by Richard Sugg
48 Pious readers may however be interested to know that some believed bitumen to have been employed by those ‘who builded the tower of Babel’, who ‘used this in stead of mortar, as appeareth in Gen. chapter the 11’ (Swan, Speculum, 302).
49 Bread of Dreams, 47. Camporesi here cites Carpi from a work of 1518, in which the author refers specifically to ‘the old people of our family’.
50 On Montagna, see V.L. Bullough, ‘Duke Humphrey and his Medical Collections’, Renaissance News 14.2 (1961): 87–91, 91.
51 The Noble Experience of the Virtuous Handy Work of Surgery, trans. anon. (1525), MIv, R3v–R4r, O1r, O4v, N2r, N1v, O1v. For more on Brunswick, see Patsy A. Gerstner, ‘Surgical Instruments, from Brunschwig’s Cirurgia’, Technology and Culture 7.1 (1966): 70–71.
52 Noble Experience, N1v, R3v.
53 Noble Experience, R4r.
54 If the blood was indeed drunk, it would of course have been metabolised like ordinary food, rather than transferred into the bloodstream.
55 For much more on this incident, see: Lauro Martines, April Blood: Florence and the Plot Against the Medici (London: Pimlico, 2003), esp. 111–37.
56 People of course grew up rather more quickly in the Renaissance. Both Francis Bacon and John Donne entered university at age twelve, and their peers would have been only two or three years older.
57 On Alexander’s suitably ironic death, see J.N.D. Kelly, Oxford Dictionary of Popes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 254.
58 Innocent’s Bull of 1484 – ‘Summis Desiderantes’ – specifically accused men and women of using devilish aid to kill cattle and spoil vines, fruits and harvests (see Witchcraft in Europe, 400–1700: a Documentary History, ed. Alan Charles Kors and Edward Peters (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 178). H.P. Broedel emphasises that Kramer and Sprenger used the Bull as a preface to Malleus and that ‘the text proclaimed itself to be as authoritative as the authors’ ingenuity could make it’ (The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 19). Brian Levack argues that Innocent’s Bull was quite similar to other such papal documents, and that its notoriety derives from its use in Malleus (The Witchcraft Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 2004), 119).
59 Innocent was paid off by Bayazid II to keep his captive brother and rival Djem from returning to Turkey (see: Kelly, Oxford Dictionary of Popes, 252; Bernhard Schimmelpfennig, The Papacy, trans. James Sievert (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 250).
60 Schimmelpfennig, Papacy, 242; Kelly, Oxford Dictionary of Popes, 252. For further details of Innocent’s military engagements, see also David Chambers, Popes, Cardinals and War: the Military Church in Renaissance and Early Modern Europe (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 89–93.
61 For overviews of the blood libel and its variants, see: The Blood Libel Legend: A Casebook in Anti-Semitic Folklore, ed. Alan Dundes (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); Bill Ellis, ‘De Legendis Urbis: Modern Legends in Ancient Rome’, Journal of American Folklore 96.380 (1983): 200–208; James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (Columbia University Press, 1996). On the impressive persistence of the myth, see especially: Frank Felsenstein, Anti-Semitic Stereotypes: A Paradigm of Otherness in English Popular Culture, 1660–1830 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), xiii; Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews, 89. In 2007 the historian Ariel Toaff (himself the son of a rabbi) published Pasque di Sangue: Ebrei d’Europa e Omicidi Rituali (‘Passovers of Blood: The Jews of Europe and Ritual Murders’), in which he argued that that some Christian children may have been killed by ‘"a minority of fundamentalist Jews of Ashkenazi origin"’. After considerable controversy, Toaff finally withdrew the first edition of the book from circulation. The revised, 2008 edition of the work accepted that blood libel tales were Christian fabrications. For more details, see Sabina Loriga, ‘The Controversies over the Publication of Ariel Toaff’s "Bloody Passovers"’, Journal of The Historical Society 8.4 (2008): 469–502. I am very grateful to Mauro Spicci for drawing Toaffs work to my attention.
62 Hunter was talking specifically about anatomy, and there is some reason for thinking that his notion was influenced by Enlightenment views of medicine and science. Yet – while such a tactic could have been a problematic one for an era which preferred to see the physician as ‘the helper of God’ – versions of this mentality can be seen in figures such as the medieval surgeon Henri de Mondeville (1260–1320) and the French royal surgeon Ambroise Paré (Hunter cited by Ruth Richardson, Death, Dissection and the Destitute (London: Phoenix, 2001), 31; on Mondeville, see Marie-Christine Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages, trans. Rosemary Morris (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), 76–77; for Paré see Lawrence, Conrad, and Neve, Western Medical Tradition, 298).
