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Magic, Medicine, and Gender in Renaissance Natural Philosophy

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Magic, Medicine, and Gender in Renaissance Natural Philosophy Publications of the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies Essays and Studies, 23 Series Editor Konrad Eisenbichler Victoria University in the University of Toronto Disreputable Bodies: Magic, Medicine, and Gender in Renaissance Natural Philosophy Sergius Kodera Toronto Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies 2010 CRRS Publications Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies Victoria University in the University of Toronto Toronto, Ontario, M5S 1K7, Canada Tel: 416/585–4465 Fax: 416/585–4430 Email: [email protected] Web: www.crrs.ca © 2010 by the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies All Rights Reserved Printed in Canada National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication This volume was published with financial support from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). Cover illustration: Giambattista Della Porta, De humana physiognomia. Naples: Apud Torquinium Longum, 1602 (colophon: 1601), p. 40. Universitätsbibliothek, Wien, by permission. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Kodera, Sergius, 1963– Disreputable bodies [electronic resource] : magic, medicine and gender in Renaissance natural philosophy / Sergius Kodera. (Essays and studies ; 23) Includes bibliographical references and index. Electronic monograph in PDF format. Issued also in print format. ISBN 978–0–7727–2063–4 1. Philosophy, Renaissance. 2. Human body (Philosophy). 3. Science—Philosophy. 4. Metaphysics. I. Title. II. Series: Essays and studies (Victoria University (Toronto, Ont.). Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies) ; 23 B775.K64 2010a 190.9'031 C2010–906022–9 Typesetting, cover design, and production: Iter Inc. Contents Acknowledgements 7 Illustrations 8 Introduction: Disreputable Bodies 9 1. Nymphomaniac Matter: The Prostitute as Metaphor for the Body in Italian Renaissance Philosophy 13 2. Matter as a Mirror: Marsilio Ficino and Renaissance Neoplatonism 47 3. Lady Vampires: Marsilio Ficino on Blood 113 4. Disease, Infection, Cognition: Air as a Universal and Daemonic Mediator in Renaissance Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism 133 5. Three Elements Instead of Four? 171 6. Masculine/Feminine. The Concept of Matter in Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’amore or the Difficult Question: Who’s on Top? 185 7. Renaissance Readings of Aristophanes’ Myth from Plato’s Symposium (189C–193D) 213 8. Meretricious Arts: The Astrological Significance of Surgical Interventions into the Body in Giambattista Della Porta 251 Epilogue: Deconstructing the Renaissance Magus 275 Bibliography 295 Index 315 Acknowledgements This book is the revised version of my Habilitationsschrift which was accepted by the University of Vienna in 2004. The texts presented here developed over the past decade out of a series of talks and related articles, all focussing on the notion of bodies and matter in Italian Renaissance Philosophy. Chapters one to three and six to eight, as well as the Epilogue have been previously published, albeit in different forms. Chapters two and three were made possible by a generous research grant, the Erwin Schroedinger Fellowship, from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), as well as by a Frances Yates Fellowship at the Warburg Institute in London, held between 1997 and 1998. It goes without saying that the quality of the present study has immensely benefited not only from the rich resources of the formidable Warburg library, but also from the manifold encounters with other scholars there. I wish to thank the Österreichische Forschungsge- meinschaft for several travel grants that allowed me to present some of the material of this book at several international conferences and symposia. I also wish to thank the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) for their generous financial support for the publication of this book. Many people have been very generous to me with their time and their vast intellectual resources: I especially wish to mention Valery Rees, Michael Allen, Georges Didi-Hubermann, François Quiviger, Walter Stephens, Barbara Garvin, William Eamon, Alice Pechriggl, Hans Belting, Konrad Eisenbichler, David Freedberg, Eva Cescutti, Anthony Grafton, Ferdinand Fellmann, Richard Heinrich, Julia Hairston, Walter Stephens, Deanna Shemek, Tanya Pollard, Will Stenhouse, Lukas Dorfbauer, David Luft and the three anonymous reviewers of the book, all of whom gener- ously supported my research over the years with their encouragement, comments, discussions, draft reading, in short, with the kind of attention that is a prerequisite for any intellectual enterprise. There is, however, one person I am especially grateful to, Marlen Bid- well Steiner. Our relationship has in so many ways played a key role in our emotional as well as our intellectual lives: the book is therefore dedicated to her. Sergius Kodera Vienna, 14 July 2010 7 Illustrations cover Giambattista Della Porta, De humana physiognomia. Naples: Apud Torquinium Longum, 1602 (colophon: 1601), p. 40. Universitätsbib- liothek, Wien, by permission. 