by Richard Sugg
45 It is possible that the Brazilian Wari’ had a similar notion, given that they fed the flesh of enemies to tribal elders in particular.
46 Porta, Natural Magic, trans. anon. (1658), 275; italics mine.
47 Electronic Enlightenment (online resource, http://www.e-enlightenment.com/): Rev. John Beale to Robert Boyle, Yeovil, 10 April 1666.
48 Ironically (given that Beale was alluding to Deuteronomy or Leviticus) such a belief was consistent with what the Ancient Hebrews understood ‘soul’ to be. In the Old Testament humans (and animals) had a quantity of vitality, not ‘a soul’, and this was simply recycled, like a kind of impersonal gas, into Yahweh upon a person’s death (see: H. Wheeler Robinson, ‘Hebrew Psychology’, in The People and the Book: Essays on the Old Testament, ed. A.S. Peake (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 353–82; W.E. Staples, ‘The "Soul" in the Old Testament’, The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures 44.3 (1928): 145–76). ‘Transanimation’ usually referred to Pythagorean metempsychosis.
49 Piero Camporesi, Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe, trans. David Gentilcore (Oxford: Polity Press, 1996), 49, citing Johann Schroeder, Pharmocopeaia Medico-Chymica (Frankfurt, 1677), 327. The case of the mummified body found in a London chimney in October 1701 very clearly shows that in a certain environment even an untreated body could ‘cure’ itself; no one detected this corpse via its stench (see: Anon., A Full and True Account of… an unknown person that was found … within the top of a chimney … (1701), title page).
50 Cf, again, Camporesi, Juice of Life: The Symbolic and Magic Significance of Blood (New York: Continuum, 1988), 29.
51 Jole Shackelford, ‘Paracelsianism and the Orthodox Lutheran Rejection of Vital Philosophy in Early Seventeenth-Century Denmark,’ Early Science and Medicine 8.3 (2003): 210–52, 245.
52 The Differences of the Ages of Man’s Life (1607), 4. Cf., also, the medical doctor Sir Thomas Browne, on varying lengths of life and personal vitality: ‘though the radical humour contain in it sufficient oil for 70, yet I perceive in some it gives no light past thirty: men assign not all the causes of long life, that write whole books thereof. They that found themselves on the radical balsam, or vital sulphur of the parts, determine not why Abel lived not so long as Adam … ’ (Religio Medici, in Works, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, 6 vols (London: Faber, 1928), I, 53.)
53 Although Cuff adds, sceptically, ‘his own hasty leaving of his life, was confutation sufficient’ of this ‘false ostentation, or extreme madness’, Donne also plays with the idea in his poem ‘The Good Morrow’, when alluding to the mixture of different humours or elements which made up an individual’s ‘temperature’ (Cuff, Differences of the Ages of Man’s Life, 71; cf. Donne, ‘The Good Morrow’, Poems, 60).
54 Sylva Sylvarum, 263.
55 Thorndike, History, VIII, 414–15. Thorndike adds that ‘Tentzel’s book continued to find readers after 1666 when it was reprinted at Erfurt … Thomas Bartholinus cited cases from it for 15 pages as a postscript to his letter on the transplantation of diseases’.
56 See R.B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought (Salem: Ayer, 1987), 171–73.
57 Tylor, extract from Primitive Culture (1871; repr. in: From Primitives to Zen: A Thematic Sourcebook of the History of Religions, ed. Mircea Eliade (London: Collins, 1967), 178). Citing Frazer, Onians (Origins, 172) also finds something similar among the Society Islanders. Cf. Ovid (born 43 BC) who, when Cephalus accidentally and fatally wounds Procris, has the former state: ‘My lips her soul receive, with her last breath:/Who, now resolved, sweetly smiles in death’ (Ovid’s Metamorphosis, trans. George Sandys (1628), 200).
58 Medicina Diastatica, trans. Ferdinando Parkhurst (1653), 75.
59 Quoted in Medicina Diastatica, 8. On Paracelsus’ iconoclasm, cf. Robert Burton: ‘Paracelsus did that in physic, which Luther in divinity’ (Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), 467). Cf. Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones on the ‘Paracelsian heresy’ (The Medical World of Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 119).
