Josephus’s Jewish Essenes based in the Holy Land and numbering no more than 4,000 men, while Philo’s Essenes (i.e., the therapeutae) effectively laid claim to the rest of the world, enabled further arguments from silence: But the same Philo in the book which he composed on the contemplative life [De vita contemplativa] says that this sort of men is great in number near Alexandria; indeed, that they live in the other regions of Egypt, and in addition in many parts of the world. He even adds that the same sort of life was adopted by Greeks and barbarians. [Philo] shows sufficiently plainly that he spoke only of Christians who, all over the world and from all nations, would have cultivated in these earliest times of the Church [this] way of life in nearly the same way. For who has ever read that Greeks or Barbarians had become Essenes, or that Jewish Essenes are to be found in the other provinces of the world?145 At the same time, it is clear that the original expansive view which dressed up both Essenes and therapeutae as Christian monks still retained sufficient value for Baronio and his Catholic readership. His strategy, in effect, sought to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, offering up many different though not necessarily compatible arguments, as a way to build consensus around the ancient roots of Christian monasticism. In this sense, Baronio only presented a more elaborate menu than Bellarmine’s two ‘probable’ options. If the expansive account proved too much, the reader might still accept that some of these idealized ascetics were or, indeed, became Christians. Baronio thus grappled at some length with the practices, beliefs, and rituals of these groups of Jewish ascetics and in the process, he highlighted the differences between them. Yet there was a second issue that the merger of Essenes, 144 Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 1:600; bav, Vat.lat.5684, fol. 384, shows that Baronio reworked and strengthened this argument. 145 Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 1:600: ‘At cum idem Philo in libro, quem de vita contemplativa conscripsit, dicat eiusmodi genus hominum apud Alexandriam magno esse numero, immo et in aliis Aegypti regionibus agere: quin insuper et in multis orbis partibus; ac etiam addat, idem vitae genus a Graecis et Barbaris esse receptum: satis manifeste declarat, non nisi de Christianis esse locutum, qui ubique terrarum, et ex omnibus gentibus eiusdem vitae, his primis Ecclesiae temporibus, in eumdem ferme modum institutum excolerent. Quis enim umquam legit Graecos vel Barbaros factos Essenos, vel Iudaeos Essenos in aliis orbis provinciis reperiri?’ Cf. Philo, The Contemplative Life, 21–​22.

308 Machielsen therapeutae, and Christians necessarily entailed: the use of different names when they were meant to be, in fact, one community. An annotated copy of Matthaeus Galenus’s Origines monasticae shows its author investing considerable energy in these various etymological puzzles in preparation for a never realized second edition. One additional, particularly curious suggestion, for instance, derived from the Hebrew verb qadar, to grow dark or mourn, ‘to be sad and sorrowful, an etymology which excellently agrees with the severity and rigour of monasticism.’146 Baronio’s most significant last-​minute manuscript intervention in the Annales similarly took the form of an extended etymological excursus at the beginning of his discussion. He was struck not only by Epiphanius’s speculations about the Jessaeans, but also by Philo’s etymology for the name Essenes in his Every Good Men is Free: ‘[Philo] declares clearly that Essenes signify saints [sanctos] and have received this name from [their] holiness. When we discussed the Christian name above, we sufficiently stated that in the beginning of the nascent Church all Christians were indeed called saints [sanctos]’.147 This etymological explanation, which aligns Christians and Essenes, as well as the fact that Baronio chose to add it to his opening gambit—​ that is, the position that he gradually moved away from—​further demonstrates the value Catholics still attached to the Essenes. Protestants, while they did not need to equate Essenes with Christians, were still confronted with that other part of the etymological puzzle, relating the therapeutae to the Essenes. Joseph Scaliger’s response to Baronio’s Annales in the prolegomena of the second edition of his Opus de emendatione temporum (1598) was primarily to argue that greater priority should be given to a historical eye witness such as Josephus, as a participant in the Jewish-​Roman War, over later church historians such as Eusebius, whose authority often caused Baronio to misdate events ‘by three years, sometimes by four, but most often by two years.’148 It was within this wider context of berating Baronio for his reliance on the ‘old-​womanish hallucinations’ of Eusebius that Scaliger turned

146 Galenus, Origines monasticae, fol. 16r; Bodleian Library, Don.e.707: ‘tristem ac maestum esse, quae monachicae severitati, ac rigori etymologia optime convenit.’ I am really grateful to Kirsten Macfarlane for translating the Hebrew passages in these notes for me. 147 Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 1:593; bav, Vat.lat.5684, fol. 383: ‘Esseos sanctos significare atque a sanctitate illud eos nomen accepisse, non obscure declarat. Verum omnes Christianos ipso exordio nascentis Ecclesiae Sanctos esse nominatos, satis superius dictum, cum egimus de nomine Christiano.’ Cf. Philo, Every Good Man is Free, 75. For Baronio’s discussion ‘de nomine Christiano’, see Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici, 1:298–​99. 148 Scaliger, Opus (1598), sig. γ3v: ‘Itaque triennio aliquando, aliquando quadriennio, ut plurimum autem biennio erratum est.’

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to the interpretatio christiana, yet the issue here was not chronological but etymological. It also evolved, again, around different ways of reading.149 Accordingly, Scaliger used Eusebius’s use of Philo as a prime example to discredit the church historian’s credibility as a witness. He noticed that Eusebius had left the Essenes well alone and had Christianized only the therapeutae. He rejected the ‘puerile delusion’ that the sect was Christian ‘because they had been ascetics, lived by themselves, and had monasteries. As if we should consider the Bonzes of Japan to be Christians, [simply] because they live together, they sing certain psalms by turns like European monks, and they keep canonical hours according to their example.’150 A generation later, Scaliger’s treatment would inspire the Huguenot scholar Jean Daillé in his devastating 1632 attack on the authority of the Church Fathers.151 Yet, for all his skills as a philologist, Scaliger did not notice that the monastic reading of Eusebius was not borne out by the actual text—​Eusebius, as we already noted, had presented the therapeutae as Christians, not as monks. Scaliger also provides us with a second act of reading, a re-​interpretation of the opening line of Philo’s De vita contemplativa: ‘That [the therapeutae] were not Christians but merely Essenes, Philo shows immediately at the beginning of his book.’152 Possibly, Baronio—​who had clearly read the first 1583 edition of Scaliger’s Opus—​had elided the name therapeutae from his account to complicate this Protestant rebranding exercise. It was more difficult to argue that Philo’s therapeutae were ‘merely’ Essenes, when the Oratorian priest had consistently called them Essenes already. Baronio’s throw-​everything-​on-​the-​ board-​so-​something-​might-​stick argumentative strategy also confused Scaliger, as it did Casaubon: ‘the author … still admitted that the true Essenes were Jews. We are amazed, in what way he thought these, Judaism and Christianity, could be well harmonized into one.’153 The extent to which the therapeutae could 149 On the ‘anilibus hallucinationibus’ of Eusebius, see Scaliger, Opus, sigs γ3r, γ6r, and note 130 above. 150 Scaliger, Opus, sigs γ4v−5r: ‘puerile illud deliramentum’; ‘quod ἀσκηταί essent, et solitarie viverent, et monasteria haberent: quasi Bonzios Iapanensium Christianos esse censeamus, quia et coenobitae sunt, et Psalmos quosdam instar monachorum Europaeorum alternis modulantur, et horas Canonicales eorum exemplo habent.’ 151 Jean Daillé, Traité de l’employ des saincts pères, pour le jugement des différends qui sont aujourd’huy en la religion (Geneva, 1632), 322–​3. Daillé invokes the testimony of Scaliger ‘et plusieurs [unnamed] autres apres luy.’ 152 Scaliger, Opus (1598), sig. γ5r: ‘Quod Christiani non essent, sed mere Esseni, statim initio libri ostendit Philo.’ 153 Scaliger, Opus, sig. γ5r: ‘Sed in Annalium tomo primo tacite perstringitur sententia nostra ab auctore, qui tamen fatetur veros Essenos Iudaeos fuisse. Mirati sumus, quomodo ille putavit in unum haec bene convenire posse, Iudaismum et Christianismum.’

310 Machielsen be accepted as Christians also depended on one’s inclination to countenance ‘Judaizing’ Christian practices and to acknowledge Christianity’s Jewish roots, which Baronio was more willing to accept than most of his contemporaries.154 In his prolegomena, Scaliger repeatedly signalled that more on the Essenes and Eusebius’s other hallucinations could be found in Book Six of his great Opus. Interestingly enough, Scaliger’s treatment of Philo’s therapeutae had not changed much since the original 1583 edition, when he had attacked Eusebius in more measured terms. In 1598, the Huguenot scholar returned to the therapeutae after a long list of other criticisms of Eusebius: The same Eusebius writes that the first Christians—​whom Philo called therapeutae—​settled in Egypt. The fact that Philo reports that these men lived in monasteries is sufficient evidence that they were Christians. But Philo had written two books on the sect of these men whom they called Essenes. One is on the active life of the Essenes [περὶ βίου πρακτικοῦ τῶν Ἐσσηνῶν] who were living in a community with others, which he entitled That Everyone Good is Free [ὅτι πᾶς ὁ ἀστεῖος ἐλεύθερος]. The other book is On the Contemplative Life of the Essenes [περὶ θεορητικοῦ βίου τῶν Ὲσσηνῶν] who were living alone and were hermits.155 The inspiration for this passage can only have come from the opening lines of Philo’s De vita contemplativa, and Scaliger quickly moves on to discuss Philo’s etymology of the therapeutae, perverted by Eusebius into healers in Christ’s name. Casaubon scribbled page references to the relevant passage in Philo in the margins of his copy of the Opus.156 The revised title of the De vita contemplativa, as Géza Vermès has already suggested, is probably achieved by merging part of the title of the De vita contemplativa (in full: περὶ θεορητικοῦ βίου ἣ ἱκετῶν) with the title bestowed on the work by Epiphanius—​On the Jessaeans (περὶ Ἰεσσαίων)—​the Huguenot scholar’s avowed scepticism about 154 On this point, see Anthony Grafton, ‘Christianity’s Jewish Origins Rediscovered: The Roles of Comparison in Early Modern Ecclesiastical Scholarship’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 1 (2016), 13–​42. 155 Scaliger, Opus (1598), 502–​3: ‘idem Eusebius scribit primum genus Christianorum in Aegypto consedisse, quos θεραπευτὰς Philo vocarit. Quod ii fuerint Christiani, satis arguere, quod ἐν μοναστηρίοις eos habitasse scribit Philo. Atqui Philo duos libros eorum hominum secta scripserat, quos Essaeos vocabant. Alter est περὶ βίου πρακτικοῦ τῶν Ἐσσηνῶν qui erant κοινόβιοι, quem inscripsit hoc titulo, ὅτι πᾶς ὁ ἀστεῖος ἐλεύθερος. Alter liber est περὶ θεορητικοῦ βίου τῶν Ὲσσηνῶν qui erant μονάζοντες καὶ μονόβιοι.’ Cf. Joseph Scaliger, Opus novum de emendatione temporum in octo libros tributum (Paris, 1583), 251. 156 Eton College, Gg.2.7; Scaliger, Opus (1598), 503.

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that Church Father’s fides notwithstanding.157 The rather fundamental distinction between the two sects—​communal versus solitary life—​is cleverly anticipated by Scaliger’s inventive use of Greek, the similarity of which makes their differences seem complementary. Unlike Baronio, Scaliger did not explore the practices of these communities in any detail. Instead, he turned to etymology in order to prove that the therapeutae were, in fact, Essenes. The fact that Philo never (again) called the therapeutae Essenes in the De vita contemplativa was problematic, but the Huguenot scholar had noticed the reverse in his Every Good Man is Free, where Philo called the Essenes therapeutae. The philosopher attributed the (still mysterious) etymology of the Essenes to their sanctity as ‘worshippers of God’ (that is, θεραπευταὶ θεοῦ; therapeutaì theoû).158 To further cement this connection, Scaliger also confronted Philo’s etymology in De vita contemplativa that the therapeutae were called thus ‘either … because they profess an art of healing … or else in the sense of worship.’159 On this basis, he discussed but then rejected, the Aramaic word asya (healer) as a possible etymology for the Essenes, a suggestion more recently revived by Vermès.160 Yet he ultimately traced the origin of the name back—​as he had done in his 1583 edition—​to hasi (Aramaic for ‘holy man’) based on Philo’s etymological musings in Every Good Man is Free. Essenes and therapeutae, then, effectively had the same holy name. In fact, it may well have been Scaliger’s etymology which had led Baronio to conclude that the Essenes (and therapeutae) were ‘saints’.161 Finally, he (rightly) dismissed as a post-​Eusebian forgery ‘this Ape’ Dionysius the Areopagite who had used the therapeutae as a label for monasticism to fake his antiquity.162 What may not be apparent is how conventional, for all its learning and linguistic skill, Scaliger’s argument was. The argument that the therapeutae were Essenes was, as we have seen, in no way new. In fact, Protestants and most Catholics would have agreed. Scaliger’s argument depended on the opening line of Philo’s De vita contemplativa, just as Sichardt’s had already done. 1 57 Vermès, ‘Essenes and Therapeutae’, 35. 158 Philo, Every Good Man Is Free, 75. 159 Philo, The Contemplative Life, 2. 160 Vermès, ‘Essenes and Therapeutae’, 35; Géza Vermès, ‘The Etymology of “Essenes” ’, in Post-​Biblical Jewish Studies (Leiden, 1975), 8–​29. 161 Scaliger, Opus (1598), 503. This also leads Scaliger to advocate the use of Ἐσσαῖοι over Essenes and conclude that they owed their name ‘ab instituto vitae et religionis, non ab arte aliqua’ (such as medicine). Scaliger’s name features as an authority in other discussions in the manuscript of the Annales but is suppressed in the printed version. See e.g. the reference to Book Six of the original Opus on bav, Vat.lat.5684, fol. 127. 162 Scaliger, Opus (1598), 504: ‘iste Simius.’

312 Machielsen Scaliger did not study or compare the practices of the Essenes and therapeutae in any detail. Even his friend Casaubon noted in the margins of his copy: ‘There remain things in this book of Philo (I speak of the second one [i.e., the De vita contemplativa]) which would deserve consideration.’163 A co-​ordinated attack by a group of Jesuits, keen to defend both the Catholic Church’s latest scholarship and its ancient traditions, caused Scaliger to examine the therapeutae and Essenes in greater detail and arrive at some innovative conclusions about both Hellenistic Judaism and patristic scholarship in the process. Of course, not all Catholics appreciated Baronio’s scholarship. In his 1612 La conveniencia de las dos monarquias catolicas, the royal chronicler Juan de La Puente saw in the Annales nothing less than a wholesale attack on Spanish traditions and, in particular, on Santiago, the country’s patron saint. Baronio, the Dominican consistently alleged, treated Spain as ‘the enemy nation.’164 The Oratorian’s treatment of the therapeutae undermined Saint James because he had been ‘the universal apostle of the Hebrews who lived in all the pagan provinces.’165 La Puente, despite (or because of) his profound anti-​Judaism, needed Philo’s testimony that the therapeutae lived among all the nations to refer to Jews rather than Christians so that Saint James could have converted them: ‘From this universality Cardinal Baronio infers that Philo spoke about Christians, but he does not infer well, because as there were Jews in all the pagan kingdoms, so there would also be this type of philosophical and religious Hebrews.’166 La Puente’s discussion, and his privileging of local traditions

163 Eton College, Gg.2.7; Scaliger, Opus (1598), 503: ‘supersunt in eo libro Philonis (posteriorem dico) quae expendi mereantur.’ I am grateful to Anthony Grafton for providing me with this transcription. 164 E.g. Juan de La Puente, La conveniencia de las dos monarquias Catolicas, la de la Iglesia Romana y la del imperio Espan̄ ol (Madrid, 1612), 165: ‘la nacion enemiga.’ On La Puente, see Richard L. Kagan, Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Baltimore, 2009), 6, 186. 165 La Puente, La conveniencia de las dos monarquias Catolicas, 175: ‘Apostol de los Hebreos, avezindados en las naciones Gentiles’. 166 La Puente, La conveniencia de las dos monarquias Catolicas, 183: ‘El mismo autor en el libro de vita contemplativa dize, que los Essenos, una secta de Iudios, viven en Alexandria, y en otras partes de Egypto, y en todas las Provincias del mundo, y que los Griegos y los Barbaros an recibido este modo de vivir. Desta universalidad colige el Cardenal Baronio, que Filon habla de los Christianos, pero no infiere bien, porque como en todos los Reynos gentiles avia Iudios, assi auria tambien este genero de Filosofos y religiosos Hebreos.’ The index, which includes two pages of anti-​Jewish slurs, gives a good indication of La Puente’s general view of Judaism: ibid., 346–​7. On the supposed role of Jews in early Spanish Christianity, see also Katrina Olds, Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-​ Reformation Spain (New Haven, 2015), 133–​6.

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over universal ones, shows both how necessary and how impossible Baronio’s Catholic consensus building was. Still, while Baronio was under attack from Spain, Jesuits on the confessional frontlines of Northern Europe gathered to defend both the cardinal and monasticism against Scaliger’s criticisms. One particular thorn in Scaliger’s side, Martin Delrio—​‘whether he is a man or a beast or rather filth made soft by shit I do not know’—​took on the defence of the Dionysian corpus.167 Another Jesuit, Nicolaus Serarius, challenged Scaliger’s treatment of the Essenes and therapeutae in a work that notionally targeted a friend of Scaliger’s, the Franeker Hebraist Johannes Drusius. In the concluding chapters of his Trihaeresium (1604), Serarius—​a long-​term admirer of Baronio—​essentially systematized the Church historian’s position on the Essenes using Scaliger’s division between ‘practical’ and ‘theoretical’ (or contemplative) Essenes.168 The Jesuit claimed that the practical Essenes (discussed by Josephus and Philo) were Jewish and had predated Christ, but that many had subsequently converted, while the ‘the theoretical Essenes all appear to have been Christians.’169 Very much like Baronio had done, Serarius built his argument out of Philo’s and Josephus’s silences. Neither Jew had used the therapeutae to defend the excellence of their religion when the need arose.170 As a Jew, Philo as ‘a man of authority among Jews … wrapped Christ the Lord, his Gospel, the sacraments and similar things in silence, and wrote in such a way that since he neither mentioned Christians nor Jews, on account of a similarity in their name and in some of their rites … Jews would consider them Jews, and Christians would acknowledge them as Christians on account of everything else; and on account of both, they would appear as either to the gentiles.171 167 Scaliger, Elenchus trihaeresii Nicolai Serarii, 6–​7: ‘homo nescio an bellua an potius lutum stercore maceratum.’ 168 On Serarius’s admiration of Baronio, see Jan Machielsen, Martin Delrio: Demonology and Scholarship in the Counter-​Reformation (Oxford, 2015), 349. 169 Nicolas Serarius, Trihaeresium, seu, De celeberrimis tribus apud Iudaeos, Pharisaeorum, Sadducaeorum, et Esseniorum sectis (Mainz, 1604), 297: ‘Theoretici Esseni videntur omnes Christiani fuisse.’ 170 Serarius, Trihaeresium, 298–​9. Needless to say, this misses the entire purpose of Philo’s De vita contemplativa. 171 Serarius, Trihaeresium, 306: ‘Cum tamen Iudaeus esset, in eoque, in quo natus erat, denasci etiam statuisset, Iudaismo, vel ab ea saltem, perfidia, quod tantae apud Iudaeos auctoritatis vir esset; palam discedere nollet; voluisse data opera; silentio Christum Dominum, eius Evangelium, sacramenta, et similia involuere; sicque scripsisse, ut, cum neque Christianos, neque Iudaeos diceret, ob nominis tamen, rituumque nonnullorum,

314 Machielsen Philo was thus able to use the ‘Christian’ therapeutae to enhance the reputation of Jews among the pagans.172 Silences, Philo’s Judaism, and some ‘Judaizing’ by early converts created a veritably unverifiable case for ancient monasticism. The contrasting approaches taken by La Puente and Serarius thus not only demonstrate the full range of Catholic responses to Baronio’s project, their work also reveals how gradations of anti-​Jewish sentiment could be used to either discredit or protect a Christian reading of a Jewish sect. When Scaliger came to respond to his Jesuit critics, he moved beyond Philo’s opening words and etymology to survey the practices of the Essenes and therapeutae in great detail. In his Elenchus Trihaeresii (1605), he claimed that the Buddhist monks of Japan had a better claim to be Christians than the Essenes, even though they predated Christianity by two millennia.173 ‘If we believe Serarius,’ Scaliger declared, ‘then monasticism was derived from the foulest founts of Jewish filth and superstitions, forty years before Christ,’ while it would also make Christ himself an Essene.174 These different parallels destabilized the boundaries between Christianity, Judaism, and pagan religions. The stridency with which Scaliger developed them reflects both the by now ill-​tempered nature of the debate and the need to pierce the layers of unfalsifiable bubble wrap with which Serarius had protected the ‘theoretical Essenes’. Possibly, they also reveal Scaliger’s frustrations at the difficulty of demonstrating a shared identity between the therapeutae and the Essenes beyond their shared Judaism. Still, Scaliger’s more extended engagement with Philo’s work also led to a number of important scholarly breakthroughs. First, as Anthony Grafton has famously shown, Scaliger extended his historicizing of the Church Fathers to Philo of Alexandria. Scaliger came to realize that Philo, as a Hellenic Jew, knew neither Hebrew nor Aramaic: ‘he may have been more ignorant of either dialect … similitudinem, Iudaeis Iudaei putarentur; ob caetera omnia Christianis Christiani agnoscerentur: ob utraque, Gentilibus utrilibet viderentur.’ 172 Serarius, Trihaeresium, 306: ‘Si Iudaeos, opinionem Gentilium non imminutam optavit, qui saepe a Christianis Iudaeos non distinguebant; suaeque gentis gloriae totum id concessum percupivit.’ 173 Scaliger, Elenchus trihaeresii Nicolai Serarii, 235. 174 Scaliger, Elenchus trihaeresii Nicolai Serarii, 259–​60: ‘Si igitur credimus Serario, a spurcissimis sordium, superstitionum, Iudaismi fontibus monachatus derivatus est, idque quadringentis annis ante Christum.’ See also the similar comment on 264. On Scaliger’s attitude towards the Jews, see W. den Boer, ‘Joseph Scaliger en de Joden’ in, Bestuurders en geleerden, eds. S. Groenveld, M.E.H.N. Mout, and Ivo Schöffer (Amsterdam, 1985), 65–​74.

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than any Gaul or Scythian.’175 He thus concluded that the etymology of hasi, of which he himself had persuaded Serarius (and Baronio), was wrong because Philo’s etymologies were entirely fantastical. The monoglot philosopher had merely attempted to derive the Essenes from the Greek word for holy, ὅσιοι. No longer bound by Philo’s speculations, Scaliger proposed the new etymology of hashai (whispering, stillness, secret). This, he argued, was a suitable name ‘for that sort of men, who either live communally in villages separately from others [i.e. the Essenes], or live alone in the wilderness [the therapeutae].’176 This insistence cannot quite camouflage a crucial fact: Philo’s discredited etymology no longer provided any support for the Essene-​therapeutae merger at all. As with the Catholic position, the Protestant alternative identity of the therapeutae, who were only so called ‘by Egyptian Greek-​speakers, not by the inhabitants of Palestine,’ had become an article of faith.177 Scaliger made a second historicizing discovery as well, the full importance of which he did not pursue fully. He pointed out that Jerome, usually ‘completely devoted to Eusebius,’ in his life of Paul the Hermit did not dare to follow Eusebius where Philo’s Essenes were concerned.178 The Huguenot scholar transcribed in full the opening lines of Paul’s Vita, in which Jerome noted contemporary debates about the origins of monasticism, and he noted Jerome’s claim that Paul was ‘the first of the monks’ who fled to the deserts during the Decian persecutions.179 Although this overlooked Jerome’s reference to the Essenes in his letter to Eustochium, and Scaliger missed the fact that Eusebius had not discussed monks at all, he nevertheless perceived the significance of the disagreements among the Fathers. This led him to earlier Fathers, for instance to Tertullian’s claim that ‘we are not forest dwellers and exiles from life’ for vindication, rather than to the conclusion that Jerome and his contemporaries were still working out the meaning of monasticism for themselves.180

175 Grafton, Joseph Scaliger, 2:508–​9; Scaliger, Elenchus trihaeresii Nicolai Serarii, 132: ‘qui utriusque dialecti imperitior fuerit, quam ullus Gallus aut Scythia.’ For the context of this change of heart, see also: Francis Schmidt, ‘The Hasidaeans and the Ancient Jewish “Sects”: A Seventeenth–​Century Controversy’, in Sects and Sectarianism in Jewish History, ed. Sacha Stern, trans. Marie-​Laure Jocteur Monrozier (Leiden, 2011), 187–​204, esp. 195–​7. 176 Scaliger, Elenchus trihaeresii Nicolai Serarii, 204: ‘illi generi hominum, qui aut vicatim ab aliis seorsim κοινόβιοι vivebant, aut in desertis μονάζοντες.’ 177 Scaliger, Elenchus trihaeresii, 203: ‘a solis AEgyptiensibus Hellenistis, non a Palaestinis.’ 178 Scaliger, Elenchus trihaeresii, 231: ‘maximum Hieronymus Eusebii studiosissimus.’ 179 Scaliger, Elenchus trihaeresii, 232: ‘primo Monachorum.’ 180 Scaliger, Elenchus trihaeresii, 233: ‘Non sumus … silvicolae et exules vitae’; Tertullian, Apologeticum, 42.

316 Machielsen Scaliger’s breakthroughs, then, must be placed within a wider—​personal and confessional—​framework that remained unbending. Confessional polemics, especially during the opening decade of the 1600s, thus brought new pressures and new insights to bear on the relationship between Essenes, therapeutae, and Christians. Neither etymology nor detailed comparisons offered resolution but pressures that prompted new insights also caused unfalsifiable readings to spring up like drug-​resistant bacteria. For Catholics, Philo’s Jewish identity proved a useful deflective shield. The Protestant weapons chest for the therapeutae as Essenes was also seriously depleted. The need to provide the therapeutae with an alternate identity persisted, even though the initial readings that had encouraged this approach had been discredited. (Scaliger also now unsurprisingly dismissed Epiphanius’s testimony on the Jessaeans.)181 The fact that everyone agreed that the two groups were clearly very different—​as different as Carthusians were from Benedictines, as Scaliger put it—​should have made the debate moot.182 It was an age with greater interconfessional dialogue that would put the issue to rest, until intra-​confessional disputes brought it back to life again. 5

Coming Full Circle: Bernard de Montfaucon, Henri de Valois, and the Anglican Comeback

If we were to return to the therapeutae on the centenary of Scaliger’s death much might appear the same. In 1709, Bernard de Montfaucon published his French translation of the De vita contemplativa.183 Although now divorced from the Essenes and stripped off their monastic garb, the learned Benedictine from the Congregation of Saint-​Maur, believed the therapeutae to have been Christians, possibly following in the footsteps of his mentor Jean Mabillon.184 Montfaucon contrasted the ‘moderns’ who ‘pushed la critique too far [and] too easily pronounced on things that required more reflection’ with the opinion of the Fathers and the ‘traditions preserved in the Church without any

1 81 Scaliger, Elenchus trihaeresii, 207–​8. 182 Scaliger, Elenchus trihaeresii, 262. 183 Philo, Le Livre de Philon, de la vie contemplative, traduit sur l’original grec, avec des observations où l’on fait voir que les Thérapeutes dont il parle étoient chrétiens, trans. Bernard de Montfaucon (Paris, 1709). 184 See the question formulated in Jean Mabillon, Traité des études monastiques divisé en trois parties, 2 vols (Paris, 1692), 2:204.

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contestation.’185 Little, then, seems to have changed. Some of the Benedictine’s twelve marks of the therapeutae’s Christianity are surprising (notably the serving of hot drinks on the Sabbath) but the contours would have been instantly recognizable to Baronio or Serarius. Philo’s Judaism still provides a useful shield: the ‘more moderate’ Philo ‘speaks only in general terms’ because he was aware of the hatred many Jews felt for the Christians, without revealing the names of the leaders or the books they are using.186 There was even a Protestant planning to enter the fray against the Maurist. The Dutch antiquarian Gisbert Cuper declared the therapeutae ‘pure unadulterated Jews’ or possibly just plainly fantastical.187 And yet underneath these apparent similarities, everything had in fact changed. Despite Montfaucon’s protestations of uninterrupted tradition, his French translation was radical only in its attempt to return to a position that Catholics had actually abandoned. The Catholic scholar Henri de Valois in two short but powerful notes to his erudite edition of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History (1659) not only put paid to the theory that the therapeutae were Christians, he rejected Scaliger’s argument that they were Essenes as well. Valois had noticed that Eusebius had not, in fact, represented the therapeutae as monastics but as ascetics: ‘these are as greatly different from monks, as a genus is different from a species.’188 Valois expressly agreed with Scaliger that the therapeutae were not Christians. Their ancient books and prophets, for instance, could hardly be the Christian gospels ‘which had only just been written in Philo’s time.’189 He also pointed out, however, that Philo never called the therapeutae Essenes in his treatise, and that the two sects differed in many things, notably in their treatment of women. The therapeutae accepted them in their midst, while ‘the Essenes recoiled from the female sex.’190

185 Philo, Le Livre de Philon, sig. a3r-​v: ‘poussé la critique trop loin … trop facilement pronconcé sur des choses qui demandoient plus de reflexion … cette tradition s’étoit conservée dans l’Eglise sans aucune contestation.’ 186 Philo, Le Livre de Philon, 261, 262: ‘plus moderez’; ‘il parle en termes generaux.’ 187 Gisbert Cuper to Jean Le Clerc, 25 June 1710, in Jean Le Clerc, Epistolario, eds. Maria Grazia and Mario Sina, vol. 3: 1706–​1718 (Florence, 1994), 281: ‘je soutiens qu’ils ont esté puri puti Iudaei pour ne parler pas de Fantastiques, et des semblables gens.’ 188 ‘Annotationes in Librum ii’, in Eusebius, Ecclesiasticae historiae libri decem: Eiusdem de vita imp. Constantini, libri IV, ed. and trans. Henri de Valois (Paris, 1659), 34: ‘Hi autem multum distant a monachis, ut genus distat a specie.’ 189 ‘Annotationes in Librum ii’, in Eusebius, Ecclesiasticae historiae libri decem, 35: ‘vixdum scripta erant Philonis aetate.’ 190 ‘Annotationes in Librum ii’, in Eusebius, Ecclesiasticae historiae libri decem, 34: ‘Philo diserte testetur Essenos muliebrem sexum aversari.’

318 Machielsen Valois’s respect for and dispassionate disagreement with Scaliger already show how much the confessional republic of letters had changed since Scaliger’s days. The royal historiographer had been closely aligned with the learned Jesuits Jacques Sirmond and Denis Pétau, the latter of whom had once been among the Huguenot’s assailants.191 Yet Valois also counted some of the most learned Protestant scholars of his day as his friends.192 The Eusebius edition was dedicated to the bishops and clergy of the Gallican Church. While this dedicatory epistle contained some strident comments about the value of ecclesiastical history for Catholics, it made all bishops—​not just the papacy—​ heirs to interrupted Apostolic succession.193 In his preface, Valois also acknowledged his profound debt to the Calvinist Archbishop of Armagh, James Ussher, who had provided him with manuscript readings by Henry Savile and John Christopherson.194 When Valois requested Ussher’s help, he noted that ‘the Italians have offered me nothing but empty words.’195 Less erudite though perhaps more authoritative, at least from a Roman perspective, was the discussion offered by Lucas Holstenius, a convert to Catholicism and prefect of the Vatican Library, and also listed among Valois’s friends. In 1661, Holstenius, published his exhaustive collection of ancient monastic rules, which he offered to the Holy See ‘with a most humble kiss of the feet.’196 In a prefatory dissertation, Holstenius opined that ‘they are deceived who make true and perfect monasticism older than Christianity.’197 Old Testament prophets such as Elijah provided rather a ‘foreshadowing’ than an ‘exemplar’: ‘the Essenes also, whom the Jews remember and whom Philo describes in their own book (although Saint Jerome considers them to have 191 See the separately paginated notes at the end of vol. 2 of Epiphanius, Sancti patris nostri Epiphanii Constantiae, sive Salaminis in Cypro … opera omnia, ed. Denis Pétau (Paris, 1622). Scaliger’s errors and hallucinations receive a string of entries in the index. While Pétau defends Serarius and the Christian identity of the therapeutae, his discussion of Philo’s two books recalls that of Scaliger’s Opus and he does not at all defend Epiphanius’s Jessaean etymology (53–​54). Valois pronounced funeral orations for Sirmond and Pétau. 192 Adrien de Valois, De vita Henrici Valesii, historiographi regii liber ([Paris], 1677), 12, lists such scholars as Claude Salmaise, Johann Friedrich Gronovius, and Isaac Vossius. 193 Eusebius, Ecclesiasticae historiae libri decem, ed. Valois, esp. sig. a3v. 194 Eusebius, Ecclesiasticae historiae libri decem, ed. Valois, sigs e4v–​i1r. 195 Henri de Valois to Ussher, 3 December 1654, in The Correspondence of James Ussher: 1600–​ 1656, ed. Elizabethanne Boran, trans. David Money, 3 vols (Dublin, 2015), 3:1109: ‘Itali ... nihil mihi praeter verba inania contulerunt.’ See also Ussher’s replies on 1110–​12. 196 Lucas Holstenius, Codex regularum, quas Sancti Patres monachis et virginibus sanctimonialibus servandas praescripsere (Rome, 1661), title page: ‘cum humillimo Pedum osculo.’ 197 Holstenius, Codex regularum, sig. b1r: ‘Frustra sunt, qui verum et perfectum Monachismum Christianismo vetustiorem faciunt.’ This is the dissertation’s opening sentence.

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been Christians) clearly differ in many aspects from the monastic way of life [institutio].’198 The librarian held that evidence of early monastic practice must have perished in the flames of the Diocletian persecution—​another argument from silence—​and that, accordingly, Antony and Paul were ‘the first authors’ on whom monastic life was built.199 This emerging ease with the absence of firm evidence reflects a growing comfort with the reality of continual confessional co-​existence which is also evident in Valois’s Eusebius edition, although it also marks a hardening of the Christian/​ non-​Christian divide. Notably, Catholic attitudes had not really changed by Montfaucon’s day. It was not Cuper, but Jean Bouhier, the young but erudite President of the Parlement of Dijon, who entered the fray against the Maurist. Familiar arguments were recycled. Later Fathers were still charged with simply copying Eusebius, in language that recalls that of Scaliger a century earlier.200 Bouhier held that Philo ‘a Jew perfectly instructed in his religion’ would not have praised the Christians whom his confrères had chased ‘out of their synagogues as reprobates and impious.’201 If arguments or even anti-​Jewish sentiment had not changed, the tone had. Montfaucon, though he did not change his mind, later conceded that he ‘had never seen so much erudition, tied to so much politesse, and that of all those who have held this position, no one, not even Scaliger, has seen the difficulty of the matter as well as [Bouhier].’202 If the lawyer’s refutation appeared to settle the matter for most onlookers,203 then his rhetorical question why a Jew would wish to praise Christians 198 Holstenius, Codex regularum, sig. b1r-​v: ‘praesagia potius quam exempla’; ‘Esseni quoque, quorum Hebraei meminerunt; uti et quos Philo libro proprio describit (quamquam hos S. Hieronymus fuisse Christianos putat) multis, ut palam est, differentiis a Monachorum instituto discrepabant.’ 199 Holstenius, Codex regularum, sig. b1v: ‘Auctores porro eius primi Paulus et Antonius fuere, quorum exemplis duo genera Monachorum informantur, alterum Eremitarum seorsim sine arbitro degentium, Coenobitarum alterum in domo communi conviventium.’ 200 Jean Bouhier, Bernard de Montfaucon, and Bernard de La Monnoye, Lettres pour et contre, sur la fameuse question: Si Les Solitaires, appelés thérapeutes, dont a parlé Philon le Juif, étaient chrétiens (s.l., 1712), 44. 201 Bouhier, Montfaucon and La Monnoye, Lettres pour et contre, 5–​6: ‘un Juif parfaitement instruit de sa Religion’; ‘chassoient de leurs Synagogues comme des reprouvez et des impies.’ 202 Cited in Abbé Papillon, Bibliothèque des auteurs de Bourgogne (Dijon, 1745), 81: ‘je n’ai jamais vû tant d’érudition, jointe à tant de politesse, et que de tous ceux qui avoient soûtenu son sentiment, personne, sans en excepter même Scaliger, n’a vû si bien que lui le point de la difficulté.’ 203 See the ironic review: ‘Lettres pour et contre sur la fameuse question, si les solitaires appellez Therapeutes, dont a parlé Philon le Juif, étoient Chrétiens. À Paris, chez Jacques Etienne, rue saint Jacques, à la Vertu. 1712. vol. 12. pp. 381’, in Journal des Sçavans pour le

320 Machielsen prompted an answer from the Benedictine monk that reveals the unexpected origins of the temporary Catholic revival of the Christian therapeutae. Montfaucon drew a parallel between Judaism and English Protestantism: ‘The whole world knows the aversion the English feel for Catholics, especially monks and monasteries.’204 Yet recent Anglicans had published eulogies of monasticism and lamentations of its destruction.205 ‘The whole world [also] knows that near London there is a convent for Catholic girls for which nearby Protestants have so great a veneration that when someone wants to insult them somehow or disturb them in the exercise of their religion, they join together in their defence.’206 If the English can move in mysterious ways, why not Jewish authors? ‘How can we say anything about why Philo and Josephus have spoken in these terms? How can we judge if they acted prudently by delivering such discourses?’207 Could the Jews of Alexandria have had a similar regard for the therapeutae as the English for their Catholic convent? While the learned Maurist would not be the last continental European to marvel at apparent English eccentricity, there was more to this reference than mere wonder. In fact, it had been Anglican scholarship which inspired and sustained Montfaucon’s attempted revival of the Christian therapeutae. After his prefatory lamentation about modern critics, Montfaucon was quick to point out that ‘even Protestants have sustained against their sect that the therapeutae

204 205 206

207

Mois de febrier 1712 (Amsterdam, 1712), 227–​36. Reading the review, Cuper wrote to the Abbé Bignon that ‘je suis aussi persuadé que le sçavant Benedictin s’est trompé, que je le suis qu’un et deux font trois’: Lettres de critique, de littérature, d’histoire, etc., écrites à divers savans de l’Europe, par feu M. Gisbert Cuper, ed. Justinus de Beyer (Amsterdam, 1743), 285. See also Basnage de Beauval, Histoire des Juifs, 2:596–​683, chs 22 and 23, both written against Montfaucon. Bouhier, Montfaucon and La Monnoye, Lettres pour et contre, 132: ‘Tout le monde sait l’aversion qu’ont les Anglois pour les Catholiques, et sur tout pour les Moines et les Monastères.’ Bouhier, Montfaucon and La Monnoye, Lettres pour et contre, 132. Montfaucon cites the Monasticon Anglicanum. Bouhier, Montfaucon and La Monnoye, Lettres pour et contre, 133: ‘Tout le monde sait qu’il y a près de Londres un Monastère de filles Catholiques, pour lesquelles les Protestants des environs ont une si grande vénération, que quand on veut leur faire quelque insulte, ou les inquiéter dans l’exercise de leur Religion, ils s’attropuent pour les défendre.’ Montfaucon is likely referring here to the community of Mary Ward sisters in Hammersmith. I am grateful to Victoria Van Hyning for discussing this passage with me. Bouhier, Montfaucon, and La Monnoye, Lettres pour et contre, 133: ‘Comment donc pourrons-​nous dire pourquoi Philon et Joseph ont parlé en ces termes? Comment pourrons-​nous juger s’ils agissoient prudemment en tenant de tels discours?’

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were truly Christians.’208 The only dissertation that treated the subject ‘as it should’ had been written by ‘Thomas Browne, an English Protestant.’209 In a footnote, the Benedictine cited two other members of the Church of England who had been of the same opinion.210 The earliest use of either the Essenes or therapeutae as possible witnesses to apostolic traditions within the Church of England that I have found, dates to 1638, when Joseph Mede, a moderate Episcopalian, used ‘the Essenes, or θεραπευταὶ’ as proof of the existence of churches and oratories in apostolic times.211 Mede still felt uncertain about Eusebius’s use of the therapeutae but he was ‘sure’ of Eusebius’s belief that ‘Churches or Oratories of Christians’ were ‘an Apostolicall ordinance’ or he would not have brought them ‘as an argument or badge to prove Philo’s Essenes to be S. Marks Christians.’212 To this curious witness testimony ‘in the First Centurie’—​which was really a fourth-​century historian’s belief about the apostolic age—​Mede adduced various ‘traditions’, including one recounted by the still later Bede.213 Mede’s appropriation seemed to have made little or no impact on other pre-​ Civil Wars scholarship, but it was reprinted in 1672.214 During the Restoration, tradition and the history of the early Church more widely, increasingly became part of a distinctly Anglican identity positioned between the religious enthusiasm of the ‘Fanaticks’ and ‘the furious Malice of Papists.’215 In a justly famous 208 Philo, Le Livre de Philon, ed. Montfaucon, sig. a4v: ‘Il y a même eu des Protestans qui ont soûtenu contre ceux de leur secte, que les Therapeutes étoient veritablement des Chrétiens.’ 209 Philo, Le Livre de Philon, ed. Montfaucon, sig. a5r: ‘comme il faut’; ‘Thomas Bruno, Protestant Anglois.’ 210 Philo, Le Livre de Philon, ed. Montfaucon, sig. a5v. The other two Anglicans, discussed further below, were William Beveridge and Isaac Vossius. 211 Joseph Mede, Churches, That Is, Appropriate Places for Christian Worship Both in, and ever since the Apostles Times (London, 1638), 17. The publication is an expanded version of a discourse ‘briefly delivered in a colledge chappell.’ 212 Mede, Churches, 19. 213 Mede, Churches, 19, 24. 214 There is, for instance, no reference to Philo or the therapeutae in Thomas Young, Dies dominica: Post Sabbatum omnis Christi amator Dominicum celebret diem, resurrectioni consecratum Dominicae, reginam et principem omnium dierum (s.l., 1639), despite the author’s readiness to cast Sunday as a Christian appropriation of the Jewish sabbat. Joseph Mede, The Works of the Pious and Profoundly-​Learned Joseph Mede, B.D., Sometime Fellow of Christ’s Colledge in Cambridge (London, 1672), 323. 215 Bishop John Fell of Oxford, cited in Grant Tapsell, ‘Introduction: The Later Stuart Church in Context’, in The Later Stuart Church, 1660–​1714, ed. Grant Tapsell (Manchester, 2012), 4. For a survey of the uses of history within the Seventeenth-​Century Church of England, see: John Spurr, ‘ “A Special Kindness for Dead Bishops”: The Church, History, and

322 Machielsen study, Jean-​Louis Quantin has shown how in these circumstances the ante-​ Nicene Fathers, in particular, met ‘almost every requirement of Church of England apologetics’, demonstrating the apostolic character of bishops and the danger of schism.216 The appeal of the therapeutae proved stronger still, because Philo’s treatise claimed to be descriptive rather than prescriptive. If primitive Christianity was the true face of the Church of the England, then the therapeutae held up a useful mirror. At the same time, their revival and the wider appeal to tradition must also be situated within the context of the authentication and publication of genuine texts of an almost apostolic provenance, such as the letters of Barnabas, Clement, and Ignatius of Antioch, during the 1630s and 1640s.217 Thomas Browne’s dissertation on the therapeutae, when it eventually appeared posthumously in 1687, was appended to an edition of Clement’s letters.218 As Quantin shows, English interest in and defence of the Fathers emerged in opposition to the French Huguenot scholar Jean Daillé, whose 1632 Traicté de l’employ des Saincts Pères skilfully undermined their authority in part by demonstrating their ignorance.219 While one such patristic mistake had been the Christian identity of the therapeutae already exposed by Scaliger, their Anglican vindication would occur almost in passing as part of a lengthy refutation of another of Daillé’s writings.220 Although Daillé bemoaned the veneration of Christian antiquity in general, he especially denounced the imposters who forged ancient texts ‘in which they make [the most ancient Christians] commend and confirm the new-​fangled form of Ecclesiastical doctrine and

Testimony in Seventeenth-​Century Protestantism’, in The Uses of History in Early Modern England, ed. Paulina Kewes (San Marino, CA, 2006), 307–​28. 216 Jean-​Louis Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity: The Construction of a Confessional Identity in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 2009), 341. 217 See Dmitri Levitin, ‘Confessionalisation and Erudition in Early Modern Europe: A Comparative Overview’, in Confessionalisation and Erudition in Early Modern Europe: An Episode in the History of the Humanities, eds. N. Hardy and D. Levitin (Oxford, 2019), 1–​94, sec. ‘England’ (67–​74). 218 Clement, S. Clementis epistolae duae ad Corinthios … Accedit Thomae Brunonis … dissertatio de Therapeutis Philonis, ed. Paul Colomiès (London, 1687). When Thomas Comber used the Essenes, believed to have been Christians ‘not only [by] Eusebius of Old but divers learned Men of these Ages’, he followed up this testimony with Clement’s ‘Genuine Epistle to the Corinthians (for we need not cite any spurious Tracts)’: Thomas Comber, A Scholastical History of the Primitive and General Use of Liturgies in the Christian Church Together with an Answer to Mr. Dav. Clarkson’s Late Discourse Concerning Liturgies (London, 1690), 20–​1. 219 Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 228–​38. 220 Daillé, Traité de l’employ des saincts pères, 322–​3.

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discipline according to their fancy.’221 One target had been the so-​called Canons of the Apostles, originally associated with Pope Clement in the first century ce, to which the Huguenot for confessional reasons attributed an implausibly late date.222 William Beveridge’s 1678 defence of the Canon can indeed be described as ‘triumphalist Anglican patristic propaganda’ with its depiction of the Anglican Church as a ‘Primitive’ Church, ‘revived in these latest times,’ although its official nature has to my knowledge not yet been emphasized.223 Not only had the work been dedicated to Archbishop William Sancroft, but Beveridge had also privately submitted the manuscript for the Archbishop’s approval: ‘I dare not venture it into the world without the judgement a more judicious person than myselfe. And although God of his infinite mercy hath blessed our Church with many eminent and learned divines there is none whose judgement … I more desire or rely so much upon as yours.’224 Although his views on the therapeutae remain unclear, Sancroft, following Beveridge, certainly took the Canons to be written ‘not by Apostles, but by Apostolic and Catholic men.’225 Beveridge’s letter to Sancroft makes his own confessional motives clear and attributes others to his French Calvinist opponent. The Englishman’s defence treated ‘most of the rites of the primitive church, particularly about bishops, metropolitans,

221 Jean Daillé, De pseudepigraphis apostolicis libri III (Harderwijk, 1653), sig. *2v: ‘in quibus eas novitiam Ecclesiasticae doctrinae, ac disciplinae formam commendare ac confirmare pro sua libidine faciunt.’ 222 The Canons of the Apostles were first published as the eighth book of De constitutionibus apostolicis, B. Clemente Romano auctore, libri octo, nunc primum, e tenebris eruti, et ad orthodoxam fidem astruendam apprime utiles, ed. Giovanni Carlo Bovio (Rome, 1563). Daillé’s scattershot approach to forgeries also targeted works which Protestants took to be genuine: Jean Daillé, De scriptis, quae sub Dionysii Areopagitae et Ignatii Antiocheni nominibus circumferuntur, libri duo (Geneva, 1666), 1. For similar confessional reasons, Daillé was keen to place the forged canons in the mid fifth century ce. 223 Dmitri Levitin, Ancient Wisdom in the Age of the New Science: Histories of Philosophy in England, c.1640–​1700 (Cambridge, 2015), 498. William Beveridge, Codex canonum ecclesiae primitivae vindicatus ac illustratus (London, 1678), sig. A2v: ‘Omnia denique usque adeo eadem in utraque habentur, constituuntur, praedicantur, ut Anglicana iure merito Primitiva nuncupetur Ecclesia, ultimis hisce temporibus rediviva.’ See also Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 349–​50. 224 Dated 2 January 1676/​7. Bodleian Library, ms Tanner 40, fol. 48r. 225 Beveridge, Codex canonum ecclesiae primitivae vindicatus ac illustratus, 9: ‘Omnes enim octoginta quinque Canones Apostolorum vulgo dictos … Joannes autem Dallaeus ab Haeretico aliquo impostore post annum Dom. ccccl confictos esse affirmavit, nos media insistentes via, eos nec ab ipsis Apostolis, nec a quovis Haeretico; nec ante annum L., nec post ccccl sed ab Apostolicis Catholicisque viris, secundo, tertiove a Christi nativitat seculo constitutos, publicatosque fuisse contendimus.’