63 Countess Dracula: the Life and Times of the Blood Countess, Elisabeth Bathory (London: Bloomsbury, 1997), 229.
64 Louis XI (1423–83) was thought to have drunk the blood of children to cure his leprosy (for the belief, see: The Memoirs of Philip de Comines (1723), 76; Reay Tannahill, Flesh and Blood: a History of the Cannibal Complex (London: Abacus, 1996), 87, citing Soane, NQ 28 February 1857, 162 (‘he vehemently hoped to recover by the human blood which he took and swallowed from certain children’); Tannahill’s source does not look wholly reliable). In the seventeenth century Andreas Tentzel, stating that ‘a bath made of the blood of infants, for curing the leprosy … hath rendered certain kings hateful to the common people’ (Medicina Diastatica, 76), implies that versions of this story tended to cluster about unpopular rulers. P.M. Kendal claims that, during his last sickness, Louis sent a sea captain in search of great sea tortoises, hoping to drink their blood for his supposed leprosy (in fact only a skin inflammation). Kendal believes that this may account for the story ‘put about by the princes after his death, that he drank infants’ blood’ (Louis XI (London: Allen & Unwin, 1971), 365).
65 For more on the fifteenth-century attempt to have Albertus canonised, see: David J. Collins, ‘Albertus, Magnus or Magus? Magic, Natural Philosophy, and Religious Reform in the Late Middle Ages’, Renaissance Quarterly 63.1 (2010): 1–44.
66 The Book of Life, trans. Charles Boer (Texas: University of Dallas Press, 1980), 57. I owe the initial reference to Ficino’s blood theory to Piero Camporesi, who records it in Bread of Dreams.
67 Book of Life, 56.
68 Valerie Fildes, who cites this, notes also that human milk was a common treatment for pulmonary tuberculosis from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century (Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 73, 34).
69 See, for example, Ambroise Paré: ‘milk is none other thing than blood made white by the power of the kernels that are in the dugs’ (Works, trans. Thomas Johnson (1634), 946–47).
70 Cf. also the physician Robert Bayfield, who in a work on tumours in 1662 advises that liver spots and accompanying fevers can be treated by ‘man’s blood distilled with breast-milk’ (Tractatus de Tumoribus Praeter Naturam (1662), 68).
71 Bread of Dreams, 45. There is a certain degree of irony in this, given that it was broadly such a cure which aimed to save one pope’s life, and that his next-but-one successor then effectively murdered the more famous Savonarola, who was indeed Giovanni’s grandson. Whilst Thorndike (History, IV, 183) gives 1464 as the date of Savonarola’s death, Y.V. O’Neill thinks that he may have lived until 1468 (see ‘Michele Savonarola and the Blighted Twin Phenomenon’, Medical History 18 (1974): 222–39, 222). Another Italian work of 1566 implies that distilled blood was quite familiar by this time, referring as it does, with relatively coded brevity, to ‘the elixir, or medicine to conserve the life of man’. While the author thinks that human blood should not be used (for medical reasons) he implies that others generally do so, and elsewhere recommends ‘human blood rectified’ as an alchemical ingredient (Giovan Battista Agnello, A Revelation of the Secret Spirit, trans. R[obert] N[apier] (1623)), 63–64, 55. Agnello’s work first appeared in Italian in 1566, and was itsel
f a translation of an anonymous Latin book of just eight pages (Thorndike, History, V, 624). For more on Agnello (who was living in London in Elizabethan times), see: Katherine Shrieves, ‘Mapping the Hieroglyphic Self: Spiritual Geometry in the Letters of John Winthrop, Jr, and Edward Howes (1627–40)’, Renaissance Studies, published online, 14 January 2010; Deborah E. Harkness, The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (London: Yale University Press, 2008), 9, 142–43, 149, 158, 170, 174–78, 213, 282. Harkness not only identifies Napier as the ‘R.N.’ of the translation, but shows that certain of Agnello’s interests were sufficiently worldly to attract a visit from William Cecil in 1577. The fifteenth-century murderer Gilles de Rais was supposedly persuaded by a monastic alchemist that the blood of the children he murdered for sexual purposes could be used in alchemy (see Tannahill, Flesh and Blood, 92–93).
