The Renaissance was preoccupied with the exploration and analysis of the human body. Other bodies also attracted attention: heavenly and geometric bodies, the body politic and other metaphors served in the search for new experiences of human and animal existence in the time of overseas expansion and sharpening religious conflict. From 30 June to 1 July 2014, a conference that brought together a group of scholars from across the world and various career stages in the Herzog August Library (HAB) in Wolfenbüttel reflected the diversity of these approaches to the body in early modern thought.
The event built on a previous symposium organised by the Centre for Early Modern Studies at the University of Aberdeen in May 2013 (supported by the Wellcome Trust), which had focused on the Scottish polymath Duncan Liddel (1561-1613). Having risen to professorships in mathematics and medicine at the University of Helmstedt after 1596, Liddel deposited his extensive book collection in the Library of Marishal College in Aberdeen upon his return in 1607.1 Torn between the philosophical disputes among followers of Ptolemy and Copernicus, Galen and Paracelsus, Melanchthon and Luther he took part in controversies that turned around the scope that was to be given to Aristotelianism after the Reformation. The role of soul and body was a central concern of such polymaths as they sought to bridge the growing divide between science and theology. In Liber de anima (1540) Melanchthon insisted that knowledge of our bodies’ anatomy gives us self-knowledge about our souls and reveals God’s workmanship within us. The task set for the conference in 2014 was to take up Liddel’s Humanist interest in bodies and explore the topic from as many disciplinary angles as possible: astronomical, mathematical, geographical, alchemic and medical, spiritual, theological, zoological, artistic and philosophical. How did new concepts of the human body contribute to the development and differentiation of scientific disciplines in the post-medieval world, right up to what was later labelled the ‘Scientific Revolution’?
By way of introduction, KARIN FRIEDRICH (Aberdeen) alerted the audience to the cooperation between the Herzog August Library (HAB) and the University of Aberdeen’s Special Collection at the University Library which links a web exhibition of Duncan Liddel’s most illustrious library volumes in Aberdeen with the HAB catalogue and a dedicated ‘Duncan Liddel’ website in Wolfenbüttel. Jane Pirie (Aberdeen) constructed Liddel’s collection from historic sources; while Hartmut Beyer (HAB) made a list of the Aberdonian polymath’s volumes available through a link to digital copies on German library websites.2 Ulrike Gleixner (Wolfenbüttel), director of research projects at the HAB, took the opportunity to introduce the DFG-funded Helmstedt project.
TRICIA ROSS (Durham, USA) and JULIA KOTZUR (Aberdeen) started the programme with ‘Bodies physical and metaphysical’. Ross related the story of Jakob Horst, dean of Helmstedt’s medical faculty, who, under the influence of Galenic and Lutheran ideas, exploited the miracle story of a boy with a golden tooth to boost student numbers. The wondrous event – attacked by contemporaries (including Liddel) as a hoax – illustrated the need of early modern society to resort to theological dimensions for a better understanding of cures. By integrating biblical texts into medical writings scientists demonstrated a turn towards the bible as a text that had to be taken literally. Conducting complementary research on the relationship between humoral theory, the eucharist and sacramental eating, Kotzur explored the relationship between body and soul in Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus”. Influenced by St Augustine’s image of the Lord as supreme omniscient physician, Shakespearean literary tropes became vehicles to explain transubstantiation and the ingestion of blood as spiritual nourishment. Kotzur proposed that the cannibalistic imagery in Coriolanus presented the flip side of the Elizabethans’ belief in the healing properties of menstrual blood and breast milk. The discussion turned around the popularity of miracle stories. Horst, just like Shakespeare, belonged among the popularisers who had little intimate knowledge of the more scholarly arguments of the soul-body debate.
The theme of the religious significance of bodily phenomena and excretions, such as gall, kidney and bladder stones, continued to dominate the second panel, ‘Knowledge of bodies and bodies of knowledge’. JETZE TOUBER (Utrecht) contrasted the veneration of bodily stones as relics in the 15th- and 16th-century with the unceremonial elimination of such stones in later centuries. Touber’s interpretation of this development as a change from an earlier ‘open bodies, closed world’ approach to a ‘closed body, open world’ approach during the early modern period, when bodily matters were increasingly ‘privatised’, found general appreciation. This has a parallel in Melanchthon’s argument that man before the Fall could see himself clearly, but with expulsion from Paradise human vision became impaired and in need of purification through empirical observation. This thesis was the point of departure for CHRISTINE PAPPELAU (Berlin) who stressed the contribution of art history to the sciences in her paper on Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘material architecture of knowledge’. Leonardo’s drawings of the human body were inspired by his observation of dissections performed at the University of Padua, which influenced his visual memory and enhanced his ability to see nature from the point of the scientist. Thus Aristotelian ideas about observation remained valid, without a ‘scholastic’ alienation from nature. Just as Aristotelianism influenced Renaissance artists to rise above ancient models, emerging scholarly disciplines followed a similar principle. The visual abilities of the observing soul triggered a critique of authorities and new solutions by ‘overcoming Aristotle but returning to him’. According to KUNI SAKAMOTO (Nijmegen), Aristotelian models remained crucial for the separation of knowledge about nature and the soul into different disciplines. Scholars such as Scaliger, Cardano and Fernel agreed on the immortality and immateriality of the soul, but they disagreed on such issues as whether the soul was heat, embraced the whole of the world (‘anima mundi’) or was a mere instrument of speculation about material facts.
