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The Politics and Poetics of Morbus Gallicus in the German Lands

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The Politics and Poetics of Morbus Gallicus in the German Lands Doctoral Dissertation for Defense The Politics and Poetics of Morbus Gallicus in the German Lands (1495 - 1520) by IRINA SAVINETSKAYA Supervisor: GERHARD JARITZ Submitted to the Medieval Studies Department, and the Doctoral School of History Central European University, Budapest CEU eTD Collection in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Medieval Studies Budapest 2016 Table of Contents ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 3 LIST OF FIGURES 4 INTRODUCTION 5 REVIEW OF SCHOLARSHIP 7 PRIMARY SOURCES 14 APPROACHES AND NOTIONS 19 BODY 19 SYPHILIS 20 “NATIONAL” AND “GERMAN” 20 AUTO- AND HETERO-IMAGE 22 FRAMING DISEASE 23 DESCRIPTION OF CHAPTERS 23 CHAPTER 1 | WHAT’S IN A NAME? 26 THE NEAPOLITAN EXPEDITION OF CHARLES VIII 28 FIRST REACTIONS 29 MEDICAL DISCUSSIONS OF THE NAME 32 THE LEIPZIG DISPUTE 37 CHAPTER 2 | THE FRENCH DISEASE AND ITS MANIFOLD CAUSES 62 “DEUS OPERATUR SEDIS CAUSIS CONCURRENTIBUS” 63 THE POLITICS OF GOD’S WRATH 66 THE FRENCH ARE TO BLAME 82 JUPITER’S CHILDREN 90 THE YEAR 1484 97 BODIES PRONE TO DISEASES 108 CHAPTER 3 | POETICS OF THE FRENCH DISEASE 118 DIFFERENTIA GALLORUM ET GERMANORUM 118 INNOCENT GERMANS, LUXURIOUS OTHERS 124 FOREIGN GOODS, VICES, AND DISEASES 135 MORBUS GALLICUS AND ITS KING 153 CONCLUSION 157 BIBLIOGRAPHY 160 CEU eTD Collection PRINTED SOURCES 160 MODERN EDITIONS OF PRIMARY SOURCES 162 TRANSLATIONS OF PRIMARY SOURCES 166 SECONDARY LITERATURE 168 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I have been fortunate to receive all kinds of support from various institutions and individuals in the past seven years, and it is a pleasure to express my gratitude here. First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor, Gerhard Jaritz, who has always been most helpful and supportive in every way, even after I moved to a different continent. I am indebted to Bethany Wiggin for inviting me to be a visiting student at the University of Pennsylvania. I am deeply grateful to Martha D. Rust and Hal Momma at NYU who welcomed me to their writing seminar at Medieval and Renaissance Center and provided me with an academic home away from home. During these years, many scholars have discussed my work with me. I am especially thankful to Katalin Szende, Gábor Klaniczay, Larry Silver, Hal Momma, Jörg Wettlaufer, Christiane Andersson, Helmut Puff, Ruth Florack, Tijana Krstić, Balázs Trencsényi, Ernst B. Gilman, Holly Borham, and András Vadas for their most useful suggestions. I would like to thank Noel Putnik, Cristian Gaspar, Ivana Dobcheva, Peter Andorfer, Kathleen M. Smith, and Vladimir Panov for their invaluable help with translations. Many people in my life have made this journey pleasurable and exciting. My family and friends in all the three countries that I call home have always been there for me when I needed them. And the unwavering genuine excitement about the historical profession of my friends Anya Mazanik, Nikita Lomakin, and Ilya Afanasyev has always been an inspiration for me. The work on this thesis has been financed with the help of grants and fellowships from CEU, as well as from Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, and CEU eTD Collection CENDARI. Finally, this project would not have been possible without the constant encouragement of my most supportive husband, Joseph Murray, and for that I am forever grateful to him. LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 1. Völkertafel, ca. 1725. 57 Fig. 2. Sebastian Brant, “De pestilentiali scorra sive mala de Franzos Eulogium.” 74 Fig. 3. “The Syphilitic Man.” 76 Fig. 4. The three roosters. 105 Fig. 5. The eagle against the rooster. 108 Fig. 6. The herald of the king of France. 151 Fig. 7. The patrician exhibiting his ulcers. 152 Fig. 8. The merchant showing his spots. 152 CEU eTD Collection 4 INTRODUCTION Often referred to as a plague and sometimes the plague of the Renaissance, the French pox came into historical focus at the end of the fifteenth century and became immediately known as morbus gallicus (and its synonyms and vernacular equivalents) in the German lands. It was named differently in other countries: “le mal de Naples” in France, the Spanish disease in Holland and Portugal, the German disease in Poland, the Polish disease in Russia and the Portuguese disease in India, earning it the appellation of the “neighbor’s disease.”1 The very term “syphilis” appeared only in the 1530s when Girolamo Fracastoro used it for the first time in his poem Syphilis sive morbus gallicus. It took a long time, however, for the new name to gain its current prevalence: morbus gallicus and its vernacular equivalents remained much more common in the German lands throughout the sixteenth century. This dissertation argues that the name and phenomenon of morbus gallicus was a composite of interconnected narratives of French-ness and German-ness from across various genres, which in addition to medical treatises included astrological, literary, polemical, and poetical works. The name, morbus gallicus, was accorded to the disease by the