324 Machielsen and the fasts of the church for the sake whereof Mr Dailé [sic] seems to have written agaynst the whole collection.’226 It was the subject of fasting, a practice in which the therapeutae were exceedingly well-​exercised, that prompted Beveridge to turn from the Canons to the Egyptian desert dwellers (and not the Essenes) for support. Although not mentioned, Beveridge had clearly read Scaliger and Valois. To the standard distinction between ‘active’ and ‘contemplative’ Essenes, the future Bishop of St Asaph objected that if the therapeutae really were ‘contemplative’ Essenes, they hardly needed an additional name.227 In language identical to that of Valois, he pointed to the Essenes recoiling from the female sex.228 In language that recalled Scaliger’s, Daillé had castigated Jerome and Epiphanius for following ‘the hallucination of Eusebius.’229 Beveridge, in turn, criticized Daillé by name, and Scaliger implicitly, for believing that ‘this most learned Father St Jerome was so careless and imprudent that he would follow the opinion of Eusebius in all things without counsel or judgement.’230 Although he could not be completely certain, the testimony of the Fathers weighed heavy on Beveridge. In an explicit refutation of Daillé’s basic premise, he held patristic testimony to be superior to those born many centuries later.231 Others followed suit in reclaiming the therapeutae as Christians, although usually with greater brevity. In 1679, Henry Dodwell, the ‘hero’ of Jean-​Louis Quantin’s study, argued that the sect of ‘the Theoretical Essenes’ was the ‘most inclinable to be brought over to the Christian Religion’ because of their shared spiritual and philosophical underpinnings.232 Christians had persuaded the therapeutae ‘that their own Religion was indeed no new one but that very Mystical Judaism which these Philosophical Hellenists had so much boasted of.’ The absence of any mention of them, either as opponents to the Christians or in general, suggested that ‘soon after the very memory of them seems to have

2 26 Bodleian Library, ms Tanner 40, fol. 48r. 227 Beveridge, Codex canonum ecclesiae primitivae vindicatus ac illustratus, 370. 228 Beveridge, Codex canonum ecclesiae primitivae vindicatus ac illustratus, 371: ‘Illi muliebrem sexum aversabantur.’ 229 Jean Daillé, De jejuniis et quadragesima liber (Deventer, 1654), 247: ‘Eusebii hallucinationem.’ Cited without reference by Beveridge, Codex canonum ecclesiae primitivae vindicatus ac illustratus, 372. 230 Beveridge, Codex canonum ecclesiae primitivae vindicatus ac illustratus, 372: ‘doctissimum illum Patrem D. Hieronymum adeo incautum fuisse et imprudentem, ut Eusebii in omnibus sententiam sine consilio et iudicio sequeretur.’ 231 Beveridge, Codex canonum ecclesiae primitivae vindicatus ac illustratus, 380–​1. 232 For the ‘hero’ label, see Quantin, The Church of England and Christian Antiquity, 21.

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been extinguished, very probably by reason of their unanimous conversion.’233 Their reputation as a ‘very Philosophical sort of Persons’ clearly recommended them to Dodwell.234 In 1681, Samuel Parker, a prebendary of Canterbury cathedral, used Philo’s therapeutae—​who after all, could be found everywhere—​to prove that ‘the Gospel of our Saviour like the Sun enlightened all the world at once.’235 Parker explicitly rejected Scaliger’s interpretation (‘according to his usual custom of quarrelling with Eusebius’) of the opening lines of Philo’s De vita contemplativa: ‘Philo no where calls them Essenes, which he would have done, if Essenes they had been of what sort soever.’236 These scholars seemed to have reached their opinions somewhat independently, though they also moved in the same circles. Going on Parker’s reply, Dodwell appears to have consulted the future Bishop of Oxford on the possible Christianity of the ‘practical’ Essenes. On 14 April 1681, Parker replied to Dodwell that he was ‘little confident’ in the Essenes discussed by Josephus, ‘v[ersus] in Philo’s Therapeutae, especialy being lately confirmed in it by a Discourse [that] I have met with about it in Dr Beveredge his Vindication of ye Apostolical Canons.’237 In 1671, Parker had succeeded Sancroft as archdeacon of Canterbury on the latter’s appointment as archbishop,238 and it was Sancroft who unites Beveridge, Dodwell, and Parker with the two men who accidentally became the most important Anglican supporters of the therapeutae: the canons of Windsor Thomas Browne and Isaac Vossius. Ironically, the last and most influential Anglican statement on the Christian identity of the therapeutae of the Restoration period had actually been written first. It had also never been intended as the stand-​alone dissertation. Browne had passed away in 1673, making his old friend Isaac Vossius his principal heir. Vossius’s wandering Variae observationes (1685) discusses the transition of ‘those Jewish monks to the Christian camp’ with special praise of Browne’s

233 Henry Dodwell, Separation of Churches from Episcopal Government, as Practised by the Present Non-​Conformists, Proved Schismatical (London, 1679), 250. 234 Henry Dodwell, A Discourse Concerning Sanchoniathon’s Phoenician History (London, 1681), 65. 235 Samuel Parker, A Demonstration of the Divine Authority of the Law of Nature and of the Christian Religion in Two Parts (London, 1681), 241. 236 Parker, Demonstration, 246–​7. 237 Dated 14 April 1681. Bodleian, ms Cherry 23, fol. 324. The letter makes it clear that by this time Parker’s work had already gone to press, but Parker had shared part of its contents with Dodwell beforehand. 238 Jon Parkin, ‘Parker, Samuel (1640–​1688), Bishop of Oxford’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).

326 Machielsen vast learning.239 The Dutch canon of Windsor, however, did not acknowledge that his own limited yet idiosyncratic contribution to the debate came from his friend. Browne and Vossius had noticed that by the time of Palladius’s Lausiac History (mid fourth century ce) Christian monks had been living on Mount Nitria, described as a mountain on the other side of Lake Mareotis from Alexandria.240 This description was, in Browne’s words, more similar than ‘an egg to an egg or milk to milk,’ when compared to the main residence of the therapeutae ‘above the Mareotic Lake on a somewhat low-​lying hill.’241 The argument, then, was that as the Christians could not have dislodged Jews from their mountaintop, the only solution to their mysterious disappearance was their conversion.242 The originality of this topographical argument notwithstanding, the idea that the therapeutae had been Jews who converted to Christianity—​a suggestion also floated by Dodwell, and which Serarius had already made for the Essenes—​provided yet another protective layer of unverifiability. As briefly noted above, Browne’s dissertation on the therapeutae appeared in 1687, as an appendix to an edition of Clement’s letters to the Corinthians. The work was edited by Paul Colomiès, Sancroft’s librarian, and dedicated to the Archbishop himself. Browne’s own links to Sancroft date back to the Interregnum, when as a chaplain to princess Mary he had tried to obtain a position for Sancroft.243 Colomiès had published the dissertation as a specimen from the many manuscripts that Browne had left Vossius. The work was, in fact, assembled from a much larger manuscript now in the University of Amsterdam library. A date on the frontpage suggests that it was completed in 1672, just before Browne’s death.244 As Valois was the often nameless ‘most erudite’ opponent whom the Windsor canon sought to refute, it cannot have been written during Browne’s exile overseas.245

239 Isaac Vossius, Variarum observationum liber (London, 1685), 47: ‘Judaeos istos monachos ad Christi transisse castra, quemadmodum optime observatum Thomae Brunoni, admirandae doctrinae viro, de cuius insignibus erga me meritis alibi dabitur dicendi locus.’ 240 Palladius, The Lausiac History, 7. 241 Thomas Browne, ‘Dissertatio de therapeutis Philonis’, in S. Clementis Epistolae duae ad Corinthios, ed. Paul Colomiès (London, 1687), 180: ‘vix ovum reperias ovo, vel lac lacti magis simile’; Philo, The Contemplative Life, 22. 242 Vossius, Variarum observationum liber, 46–​7; Browne, ‘Dissertatio de therapeutis Philonis’, 178–​81. 243 George D’Oyly, The Life of William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury (London, 1821), 94. 244 Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam Special Collections, ms iii h 24, title page. 245 Browne, ‘Dissertatio de therapeutis Philonis’, 180 (‘eruditissimo viro’), 184 (‘vir eximius’), 187 (‘vir doctissimus’). Valois’s work had appeared in 1659.

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The canon’s dissertation is an amalgamation of highly original and recycled arguments. Although Browne wrote that he was not a person ‘who prefers to err with Scaliger than side with Valois’, he borrowed one argument from the Huguenot scholar to establish the Essene identity of the therapeutae.246 This, in turn, enabled another argument from silence: the vanishing of the Essenes ‘immediately from Philo’s time to this day.’ Unlike the apparently multiplying Pharisees and Sadducees, not a single Essene had been found ‘across the whole world.’247 In support of the Judaizing practices of the therapeutae, Browne drew on one of the zaniest (authentic) sources surviving about early Christianity, Hadrian’s letter to Servianus, in which the Roman emperor, while discussing ‘the flighty morals of the Egyptians’ of Alexandria, commented on Christian bishops worshipping the pagan god Serapis.248 For Browne, such unexpected behaviour by pagan converts to Christianity made those of Judaizing therapeutae more probable. While Browne clearly influenced Mabillon and Montfaucon in France, his dissertation proved the end of the road for the Christian therapeutae hypothesis within the Church of England. Still, there had been good reasons for this unexpected Anglican revival of the therapeutae. Crypto-​Catholicism was not one of them, although the charge was often levelled against Parker.249 Just as the Catholics that preceded them, however, Anglican scholars, many of them cathedral canons, were in awe of the ‘life of almost continuous prayer’ (to quote Browne) led by the therapeutae.250 The therapeutae could be used to represent the Church of England, with its liturgy, fasting, and hymn singing, as offering the true primitive face of Christianity, much as Catholics had done before. For the same reason, Anglican opponents of the reading denounced the therapeutae as Jews excessively devoted to external worship.251 246 Browne, ‘Dissertatio de therapeutis Philonis’, 185: ‘non ego sum, qui cum Scaligero mallem errare, quam cum Valesio bene sentire.’ Browne used Scaliger’s discredited argument that Philo had called the Essenes therapeutae in his Every Good Man is Free: Ibid., 185. 247 Browne, ‘Dissertatio de therapeutis Philonis’, 183: ‘Iam vero qui, quaeso, fit ut statim a tempore Philonis ad hunc diem usque, omnis haec Essenorum Secta, per quindecim continuata saecula prorsus evanuerit? Qui fit, ut, cum per omnes mundi plagas tot innumeri reperiantur et Pharisaei et Sadducaei, ex Sadducaeis orti et Pharisaeis, ne unus, quantum scimus, in toto terrarum orbe Essenus iam repreriatur, aut insequente Philonem saeculo repertus fuerit?’ 248 Browne, ‘Dissertatio de therapeutis Philonis’, 202: ‘mores Aegyptiorum leves’. 249 Parkin, ‘Parker’. 250 Browne, ‘Dissertatio de therapeutis Philonis’, 198: ‘tota vita, una quasi fuerat oratio continua.’ 251 William Cave, Antiquitates Apostolicae, or, The History of the Lives, Acts and Martyrdoms of the Holy Apostles of Our Saviour and the Two Evangelists SS. Mark and Luke (London,

328 Machielsen There were deeper reasons as well that went to the core of Anglican confessional identity as it took shape in the later seventeenth century. Seen from the right angle, the therapeutae could be pressed into supporting the episcopacy, converted as they had been by the Apostle Mark as the first bishop of Alexandria. Indeed, Browne’s dissertation had been extracted from a much longer manuscript devoted to the episcopal see of Alexandria.252 Perhaps, just as importantly however, defence of the therapeutae was a way by which these scholars could pay homage to and defer to the judgement of the Church Fathers. It was the Fathers who, as Beveridge observed, ‘coming across Philo’s treatise De vita contemplativa, affirmed with one mouth that the Therapeutae described there were truly Christians.’253 In all these different ways, then, the therapeutae could aid the construction and articulation of a distinct Anglican identity at a remove from other Protestants. 6

Essenes in the Enlightenment and Beyond

Of the trajectories that we have been tracing in this chapter, one ended shortly after the mild-​mannered debate between Bernard de Montfaucon and Jean Bouhier. On the level of rhetoric, the Christian appropriation of the therapeutae reached its logical endpoint with the Histoire des Juifs (2nd ed., 1716) by Jacques Basnage. In many ways, Basnage was a typical Huguenot, rehashing arguments about Philo’s ‘two orders of Essenes’ that went back via La Placette and Daillé to Scaliger.254 Yet, in a clever rhetorical inversion, the Huguenot also declared that he ‘could not sufficiently marvel at the jealousy of the Christians, who are “surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses” [cf. Hebrews 12:1] and possess an almost infinite multitude of martyrs and veritable saints will steal some

1676), liv–​lv. Cave suggested that the Egyptian Essenes were those denounced by Paul in his Epistle to the Colossians for excessive worship (Col. 2:18–​23). 252 University of Amsterdam Special Collections, ms iii h 24, title page: ‘Canonis Sexti Niceni explicatio historica.’ The sixth canon of Nicea extended the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Alexandria across Egypt and Libya, according to its ‘ancient customs’. 253 Beveridge, Codex canonum ecclesiae primitivae vindicatus ac illustratus, 381: ‘Illi autem omnes in Philo tractatum de vita contemplativa incidentes, uno affirmarunt ore, Therapeutas ibi descriptos vere Christianos esse.’ The Huguenot pastor Jacques Basnage had Beveridge in mind when he accused fellow Protestants of using Christian therapeutae to defend ‘les Evêques et le Serment qu’on prêtoit sur l’Eucharistie’: Basnage de Beauval, Histoire des Juifs, 2:566. 254 On the latter point, see e.g. Basnage de Beauval, Histoire des Juifs, 2:572, 605.

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phantasms from other religions which dazzled them.’255 Basnage used the same parallels that had fuelled the fevered Christian imagination not to discredit the appropriation, as Scaliger had, but to make the act itself an object of shame. While Basnage forms a useful conclusion to the gradual transition from ecclesiastical history to the (comparative) history of religion, his comments also reflect a growing disdain among Enlightenment philosophes for the Essenes, therapeutae, and indeed religious enthusiasm itself. Not long after, Johann Lorenz von Mosheim declared the therapeutae ‘wild and melancholy enthusiasts, who led a life incongruous alike with the law of Moses and with sober reason.’256 Christians, in other words, no longer had a need or want for Philo’s ascetics. A second, related trajectory, which we have been more explicitly charting section-​by-​section, also reaches its natural conclusion in the early eighteenth century. The longue durée history of the Christian appropriation of the therapeutae and Essenes tracked, as we have seen, the confessional history of early modern Europe. Both arguments and tools used against Catholic or Protestant opponents were redeployed for intra-​confessional purposes, whether to vindicate the episcopacy and ritual within the Church of England, or the precedence of the Carmelites among the other monastic orders. The subsequent appropriation of the two Jewish sects by more heterodox thinkers follows the pattern charted by Dmitri Levitin.257 Possibly their radical otherworldiness provided them with an even greater appeal to contemporary religious enthusiasts, making them still more of a double-​edged sword than the other weapons forged in the defence of orthodoxy. In 1909, then, the Catholic Encyclopedia blamed ‘English deists and Continental Rationalists’, as well as ‘Freemasons’, for metamorphizing the Essenes into monks, wilfully unaware of the large role that early modern Catholics had once played in promoting this very reading.258 A nineteenth-​ century history of freemasonry, which dated the movement’s origins to Ancient Egypt, does indeed include the ‘Essenian Fraternities’, though not 255 Basnage de Beauval, Histoire des Juifs, 2:568: ‘Pour moi, je ne saurois assez admirer la Jalousie des Chrétiens, qui, environnez d’une grande Nuë de Témoins, et riches par une Multitude presque infinie de Martyrs et de véritables Saints, vont dérober aux autres Religions quelques Phantômes qui les ont éblouïs, et qui tâchent de s’en faire Honneur.’ 256 Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, Institutes of Ecclesiastical History, Ancient and Modern, trans. James Murdock (London, 1848), 15. 257 See Levitin, ‘From Sacred History to the History of Religion’, 1117–​60, as well as his contribution to this volume. 258 Edward Graham, ‘Essenes’, The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 5 (New York, 1909) [accessed 20 August 2019].

330 Machielsen (because of their admission of women) the therapeutae.259 While the denunciation of freemasons was new, that of unnamed Deists can be traced back to the earliest item in the encyclopaedia entry’s bibliography: Humphrey Prideaux’s The Old and New Testament Connected in the History of the Jews (1715–​17). An entirely conventional Protestant account, featuring both practical and contemplative Essenes, it denounced not only ‘Romanists’ but also unnamed ‘infidel deists of our time’ for whom ‘Christ and his followers were no other than a sect branched out from that of the Essenes.’260 While this comment might seem to foreshadow the direction of later historical scholarship, especially in nineteenth-​century Germany, it seems to have been no more than the product of the Dean of Norwich’s fevered orthodox imagination.261 Possibly, Prideaux was responding to William Whiston, Newton’s ill-​starred successor to the Lucasian chair at Cambridge. In his Primitive Christianity Reviv’d (1711), Whiston identified Arianism as the faith of Christ and the apostles, based on the Apostolic Constitutions and Philo’s De vita contemplativa—​that is, the same texts marshalled by English divines a generation earlier to construct an orthodox Anglican identity.262 A confessional coda seems warranted here. Confessionalism may be too hospitable or capacious a label to capture the bitter warfare between Scaliger and the Jesuits, the almost aggressive cross-​confessionalism of Valois, and the politesse of Montfaucon and Bouhier, let alone Whiston’s idiosyncrasies, all under a single banner. These conflicts involved not only different opponents, they possessed different voltages and thus gave off different charges, which this chapter has sought to capture. Boundaries between orthodoxy and heterodoxy also shift and are, in any case, in the eye of the beholder. Henry Dodwell, who had denounced Quakers and other ‘Modern Enthusiasts and Superordinancers’ in the same work in which he praised the Christian therapeutae, found himself as a non-​juror outside the Church of England after the Glorious Revolution.263 259 David Brewster, The History of Free Masonry Drawn from Authentic Sources of Information (Edinburgh, 1804), 34–​7. 260 Humphrey Prideaux, The Old and New Testament Connected in the History of the Jews and Neighbouring Nations from the Declensions of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah to the Time of Christ, 2 vols (London, 1718), 2:285. 261 Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘Prologue in Germany’, in Nono Contributo Alla Storia Degli Studi Classici e Del Mondo Antico, ed. Riccardo di Donato (Rome, 1992), 543–​62. 262 See esp. Whiston’s comparison between the rules of the therapeutae and the Apostolic Constitutions: William Whiston, Primitive Christianity Reviv’d, 5 vols (London, 1712), 3:38. 263 Dodwell, Separation of Churches, 254. Dodwell criticized sectarians for agreeing with Platonic philosophy—​a curious charge given Philo’s evident Platonism.

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Inevitably, these rhetorical and confessional endpoints did nothing to resolve the underlying debate as to the identity of the therapeutae. Although Christian readings notably declined in number and prominence, others took their place. The arsenal of new texts and arguments kept on growing, as it had done in the time of Galenus, Scaliger, Browne, and Montfaucon as well. Past readings—​whether Eusebius’s reading of the therapeutae as Christians or readings of Eusebius as discussing Christian monastics—​also structured new ones. New contributions were add-​ons rather than displacements. The list of authorities simply grew. While not entirely derivative, Johann Gottlob Carpzov’s 1748 commentary still lined up Scaliger, Daillé, Basnage, and Valois in ‘manly’ (mascule) opposition to the arguments of the ‘B’-​team—​Bellarmine, Baronio, Browne, and Beveridge—​that the ‘theoretical’ Essenes were Christians.264 These debates were, thus, timeless and repetitive because many of the arguments and most of the authorities did not change. Still, there is a deeper reason for these long continuities as well. It was Eusebius’s original interpretatio christiana that made the debate on the identity of the therapeutae into an interminable Scooby Doo episode, with an endless wait for the secret reveal at the end. The structure of the debate meant that the therapeutae could not just be therapeutae. They had to be given an alternate identity, whether Christian, Essene, Jewish, or, as we shall presently see, something else. The origins of one solution—​that the therapeutae and/​or Essenes would have been well-​disposed to convert to Christianity—​are difficult to pinpoint. It lurks in the background, as a secondary argument, in the writings of authors as diverse as Serarius and Browne. This therapeutae-​as-​all-​things-​to-​all-​people argument had the advantage of being unfalsifiable because it employed an absence (the eventual but unknown disappearance of the Essenes/​therapeutae) as evidence. To Christians, it was also generally unobjectionable. This was the, essentially historicizing, position of Edward Gibbon who otherwise treated both Christian forgeries and monasticism with disdain. Although agreeing with Basnage that ‘the Therapeutae were neither Christians nor monks’, he still considered it ‘probable they changed their name, preserved their manners, adopted some new articles of faith, and gradually became the fathers of the Egyptian Ascetics.’265

264 Thomas Goodwin, Apparatus historico-​ criticus antiquitatum sacri codicis et gentis Hebraeae, uberrimis annotationibus in T. Goodwini Mosen et Aaronem, ed. Johann Gottlob Carpzov (Frankfurt, 1748), 237–​8. 265 Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 6 vols (New York, 1993), 1:555, n. 1.

332 Machielsen Otherwise, the debate essentially rested on two pillars: the shared etymology (or not) of the therapeutae and the Essenes, and possible similarities or differences between their and Christian practices. Both of these were mediated by assessments of Philo’s identity as an author. As we have seen, the etymological pillar collapsed in the wake of Scaliger’s attack on Baronio. Scaliger’s exposure of Philo’s linguistic ignorance discredited the philosopher’s etymological musings and seriously devalued attempts to match therapeutae and Essenes through that route. Yet the other route remained open, ready to be pursued further by Montfaucon and others. As all ascetic communities inevitably share some commonalities, parallels between therapeutae, Essenes, monks, and early Christians could be used either to establish connections or, as Basnage did, to discredit them as pale Jewish imitations of divine Christian truths. The late Géza Vermès, the last major scholar to identify the therapeutae with the Essenes (and the Qumran community), still posited a numbered list of similarities and differences between them.266 Philo’s ambiguous identity, as we have seen, could be used to assist such readings, by excusing discrepancies or omissions, or glossing over inconvenient facts. Given this fundamental structure, the only two fundamental shifts in the debate that followed the early eighteenth century relate directly to changing attitudes towards Philo. While inventive, neither of these altered the debate long term. First, the early Enlightenment saw the revival of Philo’s identity as a Platonic philosopher. The most significant cause for this was the brief but powerful 1693 Leipzig dissertation ‘on the Platonism of Philo the Jew’ by Johann Albert Fabricius, though we could also point to other classicizing contributions.267 In addition to offering some choice examples, the German classical scholar pointed to the widespread patristic consensus that Philo was a Platonist, leaving it to the reader to judge whether ‘the writings which bear Philo’s name do not breathe the Platonic spirit and [whether] Philo was well-​versed only in Jewish and not also in Platonic wisdom.’268 Unsurprisingly, Fabricius in one of 266 Vermès and Goodman, The Essenes According to the Classical Sources, 16–​17. Vermès is more conclusive in some of his earlier writings, see n. 160 above. 267 Johann Albert Fabricius, Exercitatio de Platonismo Philonis Judaei (Leipzig, 1693). Space does not permit discussion of the curious and long afterlife of Thomas Goodwin, Moses and Aaron: Civil and Ecclesiastical Rites, Used by the Ancient Hebrewes, Obserued, and at Large Opened, for the Clearing of Many Obscure Texts Thorowout the Whole Scripture (London, 1625). Originally peripheral to the debate, the work reached a wider European audience in Dutch (1676) and Latin translations (1679). It would still form the basis for Johann Gottlob Carpzov’s commentary, who likely was not aware of its antiquity: Goodwin, Apparatus historico-​criticus, ed. Carpzov, iii–​iv, which references the 1690 Latin edition. 268 Fabricius, Exercitatio de Platonismo Philonis Judaei, sig. B3r: ‘Iudicet lector ex iis quae iam allata sunt, utrum vere vir eruditus affirmarit, scripta quae sub Philonis nomine feruntur

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the concluding one-​line ‘additions’ to his dissertation suggested that ‘Philo’s therapeutae in a certain way are the same as Platonic pilgrims.’269 A generation later, this idea—​the germ of which, of course, stemmed from Philo’s debts to Platonic philosophy—​was seized on by Johann Joachim Lange. In a series of dissertations, this young German professor argued that neither the therapeutae nor the Essenes were Jewish but ‘gentile Judaizing philosophers.’270 A final attempt to fundamentally reshape the debate came a century and a half later. It took the form of cutting through the Philonic umbilical cord altogether. In his 1879 dissertation, Paul Ernst Lucius argued that the practices described in the De vita contemplativa did not resemble Judaism in the slightest [ganz und gar nicht], but that of Christian ascetics ‘as closely as possible’ [so genau als möglich].271 Noting that the therapeutae left no trace in Philo’s other writings or that of his contemporaries, Lucius argued that the work was a Christian forgery of the third century ce, composed shortly before it found its way into the hands of Eusebius.272 In this reading then, the therapeutae described in the De vita contemplativa were again fully Christian, but Philo was not the book’s author. By recasting the author of the De vita contemplativa both these scholars sought to radically alter the terms of the debate, as set out above. Their attempts, ultimately unsuccessful, highlight that, beyond confessional reasons, a further spur for debate was the appeal of the mystery itself, akin to a modern whodunnit, as well as the prestige of solving it. Both Lange and Lucius exemplify the inventiveness—​and ambition—​of young scholars on the make. Carpzov belittled Lange, just past his mid-​20s when his dissertations appeared, as ‘clearly on his own … pursu[ing] a road no-​one so far has taken.’273 (It was not meant as a compliment.) Yet scholarly self-​fashioning, even by its most august participants, shaped this debate throughout its history. No one reading Genium Platonicum non spirare, Philonemque Iudaicae tantum non etiam Platonicae peritum fuisse sapientiae.’ 269 Fabricius, Exercitatio de Platonismo Philonis Judaei, sig. B4v: ‘Philonis Therapeutae quodammodo respondent θεωροῖς Platonicis.’ On Plato’s concept of θεωρία and the role played by the θεωρός, the traveller removed from daily life, see: Hélder Telo, ‘The Freedom of Θεωρία and Σχολή in Plato’, in Anthropologie der Theorie, eds. Thomas Jürgasch and Tobias Keiling (Tübingen, 2017), esp. 13–​14. 270 Langius, ‘Duae dissertationes historico-​criticae de Therapeutis et Essaeis’, 99–​166. See, in particular, the propositiones on 119 and 162. 271 Paul Ernst Lucius, Die Therapeuten und ihre Stellung in der Geschichte der Askese: Eine kritische Untersuchung der Schrift De vita contemplativa (Strassburg, 1879), 195, 197. 272 Lucius, Die Therapeuten und ihre Stellung in der Geschichte der Askese, 198. 273 Goodwin, Apparatus historico-​criticus, ed. Carpzov, 240: ‘Plane singularis est in eo Langius, viamque insistit a nemine hactenus tritam.’

334 Machielsen Scaliger’s refutation of Baronio can miss the extent to which he saw himself as the supreme expert confidently correcting a bumbling popish amateur. Similarly, when Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare composed his 1895 refutation of Lucius, he not only maintained that ‘Scaliger’s remarks … furnish in advance a sufficient reply to the critics of to-​day’, he was also confidently embracing his inner Scaliger himself.274 To my knowledge, Scaliger’s final resurgence as a witness to the Essene identity of the therapeutae came in the writings of Géza Vermès in the 1970s.275 Since then, scholars seem to have given up on this iterative debate, though they have by no means lost interest in the therapeutae themselves.276 As stated at the outset, the aim of this chapter was never to unmask the therapeutae but to illuminate the context which prompted discussion of their identity over the centuries. Despite patristic debts, the debate, especially as to the relationship between the therapeutae and Essenes, fundamentally began in the early modern period. It originated in the Catholic defence of monasticism, though the sects were later also put to other ends. Confessional motives thus acted as an important engine but as the later history shows still more clearly, the way the debate was structured also helped make it a merry-​go-​round. If this chapter has any contribution to offer to the debate itself, then it is to question its very premise. The need to explain the therapeutae in terms of another identity, whether Christian or Essene, would likely never have emerged if it had not been for Eusebius’s hallucinations.

Acknowledgements

I have incurred many debts while writing and researching this chapter, which builds on work I first did for my 2015 monograph and a 2016 article. I must first of all thank the editors of this volume, Dmitri Levitin and Ian Maclean, and the other participants in this project for their comments and feedback. I am also grateful to Lillian Datchev, Mateusz Falkowski, and Anthony Grafton for

274 Philo, About the Contemplative Life, 322. He added that ‘Scaliger’s arguments, if they told against Serrarius [sic] and his friends, tell against Lucius with double force.’ The refutation is laced with irony and sarcasm, though not with scatology. 275 Vermès, ‘Essenes and Therapeutae’, 35. 276 See e.g. the short summary in Maren R. Niehoff, Philo of Alexandria: An Intellectual Biography (New Haven, 2018), 86–​8. Joan Taylor has studied the therapeutae from a gender perspective: Joan E. Taylor, Jewish Women Philosophers of First-​Century Alexandria: Philo’s ‘Therapeutae’ Reconsidered (Oxford, 2006).

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inviting me to give a paper on the same topic at their inspiring ‘The Filologos and the Antiquarius’ conference, held at Princeton University in March 2019. Many friends and colleagues commented on various drafts of this chapter or answered questions of various kinds. In addition to the persons already mentioned, I would like to thank Kirsten Macfarlane, Madeline McMahon, Anthony Ossa-​Richardson, and Victoria Van Hyning for their comments, help, and advice. I owe a particular debt of gratitude to Joanna Weinberg who not only read through drafts of this chapter with great care but also shared with me some of her unpublished work.

­c hapter 9

Publishing a Prohibited Criticism

Richard Simon, Pierre Bayle, and Erudition in Late Seventeenth-​Century Intellectual Culture Timothy Twining The prohibition of Richard Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament in Paris in 1678 irrevocably altered Simon’s life and work: expelled from the Oratory, he would never regain the same extensive and ready access to Hebrew manuscripts and other such materials that he had enjoyed in the Congregation’s library. Where Simon had been able to make use of one of Paris’s leading learned publishers, Louis Billaine, his subsequent turn to English and Dutch presses placed him in a significantly different context. Instead of principally being interpreted as a contribution to biblical criticism in the tradition of Jean Morin, Louis Cappel, and Brian Walton, his scholarship instead became associated with other heterodox works, notably those of Baruch Spinoza or the Jansenists, which were likewise imported from the Dutch presses into France.1 This paper will present a new account of these developments by tracing the history of the publication of Simon’s works in France and the Dutch Republic and their initial reception in France, the Dutch Republic, and Rome until the mid-​1680s. It will demonstrate how a comparative perspective brings out the effects of various systems of control and censorship on learning, and especially biblical scholarship, in operation by the late seventeenth century, and what the result of this was for Simon’s work. In paying special attention to the roles played by the Journal des Sçavans (1665-​) and Pierre Bayle and the Nouvelles de la République de Lettres (1684–​1687) it will also shed new light on the early history of the learned journal. The cumulative effect of the print, intellectual, and censorial context in which Simon’s works came to be published is then brought out through a consideration of their treatment at the hands of the Roman Index. The conclusion will sketch how this new sense of the relationship between the origin of Simon’s work and its eventual publication suggests 1 For a full account of this interpretation of Simon and his work, see T. Twining, ‘Richard Simon and the Remaking of Biblical Criticism’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters 3 (2018), 421–​87. Note on abbreviations: the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres is cited throughout as nrl, followed by the date of publication, Article/​Catalogue number, and page numbers.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004462335_011

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that we need to reconsider the place of erudition in late seventeenth-​century intellectual culture and also, and more generally, how we write the history of erudition in a period in which its decline has so frequently been posited. 1

The Learned Journal and the Republic of Letters

A defining feature of the early modern ‘Republic of Letters’ was the exchange of learned news and information through epistolary communication. It was through letters that early modern scholars crossed confessional, political, and geographical boundaries, shared new manuscript discoveries, discussed philological questions, and generally kept one another current with everything curious that had occurred in the world of learning. Late seventeenth-​century scholarly culture was marked by a novel development: the inception of the learned journal. The aims and ambitions of this new medium were set by Denis de Sallo writing pseudonymously in the first issue of the Journal des Sçavans, where he outlined how the journal would contain the most recent learned news, including: summaries of recently-​published books with short, critical, discussions of their content; eulogies of deceased scholars; the results of natural-​philosophical experiments; decisions reached by secular and ecclesiastical tribunals; and, more generally, any other news worthy of the curiosity of men of letters.2 If these subjects drew naturally on the topics of epistolary commerce, the form itself differed appreciably in at least two notable ways. First, the journals were intended to appear periodically at regular intervals and, second, they were put into print circulation through an editorial process which decided the order of the articles and organized the contents with titles, tables, and indices. The result was a commercial product, its success or failure based on the rhythms of the late seventeenth-​century book trade. It is therefore unsurprising that although the model originated in Paris it became of particular significance in the Dutch Republic, where the market potential indicated by the spread of counterfeit editions of the Journal des Sçavans was confirmed by the rapid success of Pierre Bayle’s Nouvelles de la République des Lettres and its imitators.3 The large number of booksellers in the Republic offered ample 2 [Denis de Sallo], Le Journal des Sçavans (Paris, 1665), ‘L‘Imprimeur au lecteur’. 3 Jean-​Pierre Vittu, ‘Les contrefaçons du Journal des savants de 1665 à 1714’, in Les Presses grises: La contrefaçon du livre (XVIe-​X IXe siècles), ed. François Moureau (Paris, 1988), 303–​ 31; Hans Bots, ‘Le rôle des périodiques néerlandais pour la diffusion du livre (1684–​1747)’, in Le Magasin de l’univers: The Dutch Republic as the Centre of the European Book Trade, eds. C. Berkvens-​Stevelinck et al. (Leiden, 1992), 49–​70.

338 Twining material for reviews and there was no need, as in France, to obtain a privilege prior to publication.4 The proximity to booksellers and access, through them, to the international trade was especially vital for a journal to flourish. Otto Mencke’s Acta Eruditorum (1682-​1782) was dependent on Leipzig, a crucial centre of the German domestic and international book trade.5 As Bayle himself remarked, it was to some degree surprising how long it took until there was Dutch emulation of the French example.6 These learned journals by no means replaced the role of correspondence. Where the Acta Eruditorum depended on its editor Mencke organising an extensive network of local scholars to review and submit material, so too did Bayle’s Nouvelles de la République des Lettres depend in part on his correspondence, in which one finds letters submitted for direct inclusion in the journal, requests for works to be reviewed, suggestions for future issues, and general remarks on the form, content, and tone of the journal.7 This interaction had a significant implication. Although these journals were commercial enterprises, they also existed in a symbiotic relationship with their readership. However far their prefaces announced they would include all the ‘news’ of the Republic of Letters, this ‘Republic’ could only be as extensive as the sources and contacts of the author, editor, or bookseller of the journal. Studies of these journals have tended to adopt one of two strategies to consider the rise of a literary genre which existed across religious, geographical, and political boundaries and yet whose character was strongly shaped in each case by the specific circumstances of its creation. One choice has been to prioritize the form itself as the object of analysis and attempt to assess the significance of the journals for the history of the Republic of Letters and the 4 See [Pierre Bayle], ‘Préface’, in nrl (March 1684), sig. *2v. 5 Hub. Laeven, The “Acta Eruditorum” Under the Editorship of Otto Mencke (1644–​1707): The History of an International Learned Journal Between 1682 and 1707 (Amsterdam and Maarssen, 1990), 98–​113. 6 [Bayle], ‘Préface’, in nrl (March 1684), sig. *2v. This can probably also be attributed to the significant transitions occurring in the Dutch book trade in the late 1670s and early 1680s, as one generation of native Dutch publishers was replaced by another alongside the arrival of Huguenot libraire-​imprimeurs from France. See Otto S. Lankhorst, Reiner Leers (1654–​ 1714): Uitgever & Boekverkoper te Rotterdam (Amsterdam and Maarssen, 1983), 7–​9. Lankhorst here concurs with I.H. van Eeghen’s periodisation of the early modern Dutch book trade into the following periods: 1572–​1680, 1680–​1725, 1725–​1795. See I.H. van Eeghen, De Amsterdamse Boekhandel, 1680–​1725, vol. 5: De Boekhandel van de Republiek 1572–​1795 (Amsterdam, 1978), 75–​104. 7 Laeven, Acta Eruditorum, 147–​94; Elisabeth R. Labrousse, ‘Les coulisses du journal de Bayle’, in Pierre Bayle: Le Philosophe de Rotterdam, ed. Paul Dibon (Amsterdam, 1959), 97–​141.

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transmission of knowledge.8 An important counterbalance to these contributions has been a number of detailed studies and collections of studies on specific journals.9 There have been comparatively few studies, however, of the actual content of the reviews themselves that go beyond summaries of their articles, the way in which these related to the works of erudition they purported to describe, or how they shaped the reception and circulation of these works.10 These lines of inquiry matter since these journals marked a notable shift in the scope, genre, and form of learning. The learned journal added an additional layer to the transmission of erudition: where studies of earlier scholarship are often able to specify how or from whom a scholar obtained a given work or line of argument –​whether in the form of correspondence or the exchange of books, for e­ xample –​these journals presented public, frequently vernacular, accounts of scholarship with an open-​ended readership. This means it is particularly important to assess how given journals or their compilers characterized the works of scholarship they purported to summarize and, above all, how they reinterpreted or redescribed scholarly works for their own purposes, thereby playing an active role framing future scholarly inquiry. In studying the work of Richard Simon, its publication, reception, and transmission from France, to England, the Dutch Republic, and Rome, this chapter intends to make an initial contribution to this broader project.

8

9

10

See, for example, and from a wide secondary literature, Anne Goldgar, Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680–​1750 (New Haven, 1995), 54–​114; Jeanne Peiffer and Jean-​Pierre Vittu, ‘Les journaux savants, formes de la communication et agents de la construction des savoirs (17e-​18e siècles)’, Dix-​huitième siècle (2008), 281–​300. See, from a similarly wide secondary literature, Laeven, Acta Eruditorum; De “Bibliothèque Universelle et Historique” (1686–​1693), een periodiek als trefpunt van geletterd Europa, eds. Hans Bots et al. (Amsterdam and Maarssen, 1981); Henri Basnage de Beauval en de “Histoire des Ouvrages des Savans”, 1687-​1709: Verkenningen binnen de Republiek der Letteren aan de vooravond van de Verlichting, ed. Hans Bots, 2 vols. (Amsterdam, 1976). See though Hubert Bost, Un “Intellectuel” avant la lettre: Le journaliste Pierre Bayle (1647–​1706). L’actualité religieuse dans les Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (Amsterdam and Maarssen, 1994), and J.J.V.M. de Vet, ‘La “Bibliothèque Universelle et Historique”: Témoignage d’une revue à propos de la lutte autour de Spinoza à la fin du XVIIe siècle’, Lias 16 (1989), 81–​110, for two exceptions in this regard.

340 Twining 2

Louis Billaine, Richard Simon, and the Journal des Sçavans

Richard Simon’s Parisian publisher between 1674 and 1681 was Louis Billaine, a prominent libraire who had succeeded his father Jean Billaine as the sole bookseller in Paris with the privilege to print the works of the Order of Saint Benedict.11 Known to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz as one of the most capable and intelligent booksellers in Paris, Billaine was a learned man, well-​versed in Greek, Latin, Italian, and Spanish.12 He made several trips overseas in the course of his life, continued an extensive European correspondence, controlled bookshops in other cities –​most notably in Rome –​and regularly published extensive catalogues of works from Italy, Germany, the Dutch Republic, and England, which could be found at his shops in the Grand Salle du Palais and on the Rue Saint-​Jacques.13 Throughout the years from 1665 to 1681 (the year of his death) Billaine benefited from the advantage of the new Journal des Sçavans to advertise his wares, which were frequently covered by the journal. In 1678, for example, no fewer than sixteen articles informed readers to find the book ‘chez Louis Billaine’.14 These were not solely his own publications and often numbered among them were imports from his national and international trade, including, the Sanctae Rotomagensis Ecclesiae Concilia ac Synodalia Decreta (1677), edited by Jean-​François Pommeraye, from Rouen, or three works, including John Marsham’s Chronicus Canon (1672), which had been imported from England.15 If the diffusion of the Journal des Sçavans during this period was as extensive as Jean-​Pierre Vittu has indicated, then its readers spent a great deal of time reading about works which were undertaken by, or could be found at the shop of, this Parisian libraire.16 11

Henri-​Jean Martin, ‘Les Bénédictins, leurs libraires et le pouvoir. Notes sur le financement de la recherche au temps de Mabillon et Montfaucon’, Revue d’histoire de l’Église de France 43 (1957), 273–​87; Henri-​Jean Martin, Livre, pouvoirs et société à Paris au XVIIe siècle (1598–​ 1710), 2 vols. (Geneva, 1999), 2:711. 12 Christophe Brosseau to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 10 March 1679, in Leibniz, Allgemeiner Politischer und Historischer Briefwechsel, vol. 2: 1676–​1679 (Darmstadt, 1927), 435 (§419). 13 Martin, Livre, pouvoirs et société, 2:712. 14 [Jean-​Paul de la Roque], Journal des Sçavans (Paris, 1678), 24 Jan, 21, 24; 28 Feb, 76; 21 March, 114; 28 March, 120; 4 April, 129, 134; 25 April, 153; 16 May, 193, [197] [mis-​paginated as 193]; 1 Aug, 306; 15 Aug, 321; 22 Aug, 342; 29 Aug, 352; 5 Sep, 357; 21 Nov, 381. 15 [Jean-​Paul de la Roque], Journal des Sçavans (Paris, 1678), 22 Aug, 342; [Jean-​Paul de la Roque], Journal des Sçavans (Paris, 1678), 28 Feb, 76; 25 April, 153; 16 May, [197 –​mis-​ paginated as 193]. 16 Jean-​Pierre Vittu, ‘Diffusion et réception du Journal des savants de 1665 à 1714’, in La Diffusion et la lecture des journaux de langue française sous l’Ancien régime, ed. Hans Bots (Amsterdam and Maarssen, 1988), 167–​75.

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In publishing the works of the then Oratorian Richard Simon, Billaine probably expected similar treatment in the journal. This had been the case for two works Simon published before 1678. Both the Fides Ecclesiae Orientalis (1671) and the Voyage du Mont Liban (1675) received –​in the context of the journal –​ lengthy reviews by Jean Gallois and Jean-​Paul de la Roque.17 Under the auspices of Jean-​Baptiste Colbert, Gallois had replaced Denis de Sallo as compiler of the journal after de Sallo lost his position less for his sometimes critical reviews of contemporaries than for his forthright criticism of ultramontane politics and his connections to Port-​Royal.18 Gallois was more circumspect and generally preferred to summarize without extensive additional comments the works of scholarship that he reviewed. The Oratorian’s Fides Ecclesiae Orientalis was no exception to this. The work was intended by Simon to highlight the linguistic and historical shortcomings of recent contributions to the debate over the Eucharist by both Catholics, Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, and Protestants, notably Jean Claude. While Simon’s initial unpublished response to Arnauld and Nicole had caused what would become an irrevocable break between himself and Port-​Royal, the published work only emphasized one of these aims: the refutation of the Protestant Claude.19 Gallois’s review reflected this, he described Simon’s edition of Gabriel of Philadelphia’s works and underlined where they promoted the Roman Catholic side. The review concluded by underlining how Simon had shown the Eastern Christians ‘croient la Transsubstantiation et adorent l’Eucharistie’, among other remarkable things.20 Preoccupied with his role at the Académie des Sciences and in the service of Colbert, Gallois ceded authorship of the journal to de la Roque in late 1674.21 The new compiler’s treatment of Simon’s edition of Girolamo Dandini’s 17 18 19

20 21

[Jean Gallois], Journal des Sçavans (Paris, 1672), 8 Feb, 37–​40; [Jean-​Paul de la Roque], Journal des Sçavans (Paris, 1675), 20 May, 133–​8. Raymond Birn, ‘Le Journal des Savants sous l’Ancien Régime’, Journal des savants (1965), 15–​35, at 20–​1; Jean-​Pierre Vittu, ‘La formation d’une institution scientifique: le Journal des Savants de 1665 à 1714’, Journal des savants (2002), 179–​203, at 182–​4. Jacques Le Brun, ‘Entre la Perpétuité et la Demonstratio Evangelica’, in Leibniz à Paris (1672–​1676), 2 vols. (Wiesbaden, 1978), 2:1–​13; Jacques Le Brun and John D. Woodbridge, ‘Introduction’, in Richard Simon, Additions aux Recherches curieuses sur la diversité des langues et religions d’Edward Brerewood, eds. Le Brun and Woodbridge (Paris, 1983), 17–​20; John D. Woodbridge, ‘La “grande chasse aux manuscrits”, la controverse eucharistique et Richard Simon’, in Conflits politiques, controverses religieuses: Essais d’histoire européenne aux 16e-​18e siècles, eds. Ouzi Elyada and Jacques Le Brun (Paris, 2002), 168–​75. [Jean Gallois], Journal des Sçavans (Paris, 1672), 37–​40. Birn, ‘Le Journal des Savants’, 21–​23; Vittu, ‘La Formation d’une institution scientifique’, 182–​4.