1. Correspondences between facial birthmarks and parts of the male and female body, from Giambattista Della Porta, Della celeste fisiono- mia del libri sei. Padua: Pietro Paolo Tozzi 1623, p. 122. (Universitäts- bibliothek, Wien) 2. Sign of Cassiopeia, from: Aratri phaenomena Gemanico Caesare interprete cum comentariis et imaginibus. Venice: Aldus Manutius, 1499, sig. Hiir [= fol. 12r]. (Universitätsbibliothek, Wien) 8 Introduction This book examines the contested position of the body in Renaissance philosophy, thus encompassing rarely studied material in close readings: it shows in which ways abstract metaphysical ideas evolved in tandem with the creation of new metaphors that shaped the understanding of Early Modern political, cultural, and scientific practises such as blood letting, distillation, iconography, that are important testimonies to the power of visual imagery in shaping novel approaches to the natural world. It considers the impact of Neoplatonism on Renaissance natural philosophy, magic and metaphysics, and thus includes the following influential and original thinkers: Marsilio Fi- cino, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Leone Ebreo, Alessandro Piccolomini, Agrippa von Nettesheim, Bernardino Telesio, Giambattista Della Porta, and Giordano Bruno. In recent years, many books on the function and perception of gen- dered bodies have appeared in a variety of academic disciplines. One particu- lar focus of these studies has been the body’s relationships to material culture and politics in Early Modern European societies.1 This book approaches the topic from a slightly different angle: it contextualizes body discourses within the framework of the still largely unexplored ideas of some highly influential philosophers of the period. It thus provides a new approach to these issues by describing the function and interaction of new technologies (such as op- tics and distillation), popular beliefs (such as witchcraft and folk medicine) and their relationships to newly discovered texts from the Greek and Roman periods that captured the attention of Renaissance intellectuals between 1460 and 1600. It investigates how some philosophers forged their particular ideas on the body from both newly available and traditional materials and how, in so doing, they contributed in unexpected ways to the formation of new cultural practices, such as surgical intervention into the human body aiming at moral improvement of the individual, or medical vampirism — practices that entailed largely unexplored conceptualisations of physical bodies, but which were, as I show, tied inextricably to the formation of new and striking metaphors for the physical world. 1 See, for instance, Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (1998); David Hillmann and Carla Mazzio (eds.), The Body in Parts. Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (1997). 9 10 Disreputable Bodies Thinking about matter and the body in the Early Modern period did not only mean invoking a cluster of intimately connected ideas that encompassed physics, theology and philosophical anthropology, medicine, folk-lore and natural history; it also raised severe intrinsic methodological problems for Renaissance philosophers. For them, bodies were paradoxical entities, their metaphysical status wavering between God’s first Creation and the scum of the universe, between resistant, bulky matter and indeterminate volatile entities, moving freely between the lowest and the highest realms of the universe. This book therefore combines a topic in the history of ideas with an analysis of how gendered metaphors were employed to describe the physical aspects of the world. During the Early Modern period, such ideas formed in elliptical or self-referential ways. Philosophers were projecting gendered differences onto a universal cosmological screen, from which these distinctions were re-in- scribed into relationships between men and women on earth, thus legitimis- ing the supremacy of the former over the latter. The female body as a figure of male speech became a battleground not only in terms of the social regulations pertaining to the lives of actual women, but also in the purportedly abstract realm of metaphysics. Most Renaissance philosophers maintained that male and divine forms and female matter gathered in unstable mixtures that suggested more or less licit sexual unions. Bodies were understood to be in constant flux, hence potentially dangerous or uncanny, but also malleable and mutable to striking degrees. The images that philosophers employed in their attempts to explain the
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