60 See John’s gospel, ch. 11.
61 Cf., also, the raising of Jairus’s daughter, and the meaning of ‘death’ among the African Dowayos (Luke 8.51–55; Nigel Barley, Dancing on the Grave: Encounters with Death (London: Abacus, 1997), 46). For the strikingly reversible nature of ‘death’, in the Apocrypha, see: Acts of Peter, ‘The Gardener’s Daughter’; Acts of John, v.62–86 (The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation, ed. J.K. Elliott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 398–99, 328–35.
62 Frederick S. Paxton, Christianizing Death: The Creation of a Ritual Process in Early Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 21.
63 Daniel Korn, Mark Radice and Charlie Hawes, Cannibal: A History of the People-Eaters (London: Channel 4/Macmillan, 2001), 67.
64 ‘Russian Peasant Beliefs and Practices Concerning Death and the Supernatural Collected in Novosokol’niki Region, Pskov Province, Russia, 1995. Part I: The Restless Dead, Wizards and Spirit Beings’, Folklore 111.1 (2000): 67–90, 72.
65 A. Murgoci, ‘Customs Connected with Death and Burial Among the Roumanians’, Folklore 30.2 (1919): 89–102, 95–96.
66 Warner, ‘Russian Peasant Beliefs and Practices Concerning Death and the Supernatural Collected in Novosokol’niki Region, Pskov Province, Russia, 1995. Part II: Death in Natural Circumstances’, Folklore 111.2 (2000): 255–81, 265.
67 See Barber, Vampires, 20.
68 Dr Fludd’s Answer unto M. Foster (1631), 68, 128. Fludd writes ‘forasmuch as the text saith’ without giving that text. Job 12.10 seems to be the nearest possible match: ‘In whose hand [is] the soul of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind’. Cf., also, Diemerbroeck, who specifically identifies spirits and blood with Leviticus 17.11 (Anatomy (1694), 5).
69 Lauren Kassell, Medicine and Magic in Elizabethan London: Simon Forman, Astrologer, Alchemist, and Physician (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 116, citing from a work of 1607.
70 He does not say how old the corpse was, or if the flesh was treated according to the popular Paracelsian recipes.
71 Mosaical Philosophy (1659), 248. Sadly, Fludd does not say how this extraction was performed.
72 Joseph Mede, Works (1664), 235–36. Mede died in 1638. His Works first appeared in 1648.
73 Sylva Sylvarum, 184. Cf. also Juan Luis Vives, The Passions of the Soul: the Third Book of De Anima et Vita, trans. Carlos G. Norena (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellen, 1990), 103. All further references to Vives are to this work and edition.
74 Cited in: Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (London: Penguin, 2003), 222.
75 Lefebvre does not, however, seem to have been straightforwardly Paracelsian, but to have drawn on a range of traditions, including Neoplatonic, Paracelsian, Helmontian, and Aristotelian ideas.
76 Medicina Diastatica, 33–34.
77 On medical use of the heart, see Johann Schroeder, Zoologia, trans. anon. (1659), 58; John Keogh, Zoologia Medicinalis Hibernica (Dublin, 1739), 103. On Mayerne and the lungs, see John Aikin, Biographical Memoirs of Medicine (1780), 262–63.
78 Camillo Brunori (1726), cited by Camporesi, Bread of Dreams, 45–46.
79 Thorndike, History, VIII, 417.
80 ‘Erotic Hangings in "Cyclops"’, James Joyce Quarterly 34.3 (1997): 345–48. It is estimated that the practice causes between 250–1,000 deaths per year in the United States (J.L. Uva, ‘Autoerotic Asphyxiation in the United States’, Journal of Forensic Sciences 40 (1995): 574–81).
81 On the growth of the mandrake from the semen or urine of a hanged man, see Raymond J. Clark, ‘A Note on Medea’s Plant and the Mandrake’, Folklore 79.3 (1968): 227–31. For a seemingly open-minded discussion of hanging and mandrakes, see: Bureau d’adresse et de rencontre, Another Collection of Philosophical Conferences of the French Virtuosi (1665), 338–40.
82 Sylva Sylvarum, 264.
83 Medicina Diastatica, 74.
&
nbsp; 84 On this latter custom see Patricia Fumerton, in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, ed. Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 1–2.
85 Countess Dracula: The Life and Times of the Blood Countess, Elisabeth Báthory (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), 228.
86 In 1616, for example, Harvey’s first Lumleian anatomy occurred from 16–18 April (see Geoffrey Keynes, The Life of William Harvey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 86).