342 Twining Voyage du Mont Liban was similar to Gallois’s.22 De la Roque summarized the choicest aspects of Dandini’s journey and then set these in the context of Simon’s additions. As de la Roque showed, Simon’s comments were more than merely explicative. The Oratorian’s additional annotations in the second half of the book offered a strong counterargument to Dandini’s interpretation of the Eastern churches: where Dandini and others had seen Greek and Eastern practices as simply heretical, Simon in contrast emphasized –​and de La Roque reiterated –​that such views misunderstood the Eastern churches on a number of questions since they observed even more closely than the Roman Church ‘l’ancien droit et l’ancienne discipline’.23 3

Publishing a Prohibited Critic: Richard Simon, Reinier Leers, and the Print Trade between France and the Dutch Republic

In 1679 and thereafter books bearing Billaine’s imprint were still regularly reviewed in the Journal des Sçavans. One that was absent from these pages, however, was Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament. The work had been printed and granted a privilege by 1678, yet little could be done when, chiefly at Jacques-​Bénigne Bossuet’s instigation, the book was prohibited and almost the entire print run destroyed.24 The work itself was soon available, reprinted clandestinely by Daniel Elzevier in Amsterdam in 1680.25 The edition published by Elzevier did more than simply reprint Simon’s text with some infelicities: it reframed and redescribed it in a way that was distinctly at odds with Simon’s own accounts of his project. In particular, it included a new preface, written by Noël Aubert de Versé, which prepared the reader for the extraordinary and bold contents of the work. Simon’s rare learning and vast erudition had led him

22 23 24 25

It should be noted that de la Roque did not identify Simon in the review, although the title page reads ‘Par R. S. P’. [Jean-​Paul de la Roque], Journal des Sçavans (Paris, 1675), 136. On these events, see now Twining, ‘Simon and the Remaking’, 468–​71. On this printing, see Paul Auvray, Richard Simon (1638–​1712): Étude bio-​bibliographique avec des textes inédits (Paris, 1974), 67–​8; Alphonse Willems, Les Elzevier: Histoire et annales typographiques (Brussels, 1880), 406–​8, 410. Elzevier also published Simon’s first reply to one of the critics of the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, Ezekiel Spanheim, see [Richard Simon], Réponse à la lettre de M. Spanheim (Amsterdam, 1680). Elzevier’s widow continued publishing works under his imprint from 13 Oct 1680 to March 1681 and this included a Latin translation of the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament by Noël Aubert de Versé: Richard Simon, Historia Critica Veteris Testamenti, sive Historia Textus Hebraïci à Mose ad nostra usque Tempora (Paris [=Amsterdam], 1681).

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to advance some singular –​and singularly dangerous –​arguments, de Versé warned –​and advertised to –​his readers.26 De Versé explicitly framed his redescription of Simon’s work in the context of a similar example of scholarship presented as scandal: the 1676 edition of John Marsham’s Chronicus Canon, published in Leipzig and edited by Otto Mencke.27 Mencke’s preface introduced the work as a product of vast erudition, but one tinged with dangerous consequences in its willingness to allow for the apparent derivation of Hebrew from Egyptian religion.28 De Versé transposed Mencke’s framing of Marsham’s work and applied it to Simon’s, as he noted how Simon’s extensive learning was counterbalanced by the work’s scandalous features, above all its rejection of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch.29 Other aspects of the work, de Versé allowed, were more redolent of Simon’s confessional than his heterodox purposes, such as the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament’s denial that the sacred texts were preserved by divine providence. Yet de Versé did not think Protestants should shrink from the challenge Simon’s scholarship presented: as Jerome had advised with Origen, Tertullian, and others, one should read the book –​after having bought it, presumably –​and take what was useful while ignoring what was dangerous.30 Where scholars have often posited that the later seventeenth century saw a process whereby learning became double-​edged, put to purposes beyond its original intentions, here we can briefly glimpse one aspect of a process that could have contributed to this, as erudite works were embellished and reframed –​most probably with a view to the book trade –​in contexts removed from those of their creation.31 For Simon these events had significant implications: expelled from the Oratory he had little chance in the short-​term of publishing his works in France. Meanwhile, in Holland and elsewhere in Europe the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament was now circulating in an imperfect –​and newly re-​presented –​ form. Simon had two clear alternative locations if he still sought to publish either the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament or any of the other works he had 26

[Noël Aubert de Versé], ‘Préface’, in Simon, Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (Paris [=Amsterdam], 1680), sig. §2r. 27 John Marsham, Chronicus Canon (Leipzig, 1676). On Mencke’s editing the work, see Laeven, Acta eruditorum, 38. 28 Marsham, Chronicus Canon, sigs)(2r)-(3v. 29 [De Versé], ‘Préface’, in Simon, Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, sig. §2r-​v. 30 Ibid., sigs §3v-​[§4v]. 31 For recent articulations of forms of this thesis, see Jean-​Louis Quantin, ‘Erudition and Orthodoxy: John Fell and Patristic Scholarship in Restoration Oxford’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters 1 (2016), 43–​78, at 77–​8; Jan Loop, Johann Heinrich Hottinger: Arabic and Islamic Studies in the Seventeenth Century (Oxford, 2013), 94–​5, 214–​16.

344 Twining in preparation: England or the Dutch Republic. Although Simon did initially opt for the former, publishing the Antiquitates Ecclesiae Orientalis in London in 1682, it would be in the Dutch Republic that Simon established his most enduring relationship with a single printer-​publisher, Reinier Leers, who published all of Simon’s most extensive works from 1684 to 1694, when a disagreement over Leers’s relationship with Antoine Arnauld and other Jansenists led to a permanent break in their relations.32 Leers was a central figure in the Dutch trade of his day.33 He played a particularly important role, as his relationship with Simon would show, in the international learned book market, notably becoming a key conduit between two contrasting centres of learning and publishing, the Dutch Republic and Paris, with the first book carrying his imprint appearing in the year Daniel Elzevier died.34 Although well connected with the French authorities, especially later in his career, Leers nevertheless counted among his specialities publishing the works of learned Catholics whose books could not be published in France, including, alongside Simon, those by Nicolas Malebranche and Antoine Arnauld.35 Leers made several trips to France during the 1680s, meeting Simon on at least one of them.36 He took a keen interest in promoting Simon’s work, which included seeking and facilitating Simon’s replies to his opponents, such as Isaac Vossius.37 However, being printed clandestinely, whether by Elzevier or by Leers, created notable obstacles for the circulation of Simon’s works. The book trade between France and the Dutch Republic in the late seventeenth century was

32

For Simon’s works published in England, see Auvray, Simon, 69–​70; Scott Mandelbrote, ‘Isaac Vossius and the Septuagint’, in Isaac Vossius (1618–​1689) between science and scholarship, eds. Eric Jorink and Dirk van Miert (Leiden, 2012), 85–​117, at 104–​6; Twining, ‘Simon and the Remaking’, 473–​4. On Simon and Leers, see R. Simon to J.A. Turrettini, 14 Nov 1694, 217 (§1), in Auvray, Simon; Lankhorst, Leers, 57–​9. 33 Otto S. Lankhorst, ‘Reinier Leers, een Europese Libraire te Rotterdam (1676–​1709)’, Documentatieblad Werkgroep Achttiende Eeuw 53/​54 (1982), 21–​39; Lankhorst, Leers, 15–​127. 34 Martin, Livre, pouvoirs et société, 2: 748–​53; Lankhorst, Leers, 93–​106. For Elzevier’s own extensive trade with France, see Willems, Les Elzevier, ccxxii-​ccxlvi. 35 For Leers’s later contacts with the French authorities, see Martin, Livre, pouvoirs et société, 2:752–​3. Pierre Bayle suggested in the preface to the first issue of the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres that the freedom extended to the Dutch presses made them the refuge of Catholic authors as much as Reformed ones: nrl (March 1684), ‘Préface’, sigs *2v-​*3r. 36 Simon to R. P. B[ordes], Jan 1692, in Richard Simon, Lettres choisies, ed. Antoine-​Augustin Bruzen de la Martinière, 4 vols. (Amsterdam, 1730), 4:187 (§26). 37 See, for example, Simon to unnamed, 11 Feb 1685, 215, in Auvray, Simon.

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strictly circumscribed, especially following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in October 1685.38 The trade between the two countries –​licit and illicit –​ran mainly by sea from the Dutch Republic to Rouen and then –​the most testing part of the voyage –​into Paris itself.39 The difficulties involved in importing books are reflected in correspondence of the time: writing from Rotterdam Pierre Bayle informed his brother Jacob that a combination of thorough searches and strict penalties left people wary of importing contraband books for fear of losing their whole cargo.40 Simon’s works, along with those of Arnauld, Malebranche, and others published by Leers, can be found throughout extant catalogues of books seized by the authorities.41 Although we often lack extensive direct evidence of the successes of the authorities against the wiles of the booksellers, there is, nonetheless, indirect evidence in at least two forms: comments in correspondence as to the difficulty in obtaining books published in the Dutch Republic in Paris and the strategies adopted by authors and publishers to evade detection. Complaints regarding the former are widespread throughout the early to mid-​1680s. In 1682, for example, Gallois wrote to Christiaan Huygens in The Hague requesting copies of Simon and Spinoza’s work to be sent to Paris since such works could not be found there. Although Simon’s work was unavailable Huygens could do his best to supply a copy of Spinoza’s.42 Even figures such as Jacques-​Bénigne Bossuet could be inconvenienced. Having heard that Jean Le Clerc’s response to Simon, the Sentimens de quelques Théologiens de Hollande (1685) –​containing ideas allegedly more injurious to Scripture than the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament –​had recently been published he did his best to obtain a copy as quickly as possible, writing to Claude Nicaise to find out if any such could be obtained from Geneva, since there was no possibility of finding the work in Paris.43

38

Anne Sauvy, Livres saisis à Paris entre 1678 et 1701 (The Hague, 1972), 5; Daniel Roche, Les Républicains des lettres: Gens de culture et Lumières au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1988), 29–​46; Raymond Birn, ‘Book Production and Censorship in France, 1700–​1715’, in Books and Society in History, ed. Kenneth E. Carpenter (New York, 1983), 145–​71. 39 On this trade, see Jean-​Dominique Mellot, L’Édition rouennaise et ses marchés (vers 1600 –​ vers 1730). Dynamisme provincial et centralisme parisien (Paris, 1998), 610–​36. 40 Bayle to Jacob Bayle, 12 April 1683, in Correspondance de Pierre Bayle, eds. Elizabeth Labrousse et al., 15 vols (Oxford, 1999–​2017), 3:335 (§221). 41 Sauvy, Livres saisis, §158, §164, §180, §232, §255, §311, §337, §471, §722, §723, §1048, §1056. 42 Christiaan Huygens to Jean Gallois, 19 Nov 1682, in Huygens, Oeuvres complètes, vol. 8: Correspondance 1676–​1684 (The Hague, 1899), 401–​2 (§2284). 43 Bossuet to Claude Nicaise, 11 July 1685, Correspondance de Bossuet, vol. 3: (1684–​1688), eds. Ch. Urbain and E. Levesque (Paris, 1910), 107–​9 (§335).

346 Twining Writers and publishers adopted various strategies to mislead the authorities, notably including the employment of false title-​pages with new deceptive titles, anonymous or pseudonymous authorship, and providing false places of publication. Simon’s works were no strangers to these schemes. The Elzevier edition of the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, for example, often carried the title Histoire de la religion des Juifs, et de leur établissement en Espagne et autres parties de l’Europe, où ils se sont retirés aprés la destruction de Jerusalem.44 Simon’s publications of the 1680s similarly used a whole series of pseudonyms, including ‘Origenes Adamantius’, ‘Jérôme à Costa’, ‘Jean Reuchlin’, ‘le Sr de Moni’, and others. Leers’s imprints likewise often carried false places of publication and for Simon’s works these typically involved use of the imprint ‘Francfort, Chez Frederic Arnaud’ in order to make the work less suspect in Catholic countries.45 This strategy –​the use of an imprint amenable to Catholic authorities –​was a well-​known seventeenth-​century device, and a source of enduring frustration for authorities such as the Holy Office in Rome.46 Prohibition and censorship created patterns of absence, as works that could have been the common currency of published discussion instead became the subject of subterfuge. Where Simon’s earlier works published in Paris received two full reviews in the Journal des Sçavans, this would not be 44

Rabbi Moses Levi [Richard Simon], Histoire de la religion des Juifs, et de leur établissement en Espagne et autres parties de l’Europe, où ils se sont retirés aprés la destruction de Jerusalem (Amsterdam, 1680); Sauvy, Livres saisis, §158. 45 Le Sr. de Moni [Richard Simon], Histoire critique de la Créance et des Coûtumes des Nations du Levant (‘Francfort: Frederic Arnaud’, 1684); Jérôme à Costa [Richard Simon], Histoire de l’Origine et du Progrès des Revenus Ecclesiastiques (‘Francfort: Frederic Arnaud’, 1684); Origenes Adamantius [Richard Simon], Novorum Bibliorum Polyglottorum Synopsis (‘Utrecht: Frederic Arnaud’, 1684); I.H. Ambrosius [Richard Simon], Ambrosii ad Origenem Epistola, De Novis Bibliis Polyglottis (‘Utrecht: Frederic Arnaud’, 1685); Richard Simon, Opuscula Critica adversus Isaacum Vossium (‘Edinburgh: John Calderwood’, 1685); Hieronymus le Camus [Richard Simon], Judicium de nupera Isaaci Vossii ad iteratas P. Simonii Objectiones Responsione (‘Edinburgh: John Calderwood’, 1685); Jean Reuchlin [Richard Simon], Dissertation critique sur la nouvelle bibliothèque des auteurs ecclésiastiques (‘Francfort: Frederic Arnaud’, 1688). All of these were printed by Leers in Rotterdam: see Lankhorst, Leers, 215–​17. Leers used these strategies across his publications for both Catholic and Protestant authors. See Otto S. Lankhorst, ‘Reinier Leers, Libraire-​Imprimeur à Rotterdam (1654–​1714), et ses contrefaçons’, in Les Presses grises: La contrefaçon du livre (XVIe-​X IXe siècles), ed. François Moureau (Paris, 1988), 50–​63. 46 Lankhorst, Leers, 211–​17 lists, alongside six such for Simon, other works for which Leers employed these techniques, including eight works by Antoine Arnauld, two by Pierre Bayle, and one each from Jacques Basnage, Pierre Jurieu, Isaac Papin and Pasquier Quesnel.

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the case for those published following 1678. Aside from the two short discussions of Simon’s proposal for a new Polyglot Bible the only additional review was in 1682, where three pages of the June 22 issue were given to the Antiquitates Ecclesiae Orientalis, a compendium of letters from earlier scholars together with a life of Jean Morin written by Simon. The review was critical of Simon’s biography, in which Simon had harshly criticized his Oratorian predecessor, but strongly commended the letters of those he described as the most learned men of the century, reserving especial praise for two letters from the Samaritans to Joseph Scaliger.47 As much as de la Roque’s decision to review the work could be put down to the lustre of the collection of scholars, Scaliger foremost among others including leading Catholic scholars such as Jean Morin, Lucas Holstenius, and Leo Allatius, so too do other reasons connected to the book trade explain why it can be found in de la Roque’s journal.48 Through Henri Justel Simon had had the work printed in London and it was now available in Paris at the shops of François Muguet, Antoine Dezallier, and Sebastian Mabre-​Cramoisy.49 Where the majority of Simon’s works would henceforth be imported, often illicitly, and could not be sold openly, the Antiquitates was available in the stores of some of the largest libraires of the day and, perhaps not by coincidence, could be read about in the Journal des Sçavans. This precise suggestion does involve some speculation, but the broader point requires less: where de la Roque could praise Scaliger, Morin and others as the greatest scholars of the century, the figure subsequent historians would view as their equal in de la Roque’s era was no longer able to be read –​or even reviewed –​without difficulty in France. When de la Roque was removed from the editorship of the journal he claimed, Raymond Birn notes, that it was hard to compete with the Dutch journals since they were able to speak more freely and review whichever books they chose.50 It followed, as Pierre Bayle put it in the preface to the first issue of the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, that the Dutch Republic was particularly favourable for the creation of a ‘Journal des Sçavans’.51

47

[Jean-​Paul de la Roque], Journal des Sçavans (Paris, 1682), 22 June, 183-​[6]‌(mispaginated as 184). 48 Auvray, Simon, 69–​70. 49 [de la Roque], Journal des Sçavans (1682), 183. On the printing, see Auvray, Simon, 69–​71; on Mabry-​Cramoisy, see Martin, Livre, pouvoirs et société, 2:715–​17. 50 Birn, ‘Le Journal des Savants’, 24–​5. 51 nrl (March 1684), ‘Préface’, sigs *2v-​*3r.

348 Twining 4

Pierre Bayle and the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres

The success or failure of a journal depended on a libraire-​imprimeur who was responsible for its publication and provided books to review and an able and willing author or editor. In Henri Desbordes and Pierre Bayle, the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres had both. It was the second journal launched by Henri Desbordes since he had left Saumur for Amsterdam.52 In France he had been imprisoned briefly for publishing Jurieu’s Préservatif contre le changement de religion (1680) and his move to the Dutch Republic in 1682 followed soon after.53 Desbordes’s was a printing family who specialized before and after his flight in publishing the works of members of the Reformed, notably those either based in Saumur or those connected to members of the Academy there and their distinctive theological positions.54 His business in Amsterdam continued even further in this direction, with Desbordes publishing the works of Charles Le Cène, Jean Le Clerc, and Claude Pajon, amongst others.55 Like any libraire-​imprimeur of course, Desbordes would not expect his customers to number among the members of his confession alone and the contents of the journal would reflect this. His decision to found two journals –​and his unwillingness to cede the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres to Leers in 1687 –​likewise testified to his desire to be proprietor of a successful journal. In Bayle Desbordes found an ideal redactor. Bayle had been aware of the Journal des Sçavans from its earliest years, and in time had come to level a series of specific criticisms against how it operated: the Journal discussed too few works –​many of which were already dated by the time the reviews 52

See Olivier Bloch, ‘Introduction’, in id., Parité de la vie et de la mort. La Réponse du médicin Gaultier (Paris, 1993), 27–​32, 39–​54. 53 Jean Le Clerc to Philipp van Limborch, 10 March 1682, in Jean Le Clerc, Epistolario, ed. Mario Sina, 4 vols (Florence, 1987-​1997), 1:39 (§11); I.H. van Eeghen, De Amsterdamse Boekhandel, 1680–​1725, vol. 3: Gegevens over de Vervaardigers, hun Internationale Relaties en de Uitgaven A-​M (Amsterdam, 1965), 88–​9. 54 On Desbordes, see Louis Desgraves, ‘Le rôle des imprimeurs et des éditeurs protestants émigrés, hors de France, dans la circulation des oeuvres’, in Horizons européens de la littérature française au XVIIe siècle. L’Europe: lieu d’échanges culturels? La circulation des oeuvres et des jugements au XVIIe siècle, ed. Wolfgang Leiner (Tübingen, 1988), 299–​307. 55 [Pierre Jurieu], Le janséniste convaincu de vaine sophistiquerie (Amsterdam, 1683); [Charles Le Cène], De l’état de l’homme aprés le peché et de sa prédestination au salut (Amsterdam, 1684); Claude Pajon, Remarques sur l’avertissement pastoral (Amsterdam, 1685). Le Clerc had almost certainly known Desbordes from his time in Saumur. See Archives Départementales Maine-​et-​Loire, notary records of Jean Baranger, 5E69/​375, fol. 15r. I should like to thank Margreet Dieleman and David van der Linden for information regarding this.

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appeared –​and those on the basis of the editor’s predilections, rather than because they were either the best or universally well-​received.56 The lengthy preface to the first issue of the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres was designed to pre-​empt the objections of similar detractors. There, Bayle, aware of the possible charges of confessional bias, outlined from the outset that he would treat Catholic and Reformed works alike in the pages of the journal without partiality. He also underlined how the print trade of the Republic provided a wide range –​wider than Paris, most notably –​of works to review.57 It was Bayle’s local context in Rotterdam that meant he played a crucial role in the dissemination of Richard Simon’s work. Within a short time following his arrival in the city in late 1681 Bayle had familiarized himself with the prominent local booksellers and with one of these, the man who, as we have seen, would become Simon’s Dutch publisher, Reinier Leers, he developed a long-​ term friendship and, on occasion, working relationship.58 Leers published one of Bayle’s earliest works, the Pensées diverses (1682), disguising it, as he would Simon’s, with a false imprint, and within a short time Bayle had also acted as a go-​between for Leers in arranging for the publication of works by Jacques Basnage, Daniel de Larroque and Jacques Lenfant.59 These collaborations set the groundwork for the future in which Leers became Bayle’s principal publisher.60 Following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, moreover, Leers’s

56 57 58 59

60

Jacob Bayle to Pierre Bayle, 11 Aug 1667, Bayle Correspondance, 1:19–​20 (§7); Pierre Bayle to Jacob Bayle, 17 Aug 1675, Bayle Correspondance, 2:281 (§109). nrl (March 1684), ‘Préface’, sigs *2v-​*3r. Elizabeth Labrousse, Pierre Bayle, vol. 1: Du pays de Foix à la cité d’Erasme (Dordrecht, 1985), 178–​83; Hubert Bost, Pierre Bayle (Paris, 2006), 172–​9. [Pierre Bayle], Lettre à M. L. A. D. C. Docteur de Sorbonne. Où il est prouvé par plusieurs raisons tirées de la Philosophie, et de la Théologie, que les Comètes ne sont point le présage d’aucun malheur (Cologne: Pierre Marteau [=Rotterdam: Reinier Leers], 1682). For the history of the ‘Cologne: Pierre Marteau’ imprint, see Léonce Janmart de Brouillant, La liberté de la presse en France aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles: Histoire de Pierre du Marteau imprimeur à Cologne (Paris, 1888); for its use by Leers, see Lankhorst, Leers, 36–​8. These works were: [Jacques Basnage], Examen des méthodes proposées par Mrs de l’Assemblée du Clergé de France, en l’année 1682 (Cologne, 1684); [Daniel de Larroque], Le Proselyte abusé: ou Fausses vûës de Mr. Brueys dans l’Examen de la séparation des Protestans (Rotterdam, 1684); [Jacques Lenfant], Considérations générales sur le Livre de Mr. Brueys (Rotterdam, 1684). See Labrousse, Bayle, 1:182; Lankhorst, Leers, 144–​5, 213–​14; Jacques Basnage to Bayle, Oct-​Nov 1683, Bayle Correspondance, 3:404 (§233); Daniel de Larroque to Bayle, Oct-​Nov 1683, Bayle Correspondance, 3:409 (§234); Jacques Lenfant to Le Clerc, Dec 1683, Le Clerc, Epistolario, 1:111 (§29). Lenie van Lieshout, The making of Pierre Bayle’s Dictionnaire historique et critique (Amsterdam and Maarssen, 2001); Lankhorst, Leers, 51–​69.

350 Twining shop played host to a regular meeting of learned French Protestants that centered on Bayle, Basnage, and the latter’s brother Henri Basnage de Beauval.61 5

Richard Simon, Learning, and Commerce in the Nouvelles de la République des Letters

Bayle’s position as compiler of the journal and close cooperation with Leers intersected with his own longstanding interest in Simon’s work. This had been in evidence as early as the mid-​1670s, where Bayle’s correspondence with Vincent Minutoli and his brother Jacob Bayle shows him closely following the then Oratorian’s earliest publications.62 It was also at this time that Bayle met Henri Justel, Simon’s Huguenot acquaintance and a man responsible for informing many others, most notably Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, about the progress of Simon’s work.63 Justel and Bayle would subsequently exchange news and information about Simon’s respective publications in England and France, on occasion sending each other copies of these and other works via an intermediary, the merchant Nicolas Maurice.64 Bayle performed the same role for others, albeit from a more one-​sided position. His correspondence with Daniel de Larroque in Paris and Jacques Lenfant in Heidelberg finds him being requested precise information concerning Simon throughout the period in which he composed the journal.65 The Nouvelles de la République des Lettres saw Bayle provide the public, commercial side of these epistolary concerns, as he combined learning with due attention to the commercial demands of the print trade. His discussions of works reprinted in the Dutch Republic frequently highlighted either the enduring value of the work in question or emphasized how it improved on the work’s previous editions. Two cases from April 1686 illustrate this. In this issue Article iv was dedicated to a new edition of the Opera omnia (1686) of John Lightfoot, which had just been published by Leers.66 Bayle introduced the work with a 61 62 63 64 65 66

Gerald Cerny, ‘Jacques Basnage and Pierre Bayle: An Intimate Collaboration in Refugee Literary Circles and in the Affairs of the Republic of Letters, 1685–​1706’, in De l’humanisme aux lumières, Bayle et le protestantisme, eds. M. Magdelaine et al. (Oxford, 1996), 495–​507. See, e.g. Bayle to Vincent Minutoli, 28 May 1675, Bayle Correspondance, 2:176 (§93); Bayle to Jacob Bayle, 29 June 1675, Bayle Correspondance, 2:213 (§101). On Justel, Simon, and Leibniz, see Twining, ‘Simon and the Remaking’, 468–​71. H.C. Hazewinkel, ‘Pierre Bayle à Rotterdam’, Pierre Bayle: Le Philosophe de Rotterdam, ed. Paul Dibon (Amsterdam, 1959), 20–​47, at 26. Daniel de Larroque to Pierre Bayle, Aug-​Sept 1684, Bayle Correspondance 5:69 (§327); Pierre Bayle to Jacques Lenfant, 5 October 1684, Bayle Correspondance 5:113–​14 (§341). John Lightfoot, Opera omnia, 2 vols. (Rotterdam, 1686).

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summary history of its printing: although he admitted the work had been in progress for a long time, he proceeded to explain that such important books lost none of their value with age. The delay, moreover, largely resulted from the correctness of this new edition.67 In Article vi, Bayle reviewed Arnout Leers’s recent second edition of John Spencer’s De legibus Hebraeorum (1686).68 Bayle’s review began right where a bookseller would want by discussing the advantages of Leers’s edition, where, among much else, it corrected the faults of earlier versions and added further notes and corrections the author had placed at the end of the original edition.69 In the case of the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament this conjunction between learning and commerce took on a notable urgency. In December 1684 Bayle devoted an extensive article to Leers’s edition of the book.70 This edition had a new preface that outlined how it superseded the existing editions and explained why Protestant readers should not avoid reading it for fear of Catholic polemic.71 Bayle did more than simply comment on this new edition: he paraphrased –​in some instances even transposing word-​for-​word –​ the first two paragraphs of the new preface. Between this and February 1685’s issue, however, news had reached Rotterdam that Amsterdam’s ‘Compagnie des Libraires’ were printing a counterfeit edition of Leers’s text.72 The Nouvelles de la République des Lettres soon contained information warning readers to avoid purchasing that edition, advertising that Leers had already prepared a further edition to supersede it that would contain a ‘curious [curieuse]’ additional text, the ‘Response’ to Simon’s work from ‘Pierre Ambrun’.73 Subsequent editions of Simon’s work, and Bayle’s reviews, informed the reader not to accept any editions as legitimate unless they came from Leers’s press.74 There were other ways in which Bayle’s journal met the requirements of the trade alongside providing intellectual news. The Nouvelles de la République 67 68

nrl (April 1686), Art. iv, 408–​9. See further nrl (May 1686), 598. John Spencer, De legibus Hebraeorum ritualibus, et earum rationibus (The Hague, 1686). Arnout was Reinier’s brother: see Lankhorst, Leers, 10–​12. All subsequent references to ‘Leers’ refer to Reinier unless stated otherwise. 69 nrl (April 1686), Art. vi, 430. 70 nrl (December 1684), Art. xi, 506–​20. 71 ibid., 507–​13; Richard Simon, Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (Rotterdam, 1685), sigs *2r-​[**4v]. This and subsequent references will specify which edition of the Histoire critique is being referred to. 72 Richard Simon, Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (Amsterdam, 1685). 73 nrl (February 1685), 213; nrl (March 1685), Cat. vi, 331–​5. This, the ‘seventh’ edition, was advertised on the verso of the title page in Leers’s subsequent editions. See Simon, Histoire critique (Rotterdam, 1685), sig. [*1v]. 74 Simon, Histoire critique (Rotterdam, 1685), sig. [*1v]; nrl (March 1685), Cat. vi, 331.

352 Twining des Lettres, like the Journal des Sçavans, alerted readers not simply to the existence of new works, but informed them where they could buy them. This mattered to contemporary booksellers. In June 1684 Bayle reviewed the Bibliotheca Anti-​Trinitariorum (1684), where, having provided the details of the imprint, Bayle added that it could be found in Amsterdam at Henri Wetstein’s store.75 How do we know this was important for Wetstein? The answer can be found six months later. In April 1685 Jean Le Clerc wrote to Bayle with a message from Wetstein: the latter had given Le Clerc a copy of the Socinian Stanisław Lubieniecki’s Historia Reformationis Polonicae (1685) for Bayle and wanted to make certain Bayle would review the work and mention that the book could be found in Wetstein’s shop.76 It was no doubt to Wetstein’s displeasure that Bayle overlooked the latter request in May’s issue.77 In the case of Simon’s work this subsidiary role played by the journal was similarly important in decoding for readers how and where to purchase books published by Leers that contained imprints with false places of publication, as Bayle told his readers that while the imprint might read ‘Francfort, chez Frederic Arnaud’ they should nonetheless know that work could be found in Rotterdam, in Leers’s shop.78 The history of print culture is here also part of the intellectual history of late seventeenth-​century learned culture. While Bayle indicated where readers could find books with false imprints relating to their place of publication, he also revealed –​albeit often discretely –​who lay behind works printed anonymously or with pseudonymous imprints. This was something Bayle alerted his correspondents to: writing to Theodor Jansson van Almeloveen in early 1686 Bayle informed him that if one read the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres carefully one would uncover a number of authors behind anonymous works.79 The best example of this in Simon’s case –​and in the setting of pseudonymous publication –​came in the May 1684 issue when in two consecutive articles Bayle reviewed Simon’s Histoire critique de la Créance et des Coûtumes des Nations du Levant (1684) and Histoire de l’Origine et du Progrès des Revenus Ecclésiastiques (1684). The former claimed to be by ‘le Sieur de Moni’, one of Simon’s apparently less-​deceptive pseudonyms. In the review Bayle implied Simon was the author on a number of occasions: he noted how Simon had already published a considerable contribution to the debate between Arnauld 75 76 77 78 79

nrl (June 1684), Art. viii, 393. Jean Le Clerc to Pierre Bayle, 14 April 1685, Bayle Correspondance, 5:341 (§411). nrl (May 1685), May, Cat. x, 567. For cases of this, see nrl (May 1684), Art. ii, 228; nrl (May 1684), Art. iii, 243. Pierre Bayle to Theodor Jansson van Almeloveen, 7 March 1686, 307, Bayle Correspondance 6:307 (§529).

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and Claude on the subject of transubstantiation; he discussed Thomas Smith’s recent criticism of Simon and the responses this work made to Smith’s criticisms; finally, he concluded with a reference to Simon’s edition of the Voyage du Mont Liban.80 There were ample hints, therefore, for the reader to deduce that ‘le Sieur de Moni’ was ‘Le P. Simon’. The work in the subsequent review, the Histoire de l’Origine et du Progrès des Revenus Ecclésiastiques, carried a different pseudonym: ‘Jerôme à Costa’. In the first paragraph Bayle remarked that the ‘Jerôme à Costa’ referred to here was surely the same as the ‘le Sieur de Moni’ of the preceding article, where the probable ascription was confirmed by the character of the two works, their precise and fair spirit, and their uncommon degree of learning.81 The most extensive role Bayle played in the printing, publishing, and publicizing of Simon’s work came in the case of Simon’s Novorum Bibliorum Polyglottorum Synopsis, published in 1684 under the pseudonym ‘Origenes Adamantius’.82 Written in the form of a letter to ‘I. H. Ambrosius’ and dated to the 20 August of that year, Simon set out a detailed proposal for a new polyglot edition of the Bible, which aimed to improve upon the editions of Paris and London.83 He followed this with a second letter, a reply from ‘Ambrosius’ to ‘Origenes’, which commented on the progress made since the first, and repeated his proposals with some additional suggestions.84 In his reviews, Bayle explained and clarified at some length the contents of each tract.85 More notably, he drew out and emphasized a further feature of the Synopsis. This pamphlet was headed with an address from the bookseller to the reader, which reiterated that it was a request for suggestions to improve the prospective polyglot and gave a list of booksellers to which the reader might send their suggestions.86 Bayle reiterated the request, and encouraged 80 nrl (May 1684), Art. ii, 233–​4, 242–​3. 81 nrl (May 1684), Art. iii, 244. 82 [Simon], Novorum Bibliorum Polyglottorum Synopsis, 3. 83 See further Twining, ‘Simon and the Remaking’, 481–​4. 84 [Simon], Ambrosii ad Origenem Epistola. 85 nrl (October 1684), Art. xiii, 295–​301; nrl (January 1685), Art. ix, 69–​80. 86 [Simon], Novorum Bibliorum Polyglottorum Synopsis, sig. [A1v]. The four booksellers were Daniel Horthemels (Paris), Jean de Beaulieu (London), Johann David Zunner (Frankfurt), and Reiner Leers (Rotterdam). In addition to Leers, at least two of the other three booksellers listed here played further roles in the circulation of Simon’s books throughout Europe in the mid-​1680s. De Beaulieu, who by 1684 had established a shop on St. Martin’s Lane in London, was listed on some imprints of Simon’s Histoire de l’Origine et du Progrès des Revenus Ecclésiastiques and Histoire critique de la Créance et des Coûtumes des Nations du Levant. See Trinity College, Cambridge, L.13.28 and U.24.30, respectively. On de Beaulieu, see Katherine Swift, ‘ “The French-​Booksellers in the Strand”: Huguenots in the London

354 Twining his readers to send in their comments. In the review of the Epistola Bayle went further still. He updated his readers that Leers had shown him the great number of replies that the request had elicited, the majority of them from learned Protestants. But he also noted some ‘bons Protestans’ were nervous since they suspected the Catholic compiler of the prospective polyglot would use the scheme in favour of the furtherance of that religion. Bayle assuaged their fears: he assured them the author of the proposal would not conduct himself in such a way, and he then explained at length why the history of the biblical text, particularly its transmission through scribal reproduction, demanded an embrace of the textual and philological learning embodied in the polyglot.87 6

Richard Simon, Jean Le Clerc, and Confessional Division in the Republic of Letters

Only Nicolas Malebranche, Antoine Arnauld, and Pierre Jurieu received more articles and catalogue entries for their works in Bayle’s Nouvelles de la République des Lettres than Richard Simon.88 The lengthiest reviews –​notably those for the Histoire critique de la Créance et des Coûtumes des Nations du Levant and the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament –​extensively summarized their content, explained the work’s print history, and placed it in the context of the contemporary debates to which it contributed.89 Bayle’s appreciation and exposition of Simon’s learning was notable, and for contemporaries could even be suspected of affecting the circulation of the Nouvelles de la République itself. After entering France relatively freely between May and December 1684, the start of 1685 saw a change on the part of the French authorities, who began to prevent its entry into France.90 Commenting on these events, François Janiçon book trade, 1685–​1730’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland 25 (1990), 123–​39, at 125–​6. Horthemels, meanwhile, was one of Leers’s contacts (first in Brussels and then later in Paris), played an important role in the Roman Index’s encounter with Simon’s work, and appeared on an imprint of Simon’s Fides Ecclesiae Orientalis in 1686. See Reinier Leers to Nicolas Malebranche, 11 June 1685, 226 (§1), in Lankhorst, Leers; Richard Simon, Fides Ecclesiae Orientalis (Paris, 1686); and below, 361-​2. On Zunner, a prominent bookseller in Frankfurt and correspondent of Leibniz, see Lexikon des gesamten Buchwesens, vol. 3: Petreius-​Zyprische Schrift. Register, eds. Karl Löffler and Joachim Kirchner (Leipzig, 1937), 641. 87 nrl (January 1685), Art. ix, 77–​9. 88 See Bost, Un “Intellectuel” avant la lettre, 246–​7, 287–​9, 301, 327–​8. 89 nrl (May 1684), Art. ii, 228–​43; nrl (December 1684), Art. xi, 506–​20. 90 Labrousse, Bayle, 1:190; Bost, Un “Intellectuel” avant la lettre, 111–​13; François Janiçon to Bayle, 2 Feb 1685, Bayle Correspondance, 5:238–​9 (§383).

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provided three reasons why the journal’s free circulation might have been impeded, the second of which highlighted the great esteem in which Bayle held Simon’s scholarship and how far Bayle seemed to agree with Simon’s opinions.91 Throughout this period Bayle recognized the merits of Simon the critic.92 In his review of the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament Bayle made out to be perplexed as to why the work had been forbidden in Paris when large parts of it, especially those concerning the role of church tradition, appeared strongly favourable to the Catholic cause. The most probable reason, he averred, was that someone who penetrated so learnedly into such sensitive subjects always ran the risk of being rejected initially before becoming widely accepted. Simon was like Jerome: he had risked the opprobrium of contemporaries, but in the long term he would come to receive praise and esteem.93 In each catalogue entry and review until mid-​1685, Bayle emphasized Simon’s moral, in addition to his intellectual, qualities, arguing that Simon was remarkably free from odium theologicum.94 Bayle put this claim to use in two ways. First, as we saw in the case of the Simon’s synopsis for a new polyglot edition of the Bible, and also evident in the articles devoted to the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, Bayle encouraged Protestants to read and engage with Simon’s work, despite the fact that he was a Catholic.95 Second, however, Bayle also used his interpretation of Simon’s apparent confessional neutrality for his own confessional purposes, demonstrating how Simon’s work could be taken to undermine the claims of other Roman Catholics and the Roman Catholic Church, more generally. The Histoire critique de la Créance et des Coûtumes des Nations du Levant showed how far removed the Roman Church was from antiquity, and how misleading in this instance the whole concept of tradition could be.96 The journal’s serial form gave Bayle this polemical flexibility: where

91

92

93 94 95 96

Janiçon to Bayle, 2 Feb 1685, Bayle Correspondance 5:238–​9 (§383). Pierre Rainssant would tell Bayle five months later that the journal had since become so scarce that one could only read it by borrowing copies from others: Rainssant to Bayle, 12 July 1685, Bayle Correspondance, 5:426 (§439). For recent comments on Bayle and criticism to this point in his career, and a subsequent discussion that underlines his ‘promotion’ of ‘Simonian’ biblical criticism, see Jean Bernier, ‘Pierre Bayle and Biblical Criticism’, in Scriptural Authority and Biblical Criticism in the Dutch Golden Age: God’s Word Questioned, eds. Dirk van Miert et al. (Oxford, 2017), 240–​56, at 248–​52. nrl (December 1684), Art. xi, 509–​12. nrl (April 1684), 206, 207–​8. nrl (October 1684), Art. viii, 295–​301; nrl (January 1685), Art. ix, 69–​80. nrl (May 1684), Art. ii, 243.

356 Twining in the context of the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament he had disparaged the authorities in Paris for failing to recognize Simon’s appeals to tradition could be taken to favour their position, in the case of the Histoire critique de la Créance et des Coûtumes des Nations du Levant he wielded Simon’s ecclesiastical scholarship to undermine directly the Catholic cause. Bayle’s extensive treatment of the content of Simon’s works was subject to a change of emphasis, one coterminous with the biblical critic’s decision to engage repeatedly the Protestants Isaac Vossius and Jean Le Clerc in extensive and increasingly vituperative debates. In Article vii of the April 1685 issue Bayle struck the first notes of concern. In reviewing Simon’s response to Vossius, Bayle identified a feature of the dispute between the two which, he implied, stood for many learned disputes of the time: Simon and Vossius’s erudition meant that they could always find –​or at least keep repeating –​the arguments necessary to support their positions and not yield to their opponent’s point of view.97 For Bayle this provided a reason why polemical debate in the Republic of Letters generally degenerated from initially polite exchanges to ones increasingly filled with anger or vituperation.98 The contest between Simon and Vossius had undoubtedly followed this pattern: by the later works Vossius had accused Simon of favouring Spinozism and Simon had responded by arguing Vossius preferred apocryphal texts to those accepted by the church.99 Bayle’s article had a short addendum, in which he wrote that he had recently received a letter via a friend from a ‘M. Saldenus’. This was Willem Salden, a minister in the Dutch Republic, who in 1684 had published his Otia theologica in Amsterdam.100 A chapter in this work had dealt with the subject of the authorship of the Pentateuch, strongly criticising Simon’s apparent denial of Mosaic authorship.101 Simon abruptly dismissed Salden in the new preface to the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, and refused to acknowledge the author was worthy of a scholarly reply.102 In his addendum, however, Bayle informed his readers that although he had been sent a letter that defended Salden from Simon’s rebuke, it would not be published, since Salden, not wanting to render

97 98 99 100

nrl (April 1685), Art. vii, 407–​8. Ibid., 408. On this debate, see Mandelbrote, ‘Vossius and the Septuagint’, 100–​9. Willem Salden, Otia Theologica (Amsterdam, 1684). The work had been sent to Bayle for review in the nrl by Jean Le Clerc: Le Clerc to Bayle, 8 June 1684, Bayle Correspondance, 4:163 (§285). For the review, see nrl (June 1684), Art. vi, 375–​89. 101 Salden, Otia Theologica, 18–​36. 102 Simon, Histoire critique (Rotterdam: Leers, 1685), sigs **3v-​[**4v].

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the invective more violent still, had prevented Bayle from doing so, a decision the journalist could only praise.103 Between these two alternatives, it was that of Vossius, rather than Salden, which Simon and his opponents tended to choose in the following two years. Simon’s increasingly strong rhetoric against his Protestant opponents struck at the way in which Bayle had used a posture of neutrality to further his confessional commitments. Where the relative liberty of the Dutch print trade had allowed Bayle freely to use the works of Malebranche, Arnauld, and Simon to provide direct and indirect critiques of Catholic belief and contemporary France, it nonetheless became much more problematic when Simon used that same freedom to criticize the Reformed religion and the members of that faith. These exchanges meant that Bayle could no longer describe Simon’s demeanour as praiseworthy, preferring instead to pass over such matters in silence. His correspondence, however, reveals how his views had changed: in a letter to Jean Bruguière de Naudis Bayle underlined his displeasure that Simon conducted himself with such ferocity, not just against his adversaries, but all Protestants.104 Bayle had not yet broken irrevocably with Pierre Jurieu, and in a review of the latter’s L’Accomplissement des prophéties (1686) noted how Simon, in his Réponse au livre intitulé Sentimens de quelques Théologiens de Hollande (1686), had conducted himself in a ‘very shocking’ manner.105 Jurieu’s subsequent rebuke of Simon treated the latter as he deserved, Bayle later wrote to Vincent Minutoli. The biblical scholar was at root ‘un impie’ let loose ‘like a horse, or like an enraged mastiff’ among the Reformed.106 Bayle’s treatment of Simon from early 1685 onwards was further complicated by the role played by the Arminian Jean Le Clerc. In November that year Bayle reported that those readers who had written complaining of Simon’s apparently unfair treatment of a Protestant scholar were mistaken since it 1 03 nrl (April 1685), Art. vii, 412. 104 Bayle to Jean Bruguière de Naudis, 26 Nov 1685, Bayle Correspondance, 6:118 (§486). 105 nrl (March 1686), Art. vi, 296: ‘Le dernier chapitre du I. tome regard M. Simon qui s’est emporté d’une manière très-​choquante contre M. Jurieu dans sa réponse aux Sentimens de quelques Théologiens’. For Simon’s criticism of Jurieu, see [Richard Simon], Réponse au Livre intitulé Sentimens de quelques Théologiens de Hollande sur l’Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament (Rotterdam, 1686), 218–​21. 106 Pierre Bayle to Vincent Minutoli, 8 July 1686, Bayle Correspondance, 7:13–​14 (§593): ‘Vous aurez pû voir dans L’Accomplissement des prophéties de Mr Jurieu, que ce Mr Simon s’est fait des affaires avec lui. On l’a traité comme il le mérite; car c’est dans le fond un impie, qui pour faire sa cour aux persécuteurs de France, s’est déchainé sur nous, comme un cheval, ou comme un dogue enragé, dans son dernier livre’. For Jurieu’s criticism of Simon, see [Pierre Jurieu], L’Accomplissement des prophéties ou la delivrance prochaine de l’Église, 2 vols. (Rotterdam, 1686), 1:354–​74.

358 Twining was Le Clerc himself who was to blame for the acrimonious confessional hue the debate between the two had taken on.107 This was by no means the first time Bayle had been critical of Le Clerc’s work on confessional or theological grounds. Le Clerc’s Entretiens sur diverse matières de théologie (1684), Bayle had warned, contained any number of outbursts against ‘standard theology [theologie ordinaire]’ and openly attacked the Trinity and Incarnation.108 The boldness of the Sentimens de quelques Théologiens de Hollande, similarly, would only serve to render the Arminians more odious; the best thing Calvinists could do would be to distance themselves from the sect.109 Bayle’s concerns on this score reflected both his criticism of Le Clerc’s approach to the inspiration of Scripture, and also the potential risk posed to their religion should Protestants risk holding or be associated with such doctrines.110 In his final article on Simon in the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres Bayle could return to his preferred ground.111 The second of Simon’s replies to Le Clerc was bound after a piece in which Simon criticized the opinions of fellow Catholics –​notably Louis Ellies Du Pin –​and Spinoza on the question of the inspiration of Scripture.112 Bayle had little objection to explaining in great detail how Simon and other Catholics differed from one another in their views of the biblical text. He had less still, moreover, reporting Simon’s subtle criticism of Spinoza. The review ended, and here one may judge Bayle grateful, with a note that said the latest response to Le Clerc was not yet printed and so could not be commented upon.113 The Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, and the depiction of Simon’s works found therein, was therefore the product of a series of demands that could lead in different directions: Bayle at once had to meet the requirements of the print trade while also fitting his reviews to his own learned and polemical objectives. Where the former owed most to his relationship to Reinier Leers, the latter was found both in Bayle’s –​especially initial –​appreciation of Simon’s scholarship and the way in which he attempted to wield Simon’s work to meet his confessional commitments, a task that became more difficult as Simon’s arguments with his Protestant adversaries progressed.

1 07 108 109 110 111 112

nrl (November 1685), Art. viii, 1258–​9. Bayle to Le Clerc, 23 April 1685, Bayle Correspondance, 5:345 (§413). Bayle to Jacques Lenfant, 6 July 1685, Bayle Correspondance, 5:420 (§436). Pierre Bayle to Jean Le Clerc, 18 July 1685, Bayle Correspondance, 5:430–​2 (§441). nrl (December 1686), Art. vii, 1446–​55. [Richard Simon], Lettre à Monsieur l’Abbé P[irot]. D. et P. en Th. touchant l’Inspiration des Livres Sacrés (Rotterdam, 1687), 31–​7, 45–​8. See further Levitin’s chapter in this volume. 113 nrl (December 1686), December, Art. vii, 1455.