In his key note on early modern imagination of the Jewish body, ROBERT JÜTTE (Stuttgart) covered a broad thematic range. With the help of a series of detailed examples, Jütte illustrated the way Jewish physiology was discussed in stereotypes which predated but also prepared later racial typecasting. This included 16th-century depictions of hooked noses and red hair (often the symbol for traitors), while medieval pictures had not featured these but instead presented Jews with beards – a fashion that spread among non-Jewish quarters in early modern German cities. The paper pointed out numerous ambiguities in early modern stereotyping clearly distinct from modern racial anti-semitism.
The afternoon panel with ELIZABETHANNE BORAN (Dublin), KIMBELL KORNU (Tennessee) and SEBASTIAN PRANGHOFER (Hamburg) concluded the first day under the heading ‘Teaching the Body’. Presenting the case study of the dissection of an accidentally burnt elephant in Dublin Zoo, Boran demonstrated the contribution of the Dublin Philosophical Society to the transfer of knowledge between university institutions and the wider late 17th-century Irish public. The attention of Irish scholars paid to events in Britain at large was galvanised by the appointment of the first anatomy chair in Cambridge, resulting in the Foundation in 1699 of the Royal College of Physicians. Kornu’s paper on anatomical dissection presented the perspective of the medical practitioner today looking back at Galen’s emphasis on the humility of the surgeon knowing his limitations. For the trained practitioner anatomy emerged as a way of ‘knowing thyself’, as well as a stepping stone for the knowledge of God (as in Avicenna, Melanchthon, St Augustine and Vesalius). Pranghofer picked up this thread in his presentation on the body of the anatomist in the 17th-century. He explored the changing nature of early modern anatomy from a focus on the anatomist’s moral authority to an emphasis on his entrepreneurial value as a skilled craftsman within the setting of detailed depictions of anatomical theatres in 17th-century Dutch paintings.
The range of case studies, the geographical spread and the multi-disciplinarity of this first day were balanced by impressive coherence and focus on the main thematic thread in the ensuing discussion. Participants stressed the ubiquitous tension between the influence of Melanchthonian thought (and Melanchthon’s strong support for a polymathic approach to the natural sciences, mathematics and astronomy) and the diminishing but still lasting presence of the corpus Aristotelicum across early modern university faculties and disciplines.
TOBIAS WINNERLING (Düsseldorf) started the second day with a sophisticated network analysis of herbalists based predominantly between Basel, Strasbourg, Wittenberg, Halle and Leipzig. Most scholars were protestants and had studied medicine (botany was not a university discipline); many also published on theological and confessional issues. Winnerling’s mapping skills triggered a lively discussion about the strength of Galenic tradition and these botanist-theologians’ rejection of Paracelsian neo-Platonism. Picking up the panel’s theme, ‘Heavenly bodies and down to earth’, MARCIN KONIK (Kraków) offered an excursion into the work of the Jesuit polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602 – 1680). Examples included the idea of cosmic music and its significance for universal harmony among humankind as well as the association of the humours with the four cardinal points. They all underscored the speculative nature of much of early modern science writing on both sides of the confessional divide. JONATHAN REGIER (Paris) returned to early modern medicine with a comparison of Duncan Liddel’s Ars Medica to Johannes Kepler’s work, both in opposition to the rising Lutheran Orthodoxy. Both agreed on Melanchthon’s definition of medicine (and physics) as an art centred in the human body which has a methodological and ethical task to fulfil.
In a second key note lecture, MICHAEL STOLBERG (Würzburg), who directs the Institute for the History of Medicine at the University of Würzburg, presented the results of his well-established project on medical practitioners’ letters (‘Frühneuzeitliche Ärztebriefe des deutschsprachigen Raums, 1500-1700’). The practical approaches to medicine revealed in this correspondence dismantle many stereotypes we have of early modern medicine. Although the letters inform us about physicians’ attitudes to witchcraft or miracle apparitions, they also demonstrate through a language defining variations of illness as ‘pollution, dirt, obstruction and bad vapours’ that the reality of medical practice was not based on superstition but empiricism.