87 See: Roger French, Dissection and Vivisection in the European Renaissance (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 3, 238.
88 A Hangman’s Diary (1573–1617), 116. Richard Evans explains, more generally, that ‘drowning was mainly though not exclusively reserved for female offenders, and … applied above all to crimes against morality and religion, such as adultery and heresy’ (Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany, 1600–1987 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 30).
89 ‘Indulco and Mumia’, The Journal of American Folklore 77.303 (1964): 3–11, 8–9.
90 Cited in Bread of Dreams, 47; italics mine.
91 Transubstantiation Exploded (1638), 83–85.
92 Good Thoughts in Worse Times (1647), 100–101.
93 The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660 (London: Duckworth, 1975), 386–87, 394–402.
94 For more on the early stages of microscopy, see Catherine Wilson, The Invisible World: Early Modern Philosophy and the Invention of the Microscope (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 79–81, 220–23.
95 Juice of Life, 31.
96 Charas, Pharmacopœia, 98.
97 Medicina Diastatica, 76.
98 Two Treatises of Government (1690), 72–73. Vega’s claim may be true, although he and Locke have misunderstood its significance. The eating of a child born to a tribal woman and her surrogate outsider husband was something which we witnessed in chapter four, in the case of the Tupinamba.
99 Notice, too, how the relatively scientific and empirical Irvine here definitely rejects the older, essentially Scholastic idea that the soul is merely ‘everywhere and nowhere’ in the body.
100 Medicina Magnetica, 90–91.
101 Electronic Enlightenment (online resource, http://www.e-enlightenment.com/): translation from French into English, letter from Georges Pierre Des Clozets to Robert Boyle, Caen, 24 March 1678. For more on Des Clozets and the homunculus, see: Lawrence Principe, The Aspiring Adept: Robert Boyle and His Alchemical Quest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 115, 119, 132–2.
102 Philip Schwyzer, ‘Mummy is Become Merchandise: Literature and the Anglo-Egyptian Mummy Trade in the Seventeenth Century’, in Re-orienting the Renaissance, ed. Gerald Maclean (London: Palgrave, 2005), 66–87, 71 (citing Fray Luis de Urreta’s History of Ethiopia (1610–11)).
103 Mosaical Philosophy, 236–37. Cf. George Chapman, Bussy D’Ambois (c. 1603), on a flatterer as ‘worse than the poison of a red-haired man’ (Bussy D’Ambois, ed. Nicholas Brooke (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1964), 3.1, 15–18). On dating, see Mark Thornton Burnett, new DNB.
104 The Jewish stereotype is further reinforced by the fact that, as Fludd claims, the mythical Jew also sold the potion ‘at an excessive rate’. In yet one more version of the story, Fludd has a wicked Catholic cardinal similarly distilling poison from the living breasts of his red-haired mistress.
105 Andrew Wear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 86–87. Hence, for example, the more orthodox medical use made of vipers (see Michael Foster’s DNB article on Sir Kenelm Digby’s various experiments).
106 The History of the Holy War (1639), 90. Cf. also Conrad Gesner, The New Jewel of Health, trans. George Baker (1576), 145r, effectively using poison against poison, with his recipe for an antidote which includes live scorpions, boiled for some four hours.
107 Mosaical Philosophy, 236–37.
108 On this physiology, see Donne: ‘For if the sinewy thread my brain lets fall/Through every part,/Can tie those parts, and make me one of all’; ‘As doth the pith, which, lest our bodies slack,/Strings fast the little bones of neck, and back’ (‘The Funeral’; ‘Of the Progress of the Soul’, Poems, 59, 203).
109 Bread of Dreams, 44–46.
110 Cf. the Jewish anatomist of Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller, as discussed in Richard Sugg, Murder after Death (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007), 177–88.
111 See Webster, Great Instauration, 282–84.
112 Course of Chemistry, trans. anon. (1720), 507–8. This work was first published in 1675. Once again, the head must be that of a healthy young man, killed by a violent death.
113 Pharmacopœia, 2
114 The Labyrinth of Man’s Life (1614), B1r.
115 Lustra Ludovici (1646), 5.
116 Jacob Behmen’s Theosophic Philosophy (1691), 377.
117 Theosophic Philosophy, 80.
118 Despite asking an anatomy lecturer, I have not been able to learn what these might be.
119 On mummy and the Eucharist, cf. also Karen Gordon-Grube, ‘Anthropophagy in Post-Renaissance Europe: The Tradition of Medicinal Cannibalism’, American Anthropologist 90.2 (1988): 405–9, 408.