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359

Richard Simon and the Roman Index

As the authorities in France, so would those in Rome come be unnerved by Bayle’s reviews of Simon’s works in the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres.114 This, however, only came in 1689, when Bayle’s journal was the subject of censure, and when Simon himself had already been the subject of a lengthy inquest in Rome. The case of Simon’s treatment at the hands of the Congregation of the Index presents an important contrast to the Parisian and Dutch contexts we have hitherto focused on. Not least, this was due to the way in which Simon’s works posed acute challenges for the Index owing precisely to the complicated print history outlined thus far, as Catholic authorities far removed from the Northern European centre of print attempted to track down and uncover what they could about Simon’s work. Charting these attempts provides a glimpse not only of how the Index functioned during this period, but also how works of erudition were received and understood in a Roman setting and how the print culture we have hitherto examined could shape this process. Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament first came to Rome’s attention in 1682, when a copy of Simon’s work in the 1680 Amsterdam printing was passed on to the Secretary of the Index, Giacomo Ricci, and sent to be reviewed by Laurentius Boulboul, a member of the Order of Clerics Regular Minor (Caracciolini) and a frequent consultor for the Index throughout the 1670s and early 1680s.115 Boulboul was critical of aspects of Simon’s work, notably its implications for the Pentateuch’s Mosaicity, Simon’s account of the extent of textual variation between the different versions of the text (especially his references to the errors contained in the great manuscript of the Septuagint, Codex Vaticanus), and his apparent diminution of the authority of the Vulgate.116 Boulboul was more generally positive in his appraisal of Simon’s work: he underlined Simon’s 114 See Marta Fattori, ‘Le censure di Antonio Baldigiani alla rivista “Nouvelles de la République des Lettres” di Pierre Bayle’, Nouvelles de la République des Lettres 26 (2006), 105–​21, at 114–​ 19; J. M. De Bujanda, Index des livres interdits, vol. 11: Index librorum prohibitorum 1600–​ 1966 (Geneva, 2002), 115. Both authorities, it is worth noting, were audiences Bayle had in mind when writing his reviews. See his ‘Préface’, in nrl (March 1684), sig. *5r. 115 Archivio della Congregazione per la Dottrina della Fede [henceforth acdf], Diario 7, 14 April 1682, 159-​60, where the censura is committed to Boulboul, with the return of Boulboul’s verdict subsequently reported on 2 June 1682 (162). All references to materials held by the acdf are from the archives of the Congregation of the Index. For an earlier account of this initial censure of the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament by the Index, see Mandelbrote, ‘Vossius and the Septuagint’, 99–​109. Giacomo Ricci was Secretary from 1676–​1684. On the Index generally in this period see, for now, Elisa Rebellato, La fabbrica dei divieti. Gli indici dei libri proibiti da Clemente VII a Benedetto XIV (Milan, 2008). 116 acdf, Protocolli rr, fols 411r-​412v.

360 Twining erudition, discussed how his ideas undermined Protestant tenets regarding scriptural integrity, and concluded that Simon’s book ought to be permitted after correcting the suspect passages.117 This view was evidently not shared by the members of the Index, however, and the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament was prohibited by the Congregation.118 This was only the start of the Index’s engagement with Simon’s work. In September 1685 the Secretary Giulio Maria Bianchi reported that a ‘very dangerous work’ written in French, the Histoire critique de la Créance et des Coûtumes des Nations du Levant, had been brought to his attention.119 Its censure was entrusted to Emmanuel Schelstrate, who returned a resoundingly negative verdict. Schelstrate outlined that the censure would become much too long were it to focus on enumerating every mistake in the work, and focused instead on the author’s serious doctrinal errors and additional misunderstandings on the subjects of the practice of confession, simony, and the possibility of reconciling the Nestorian and Roman Catholic views on Christ’s nature.120 These positions, Schelstrate outlined, would have been serious enough were they a direct attack from a heretic, but the author’s claims to be a Catholic only rendered it a more serious threat: few were more dangerous than those who used the cover of orthodoxy to spread such errors.121 Schelstrate’s condemnation of the work itself was categorical, but it was also lacking a precise target beyond the text itself, for both he, and the Index, failed to detect who was behind the pseudonym ‘Le Sieur de Moni’. The subterfuge Simon had had recourse to in the Dutch Republic had succeeded in deceiving the censors, and they had not yet been able to read Bayle’s Nouvelles de la République des Lettres in such a way as to decipher the work’s true author.122 The advance of theses deemed unacceptable for Catholic scholarship was likewise repeated shortly after in the case of Simon’s Novorum Bibliorum Polyglottorum Synopsis. Having been reported to the Secretary in early 1686 the Congregration took two decisive steps. First, they ordered the censure of the

1 17 acdf, Protocolli rr, fol. 412v. 118 acdf, Diario 8, 9 Feb 1683, 4; De Bujanda, Index librorum prohibitorum, 11:837, lists the 1678 edition, rather than the 1680. 119 acdf, Diario 8, 8 Sep 1685, 77, ‘Secret. dixit apud se recusatum fuisse … valde perniciosum librum gallico idiomate’. Giulio Maria Bianchi was Secretary from 1684–​1707. 120 acdf, Protocolli vv, fols 40r-​41r. 121 acdf, Protocolli vv, fol. 41r-​v. 122 For the prohibition of the work, see, acdf, Diario 8, 3 December 1685, 97; De Bujanda, Index librorum prohibitorum, 11:836.

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work to be carried by Raphael Fabretti.123 Like Schelstrate, Fabretti was disconcerted by the suggestion that the author was a Catholic, suggesting instead that he strongly suspected it was the deceitful work of a heretic, especially on account of the book’s attitude to the Vulgate.124 Fabretti focused his whole censure on this subject, discussing at length the ways in which the claims it made regarding the Vulgate’s shortcomings evidently contradicted the stipulations of the Fourth Session of the Council of Trent. He explained that although he did not deny the possibility that the Vulgate could err, it nonetheless had to be insisted that the Church could not err in its decision regarding that text’s authority. Above all, a private individual, rather than the Church, could not be given the liberty to judge arbitrarily which variant readings ought or ought not be preferred to others.125 On this basis Fabretti insisted the work be prohibited, adding that this should be done none too soon, since the author requested subscriptions to fund the work, and they should act fast to prevent any Catholics from supporting the project.126 The second move the Congregation made was to investigate the projected polyglot and who was behind it. To do so, they proceeded as they had done some years earlier in the case of Spinoza’s works: they had the Secretary write to an ecclesiastical representative in Northern Europe, in this case the Papal Internuncio in Flanders, Sebastiano Antonio Tanara, and ordered him to find out what he could about the work and its author.127 Tanara took the Congregation’s orders seriously, responding to the Congregation’s request by detailing that he had written to the Nuncio in France, Angelo Ranuzzi and, in the Low Countries, to the Apostolic Vicar of the Dutch Mission in order to find out more information.128 Tanara benefited from a quick reply from Ranuzzi, who had tracked down the bookseller Daniel Horthemels –​one of those listed in the prospectus –​who informed Ranuzzi that the author was none other

123 Fabretti was also responsible for the censure of Isaac Vossius’s work in this period, for which, see Mandelbrote, ‘Vossius and the Septuagint’, 108–​9. 124 acdf, Protocolli vv, fol. 177r. 125 acdf, Protocolli vv, fols 177v-​178r. 126 acdf, Protocolli vv, fol. 178r. For the agreement of the Congregation and prohibition of the work, see acdf, Diario 8, 2 July 1686, 134; De Bujanda, Index librorum prohibitorum, 11:837. 127 acdf, Diario 8, 24 Sept 1686, 153. See, for the prohibition of Spinoza’s work, acdf Diario 7, 6 Dec 1678, 126, and, for the corresponding efforts to uncover more about Spinoza, see Jean Orcibal, ‘Les Jansénistes face à Spinoza’, Revue de la littérature comparée 23 (1949), 441–​68. 128 acdf, Protocolli vv, Sebastiano Antonio Tanara to Giulio Maria Bianchi, 9 Aug 1686, fol. 310r.

362 Twining than Richard Simon, an Oratorian.129 At this stage events moved quickly, as the Secretary hastily replied to Tanara to find out everything he could about Simon and his work.130 A request to which Tanara could only, for the moment, respond to by informing Rome that Ranuzzi was proceeding diligently to do so.131 Ranuzzi’s efforts eventually yielded definitive results.132 He successfully obtained from Jean Bahier, Secretary of the Oratory, an authoritative account of Simon’s expulsion from the order, one that detailed how Simon had misled Edme Pirot, censor and syndic of the Sorbonne, about the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament’s false or dangerous propositions in order to have the work published.133 Bahier’s letter caused the Index to retrieve hastily the verdict it had given the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament in 1682, and Bianchi reported that the Congregation had prohibited the 1680 edition.134 This established, Bianchi outlined the further steps that had to be taken in the matter, notably those regarding other works by Simon that had not hitherto been prohibited.135 These comprised a series of Simon’s responses to his Protestant critics: two to Vossius, and Simon’s first response to Jean Le Clerc. All three works were then committed to Giacomo Ricci for censure.136

129 acdf, Protocolli vv, Sebastiano Antonio Tanara to Giulio Maria Bianchi, 23 Aug 1686, fol. 311r. Horthemels, a convert to Catholicism who was only received into the Communauté des Libraires in 1686, played an appreciable role in the international trade during this and the following period. See Martin, Livre, pouvoirs et société, 2:726, based on information taken from the important probate inventories found at Arch. Nat. Min. Central. xxiii, 366 (11 Dec 1691); xlix 399 (9 June 1692). 130 acdf, Diario 8, 29 Nov 1686, 158. 131 acdf, Protocolli vv, Sebastiano Antonio Tanara to Giulio Maria Bianchi, Nov 1686, fol. 451r. 132 acdf, Diario, 8, 21 Jan 1687, 166, where Bianchi explains that he had written again to Tanara to see where the affair stood. 133 acdf, Protocolli xx, Jean Bahier to Sebastiano Antonio Tanara, 3 Jan 1687, fol. 18r-​v, for the French original; acdf, Protocolli xx, 17r, contains a translation into Italian for the Congregation. It was read to the Congregation on 17 March, for which, see acdf, Diario 8, 17 March 1687, 182. 134 acdf, Protocolli xx, 86r-v; acdf, Diario 8, 27 May 1687, 198. This copy is still today found in the Biblioteca Casanatense, at kk v 45, where it is identifiable as the copy prohibited owing to the cross on the spine. I would like to thank John Robertson for the information regarding this copy. 135 acdf, Diario 8, 27 May 1687, 199. 136 acdf, Protocolli xx, fols 242r-​244v. The works were: [Simon], Opuscula Critica adversus Isaacum Vossium; [Simon], Judicium de nupera Isaaci Vossii ad iteratas P. Simonii Objectiones Responsione; [Simon], Réponse au livre intitulé Sentimens de quelques Théologiens de Hollande.

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Ricci’s verdict, unlike Boulboul’s earlier even-​handed treatment of the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, was resoundingly negative. Where Boulboul had openly approved of Simon’s learning, recommending only some modifications to the work, Ricci, in contrast, detailed how Simon’s works treated the Vulgate, picking out and accumulating comments from the three works in question that expressly undermined that text’s authority, directly contradicting Ricci’s own interpretation of Trent’s decrees.137 The majority of these were simply comments where Simon indicated, for example, that the post-​Tridentine Vulgate that had been declared authentic was not free from errors.138 Yet, Ricci was also attuned to more oblique threats to the Vulgate’s authority: in discussing Simon’s reply to Vossius Ricci was particularly alert to the implications of Simon’s remarks concerning Jerome’s work, the way in which scholars learned in Hebrew and Greek had felt free to correct his version, and how far, in general, Simon thus highlighted purported errors Jerome had made.139 Ricci appealed to Robert Bellarmine’s learning and authority in order to make the point that since the Vulgate recognized by Trent was ultimately Jerome’s version, any such indirect criticism was likewise illegitimate.140 Ricci unsurprisingly recommended all the works for condemnation, a verdict agreed by the Congregation.141 Ricci’s censure together with the efforts of Bianchi to find out more information about Simon and his work through Tanara and Ranuzzi would be crucial in determining Simon’s image as a suspect Catholic author in the eyes of the Congregation. Many of his subsequent publications, including his critical studies of the New Testament and the Bibliothèque critique (1707-​1710) would subsequently be harshly treated in extensive censures, and thereafter prohibited.142 Simon’s treatment at the hands of the Index was redolent of the concern with which Rome judged a Catholic author who departed, either on questions of ecclesiastical or biblical scholarship, from the positions then held as Roman orthodoxy. In the context of biblical criticism, in particular, it reflected the predominance of a view that had developed favouring a strict interpretation of the Tridentine decree regarding the Vulgate, and the paramount importance 1 37 acdf, Protocolli xx, fols 242r-​244v. 138 acdf, Protocolli xx, fol. 242v. 139 acdf, Protocolli xx, fol. 242r, referring, in particular, to [Simon], Opuscula Critica adversus Isaacum Vossium, 27, 73–​77. 140 acdf, Protocolli xx, fol. 242r-​v. 141 acdf, Protocolli xx, fol. 244v; acdf, Diario 8, 22 Sep 1687, 222; De Bujanda, Index librorum prohibitorum, 11:836–​7. 142 acdf, Protocolli ddd, 145r-​146r; acdf, Protocolli cccc, fols 19r-​23v; De Bujanda, Index librorum prohibitorum, 11:836–​7.

364 Twining attached to defending its authority in comparison to other versions.143 Simon’s case also demonstrates the problems and challenges that the rise of the Dutch Republic as a centre of print could create or exacerbate for the Index, as it was forced to mount a determined investigation over a prolonged period to uncover and overcome the subterfuge with which Leers had published the works of a prohibited critic. 8

Conclusion

The Roman censura provides a counterpoint to the article in the early learned journal. Although both gave short, often pithy assessments of the work in question, their overarching objectives pointed in different directions: where one was the private possession of an authoritative institution, focused on assessing how far a work should be deemed problematic and have its circulation circumscribed, the other was a commercial product directed towards highlighting why the work should be read, widening as far as possible its market. Between these two sets of concerns the case of Richard Simon is illustrative of these contrasts: as the intersection of learning and commerce saw Bayle and the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres shape the reception of Simon’s works, so, in contrast, did the Roman Index, its secretaries, censors, and network of ecclesiastical informants, do their best to try and uncover and eventually prohibit what Leers and others had disguised. This comparison, however, should not obscure what continued to be common in this world of learning. Both Bayle and Boulboul, for example, could evidence their appreciation of Simon’s erudition. Further, and perhaps most importantly, this study also shows the continued priority attached to confessional commitments in this period: where Bayle attempted to exploit Simon’s work to his advantage in this context only to be disappointed when Simon and his opponents’ positions worked directly against his purposes, so too was the Roman Index chiefly preoccupied with understanding the implications of Simon’s works for the Vulgate or other theological or ecclesiastical doctrines. The one distinct way in which Bayle differed from the Index was in the active role he played in the circulation of Simon’s work. The study of this distinctive role –​linked to the broader publishing context in which it took place –​ leaves us in a position to investigate further how far Simon’s case is only one

143 Timothy Twining, The Limits of Erudition: The Old Testament in Post-​Reformation Europe (in preparation).

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part of a broader series of changes in late seventeenth-​century learning, as the reframing of erudition in new editions or learned journals removed it from the context of its creation, and how this, and the shift to the vernacular more generally, created an apparent caesura in the history of scholarship, where, rather than a crisis, this period saw a slow and complicated process of transition that has gone hitherto untraced.

­c hapter 10

European Scholarship on the Formation of the New Testament Canon, c.1700 Polemic, Erudition, Emulation Dmitri Levitin 1

Introduction: The Problem of Religious Erudition c.1700

Recent years have witnessed the publication of some remarkable scholarship concerning early modern biblical criticism. The majority of this scholarship –​I am thinking here of works by van Boxel, Dunkelgrün, Grafton, Hardy, Macfarlane, Malcolm, Mandelbrote, van Miert, Touber, Twining, Weinberg, and others –​has focussed primarily on Old Testament studies. This is perfectly understandable. After all, the Hebrew Bible was the subject of some of the most exciting early modern debates, not least concerning the antiquity of the vowel points and Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. On the subject to be considered here, the Canon of Scripture, there seems to be equally good reason for this focus: if by the seventeenth century all confessions agreed on the content of the New Testament Canon, that of the Old Testament was a central point of contention in inter-​confessional dispute (Trent’s bible decree had canonised many of the Old Testament deuterocanonical books). To be sure, some very fine studies have been devoted to early modern New Testament scholarship. But these have largely confined themselves either to the principles of textual criticism, or to the famous debate concerning the Johannine Comma.1 It is fair to say that a fascinating story remains to be told about virtually all aspects of New Testament scholarship from Stephanus to Griesbach.2 This essay is an attempt to make a modest contribution to that story, focussing on debates concerning the formation of the Canon in the

1 J. Krans, Erasmus and Beza as conjectural critics of the New Testament (Leiden, 2006); G. McDonald, Biblical criticism in early modern Europe: Erasmus, the Johannine comma, and Trinitarian debate (Cambridge, 2016). The classic overview for the sixteenth century is J.H. Bentley, Humanists and Holy Writ (Princeton, 1983). 2 Older surveys are W.G. Kümmel, Das neue Testament: Geschichte der Erforschung seiner Probleme [1958], trans. H.C. Kee (London, 1973), 62–​119; W. Baird, History of New Testament research: from Deism to Tübingen (Minneapolis, 1992).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | DOI:10.1163/9789004462335_012

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decades around 1700. As we shall see, this period witnessed the development of some very original ideas, which deserve to take their place in the history of scholarship. But these ideas are not only worth studying in their own right, but also because they reveal something about the nature of intellectual change in early modern Europe, and about the place of classical reception within it. I have for some time been arguing that the classic model of intellectual change in the period around 1700, in which ‘liberal’ thinkers deconfessionalised and detheologised their approaches to the Bible and to ecclesiastical history, generating results and techniques that were essential to the formation of the ‘modern’, ‘critical’, or even ‘scientific’ study of the faith, needs to be replaced with rather more complex model of change. A historicist attitude to religion did emerge in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not against confessionalisation, but in its service. The tools of historical and philological erudition developed by the Renaissance humanists were weaponised by churches for the sake of inter-​and intra-​confessional warfare, with massive resources devoted to the study of languages, collection of manuscripts, printing, etc. Far from being the preserve of ‘liberal’ or ‘radical’ figures, the most pioneering scholarly ideas were usually developed by those with a confessional axe to grind. The total ‘detheologisation’ of scholarship is a myth.3 The present case study offers an opportunity to develop this thesis. As we shall see, the period 1680–​1720 witnessed great innovation in the study of the formation of the New Testament Canon across the confessional spectrum: among French Catholics, English scholars and theologians, the Dutch Reformed, and German Lutherans. They used fascinating new evidence written in many languages; they speculated on the Jewish origins of Christianity; and they showed a sophisticated awareness of the material conditions in which the Scriptural texts may have circulated. Nonetheless, despite these innovations, their theses were still grounded in theological assumptions and the desire to serve confessional polemic. Ideas that at first glance may look like purely scholarly advances in the study of the process of Canon-​formation were often as much about theological issues, above all the authority of tradition and the church fathers.

3 Most recently: D. Levitin, ‘Confessionalisation and erudition in early modern Europe: a comparative overview’, in Confessionalisation and erudition in early modern Europe: an episode in the history of the humanities, eds. N. Hardy and D. Levitin (Oxford, 2019), 1–​94 (see also works cited there).

368 Levitin The comparative approach adopted throughout this volume proves particularly fruitful for such an investigation. Scholars and theologians across Europe inherited the same set of texts and problems –​many of them are still those faced by New Testament scholars today. While the fourfold Gospel was asserted as early as Irenaeus,4 the earliest authorities for the ‘full’ Canon of twenty-​seven books were disappointingly late: namely, Athanasius’s thirty-​ ninth Festal Letter (367) and some other near-​contemporary texts (the Muratorian Fragment was unknown until 1740). Athanasius’s close contemporaries, such as Cyril of Jerusalem (writing c.350), excluded Revelation.5 Even more worryingly, both Eusebius and Jerome suggested that there had been strong doubts in the Church about the so-​called antilegomena, including Hebrews (the only unsigned Pauline epistle), James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and Revelation.6 Conversely, many of the earliest fathers seemed to have cited, or even considered inspired, the works of those who came to be called the ‘apostolic fathers’ (the Clementine Epistles, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, and the Epistles of Ignatius and Polycarp). Non-​ canonical gospels, such as those ‘according to the Egyptians’ and ‘according to the Hebrews’ clearly circulated very early –​but how early? The final, eighty-​fifth of the Apostolic Canons appended to the ambiguous Apostolic Constitutions also mentioned the Clementine Epistles, and the Constitutions themselves, as canonical. As we shall see, the way these issues were approached was heavily shaped by confessional concerns. However, our story needs to be much more complicated –​and interesting –​than simply charting ‘Catholic’, ‘Anglican’, ‘Reformed’ or ‘Lutheran’ approaches to the problem of Canon-​formation. A position may have been reached in a confessional context, but, since it was almost always developed in the international scholarly languages of Latin or French, it quickly became the subject of pan-​continental debate. Ideas developed in one confessional context were appropriated by scholars operating in another, especially if they felt under pressure to emulate the latest developments. (One of the most interesting things about the case studies considered here is that they were almost always aware of each other’s work.) As I shall argue in the conclusion, this emulatory mechanism was perhaps the key driver of intellectual change in our period, at least in the field of religious erudition.

4 Haer., iii.1.1, iii.11.8. 5 Catech., iv.33–​6. 6 E.g. Eusebius, Hist. eccl., iii.25; Jerome, Ad Dard. 129.3.

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The Canon of the New Testament and Confessional Polemic

To understand what was innovative about the ideas developed c.1700, we must first establish how the question of the New Testament Canon was approached in the previous century. By the late 1500s, the content of that Canon was not an object of direct dispute between Catholics and Reformed. (Luther’s doubts about Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation retained some force among Lutherans, but they now tended to adopt a more conciliatory attitude or simply include them in the Canon, the latter position gradually becoming the mainstream one once it was institutionalised via the influential works of Johann Gerhard (1582–​1637)).7 This meant that it was not the subject of dedicated treatises or a separate theological locus. A century later, scholars would frequently comment on this neglect.8 They were only partially correct to do so. Their predecessors did in fact adopt positions on the question, even if they did so in passing while discussing the rule of faith, the Old Testament Canon, or some other topic of controversy. This much becomes clear from a brief examination of perhaps the two foremost articulations of the Catholic and Reformed position on Scripture advanced in this period: Robert Bellarmine’s Disputationes de Controversiis Christianae Fidei (1581–​93), a product of the future Cardinal’s lectures at the Collegio Romano; and William Whitaker’s Disputatio de Sacra Scriptura (1588), a summary of Whitaker’s Cambridge lectures, developed in response to Bellarmine’s arguments, which were being conveyed to Whitaker by spies. Bellarmine, in the first volume of the Disputationes, ‘De verbo Dei’, took great pleasure in listing various uncertainties in the New Testament Canon in order to prove that it could only have been settled by papal or conciliar authority. In this regard, he adduced the earliest councils for which there was evidence of them declaring a Canon –​those of Laodicea (c.363) and Carthage (c.397) –​and that of popes Innocent i (r. 401–​17) and Gelasius i (r. 492–​6).9 Regarding the Epistle to the Hebrews in particular, which Bellarmine knew had been deemed non-​canonical on doctrinal grounds not just by Luther but also by high-​profile followers like Martin Chemnitz and Flacius Illyricus, he

7 J. Preus, ‘The New Testament Canon in the Lutheran dogmaticians’, The Springfielder, 25 (1961), 8–​33. 8 See e.g. Jeremiah Jones, A new and full method of settling the canonical authority of the New Testament, 3 vols (London, 1726–​7), 3:1–​2; Jean Martianay, Traité historique du canon des livres de la Sainte-​Ecriture (Paris, 1703), sig. ā iiiijv. 9 For these four listed together, see e.g. Robert Bellarmine, Disputationes de controversiis christianae fidei [1581] (Lyon, 1596), cols. 9–​10.

370 Levitin relied on these four authorities, as well as the even later councils of Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451).10 Much of the time, Bellarmine was plundering this evidence from the great Bibliotheca sancta (1566) by the converted Jew Sixtus of Siena.11 From Sixtus he also adopted the argument that the Church’s authority to determine the Canon stemmed simply from a reliable human tradition, as with any other book, pagan or Christian.12 This allowed him to respond to Protestant claims of arbitrary authoritarianism on the Church’s part: ‘we do not say, as Chemnitz most impudently calumniates, that the Church, that is the Pope, can by his own arbitrary power, without any ancient testimony, render a book canonical from not canonical… the Church… can only declare which books are to be held canonical… neither rashly nor arbitrarily but from the ancient testimony’.13 But given the ambiguities (if not downright contradictions) of many of the earliest sources, this sometimes involved making distinctly unconvincing arguments. On the famous story of the woman taken in adultery (John 7:53–​8:11), for example, Bellarmine had to acknowledge that it was not always present in Scripture (as Eusebius and Erasmus had already noted), but that ‘nevertheless it should not be doubted that it is true history and is Evangelical’, on the basis of other patristic testimonies and the fact that ‘it is read in the Church on the Saturday after the third Sunday of Lent’.14 This seeming failure of tradition was even more obvious in the case of New Testament apocrypha such as Hermas, since Bellarmine had to admit that early fathers such as Origen had thought it inspired, and others (including Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian) had

10 11

Ibid., col. 45. Almost all discussion has focussed on his approach to the Old Testament: e.g. J.W. Montgomery, ‘Sixtus of Siena and Roman Catholic Biblical scholarship’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 54 (1963), 214–​34. His Jewishness is questioned in F. Parente, ‘Alcune osservazioni preliminari per una biografia di Sisto Senese. Fu realmente Sisto un ebreo convertito?’, in Italia Judaica (Rome, 1986), 210–​31. 12 Disp., col. 15. 13 Ibid., cols. 30–​ 1: ‘Itaque non dicimus, ut Kemnitius impudentissime calumniatur, Ecclesiam, id est, Papam posse pro suo arbitratu sine ullis veterum testimoniis, facere librum canonicum de non canonico… Fatemur enim Ecclesiam nullo modo posse facere librum canonicum de non canonico, nec contra, sed tantum declarare quis sit habendus Canonicus, & hoc non temere, nec pro arbitratu, sed ex veterum testimoniis…’ The reference to Chemnitz is to his Examen Concilii Tridentini [1565–​73] (2nd edn, Frankfurt, 1578), 53–​8 on the Canon. 14 Disp., col. 44: ‘Nihilominus dubium esse non debet, quin ea & historia sit, & Evangelica, cum legatur in Ecclesia in sabbato post Dominicam iii. Quadragesimae, & eam agnoscant gravissimi Patres Graeci’, contra Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., iii.39.

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judged it useful. All Bellarmine could reply to this was that it was not placed in the Canon by any Synod and that Gelasius had expressly excluded it.15 Whitaker predictably opposed such reliance on conciliar or papal authority. But his own position was no less theological. According to the Englishman, Scripture was its own interpreter and guarantor –​it was αὐτόπιστος.16 This was a central claim of Reformed theology, and Whitaker’s formulation came close to Calvin’s own.17 With it came a strong doctrine of Scriptural inerrancy: Jerome, Erasmus, and their Catholic followers like Melchior Cano had been wrong to suggest that the holy penmen could have erred or lapsed in memory on even non-​essential matters; at all times, ‘they wrote as they were moved by the Holy Ghost’.18 Also like Calvin, Whitaker insisted that the chief role in conversion was played not even by Scripture itself, but by the testimonium internum of the Holy Spirit working within the believer: we acknowledge the Scriptures ‘because the Spirit persuades us within that these are the words of God’.19 There were also ‘external’ factors testifying to Scripture’s divinity, but even these were primarily not historical, but intrinsic to the text itself (e.g. its ‘majesty’ or ‘purity of style’); in any case, they were secondary criteria.20 This approach extended to Whitaker’s treatment of the Canon. Officially, the English Church’s position on the subject differed from her Reformed counterparts, taking as canonical ‘those… books… of whose authority there was never any doubt in the Church’.21 But Whitaker resorted to the continental Reformed argument: ‘we are persuaded of the sacred character of these books [by] the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit’; while church history was a useful supplementary argument, the argument from the testimonium internum was a ‘more certain, true, and venerable testimony than that of the church’.22 This involved dismissing famous testimonies by church fathers such as Augustine to the effect that with respect to canonicity, the believer should prefer those books

15 16 17

Disp., cols. 58–​9. William Whitaker, Disputatio de Sacra Scriptura (Cambridge, 1588), 200; also e.g. 245. See above all H. van den Belt, The authority of Scripture in Reformed theology (Leiden, 2008), esp. 125–​32 on Whitaker. 18 Whitaker, Disputatio, 9–​10; also 214–​15. 19 Ibid., 234 (‘quòd Spiritus sanctus nobis intus has esse Dei voces persuadeat’). See also 200, 208–​9, 213, 247–​8. 20 Ibid., 211–​13. 21 Article 6; see E. Gibson, The Thirty-​nine Articles of the Church of England (London, 1898), 71, 250–​2; J.-​L. Quantin, The Church of England and Christian antiquity (Oxford, 2009), 47–​50. 22 Disputatio, 200, ‘Nos enim Ecclesiae testimonium libenter amplectimur, eiusque authoritatem admittimus; sed affirmamus longe aliud certius, & verius, & augustius testimonium esse, quam Ecclesiae’.

372 Levitin which had been universally received –​such testimonies were much favoured by Catholics, and, as we shall see, would be taken up by English divines of a different stripe. But according to Whitaker, Augustine was here not espousing the position of true Christians, but just ‘preparing beginners and novices’.23 Against Bellarmine, Whitaker deployed a series of triumphantly destructive conclusions: the council of Carthage ‘was no more than provincial, composed of a few bishops’; the synod of Laodicea not only made errors in its description of the Old Testament apocrypha, but had not even placed Revelation –​which both Catholics and Protestants acknowledged as canonical –​in the Canon.24 More generally, the Catholic authorities were absurdly late: ‘for who can, without exceeding impudence, maintain that there was no certain Canon –​even of the old Testament –​for four hundred years after Christ, even until the time of the council of Carthage?’25 These were powerful attacks. Unfortunately for Whitaker, they rendered his own scripturalism somewhat precarious. It was all well and good pointing out against Bellarmine that the fathers who lived before Carthage ‘testify that they very well comprehended and understood what books were divine and canonical’, but what should a Protestant say when there was clear evidence that many of the earliest Christians had rejected books now deemed canonical, not least Revelation, as Whitaker well knew?26 Here, the nature of confessional conflict allowed Whitaker the luxury of retreating into silence.27 But this meant condemning the same church fathers whom Whitaker had praised for recognising the ‘correct’ Canon before Carthage!28 In any case, what was one to do with a book like the Epistle to the Hebrews, which, according to Eusebius and Jerome, had not been accepted into the Canon until a relatively late date? Whitaker attributed this not to the authority of the church or individuals, but to the fact 23 24 25 26

27 28

Disputatio, 224: ‘Sed Augustinus eo in loco tyrones & novitios instituit’. The Augustine source is Doct. Christ., ii.8. Disputatio, 11 (‘Carthaginense concilium fuit duntaxat provinciale, paucorum Episcoporum’); 21–​2. Ibid., 22: ‘Quis enim nisi admodum impudenter defendet nullam fuisse certum Canonem, ne veteris quidem Testamenti, annis 400. post Christum, nimirum usque ad tempus concilii Carthaginensis?’ Ibid., 22: ‘Patres, testantur, qui ante illud Concilium vixerunt, se satis tenere atque intelligere, quinam libri divini ac Canonici essent’. For this problem in the late 16th century more generally, see I. Backus, ‘The church fathers and the canonicity of the Apocalypse in the sixteenth century: Erasmus, Frans Titelmans, and Theodore Beza’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 29 (1998), 651–​65. Disputatio, 74: ‘Hoc loco sequitur, ut de novi Testamenti libri disseramus. Sed quia nulla est inter Papistas & nos de his controversia, praetermittam’. Ibid., 75.

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that later Christians ‘perceived and recognised its doctrine clearly to be divine and inspired [θεόπνευστος]’.29 But did this mean that earlier Christians were not infused with the testimonium internum? Surely not. Given such problems, it is unsurprising that unlike the question of the Canon of the Old Testament, that concerning the Canon of the New was for the most part tactfully ignored on all sides of the confessional divide. That is not to say that the scholarly problems facing anyone trying to establish the Canon were unknown. The New Testament apocrypha had long been available in good editions. Their high-​profile humanist editors –​men like Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples –​often noted uncomfortable facts in their commentaries, such as Jerome’s high estimation of Hermas.30 As ever more refined scholarly attention was paid to the Greek fathers in particular, such facts became harder to ignore.31 They became acute when the writings of the ‘apostolic fathers’ were published, edited, and analysed, above all by French and English scholars in the second half of the seventeenth century.32 Already by the early 1670s, the English patristic and conciliar scholar William Beveridge could declare that

29

30

31 32

Disputatio, 221–​2: ‘doctrinam in illis sacram & θεόπνευστον, ac plane divinam perspiceret atque agnosceret’. Whitaker does not give a source for the disputed canonicity of Hebrews, but it is certainly either Eusebius, Jerome, or a later discussion derived from them. Erasmus brought the issue to the fore, and Luther, Cajetan, Calvin and Beza all expressed doubts as to Pauline authorship without questioning its canonicity, while Oecolampadius, Pellikan, and the Rheims New Testament among others all mentioned its slow reception into canonicity among the Latins (see K. Hagen, Hebrews commenting from Erasmus to Bèze, 1516–​1598 (Tübingen, 1981), 19, 29, 36, 38, 43, 45, 89, passim; the Reformed after Calvin ‘increasingly emphasise that the Holy Spirit is the author of Hebrews. The identity of the human person … is unimportant’ (96)). For this example, see I. Backus, ‘Renaissance attitudes to New Testament Apocryphal writings: Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and his epigones’, Renaissance Quarterly, 51 (1998), 1169–​98, at 1185–​7. See further id., ‘Christoph Scheurl and his anthology of New Testament Apocrypha’, Apocrypha 9 (1998), 133–​56; id., ‘Praetorius anthology of New Testament Apocrypha (1595)’ Apocrypha, 12 (2001), 211–​36; id., ‘Les apocryphes néotestamentaires et la pédagogie luthérienne des XVIe-​X VIIe siècles’, in Apocryphité, ed. S.C. Mimouni (Turnhout, 2002), 263–​76. For just one –​particularly high-​profile –​example, see Isaac Casaubon, De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes xvi (London, 1614), 73–​4, using the fact to make an unsubtle attack on Catholic traditionalism. For a classic case-​study of this process, see J.-​L. Quantin, ‘L’orthodoxie, la censure et la gloire. La difficile édition princeps de l’épître de Barnabé, de Rome à Amsterdam (1549–​ 1646)’, in “Editiones principes” delle opere dei Padri greci e latini, ed. M. Cortesi (Florence, 2006) 103–​62; also J.A. Fischer, ‘Die ältesten Ausgaben der Patres Apostolici: Ein Beitrag zu Begriff und Begrenzung der Apostolischen Väter’, Historisches Jahrbuch 94 (1974), 159–​90; 95 (1975), 88–​119.

374 Levitin ‘among all the all the older writers on church matters, you will barely find two who will agree on the number of canonical books’.33 Awareness of these issues was heightened by the fact that in the generation that succeeded Bellarmine and Whitaker, many Catholics and Protestants came to adopt more historicist modes of defending their confessional positions. Catholic attitudes towards church tradition shifted from seeing the fathers as sources of authority to presenting them as ‘witnesses’ to tradition, placing ever more emphasis on the ante-​Nicenes; a key player here was Cardinal Jacques Davy Du Perron (1566–​1618).34 In the Protestant world, meanwhile, the first half of the seventeenth century saw a growing divide. Some, including many Reformed and an increasing number of Lutherans (especially after the Regensburg Colloquy (1601)) responded to Catholic anti-​scripturalism by insisting ever more strongly on Scripture’s self-​authenticating quality, either via the witness of the testimonium internum or through characteristics ‘intrinsic’ to the text.35 In opposition, Arminians in particular moved away from such defences of scripturalism towards those based on historical verification through external testimonies, above all early church tradition.36 We can see the influence of this development in Whitaker’s own university, Cambridge. Anti-​Calvinists there started to argue that the Canon of Scripture –​ and specifically the canonicity of disputed books –​was known primarily by church tradition, a position which they of course differentiated from Catholic traditionalism.37 This argument found its foremost printed articulation in John 33 William Beveridge, ΣΥΝΟΔΙΚΟΝ sive pandectae Canonum SS. Apostolorum et Conciliorum ab Ecclesia Graeca receptorum, 2 vols in 1 (Oxford, 1672), 2: ‘Praefationem ad Annotationes in Canones Apostolicos’ (new pagination), 5b: ‘inter omnes vetustiores rerum Ecclesiasticarum scriptores, vix duos in eodem canonicorum librorum numero consentientes reperias’. Admittedly Beveridge was here discussing the ot Canon. For Beveridge, see further p. 404 below. 34 Quantin, Antiquity, 216–​17. 35 K. Appold, ‘Scriptural authority in the age of Lutheran orthodoxy’, in The Bible in the history of the Church, ed. J. Maxfield (St. Louis, 2005), 19–​33, esp. 29–​30. 36 For a systematic statement, see Simon Episcopius, Institutiones theologiae [1650], in Opera theologica, 2 vols (Amsterdam, 1665), 1:232–​3. The best discussion is now K. Daugirdas, Die Anfänge des Sozinianismus (Göttingen, 2016), 439–​87. 37 See the act thesis ‘Sacra Scripta est ἀυτόπιστος. 1630’, recorded in Bod. ms Sancroft 132, p. 81, where the disputant acknowledged that this is established through the internal testimony of the spirit, but also through ‘multis testimoniis antiquitatis’. See also the earlier thesis, undated but from around c.1625, at p. 8: ‘Jacobi Ep[is]t[ol]a est Canonica’, defending the canonicity of the Epistle of James on the basis of patristic testimony, esp. Eusebius, Hist. eccl., ii.23. A particularly controversial case was that of Clement Bretton of Sidney Sussex, who proposed for his D.D. the thesis ‘Canon Scripturae innotescit solum modo per traditionem Ecclesiae’: bl ms Harl. 7019 (‘Innovations in religion and abuses

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Cosin’s Scholastic history of the canon of Holy Scripture (1657). Cosin stated explicitly that history was a much better source for the Canon than either the testimonium internum or qualities intrinsic to the text.38 Such historicism may have been useful for implying that the Reformed bordered on ‘enthusiasm’, but it brought its own problems. Cosin could enjoy himself mocking Baronio’s convoluted efforts to place the Synod of Laodicea before Nicaea, and noting that it favoured the Protestant version of the Old Testament Canon. But in response to the fact that it did not list Revelation among the New Testament books, he had to resort to a dubious hypothetical argument of his own. The book, he claimed, was not listed on the basis of a contemporary custom to exclude books not to be read in church, a ‘custom… not grounded upon any opinion they had, as if that book were no part of the New Testament, but because it was so replenished with abstruse and hidden mysteries, as that… the people would receive the less instruction and edifying by it’. The ancient Church was therefore (supposedly) acting in just the same way as the modern English Church, which excluded Revelation from its Calendar of Lessons while still considering it canonical.39 Whatever its advantages in confessional polemic, keeping such historicism in check was difficult. Peter Gunning (1614–​84), another anti-​Calvinist English divine and the man who had inspired Cosin to write his book in the first place, agreed with him that the way to establish the canon ‘only is, or can be, by historical disquisition’.40 But Cosin had argued for canonicity on the basis of the universal consent of the early church, and while Gunning was sure that such a thesis could defeat the papists’ position on the Old Testament apocrypha, he was far less sure about its potential to establish the New Testament Canon. ‘No man can with any colour believe now’, he wrote to Cosin, ‘that no other books are at all canonical, or truly and certainly to us God’s Word, of whose authority there has been some doubt in the Church’. He was able to offer plenty of examples of such doubts, and early ones at that, mentioning not only Revelation but also in government in the University of Cambridge’, fols. 52–​93), fol. 67r. The question was not one of those eventually discussed: see further Quantin, Antiquity, 198–​9. 38 John Cosin, A scholastical history of the canon of Holy Scripture [1657], in id., Works, 5 vols (Oxford, 1843–​55), 3:6–​7. 39 Cosin, Canon, 73. The dubious reading of Laodicea is justified by reference to Canon lix. I have not been able to find any scepticism on the part of 17th-​century scholars about the authenticity of Canon lix. Modern scholarship has for some time been near-​unanimous that it is a later addition (it is not present in the earliest mss). See e.g. T. Zahn, Geschichte des neutestamentlichen Kanons, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1888–​90), 2:200–​1. 40 Gunning to Cosin, early 1657, Cosin, Works, 4:410 (the original is Queen’s College, Oxford, ms 218, fol. 329r).

376 Levitin the usual suspects: 2 and 3 John, James, Jude, 2 Peter, Hebrews, the last chapter of Mark, the woman taken in adultery in John, and the story of Christ sweating blood in Luke. ‘Even whole Churches, and many of those very authors which you allege for your conclusion’, he told Cosin, ‘have but too much doubted of many of those, which you (notwithstanding such doubting of theirs), do now firmly believe to be God’s Word’.41 Cosin attempted to respond: when the early fathers questioned canonical books, they were only expressing private opinions, not the true consent of the church.42 This was standard argumentation among admirers of the ante-​Nicenes; for example, it was often used to explain away Origen’s heterodoxies on the Trinity. But the more scholarship one did, the more such reasoning appeared like special pleading. I shall return to England to explore how Gunning’s successors tried to deal with such problems. But first we must turn our eyes across the Channel to France, where the leading Catholic scholars were faced with the same issues, and likewise partly abandoned the positions adopted by their predecessors. 3

Catholic France: Richard Simon and the Historicisation of the Case for Tradition

France had seen more investment and success in confessionalised erudition than any other Catholic country. Both patristic and biblical scholarship flourished, and by the second half of the seventeenth century almost all major institutions had adopted a ‘positive’ theological method over and against its ‘scholastic’ counterpart.43 The Congregation of the Oratory, founded in 1611 by Pierre de Bérulle, had embraced such methods perhaps more eagerly than any other. Next to Jean Morin (1591–​1651), its most famous son was Richard Simon (1638–​1712). We need not recount the details of Simon’s Histoire critique du Vieux Testament (1678), its thesis concerning the non-​Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, and its condemnation by Bossuet. Until recently this book was seen as a radical break from earlier forms of biblical criticism, supposedly introducing a new, non-​theological, and perhaps even Spinozist method. But we now know that Simon’s scholarship, however innovative, was part of a

41 42 43

Ibid., 414–​15. Cosin to Gunning, 4 April 1657, Cosin, Works, 4:423–​4, 427–​8, 429. See Levitin, ‘Confessionalisation and erudition’, 28–​35 and the works cited there.

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Catholic (and specifically Oratorian) tradition, and its intentions were undeniably confessional.44 But what of his work on the New Testament, to which he turned after his expulsion from the Oratory in 1678, and which culminated in his French New Testament of 1702?45 This work has been far less studied than that on the Hebrew Bible, but in an important book, a recent commentator has argued that Simon’s work on the New Testament can be conceived as marking a Foucauldian shift from a ‘premodern episteme, in which critical thought was subordinated to a theological a priori’ and in which ‘it was almost inconceivable to doubt the inspiration of Scripture, or even to conceive of it as a human text subject to the same rules of composition and transmission as any other’, to a new episteme, in which, ‘by disconnecting critical questions from theological ones, Spinoza and Simon created a context in which new questions could be asked and answered’.46 An examination of Simon’s ideas concerning the formation of the New Testament Canon leads to a rather different conclusion. Simon discussed the subject primarily in his Histoire critique du texte du Nouveau Testament (1689). The discussion is therefore subordinated to the grander aim of identifying the criteria for establishing the ‘best’ text. Simon conceived of himself as a new Jerome, but he also idolised the Vulgate editors who worked under Sixtus v and Clement viii in the late sixteenth century.47 This text-​critical work led him to believe that Jerome had inherited a ‘good’ tradition of Greek manuscripts from which he had corrected both the Old Latin and ‘bad’ Greek manuscripts, but had not gone far enough: Simon saw his own work as the completion of this

44

T. Twining, ‘Richard Simon and the remaking of seventeenth-​century biblical criticism’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 3 (2018), 421–​87, and his chapter in this volume. 45 Le Nouveau Testament de nôtre Seigneur Jésus-​Christ (Trévoux, 1702). For aspects of the reception, see A. Monod, ‘La Controverse de Bossuet et de Richard Simon au sujet de la “Version de Trévoux” ’, Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses, 3 (1922), 197–​219, 317–​37. 46 McDonald, Biblical criticism, 146. 47 For self-​identification with Jerome, see the Preface to the Histoire critique du texte du Nouveau Testament (Rotterdam, 1689), sig. *2r, = id., Critical history of the text of the New Testament, trans. A. Hunwick (Leiden, 2013), xv–​xvi. In what follows, I will cite the original (as hctnt), followed by the equivalent in Hunwick in square brackets. When I have adopted a different translation from Prof. Hunwick’s, I also quote the original. For the late sixteenth-​century Vulgate editors, see hctnt, sig. **2r [xxiii], accompanied with the usual confessional polemic: ‘Il n’y a que des Protestans mal sensés… qui puissant trouver à redire à la diversité des Editions de la Bible qui ont esté publièes par ces deux Papes’.

378 Levitin process, which would also have the benefit of showing Beza’s ‘mauvaise foy’ in his New Testament commentary.48 This thesis was developed at the end of the Histoire critique; much of its first three quarters were devoted to explaining the formation of the Canon, making reference to a spectacular range of literature, both ancient and modern. To understand the principles on which Simon built his account of Canon-​ formation, we must go back to the polemics in which he became embroiled in the wake of the publication of the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, especially those with the Arminian Jean Le Clerc (1657–​1736), who will reappear frequently in this essay. In the Sentimens de quelques theologiens de Hollande (1685) that he composed with the help of Noël Aubert de Versé (1645–​1712), Le Clerc not only attacked the specifics of Simon’s historical argument, but also defended an Arminian theological thesis about the nature of inspiration. Only the prophetic books were directly inspired, whereas the rest of Scripture was simply an accurate historical report written in a human manner.49 Simon, drugging himself with so much coffee and chocolate that he became quite sick and had to recover with a fish-​only diet,50 quickly wrote a long response in which he outlined his own view of the Catholic doctrine of tradition. According to him, most Protestants had relied on the fanatical idea of the testimonium internum to assert the perspicuity of Scripture. The Arminian Le Clerc had abandoned this, but had also abandoned the guide of tradition.51 Such a move could only lead to Socinianism. All of Christianity was contained not solely in Scripture, but in Scripture combined with apostolic tradition.52 The early church always used unwritten apostolic traditions against heretics.53 This was not blind authoritarianism, because the articulation of tradition represented the universal consent of the whole church, rather than the caprices of certain individuals claiming private illumination.54 How could Le Clerc claim to use 48

This is the briefest possible summary of Simon’s hugely elaborate thesis, first developed in hctnt, 336–​430, qu. 372b [285–​364, qu. 314]. It led to a massive dispute with the Jansenists. 49 [Jean Le Clerc and Noël Aubert de Versé], Sentimens de quelques theologiens de Hollande (Amsterdam, 1685), 85, 219–​86 (primarily reporting de Versé’s view), 317–​18. 50 Jean-​Benoît-​Désiré Cochet, Galérie dieppoise (Dieppe, 1862), 351. According to Cochet, this account comes from a ms composed c.1710–​20 (328, n 1). 51 Richard Simon, Réponse au livre intitulé Sentimens de quelques théologiens (Rotterdam, 1686), esp. 14–​15. 52 Ibid., 42. 53 Ibid., 159–​60, using Tertullian, De praescript. xxi, a favourite passage of Catholic polemicists. See further Richard Simon, ‘Reponse à la lettre de Mr. De Veil’ [16 Aug 1678], in Histoire critique du Vieux Testament… nouvelle edition (Amsterdam, 1685), 561b–​562a. 54 Simon, Réponse, 17, 162–​3.

