Introduction 1
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Notes Introduction 1. Leone Ebreo, Dialogues of Love, trans. Cosmos Damian Bachich and Rossella Pes- catori (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), p.140. The editors note here that this usage is found in Boccaccio as well, citing De genealogia deorum (III:21). 2. Kathleen P. Long, Hermaphrodites in Renaissance Europee (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 3. Pierre de Ronsard, Œuvres complètes, ed. Paul Laumonier, vol.12 (Paris: Didier, 1946), p.40, ll.109–12. The translation here, as all translations unless otherwise indicated, are my own. 4. For an important, thoughtful presentation of the negative view see Raymond B. Waddington, “The Bisexual Portrait of Francis I: Fontainebleau, Castiglione, and the Tone of Courtly Mythology,” Playing with Gender, ed. Jean R Brink, Maryanne C. Horowitz, Allison P. Coudert (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), pp.99–132. Barbara Hochstedler Meyer supports seeing a more positive message in of the portrait in “Marguerite de Navarre and the Androgynous Por- trait of François Ier,” Renaissance Quarterlyy (Summer, 1995): 287–325. Further discussion is in Long, Hermaphrodites, 198–200; Gary Ferguson, Queer (Re) Readings in the French Renaissancee (Aldershot UK: Ashgate, 2008), p.262; and Daniel Russell, “Emblematic Discourse in Renaissance Royal Entries,” in French Ceremonial Entries in the Sixteenth Century: Event, Image, Text, ed. Nicolas Russell and Hélène Visentin (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Stud- ies, 2007), pp.55–72. Russell complicates the question by suggesting, following Françoise Bardon, that the image may be posthumous and have its origins in a royal entry of Henri II. 5. Amour was feminine when used in a nonsexual sense. For a list of other such gender-changing words, see Georges Gougenheim, Grammaire de la langue fran- çaise du seizième sièclee (Lyon: IAC, 1951), pp.41–46. 6. Reflecting the negative theology of Pseudo-Dionysius, this idea is especially strong in the De Docta ignoratiaa of Nicolas of Cusa (1401–1464), much admired by Lefevre d’Etaples (ca 1450–1537) and by Charles de Bovelles (1479–1566). See also Jean Libis, “L’Androgyne et le Nocturne,” L’Androgyne: Cahiers de l’Hermétismee (Paris: Albin Michel, 1986), pp.11–25. 168 ● Notes to Pages 3–6 7. The many ever-present biblical texts stored in people’s memories were subject to unintentional editing, as is documented in frequent inexact biblical quotations often, perhaps generally, made without consulting hard copy. Some of the result- ing divergences from the received text of the Bible are not without interest. They are flagged when they occur in texts quoted in this study. 8. In this study androgynee is frequently used as an adjective as well as a noun, replacing the more common adjectival form, androgynous, since its modern connotations (neither quite one nor the other) are sharply contrary to what is intended here. Chapter 1 1. The Greek tradition contains earlier references to androgynes without using that term to describe them, notably in the works of Empedocles (490–345 BCE), which O’Brien identifies as a source of Plato’s myth (Denis O’Brien, Empedocles’ Cosmic Cyclee [Cambridge University Press, 1969], p.25). There they are “whole- natured creatures” who “had no sex, or were bi-sexed.” Later “men and women arose from the separation of the whole-natured creatures” (p.209). Empedocles’s works were for all practical purposes unavailable to Renaissance readers. 2. Georg Wissowa and August F. Pauly, Realencyclpädie der classischen Altertumswis- senschaftt, vol 20.2(Stuttgart: Druckenmüller, 1931), columns 1984–1991. Justin Martyr (100–165 CE) notes that when Plato, in Republic 10, ascribes responsi- bility to man because he has free will, Plato borrowed this idea from Moses (see Justin, La philosophie passe au Christt, l’œuvre de Justin, ed. and trans. Adalbert Hamman [Paris: Éditions de Paris, 1958], p.71). (The passage in question occurs in Justin’s Apologies, ch.44). 3. Augustine, in De Civ. Dei (18.39), makes the grandfather of Hermes/Mercury a contemporary of Moses. The best known and possibly earliest preserved of the many mentions of Plato’s travels to Egypt is Cicero, De republica (1.10.16). 4. The perceived connections between Moses and Pythagoras and Ambrose’s impli- cation that Pythagoras was a Jew are explored in Christiane L. Joost-Gaugier, Pythagoras and Renaissance Europe: Finding Heaven (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 2009). 