120 To be more precise, we must say that for Catholics this failure to decay was important; for the Greeks it was usually an extremely negative phenomenon, linked to sin, excommunication and vampirism (see, for example, Paul Ricaut, The Present State of the Greek and Armenian Churches (1679), 280–82).
121 John Hooper, ‘Monumental Church Dedicated to Controversial Saint Padre Pio’, Guardian, 2 July 2004.
122 The Incorruptible Flesh: Bodily Mutation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore, trans. Tania Croft-Murray (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 36–43, 46–48.
123 Vivian Nutton, in Lawrence I. Conrad, Michael Neve, Vivian Nutton, Roy Porter, and Andrew Wear, The Western Medical Tradition: 800 BC to AD 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 175.
124 See, for example: John Bridges, A Sermon, Preached at Paul’s Cross [1571], 126; George Goodwin, Babel’s Balm (1624), 65.
125 Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 171–72.
126 For more on the psychology of the act and the sick woman’s response, see The Anatomy of Disgust (London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 158–63.
127 For a rather different view of the relationship between religious piety and disgust, see: Alexandra Cuffel, Gendering Disgust in Medieval Religious Polemic (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007).
128 Compare particularly Catherine’s subsequent vision, in which Christ told her ‘"you forced yourself to swallow without a qualm a drink from which nature recoiled in disgust … As you then went far beyond what mere human nature could ever have achieved, so I today shall give you a drink that transcends in perfection any that human nature can provide … "’ Christ then put Catherine’s mouth to his wounded side and let her drink his blood (Bynum, Holy Feast, 172). This passage offers not only a strong instance of spirit over matter, but an especially striking instance of Christian endo- cannibalism. Assuming that the ‘vision’ was self-produced, it also confirms Catherine’s egotism.
129 Bynum, Holy Feast, 144–45. Titus 1.15.
130 Conflicts and Comforts of Conscience (1628), 100.
131 See, for example: Carola Scott-Luckens, ‘Propaganda or Marks of Grace? the Impact of the Reported Ordeals of Sarah Wight in Revolutionary London, 1647–52’, Women’s Writing 9.2 (2002): 215–32; Rebecca Bullard, ‘Textual Disruption in Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea (1654)’, The Seventeenth Century 23.1 (2008): 34–53.
132 Britain’s Remembrancer (1628), 44r.
Opposition and Ambivalence Notes
1 Karl H. Dannenfeldt, ‘Egyptian Mumia: The Sixteenth Century Experience and Debate’, Sixteenth Century Journal 16.2 (1985): 163–80, 176, citing
Paradoxorum Medicinae (Basle, 1535).
2 See The Glory of Women, trans. from Latin (1652). This was first written around 1509.
3 The Vanity of Arts and Sciences (1676), 302–3.
4 Thorndike, History, V, 446, VIII, 414.
5 While Gesner’s original text reads ‘nether’, in context this evidently means ‘neither’ rather than ‘never’.
6 A Treasure of Easy Medicines (1771), 120.
7 Essays, trans. John Florio (1613), 104.
8 The Apology and Treatise of Ambroise Paré (1585), ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Falcon, 1952), 145.
9 The Case Reports and Autopsy Records of Ambroise Paré, ed. and trans. W.B. Hamby, from J.P. Malgaignes, Oeuvres Completes d’Ambroise Paré, Paris 1840 (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas, 1960); cited by A.N. Williams, ‘"Labor improbus omnia vincit"; Ambroise Paré and Sixteenth-Century Child Care’, Archives of Disease in Childhood 88 (2003): 985–89. The use of an animal-skin for severe bruising was still known in Greece in the twentieth century: when one old man of 83 fell from a balcony, ‘his people put him in the skin of a freshly-killed lamb … to heal him’ – after which he lived to be 95 (Richard and Eva Blum, The Dangerous Hour: The Lore of Crisis and Mystery in Rural Greece (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970), 65).
10 ‘Treatise on Mummy’, cited in Karen Gordon-Grube, ‘Anthropophagy in Post- Renaissance Europe: The Tradition of Medicinal Cannibalism’, American Anthropologist 90.2 (1988): 405–9, 407.