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the Vincentian rule –​that one should have recourse to universal tradition to decide controversies –​without acknowledging that his position was effectively the Catholic one?55 When it came to the Canon, it was by virtue of being in possession of this tradition that the Church could deem certain books canonical: the Church certainly could not arbitrarily re-​write Scripture.56 Here the Church directly inherited the rights of the Grand Sanhedrin.57 However, despite this similarity, the process of Canon-​formation in Judaism differed fundamentally from that in early Christianity. According to Simon, Le Clerc’s ignorance of this fact had led him into all his errors. To oppose Simon’s thesis about the authority of the Great Sanhedrin as it had been developed in the Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, the Arminian had argued that while the precise circumstances in which the Old Testament Canon had been formed were lost to history, it had probably happened in the same gradual, non-​authoritarian fashion as that of the New. That is to say, in both cases private individuals received and used the holy writings long before they were collected by an assembly. In the case of the New Testament, the texts circulated by the individual churches to whom the apostles had written were gradually added to these privately collected canons. Writings that were not publicly known were only added to the Canon later, after examination. Most importantly, ‘all this was done by the care of pious persons, who eagerly collected the writings of these holy men without holding an assembly specifically for that purpose’.58 The process was greatly helped by the fact that the apostolic holographs often survived, contrary to a claim made in passing by Simon in the Histoire Critique du Vieux Testament (as part of his argument for the importance of Church tradition). Le Clerc’s case at this point depended on Tertullian mentioning ‘authenticae literae’ in certain churches, as well as a reference by Peter of Alexandria (bishop of Alexandria, 300–​11) to possessing John’s Gospel in the Evangelist’s ‘own hand’ (το ιδιοχειρον).59

55

Ibid., 42. The reference is to [Le Clerc & de Versé], Sentimens, 61–​2, where Le Clerc claimed that Protestants adhered to the Vincentian rule, as in Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium, 3.4. 56 Simon, Réponse, 109–​10, 240–​1. 57 Ibid., 112. 58 [Le Clerc], Sentimens, 216–​17, qu. 217: ‘Tout cela s’est fait sans Assemblée tenuë exprés, par les soins des personnes pieuses, qui ramassoient avec avidité les Ecrits de ces Saints Hommes’. 59 Ibid., 300–​5, contra Simon, Histoire critique du Vieux Testament, 265a, Le Clerc’s sources are Tertullian, Praescr. 36, and the Alexandrian Chronicle, fr. 2 (pg, xviii, 519). However, he was just plundering these references from Grotius and Pierre-​Daniel Huet.

380 Levitin For Simon, this argument betrayed a fundamental incomprehension of the circumstances in which Christianity arose. Le Clerc ‘does not take heed’, he wrote, ‘that there is a great difference between the Jews who composed a commonwealth where the books were kept in archives, and the Christians who, at the beginning of Christianity, were not gathered into such a body, and so could not make a collection of their sacred books by a public authority, like the Jews’.60 Tertullian spoke of authentic copies rather than holographs; the story of John’s Gospel surviving in Alexandria was a local ‘popular tradition’, akin to Jewish fables of possessing the Hebrew Bible in Ezra’s own hand.61 The originals were lost not because there was no respect for them, but because of basic historical reality: ‘this loss had no other cause than the destitution of the first Christians, who did not live in a commonwealth like the Jews, where they could preserve their books in archives’.62 Of course, all this was designed to buttress Simon’s argument for the necessity of Church tradition. No less confessionally driven was Simon’s view of Scriptural inspiration. Protestants, he thought, veered into one of two extremes. One was the enthusiasm of the mainstream view, adopted by those like Beza, who thought that each word was directly inspired to such an extent that they distinguished between the Scriptural ‘author’ (God) and ‘writers’ (the Evangelists, etc.) On the other side were those Arminians like Grotius and now Le Clerc and Aubert de Versé (who had written the portion of the Sentimens concerning inspiration), who, he claimed, had succumbed either to Socinianism or –​even worse –​Spinozism in refusing to ascribe inspiration to anyone but prophets.63 For Simon, the happy medium lay in the view of sixteenth-​century Louvain Jesuits such as the Professor of Theology Leonardus Lessius (1554–​1623) and his follower Cornelius a Lapide (1567–​1637). They had argued that ‘inspiration’ did not have to mean the power of prophecy or dictation, but simply the assistance

60 Simon, Réponse, 121–​2: ‘Il ne prend pas garde qu’il y a bien de la difference entre les Juifs qui composoient un corps de République où l’on conservoit les Livres dans les Archives, & entre les Chrêtiens qui dans les commencemens du Christianisme ne faisoient aucun corps, & qui par consequent ne pouvoient pas faire par une autorité publique, comme les Juifs, un Recueil de leurs Livres Sacrés’. 61 Simon, Réponse, 152–​3. On Tertullian, Simon followed the conclusion of Nicolas Rigault, ‘Observationes et notae’ in Tertullian, Opera… editio secunda (Paris, 1641), 70b (new pagination). 62 Simon, Réponse, 157: ‘Cette perte n’a point d’autre origine que la misere des premiers Chrêtiens, qui ne vivoient pas dans un corps de République à la maniere des Juifs pour conserver leurs Livres dans des Archives’. 63 Simon, Réponse, 122–​37; [id.], Lettre à Monsieur l’Abbé P.D … touchant l’inspiration des livres sacrés (Rotterdam, 1687).

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granted to eyewitnesses to make sure that they did not fall into error.64 As Simon knew, this view had been opposed by the Louvain ‘Augustinians’ and by their allies at Douai, such as Guilielmus Estius (1542–​1613). But for him, the anti-​Jesuit position, with its insistence on direct inspiration and dictation, was far too similar to the Reformed view.65 This conclusion, very important to understanding the whole of Simon’s approach, was confessionally inflected in two ways. First of all, it was part of an intra-​confessional stance. The Jesuits had developed their argument as a contribution to an anti-​Augustinian theology of grace,66 one with which Simon was in broad agreement against any form of what he perceived to be Augustinian scholasticism (whether that of the Douai theologians or the Jansenists). More importantly, it was an inter-​confessional position. For according to Simon, once one accepted the Jesuit view of inspiration, one also had to accept that the process of canonisation was a human, historical one, in which the authority of the Church played a central role. This did not mean that any book could be declared canonical. What the Church was preserving via tradition was knowledge of the ‘writings… adduced by the Holy Spirit as appropriate canonical texts for religious guidance’.67 The story of Canon-​formation offered in the Histoire critique du texte du Nouveau Testament was a fuller articulation of these theological assumptions, intermixed with Simon’s scholarly conclusions. Christ, who had proclaimed that he came into the world not to destroy but to fulfil the ancient law, ‘did not need to put down his teachings in writing’; he based his ‘modified doctrine’ on that of the Old Testament, and performed miracles to confirm his mission.68 Certainly he did not instruct his disciples to record anything in writing, simply telling them to preach his gospel to the world. It was only when people wanted to preserve a record of this preaching that the Gospels were

64

65 66 67 68

hctnt, 280a–​7b [237–​41]. For the condemnation of Lessius’s view discussed by Simon, see G. Schneemann, Controversiarum de divinae gratiae liberique arbitrii concordia (Fribourg, 1881), 374–​5; for Bellarmine’s reaction, see the letter in X-​M. Le Bachelet, Bellarmine avant son Cardinalat, 1542–​1598: correspondence et documents (Paris, 1911), 172–​5. There is a lack of literature on this important development (most scholarship focusses on Louvain debates concerning grace) but see A.M. Artola, ‘El sistema inspiracionista de Leonardo Lessio, S.I’., Archivo Teologico Granadino 37 (1974), 5–​44. hctnt, 279, 285b–​6a [236, 240–​1]. For the broad context, see W. François, ‘Augustine and the golden age of biblical scholarship in Louvain (1550–​1650)’, in Shaping the Bible in the Reformation, eds. B. Gordon and M. McLean (Leiden, 2012), 235–​90. hctnt, 294a [247]. hctnt, 1a [1]‌.

382 Levitin written down. Unlike in the Jewish commonwealth, Christians had no ‘official scribes’. This meant that heretics quickly appeared who doubted the authority of the apostolic books, and took advantage of the lack of official records to produce their own ‘apostolic’ forgeries. But the heretics contradicted each other, ‘whereas the church fathers took advantage of the doctrinal unanimity in the Churches founded by the apostles, citing it as proof that the apostolic books were authentic’.69 Tradition, in other words, was always the tool used to establish the Canon. How absurd and self-​defeating then was the Protestant view! Writing only a few years after the Revocation, Simon could not contain the glee of an ungracious victor: ‘Nothing more senseless can be imagined than the creed of the former Reformed Church of France: “We accept these books as canonical, not by virtue of the common assent and consensus of the Church, but through the witness and conviction of the Holy Spirit within” ’.70 Such an argument, he posited, would have played into the hands of all the ancient heretics. No wonder, Simon gloated, that the Arminians had rejected it in favour of recourse to the testimony of the early church, a position that Simon presented as a concession of defeat to Catholic traditionalism.71 The Gospels were composed in the order reported by the earliest fathers, starting with Matthew. Any manuscript evidence to the contrary –​such as that in Codex Alexandrinus –​could be safely ignored. For example, Beza had assumed that Luke must have written first because the reference to the ‘many’ who had previously ‘taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us’ in his notoriously ambiguous preface could not possibly have referred to the canonical Gospels. But for Simon ‘the evidence of all of antiquity’ trumped such an individualist ‘hypothesis’. This was a standard Catholic assumption (Simon himself took it from the celebrated Jesuit exegete Juan Maldonado (1533–​83)).72 No less confessionally driven was Simon’s repetition, at even greater length, of the thesis he had sustained against Le Clerc: historical circumstances dictated that the original holographs were quickly lost.73 One might ask, Simon noted, why providence had not preserved the most important documents of the Christian religion. The answer was simple: the hand of providence was to be seen not in

69 70 71 72 73

hctnt, 3b [2]‌, citing Clemens Alexandrinus, Strom., iii.13. hctnt, 10–​11 [8]‌. The reference is to the Confessio Fidei Gallicana (1559): P. Schaff, The Creeds of Christendom, 3 vols (New York, 1877), 1:361. nctnt, 12a–​14a [8–​10], citing Episcopius’s Opera, as n. 36 above. nctnt, 47b [41], drawing on Juan Maldonado, Commentarii in quatuor Evangelistas [1596–​7], 2 vols (Lyon, 1615), 1:7a. hctnt, 36b–​46b [33–​40].

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the preservation of originals but in the preservation of accurate copies by the Church. Even if the canonical books had not been written, ‘religion would have survived through tradition in the same way it was first established before the apostles had committed anything to writing’.74 According to Simon, the very names of the authors of the Gospels –​probably not appended to the originals –​would not be known if it were not for Church tradition, as Adam Tanner (1571–​1632) and other Jesuits had long ago demonstrated against the Lutherans at the Regensburg Colloquy.75 Simon’s dogmatic insistence on the non-​survival of the original holographs may have been relatively novel even in Catholic circles, but as should be clear, his whole argument was designed to serve the Catholic case for tradition. When he deviated from earlier attempts to do the same by the likes of Baronio, he only did so when he believed he had a better argument available. For example, when dealing with the famous problem of the authorship and canonicity of the Epistle to the Hebrews, Simon had to face the fact that both Eusebius and Jerome had reported that its Pauline authorship had been doubted in the Latin church.76 Baronio had argued that Eusebius had misrepresented the views of the Latins so as to support Arianism, and that Jerome had blindly followed him.77 For Simon, such criticism was unwarranted, especially when there was independent evidence that Hebrews was not read in the West. However, both its canonicity and Pauline authorship could be confirmed with a mixture of historical speculation and textual criticism, above all Origen’s thesis that it had been written in Greek by one of Paul’s scribes or disciples, ‘who merely set down what he had learnt from his master’.78 As for the fact that 74

hctnt, 37b [34], citing Irenaeus, Adv. Haer., iii.4.1, who indeed has ‘Quid autem si neque Apostoli quidem Scripturas reliquissent nobis, nonne oportebat ordinem sequi traditionis, quam tradiderunt iis quibus committebant ecclesias?’ (The Greek does not survive.). 75 hctnt, 15b–​20a [11–​15]. For the titles not being in originals, Simon again relies on patristic authority, in this case Chrysostom, Hom. 1.1 on Romans. For the Regensburg Colloquy, see p. 374 above; Simon used Tanner’s Relatio compendiaria de … colloquij Ratisbonensis (Munich, 1602). 76 Eusebius, Eccl. Hist., iii.3.5 ; vi.20.3; Jerome, Ep. cxxix; In. Isa., vi.6. Simon also knew that it had been ascribed to Barnabas as early as Tertullian, in his De Pudicitia, 20. 77 Cesare Baronio, Annales ecclesiastici [1588–​1607] (Antwerp, 1612), 1:610. 78 hctnt, 179b [152]; Origen’s judgement is reported in Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., vi.25.13. An even bigger problem was that the Epistle seemed to deny the possibility of repentance if someone had fallen after baptism (Heb. 6:4–​6), thus favouring the Novatian heresy. This had stimulated much debate (see Hagen, Hebrews commenting, 6, 9–​13; D. Cooper, ‘Reformation responses to Novatianism: 16th-​century interpretations of Hebrews 6:4–​6’, Journal of Theological Interpretation, 3 (2009), 261–​79). Simon’s solution was to note that whereas the Vulgate translated the Greek ἀδύνατον as impossibile, an Old Latin ms had

384 Levitin many of the Catholic Epistles seem to have been only gradually accepted by the Church –​as evidenced by the fact that several were missing from Syriac manuscript versions that Simon dated very early79 –​he did not resort to arguing that the judgement of Laodicea, Carthage, Innocent or Gelasius must have represented universal church teaching. Rather, he adopted the reasoning used by Faustus Socinus (1539–​1604): This hero of the Unitarians makes it clear that in the early stages there were doubts about the authorship of the Epistles of St James, the second of St Peter and that of St Jude because these were discovered after the compilation of the other New Testament books was made. However, he says, as it was subsequently acknowledged that they really were by the apostles whose names they bore, most of the churches had no further reservations.80 It may be thought surprising that a Catholic could so eagerly adopt a Socinian thesis. But in fact, it simply served Simon as another defence of traditionalism, albeit a more historicised traditionalism than that adopted by Bellarmine and Baronio. Simon knew that Luther had questioned James and –​more threateningly –​that Grotius had attributed 2 Peter to Simeon (second bishop of Jerusalem), and Jude to Judah Kyriakos (last Jewish bishop of Jerusalem, up to the time of the Bar Kokba revolt in c.135).81 But, Simon countered, Grotius had no manuscript evidence to substantiate his theses (such as that the original title of 2 Peter attributed the text to Simeon, or that the attribution of Jude was a later interpolation); rather, he had based his thought ‘solely on deductive reasoning which is not conclusive’. Socinus’s developmentalism offered Simon a defence of Catholic tradition against such ‘deductive reasoning’. Jude may not

79 80 81

used difficile, which was, he claimed, a better translation of the meaning as it was understood in the early church. I have been unable to identify this ms. hctnt, 187b [160]. hctnt, 191b–​192a [163]. The reference is to Socinus’s De Sacrae Scripturae auctoritate [1588], in Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum qui Unitarii appellantur ([Amsterdam], 1656), 1:267b–​269b. hctnt, 190a–​b, 197b–​8a, 201b–​2a [161–​2, 167–​8, 170]. For Grotius, see his Annotationes in Novum Testamentum, 3 vols (Amsterdam and Paris, 1641–​50), 3:38. The thesis on 2 Peter in particular seems to me to be at least partially theologically motivated (by preterism). I have deliberately not said much about Grotius as a New Testament scholar in this essay, since the topic is currently the subject of debate. See Hardy, Criticism, 194–​240 and the works cited there.

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‘at first’ have been ‘accepted in every church’, but gradually the Church incorporated it into the Canon, and so it deserved to be accepted.82 Such a developmentalism could not explain why some of the earliest fathers had used apocrypha, above all Clement of Alexandria and Origen, who quoted texts such as the Gospel of the Egyptians or the Epistle of Barnabas. Here, Simon was forced into special pleading: ‘in their arguments, and even in their written works, the early Fathers who wrote against the Pagans or the Jews sometimes follow the rhetorical method of using reasons that are merely apparent, and spurious Acts which are not always reliable’.83 On other occasions, Simon simply resorted to the reasoning that had been standard fare for Catholic apologists for over a century (and which had increasingly been adopted by English theologians and scholars like Cosin): what mattered was not the opinion of any one father, but of the whole Church. ‘Some Church Fathers have even referred to some books as sacred books as if they were of actual inspiration’, Simon admitted, before quickly resolving the problem in the usual fashion: ‘but it can easily be seen from the same writings of those fathers that these works were only approved by certain individuals, whose judgment cannot be deemed authoritative’.84 Simon’s near-​unparalleled knowledge of the manuscripts made no difference to this conclusion. He knew, for example, that ancient manuscripts such as the stichometry in Codex Claromontanus listed as canonical the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, the Acts of Paul, and the Revelation of Peter, but did not see this as problematic in the face of Catholic ‘tradition’.85 It is not that Simon did not know of any objections to such reasoning. In the Sentimens of 1685, Le Clerc had already complained that at any one point in time Simon’s ‘universal tradition’ consisted of no more than three or four fathers –​and why trust those rather than the ones who cited apocrypha or arrived at theologically unsatisfactory conclusions?86 This was not a novel 82 83

84

85 86

hctnt, 198b [167]; 202a–​b [170–​1]. hctnt, 34b–​5a [28–​9]. See similar reasoning to explain away why Clement of Alexandria cited the apocryphal Revelation of Peter (as recounted in Eusebius, Hist. eccl., iii.25) at hctnt, 29b–​30a [24]. Or see his explanation for why some fathers quoted the spurious Acts of Paul and Thecla, because supposedly ‘there were several true statements’ within them (156a [133]). Such examples could be greatly multiplied. hctnt, 230b [195 –​deficient]. ‘Il y a même quelques Peres qui en ont cité quelques-​uns sous ce nom, comme s’ils avoient été veritablement inspirés. Mais il est aisé de connoître par les Ecrits mêmes des Peres, que ces Ouvrages n’ont été approuvés que de quelques particulieres dont le jugement ne peut pas servir de loy’. hctnt, 230b–​1a [195]. Simon cites ‘Catal. Libror. Script. S. ex. Codd. mss. Bibl. Reg. & S. Germ’., but the order cited is that of the stichometry in Codex Claromontanus, which I presume is what is meant. [Le Clerc], Sentimens, 305–​6.

386 Levitin argument against Catholic traditionalism: Le Clerc was just parroting the great classic of Reformed anti-​patristics, Jean Daillé’s, Traité de l’emploi des saints Pères (1632). But Simon simply refused to accept the point. Le Clerc was no more ‘critical’ than Simon; as we shall see, the Arminian had his own theological red lines that he was unprepared to cross. The reality is that on all sides, ‘critics’ were willing to use the latest scholarly tools when it suited their confessional position –​usually when they were on the attack –​but retreated into the old arguments when on the defensive. This does not mean that scholarly innovations were absent, or that Simon found defending his ideological position to be incompatible with new arguments that can be described as quite radically ‘historicist’. On the contrary, since seventeenth-​century confessional warfare worked primarily by means of persuasion (at least among elites), there was an incentive for scholars such as Simon to show that new findings were compatible with their broader theological position. This becomes evident from an examination of the scholarly conclusion that Simon was most forceful in defending: that Matthew’s Gospel was originally written in Aramaic. There can be no doubt that this argument was a confessional one, developed as part of his assault on Protestant scripturalism. According to Simon, Protestants, above all Mathias Flacius, ‘fearing that if the Gospel of St Matthew really was originally written in Hebrew or Chaldaic, and if the Greek text we have was merely a translation, they did not have the true Gospel’, had accepted the conclusion rashly reached by Erasmus that the text was originally composed in Greek. (Simon seems to have genuinely despised Erasmus, repeatedly launching vicious invectives against him.)87 In this the Protestants went against the whole of the earliest Church tradition –​ starting with Papias in the early second century –​and so had to be opposed.88

87

88

hctnt, 49a [42–​3]. Flacius had developed his thesis, with a great deal of documentation, in his Novum Testamentum Jesu Christi filii Dei, ed. id (Basel, 1570), Praefatio. Simon was also concerned with the later modification of the argument by Calvin and the Cambridge Hebraist John Lightfoot, the latter in his Harmoniae quatuor evangelistarum, which appeared in Latin in the Opera omnia (Rotterdam, 1686) (see there 1:276–​80); the English original was published in 1644. hctnt, 47b–​8a [41–​2]. The source for Papias is Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., iii.39. Simon spent much time explaining that the reference here and in other early Christian sources to ‘Hebrew’ was in fact to the Aramaic then spoken in Palestine. This was in part because of his continued feud with Isaac Vossius, who had sought to show that the Palestinian Jews spoke Greek, so as to support his theory about the Septuagint being the best version of the ot. See further S. Mandelbrote, ‘Isaac Vossius and the Septuagint’, in Isaac Vossius, eds. E. Jorkin and D. van Miert (Leiden, 2012), 85–​118, esp. 99–​102.

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Adopting this conclusion involved defending long-​dead Catholic titans such as Erasmus’s opponent Diego López de Zúñiga (d. 1531)89 and Baronio himself.90 But not content with simply recounting the usual patristic loci, Simon also developed an ingenious historical thesis. He knew that Protestant opponents like Flacius and especially Baronio’s great critic Isaac Casaubon had argued that the supposed ‘Aramaic’ version of Matthew was in fact an interpolated gospel used by the heretical Jewish-​Christian sects of the Nazarenes and the Ebionites. But, responded Simon, the Nazarenes were not heretics but simply the earliest Christians, and Matthew had written for them. If we still had their original Hebrew Gospel we would be able to use it to clear up difficulties in the Greek, as had Jerome, who had access to a copy.91 It was true that the Nazarene Gospel may have been interpolated (Jerome had recorded numerous examples of differences with the ‘Church’ Matthew). But, Simon conjectured, these interpolations probably represented genuine oral traditions. Only later did the Ebionites –​who were indeed true heretics –​corrupt this Hebrew Gospel with their alterations.92 If anyone had made unwarranted alterations to the text it was the unidentified Greek translator, who had perhaps ‘made abridgements, and sometimes took the liberty of translating the meaning rather than the words’ [!]‌. Nonetheless, this early Greek version was ‘authoritative’, because it had ‘come down through the centuries to us through consistent traditions. To show that the Greek text of St Matthew was authentic, we must rely not on the fanciful reasons of Protestants, but on this same continuous tradition in the churches’.93 The beauty of this thesis was not only that it could ‘save’ the testimonies of the fathers, but also that it could be used to explain other textual puzzles. For example, the story of the adulterous woman present in the canonical John but missing from so many manuscripts had probably been preserved

89 90 91

92 93

For whom see R.H. Graham, ‘Erasmus and Stunica: a chapter in the history of New Testament scholarship’, Erasmus of Rotterdam Society Yearbook, 10 (1990), 9–​60. Annales, 164. hctnt, 77a–​b [67], referring to Jerome, in Matt. 6:11, where the hapax legomenon ‘ἐπιούσιον’ (qualifying ‘ἄρτον’, bread) that appears in the Lord’s Prayer is clarified with ‫( ָמ ָחר‬tomorrow) as Jerome found it in ‘the Gospel according to the Hebrews’, which he considered the same as the Gospel of the Nazarenes. Simon does not say as clearly as he could have that he was thus going against Jerome, who kept ‘Panem nostrum supersubstantialem da nobis hodie’. hctnt, 87a–​94a [75–​9]. The key source that allowed Simon to conjecture a difference between the Nazarene and Ebionite Gospels were the quotations in Epiphanius, Pan., xxx.13. hctnt, 98a–​b [83].

388 Levitin in the Nazarene Gospel (where it appeared), and then later added to John, thus explaining its absence from earlier manuscripts.94 With this ingenious hypothesis –​stronger than anything asserted by any previous Catholic scholar –​Simon believed he had saved the traditions of the early Church. He could even conclude that ‘what misled Casaubon and several others… who reject the Hebrew Gospel of the Nazarenes as apocryphal, was insufficient thought about the origins of the Christian religion’ –​namely, its Jewish roots.95 This may seem an outrageous accusation to launch at Casaubon, who did so much to investigate the Jewish origins of Christianity, as Anthony Grafton and Joanna Weinberg have taught us.96 But here again, Simon’s confessional allegiance convinced him that Protestants who had recognised these Jewish origins had nonetheless failed to follow that recognition through to its logical theological conclusion (it helped Simon’s case that Casaubon had had to make arbitrary emendations to sustain his ‘Protestant’ defence of the Greek Matthew).97 This assumption that early Christianity had inherited its traditionalism from intertestamental Judaism went well beyond Simon’s attitude to Matthew’s Gospel, and informed much of his defence of a Catholic approach to the New Testament. In 1681 Simon had published a Comparaison des cérémonies des Juifs et de la discipline de l’Eglise, appended to a new edition of his translation of Leon Modena’s Historia degli riti hebraici (1637). This book has recently been described as ‘reflect[ing] the passage from a theological to an anthropological interest in Judaism and the Jews’.98 It is difficult to agree with such a thesis when one sees that almost every chapter of the book seeks to defend Tridentine traditionalism, ecclesiology, or liturgy. A perfect e­ xample –​ particularly relevant for us –​is Simon’s discussion of the famous question of the use of Old Testament quotations in the New. All Christians had always

94 95 96 97

98

hctnt, 81b–​2a, 85b–​6a, 142b–​51b [70–​1, 73–​4, 123–​9]. The source is Eusebius, Hist. eccl. iii.39.17, which in fact has ‘Gospel of the Hebrews’, but Simon simply conflated that with the Nazarene Gospel. hctnt, 78a [68]. A. Grafton and J. Weinberg, “I have always loved the Holy Tongue”. Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance Scholarship (Cambridge, MA, 2011). Where Epiphanius, Pan., xxix.9.4, speaking of the Nazarenes, has ‘ἔχουσι δὲ τὸ κατὰ Ματθαῖον εὐαγγέλιον πληρέστατον Ἑβραϊστί’, Casaubon had suggested ‘οὐ πληρέστατον’ to undermine further the Nazarene Gospel (Exercitationes, 486a). Simon rightly pointed out how unjustified this was (hctnt, 78a [68–​9]). For Casaubon as a confessionally motivated scholar, see now Hardy, Criticism, 49–​151. G. Stroumsa, A new science: the discovery of religion in the age of reason (Cambridge, MA, 2010), 70.

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sought to claim that the application of Old Testament passages to Christ was a legitimate practice. Simon, following in the footsteps of Grotius, sought to justify this practice by historicising it: the allegorical readings of the Old Testament by the earliest Christians were ‘consistent with the [Jewish] practice of those days’, as evidenced above all by the Targums and the Midrashim. The Epistle to the Hebrews in particular contained the most allegorical references of this sort, and it was no coincidence that Paul had studied with Gamaliel in Jerusalem. Predictably, Simon deployed this historical reasoning against Jews and Socinians.99 But he also used it against Protestants. The intertestamental Judaism on which Christianity was built was traditionalist: ‘in the time of Our Lord and the apostles, the Jews believed various things which were based solely on tradition, and of which there was no literal proof anywhere in the Old Testament’. The Evangelists and apostles adopted this traditionalist-​allegorical approach, and so Protestants who limited themselves to literal interpretation once again had failed to recognise that ‘it is impossible to understand Christianity and the principles on which it was founded cannot be properly understood if one does not know Judaism, from which it derived’.100 Far from signalling a shift away from theological polemic, Simon’s historicisation of Jewish Christianity was another salvo in inter-​confessional warfare. When he insisted that the New Testament was written in what he called ‘synagogical’ Greek, he did so partly out of a genuine philological curiosity, but also out of a desire to demonstrate that Protestant claims to ‘comprehend the [Pauline] Epistles [by] relying solely on their own intelligence’ were doomed to failure: only a knowledge of Church tradition could make such comprehension possible. Moreover, this tied in nicely with Simon’s ‘Jesuit’ view of inspiration: while St Paul was inspired, he remained a human writing in the Jewish style in which he was trained.101 All this being established, it now seems safe to say that in Simon’s case we cannot contrast a ‘critical’ or ‘non-​theological’ approach to the New Testament and the formation of the Canon to a ‘theological’ one. Given this fact, it is unsurprising that Simon’s approach drew the ire of Protestants –​I shall return

99

hctnt, 244b–​54a [207–​13]. On earlier discussion of the issues, especially by Grotius, see Hardy, Criticism, 198–​205. 100 hctnt, 271b [229 –​deficient]: ‘En un mot il est impossible d’entendre parfaitement la Religion Chrêtienne, & les principes sur lesquels elle est établie, si on ne sait celle des Juifs, d’où elle tire son origine’. At greater length, see [Richard Simon], Comparaison des Cérémonies des Juifs, et de la discipline de l’Église (Paris, 1681), 3–​26, 88–​105. 1 01 hctnt, 311b–​12a [262–​3].

390 Levitin to some of them shortly.102 Some Catholics were also unhappy with some of his specific conclusions. For example, the Oratorian Michel Le Vassor –​who had previously clashed with Simon over the Old Testament –​did not like Simon’s strong insistence that the Gospel of the Nazarenes was effectively the best version of Matthew, preferable even to the Greek translation.103 But while historians tend to focus on such episodes of controversy perhaps more interesting –​and more important –​is the opposite phenomenon: when new ideas are quietly integrated into the mainstream. In the case Simon’s theses about the formation of the New Testament Canon, we possess a particularly nice example of how this occurred in the form of some works by the Sorbonne professor Louis Ellies Du Pin (1657–​1719), specifically the second volume of his Dissertation Préliminaire, ou Prolégomènes sur la Bible (1699).104 Du Pin, like le Vassor, had opposed some of Simon’s conjectures concerning the Old Testament, an opposition to which Simon responded with characteristic rudeness.105 But on the New Testament, Du Pin, who was adamant that the historical method of ‘positive theology’ adopted by Simon was the right one,106 accepted almost all of the former Oratorian’s conclusions. Following Simon, he openly stated that the ‘tradition’ by which the Canon was known 102 For an interesting response that I do not have space to discuss, see Antoine Coulan, Examen de l’Histoire critique du Nouveau Testament divisé (Amsterdam, 1696). Coulan (1667–​94) was a Huguenot preacher in London who died young; as far as I can tell his exegesis is unknown to scholarship, but for aspects of his biography and political thought, see D. Poton, ‘ “Contre un Livre intitulé Avis important aux Réfugiés sur leur prochain retour en France” par Antoine Coulan’, in Tricentenaire de la Révocation de l’Édit de Nantes. La Révocation et l’extérieur du royaume (Montpellier, 1987), 323–​32. 103 He had planned to put his objections in his Paraphrase sur l’Evangile de S. Mathieu (Paris, 1689), but was convinced not to do so by the Superior of the Oratory, Abel Louis de Sainte-​ Marthe: all that remained was the heading ‘Réflexions sur un nouveau livre de M. Simon’ which the printer forgot to remove. But a summary of Le Vassor’s objections appeared in the Journal des Sçavans (1689), 122–​3. Le Vassor moved to England and converted to Protestantism in the mid-​1690s (E. Haase, Einführung in die Literatur des Refuge (Berlin, 1959), 112) –​a full study of his career would be very welcome. 104 See J. Grès-​Gayer, ‘Un théologien gallican, témoin de son temps: Louis Ellies Du Pin (1657–​ 1719)’, Revue d’histoire de l’Église de France, 72 (1986), 67–​121; id., ‘Un théologien gallican et l’Écriture Sainte: le projet biblique de Louis Ellies Du Pin’, in Le Grand Siècle et la Bible, ed. J.R. Armogathe (Paris, 1989), 255–​75. 105 Louis Ellies Du Pin, Nouvelle Bibliothèque des Auteurs Ecclésiastiques [1686], 2nd edn (Paris, 1690), ‘Dissertation préliminaire sur les Auteurs du Vieux et du Nouveau Testament’, 28a–​39b; [Simon], Lettre; Jean Reuchlin [i.e. Richard Simon], Dissertation critique sur la Nouvelle Bibliotheque des Auteurs ecclesiastiques (Rotterdam, 1688); Richard Simon, Critique de la Bibliotheque des auteurs ecclesiastiques (Pris, 1730). 106 Louis Ellies Du Pin, Dissertation Préliminaire, ou Prolégomènes sur la Bible… seconde edition, 2 vols (Paris, 1701), 1:Preface, sigs. ā ijv–​ā iijr.

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was not the decision of a Council, but rather the long historical tradition of the whole Church.107 This meant that just like Simon, his theory could accommodate a degree of developmentalism concerning the disputed books.108 Indeed, he supported this idea with some conjectural-​historical reasoning of his own. Texts such as Paul’s Letter to the Romans, the second and third Johannine Epistles, the Epistle of Jude, or even Revelation were originally only known by the Churches for whom they were written, and it was only gradually, as they were disseminated and analysed by the orthodox Church, that they were accepted into the Canon. Moreover, Du Pin accepted in full not only Simon’s theory of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ traditions of Greek manuscripts, but even his most controversial theory: that Matthew had originally been written in Aramaic and been preserved as the Gospel of the Nazarenes. Du Pin adopted this hypothesis for the same confessional reason as Simon had developed it: ‘to show the weakness of the conjectures which are alleged against the testimonies of ancient and credible authors’ –​i.e. to refute Protestants who had condemned the church fathers.109 Despite these obvious ideological aims, Du Pin’s book soon became recommended reading for trainee divines not just in the Catholic world (although Protestants cautioned against his arguments in favour of tradition).110 It is an excellent example of how ideas like Simon’s could quickly enter the institutionalised mainstream. But while it was all very well stating such principles in general, when it came to specifics Du Pin had to resort to the same old arguments and the same special pleading as Simon. When early church writers doubted the canonicity of a book, as the very early Hippolytus (c.170–​235) and Caius (d.296) doubted Hebrews, they were dismissed as individual outliers going against putative Church ‘consensus’. The same went for those who doubted Jude or Revelation.111 On 2 Peter, Du Pin simply had to rely on fourth-​and fifth-​century authorities,

1 07 Prolégomenes, 2 (‘Sur le Nouveau Testament’), 41–​2. 108 Ibid., 44–​5. 109 Ibid., 71–​99, qu. 87 (‘Cela suffit pour faire voir la foiblesse des conjectures que l’on allegue contre des témoignages d’Auteurs anciens & dignes de foi’). 110 See e.g. Christoph Matthaüs Pfaff, Introductio in historiam theologiae literariam (Tübingen, 1724), 60, calling it ‘Liber… egregius’. On Pfaff, see below. For praise mixed with warnings, see the English translation: A compleat history of the canon and writers of the books of the Old and New Testament, 2 vols (London, 1700), 2: sig. br-​v. The subsequent attack on preterism –​including Protestant –​suggests an editor inclined to more Reformed theology (sigs. [c]‌r-​v). 111 Prolégomenes, 2:46. The sources for Hippolytus and Carius are Photius, Bibl, 121 and Eusebius, Hist. eccl., vi.20 respectively. For this argument developed in the case of Hebrews, see 188–​9.

392 Levitin no different from Bellarmine more than a century earlier.112 Meanwhile, that the fathers cited apocryphal Gospels such as the Gospel of the Egyptians was something that he for the most part tactfully skirted over.113 When he did mention it, he tried to turn this difficulty into another opportunity for confessional point-​scoring by arguing that the fact that apostles had written texts which were nonetheless non-​canonical (i.e. Hermas, the Clementine Epistles, and the Epistle of Barnabas) was proof that canonicity depended not on the status of the author but the judgement of the Church.114 4

England: Historicising the Canon in the Service of Christian Antiquity

In the same year that Simon published his Histoire critique du texte du Nouveau Testament, an even more remarkable reconsideration of the historical formation of the New Testament Canon was published from John Fell’s famous press in Oxford: that which appeared in Henry Dodwell’s Dissertationes in Irenaeum (1689). This history was designed to buttress the authority of the episcopal Church. Since the Restoration, this enterprise had generated a wide range of publications that suddenly thrust England into the centre of European scholarly life.115 Dodwell’s argument about the Canon, however original in itself, needs to be understood in this scholarly-​confessional context. It and its nefarious appropriation by the deist John Toland are the only case studies in the history of early modern debates on the New Testament Canon that have received scholarly attention,116 so I need only briefly summarise Dodwell’s position. According to the Irishman, the Canon of inspired books could only be known through tradition. Without naming anyone directly, Dodwell blatantly 1 12 113 114 115

Prolégomenes, 2:212–​16, 228–​31. E.g. ibid. 309–​10. Ibid., 330–​1. J.-​L. Quantin, ‘Erudition and orthodoxy : John Fell and patristic scholarship in Restoration Oxford’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 1 (2016), 43–​78; W. Poole, John Fell’s New Year books, 1666–​1686 (Oxford, 2018). 116 See the classic J.-​L. Quantin, ‘Dodwell, Mill, Grabe et le problème du canon néo-​ testametaire au tournant du XVIIe et du XVIIIe siècle’, in Apocryphité, ed. S.C. Mimouni (Turnhout, 2002), 285–​306. For Toland, see J. Champion, ‘Apocrypha, canon and criticism from Samuel Fisher to John Toland, 1650–​1718’, in Judaeo-​Christian intellectual culture in the seventeenth century, ed. A. Coudert et al. (Dordrecht, 1999), 97–​124; id., Republican learning (Manchester, 2003), 190–​212.

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condemned Reformed theology as enthusiastic for thinking otherwise.117 The authenticity of the Canon was known no better than the authenticity of the text of Irenaeus, and Christians who wrote to detract from the trustworthiness of the second-​century fathers (i.e. those like Daillé) were unwittingly undermining the scripturalism they so proclaimed.118 In a remarkable section of text that took up only nine octavo pages, Dodwell explained how this fact was reflected in the process by which the Canon had come to be formed. Its books, all written before the destruction of Jerusalem,119 were stored in individual churches and were not well-​known (with the exception of the Pauline epistles) until the end of Trajan’s rule (ad 117). In fact, none of the first three evangelists had seen the others’ Gospels –​‘otherwise they would not have contained so many contradictions, which have exercised the thoughts of the learned almost since the Canon was formed’ (here Dodwell instanced the famous problem of the different genealogies for Christ offered by Luke and Matthew).120 In the absence of an established Canon, the earliest Christian writings –​Clement of Rome, Barnabas, Hermas, Ignatius, Polycarp –​freely cited the apocrypha while offering no quotations from the canonical gospels (or mutilated quotations at best). In fact, in the first century, the true apostolic writings were ‘bound with the apocryphal, so that there was no public note or censure by the Church stating clearly which were to be preferred’.121 Contrary to the testimony of Eusebius, until then universally accepted, Dodwell asserted that while John may have seen the other Gospels and approved them, he had not fixed the Canon: witness the fact that Ignatius, writing after the apostle’s death, still cited the apocrypha. However, Justin Martyr, who flourished in the second quarter of the second century, possessed the final Canon.122 At around the same time (i.e. the end of Trajan’s reign) the process of evangelisation become one of circulating the Gospels, a process that was

117 Henry Dodwell, Dissertationes in Irenaeum (Oxford, 1689), 62–​3, including ‘Mitto hic rationes alias ab aliis assignatas quae manifestum sapiunt Enthusiasmum’. 118 Ibid., 75. 119 Ibid., 22. 120 Ibid., 68: ‘Aliter foret ne tot essent ἐναντιοφανῆ quae fere a prima usque Canonis Constitutione Eruditorum hominum ingenia exercuerint’. Dodwell kept to the order of composition then standard in most accounts –​Matthew-​Luke-​Mark-​John –​but made sure to emphasise the chronological gaps between them to support his point about mutual independence (ibid., 69). 121 Ibid., 67: ‘Sic autem vera Apostolorum Scripta cum Apocryphis in iisdem voluminibus compingi solebant, ut nulla prorsus nota aut censura Ecclesiae publica constaret quae quibus essent anteferenda’. 122 Ibid., 70, 71–​2, referring to Justin, 1 Apol., 67.

394 Levitin providentially assisted by Trajan’s victories over the Parthians, which opened the road to the East. Here Dodwell repurposed the old story –​laughed at by scholars such as Simon –​that Pantaenus had found the original of the Gospel of Matthew in India. According to Dodwell, what he found was in fact a relic of this early evangelisation in the East.123 This was a confessionalised argument not only because Dodwell used it to undermine Reformed anti-​patristic scripturalism, but also because it constituted one thread of his elaborate defence of episcopacy.124 The earliest Christians continued in communion with the Jews, subject to the Sanhedrin and the synagogues. Only gradually did they establish their own churches, each still under the rule of the bishop of Jerusalem, appointed by heredity from Jesus’s family. When the hereditary line ran out with the death of Simeon (c.105) each church became independent under its own bishop. Accordingly, the early Christians primarily read the Old Testament, and only after the settlement of episcopal jurisdiction were the Gospels ‘published’, so as to help each independent Church assert the truth of its apostolic doctrine against the heretics who had begun to appear at this point, above all the Ebionites and Nazarenes.125 Ascertaining the truth was helped by the fact that the extraordinary assistance of the Holy Ghost lasted until the fourth century. The canonicity of each book could thus be established from early second-​century testimony.126 Dodwell later came to insist that the original holographs were long preserved in individual churches, and that accurate copies of the transcriptions kept at Ephesus, where the Canon was settled, were quickly circulated to all the other churches.127 This involved a long and elaborate argument to explain what Ignatius meant when he disputed with opponents concerning doctrine and they claimed that his views were not present in the ‘archives’ (ἀρχεία), something that had recently much exercised Isaac Vossius and Simon,

1 23 Ibid., 73. The source is Eusebius, Hist. eccl. v.10. For Simon, see hctnt, 40b–​41b. 124 What follows is indebted to Quantin, ‘Problème’; id., ‘Anglican scholarship gone mad? Henry Dodwell (1641–​1711)’, in History of scholarship, ed. C. Ligota and J.-​L. Quantin (Oxford, 2006), 305–​56. 125 Diss., 71–​2; id., De nupero schismate Anglicano. Paraenesis ad exteros (London, 1704), 96–​7. 126 Diss., 75. Dodwell believed himself to be reconstructing the process Eusebius promised to adopt in Hist. Eccl., iii.3. He thus combed Eusebius for such testimonies, deriving the following: Papias: 1 Peter; 1 John (iii.39 –​I cannot see where Dodwell there found a reference to 1 Peter); Polycarp: 1 Peter (iv.14); Justin Martyr: Revelation (iv.18); Theophilus Antiochenus: Revelation (iv.24); Irenaeus: 1 John, Revelation, Hebrews (v.8; v.26); Clement of Alexandria: Barnabas, Clementine Epistles, Jude (13, 14). 127 Paraenesis, 100–​2. At Diss., 73–​4, he had already accepted that Tertullian’s reference to ‘authentic’ copies (n. 59 above) was to the original holographs.

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who had both agreed that the reference was in fact to the Old Testament.128 I suspect –​although cannot prove –​that Dodwell’s belief that real archives were being discussed, and his concomitant insistence on reliable textual preservation and transmission, was a salvo implicitly directed at Simon. Nonetheless, such anti-​Catholic digressions did not stop Dodwell’s narrative being completely different from anything previously developed by any Protestant. Moreover, all the scholarly labours that led him to this radical conclusion also led him, in private, to deny the canonicity of Revelation and 2 and 3 John –​according to Dodwell they were never accepted by the early church and only incorporated later when erroneously ascribed to the apostle rather than to the presbyter who really wrote them. They also led him to insist on the canonicity of the Epistle of Barnabas, which he claimed was wrongly excluded from the ‘modern’ Canon formed by the Synod of Laodicea (a nice reversal of the usual Catholic narrative).129 Dodwell’s historicisation of the process of Canon-​formation was the most ground-​breaking of any composed in Europe around 1700. More than a century later, his ideas were still evoking scandalised tirades from ministers in the Church of Scotland and professors at the newly established theological seminary in Princeton.130 As is well known, they achieved notoriety in England when appropriated by John Toland in his Amyntor (1699).131 Beyond a re-​ articulation of Dodwell’s narrative for anticlerical ends, Toland –​writing in a hurry132 –​did not in fact offer much that could trouble the orthodox. He 128 Ignatius, Phil, 8; [Richard Simon], ‘Castigationes ad opusculum Isaaci Vossii de Sibyllinis Oraculis & responsionem ad objectiones nuperae Criticae sacrae’, in Jacob Gaillard, ‫ אשכול ענבים‬hoc est Specimen quaestionum in Novum instrumentum, de filio hominis (Leiden, 1684), 7 (new pagination), repr. in [Richard Simon], Disquisitiones criticae (London, 1684), 227–​8; Isaac Vossius, Variarum observationum liber (London, 1685), 364–​ 5. For modern views, including some niche ones akin to Dodwell’s, see W.R. Schoedel, ‘Ignatius and the archives’, Harvard Theological Review, 71 (1978), 97–​106. 129 For this last claim see Dodwell’s ‘Dissertatio. De vero huius Epistolae, quae Barnabam Auctorem praefert, Auctore Barnabâ’ [1691], Bod. ms. St Edmund Hall 32, summarised in Quantin, ‘Problème’, 297–​8. For the stir immediately created by this letter, see e.g. Edward Bernard to Richard Bentley, Feb 1691, Bod. ms Smith 4, p. 61. For Dodwell’s plans to reveal his thoughts on the matter, see Dodwell to Thomas Smith, 15 Jan 1698, Bod. ms Smith 49, fols. 157r–​158r. 130 George Campbell, Lectures on ecclesiastical history, 3rd edn (London, 1824) 108; Archibald Alexander, The Canon of the Old and New Testament Scriptures ascertained (London, 1831), 132, 146. Alexander was the first professor at the Princeton Theological Seminary. 131 [John Toland], Amyntor (London, 1699), 69–​78 simply translates Dodwell, Diss., 66–​9. Toland’s notes from Dodwell are printed in Toland, Nazarenus, ed. Champion, 290–​6. 132 Toland was replying to Offspring Blackhall, A sermon preached before the House of Commons… January 30th 1698/​9 (London, 1699).