Metaphors featured large in the last panel ‘”Body of Proof”: Medicine, Method and Humanist discourses’, exploring the link between medical images, statecraft and their impact on the ‘conditio humana’. In a witty and stimulating paper YVONNE KIDDLE (Perth) focused on Robert Burton’s play Philosophaster (1606), the story of a charlatan who almost brings a city to its knees, before wise men restore it to order and save it from ruin. As the body politic is healed by philosophy, Burton consciously medicalises the polis. Its melancholy and mental illness intensified with the arrival of civil war. Spinoza’s treatment of the ‘body’, the subject of IGOR KAUFMANN’s (St Petersburg) paper, similarly eschewed the Cartesian dualism of body and spirit, although the paper failed to provide a clear conclusion on this matter. An intense half day ended with an analysis by JUSTIN SMITH (Paris) on early modern ‘race’ concepts. Based on examples from Aristotle, Linnaeus, Tyson to Jefferson, Bulwer and Buffon, and establishing an interesting link to the first key note, Smith pointed at notions of human ‘degeneration’ in the context of the philosophical fear of human decline since the Fall. He showed the extent to which eighteenth-century contestations about the nature of American Indians (‘strong and uncorrupted’ versus ‘degenerate and weak’) differed from later racialist approaches. Enlightenment discussion about the boundaries between ‘classifications’ of human types remained permeable; it also expressed a continuous fear about the fluidity of the categories that defined such classifications.
The conference revealed the considerable complexity of early modern scholarship, exposing in some instances the transition from a more metaphysical to a more practical and ‘applied’ craft approach to science in some instances (Stolberg, Touber, Boran). Several papers took account of the diffuse cultural baggage that accompanied distinctions between human ‘races’ (Jütte, Smith), the continuous influence (often of a doctrinal nature) of theology on all scholarly disciplines that dealt with bodies (Regier, Winnerling, Pranghofer, Ross, Kaufmann, and Konik), as well as the strength of body metaphores in early modern literary, political, artistic and philosophical works (Kotzur, Pappelau, Kiddle). The emergence of defined academic disciplines and identities was anything but a clear and linear process of separation. Hence there is potential for Melanchthon’s continued significance for today’s mantra of interdisciplinarity in the academy.
Conference Overview:
Welcome and Introduction
Karin Friedrich (University of Aberdeen)
I: Bodies physical and metaphysical
Tricia Ross (Duke University, Durham), Secrets of Soul and Body. Jacob Horst and the Wonders of Nature
Julia Kotzur (University of Aberdeen), Bridging the Sacred and the Secular. A critical investigation into the relationship between sacramental eating and Galenic humoral medicine in Coriolanus
II: Knowledge of bodies and bodies of knowledge: the development of disciplines
Jetze Touber (Universiteit Utrecht), Boundary Stones of Embodiment. Internal Stones and Disciplines of the Human Body 1500-1700
Christine Pappelau (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), Der Körper als „Ding“ des Erkennens. Die materielle Architektur des Wissens bei Leonardo da Vinci
Kuni Sakamoto (Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen), The Concept of the Body in Scaliger, Cardano and Fernel
Key Note
Robert Jütte (Institut für die Geschichte der Medizin der Robert Bosch Stiftung, Stuttgart), Das Leibhaftige des Fremden – Vorstellungen vom jüdischen Körper in der Frühen Neuzeit
III: Teaching the Body
Elizabethanne Boran (Edward Worth Library, Dublin), Reading and Teaching Anatomy in Early Modern Dublin
Kimbell Kornu (Vanderbilt University, Tennessee), “Know Thyself”: The Soul of Anatomical Dissection
Sebastian Pranghofer (Helmut-Schmidt-Universität, Hamburg), The dissected body and the body of the anatomist in the 17th-century
IV: Heavenly bodies and down to earth
Tobias Winnerling (Universität Düsseldorf), The Herbal as Protestant Phenomenon
Marcin Konik (Universytet Jagielloński w Krakowie), Athanasius Kircher and his Typus sympaticus Microcosmi cum Migacosmo
Jonathan Regier (Université Paris 7), The Universality of Medicine: Liddel’s “Ars Medica” (1607)
Key Note
Michael Stolberg (Universität Würzburg), Humanist medicine and the rise of the clinical gaze (1540-1560)
VI: ‘Body of Proof’: Medicine, Method and Humanist discourses
Yvonne Kiddle (University of Western Australia), The Early Modern Body and the Political as Pathogenic Agent
Igor Kaufmann (St Petersburg State University), Spinoza’s philosophy of science and the historiography of early modern natural philosophy
Justin Smith (Université Paris 7), Race as Deviation in Bulwer and Buffon
Notes:
1 The Liddel Library, University of Aberdeen, <http://www.abdn.ac.uk/library/about/special/projects/the-liddel-library/> (3.9.2014).
2 Herzog August Bibliothek: Wissensproduktion an der Universität Helmstedt, <http://uni-helmstedt.hab.de/index.php?&sPage=liddel_cat_cat> (3.9.2014).