Abstract
In the Renaissance, the horrors and mysteries of contagion1 were manifested in their most terrible form by two mysterious diseases: syphilis, recently introduced in Europe,2 and the plague, which had reappeared in the West at the end of the fourteenth century.3 The works dedicated to syphilis were still relatively few and did not constitute a popular genre, but the latter had already inspired a considerable literature which expressed both a desperate feeling of impotence in the face of a curse which defied all human resistance, and a renewed effort to understand it. Thus, depending on what we are looking for, we can find in these works either remnants of archaic notions, such as explanations in terms of divine wrath or the use of analogical and magical thinking, or the first manifestations of a medical revolution in progress.
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Notes
On contagion, see V. Nutton, ‘Seeds of Disease. An Explanation of Contagion and Infection from the Greeks to the Renaissance’, Medical History, 27 (1983) 1–34.
See J. Arrizabalaga, A. Cunningham and R. French, eds, Medicine from the Black Death to the French Disease (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998).
See J.-N. Biraben, Les Hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et méditerranéens, 2 vols (Paris: Mouton, 1975–76). The plagues described in the Bible and in other ancient sources seem to have been various forms of typhus or pox. The plague appeared in Europe in AD 541 and disappeared at the end of the eighth century. It returned in 1347 (the ‘Black Death’). Then, over four centuries, it remained the most lethal disease in Europe.
See M. Ficino, Consilio contra la pestilenza (Firenze, 1481): ‘La pestilentia è uno vapore velenoso concreato nell’aria inimico dello spirito vitale … quello vapore pestilente non proprio per calidita, frigidita, siccita, humidita è inimico, ma perche la proportione sua è quasi a punto contraria alla proportione, nella quale consiste lo spirito vitale del cuore’, ch. 1, 2r°-v°. Ficino here follows the Consilium contra pestilentiam composed by Gentile da Foligno during the Black Death (Firenze, bibl. Laurent., Plut. 90 supra Cod. 20, fol. 65r°-v°); trans. in A. M. Campbell, The Black Death and Men of Learning (1931; New York: AMS Press, 1966), pp. 37–8.
R. French, Canonical Medicine: Gentile da Foligno and Scholasticism (Leiden: Brill, 2001). Ambroise Paré assumes that the patient must be given an antidote (preferably theriaca) as soon as possible ‘pour contrarier et resister au venin, non en tant qu’il soit chaud ou froid, sec ou humide, mais comme ayant une propriété occulte’; Traité de la peste, verolle et rougeolle, avec une breve description de la lepre (Paris: Wechel, 1568), ch. 24. See also Lauent Joubert: ‘il n’y a propriété aucune de ses qualitez manifestes, qui rende I’air pestilent… mais … c’est une propriété que I’on dit specifique et occulte’; De peste, trans. G. Des Innocents (Toulouse: Lertout, 1581), p. 9.
An element in itself is always pure (see Joubert, De peste, ch. 1, pp. 2–3), but the air can contain infectious and poisonous particles. See Jean Jasme (Traicté de la peste, 1376; printed in Paris at the end of the fifteenth century): ‘ceste pestilencieuse maladie est contagieuse car de corps infectz yssent humeurs et desfluent fumees venimeuses corrumpans et causans infections de lair’; cited in E. Droz and A. C. Klebs, Remèdes contre la peste (Paris: Droz, 1925), p. 34.
See A. Carmichael, ‘Contagion Theory and Practice in XVth-century Milan’, Renaissance Quarterly, 44 (1991) 231ff. Such prescriptions were dictated by the theory of fomites (see below).
This exclusion was not absolute, but the exceptions were limited. Galen admits that there are ‘occult virtues’ in certain remedies (especially the antidotes) which are efficient tota substantia (De simplicium medicamentorum facultatibus, ed. Kühn, XI, 823; Methodus medendi, XII, 356–8); these remedies, required in case of plague (see note 4 above) were identified a posteriori by the observation of their effects. Arab medics had been very active and inventive in this field. On the evolution of Galenism and on Arabic medicine, see O. Temkin, Galenism: The Rise and Decline of a Medical Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973).
D. Jacquart and M. Micheau, La Médecine arabe et l’Occident médiéval (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose, 1990).
On the importance of alchemical remedies with occult properties, see C. Crisciani, ‘Oro potabile ra alchimia e medicina. Due testi in tempo di peste’, in F. Calascibetta ed., Storia e fondamenti della chimica. Atti del VII Convegno Nazionale (Roma: Accademia Nazionale delle Scienze, 1997), pp. 83–93.
C. Crisciani and M. Pereira, ‘Black Death and Golden Remedies: Some Remarks on Alchemy and the Plague’, in A. Paravicini Bagliani and F. Santi, eds, The Regulation of Evil: Social and Cultural Attitudes to Epidemics in the Late Middle Ages (Firenze: Società Internazionale per lo Studio del Medioevo Latino, 1998) Micrologus’ Library, 2, pp. 7–39.
See E. Grant, ‘Medieval and Renaissance Scholastic Conceptions of the Influence of the Celestial Region on the Terrestrial’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 17 (1987) 1–23.
See B. Goldstein, Levi ben Gerson’s Prognostication for the Conjonction of 1345 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Association, 1990).
L. Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Sciences (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935) III, pp. 289–92, 303–9, 326–37.