396 Levitin supplied a long catalogue of early Christian apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, but this could have been taken from any orthodox compilation. (In fact, I suspect that it was plundered from the comprehensive catalogue recently published by the orthodox Lutheran Thomas Ittig, who was himself concerned with countering Dodwell.)133 Moreover, Toland’s own argument was somewhat confused. Knowing that English clerics had particularly invested in publishing and defending the texts of the ‘apostolic’ fathers, he trained his guns on them.134 Unfortunately, he tried to do too much, claiming both that these texts were spurious and that their non-​citations of the ‘canonical’ New Testament proved that the Canon had not been settled in the first century, as Dodwell had argued.135 All his English opponents jumped on this inconsistency.136 Far more powerful were the arguments that Toland pillaged directly from Dodwell: the early fathers, especially Clement of Alexandria and Origen, cited these texts as Scripture; the same fathers often cited other apocrypha, such as the Revelation of Peter.137 But if these texts were genuine, Toland asked, why were they not in the Canon, just like Mark and Luke, who were also only disciples of the apostles? To this he added the usual problems, above all the disputed status of Hebrews, 2 Peter, Revelation, etc. How could the much vaunted Synod of Laodicea have established a Canon when the tradition preceding it was so varied, and when it was not assisted by any revelation?138 Three replies to Toland were immediately published, emanating from across the ideological spectrum: one from the learned nonjuror John Richardson; another from the young Cambridge divine Samuel Clarke; and a third from England’s leading Unitarian, Stephen Nye.139 All three abandoned the 133 See Ittig’s ‘Dissertatio prima de pseudepigraphis Christi, Mariae & Apostolorum’, in Appendix Dissertationis de Haeresiarchis aevi apostolici et apostolico proximi (Leipzig, 1696), 97–​240. Toland advertised his knowledge of Ittig’s book at Amyntor, 66. For Ittig’s concern with Dodwell, see his De Haeresiarchis aevi Apostolici & Apostolico proximi (Leipzig, 1696), sigs. )(2r–​)(4v. 134 Toland, Amyntor, 44. 135 Ibid., 38–​40, 42–​4, 79. 136 [Stephen Nye], An historical account, and defence of the Canon of the New Testament (London, 1700), 7, 38–​40, 53–​4; John Richardson, The canon of the New Testament vindicated… the second edition corrected (London, 1701) 2–​3, 99. 137 Toland, Amyntor, 44–​6, 52–​3. 138 Ibid., 47–​8, 56–​8. 139 There is no scholarship on Richardson, student and fellow at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and rector of North Luffenham, Rutland, 1685–​90 (Venn, Alum. Cantab. i.452b). His learning is evident from his posthumously published sermon-​lectures, preached in Emmanuel Chapel (Praelectiones Ecclesiasticae triginta novem, 2 vols (London, 1726 –​Richardson’s reply to Toland is vaunted in the Dedication and Preface written by his nephew, the antiquarian William Richardson: sigs. A2r-​v, [A3]r-​v); and

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traditional Reformed argument: the testimonium internum was conspicuous only by its absence. Instead, they all adopted historicised versions of the case from tradition; indeed, it is fair to say that they all came closer to Catholic arguments than they did to the position adopted by Whitaker a century earlier. According to all three, the identity of the canonical books was known through tradition.140 Mark and Luke were to be accepted as gospels while the Clementine Epistles or the Epistle of Barnabas were not because the former had been directly sanctioned by the apostles, whose judgement lived on through the Church.141 Clarke adopted this argument to such an extent that he accepted the claim usually made only by Catholics (and which he himself took directly from Baronio) that the non-​apostolic Gospels were in fact apostolic in origin: Peter dictated Mark’s Gospel, and the account of Paul’s travels in Acts had to have been written before his death and on his authority.142 As for Dodwell’s position, all three agreed that the apostolic fathers did cite the New Testament, which implied that it had circulated more widely in the first century than the Oxford scholar had suggested. If the citations were not always (or ever) accurate, it was because they cited from memory, just as they cited the Old Testament.143 When the later fathers cited the Clementine Epistles, Hermas, etc., –​let alone apocrypha like the Revelation of Peter –​they did not necessarily take them to be inspired, but only edifying, and permitted to be read in Churches.144 Deploying this argument was made easier by the fact that Toland had blatantly dissimulated, citing patristic loci where apocrypha were mentioned but clearly not deemed inspired or canonical. Nonetheless, on some occasions such citations were impossible to explain away, such as when Clement of Alexandria called Hermas and the Epistle of Barnabas ‘Scripture’, or –​even worse –​when Origen called Hermas ‘inspired’. Here Toland’s opponents resorted to a trick long used by Protestants when attempting to show that the Old Testament apocrypha had not been thought canonical in the early church: supposedly, ‘Scripture’ here did not mean ‘canonical Scripture’, but just

from his extensive book collection, bequeathed to Emmanuel. On Clarke, see J. Ferguson, Samuel Clarke (Kineton, 1976); on Nye: H. McLachlan, The story of a nonconformist library (Manchester, 1923), 53–​86. 140 [Nye], Account, 30–​2; Richardson, Canon, 8–​13; Samuel Clarke, Some reflections on that part of a book called Amyntor… which relates to the writings of the primitive fathers and the canon of the New Testament (London, 1699), 32–​5. 141 Richardson, Canon, 33–​4; Clarke, Reflections, 37–​42. 142 Clarke, Reflections, 41–​2. 143 [Nye], Account, 48–​53; Richardson, Canon, 85–​90. 144 [Nye], Account, 57–​64; Richardson, Canon, 19–​22, 47–​9, 103–​4; Clarke, Reflections, 44–​6.

398 Levitin referred to edifying writings.145 Otherwise, any one father’s thoughts were his own, and not those of the Church as a whole.146 The level of originality and sophistication in these responses to Toland does not at all map on to the putative ‘liberalism’ of the author; if anything, the relationship is inversely proportional.147 The Unitarian Nye retreated into the most conservative position of all three. In fact, it is astonishing to see the man who in the previous decade had done more than anyone to argue that the orthodox English Church had misrepresented ante-​Nicene belief now jumping so quickly to the argument that there existed an unquestionable historical tradition of what he called ‘orthodoxy’ concerning the Canon. According to Nye, when Laodicea outlined the ‘orthodox’ Canon, it did not establish it but simply reported on universal church tradition.148 Nye even posited that in the case of the disputed books (James, Jude, 2 Peter, etc.) Laodicea probably received them because they had ‘certain Information that these Books were read, as Writings of the Apostles, in all Churches of antient Foundation’.149 This argument might have been taken straight out of a Catholic divinity manual. We could not wish for a better example of the fact that writers in the Socinian tradition were not intrinsically ‘liberal’; rather, like everyone else, they had a confessional position that they sought to defend using every argument possible.150 In contrast, the nonjuror Richardson made a genuine effort to engage with the scholarly problems that he faced, above those raised by Dodwell. He took seriously the evidence of varying testimonies, leading him to accept Dodwell’s thesis that the Canon was only finally assembled ‘in the Beginning of the Second Century, about the time of St. Johns Death, or immediately after it’.151 Moreover, he was willing to accept that this was a gradual process. Particular churches only received specific books –​and the testimonies that confirmed their authenticity –​over time. Separating the canonical wheat from the spurious chaff was an activity that had required consideration, and the apocrypha 1 45 [Nye], Account, 59–​64; Richardson, Canon, 21–​2, 26–​7. 146 [Nye], Account, 72–​3; Richardson, Canon, 29–​31. 147 Contra J. Sheehan, The enlightenment Bible (Princeton, 2005), who calls Clarke a ‘liberal Anglican’ (41), and Richardson’s book one ‘we might expect to appeal to a biblical conservative’ (54). 148 [Nye], Account, 67–​8. See also the attacks on Dodwell at 32–​3, 43–​5. 149 Ibid., 82. All this is a commentary on Eusebius, Hist. eccles., iii.25. 150 Astonishingly, Nye even used the favourite argument of all persecutors throughout Christian history: given the strength of evidence behind the ‘orthodox’ Canon, anyone who rejected it could only be wilfully depraved, seeking to ‘affect to be Infidels; or that love to be vain, tho in a serious and weighty Subject’ (ibid., 35). 151 Richardson, Canon, 9–​10.

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were not always identified immediately.152 Hence the Peshitta lacked 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, Jude, and Revelation because it was composed very early, ‘before the controverted Books were Universally receiv’d’ (a thesis no doubt pilfered from Simon).153 However, Richardson concluded, the process of establishing canonicity had been made reliable by the fact that the earliest Christians possessed a solid oral tradition concerning true apostolic doctrine, against which any book could be measured.154 In scholarly terms, Richardson was therefore no conservative. What he could not accept was Dodwell’s full thesis about the near-​total ignorance of the canonical New Testament in the first century, which he replaced with an interesting conjectural-​developmental theory of his own. It was true that the apostles travelled and preached in the second half of the first century, a time of war and persecution, and that this made the circulation of texts difficult. Nonetheless, the imperfect citations by the apostolic fathers –​which Dodwell thought could have been taken from the apocrypha –​were for Richardson proof that there was at least some knowledge of the canonical texts at this time. Moreover, the fact that the evangelists did not explicitly cite each other did not prove that they had not read each other: after all, many Old Testament books did not cite other books which their authors had certainly read. On the basis of internal echoes, Richardson suggested that Peter had read some of Paul’s Epistles and Mark’s Gospel, Paul that of Luke, and John the other three. Nonetheless, Richardson admitted that Dodwell was right that one could not glean from any first-​century writings the names of the authors of the canonical Scriptures: ‘The assurance we have that the… Books of the New Testament are Canonical, must be taken from the Writers of the Second Century’.155 As for the non-​canonical quotations in the apostolic fathers, these probably came not from apocrypha but from reliable oral tradition. Most likely, Richardson speculated, was that it was this tradition that was later collected as the much-​ debated Apostolical Constitutions, even if many falsehoods were also interpolated.156 For all these fallibilities, however, apostolic tradition was secure, helped by the fact that the original holographs survived for a long time, contra Simon.157

1 52 153 154 155 156 157

Ibid., 9, 20–​1, 99–​101. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 85–​7, 88–​9 (qu.), 90. Ibid., 91–​4. For the Const. Ap., see further below. Ibid., 117–​18.

400 Levitin It is thus not at all the case that ‘radicals’ like Toland and Nye espoused the most sophisticated historicism. Far more significant than Toland’s appropriation of Dodwell was that by two of his Oxford acquaintances: the Lutheran émigré and editor of patristic and apocryphal texts John Ernest Grabe (1666–​1711), and the great New Testament editor John Mill (1645–​1707).158 These appeared in Latin publications read across Europe, meaning that it was impossible for anyone approaching the subject seriously not to be aware of the new ideas emanating from England. In particular, the pan-​continental impact of the New Testament published by Mill –​who had planned to edit the apostolic fathers with Dodwell before their relationship soured over politics –​was immense.159 Anyone familiar with early modern scholarship knows about Mill’s 30,000 textual variants and the debate they aroused. But his lengthy and sophisticated thoughts on the formation of the Canon, no less important, are almost unknown. According to Mill, the apostles and disciples initially preached without writing, and the first texts to be written were simple letters, beginning with those to the Thessalonians in ad 52.160 This chronological prioritisation of the epistles over the Gospels may seem innocent to us, but in 1707 it was still controversial. For example, when he read Mill, Le Clerc –​hardly known as a reactionary –​refused to believe that the Gospels had not been written much earlier, soon after the apostles began preaching.161 Mill also posited a lost letter to the Corinthians, referred to at 1 Cor. 5:9.162 While the idea that there were such lost Scriptures was not unheard of, it was also a matter of controversy, as we shall see. Mill placed very early –​around 58 ad –​the composition of the inaccurate pseudo-​Gospels mentioned in Luke’s preface. According to him, these were not written by heretics, but by well-​meaning Christians who wrote on the basis of oral tradition but were not always possessed of all the information. The Gospels according to the Hebrews and the Egyptians were two such writings.

158 For some details, see Quantin, ‘Problème’, 298–​301. For Grabe, see his Spicilegium SS. Patrum (Oxford, 1700). There are many notes on nt apocrypha in his mss: see e.g. Bod. ms Grabe 8, fol. 91rff. 159 A. Fox, John Mill and Richard Bentley: a study of the textual criticism of the New Testament, 1675–​1729 (Oxford, 1954), remains the fullest treatment (140–​1 for details of the planned collaboration with Dodwell). 160 John Mill, ‘Prolegomena’, in Η ΚΑΙΝΗ ΔΙΑΘΗΚΗ. Novum Testamentum. Cum lectionibus variantibus (Oxford, 1707), Ib. A later than usual dating for Matthew is justified at viib–​ viiia. Mill’s chronology for Paul is derived from John Pearson’s ‘Annales Paulini’, in id., Opera posthuma chronologica (London, 1688) –​the book was edited by Dodwell. 161 See his review of Mill in Bib. Choisie, 14 (1707), 354–​5. 162 Proleg., iia–​b.

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The former survived only among the Nazarenes, but it was not the original Aramaic Matthew –​an obvious rebuttal of Simon, for whom Mill otherwise had the highest respect. He did, however, accept that Matthew had originally written in Aramaic on the basis of the same patristic testimonies as Simon, even if he was sure that the text had not survived and that Jerome had not really seen it.163 The Gospel according to the Egyptians, meanwhile, was composed by the Essenes in Alexandria –​their predilection for allegorical mysticism was evident in the few fragments that survived.164 Like Dodwell, Mill envisaged a first century in which true and false Gospels circulated side-​by-​side, without much in the way of differentiation. Unlike his former friend, however, he had done too much work on the text itself not to see the blatant similarities between some of the Gospels, above all Matthew and Mark, and so could not agree that the Evangelists had not seen each other’s texts. It is an overstatement to say that ‘he adumbrated the Synoptic problem’165, but he did argue that Mark had seen Matthew, which he clarified and supplemented.166 Luke, meanwhile, used both Matthew and Mark, deploying them towards his aim of confuting erroneous gospels, especially the Egyptian one made by the Essenes.167 But neither Luke’s Gospel nor his Acts prevented the appearance of more spurious writings after the deaths of Peter and Paul: the Acts, Preaching, and Revelation of Peter, and the Acts of Paul.168 Hence, when Clement of Rome, Hermas, and Barnabas wrote c.ad 70, they barely cited the New Testament; if they did, it was from such apocrypha.169 This idea, obviously taken from Dodwell, served to set up an original narrative of how the Canon finally came to be formed. Scriptural authors themselves knew those written by the others: hence 2 Peter 3:16 spoke of the Pauline epistles as ‘Scripture’, using the same word as usually used for the Old Testament books (γραφή).170 But the Canon of the four Gospels was only formed around ad 100, by Asian bishops no doubt acting on John’s authority.171 It was the

163 Proleg., Va–​v ib, viiia. Mill also speculated that Matthew had been translated into Greek by James, first bishop of Jerusalem. 164 Ibid., vib–​v iia, commenting on the passages in Clemens Romanus, Ep. 2, 12; Clemens Alexandrinus, Excerpts from Theodotus, 67. 165 Fox, Mill, 70. 166 Proleg., xiib–​x iiia. 167 Ibid., xiiib–​x ivb, following up a suggestion in Grabe, Spic., 33. Mill also thought Jude to be an abridgement of 2 Peter, composed c. 90 (xviib). 168 Proleg., xvb–​x vib. 169 Ibid., xvib–​x viia. 170 Ibid., xxiia–​b. 171 Ibid., xxiiia.

402 Levitin Gospels and the Old Testament prophets that were read in church in Justin Martyr’s time.172 How then did Acts, the epistles, and Revelation get added to the Canon? It cannot have been done by a General Council, Mill reasoned, because then each church would have received all the books at the same time, which was not the case.173 There was evidence, however, that the first Canon to include Acts and some epistles was made in Rome. This Canon only included fifteen epistles (thirteen Pauline, 1 Peter, 1 John) –​these were the only epistles cited by Polycarp in the early first century, and this would explain why Romans had been placed first among the Pauline Epistles, even though it was not written first. This ‘Roman’ Canon was prepared sometime between c.110 and 127, a terminus ad quem dictated by the fact that at this point the heretic Marcion declared his own Canon to which the orthodox one was opposed.174 Subsequently the Canon was enlarged through the contributions of individual churches who supplied epistles in their possession, which were then progressively accepted by others. The Church of Jerusalem supplied Hebrews, James, and Jude; the Asian churches 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and Revelation.175 The brilliance of this thesis was that it explained the differences of opinion between the churches –​differences that sometimes took several centuries to resolve. For example, there was evidence that the Epistle of James –​for which Mill provided a particularly scholarly and sophisticated reception history –​passed from Palestine to Syria, Cyprus, Egypt, Phrygia, and Asia, gradually accepted by the churches in each place. In the West, it was not quoted by anyone before Hilary of Poitiers (310–​67). It was possible that he, having been banished to Phrygia just at the time of the Council of Laodicea, reported upon his return the Eastern tradition concerning the text, and promoted its acceptance in the West so successfully that it was deemed canonical by the time of Innocent I and the Council of Carthage. Similar stories could be told about Jude, Hebrews, 2 and 3 John, and 2 Peter: Mill was happy to admit that the last of these had not been cited by anyone in the first two centuries.176

172 Ibid., xxiiib, referring to Justin, 1 Apol., 67. Mill mistakenly has 2 Apol., but his reference is clear from his words: ‘Et quidem solam hanc, e Libris N.T. una cum Scriptis Prophetarum, in Sacris conventibus etiam suo tempore lectitam fuisse, tradit Justinus’. 173 Proleg., xxiiib. 174 Ibid., xxiiib–​x xiva. But Mill also mentions the possibility of a date around 114, because Grabe had suggested to him yet another creative reading of Ignatius, Phil., 5, specifically ‘προσφυγων τω ευαγγελιω ως σαρκι Ιησου και τοις αποστολοις ως πρεσβυτεριω εκκλησιας’, where εὐαγγέλιον is the Gospels, ἀποστόλους is the epistles, and προφήτης the ot. 175 Proleg., xxiva. 176 Ibid., xxiva–​x xvb.

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Of all the accounts of Canon-​formation written around 1700, the one in Mill’s Prolegomena is the one that appears most ‘modern’. But a lack of open theological polemic should not be mistaken for a lack of theological presuppositions. Both theologically and ecclesiologically, Mill was no liberal. The whole of his discussion was designed to reassert the authority of the established Canon using the latest historical arguments. When faced with a battle between Church tradition and purely critical judgement –​such as the fact that the style of the Epistle to the Hebrews was so different from that of the other Pauline Epistles –​Mill always sided with the former.177 But this left much room for very sophisticated and creative historical reasoning. In England, everyone had by this period adopted a ‘historicist’ approach to the formation of the Canon. This was not because the English were uniquely clever or because there was an ‘Anglican enlightenment’. It was because the confessional identity of the Restored church encouraged investigation of apostolic Christianity, and the question of Canon-​formation followed. The most avant garde conclusions were reached by those leading this investigation: by men such as Mill, or nonjurors like Dodwell, Richardson, and Thomas Brett.178 Every figure we have discussed considered the Bible inspired and a source of doctrine, not just moral commonplaces. The exception was Toland, but his scholarship was, by the standards of the day, by far the most unreliable: he had no followers that we know of.179 At the same time, the normalisation of such theological historicism sometimes did lead to an increased sense that scholarship might justify further reformation of what ‘orthodoxy’ should be. Dodwell was one product of such 177 Ibid., xia–​x iia, developing an elaborate argument for why stylistic differences were irrelevant. 178 Thomas Brett, Tradition necessary to explain and interpret the Holy Scriptures (London, 1718), ii–​xv, 15–​16, 21, 25, 27–​8, 30–​2, 40, 42, 44–​63, using a mixture of Dodwell and Grabe to attack Toland and the Reformed, and to defend episcopacy and the new ‘usager’ liturgy, developed further in id., A farther proof of the necessity of tradition to explain and interpret the Holy Scriptures (London, 1720), 4–​6, 32, 46–​7, 113–​15. For a horrified response from an otherwise sympathetic layman, see Sir Richard Cox to Brett, 15 Jan 1722, Bod. ms Eng. th. c. 27, fol. 373r, accusing Brett of making ‘a Shocking Comparison, between ye Evidence of ye Tradition, & of the Canon of Scripture… Scripture is not like The Arabian Tales, where a Principall part is kept for future discovery’. Brett’s reply is Bod. ms Eng. th. c. 39, fols. 205r–​208r. 179 Which did not stop him propagating his position at home and abroad: J.-​P. Erman, Mémoires pour servir a l’histoire de Sophie Charlotte Reine de Prusse (Berlin, 1801), 203–​ 11 (205–​6 reveals Toland’s debts to Simon). As is well known, Toland’s Nazarenus (1718) developed an even more implausible thesis about the authenticity of a sixteenth-​century Italian ms of the Gospel of Barnabas.

404 Levitin a belief; another was William Whiston (1667–​1752). Whiston is a fascinating figure, but his friendship with Newton has so dominated the attention of historians that the idiosyncrasies of own views, especially on the Bible, have been seriously underappreciated.180 Now, Whiston did begin, around 1707, with the Newtonian assumption that something akin to Arianism was the true primitive faith, which had been corrupted by the orthodox, Athanasian party in the fourth century.181 But he went far beyond this to develop, in his Primitive Christianity reviv’d (1711), a scheme which completely deviated from Newton’s biblicism. In summer 1708 he was introduced by Grabe to the Apostolic Constitutions attributed to Clement of Rome. They had been published in 1563 by the great Jesuit patristic scholar Francisco Torres (1509–​84), who considered them genuine. But they had then been roundly dismissed as spurious. James Ussher (1581–​ 1656), in the course of his demonstration of the falseness of the ‘long’ recension of the Ignatian Epistles, had argued –​on the basis of similarity between the two –​that they were both composed by the same forger in the fourth century.182 Daillé, as part of his campaign to demonstrate the unreliability of many of the texts from Christian antiquity, wrote a long book in which he argued for an Arian authorship, possibly as late as the end of the fifth century.183 This predictably elicited counter-​arguments from English scholar-​theologians. William Beveridge argued at length that at least some of the Apostolic Canons appended to the Constitutions dated from the second century and reflected true apostolic traditions. In passing, this involved some daring statements about the process 180 His leading biographer, for example, has written that ‘Whiston’s Arianism, like his theory of earth history and his Whig propagandizing, derived from his rationalistic, Newtonian method of biblical interpretation’ (J. Force, William Whiston: honest Newtonian (Cambridge, 1985), 93), a conclusion I think incorrect in every respect. For other overviews of Whiston’s schemes and the trouble they landed him in, see E. Duffy, ‘ “Whiston’s Affair”: the trials of a primitive Christian 1709–​1714’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 27 (1976), 129–​50; S. Snobelen, ‘Suffering for Primitive Christianity: William Whiston and toleration in eighteenth-​century Britain,” in Scepticisme, Clandestinité et Libre Pensée, ed. M. Benítez et al. (Paris, 2002), 269–​98. 181 Whiston details the development of his thought in the ‘Historical Preface’ attached to Primitive Christianity reviv’d, 4 vols (London, 1711), 1:ii–​viii, xiii. There is some corroboration to this chronology from the fact that sermons Whiston preached in the late-​1690s, and repeated through to 1707, are orthodox and Trinitarian: Bod. ms Eng. th. e. 45 (see esp. the catechistical sermons preached at Tamworth in 1699, 1–​5 rev. (second pagination)). Newton abandoned his Arianism in the 1710s, partly in response to the extremes of Whiston’s position: see my Kingdom of Darkness (Cambridge, forthcoming). 182 James Ussher, ‘De Ignatii Martyris epistolis..’., in Polycarpi et Ignatii Epistolae (Oxford, 1644), lxiii–​lxxi, and subsequent chapters. 183 Jean Daillé, De pseudepigraphis apostolicis (Harderwijk, 1653).

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of canonisation: the real Constitutions, while they differed greatly from the text that now existed, had certainly been known to Epiphanius in the fourth century and had even been taken for canonical Scripture in the third, ‘at the time before the Canon was settled’.184 Beveridge’s Cambridge mentor John Pearson, as part of his famous Vindiciae (1672) of the Ignatian Epistles, argued that the current text was formed from earlier books attributed to Clemens Romanus, Ignatius, and Hippolytus and then interpolated by the collector,185 a judgement accepted by Grabe.186 None of these men thought that they were playing with fire. But with hindsight, it is clear that they paved the way for Whiston’s extraordinary, idiosyncratic thesis. There can be no doubt that he was attracted to the Apostolical Constitutions by their Arian Christology. What is remarkable is the extent to which he was consequently prepared to rethink the very structure of all of Christianity in a manner that had far less in common with Newton or any other Arian or Socinian than it did with the liturgical revisionism of some nonjurors. Inspired by Beveridge, Pearson and Grabe, Whiston quickly decided that the Apostolic Canons appended to the eighth book of the Constitutions had been compiled by Hippolytus in the late second century, and reflected true apostolic tradition.187 This meant that the real Canon of the New Testament was that listed in the last, eighty-​fifth of these Canons: ‘I mean as including all the Books we now own for Canonical; and also the Two Epistles of St. Clement, and the Constitutions of the Apostles by St. Clement’.188 To these should be added Hermas, the Ignatian Epistles, Polycarp, and the lost Revelation of Peter and Acts of Paul, all of which had been quoted as inspired by the earliest Christians, as Mill had shown.189 If this was not bizarre enough, Whiston also announced that 2 Esdras –​which if anyone else thought canonical they ascribed to the 184 William Beveridge, Codex Canonum ecclesiae primitivae vindicatus ac illustratus (London, 1678), 282–​3. The dispute between Daillé and Beveridge resonated across Europe for some time: see e.g. the Wittenberg disputation: Johann Wilhelm Jan (praes.), Dissertatio historico-​critica de antiquitate Canonum Apostolicorum, qua Io. Dallaei ac Guil. Beveregii sententiae inter se comparantur (Wittenberg, 1706). For Beveridge’s broader aims, see Quantin, Antiquity, 349–​52. 185 John Pearson, Vindiciae Epistolarum S. Ignatiae (Cambridge, 1672), 48–​64: a very learned mini-​dissertation that deserves more attention than I can give it here. 186 Spic., 283–​8. Grabe’s notes from Pearson on this matter are in Bod. ms Grabe 8, fols. 76r, 79r. 187 Whiston, ‘Advice for the Study of Divinity’, in Sermons and Essays upon several subjects (London, 1709), 299–​ 300; ‘Historical Preface’, Primitive Christianity, 1:lxxxviii. All of Whiston’s ‘proofs’ for early acceptance of the Const. Ap., were plundered from Beveridge: Primitive Christianity, 3:84–​91. 188 ‘Study of Divinity’, Sermons and Essays, 296. 189 Primitive Christianity, 3:64–​71.

406 Levitin Old Testament Canon –​had in fact been written by an unknown Christian at the end of the first century ad, and would be deemed canonical ‘had we an uncorrupt Copy’.190 But pride of place went to the Apostolic Constitutions themselves, which, Whiston told the no doubt gobsmacked Vice-​Chancellor of Cambridge in 1710, were ‘no other than the Original Laws and Doctrines of the Gospel: The New Covenant, or most Sacred Standard of Christianity; equal in their Authority to the Four Gospels themselves; and superior in Authority to the Epistles of single Apostles’.191 This claim was folded into a full theological system. The accepted New Testament books only provided a historical account of Christ’s actions before his resurrection. But it was inconceivable that Christ had left the Church without a ‘Pandect of Laws’ of the type possessed by the Jews.192 The Constitutions were just such a set of laws, all of which –​abstinence from blood and strangled animals, a hyper-​elaborate baptism ritual, a large set of fasts and festivals, a liturgy in which the Lord’s Prayer was only used at baptism, the rule that priests should not marry after ordination –​were still binding, and which Whiston practised for the rest of his life.193 They had been given by Christ to the eleven remaining apostles on Mount Sion in the forty days he spent with them after his resurrection, and were then ratified at a series of Councils in Jerusalem between ad 64 and 86, where Clement of Rome transcribed them.194 Subsequently, they were entrusted to the bishops of the nineteen apostolical churches, who kept them secret so as to preserve them ‘from unbaptiz’d Heathens, Jews, and Catechumens, til a proper time should come for their universal publication’ (that time had now come).195 This secrecy explained why they were not explicitly acknowledged in the first four centuries. But if one knew where to look one could find plenty of evidence that these first Christians ‘observ’d a Doctrina & Disciplina Arcana’. Remarkably, Whiston found all this evidence in the De Disciplina Arcani (1685) by the Jesuit Emmanuel Schelstrate (1649–​92), assistant librarian at the Vatican and an arch-​defender of the papacy, who had used it to explain the silence of the early church on such aspects of Tridentine liturgy as the use 190 Ibid., 67–​8, 76–​8. See further A. Hamilton, The apocryphal Apocalypse (Oxford, 1999), 267–​79. 191 Whiston to Charles Roderick, 22 Feb 1710, in ‘Historical Preface’, Primitive Christianity, 1:cii. 192 Primitive Christianity, 3:161–​2. 193 For a summary, see Primitive Christianity, 3:709–​13. Late in life, Whiston proudly recorded how he subjected his grandchildren to his ‘primitive’ baptism rite: Bod. ms Eng. misc. d. 297, p. 6. 194 Primitive Christianity, 3:14–​30; 78–​83, 112–​25. 195 Ibid., 152. For the nineteen apostolic bishoprics, the source is the Const. Ap. itself (vii.46).

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of images in worship.196 Of course, for Whiston, the ‘secret’ that was being concealed was the contents of the Constitutions (he conjectured that lesser bishops had been able to write to the apostolical bishoprics for doctrinal and disciplinary clarification). These contents were only publicised in the fourth century, when the ancient faith began to be corrupted by the Athanasian Trinitarians.197 But Athanasius had got his nefarious hands even on the precious Constitutions: hence the Ethiopic version recently mentioned by Job Ludolf was in fact a corrupt abridgement produced by Athanasius or one of his supporters to uphold his bastard ‘orthodoxy’.198 As one delves further into this conspiracy theory, it is tempting to concur with the judgement that Whiston, all of whose books were published at the expense of the author, was ‘a crank of almost modern type’.199 Certainly much of his scholarship was bizarre by the standard of any time. For example, since he posited that the Apostolic Canons had been transcribed by Clement in ad 67, he had to claim that John’s Gospel, which it listed as canonical, had been composed in the early 60s (and that Cerinthus and Ebion were already then flourishing), thirty years earlier than anyone else believed.200 He argued for the authenticity of the ‘long’ recension of the Ignatian Epistles, since it quoted the Apostolic Constitutions.201 Perhaps most absurdly, he claimed to have re-​discovered a lost apostolic book, the Doctrine of the Apostles (which he believed had been composed as an epitome of the Constitutions at one of his imagined Apostolic Councils in Jerusalem), preserved in Arabic in the Bodleian Library.202 Grabe, one of many whom Whiston pestered to approve his ideas, proved with the assistance of the émigré convert and orientalist Jean Gagnier (c.1670–​1740) that this was just a translation of the Apostolic Constitutions

196 Primitive Christianity, 3:130–​43, relying on Emmanuel Schelstrate, De Disciplina Arcani contra disput. E. Tentzel (Rome, 1685). This was a defence of the thesis first made in id., Antiquitas illustrata (Antwerp, 1678) from the critique by the Lutheran Wilhelm Ernst Tentzel (Dissertatio de Disciplina Arcani (Wittenberg, 1683)). See further L. Ceyssens, ‘Introduction’, in La correspondance d’Emmanuel Schelstrate, ed. id. (Brussels, 1949), 5–​91, esp. 47–​8. 197 Primitive Christianity, 3:152–​3. 198 ‘A Dissertation upon the Epistles of Ignatius’, in Primitive Christianity, 1:83–​4; Primitive Christianity, 3:151–​2; Job Ludolf, Commentarium ad Historiam Æthiopicam (Frankfurt, 1691), 239. 199 Fox, Mill, 109. 200 Primitive Christianity, 3:38–​40. 201 ‘Dissertation upon the Epistles of Ignatius’. This ‘discovery’ was made in Jan 1710: ‘Historical Preface’, xcvii. 202 Primitive Christianity, 3:119; A reply to Dr. Allix’s remarks (London, 1711), 8, 10, 25–​7.

408 Levitin themselves: Whiston, he noted, had therefore promised the world a new, canonical book of the New Testament which he himself had not read.203 But it is important to recognise that, for all these absurdities, Whiston was also following –​however eccentrically –​in the footsteps of Grabe himself. Once in England, the German had conducted extensive study of the Apostolic Constitutions, and while he of course did not think them canonical, he did use some of the liturgical prescriptions in the eighth book to justify his own non-​ communion with the Church of England.204 With their speculations about the nature of primitive Christianity, English clerics had opened the door to the kind of wholesale reconsideration of the Canon offered by Toland and Whiston. They had also laid down the gauntlet to the Reformed on the Continent, who could not ignore their results. 5

Continental Reformed and Arminians: Responding to French and English Scholarship

Together, the theses developed by Simon and Dodwell and adapted by others led Protestants to consider anew the problem of the New Testament Canon, and to recognise the subject as a distinct theological locus. Here we see the impact of trans-​confessional emulation in its most overt form. For example, the Lutheran Johann Heinrich Maius, upon becoming professor of theology at Giessen in 1690, immediately set his students to answering systematically Simon’s Histoire critique du texte du Nouveau Testament in a set of disputations that took four years to complete.205 Maius and his students were most scandalised by the claim that Christ had not immediately intended for the Gospels to 203 Johann Ernst Grabe, An essay upon two Arabick manuscripts (London, 1711), vii. Whiston responded in Remarks on Dr. Grabe’s essay (London, 1711). Simon Ockley, who translated parts of the ms for Whiston, also distanced himself: see his Account of the authority of the Arabick manuscripts in the Bodleian Library (Lodnon, 1712), which also contains interesting reflections on the history of Arab Christianity and its texts. The ms is Bod. ms Roe 26: see A. Nicoll, Bibliothecae Bodleianae codicum manuscriptorum Orientalium catalogi partis secundae volumen primum (Oxford, 1821), 33–​4. On Gagnier, see M.J. Franklin in the odnb and the works cited there. 204 For Grabe’s research into the Apostolic Constitutions, see Bod. mss Grabe, 3, 4, 5, 26. See further p. 431 below. Whiston did not fail to note the similarities between them: Reply to Allix, 8. 205 Then published as Examen Historiae Criticae Textus Novi Testamenti, a P. Richardo Simonio… (Giessen, 1694). On the prolific Maius, see Zedlers Grosses vollständiges Universal-​Lexicon, xix (Halle, 1739), 657–​60.

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be written, and by Simon’s case for an Aramaic Matthew.206 But while they disputed, the first published responses to Simon and Dodwell, written in French, were appearing from the Dutch presses that were by this point dominating European scholarly output. Given their long-​standing antipathy, which we have encountered already, it should come as no surprise that the first major Protestant response to Simon’s arguments came from Le Clerc in a review in his journal, the Bibliothèque universelle. Completely in contrast to the historiographical image of him as someone who put scholarship and irenicism above confessional interests and personal vendettas, Le Clerc both feared and despised Simon, and in his reviews missed no opportunity to shower the Catholic with backhanded praise while ridiculing his arguments.207 But there was also a more serious reason for Le Clerc’s attacks, namely the fact that his own, history-​based approach to defending the veracity of Scripture (and thus of establishing the Canon) came uncomfortably close to Simon’s traditionalism, as Simon himself had gleefully noted. As Le Clerc admitted, one could agree with Simon’s method, as long as the use of Church tradition did not mean abandoning one’s own critical faculties and submitting blindly to the Church’s judgement.208 Since Simon had never argued for any such abandonment, this is more revealing of the fact that Le Clerc, like all Arminians by this point, had moved far away from traditional Reformed arguments about the testimonium internum and self-​revealing Scripture in favour of a position that was relatively similar to the historicised traditionalism that had been developed by Catholics throughout the seventeenth century.209 Le Clerc rejected not the principle but the application of Simon’s traditionalism. If Christ had never intended for the Evangelists to write their Gospels and Christianity could have survived just as well solely via oral tradition, as the Frenchman had claimed, then how could the truth have been distinguished from heresy when the latter appeared? And if Simon was right that all it took to be a good follower of Christ in the earliest days of the faith was to observe the Old Testament law, then all the Mosaic ceremonies would have been 206 I have consulted the second edition: Repetitum examen Historiae criticae textus Novi Testamenti a P. Richardo Simono (Frankfurt, Leipzig, and Jena, 1699), 1–​17; 54–​120. 207 See e.g. the condescending conclusion to the review, buh, 12 (1689), 404–​72, at 472. No different is the tone of the review of the subsequent volume: buh, 16 (1690), 49–​84. 208 buh, 12, 407–​8. 209 Le Clerc also insisted that his view of inspiration was similar to Simon’s, despite the latter’s accusation of Spinozism; Spinoza, Le Clerc said, simply considered the Apostles to have been impostors (460–​1).

410 Levitin retained and Christ would not have brought new laws, neither of which was true.210 As for Simon’s thesis about the non-​survival of the originals because the Christians, unlike the Jews, could not have a system of public scribes, Le Clerc simply repeated the point he had been making for most of the last decade: the whole public scribes thesis was nonsense. Indeed, ‘if we were as well informed about the history of ancient Judaism as we are about Christianity’ we might discover that there were as many heretics among the Jews as there were among Christians. In other words, the former did not have a more stable mode of textual transmission than the latter.211 What truly delighted Le Clerc was pointing out when Simon had blindly followed early Church writers, and how absurd this was. He noted quite rightly how the Oratorian had had to engage in special pleading to ‘save’ the fathers when they cited apocrypha.212 He correctly pointed out that when Simon claimed Church tradition for disputed Epistles he in fact relied only on later traditions that suited his argument (a manoeuvre, Le Clerc implied, that would only work on Catholics who already accepted the infallibility of the Church).213 And as for Simon’s darling hypothesis about Matthew being in Aramaic, the Church ‘consensus’ that Simon had identified was nothing else but patristic repetitions of the testimony of Papias, a notably unreliable witness. Unsurprisingly, Le Clerc was unwilling even to countenance Simon’s claim that the Greek translation of Matthew was partially rewritten by the translator.214 Reading this review, with its assaults on supine acceptance of patristic testimony, it would be tempting to agree with those commentators who have sought to present Le Clerc as particularly ‘critical’ or ‘enlightened’.215 But as already noted, it was one thing to deploy such arguments when one was on the attack, but quite another to stick to them when one had to defend one’s own position. This is the dilemma Le Clerc faced when he read Dodwell’s work in 2 10 Ibid., 409, 410–​11. 211 Ibid., 411–​14 (qu. 412: ‘Si nous étions aussi bien instruits de l’ancienne histoire Judaïque, que de celle du Christianisme, nous trouverions peutêtre bien des Héretiques parmi les anciens Juifs, qui y auroient fait la même chose, que ceux qui sont sortis d’entre les Chrétiens ont faite’). 212 Ibid., 413. 213 Ibid., 448–​50. 214 Ibid., 416–​18, 426–​7. 215 E.g. M.C. Pitassi, Entre croire et savoir: le problème de la méthode critique chez Jean Le Clerc (Leiden, 1987); J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. v (Cambridge, 2010), 89–​136; Hardy, Criticism, 391–​8. But for an interpretation closer to mine, see K. Collis, ‘Reading the Bible in the “early enlightenment”: philosophy and the Ars critica in Jean Le Clerc’s early theological dialogues’, Erudition and the Republic of Letters, 1 (2016), 121–​50.

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the 1690s. Always partially mesmerised by English patristic erudition –​some of which he helped re-​publish on the Continent –​Le Clerc was both in awe of Dodwell’s learning and scandalised by his conclusions.216 In the late 1690s he undertook several projects of New Testament criticism; like Simon’s these culminated in a new French translation (1703).217 To one of them, the Harmonia Evangelica (1700), he appended a dissertation directly addressing the problem of the Canon. Like Dodwell, Le Clerc here was adamant that a historical method, based on the testimony of the early fathers, was the only one suitable for proving both the New Testament Canon and the divinity of the books. (He did not even deign to mention the testimonium internum).218 But this was not Catholic traditionalism. Le Clerc’s hatred of Simon had not dissipated by this point, and he still spent much time disproving that Matthew wrote in Aramaic, claiming that this was a myth propagated by the Nazarenes and credulously believed by Papias and then the rest of the fathers. This allowed him to lecture readers on his favourite theme: that the fathers were often not to be trusted. On this occasion, ‘the great consent of sacred antiquity’ was a ‘spectre’, for one was dealing not with a certain tradition but only with an opinion supinely accepted from Papias by subsequent writers.219 More generally, Le Clerc now developed a fuller explanation for why the Gospels had to have been written, contrary to Simon’s thesis that oral tradition in the Church would have been sufficient to preserve and propagate Christianity. Written records were essential to fulfil Christ’s instruction to ‘teach all nations’ (Matt. 28:19). Contemporary pagans and Jews laboured under so many ‘foolish prejudices’ that they needed constant reminders so as to keep a clear sense of the doctrine handed down by Christ. As for the Church itself, oral tradition and memory were notoriously unreliable, as shown best by the ‘fictitious “traditions” ’ that the rabbis had appended to the Jewish law. Hence the Gospels were probably read in churches only a few years after they were composed. Just as the Jews had the Pentateuch and the Prophets read in the synagogues, ‘the Christians of the first century, who followed their example

216 See further Quantin, ‘Problème’, 304; Levitin, Ancient wisdom, 531–​9; S. Brogi, ‘Jean Le Clerc et l’Église angicane’, in Les relations franco-​anglaises aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, ed. G. Artigas-​Menant (Paris, 2007), 117–​44. 217 Le Nouveau Testament de nôtre seigneur Jesus-​Christ (Amsterdam, 1703). 218 Jean Le Clerc, ‘Dissertatio tertia, de auctoribus Evangeliorum’, in Harmonia Evangelica (Amsterdam, 1700), 537b. 219 Ibid., 533a: ‘Maxima piae antiquitatis consensio… merum est μορμολυκεῖον’.

412 Levitin in many things, initiated the reading not only of the Old Testament but also of the Gospels’.220 Needless to say, Le Clerc had no evidence for this final claim. But his theological principles meant that he had to make it, not only against Simon, but now also against ‘a man of the greatest penetration and skill in ecclesiastical antiquities’: Dodwell. Le Clerc simply could not accept that it was possible that there was no fixed Canon before the early second century: I admit that no Synod, formed of either all or many Christian churches, laid down rules on the matter at this time. But what teaches this most learned man [Dodwell] that none of the apostles, nor even John –​who survived them all –​nor any of the apostles’ followers, taught Christians which book, out of those that circulated among them, were the ones from which they could safely draw the history of Christ’s sayings and deeds? Is it credible that Christians were spurred by no curiosity in a matter that was of such weight and moment? And that the apostles and their disciples took so little care to distinguish the true Gospels from the false?… We have very few details of the history of the first century after the acts of the apostles, but that lack of documentation does not justify rejecting the idea that something happened (so long as it is plausible, and not contradicted by any authentic history), merely on the grounds that no record of it survives in contemporary writings’.221

220 Ibid., 540a (‘Ethnici ac Judaei multis praeconceptis inanibus opinionibus, gravissimisque erroribus praepediti…’); 540b (‘Judaeorum Magistros mirum in modum Religionem Mosaïcam corrupisse, fictitiis traditionibus ei admistis’… ‘primi saeculi Christiani, qui eorum exemplum multis in rebus sequuti sunt, non modo Vetus Testamentum, sed & Evangelistarum libros, quibus dicta ac facta Jesu Christi continebantur, lectitare coeperunt’). 221 Ibid., 541a (‘vir acutissimus & Antiquitatum Ecclesiasticarum peritissimus’); 541b (‘Fateor nullam Synodum ex omnibus, aut multis Ecclesiis Christianis coactam, quidquam hac de re, hisce temporibus, definiisse; sed quis docuit virum doctissimum nullum Apostolorum, ne Joannem quidem, qui omnibus superstes fuit, nullum Apostolicum virum Christianos docuisse e quibus libris, inter eos qui tunc volitabant per manus, tuto possent haurire historiam dictorum & factorum Christi? Credibilene est Christianos nulla curiositate, hoc in negotio tam gravi, ut diximus, & tanti momenti, incensos fuisse; Apostolosque, ac eorum discipulos parum curasse an vera Evangelia a fictis secernerentur?… Perpauca nobis supersunt de primi saeculi historia, post Acta Apostolorum; nec penuria monumentorum nos patitur negare quidpiam quod minime absurdum est, nec ulli verae Historiae contrarium, fuisse, quia nulla ejus superest ex aequalium Scriptis memoria’).

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Le Clerc has here abandoned his famous historicism in favour of purely theological assumptions. The only authorities he had for such a claim were Papias (whom he had so maligned concerning the Aramaic Matthew!) and then Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, all much later witnesses. Was this not to fall into exactly the same kind of reliance on ‘later’ tradition that he had condemned in Simon? Dodwell, of course, did have contemporary evidence to draw on: that of the apostolic fathers. To obviate this evidence, Le Clerc was forced into his own form of special pleading. It was true, he admitted, that Barnabas, Clemens Romanus, and Hermas were often bound with the true Gospels, but ‘I would rather attribute this to the negligence of the second century… than charge the apostles and their followers with a negligence which I cannot see how one could excuse’.222 As for the lack of accurate quotations from the New Testament in the apostolic fathers themselves that Dodwell had noticed, Le Clerc had to speculate that this was due to the contemporary custom of allusive quotation.223 Similarly, the use of apocrypha by the fathers was nothing more than an unfortunate custom of the time.224 Other aspects of Le Clerc’s argument betrayed his theological presuppositions. That the Gospels were written not just by apostles but also by two of their disciples was an act of providence, since it ensured that the apostles were not the sole witnesses for their own mission and authority.225 Finally, when faced by Dodwell’s argument that the Gospels were not well known in the first century, even to the authors themselves, he had to go against his own prior insistence that they were. He quietly admitted that Clemens Romanus appeared to have seen only Luke’s. But, he attempted to counter, such ignorance was due not to the fact that the Gospels were locked away in individual churches (as Dodwell had posited), but simply because they were written ‘at around the same time in remote lands, each Evangelist setting forth these writings of his own before he had seen the similar books of the others’.226 This publication occurred before the destruction of Jerusalem, sometime towards the end of Nero’s reign. For Le Clerc, this was a theological point: it was proof 222 Ibid., 541b: ‘Malim hoc tribuere oscitantiae Secundi Saeculi … quam Apostolos aut Apostolicos viros insimulare neglegentiae, quae quomodo posset excusari non satis intelligo’. 223 Ibid., 542a. 224 Ibid., 543a: ‘pravae illorum saeculorum’. 225 Ibid., 536a–​b, offering an incredibly forced reading of Tertullian, Cont. Marc., iv.1. In any case, on Le Clerc’s own principles Tertullian should have no special authority on the matter. 226 Ibid., 543b–​544a: ‘circa idem tempus in remotis terrarium oris scripta fuisse, ita ut singuli Evangelistae prius opera haec sua emiserint, quam aliorum similes libros viderint’.