5. For an image of the portrait, accessed December 29, 2012, see http://www.wga .hu/html_m/b/berrugue/pedro/plato.html. Now in the Louvre, it was part of a series of twenty-eight panel-portraits of great men (Aristotle, Virgil, Solon, etc.) painted by Pedro Berruguete and Joos van Gent in the 1470s and 80s. Although glossed versions of ancient texts, including Plato, might have looked similar, the date of the painting makes the Bible quite likely. For an image of such a glossed Bible, see Biblia latina cum glossa ordinaria Walafridi Strabonis aliorumque et interlineari Anselmi Laudunensis et cum postillis ac moralitatibus Nicolai de Lyra. (Basel: Froben, 1498), accessed November 25, 2013, http:// www.e-rara .ch/bau_1/content/pageview/5083825. That page shows Genesis 1:27; any other page would look similar, as would manuscript Bibles on which incunabula edi- tions were modeled. Notes to Pages 6–7 ● 169 6. A rapid summary of the androgyne in the (mostly Italian) Renaissance is to be found in Edgar Wind, Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissancee (London: Penguin/Per- egrine, 1967), p.212–15. 7. Similarly, other sources of the androgyne, like the Zoharr and other mystical Jewish sources, have been omitted from the discussion of Genesis. See Elliot R. Wolfson, “Ontology, Alterity, and Ethics in Kabbalistic Anthropology,” Exemplariaa 12, no. 1 (2000): 129–55, esp.141–48. 8. All quotations from the Bible in English, unless otherwise noted, are from the Revised Standard Version (RSV). 9. It is interesting to note how various translations transmit these contradictions. Robert Young’s so-called Literal Translation, first produced in 1862 and revised in 1898, replaces “creates” and related forms in verse 27 with “prepared,” as though subscribing to rationes seminaless or perhaps hoping to avoid having the appearance of Eve seem in conflict with the previous chapter. Daniel Boyarin offers another literal translation in which the problematic adam/Adam is regu- larly replaced by earth-creaturee to reflect the Hebrew etymology, but he retains the unstable singular and plural; then in Genesis 5:1–2 Boyarin reverts to Adam as proper noun, even if at the end, the name clearly refers to a plural: “This is the book of the Generations of Adam, on the day that God created Adam in the image of God He made him. Male and female He created them, and He blessed them and called their name Adam, on the day he created them” (Daniel Boyarin, Sparks of the Logos Essays in Rabbinic Hermeneuticss [Leiden: Brill, 2003], p.175). 10. From the eighteenth century until the last quarter of the twentieth, the majority of scholars came to believe that the text of the Pentateuch was a compilation of earlier texts composed (orally or in writing) over a period of some five hundred years, from ca. 950 BCE to about 500 BCE. This consensus has been replaced in the last few decades by new questions and new arguments. Ted Hildebrandt’s “Genesis Bibliography” of 2004 is 147 pages long (Ted “Genesis Bibliography,” Ted Hildebrandt, accessed November 17, 2013, http://www.biblicalstudies .org.uk/genesis.php). There is a useful summary of these various approaches in Gordon Wenham, “Pentateuchal Studies Today,” Themelioss 22, no. 1 (October 1996): 3–13, accessed November 17, 2013, http://www.biblicalstudies.org.uk/ article_pentateuch_wenham.html. 11. Philo of Alexandria, also known as Philo Judaeus, sits at the margins of the Chris- tian tradition. He possibly influenced Paul directly, was a strong influence on Origen, and was respected and used by Clement of Alexandria, by Eusebius, and (perhaps less directly) by many others. His work survived, where many other Jew- ish texts of the period did not, because of his influence on Clement and Origen. He was subsumed into the category of Fathers of the church, so considered by Jerome; medieval manuscripts refer to him as Bishop Philo. Pamphilus, Eusebi- us’s teacher, copied Philo’s work for the library in Cesarea. See François Daumas, “La Solitude des Terapeutes,” Philon d’Alexandrie: Actes du Colloque, ed. Roger Arnaldez, Jean Pouilloux, et al. (Paris: CNRS, 1967), pp.347–58. 12. Augustine, De Genesi ad Litteram/ The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. and anno- tated John Hammond Taylor (New York: Newman, 1982), p.253 n.67. Taylor 170 ● Notes to Pages 7-8 suggests that part of the impulsion for this was to harmonize Genesis 1:1–2:4 with the second account, Gen 2:5–25. A mistranslation lies behind Augustine’s sense of the pressing need for such an idea: he “also interpreted Ecclesiastes (Sir- ach) 18:1 as meaning that God created all things simultaneously (simul) [an error in Old Latin and Vulgate translation of a Greek expression usually meaning ‘without exception’]. These considerations led him to conclude that when God created He did indeed create all things simultaneously, but that living things made in that original creative act were not made in actuality in their own proper substances but only potentially in their causal reasons placed in the earth by the Creator” (p.161 n.3). Eusebius too, in Préparation évangéliquee (III.10.13), evokes the activity of rationes seminales in hexameral creation. Henri de Lubac points out that many medieval theologians, starting with Bede shared or rather inher- ited Augustine’s assumptions (Henri de Lubac, L’Exégèse médiévalee [Paris: Aubier, 1964], p.155).