confrontation between the French King Charles VIII and Maximilian I over Naples in 1494-1495. It was readily accepted by chroniclers and even though heated debates broke out in the medical community about the disease’s “correct name,” morbus gallicus and its vernacular variations remained the most popular designations of the disease in the period under study. The Neapolitan expedition of Charles VIII not only bestowed a name upon the disease, but also influenced the medical CEU eTD Collection discussions of its causes. An overwhelming majority of authors dealt with in this dissertation regarded morbus gallicus as the disease of another people, the French, from whom (but – 1 Herfried Münkler, Hans Grünberg and Kathrin Mayer, Nationenbildung: die Nationalisierung Europas im Diskurs humanistischer Intellektueller: Italien und Deutschland (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1998), 160; Stefan Winkle, Geisseln der Menschheit: Kulturgeschichte der Seuche (Düsseldorf: Artemis & Winkler, 1997), 547- 548. 5 importantly – not necessarily by) it spread to the German lands and other countries. They repeatedly presented morbus gallicus as God’s punishment for the acts of disobedience of Charles VIII towards Emperor Maximilian I. Explanations of its astrological and humoral causes also pointed to the French as the first targets of the disease. In non-medical texts, morbus gallicus was often employed as a topos of French-ness or foreignness, and used to wage attacks on goods and practices that were deemed morally corrupt, as well as to define the normative German-ness. France, the country after which the disease was named, played the role of one of the most important “archetypical Others”2 for the formation of German late medieval national identities, comparable only to that of Rome.3 Having emerged at a time marked by an increase in attempts to define what it meant to be “German,” morbus gallicus was soon incorporated into the formation of German identites which were defined in anthithesis to the imagined French-ness. The rediscovery of writings of Antiquity and their reintroduction into the learned culture, along with the wars of Emperor Maximilian I abroad and his ambitions as a universal ruler, all framed morbus gallicus as a foreign disease, a symbol of all things French and foreign troubling the German lands. As this dissertation demonstrates, the association between the French and this new disease was maintained in a variety of genres, including medical treatises, literary and poetical works, chronicles, and astrological prognostications and relied upon existing perceptions of CEU eTD Collection 2 Len Scales, The Shaping of German Identity: Authority and Crisis, 1245-1414 (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 374. Hirschi examined the bearing of perceptions of Italy and France on German self-fashioning in Caspar Hirschi, Wettkampf der Nationen: Konstruktionen einer deutschen Ehrgemeinschaft an der Wende vom Mittelalter zur Neuzeit (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2005), 326-347. For a different perspective on relations between the French and Germans as cultural and political allies, see Jean- Marie Moeglin, Kaisertum und allerchristlichster König 1214 bis 1500 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2010). 3 See, for example, Kurt Stadtwald, Roman Popes and German Patriots: Antipapalism in the Politics of the German Humanist Movement from Gregor Heimburg to Martin Luther (Geneva: Droz, 1996); Helmut Puff, Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400-1600 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 6 French-ness and German-ness. Thus, morbus gallicus was a palimpsest4 of intertextual narratives of German-ness and French-ness. The lack of contemporary discussions of the name of the English sweating sickness, yet another “national” illness, a respiratory disease which swept across the German lands in the late 1520s5 and which, unlike the French pox, was lethal,6 is another indication that the French pox represents a seminal case. Despite the importance of morbus gallicus for the formation of German national identities, its role in late medieval narratives of French-ness and German-ness has escaped scholarly focus.7 My dissertation aims to fill this gap by examining how German medical and non-medical writers in the first decades since its outbreak framed the French-ness of morbus gallicus with the help of explanations of its origins and causes. Review of scholarship The first scholarly publications on the history of the French disease appeared in the early twentieth century and were aimed at answering two major questions: where did the disease come from and when did it appear in Europe for the first time.8 Karl Sudhoff (1876- 4 The notion was proposed by Jonathan G. Harris. He defines morbus gallicus as “a textual palimpsest that splices together many strands of discourse – strands that include not only the physiological and the pathological, but also the religions and the economic.” Jonathan G. Harris, “Po(X) Marks the Spot: How to ‘Read’ ‘Early Modern’ ‘Syphilis’ in The Three Ladies of London,” in Sins of the Flesh: Responding to Sexual Disease in Early Modern Europe, ed.
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