Rudolf Sies, ‘Das Pariser Pestgutachten von 1348 in altfranzösischer Fassung’, Untersuchungen zur mittelalterlichen Pestliteratur, IV (Würzburg, 1977).
H. Pruckner, Studien zu den astrologischen Schriften des Heinrich von Langenstein (Leipzig and Berlin, 1933).
On the astrological explanation of syphilis, see Paola Zambelli, L’Ambigua natura della magia (Milano: Il saggiatore, 1991), ch. 4.
See A. Mundella, Epistolœ medicinales (Lyon: Junta, 1556), n° 3, Nov. 1538, quoted by Nutton, ‘The Reception of Fracastoro’s Theory of Contagion: The Seed that Fell among Thorns?’, Osiris, 2nd ser. VI (1990) n. 13; and the letter to G.B. Ramusio (10 May 1549), in Opera (Cominiania, 1739), section Quædam fragmenta, I, pp. 96–7.
See L. Baumgartner and J.-F. Fulton, A Bibliography of the Poem Syphilis sive Morbus Gallicus by Girolamo Fracastoro of Verona (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1935).
F. Cairns, ‘Fracastoro’s Syphilis, the Argonautic Tradition and the Ætiology of Syphilis’, Humanistica Lovaniensia, 43 (1994) 246–61.
On this term, see P. Michaud-Quantin and M. Lemoine, Etudes sur le vocabulaire philosophique du Moyen Age (Roma: Edizioni del Ateneo, 1970), pp. 113–50.
On this conception, completely theorized by Alhazen, and on its transmission, see D. C. Lindberg, ‘Alhazen’s Theory of Vision and its Reception in the West’, Isis, 58 (1967) 321–41; idem, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), ch. 4.
G. F. Vescovini, Studi sulla prospettiva medievale (Turin: Giappichelli, 1965), ch. 7. Alhazen’s De aspectibus (or Perspectiva) was translated into Latin towards the beginning of the thirteenth century. Roger Bacon was probably the first European philosopher who knew and understood thoroughly Alhazen’s great optical treatise De aspectibus: his own Perspectiva (composed in the 1260s) is the fifth part of his Opus majus. Witelo (Perspectiva, ca. 1274), and John Pecham (Perspectiva communis, ca. 1274–79) were also influenced by Alhazen. See D. C. Lindberg, John Pecham and the Science of Optics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970).
See M.-Th. D’Alverny and F. Hudry, ‘Al-Kindi, De radiis’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen-Age, 41 (1974) 224. On the geometrization of this conception, see the preceding note.
See, for example, Robert Grosseteste, De lineis, angulis, et figuris, in E. Grant, A Source Book in Medieval Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), pp. 385–6; and Bacon: ‘A species is the first effect of an agent; for all judge that through species “all” other effects are produced … the agent sends forth a species into the matter of the recipient, so that through the species first produced, it can bring forth, out of the potentiality of the matter “of the recipient” the complete effect that it intends.’ De multiplicatione specierum I, 1, trans. in D. C. Lindberg, Roger Bacon’s Philosophy of Nature: A Critical Edition with English Translation, Introduction, and Notes, of De multiplicatione specierum and De speculis comburentibus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 6.
See D. C. Lindberg, ‘Roger Bacon on Light, Vision, and the Universal Emanation of Force’, in J. Hackett, ed., Roger Bacon and the Sciences (Leiden: Brill, 1997), pp. 243–75.
On further developments of the theory, see K. Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham (Leiden: Brill, 1988) (centred on optics and cognition); Eadem, ‘Et maxime visus, cujus species venit ad stellas et ad quem speciem stellarum veniunt. Perspectiva and Astrologia in Late Medieval Thought’, Micrologus, 5 (1997) 201–24.
C. Gagnon, ‘Le statut ontologique des species in medio chez Nicole Oresme’, Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen Age, 60 (1993) 195–205. Leen Spruit’s monumental thesis (Species intelligibilis. From Perception to Knowledge, 2 vols [Leiden, Brill, 1995]) provides a general survey, but unfortunately does not investigate the link between the species intelligibiles (in other words, mental concepts) and the species in the sensible world.
E. Peruzzi, La nave di Ermete. La cosmologia di Girolamo Fracastoro (Firenze: Olschki, 1995); Idem, introduction to his edition and translation of Girolamo Fracastoro, L’Anima (Firenze: Le Lettere, 1999).
E. Peruzzi, ‘Antioccultismo e filosofia naturale nel De Sympathia & Antipathia rerum di Girolamo Fracastoro’, Atti e Memorie dell’Accademia toscana di Scienze e Lettere. La Colombaria, 45, nuova serie 31 (1980) 41–131.
As a scientific poet and as a philosopher, Fracastoro was well acquainted with Lucretius’s De natura rerum. His friend Andrea Navagero had prepared the edition of the poem printed by Aldus in 1515. See C. Goddard, ‘Lucretius and Lucretian Science in the Works of Fracastoro’, Res Publica Litterarum, 16 (1993) 185–92.
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Pantin, I. (2005). Fracastoro’s De Contagione and Medieval Reflection on ‘Action at a Distance’: Old and New Trends in Renaissance Discourse on Contagion. In: Carlin, C.L. (eds) Imagining Contagion in Early Modern Europe. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230522619_1
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