414 Levitin of the veracity of the Gospel narratives, since they did not depend on each other. Later, when Mill argued that they did and offered convincing textual evidence to that effect, Le Clerc had to modify his thesis, positing that the apostles had individually taken ‘mémoires’ –​written in Hebrew! –​of Christ’s words and actions from which they then wrote up their Gospels, thus explaining any verbal similarities between them. There was of course not a scrap of evidence for such ‘mémoires’, but, for Le Clerc, they were theologically necessary: ‘I confess that I am of the opinion of those who believe that one can draw a proof of the truth of the history of Christ from the fact that the first three Evangelists agree so well with one another without having communicated their histories’.227 So much for the brave, enlightened Le Clerc, putting criticism before any theological assumptions. The Arminian never changed his mind on this score; in fact, in his Historia Ecclesiastica (1716) he only became more aggressively defensive, having seen Grabe and Mill adopt aspects of Dodwell’s theory. Mill, it will be recalled, had posited that the spurious Acts of Paul had been written around ad 69 to supply the omissions in Luke’s Acts of the Apostles.228 For Le Clerc, such speculation was illegitimate. He was desperate to show –​just as he had been in 1700 –​that the first century was one of textual purity, and apocrypha like the Acts of Paul only started proliferating later, in the second.229 In other words, Le Clerc was no different from his great enemy Simon: he was prepared to innovate, but his historicism was limited by his theological presuppositions. In fact, a rather more radical response to Simon and Dodwell came from another Dutch-​based Huguenot, the Rotterdam minister Jacques Basnage (1653–​1723), in his Histoire de l’église depuis Jesus Christ jusqu’à present (1699). Unlike Dodwell, Simon, Grabe, Mill, or even Le Clerc, Basnage was no professional scholar –​as far as I can tell, he had never seen a biblical manuscript in his life. Rather, like his great friend Pierre Bayle, he was a well-​read populariser, albeit more systematically in fields relating to Christian and Jewish 227 Bib. Choisie, xiv, 371–​2, 374 (J’avouë que je suis du sentiment de ceux, qui croyent que l’on peut tirer une preuve de la verité de l’Histoire de Jesus-​Christ, de ce que les trois premiers Evangelistes s’accordent si bien entre eux, sans s’être communiqué leurs Histoires’). 228 Proleg., xvb–​x via. Le Clerc himself desperately wished that someone had filled in these omissions: Historia Ecclesiastica duorum primorum … saeculorum (Amsterdam, 1716), 431–​2. The key source for these Pauline Acts is Euesbius, Hist. Eccl., iii.3. The ambiguity of the terminology there had already been pounced on by Grabe to claim that the book was among those doubted only by some: Spic., 86–​7. 229 Le Clerc, Historia Ecclesiastica, 454–​5. The rest of the discussion of the Canon (454–​70) is full of similar reasoning. See also Bib. choisie, xiv, 358–​9. For the general principle, see id., ‘De auctoribus Evangeliorum’, 542b.

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antiquities.230 Like Bayle, he sought to synthesise a large amount of reading into a convincing defence of his own Reformed faith, and to use that synthesis to contribute to contemporary confessional disputes. And so he began his discussion of the Canon by insisting, contra Simon, that Christ directly instructed his disciples to write as well as to preach; the first proximate cause of doing so was persecution.231 Catholics had posited that Matthew, the first of the Evangelists, had been ordered to write by other apostles, but Basnage thought the order had come direct from the Christ via the Holy Spirit.232 This was a manifestation of his Reformed doctrine of inspiration: the Holy Spirit did not just preserve the holy penmen’s memories, but actively dictated to them.233 There can be no doubt that this was a confessional argument, directed at both Catholics and Arminians. Basnage’s innovation was to historicise it further. The miracle of Pentecost, when the Spirit descended on the disciples in tongues of fire (Acts 2:3), could not have served solely to strengthen the evangelists’ memories: they were ignorant men who needed ‘new help and new light to preach and to write the saving truths’, and to let go of erroneous opinions such as the temporal reign of the Messiah, which they shared with other Jews at the time.234 Hence all the Catholic theses synthesised by Simon about Peter dictating Mark or Paul dictating Luke were both wrong and unnecessary: each Gospel was equally inspired by the same Holy Spirit and did not require direct apostolic warrant for its legitimacy.235 Once this theological propaedeutic was established, Basnage was happy to accept Simon’s thesis that the original holographs had not survived.236 Here, once again, we have a good example of how a a scholar could use theological 230 The fullest account is G. Cerny, Theology, politics and letters at the crossroads of European civilization (Dordrecht, 1987), but it does not discuss his scholarship. For his journalistic activities more generally, see H. Bots and L. van Lieshout eds., Henri Basnage de Beauval en de Histoire des ouvrages des savans (1689–​1709), 3 vols (Amsterdam, 1984). The only historical work of his that has received scrutiny is his Histoire des Juifs (1706–​7): see M. Silvera, ‘Contribution à l’examen des sources de L’Histoire des Juifs de Jacques Basnage: Las Excelencias de los Hebreos de Ysaac Cardoso’, Studia Rosenthaliana, 25 (1991), 42–​54 and works cited there. 231 Jacques Basnage de Beauval, Histoire de l’église depuis Jesus Christ jusqu’à présent (Rotterdam, 1699), 419–​20. See also id., Histoire du Vieux et du Nouveau Testament (Amsterdam, 1704), Preface to ‘Nouveau Testament’, new pagination, sig. B2ra–​b (henceforth ‘Preface’). 232 Histoire, 419–​20. 233 ‘Preface’, sigs. Bvb–​B2ra. 234 ibid., sig. Bvb. 235 Histoire, 421 (Mark and Peter), 423 (Luke and Paul). 236 ‘Preface’, sig. B2rb.

416 Levitin reconfiguration so as to accept elements of a thesis he thought potentially correct, even if it had been composed by a confessional rival. What Basnage dogmatically could not accept was Dodwell’s claim that there had been no fixed Canon of the four Gospels until the end of Trajan’s reign. He tried, like Le Clerc, to show that the Gospels were ‘very well-​known and cited before the reign of Trajan’.237 For this, he had to resort to conjectural reasoning akin to that of the Arminian. According to Basnage, since the Jews had read the Law in their temples, it was rational to assume that the earliest Christians adopted the same practice. With a glorious non sequitur, he then declared that ‘thus from the time of the apostles the Gospel was read in assemblies on Sundays, having been composed for this purpose’. Moreover, the Gospels had been composed in a time of persecution, when Christians were forced to disperse. Matthew had written specially for such fleeing faithful, who must have carried copies with them: if they had not, ‘the negligence of these early Christians would have been criminal’, which was inconceivable.238 It did not take until the time of Trajan for the Gospels to be used in evangelising; Matthew himself had travelled and no doubt taken his Gospel with him. (It is surely for the sake of this argument that Basnage dated the composition of Matthew far earlier than was common, to ad 36/​7). Luke very likely had seen Matthew and Mark, and wrote to supplement them. As for John, one simply had to take on trust Eusebius’s claim that he knew the other three Gospels.239 This left Basnage with the problem of explaining away Dodwell’s demonstration that the fathers frequently cited the apocrypha as canonical. It was here that the Huguenot turned out to be far more daring than Le Clerc. The fathers had done so, he posited, because there was no set Canon in the first three centuries! If there had been some kind of authoritative body pronouncing on the question –​whether the Council of Elders posited by Dodwell or the authority of the Church of Rome posited by Catholics –​then there would have been far less uncertainty than there had been. And thank goodness, Basnage continued, that there was no such authoritative power. For if it had been held by the Church of Rome, then the Epistle to the Hebrews would have been deemed non-​canonical forever, since the Latin Church rejected it at this time, unlike the Greeks, who in turn rejected Revelation. That was not to say that there was 2 37 Histoire, 426: ‘les Evangiles étoient fort connus, & ont été citez avant l’empire de Trajan’. 238 Ibid., 427: ‘Ainsi dès le tems des Apôtres on lisoit l’Evangile le Dimanche dans les assemblées, parce que c’étoit dans cette vuë qu’il avoit été composé’; ‘S’ils le negligeoient, la negligence de ces premiers Chretiens étoit criminelle’. 239 Ibid., 427–​8, and 420 for the early dating of Matthew, for which he had no evidence except the speculation that it was written when Matthew left Jerusalem.

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not a high degree of stability concerning the Canon. Apostolic tradition –​carried on by their direct disciples –​no doubt confirmed the authenticity of most of the books, and it always without fail served to dispel the forged Gospels of the heretics. Moreover, tradition was fortified in proportion to the number of churches which held to the same belief (another example of Protestant appropriation of Catholic argumentation).240 However, Basnage continued, ‘as this did not remedy all the inconveniences which could happen above all in places and times a little distant from those of the apostles, each Church provided for itself by reserving for itself the freedom of judging which books should be read, received, or rejected’.241 Where all his contemporaries struggled to find a solid tradition for the canonicity of Hebrews and Revelation, Basnage revelled in the fact that the Latin Church had rejected the first and accepted the second while the Greeks had adopted exactly the opposite position.242 I think there is a high degree of probability that Basnage derived all his evidence for this from Simon, who had done his best to downplay it, as we have seen. As for the Councils and Popes –​ Laodicea, Carthage, Innocent i, Gelasius –​brought forth by Catholics like Baronio, Basnage could make the obvious point that one would have thought that if their decisions were authoritative, they would have been made earlier. In reality, they were either small assemblies or private judgements.243 Basnage posited that, quite contrary to such Catholic authoritarianism, the freedom that each Church possessed could explain many of the individual deviations noted by Dodwell –​hence Clement of Alexandria’s canonisation of the Epistle of Barnabas, and Origen’s of Hermas. This freedom also explained some of the famous doubts about Epistles like James, Jude, and 2 Peter. The last of these, for example, was certainly not in the earliest Canon, and remained in doubt in Origen’s time; it then began to be read by some people who found it edifying until all doubt about its canonicity was removed. Nonetheless, deviations between Churches remained: as Simon had shown, for example, the Syriac Church did not receive 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and Jude.244

2 40 Ibid., 429–​30. 241 Ibid., 430: ‘Cependant comme cela ne remedioit pas à tous les inconveniens qui pouvoient arriver principalement dans les lieux, & les tems qui étoient un peu éloignez des Apôtres, chaque Eglise pourvut à sa propre sureté, en se reservant la liberté de juger par elle-​même des livres qu’elle devoit lire, recevoir, ou rejetter’. 242 See the long discussion of both at ibid., 431–​7. 243 Ibid., 437–​40. 244 Ibid., 430–​1, citing Simon, hctnt, 187b [160].

418 Levitin All this was not an exercise in abstract historical speculation; rather, it was an intervention in contemporary polemics. Basnage was defending the ‘voie d’examen’ –​the radical right of private examination that Huguenots had been forced to extol in the wake of Pierre Nicole’s Préjugez légitimes contre les Calvinistes (1671). There, the Jansenist had argued that the Protestant requirement that individual believers judge Scripture for themselves was unsustainable, in light of all the philological acumen required to form such judgements.245 Basnage’s history of Canon-​formation was part of his campaign to counter this argument: ‘whether [a Church] rejected a Sacred text or received it in the Canon, it was always done by means of the voie d’examen’.246 This was always achieved in a rational, human manner: by examining Church tradition and the style of the work under dispute. Two conclusions ensued: ‘I. In the first centuries, the Canon was not fixed by any recognised authority. ii. Each Church enjoyed a full liberty to reject from the Canon books which to them did not appear divine’.247 This imposition of Huguenot tolerationism onto Church history may give some cause to declare Basnage ‘enlightened’. I take little interest in questions of terminology, but I do want to temper pre-​emptively any whiggish enthusiasm that the above description may provoke. First of all, Basnage thought that there could be no rational reason to doubt the canonicity of the four Gospels. Indeed, they must have always been known to the whole Church, since they contain the totality of doctrine.248 With this in mind, Basnage’s history of deviations in the history of the Canon appears much less radical –​such deviations matter far less when a stable, unchanging theological base is first posited. In any case, the choice that individual churches had was far from arbitrary, but governed by strict criteria: ‘they weighed the sense and the doctrine [foi], and everything that did not agree with truth and orthodoxy was rejected as heretical’.249 And so when Basnage made much of the fact that ‘le Canon des

245 Pierre Nicole, Préjugez légitimes contre les Calvinistes (Paris, 1671), 206–​18; J. Lecler, ‘Protestantisme et “libre examen”. Les étapes et le vocabulaire d’une controverse’, Recherches de science religieuse 57 (1969), 321–​74. 246 Histoire, 431: ‘Soit qu’on rejettât un Ecrit Sacré ou qu’on le reçut dans le Canon, on le faisoit presque toûjours par la voye d’examen’. 247 Ibid., 430: ‘I. Que le Canon n’étoit point fixé par aucune autorité reconuë dans les premiers siecles. ii. Que chaque Eglise jouïssoit d’une pleine liberté pour rejetter du Canon les livres qui ne lui paroissoient pas divins’. 248 Ibid., 411. 249 Ibid., 431: ‘on pesoit le sens & la Foi, & tout ce qui ne s’accordoit point avec la verité, & l’orthodoxie, étoit rejetté sur le compte des Heretiques’. As an example, Basnage cited Tertullian’s rejection of the Acts of Paul and Thecla because it advocated women’s

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Ecritures se formoit par les tems’, it was not really out of a deep sense of historicism, but rather out of a desire to confute Catholic insistence on conciliar or papal authority.250 His focus on the historical uncertainty over Hebrews and Revelation in particular clashed awkwardly with his own dogmatic belief in their canonicity.251 In reality, in both cases he was more concerned to show that ‘disgraceful’ claims to their non-​canonicity stemmed from the Church of Rome.252 Moreover, he seemed to imply that only churches had the right to determine what Canon to use –​individuals who dissented could read whatever they wanted, but only in private.253 This was a particularly Reformed form of scholarly-​confessional polemic, and was not to the taste of other Protestants. Richardson, for example, inserted into his anti-​Toland book a Preface condemning Basnage’s acceptance of a historically fluid canonicity. This involved relying on the old arguments: when Origen said Hermas was inspired he was espousing his own view rather than that of the universal Church; on the other hand, when Eusebius said that 2 Peter was only gradually accepted, this tradition was to be ignored.254 As for Hebrews, James, and Revelation, Richardson simply retreated into the oldest argument of all: they had been deemed canonical by Laodicea, which was surely confirming a universal tradition.255 This may seem like a minor skirmish, but it was taken seriously across Europe: the leading Lutheran Valentin Ernst Löscher (1673–​1749) summarised the Basnage-​Richardson debate in the Unschuldige Nachrichten von Alten und Neuen Theologischen Sachen, probably the foremost forum for the dissemination of theological debate in the Lutheran world at this time.256 preaching (De bapt., 17). The same year that Basnage wrote this, Grabe published a new edition of the text from two Bodleian mss (Barocci 180, Digby 39): Spic., 81–​127. 250 Histoire, 431. The whole passage is a commentary on Jerome, Vir. Ill., ii, where Jerome says the Epistle of James that it ‘paulatim tempore procedente obtinuerit auctoritatem’. Basnage opposed the reading of Aubert le Mire (1573–​1640) that this referred to Conciliar authority. 251 Histoire, 431–​2, 434. 252 Ibid., 432 (on Hebrews, which, he claimed, was first rejected by the Arians because it contained evidence of Christ’s divinity, and then by Pope Cajus because it seemed to favour a view of sin that just happened to match that of ‘nos [i.e. Reformed!] Theologiens’: ‘l’Eglise de Rome rejetta ce Livre Sacré, & voici la veritable cause de sa disgrace’). For Revelation, see 434–​5: although the book was mostly rejected by the Greeks, Basnage was at pains to show that the corruption originally began in Rome, again with Caius. 253 ibid., 431. 254 Richardson, Canon, sig. [A4]r-​v (on Origen); sigs. [A8]v–​ar (on Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. iii.3). 255 Richardson, Canon, sig. ar-​v. 256 Unschuldige Nachrichten von Alten und Neuen Theologischen Sachen, 4 (1704), 665–​8, already noted in Sheehan, Enlightenment Bible, 54–​5.

420 Levitin Before turning to that world, we must examine a Reformed theologian who is more or less unknown, but whose ideas about the Canon were far more innovative than those of the supposedly ‘enlightened’ Le Clerc and Basnage: Johannes Ens (1682–​1732). Le Clerc and Basnage mostly wrote reviews, polemics, and popularisations in which they responded as quickly as possible to Simon and Dodwell. But by the early eighteenth century, the New Testament Canon had become a recognised locus of theological study in the Reformed world. For example, in Basel, Johann Christoph Iselin –​destined to become an important scholar in his own right –​wrote his D.D. thesis on the question of the Canon. That thesis shows his familiarity with the work of Simon, Dodwell, Beveridge and Basnage.257 Ens, the product of a clerical dynasty, also first developed his ideas in preparation for a doctorate, awarded in Leiden in 1707. But he published them in full only in 1710 (by which point he was a pastor in Beets), in his 530-​page Bibliotheca Sacra, sive diatribe de librorum Novi Testamenti Canone.258 So remarkable is this book that I have no doubt that had it been written in English rather than the convoluted Latin in which it appeared, historians would now talk about it as a milestone of early eighteenth-​century scholarship. Ens was sure that the Canon could only be established historically. As we have seen, such an assertion was by this point not controversial, but it is nonetheless remarkable to see his disdain for the use of the testimonium internum in this regard –​dismissed as an enthusiastic argument which embarrassed the Reformed in front of their Catholic opponents259 –​as well as his further insistence that to know the divine authority of any one book, one must first establish the authority of the Canon in toto.260 But Ens had read his Simon, Dodwell, and Mill, and he knew that the task was easier set than accomplished. His solution was to accept many of their conclusions so as to construct a spectacular 257 Johann Christoph Iselin, Dissertatio Inauguralis Canonem Novi Testamenti pandere incipiens (Basel, 1711). Iselin adopted a version of Basnage’s story, directed against Dodwell, Simon, and also older Catholic arguments concerning Laodicea, Gelasius, etc. 258 Johannes Ens, Disputatio historico-​theologica inauguralis de librorum Novi Testamenti canone… pro gradu Doctoratus (Leiden, 1707). As Ens explains in Bibliotheca sacra: sive diatribe de librorum Novi Testamenti Canone (Amsterdam, 1710), sig. *5v, the publication of the book was delayed by the work of his first ministry. The little biographical information that exists is collected in W.J. van Asselt, ‘Ens, Johannes’, in Biografisch lexicon voor de geschiedenis van het Nederlandse protestantisme, eds. J.W Buisman and G. Brinkman (Kampen, 2001), 5:172–​3. Prof. van Asselt claims that the work on the Canon was stimulated by the threat of deism (‘De canon-​kwestie was ca. 1700 mede door de geschriften van deïsten zoals J. Tolands Christianity not mysterious (1696) aan de orde gekomen’.) but I have found no evidence for this. 259 Bibiliotheca sacra, 421–​2. 260 E.g. ibid., 414.

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conjectural narrative that could account for many of the problems that the previous two centuries of debate had identified. According to Ens, the apostles and their disciples had written many books, most of which had been lost. Christians should not fear this fact; after all, many Old Testament books had also gone missing.261 Indeed, during the earliest days of Christianity, utility would have dictated the need for many writings. Initially, the apostles simply preached among the Jews, but from around the mid-​40s, when the Jerusalem Church needed to inform others –​including pagans –​ about what had happened there, writings came to proliferate.262 Matthew had written first, but then a host of epistles were written, and there was no reason to suppose that Paul, Peter, James, and Jude had been the only ones to write: after all, Christ had instructed his followers to ‘teach all nations’ (Matt. 28:19). One therefore had to assume that Bartholomew, Thomas, James the Less, Andrew, etc. had also written epistles. Paul’s were the only ones to survive from this period because the others had been so successful that those they converted did not feel the need to preserve them in their churches. Moreover, internal cross-​references that Ens believed he had spotted revealed that Paul had clearly written far more than fourteen epistles. This was only natural, since he wrote to many churches –​the letters were not circulated around regions, but each church was sent its own.263 Ens was adamant that all these lost first-​century writings were inspired. They did not survive due to the material circumstances of the church in the second and third centuries. Much of that was caused by persecution: Diocletian had burned Christian books as late as 303.264 But it was also due to the negligence of Christians themselves from the mid-​second century onwards. Had Papias not been so ignorant about the original state of things so as to think Matthew had been written in Hebrew? (A beautiful way of countering Simon and Du Pin!) And was it not the case that by the third century some learned men, such as Origen, were altogether oblivious of the canonicity of some of the inspired books that had survived? In this period the transcription of books was a neglected practice in most of the areas where Christianity flourished, so much so that Constantine, upon conversion, immediately initiated a programme of

261 ibid., 22–​6. Among several, Ens instanced the ‘Book of the Wars of the Lord’ mentioned in Num. 21:14 (he mistakenly has 21:24). 262 Bibliotheca sacra, 35–​7. 263 Ibid., 38–​61, citing as examples of internal references 2 Cor. 11:28; Phil. 4:3; 2 Thess. 2:1–​2. For circulation to each church, Ens extrapolated from 1 Thess. 5:27. Another key source was Polycarp, Phil., 13. 264 Bibliotheca sacra, 72–​3.

422 Levitin transcription to be made in the East, the only place where such skills still flourished.265 As Dodwell had rightly said, more or less nothing had survived from the first century, apart from a few fragments preserved by Eusebius. In fact, Ens went further than the Irishman, since he also thought the Epistle of Barnabas –​ which Dodwell held so dear –​to be spurious.266 Given such a lack of evidence, how, then, could one establish anything about the formation of the Canon? To answer this question, Ens worked backwards, developing spectacularly on the arguments first made by Mill. The heretic Marcion had been repeatedly accused of corrupting the Canon,267 and he flourished around ad 127. Contra Mill, the ‘apostolic Canon’ that Tertullian had posited against Marcion was the complete Canon –​Gospels, Catholic Epistles, and Revelation –​that was then accepted by the Church. But it was not all formed at one time. John had collected the four Gospels, writing his own to supplement the other three. John’s choice was based on the criterion of utility: Matthew had written ‘historico-​apologetically’ against the Jews, Mark confirmed believers in their faith and informed them of Christ’s mediatorial mission, Luke had written against the pseudo-​gospels that had begun to circulate, and John now opposed the new heresies, especially that of Cerinthus.268 Now, Ens knew that Dodwell had opposed the Eusebian idea that John had formed the Canon. But he had an exciting new testimony up his sleeve: the Acts of Timothy, then known only in the Latin recension which attributed the text to Polycrates (bishop of Ephesus in the 190s), first published in 1485 and recently reprinted in Paris.269 This text reported that when John arrived in Ephesus, ‘those who had followed after the disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ did not know how to organise sheets of paper in their possession in various languages which had been sporadically organised and which concerned the miracles of our Lord’, and that these papers being presented to John, ‘he put the things said by them in order in three Gospels, and registered them as by Matthew, Mark, 265 Ibid., 69–​70 (erroneous ideas about Hebrew/​Aramaic Matthew, directly mentioning Du Pin); 70 (Origen); 70–​2 (negligence in transcription, using a clever reading of Irenaeus, Adv. haer., iii.4. For Constantine, see the letter to Eusebius in Vit. Const. iv. 266 Bibliotheca sacra, 73–​5 citing Dodwell, Diss., 281–​5 . 267 Bibliotheca sacra, 90–​3, drawing on Epiphanius, Pan, xlii.9.5 and Tertullian, Cont. Marc., iv and v (presumably thinking of iv.5 in particular). 268 Bibliotheca sacra, 95–​110. 269 Codex Canonum vetus Ecclesiae Romanae a Francisco Pithoeo ad veteres manuscriptos codices restitutus (Paris, 1687), 365–​7. For the earlier textual history, see C. Zamagni, ‘Passion (ou Actes) de Timothée. Étude des traditions et édition de la forme bhg 1487’, in Poussières de christianisme et de judaïsme antiques, ed. A. Frey and R. Gounelle (Prahins, 2007), 341–​75, at 343–​4.

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and Luke, assigning their names to the Gospels’, as well as writing his own.270 For Ens, this testimony, in tandem with the better known account in Eusebius, confirmed that Dodwell was wrong (this was despite Ens’ sage scepticism about Polycrates’s authorship). The Irishman had no proof that at this time the apostolic writings were bound with the apocrypha –​all such examples were later, from the second and third centuries.271 Meanwhile, the quotation of apocrypha by apostolic fathers such as Clemens Romanus was irrelevant, since John had not yet formed the Evangelical Canon.272 Ens was sure that the Acts of Timothy only confirmed what Eusebius already hinted at: that John did not form the rest of the Canon. This daring conclusion –​already reached by Mill –​could be justified theologically: all the doctrine required for salvation was already in the four Gospels, and canonising the epistles was not necessary while an apostle was still alive.273 However, this left the problem that had so vexed the Englishman: how to explain the formation of the full Canon sometime before ad 127, and to ascertain whether it contained all the books now deemed canonical –​a problem exacerbated by a near total lack of evidence.274 Once again, one was left having to extrapolate back from later traditions, and to assume that the Canon mentioned in Athanasius’s Festal Letter was that adopted in the early second century. Ens knew that this was far from ideal, but insisted that it was the most likely scenario. Doubt about certain books, he suggested, only began to appear from the second century, when those who had known the apostles personally had finally died out.275 In any case, when doubts existed, they were de jure rather than de facto; that is to say, the Canon as it had been transmitted in the Church was still accepted, even if one rejected one of the books. Hence, for example, Origen wrote a commentary on Hebrews without believing it inspired.276 But if the full Canon had been formed in these first three decades of the third century, who had formed it? Indeed, how could one know whether it had been formed all at once, or gradually, as some Catholics had argued? (Presumably 270 I use the translation by C.W. Concannon in New Testament Apocrypha, vol. 1, ed. T. Burke and B. Landau (Grand Rapids, 2016), 403, based on the Greek critical text in Zamagni, ‘Timothée’. The Latin used by Ens has ‘constitutas differentibus linguis conscriptas’ for these papers. 271 Bibliotheca sacra, 116–​17. See also the attack on Dodwell’s reading of Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., iii.37 at 124. 272 Bibliotheca sacra, 117–​18, also 119–​20. 273 Ens offers several arguments to this effect at ibid., 125–​135. 274 Lamented at ibid., 135–​6. 275 Ibid., 189–​90, again drawing on Dodwell. 276 Ibid., 172–​3, 177–​8.

424 Levitin Ens was thinking of Simon or Du Pin.) Here, Ens came up with his most ingenious conjectural thesis. The whole of the New Testament was rationally organised. John had ordered the Gospels chronologically. The epistles, meanwhile, were ordered chronologically between the authors; when by the same author, they were ordered by the status and ‘dignity’ of the church or individual that was the recipient (the biggest problem here was explaining why the epistles to the Thessalonians came after those to the Philippians, given that Thessalonica was the capital of Macedonia and Philippi just a town in the same region).277 This rational organisation proved that the Canon was collected at the same time.278 Moreover, it was impossible that the work had been accomplished by one man –​to assess all the books that were then in circulation was simply too much of a task. Far more likely was that it was done by a group of elders meeting for this purpose. And it just so happened that such meetings were mentioned by several fathers and ecclesiastical historians.279 Probably, Ens conjectured, it was just such a meeting that had settled the Canon. Most likely it had occurred in the East, where apostolic doctrine was best preserved and where the holographs still survived.280 Ignatius and Polycarp may well have taken part.281 Crucially, these collectors of the Canon were blessed with an extraordinary grace, without which they could not have accomplished their task. There were simply too many books, which could not be distinguished merely by their internal characteristics.282 This extraordinary gift was not given to individuals but to the whole Church, and continued through to the middle of the third century –​witness the famous miracles performed by Gregory Thaumaturgus. But the collectors were particularly possessed of such charismata, as Eusebius had reported of Polycarp.283 Hence it could be said that the Canon had been formed directly through God’s will.284 277 I have here summarised the long discussion in Bibliotheca sacra, 204–​325. I suspect the whole idea came to Ens from reading Mill, Proleg., xxviiia. 278 Bibliotheca sacra, 252: ‘Cum igitur Librorum Ordo & Dispositio non conveniat cum successiva Canonis consignatione, concludimus non successive Libros esse collectos’. 279 Ibid., 327–​8, 336–​7, citing Irenaeus as quoted in Eusebius, Hist. eccl., iv.2 for a supposed meeting in Rome (but Ens must surely mean iv.14.1) and Hist. Eccl., v.3 for meetings in Gaul, Asia, and Phrygia. 280 Bibliotheca sacra, 342–​50. On the survival of the holographs, see also 455–​7: Ens argued that they survived until the early second century, thus implicitly adopting a middle ground between Simon and Le Clerc. 281 Ibid., 350–​7; Ens also mentions Quadratus. 282 Ibid., 361–​2: ‘Neque enim credibile est, quod libri hi ab istis per notas quasdam facile dignosci potuerint …’. 283 Ibid., 362–​8; for Polycarp, see Eusebius, Hist. Eccl., iv.15. 284 Bibliotheca sacra, 368–​9.

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There are strong similarities here not only with Mill but also with Dodwell. But Ens had stripped the latter’s thesis of its episcopalian apologetics and had added much of his own. All that remained was to explain why, if the formation of the Canon was so inspired, there were doubts about it so soon after, from the late second century onwards. Here even he had to resort to the usual reasoning: individual doubts, such as Origen’s, should not undermine an otherwise (supposedly) near-​universal tradition.285 But Ens historicised the argument, explaining that doubts had only crept in after Marcion and his band of heretical followers had spread confusion throughout the Christian world, just at the same time as men who had know the apostles, like Polycarp, had died.286 In other words, one could accept that there had been doubts from a very early stage, but still posit that the true Canon had been established in the early second century and that it should be the Christian’s rule of faith. A Reformed theologian had managed to co-​opt the historical arguments developed by Dodwell and Mill, and, by combining them with some remarkable reasoning of his own, adapt them for the needs of Reformed biblicism. 6

Lutheranism: The Race to Keep Up

The debate concerning the New Testament Canon entered Lutheranism from without. This statement will not please those who believe that Pietism, a movement native to Lutheranism, ushered in a glorious age of ‘liberal’ Scriptural interpretation.287 In fact, by the standards of late seventeenth century scholarship, the Scriptural hermeneutics of the leading Pietists was very outdated; Augustus Hermann Francke, for example, recommended in his Manuductio ad lectionem Scripturae Sacrae (1693) the kind of ‘logical’ exegesis that had been de rigueur around 1600.288 What is most interesting about Lutheran hermeneutics at the turn of the eighteenth century is not a mythological freedom stimulated by Pietism, but an acute sense of needing to catch 2 85 E.g. ibid., 382–​3, 412–​13. 286 Ibid., 385–​7. 287 For such claims, see e.g. M. Legaspi, The death of Scripture and the rise of Biblical studies (Oxford, 2010); Sheehan, Enlightenment Bible, 57. I have argued more broadly that emulation of foreign erudition was far more important than Pietism for the development of Lutheran scholarship in my ‘Confessionalisation and erudition’, §4. 288 August Hermann Francke, Manuductio ad lectionem Scripturæ Sacræ (Halle, 1693). See further J. Wallmann, ‘Scriptural understanding and interpretation in Pietism’, in Hebrew Bible/​Old Testament: the history of its interpretation. From the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, ed. M. Saebø (Göttingen, 2008), 902–​25, esp. 905.

426 Levitin up with developments elsewhere in Europe, especially in France, the Dutch Republic, and England. Take for example Maius’s aforementioned anti-​Simon disputations (p. 408 above). In 1699, Maius published a new edition. In a new ‘Dissertatio Praeliminaris de Critica Sacra’, Maius stressed how important it was that Lutheran theologians adopt the methods of ‘criticism’. His specific claims were not original, as they were almost all taken from Daniel Heinsius’s preface to his famous Aristarchus Sacer (1627), Du Pin, and Simon himself.289 But his is just one of several possible examples of the fact that the sort of approach being adopted by Simon, Dodwell, Le Clerc, and others I have discussed was quickly being incorporated into Lutheran theological education, which was itself being conducted in universities that were then undergoing a process of increased funding and expansion. But if disputing on the formation of the New Testament Canon quickly became standard practice,290 and if publishing scholarly editions of the apocrypha now became an intellectually and commercially viable enterprise in the Lutheran world,291 it still took more direct exposure to foreign scholarship to stimulate an original Lutheran contribution to the debate. The man who received just such an exposure was Christoph Matthäus Pfaff (1686–​1760). Pfaff, another prodigy from a clerical family, excelled in his training at Tübingen (particularly in Samaritan), and was sponsored by the Duke of Württemberg to travel across Europe to further his theological knowledge.292 On these travels, he met virtually everyone worth knowing, including Le Clerc and Basnage, but was particularly influenced by those whom he encountered in England, including Whiston, Grabe, and Dodwell (he maintained a correspondence with the last of these).293 Upon his return to Germany in 1709 he was ordered to accompany the hereditary prince to Savoy. Subsequently he travelled again to the Dutch Republic, Spanish Netherlands, and France, again meeting all the most important scholars of the time, including Du Pin and Montfaucon. When he finally returned to Tübingen he was appointed theology professor and, via 2 89 Maius, Repetitum examen, ‘Dissertatio Praeliminaria de Critica Sacra’, 3–​9. 290 See e.g. Johann Georg Neumann (praes.) Disputatio theologica de Canone S. Scripturae obsignato (Wittenberg, 1711). The candidate displays knowledge of the works of Beveridge (sigs. [A4]r, [B2]v), Simon (sig. C2v), Du Pin (sigs. [G4]r, Ir), Dodwell (whose thesis is discussed at length at sigs. [G3]v–​H3r, I2v–​I3v), and Grabe (sig. Ir). The argument is that the Canon was settled by John, but that the books circulated publicly beforehand. 291 J.A. Fabricius, Codex apocryphus Novi Testamenti (Hamburg, 1703). 292 For all these biographical details, see G. Thomann, ‘Christoph Matthäus Pfaff (1686–​1760) und die Anfänge der dogmengeschichtlichen Disziplin’, Blätter für württembergische Kirchengeschichte 85 (1985), 83–​133, at 92–​6, and the works cited there. 293 Dodwell to Pfaff, 22 Feb 1711, Bod. ms St Edmund Hall 14, p. 46 (already noted in Quantin, ‘Dodwell’, 334).

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ducal patronage, became the most powerful figure in the University, obtaining the chancellorship in 1720. For the rest of his life, he also pursued various ecumenical schemes with both Catholics and the Church of England.294 Pfaff had long before announced his presence on the European scholarly scene, at the age of twenty-​three, with his Dissertatio critica de genuinis librorum Novi Testamenti lectionibus (1709). As the title suggests, this work was primarily concerned with text-​critical questions, especially as they had been stimulated by the publication of Mill’s edition. But it also contained some interesting thoughts on the formation of the Canon, informed by Pfaff’s familiarity with more or less all the relevant literature published up to that point (unlike most continental scholars he could read English, and so had read Toland, Nye, and Richardson, as well as Dodwell, Grabe, and Mill and all the French works). In contrast to Ens, Pfaff –​probably because of his time in England –​was directly concerned with countering the deist threat.295 His summary of possible deist arguments was in fact much more threatening than anything offered by Toland, since Pfaff relied on a much better knowledge of the primary literature. As far as he was concerned, the biggest danger came from the undoubted fact that many false Gospels and Acts circulated in the early days of Christianity –​ now collected by Grabe, Fabricius, and Ittig, and summarised by Simon and Mill –​and the fact that some of the fathers cited non-​canonical works such as the Gospel According to the Egyptians, which Grabe and Mill had shown definitively to have been used by Clement of Rome.296 Against this, Pfaff was sure that there was only one reliable argument: church tradition.297 In fact, so much did he insist on the fact that the Gospel narratives had to have their origin in a tradition of eyewitnesses (αὐτόπται) that he accepted the claim more often made by Catholics that Peter and Paul had dictated the Gospels of Mark and Luke.298 But, rather disappointingly, he did not elaborate on this, simply saying that while the Canon had first been formally stated at Laodicea, it had ‘undoubtedly’ been passed down by tradition from the apostles onwards.299 This thesis contrasted rather starkly with that made by Pfaff in his very next chapter. According to the young Lutheran, the early Christians were not very 294 Pfaff’s correspondence with Archbishop William Wake between 1721 and 1725 is preserved in Christ Church College, Oxford, mss Wake Epist. 25–​6. 295 As he announces in Dissertatio critica de genuinis librorum Novi Testamenti lectionibus (Amsterdam, 1709), sigs. *5v–​[*6]r. 296 Ibid., 4–​9. 297 Ibid., 16. 298 Ibid., 40–​3. Much to the annoyance of Jacques Bernard, in a review in Nouvelles de la République des Lettres (July 1709), 87–​8. 299 Dissertatio, 25: ‘indubium’.

428 Levitin good at preserving the texts which came into their possession. The difficult passage of Ignatius about the ‘archives’ that had so stimulated the philological energies of Vossius, Simon, and Dodwell simply proved that even orthodox fathers were not always competent to separate apostolical from spurious.300 Under persecution, the Church struggled to preserve the autographs. Moreover, contra Mill, the Catholic Epistles had been widely circulated, meaning they were easily lost. But not only they: also lost were many other letters, which would have been canonical if preserved. Providence had conserved only enough to ensure adequate knowledge of what was requisite for salvation.301 Pfaff thus pre-​empted Ens in arguing for lost canonical Scriptural texts, and while he did not develop his argument at nearly the same length as the Dutchman, he did use some of the same proof-​texts.302 Why did he take this step, which not only seemed to contradict his anti-​deist insistence on the stability of tradition but also served to antagonise Protestant counterparts?303 Because it was demanded by Pfaff’s principles of text criticism. Against Mill, he insisted –​rightly –​that Codex Vaticanus was more ancient than Codex Alexandrinus. This meant explaining its many seeming corruptions. But what else was to be expected from the ignorant laymen (‘idiotae’) who were the disciples of the apostles, men who lacked any skill in transcription and did not bother to acquire any, having their knowledge from apostolic tradition itself?304 The demands of anti-​deist apologetics on the one hand and an anti-​Mill textual theory on the other thus ended up tugging Pfaff’s thoughts on the formation of the Canon in opposite directions. But this was not the end of the matter. At the end of his time in Turin, where he had made several important discoveries of patristic manuscripts,305 Pfaff announced a spectacular find: some previously unknown fragments of Irenaeus preserved in a biblical catena. These were not only fascinating but also timely, because the text of Irenaeus had just undergone monumental editorial labours by Grabe (1702) and by the Maurist René Massuet (1710).306 Pfaff published these fragments, first in Scipione 3 00 301 302 303

Ibid., 28–​36. Ibid., 44, 46–​50. 1 Cor. 5:9; 2 Thess. 3:17; and Polycarp, Phil., 13. See Bernard’s review, 89–​90; also Nathaniel Lardner, in A history of the apostles and evangelists [1760], in id., Works, ed. A. Kippis, 11 vols (London, 1788), 6:352–​61. 304 Dissertatio, 61. 305 E. Heck, ‘ “Du sollst nicht zitieren aus zweiter Hand”: Entdeckung und frühe Benutzung des Turiner Codex der lactanzischen Epitome divinarum institutionum’, Philologus, 13 (1993), 110–​21. 306 Irenaeus, Contra omnes Haereses libri quinque, ed. J.E. Grabe (Oxford, 1702); Irenaeus, Detectio et eversio falso cognominatae agnitionis, ed. P. Massuet (Paris, 1710). See further J.-​L. Quantin, ‘Le triomphe de l’Église anglicane? Johann Ernst Grabe éditeur d’Irénée’, in Crossing traditions, ed. M-​C. Pitassi and D. S. Camillocci (Leiden, 2017), 230–​49.

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Maffei’s Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia (1713) and then in a large edition with commentary (1715).307 The publication was a major literary-​scholarly event. First, it was not every day that new evidence of second-​century Christianity was discovered. Second, the anti-​philosophical and anti-​ritualistic spirituality of the fragments, and the Eucharistic theology they contained, seemed to support brilliantly Pfaff’s own irenic form of Lutheranism and quest for intra-​ confessional concord, a point hammered home in the textual commentary and the three massive dissertations he appended to his edition.308 Unfortunately, as Adolf von Harnack demonstrated in 1900, Pfaff had forged the fragments.309 I shall not repeat the whole story here, which is recounted in destructive detail by von Harnack.310 What is of interest to us is Pfaff’s new theories about the status of Scripture in early Christianity. In Pfaff’s first fragment, where ‘Irenaeus’ proposes a simple, anti-​philosophical faith, one reads: Αὕτη γάρ ἐστιν ἡ ἐπιλογὴ τῆς ἀπο­στολικῆς διδασκαλίας καὶ τῆς ἁγιω­τάτης πίστεως τῆς ἡμῖν παραδοθείσης, ἤν οἱ ἰδιῶται δέχονται καὶ οἱ ὀλιγομα­θεῖς ἐδίδαξαν, οἱ ταῖς γενεαλογίαις ταῖς ἀπεράντοις οὐ προσέχοντες…311

This is the teaching of the apostles and the most holy ‘faith which was once delivered unto us’ which the ignorant receive and the unlearned have taught, ‘not caring for endless genealogies’…

307 Giornale de’ Letterati d’Italia, 16 (1713), 226–​45, with Maffei’s sceptical response (albeit without ever questioning Pfaff’s integrity) at 245–​54; S. Irenaei Episcopi Lugdunensis fragmenta anecdota (The Hague, 1715). 308 Entitled ‘De oblatione Eucharistiae in primitiva Ecclesia usitata’; ‘De consecratione Eucharistiae in primitiva Ecclesia usitata’; ‘De Praejudiciorum Theologicorum causis’. 309 A. Harnack, Die Pfaff’schen Irenäus-​Fragmente als Fälschungen Pfaffs nachgewiesen (Leipzig, 1900). From here, Pfaff earned a place in that classic of early modern studies, Anthony Grafton’s Forgers and critics (Princeton, 1990), 32, 148. But it is not quite right to say (148) that ‘Pfaff’s forged fragments called forth a brilliant rebuttal from one of the greatest critics of his time, Scipione Maffei, which settled the matter of their authenticity permanently’. Maffei never accused Pfaff of forgery (he simply dated the fragments much later and questioned their Irenaean provenance). Meanwhile, the fragments continued to be taken very seriously –​even Harnack initially thought them to be of second-​century origin. It is particularly entertaining to see 19th-​century Anglican scholars using them while accusing Pfaff of having misinterpreted their contents, which naturally proved Anglican Eucharistic doctrine! See e.g. the edition of Irenaeus by William Wigan Harvey, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1875), 2:502, n. 8. 310 See also P. Batiffol, ‘Le Cas de Pfaff d’après des pièces nouvelles’, Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique (1901), 189–​200. 311 Fragmenta, 2–​3 [=Harnack, 33]. The quoted biblical passages are from Jude 3, 1 Tim. 1:4.

430 Levitin And in the second fragment, in which ‘Irenaeus’ propounds a Eucharistic theology that is Lutheran in essence but would be tolerable to Catholics (and hence could be used as a basis for Pfaff’s ecumenical schemes), we find: Οἱ ταῖς δευτέραις τῶν ἀποστόλων διατάξ­εσι παρηκολουθηκότες ἴσασι, τὸν Κύριον νέαν προσφορὰν ἐν τῇ καινῇ διαθήκῃ καθεσ­τηκέναι, κατὰ τὸ Μαλαχίου τοῦ προφήτου.312

They who know the latter [/​second] apos­tolic constitutions know that in the New Testament the Lord has decreed a new offering, according to what is said by the prophet Malachi [1:11]…

Reading these passages, one inevitably thinks of the Apostolic Constitutions about which Whiston had made such a noise only a few short years before the publication of Pfaff’s forgeries. Now, Pfaff had read Whiston, and while he categorically rejected the Englishman’s thesis about the text being canonical, he did believe that Whiston was right to hold that the Constitutions contained some genuinely apostolic material, and that, as Pearson had shown, there was a tradition of didactic stories by the apostolic fathers (Barnabas, Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp, Hermas).313 These apostolical διδασκαλίες were, he claimed, extra-​Scriptural traditions of the type posited by Dodwell.314 But the non-​juror had been wrong to claim that these traditions were inspired and thus to be used as a rule of faith. The fathers were not infallible. Even the earliest, such as Irenaeus, had received false traditions as true: witness his belief that Christ died at fifty.315 The fathers also had to be subjected to the rules of criticism, and there was no such thing as patristic ‘consensus’.316 However, Reformed theologians like Basnage were wrong to deny the existence of any apostolical διδασκαλίες in non-​essentials.317 Where an impartially applied ars critica showed such an apostolic tradition, it was an excellent basis for coming to ecumenical agreement. And needless to say, Pfaff’s fragments were just such ‘reliable’ traditions, Irenaeus being an eyewitness to primitive Eucharistic practice! Moreover, they could be confirmed by other Irenaean testimony, by other early fathers (especially Justin Martyr), and by teachings preserved in the Apostolic Constitutions –​teachings which could

312 Fragmenta, 25 [=Harnack, 34]. One wonders why Pfaff picked the ambiguous ‘δεύτερος’ –​ to imply a secondary source of religious authority? 313 Pfaff summarises the English debate about the Apostolic Constitutions in Fragmenta, 10–​17. 314 Ibid., 13. 315 Ibid., 29–​34. The reference is to Adv. Haer., ii.22. 316 Fragmenta, 34–​8. 317 Ibid., 18–​19, citing Basnage, Histoire, 475–​6 (Pfaff mistakenly has 465–​6).

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now be recognised as true extra-​biblical apostolic traditions, however spurious the rest of the text.318 In the third dissertation appended to the Fragmenta, ‘De Praejudicis Theologicis’, Pfaff presented such an ‘impartial’ application of the ars critica as the key to peace between the Churches. He voiced this in terms openly borrowed from Le Clerc.319 In return, the Arminian, pleased to hear his own ideas being preached back at him, gave a glowing review to Pfaff’s book, praising his ecumenicism and accepting the authenticity of the Irenaean fragments.320 So much for the penetrative force of ‘enlightened criticism’! But in any case, it is important to recognise that the ecumenicism behind Pfaff’s whole scheme, including his thesis of ‘secondary’ apostolical traditions to be used alongside Scripture, was, like all ecumenicism, heavily tilted in favour of his own confessional position. In fact, his forgery seems to have been born out of a sense of panic that the ecumenical rug was being pulled out from under the Lutherans. In his own edition of Irenaeus, Grabe had proposed a novel Eucharistic theology –​his adherence to which prevented him from entering into communion with the Church of England –​in which ‘oblation and consecration are one action’321 and which he differentiated from that of the Reformed, Rome, and the Lutherans. This had caused much agitation among Lutherans.322 Meanwhile, in his edition of Irenaeus Massuet had simply reasserted the Tridentine reading of Irenaeus on the Eucharist.323 Pfaff’s fragments, supposedly part of a secondary apostolic tradition some of which made it into the Apostolic Constitutions, allowed him to argue against Massuet that Irenaeus did not teach transubstantiation and other Catholic doctrines, but also against Grabe that the real presence was part of the primitive faith. Grabe’s ‘primitive liturgy’, printed in Pfaff’s book (it had been supplied to him by George Hickes), could thus be the basis of

318 Fragmenta, 39, concluding ‘Id quod luculentum omnino veritatis est testimonium, hasque, quas ita vocare liceat, διατάξεις ab omni fraudis & suppositionis suspicione vindicat’ [!]‌For the agreement of Pfaff’s fragments with Const. Ap., viii.40, see further Fragmenta, 42–​5; ‘De Oblatione veterum Eucharistica’, 312–​17. 319 Fragmenta, ‘De Praejudiciis Theologicis’, 596–​9. 320 Bibliothèque ancienne et moderne, 3 (1715), 448–​57, esp. 450–​1. 321 G. Every, ‘De Grabe and his manuscripts’, Journal of Theological Studies, 8 (1957), 280–​92, at 286; Quantin, ‘Grabe’, 243–​4. 322 Johannes Franciscus Buddeus, ‘De origine Missae Pontificae… contra virum clarissimum Io. Ernestum Grabium’, in Primitiae Ienenses (Jena, 1705); Thomas Ittig, Historiae Ecclesiasticae primi a Christo nato seculi selecta capita (Leipzig, 1709), 204–​6, both of which were known to Pfaff. 323 See Massuet’s ‘Dissertatio tertia’, in his edition, cxxxviii–​clii.

432 Levitin church union on Lutheran terms.324 Since we know that Pfaff only ‘discovered’ his Irenaeus fragments late during his Turin period,325 I should like to conjecture that a reading of Whiston’s work gave him the confidence to concoct his forgeries, and to posit extra-​Scriptural apostolic traditions that would support Lutheran ecumenicism. All this makes it rather difficult to describe Pfaff’s approach as heralding the ‘deconfessionaliation of theology’, as has his foremost German biographer.326 Rather, Pfaff’s speculation on the Canon were born out of a reverential attitude to English and French theological erudition, and a desperate desire to emulate it for the Lutheran cause. At Tübingen, he relentlessly instructed students to follow the methods developed in those two countries, to the extent that he sought to introduce the English college system, because he believed it would ‘get the students accustomed to regular work and stop the violence at the university’ (perhaps he exaggerated his knowledge of England).327 His success paved the way for the creation of the conditions in which Lutheran scholars could completely reconsider the process of Canon-​formation later in the eighteenth century, most famously in Johann Salomo Semler’s Abhandlung von freier Untersuchung des Canon (1771). 7

Conclusion

We are at an exciting moment for the history of European intellectual life c.1700. By abandoning a model in which ‘liberal’ heroes oppose a reactionary ‘orthodoxy’ and help constitute a canon for various nationalist myths –​ ‘Anglican enlightenment’, a ‘Pietist Aufklärung’, a ‘Dutch Erasmianism’, and so on –​we are rediscovering some of the most interesting, transformative, and 324 Fragmenta, 501–​29; Every, ‘Grabe’, 284–​5; G. Thomann, ‘John Ernst Grabe’s liturgies –​two unknown Anglican liturgies of the seventeenth century’, in id., Studies in English Church history, 2nd edn (Stoke-​on-​Trent, 1993), 89–​126. 325 Batiffol, ‘Cas de Pfaff’, 197. Prof Batiffol based his case on the letters in in bnf mss fonds français 17681 (fol. 62r), 19648 (fols. 15r–​36r), 19664 (fol. 297r), 19679 (fol. 309r). I am very grateful to Jean-​Louis Quantin for supplying me with photographs of those letters not printed by Batiffol. 326 Thomann, ‘Pfaff’, 127: ‘All diese Faktoren führten Pfaff dazu, eine Entkonfessionalisierung der Theologie anzustreben’. Prof. Thomann’s study, while very valuable, is marked by a concern to discover the origins of ‘correct’ dogmatic history in Lutheranism (128). This leads him barely to mention the whole episode surrounding the forged Irenaeus (93–​4). 327 Thomann, ‘Pfaff’, 116: ‘Am liebsten wäre ihm übrigens die Einführung des englischen College-​Systems gewesen, um die Studenten an eine geregelte Arbeit zu gewöhnen und die Gewalttätigkeiten an der Universität zu beenden‘.

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complex episodes in the history of scholarship.328 The present case study is just one of a growing body of evidence suggesting a move in this direction. (Of course, this is only the case for religious erudition. I do not seek to claim –​and indeed would strongly oppose the claim –​that other forms of intellectual activity, including other forms of scholarship, were so heavily influenced by confessional issues.) Innovation happened because churches across Europe weaponised the tools of humanist scholarship and invested hugely in their development and deployment. The more a Church invested in scholarship to buttress its confessional identity, the more likely its scholars were to present innovative results. But these discussions were never vacuum-​sealed in the confessional milieu in which they were produced: across Europe, scholars from other confessional backgrounds adopted and adapted these results for their own ends. The cycle then repeated itself. In other words, there was a complex interplay between the needs of inter-​and intra-​confessional polemic, trans-​ confessional emulation, the development of scholarly tools and techniques, and the structural conditions in which scholarship was conducted. No single text or scholarly result can be reduced to any of these factors. The most obvious manifestation of this complexity, and the futility of simplistic ideological mapping, is the fact that the desire to use the most avant-​garde scholarship to buttress one’s own confession could just as easily pit one against one’s own co-​religionists (witness the examples of Catholic opposition to Simon, or the English opposition to Dodwell). 328 As well as the studies cited throughout this essay, see also T. Wallnig, Critical Monks: the German Benedictines, 1680–​1740 (Leiden, 2019); A. Bevilacqua, The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA, 2018).

Index of Names, Places and Institutions The choice of terms for inclusion in the index has been dictated by the volume’s aspiration to foster comparison between localities, schools of thought, institutions, and individuals. Consistency has not been sought in the use of vernacular or Latinised names, but cross-​ references will be provided where needed. Not all saints have been accorded their title. All Netherlandish surnames with ‘van’ as an element have been listed under the first substantive. References to broad early modern institutional terms (‘Catholic’, ‘Protestant’, ‘Anglican’, ‘Reformed’) and to countries have not been included. Abishag 212 a Castro, Benedictus 239 Ader, Guillaume 182, 204 Aëtius of Amida 195, 198, 221 Agricola, Georg 14, 120, 122, 123–​9, 132, 133, 136, 138, 140 Agrippa, Henricus Cornelius 247 Agustín, Antonio 136, 141 Akkermann, Nadine 17 a Lapide, Cornelius 196, 197, 203, 204, 380–​1 Albanese, Guido Antonio 238n67 Albo, Joseph 144 Alcalá de Henares, University of 185, 186, 187, 200, 207, 209 Alciati, Andrea 119, 122, 129, 141 Alderotti, Taddeo 221 Aldrovandi, Ulisse 191 Alexander of Tralles 195, 221 Alexandria 280, 287, 288, 290, 293, 305, 307, 312, 314, 320, 326, 327, 328, 401 Almeloveen, Theodorus Janssonius van 9 Altdorf 192 Amatus Lusitanus 229 Amboise, Geoffrey d’ 292 Amsterdam 342, 346, 352, 356, 359 Amsterdam, Illustrious School of 30–​31, 33 Amsterdam, Jewish community of 161–​2 Amsterdam, Remonstrant Seminary of 59, 152, 160–​1 Amyraut, Moyse 36 Anderson, Benedict 22 Andrault, Raphaële 259, 261 Andrew, St. 421 Andry, Nicolas 249n Anstey, Peter 251, 254 Antony, St. 279, 283, 284, 290, 294, 302 Apion 286n39, 305

Appian, 122 Aquinas, Thomas 145, 279–​80, 291 Archesilaus 211 Aretaeus of Cappodocia 221, 257 Aretino, Pietro 75 Argenterius, Joannes 258n Arianism 167, 330, 383, 404–​5 Aristotle, Aristotelianism 31, 48, 163, 184, 185, 189, 191, 195, 200, 204, 208, 221, 226, 227n36, 236, 240–​1, 245n89 Arminius, Jacobus 144, 151, 153, 155–​61, 164–​ 5, 167, 174 Arnauld, Antoine 341, 346n46, 352–​4, 357 Arrowsmith, John 167 Athanasius of Alexandria 283–​84, 368, 407, 423 Aubert de Versé, Noël 342–​3, 378, 380 Augustine of Hippo 93–​94, 111, 115, 145, 147, 371–​2 Aurelianus, Caelius 249–​50n110 Avicenna 197, 199, 201, 214, 227 Bacon, Francis, Baconianism 15, 213, 230–​2, 241, 253–​4, 259, 262, 267n182, 269n189, 270 Baglivi, Giorgio 15, 217, 220, 249, 250n110, 255–​62, 267, 268, 269, 272–​4 Bahier, Jean 362 Bailey, Natasha 17 Baillou, Guillaume de 218n3, 224, 250n111 Baldit, Michel 181 Baliani, Giovanni Battista 208 Ball, John 165n126 Barbaro, Ermolao 122 Barbarossa, Emperor 213 Barbeyrac, Charles 218 Barbo, Giovanni 95

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Index of Names, Places and Institutions

Bardi, Girolamo 14, 188, 189, 190, 193, 197, 198, 200, 201, 202, 203, 207–​9, 213, 215, 216 Barlaeus, Caspar 30–​32 Barnabas, St. 368, 384, 385, 392, 393, 395, 397, 401, 413, 417, 422, 430 Baronio, Cesare 15, 106, 301, 303–​8, 309, 310, 311, 312, 313, 315, 317, 331, 332, 383, 384, 387, 397, 417 Bartholin, Caspar 191 Bartholin, Thomas 15, 191, 192, 193, 194, 198, 199, 201, 203, 209, 212–​3, 240n73, 241n76, 245 Bartholomew, St. 421 Bartoletti, Fabrizio 249 Basel 113, 296 Basin, Thomas 96n8, 97, 99n22, 101n30, 102–​105, 115 Basnage, Jacques 16, 288, 320n203, 328–​29, 331, 332, 346n46, 349–​50, 414–​19, 420, 426, 430 Bayle, Pierre 16, 337–​8, 344n35, 345, 346n46, 347–​59, 364, 414–​5 Beaulieu, Jean de 353n86 Beccadelli, Antonio 12, 65–​7, 74–​6, 78–​ 9, 81–​9 Bede, the Venerable 100, 111 Beeckman, Isaac 190 Beets 420 Bell, Thomas 301 Bellarmine, (Bellarmino), Robert 15, 277–​78, 279, 283, 302, 307, 331, 369–​74, 384, 392 Bellini, Lorenzo 249, 250n109, 256, 261n155 Benedict of Nursia 283, 292, 293, 300, 316 Benfey, Theodor 24 Benivieni, Antonio 229 Bentheim 22 Bentley, Richard 6, 25–​27, 34, 55 Berghaus, Peter 122 Berne 247n98 Bernard, Edward 139 Bernard, Jacques 427n298 Bérulle, Pierre de 376 Beveridge, William 321n210, 323–​24, 325, 328, 331, 373, 404–​5, 420 Beverland, Hadriaan 12, 65–​7, 74–​85, 87–​9 Bèze (Beza), Théodore de 47, 377, 380, 382 Bianchi, Giulio Maria 360, 362 Biddle, John 165

Bidloo, Govert 250n111 Bijnkershoek, Cornelis van 50 Billaine, Louis 336, 340, 342 Bisco, John 165n Blair, Ann 184, 200, 208 Bochart, Samuel 36 Böckh, August 119 Bodin, Jean 122, 132 Boeckler, Johann Heinrich 55 Boerhaave, Herman 15, 217, 220, 226n31, 233n52, 262, 266n179, 267–​70, 272–​4 Bohn, Johann 264 Boivin, Jean 38 Bolingbroke, Henry St John, Viscount 175 Bologna, University of 226, 255 Bolzani, Pierio Valeriano 70 Bonaventure 145 Borelli, Giovanni Alfonso 249n109, 261n155, 267n182 Bos, Lambert 44, 46 Bossuet, Jacques-​Bénigne 16, 342, 376 Botallus, Leonardus 244n85 Bourbon, prince de Condé, Henri Jules de 42 Bourbon, prince de Condé, Louis de 42 Bouhier, Jean 319 Bouilliau, Ismael 37 Boulboul, Laurentius 359–​60, 364 Bourdelot, Pierre 42 Boxel, Piet van 366 Boyle, Charles 25 Boyle, Robert 249, 251, 262, 264 Bracciolini, Poggio 83 Brandt, Gerard 153n60 Brasavola, Antonio Musa 240n72 Braun, Hans 130 Brerewood, Edward 14, 120, 135–​39, 140, 141 Brerewood, Robert 135 Brett, Thomas 403 Briggs, Robin 17 Bright, George 166 Brignole Sale, Anton Giulio 207–​8 Brockliss, Laurence 40 Broekhuizen, Joan van 44, 52, 54–​55 Browne, Thomas 321, 322, 325–​328, 331 Buchelius, Arnoldus 30 Budé, Guillaume 14, 118–​9, 121–​23, 129, 134, 136, 138, 140, 141, 295, 296 Bull, George 171–​2, 174

Index of Names, Places and Institutions Bullinger, Heinrich 146 Burman the Elder, Pieter 26, 28, 35, 44, 47, 55 Buxtorf the Elder, Johann 199, 203 Byrhtferth of Ramsey 111 Cabeo, Niccolò 208 Caius 391 Callimachus 44, 46 Calvin, John 146–​7, 158, 164, 174, 283, 371 Calvo, Fabio 221 Cambridge, Catharine Hall 166 Cambridge, Christ’s College 166 Cambridge, Clare Hall 167 Cambridge, Trinity College 25 Cambridge, University of 27, 165–​6, 167–​ 71, 406 Campanella, Tommaso 189, 191, 193, 212 Cano, Melchior 371 Canons of the Apostles 323–​25 Capo di Vacca (Capivaccius), Girolamo 237n63, 258n140 Cappel, Louis 16, 36, 109–​110 Cardano, Girolamo 226, 229, 240, 244n87, 260 Carmelites 291–​92, 302, 329 Carpzov, Johann Gottlob 331, 333 Carrichter, Bartholomäus 218 Cartesianism, see Descartes Carthage, Council of 369, 372, 383, 402, 417 Casaubon, Isaac 36, 304, 309, 310, 312, 387–​8 Caspar, Max 131 Cassian, John 284, 290 Castle, George 246n93 Cattaneo, Marcello 17 Catullus 63, 65, 70–​2, 74, 86 Celsus, Aulus Cornelius 201, 217 Ceneau, Robert (Coenalius) 122 Cerinthus 407, 422 Cesalpino, Andrea 249 Chalcedon, Council of 370 Charles v, Emperor 85 Charpentier, François 52 Chartier, René 222 Chemnitz, Martin 369–​70 Chesnau, Nicolas 261 Chirac, Pierre 218 Chorier, Nicolas 75 Christian v, King 116

437

Christopherson, John 295, 318 Chrysostom, John 46, 284, 293 Cicero 31–​32, 40, 44, 53, 54 Clare, John 277–​78, 279 Clarke, Samuel 396–​7 Claude, Jean 341, 352–​3 Clement of Alexandria, 370, 385, 396, 413, 417 Clement of Rome (Clemens Romanus) 392, 393, 397, 401, 404, 406, 407, 413, 423, 427, 430 Clement viii, Pope 377 Clichtove, Josse van 292–​94, 296 Clignetus, Petrus 155n72 Coimbra, University of 162–​3 Colbert, Jean-​Baptiste 341 Cologne 129, 181 Colomiès, Paul 326 Commelin, Caspar 250n111 Conring, Hermann 193 Constantine, Emperor 421 Conybeare, Frederick Cornwallis 286n39, 287, 286n39, 296n92, 334 Cook, Harold 272 Cooper, Richard 122 Copenhagen, University of 13, 116, 191 Cordaeus, Mauritius, see de la Corde, Maurice Cornarius, Janus 219, 220, 221 Cosin, John 374–​6, 385 Costeo, Giovanni 236n62 Cotton, Rowland 166 Courtin, Antoine de 40 Coward, William 142, 173, 175 Croke, Richard 124 Cudworth, Ralph 167–​8 Cumberland, Richard 139 Cunningham, Andrew 254 Cuper, Gisbert 317, 319 Cyril of Alexandria 148 Cyril of Jerusalem 368 da Costa, Uriel 161–​3, 173, 175 da Monte, Giovanni Battista 225n31, 229, 262 da Montefeltro, Federico 95 da Montefeltro, Guidobaldo 95 da Rho, Antonio 81, 86–​7 da Silva, Samuel 163

438 

Index of Names, Places and Institutions

Dacier, André 55, 56–​57 Dacier (née Lefèvre), Anne 9, 38 Daillé, Jean 309, 322–​23, 324, 328, 331, 386, 393, 404 Daugirdas, Kęstutis 153 David, King 212–​13, 216 de Castro, Pedro 246 de Ceglia, Francesco Paolo 266 de Goyer, Jacob 85 de Graaf, Reinier 77 de Hooffsche, Adriaan 96, 115 de la Corde, Maurice 223n22 de le Boë Sylvius, Franciscus 193, 234, 235 de Pineda, Juan 192 de Vega, Cristóbal 185 de Sallo, Denis 337 de’ Medici, Cosimo 86–​7 Dekesel, Christian Edmond 122 Della Capra, Bartholomeo 86 Della Casa, Giovanni 42, 66, 89 Delrio, Martin 313 Democritus 212 Desbordes, Henri 348 Descartes, René, Cartesianism 2, 36, 48, 190, 191, 194, 211–​12, 215, 228, 233, 234–​5, 247n95, 251, 264, 266, 267n182, 270 Despauterius, Johannes 42 Desprez, Louis 73–​4, 89 Deventer, Illustrious School of 30 Dewhurst, Kenneth 254 Dieterich (Dietericus), Johann Conrad 239n70, 245, 246n91 Dillingham, Theophilus 167 Diocletian, Emperor 421 Dionysius the Areopagite 289, 297, 299, 302, 311 Dodoens, Rembert 229 Dodwell, Henry 16, 324–​25, 326, 330, 392–​9, 401, 403, 408, 410–​14, 416, 420, 422–​3, 425, 426, 427, 428, 430, 433 Doläus, Johannes 234, 248 Dordt, Synod of 152, 157–​9 Douai 381 Drelincourt, Charles 269, 273 Drusius, Johannes 313 du Bois, Jacques 224 du Laurens (Laurentius), André 206, 207, 212 Du Perron, Jacques Davy 374

Du Pin, Louis Ellies 16, 358, 390–​2, 421, 424, 426 Dunkelgrün, Theo 366–​1 Dunton, John 255n127 Durazzo, Stefano 208 Duret, Louis 217, 223, 224, 249n109 Dwinglo, Bernardus 156 Ebion, Ebionites 387, 394, 407 Egerton, Thomas 135 Eisenschmid, Johann Caspar 119, 122–​3 Elias, Norbert  Elijah ben Moses Bashyazi 108 Elijah, Prophet 284, 292, 294, 298n107, 302, 318 Elzevier, Daniel 342, 344, 346 Empirical sect, ancient 230, 257 Empirics, modern 253, 257, 271, 273 Ens, Johannes 16, 420–​5, 427 Ephesus 394, 422 Ephesus, Council of 370 Epicurus, Epicureanism 74, 184, 191 Epiphanius of Salamis 286–​87, 290, 294, 296, 299, 300, 308, 310–​11, 316, 318n191, 324, 405 Episcopius, Simon 14, 144, 151–​4, 156–​61, 163, 168–9, 171, 174 Erasmus, Desiderius 47, 63, 64n4, 71–​2, 106, 290, 292, 297, 370, 386 Ernst, Wolfgang 17 Erotian 222 Essenes 15–​16, 277–​334, 401 Estienne (Stephanus), Robert 47, 366 Estius, Guilelmus 381 Ettmüller, Michael 234 Euclid 226 Eusebius of Caesarea 148, 286, 287–​88, 289, 290, 291, 293, 294, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300, 301, 302, 303, 304n131, 308–​9, 310, 315, 317–​18, 319, 321, 322n218, 324, 325, 331, 333, 334, 368, 370, 372, 383, 393, 416, 419, 422–​3, 424 Ezra 380 Faber, Tanaquil 64, 68–​9, 89 Fabretti, Raphael 361 Fabricius, Johann Albert 332–​33, 427 Farnaby, Thomas 74 Farnese, Cardinal Alessandro 133

Index of Names, Places and Institutions Faustus of Mileve 145 Fell, John 392 Fernel, Jean 191, 195, 198, 203, 217 Ficino, Marsilio 195, 212 Findlen, Paula 65, 83 Flacius Illyricus, Matthias 369, 386, 387 Florence 249, 255, 256 Foës (Foetius), Anuce 222, 238 Fontaine, Gabriel 237n64 Fontaine, Nicolas 238n67 Foreest, Pieter van 229 Fossombrone 106, 111 Foucault, Michel 377 Fracastoro, Girolamo 197, 203, 212, 270 Francius, Petrus 52 Francke, Augustus Hermann 425 Franckenberger, Reinhold 113n71 Franco, Niccolò 66, 89 Franeker, University of 29, 46, 151, 153 Frankfurt am Main 192 Frankfurt Book Fair 236, 238n68, 239, 241n77 Frederick iii, King 116 Freemasons 329–​30 Freiburg 296 Frijhoff, Willem 40 Frith, John 165 Fulda 296 Gagnier, Jean 407 Galen, Galenism 13, 119, 124–​5, 129, 180, 186, 195, 200, 204, 205, 207, 214, 217n1, 221, 222, 223, 224, 225, 226, 228, 231, 233n52, 234, 235, 236, 243n83, 244, 245n89, 247, 249, 251, 254, 257, 265, 268, 269, 270 Galenus, Matthaeus 299, 300, 302, 308, 331 Galilei, Galileo 188, 191, 207, 208, 257n132 Gallois, Jean 341, 345 Gamaliel 389 Gassendi, Pierre 133 Geesteranus, Peter 152 Gelasius i, Pope 369, 371, 383, 417 Gelenius, Sigismund 297 Geneva 235 Genoa 188, 207, 208 Genoa, Accademis degli Addormentati 208 Georgi, Theophilus 250n113 Gerhard, Johann 369 Gessner, Conrad 191, 230

439

Gibbon, Edward 331 Giessen, University of 245, 408 Giustiniani, Agosto 295 Glisson, Francis 254n124 Goens, Rijklof Michaël van 34 Gomarus, Franciscus 151, 155–​6, 158, 174 Gorris, Jean de 230 Grabe, John Ernest 16, 400, 404, 405, 407–​8, 414, 426, 427, 428, 431 Graevius, Johann Georg 22, 25, 43–​44, 54 Grafton, Anthony 2n4, 6, 72, 132, 282n21, 314, 366, 388 Granjel, Luis 187 Grass, Sigismund 273 Grassi, Orazio 188 Greaves, John 118, 123, 133, 139 Gregory of Nyssa, St 258 Gregory Thaumaturgus 424 Griesbach, Johann Jakob 366 Groetsch, Ulrich 6 Groningen, University of 27 Gronovius, Jacobus 84–​5 Gronovius, Johann Friedrich 25, 37n52, 45, 61, 318n192 Grotius, Hugo 160, 171, 380, 384, 389 Gruter, Isaac 231 Gundling, Nicolaus Hieronymus 274 Gunning, Peter 375–​6 Gyza, Great Pyramid of 118 Hadrian, Emperor 327 Hagendoorn, Ehrenfried 229n41 Halberstadt 262 Hall, Richard 300 Halle, University of 262 Hamburg 162, 237–​8, 242 Hammersmith 320n206 Hammon, George 165n125 Hammond, Henry 165 Hannaway, Owen 124 Harderwijk, University of 27, 267 Hardy, Nicholas 366 Harrison, Peter 182 Harvey, William 186, 190, 193, 233, 243n83, 249, 250, 266 Haugen, Kristine 6 Heberden, William 270 Hecquet, Philippe 217, 250n112, 255n128 Heinsius, Anthonie 43, 57

440 

Index of Names, Places and Institutions

Heinsius, Daniel 45, 426 Heinsius the Elder, Nicolaas 37n52 Helmont, Joan Baptista van 234, 235, 243n83, 247n97, 249, 251, 269, 270 Helmstedt, University of 192, 215 Helsingør 107 Hemsterhuis, Tiberius 45, 46, 48, 56 Henri iv, King 41 Heraclitus of Ephesus 211 Hermann, Paul 250n111 Hermas, Shepherd of 368, 370, 373, 385, 392, 393, 397, 401, 405, 413, 417, 419, 430 Herod, King 287, 296, 304, 306 Herodians 305 Hertz, Johannes Gabriel 249 Hesiod 44, 46 Heurne, Jan van 223, 240 Hickes, George 431 Hilary of Poitiers 402 Hippocrates, Hippocratism 9, 13, 15, 119, 125, 180, 185, 195, 196, 200, 201, 203, 204, 205, 212, 214, 215, 217–​74 Hippolytus 391, 405 Hody, Humphrey 172 Hoffmann, Friedrich 15, 218n4, 220, 226n32, 233, 262–​7, 268, 269, 272–​4 Hollewand, Karen 12 Holstenius, Lucas 318–​19 Holy Roman Empire 129 Homer 31, 38 Hommius, Festus 153–​4, 156–​8, 174 Hoogstraten, David van 22, 52 Horace 25–​6, 55, 57, 65, 73–​4, 102 Horthemels, Daniel 353n86, 361–​2 Hospinianus, Rodolphus 298, 301 Hotton, Petrus 250n111 Houdar de la Motte, Antoine 37–​8 Houllier, Jacques 224, 225, 269 Huet, Pierre Daniel 61 Hultsch, Friedrich 119–​20 Hunt, Lynn 65 Huygens, Christiaan 269, 345 Ignatius of Antioch 114, 322, 368, 393–​4, 405, 407, 424, 428, 430 Imperiale, Bartolomeo 208 Innocent i, Pope 369, 383, 402, 417 Inowlocki, Sabrina 288n55, 289, 301n122

Irenaeus 368, 393, 413, 428–​32 Iselin, Johann Christoph 420 Ittig, Thomas 396, 427 Jakob of Speyer 95 James, St. (Santiago) 312, 384, 402, 417, 421 James the Less 421 Janiçon, François 354 Janssonius van Almeloveen, Theodorus 27 Janus, Jacobus 218n4, 241 Jerome 74, 101, 104n39, 105, 111, 115, 284, 285, 287, 288–​90, 293, 294, 295, 296, 298n107, 299, 315, 318, 324, 368, 372, 373, 377, 387, 401 Jerusalem 393, 402, 413 Jimeno, Pedro 185 Joachimsthal 125 Job 192, 194 Johannes, Erasmus 149 John the Baptist 284, 293, 294, 298n107 John, St. 379, 387, 393, 399, 401, 416, 422–​4 Jordanova, Ludmilla 214 Josephus 150n41, 213, 278, 280, 282, 290, 293, 299–​300, 302, 304, 305, 306, 308, 313, 320, 325 de Jouvancy, Joseph 73 Judah Kyriakos 384 Jude, St. 384, 391, 417, 421 Julia, Dominique 40 Junius, Franciscus 164 Jurieu, Pierre 346n46, 348, 354, 357 Justel, Henri 347, 350 Justin Martyr 393, 402, 430 Juvenal 73 Kelley, Donald R. 139–​40 Kepler, Johannes 14, 120, 123, 129–​34, 135, 136, 139, 140 King, William 25–​27 Knoeff, Rina 269 Küster, Ludolf 33 La Mettrie, Julien Offray de 233n53 La Peyrère, Isaac de 210–​11 La Placette, Jean 300, 328 La Puente, Juan de 312–​13, 314 Lambin, Denis 74 Lanay, Jean 238n67

Index of Names, Places and Institutions Lange, Johann Joachim 333 Lange, Villum 13, 107–​17 Langwedel, Bernhard 237–​44 Laodicea, Synod of 369, 372, 384, 395, 396, 398, 402, 417, 419, 427 La Roche, Michel de 23 La Roque, Jean-​Paul de 341–​2, 347 Larroque, Daniel de 349–​50 Latomus, Jacobus 297–​98 Laurentius, see du Laurens Laurentius, see Lorenz Le Clerc, Daniel 235 Le Clerc, Jean 16, 24, 59–​61, 345, 348, 352, 356–​8, 362, 378–​81, 385–​6, 400, 409–​14, 416, 420, 426, 431 Le Mort, Jacobus 248–​9, 250n112 L’Empereur, Constantijn 158–​9 Le Vassor, Michel 390 Le Cène, Charles 348 Le Fèvre, Anne, see Dacier, Anne Lecce 255 Leers, Reinier 342, 344–​6, 348–​52, 353n86, 354, 358, 364 Leeuwenhoek, Antoni van 269 Lefèvre d’Etaples, Jacques 106, 373 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 48, 263, 273, 340, 350, 353n86 Leiden 107, 153, 190, 191, 193, 194, 231, 269 Leiden Latin school of 190 Leiden, University of 22, 30, 31, 46, 61, 87, 151–​6, 158–​9, 161, 164, 190, 248, 267, 420 Leigh, Thomas 255n127 Leipzig 113, 116 Leipzig, University of 124, 234 Lemos, Luis de 236, 245n90 Lenfant, Jacques 349–​50 Leo x, Pope 106 Leopoldina (Academia Naturae Curiosorum), 256 Lessius, Leonardus 380–​1 Leuven, University of 15, 95–​96, 98, 104, 105n46 Levitin, Dmitri 8, 16–​17, 270, 281, 329 Lightfoot, John 9, 14, 144, 166–​72, 174, 350–​1 Lightfoot, Joseph Barber 277, 281 Ligorio, Pirro 122 Ligota, C.R. 1 Liguria 188

441

Limborch, Philipp van 153n60, 163 Linden, Joannes Antonides van der 219, 222, 240n72 Linz 130, 132, 133 Lipenius, Martin 222 Lisieux 97 Livy 45, 61 Lo Presti, Roberto 268, 270 Locke, John 48, 252 Lombard, Peter 145 Lommius, Jodocus 229, 250n111, 261 London 165, 194 London, College of Physicians 194, 246, 252 London, Gresham College 135, 139 London, Royal Society of 241, 251, 256, 262, 273 London, Sion College of 166 Lonie, Iain 224, 229, 265–​6 López de Zuñiga, Diego 387 Lorenz (Laurentius), Georg Friedrich 218, 220, 237–​48 Löscher, Valentin Ernst 419 Louis xiii, King 192 Louis xiv, King 41, 42 Lowth, Robert 174n185 Lübeck 237 Luchtmans, Samuel 35 Lucian 44, 46 Lucilius 54n110 Lucius, Paul Ernst 333 Lucretius 65, 68, 73–​4, 191 Luke, St. 382, 393, 396–​7, 401, 413, 414, 415–​ 16, 422–​3, 427 Luther, Martin 145, 279, 283, 293, 297, 369, 384 Lygaeus, Joannes 238 Mabillon, Jean 316, 327 Mabre-​Cramoisy, Sebastian 347 Macedonia 424 Macfarlane, Kirsten 366 Machielsen, Jan 15 Maclean, Ian 15 Macrobius 220n10, 237n63, 245n89 Maffei, Scipione 428–​9 Magdeburg Centuries 298, 302 Magliabechi, Antonio 256 Maimonides 143, 169, 173, 213

442 

Index of Names, Places and Institutions

Maius, Johann Heinrich 408, 426 Major, Johann Daniel 242 Malcolm, Noel 366 Maldonato, Juan 382 Malebranche, Nicolas 344–​5, 354, 357 Malpighi, Marcello 249n109, 256, 273 Mandelbrote, Scott 17, 366 Mandeville, Bernard 77 Manget, Jean-​Jacques 235 Marburg 248 Marchand, Suzanne 7 Marcion 402, 422, 425 Mareotis (Lake) 288, 302n125, 326 Margarita, Anton 199, 203 Mariana, Juan de 118, 123 Mark, St. 287, 288, 289, 290, 293, 303, 321, 328, 396–​7, 401, 415, 422, 427 Marsham, John 142, 172–​3, 340, 343 Martensen, Robert 254 Martial 63, 65–​6, 73n28, 86 Martianus, Prosperus 249n109 Massaria, Alessandro 237n63, 245n89, 258n140 Massuet, René 428, 431 Mastlin, Michael 132 Matthew, St 382, 387–​8, 391, 393, 401, 409, 410, 413, 415–​16, 421, 422 Mattioli, Pietro Andrea 191 Mead, Richard 14, 15, 182, 183, 194, 198, 201, 202, 209, 212, 213–​14, 216 Mede, Joseph 321 Melanchthon, Philip 145 Mena, Fernando 185 Mencke, Otto 338  Mercatus, Ludovicus 258n140 Mercuriale, Girolamo 197, 203, 212, 222, 236, 237n63, 245n90, 249n109 Mersenne, Marin 123 Methodist Sect 257, 261 Mey, Johannes de 15, 182, 190, 191, 192, 193, 198, 199, 201, 202, 203, 209–​11, 212, 213, 215–​16 Michaelis, Christian Benedikt 34 Michaelis, Johann David 34 Middelburg 96, 190, 198 Middleton, Conyers 26–​27 Midwinter, Daniel 255n127 Miert, Dirk van 7, 36, 366

Mill, John 16, 400–​3, 405, 414, 420, 422–​3, 425, 427, 428 Miller, Peter 138 Minden 262 Minutoli, Vincent 350, 357 Modena, Leon 162n124, 388 Moles, Vicente 14, 182, 186, 187, 189, 190, 193, 196, 197, 200, 203, 204–​5, 209, 215, 216 Molière, Jean-​Baptiste Poquelin 248 Molyneux, Thomas 254n124 Montano, Benito Arias 136, 138–​9, 141 Montausier, Charles de Sainte-​Maure, duc de 39, 43, 57 Montfaucon, Bernard de 316–​17, 319, 320–​21, 327, 328, 330, 331, 332, 426 Montpellier, University of 191, 218 Moreau, René 192 Morin, Jean 16, 347, 376 Mosellanus, Petrus 124 Moses 142, 148, 150, 160–​1, 162n114, 164, 168, 169, 170, 171, 175, 196, 197, 200, 201, 203, 208, 210, 215 Mosheim, Johann Lorenz von 329 Moulton, Ian F. 77 Muggleton, Lodowick, Muggletonians 165 Müller, Ingo 234, 265–​6 Müller, Lucian 24 Munsterus, Joannes 237n63, 245n89 Muret, Marc-​Antoine 64, 71 Naldius, Matthias 245n90 Naples 189, 256 Naples, University of 255 Napoleon i, Emperor 218 Naudé, Gabriel 55 Nazarenes 387, 388, 390, 391, 394, 401 Nedham, Marchamont 246 Nero, Emperor 413 Newton, Isaac, Newtonianism 118, 194, 214, 269n189, 330, 404, 405 Nicaea, Council of 375 Nicaise, Claude 345 Nicephorus Gregoras 258n140 Nicholls, William 173 Nicolaus a Lyra 204 Nicole, Pierre 341, 418 Nitria (Mount) 326 Noceto, Giovanni Battista 208

Index of Names, Places and Institutions Nodot, François 54 Nothaft, Philipp 13 Nye, Stephen 396, 398–​400, 427 Opizzoni, Giovanni Battista 124 Oppenheim 192 Oribasius 221 Origen 370, 376, 383, 384, 396, 413, 417, 419, 421, 423, 425 Overton, Richard 165n125 Ovid 63–​5, 86 Oxford 107, 392 Oxford, All Souls College 17 Oxford, Bodleian Library 407 Oxford, Brasenose College 135 Oxford, University of 118, 135, 139, 165, 171, 251 Paaw, Pieter 250n111 Padua 191, 255 Padua, University of 237n63, 239, 240n72, 242, 251, 255, 258, 262, 273 Paetus, Lucas (Luca Peto) 119, 122, 132 Pajon, Claude 348 Palaeologus, Jacobus 149 Palermo 75 Palladius 284, 326 Pallilio, Matteo 249 Pallavicino, Ferrante 66, 89 Pantaenus 394 Papias 386, 410, 413, 421 Papin, Isaac 346n46 Paracelsus, Theophrast Bombast von Hohenheim, Paracelsianism 218n4, 230, 231, 233, 234, 235, 237n64, 244, 247, 249, 250, 270 Paris 107, 336–​7, 340, 345–​7, 349–​ 50, 355–​6 Paris, Paris Hippocratics 245, 261 Paris, Sorbonne 390 Parker, Samuel 325, 327 Pastorino, Cesare 13–​14 Patin, Guy 245–​6 Paul iii, Pope 106 Paul of Aegina 195, 196, 199, 201, 202, 204, 214, 221 Paul of Middelburg 13, 95–​107, 109, 111–​ 12, 115–​17

443

Paul of Thebes 284, 290, 294, 315, 319 Paul, St. 289, 328n251, 383, 385, 389, 397, 399, 401, 405, 414, 415, 421, 427 Paulli, Simon 250n113 Pearson, John 405, 430 Peiresc, Nicolas Claude Fabri de 123, 133 Perilli, Lorenzo 124 Perizonius, Jacob 22, 45, 49, 52, 53 Perkins, Williams 300 Perrault, Charles 37, 53 Persius 73 Petau (Petavius), Denis 107–​108, 112, 287n44, 318 Peter de Rivo 98–​99, 104n42, 105, 115 Peter of Alexandria 379 Peter, St. 295, 385, 397, 399, 401, 405, 415, 421, 427 Petit, Samuel 108 Petronius 54 Pfaff, Christoph Matthäus 16, 426–​32 Pfeffer, Michelle 14 Pharisees 143, 168, 280, 305, 327 Philip ii, King 182, 185, 186, 204 Philip iii, King 186 Philip iv, King 186, 196 Philippi 424 Philo Judaeus 198 Philo of Alexandria 278–​333 Photius of Constantinople 301, 302n123 Phrygia 402 Piccolomini, Marcantonio 76 Pietro d’Abano 221 Pisa 188 Plato, (Neo-​)Platonism 184, 189, 191, 200, 208, 212, 288, 289, 290, 295, 330n263, 332–​33 Pliny the Elder 121, 195, 202, 205, 280, 294 Plutarch, 122 Pococke, Edward 139 Polyander, Jean 152 Polycarp 368, 393, 402, 405, 424, 425, 430 Polycrates 422–​3 Pompey the Great 202 Pomponazzi, Pietro 262 Ponce de Santa Cruz, Antonio 227 Poole, Matthew 166 Poole, William 17 Popkin, Richard 212

444 

Index of Names, Places and Institutions

Portius, Leonardus (Leonardo de Portis) 119, 122, 129, 136, 141 Possevino, Antonio 300 Prideaux, Humphrey 330 Propertius 72 Ptolemy 226 Pyrrho of Elis, Pyrrhonism 211, 212 Pythagoreans 290, 293 Quakerism 167 Quantin, Jean-​Louis 1, 7, 8, 322, 323n223, 324 Quesnel, Pasquier 346n46 Quintilian 93 Qumran 280, 332 Rainolds, John 106n53 Rainssant, Pierre 355n91 Raków 149, 164 Rampling, Jennifer 17 Ranuzzi, Angelo 361–​2 Rapin, René 61 Rechstood, Dionysius 88n85 Redi, Francesco 249n109, 256 Reeve, John 165n125 Regensburg, Colloquy of 374, 383 Reimarus, Hermann Samuel 6 Renato, Camillo 149 Republic of Letters 337–​8, 356 Restaurand, Raymond 232n48, 233 Reuchlin, Johann 106 Ricci, Giacomo 359, 362–​3 Richardson, John 396, 398–​9, 403, 419, 427 Richelieu, Amand Jean du Plessis, cardinal de 41 Riolan the younger, Jean 266 Rivet, André 158 Rivière, Lazare 261 Roberts, Francis 165 Rocco, Antonio 66, 89 Roling, Bernd 211 Rollin, Charles 58 Roman Empire 131–​2 Rome 133, 188, 250, 256, 336, 340, 359–​65 Rome, Congregation of the Index 359–​64 Rome, Fifth Lateran Council 162–​3 Rome, Inquisition 256 Rome, la Sapienza 255 Rooden, Peter Van 159 Roos, Anne-​Marie 17

Ross, Tricia 192 Rotterdam 345, 346n45, 349, 351–​2 Rotterdam, Illustrious School of 30 Rudolf ii, Emperor 130 Rufinus of Aquileia 289, 293 Rufus of Ephesus 221 Ruhnken, David 25, 45, 46, 48 Ruisch, Federik 250n111 Ruland the Elder, Martin 229 Sadducees 143, 150, 160–​1, 167, 169–​70, 171–​2, 173, 280, 305, 327 Sala, Angelo 249 Salamanca, University of 207 Salden, Willem 356–​7 Salerno, School of 218n3, 255 Salmaise, Claude 318n Sanchi, Luigi-​Alberto 121 Sancroft, William 323, 325, 326 Sanctorius, Sanctorius 235n57, 260 Sandt, Maximilian van der 181, 189 Saragossa, Nuestra Señora de la Gracia, hospital of 187, 207 Saragossa, University of 187, 198, 200, 201, 207 Saul, King 194 Saumaise, Claude 9, 22, 36, 318n192 Savile, Henry 318 Saye, Robert 171n Scaliger, Joseph Justus 6, 36, 64, 72, 89, 107–​ 108, 112, 113n71, 118, 281–​82, 284, 286, 289, 298, 300, 303–​4, 308–​16, 317, 318, 319, 322, 324, 325, 327, 328, 329, 330, 331, 332, 334 Scaliger, Julius Caesar 95, 240–​1 Scheffler, Joannes Ernestus 238n67 Schelstrate, Emmanuel 360, 406 Schopffius, Abraham 236n63 Schoppe, Caspar 55 Sehested, Christen Thomesen 116 Selden, John 108, 109n60, 117 Semler, Johann Salomo 432 Sennert, Daniel 195, 244 Septalius, Ludovicus 250n111 Serarius, Nicolaus 313–​314, 315, 317, 318n191, 326, 331 Shalev, Zur 118 Sheldon, Gilbert 171–​2 Sichardt, Johannes 296–​97, 299, 305, 311

Index of Names, Places and Institutions Siena 75, 77, 75 Siena, Accademia degli Intronati 75, 83 Simeon, Bishop of Jerusalem 384, 394 Simon, Richard 16, 37, 336–​65, 376, 377, 378–​99, 408–​9, 412, 414, 415, 417, 420, 421, 424, 426, 428, 433 Sinapius, Michaël 246–​7 Siraisi, Nancy 140n69, 183 Sirmond, Jacques 318 Sixtus iv, Pope 295 Sixtus v, Pope 377 Sixtus of Siena 370 Sjælland 192 Smith, Thomas 353 Smith, Wesley 273 Snell, Willebrord 123, 131n41 Snellen, Hendrik 250 Socheus, Antigonus 169 Socinus, Faustus, Socinianism 144, 148–​50, 151–​4, 157, 158n88, 160, 164–​6, 167–​8, 171–​2, 174, 378, 380, 384, 389, 398, 405 Socinus, Lelio 149 Solomon, Temple of 136–​7 Sorbait, Paul de 248 Soria, Juan de 301 Sozomen 284, 290 Spencer, John 142, 172–​3, 351 Spinoza, Baruch, Spinozism 16, 142, 248n99, 358, 361, 376, 377 Spratling, Robert 246n93 Sprengell, Conrad Joachim 223n21 Stahl, Georg Ernst 218n4, 226n32, 227, 228, 235, 263–​4, 273 Stanglin, Keith 152 Stapylton, Robert 73 Statius, Achilles 74 Stegmann, Joachim 165 Steno, Nicolaus 191 Stephanus, Robertus, see Estienne, Robert Steuco, Agostino 106 Stevin, Simon 129 Stoicism 184, 191, 210, 212 Stover, Justin 17 Strasbourg 113, 119 Suetonius 45 Swieten, Gerard van 268 Sydenham, Thomas 15, 217, 218n3, 220, 249n109, 251–​5, 258, 261, 262, 264, 266n179, 268, 269, 272–​4

445

Sylvius, Jacobus, see du Bois Tachenius, Otto 234, 247n97, 249, 273 Tacitus 31, 45 Tanara, Sebastiano Antonio 361–​2 Tanner, Adam 383 Tartaretus, Petrus 226n34 Tauvry, Daniel 233n53 Taylor, Jeremy 172 Terence 63–​4 Tertullian 315, 370, 379–​80, 422 Theodoret of Cyrus 193 Theophilus of Caesarea 99–​100, 111, 114 Theophylact of Ohrid 114 Thessalonica 424 Thomas, Keith 17 Thomas, St. 421 Thorndike, Herbert 165n126 Thucydides 61 Tifernate, Lilio 295 Tilemann, Johann 238n67 Tillotson, John 172, 175 Timothy, St. 422 Toland, John 142, 174–​5, 392, 395–​400, 403, 408, 419, 427 Toomer, G.J. 6 Torres, Francisco 404 Touber, Jetze 7, 14–​15, 366 Tozzi, Luca 256, 261, 273 Trajan, Emperor 393, 416 Trelcatius, Lucas 154 Trent, Council of 208, 366, 388, 406 Trigland, Jacobus 153n60 Triller, Wilhelm 274 Tübingen, University of 132, 426, 432 Tulp, Nicolaas 250n111, 261 Tunstall, Cuthbert 136 Turin 428, 432 Turnèbe, Adrien 297 Twining, Timothy 16, 17, 366 Twysden, John 246n93 Tyndale, William 165 Uberte de la Cerda Ballaguer, Marcelino 14, 187, 188, 189, 190, 192, 193, 198, 200, 201, 203, 204, 205, 215 Ulm 129–​30 Urbino 13, 95, 97–​98 Ussher, James 318, 404

446 

Index of Names, Places and Institutions

Utrecht 97, 194 Utrecht, University of 22 Uzziah, King 195 Valckenaer, Lodewijk Caspar 29, 45, 46–​47, 50, 56 Valencia 185, 186 Valla, Lorenzo 101, 102n32 Valladolid, University of 207, 227 Valleriola, François 224n26, 229 Valles (Vallesius), Francisco, 14, 180n, 181n6, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186, 187, 188, 189, 190, 191, 192, 193, 196, 197, 199, 201, 203, 204–​ 7, 212, 213, 214, 215, 216, 240n72, 244, 245n89, 258n72, 269 Valois, Henri de 317–​19, 324, 326, 327, 330, 331 Velasco de Taranta 261n155 Venice 124, 249, 255, 295 Venice, Jewish community of 162n114 Vergil, Polydore 294 Verhaart, Floris 12 Vermès, Géza 280n18, 310, 311, 332, 334 Vesalius, Andreas 185, 207, 264, 267 Vienna 248 Vignali, Antonio 12, 65–7, 74–89 Villalpando, Juan Bautista 123, 131n41, 132–​4, 138–​9, 141 Viret, Pierre 278, 283, 301n Vogler, Valentin Heinrich 15, 192, 193, 194, 197, 201, 203, 209, 211–​12, 215 Völkel, Johann 150, 153, 164, 168, 174 Voltaire, François-​Marie Arouet de 35 Volterrano, Raffaello Maffei 295 von Haller, Albrecht 225n31, 268 von Harnack, Adolf 429 von Württenberg, Georg ii, Herzog 426 Vorstius, Conrad 151, 158 Vossius, Gerard 30, 108, 160 Vossius, Isaac 36, 318n192, 325–​6, 344–​5, 356, 362–​3, 394, 428

Wake, William 427n294 Walaeus, Johannes 233n52 Walcheren 190 Waldmann, Felix 17 Waldschmidt, Johann Jakob 229n41, 235n58, 248, 261 Walker, Obadiah 139 Walton, Brian 16, 139, 166 Wandal, Hans 13, 113–​117 Warburton, William 14, 142–​3, 145, 174, 175 Ward, Mary 320n Warsaw 247 Water, Willem van de 35 Weber, Max 43 Wedel, Georg Wolfgang 220, 227–​9, 262 Weinberg, Joanna 295, 366, 388 Weiss, Roberto 120 Welsing, Heinrich 157 Westminster, Assembly of Divines 166 Wettstein, Johann Jakob 9 Whigs 27 Whiston, William 16, 330, 404–​8, 426, 430, 432 Whitaker, William 277–​78, 369, 371–​4, 397 Wier, Johann 229 Wijffels, Alain 17 Willis, Thomas 234, 235, 247n97, 251, 264 Witsius, Herman 164 Wittelsbach, Ernst von 129 Wittenberg, University of 150 Witthöft, Harald 120, 123, 129n31, 130–​1 Worm, Ole 191 Wyttenbach, Daniel 25n12 Xenophon 46 Zadoc 169–​70 Zunner, Johann David 353n86 Zwingli, Huldrych 146