72 The Virtuous Book of Distillation (1528), M2r–v. This work first appeared in German in 1512.
73 Juice of Life: The Symbolic and Magic Significance of Blood (New York: Continuum, 1988), 31. In a 1580 translation of some of Fioravanti’s writings there are several references to dangerously wounded men cured by ‘our quintessence’ (33v, 35r–v, 37v–38r). Although Fioravanti does not give the full recipe for this, his ‘syrup of quintessence’ is indeed said to have revived ‘those that are half dead’ and to have ‘done miracles’. This contains twelve ounces of a ‘pure rectified aqua vitae’ which sounds very much like the ‘rectified’ fifth essence of human blood (A Short Discourse … Upon Chirurgery, trans. John Hester (1580), 55v (cf. also the ‘elixir vitae’ of Arnold of Villanova (New Jewel, 170r)). This work was partially translated by Thomas Hill and passed to Hester on Hill’s death in 1574 (Harkness, Jewel House, 88–89). For more on Hill, see John Considine, new DNB. Cf. also, more broadly, the Italian natural philosopher Giambattista della Porta, on a mummy elixir which, ‘being anointed on the lips or nostrils, reviveth the soul … ’ (Natural Magic, trans. anon. (1658), 275; this work first appeared in 1558).
74 Juice of Life, 29–30.
75 The Vanity of Arts and Sciences, trans. anon. (1676), 302–3.
76 ‘Egyptian Mumia’, 176, citing Paradoxorum Medicinae (Basle, 1535).
77 Thorndike, History, V, 445, 454. Thorndike also notes that the anatomist Alessandro Benedetti and the German physician Euricius Cordus opposed the use of corpse medicines around this time (V, 454).
78 Gesner, New Jewel of Health, 145r; Suavius (born Jacques Gohorry) is cited by Thorndike (History, V, 637, 639). In the view of Charles Webster, Gesner ‘regarded his fellow countryman Paracelsus with a mixture of admiration and fright’ (From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 5).
79 Quoted in Medicina Diastatica, 8. On Paracelsus’ iconoclasm, see 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).
80 Lynn Thorndike notes that most of Paracelsus’ writings existed only in manuscript form when he died, but that they began to be published extensively around twenty years after his death (History, V, 618, 620).
81 Jonstonus, An History …, 98.
82 Secreti Nuovi first appeared under Ruscelli’s pseudonym, Alexis of Piedmont. On this and the work’s popularity, see: William Eamon and Françoise Paheau, ‘The Accademia Segreta of Girolamo Ruscelli: A Sixteenth-Century Italian Scientific Society’, Isis 75.2 (1984): 327–42, 330.
83 A Very Excellent … Book, 20, 12; 19–20 (2nd set of pages). Ruscelli’s phrase in the second case is ‘the wolf’, now glossed by the OED as ‘a name for certain malignant or erosive diseases in men and animals’ (7a).
84 The Third and Last Part of the Secrets of the Reverend Master Alexis of Piemont (1562), 3r, 32.
85 Theatrum Mundi, trans. John Alday (1566), T3r; New Jewel, 44v, 66v, 137v.
86 New Jewel, 227v–228r. As we have seen, this book also recommends what looks like human fat (‘grease of mumia’ (New Jewel, 145r)) in a balm to treat wounds of the bones.
87 The Apology and Treatise of Ambroise Paré (1585), ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Falcon, 1952), 143.
88 On this and related issues, see: Nicholas Jewson, ‘Medical Knowledge and the Patronage System in 18th-Century England’, Sociology 8 (1974): 369–85; Margaret Pelling, Medical Conflicts in Early Modern London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 226.
89 Cf. John Carvel, ‘Patients to Rate and Review their GPs on NHS Website’, Guardian, 30 December 2008.
90 Howard Wilcox Haggard, Devils, Drugs and Doctors: the Story of the Science of Healing from Medicine-man to Doctor (Wakefield: EP Publishing, 1975), 324.
91 See: Mabel Peacock, ‘Executed Criminals and Folk Medicine’, Folklore 7 (1896): 268–83, 270.
92 For France, see also Joseph Duchesne, A Brief Answer, 33v–34r.
93 Thorndike points out that Brasavola, for example, was using dissections as a source of human fat (History, V, 454).
94 Allen G. Debus notes that, despite their involvement with France, the early Paracelsians Severinus and Guinter ‘did not affect the development of chemical medicine’ during their years in France (The French Paracelsians: The Chemical Challenge to Medical and Scientific Tradition in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 21). Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones state that ‘most first-generation Paracelsians in France were not graduate physicians’. They add that the Protestant rulers of the independent kingdom of Navarre patronised Paracelsian healers from the mid-sixteenth century, and court patronage continued to be important into the next century, despite changes of monarch. Even though the universities managed to promote a judgement threatening death for those who taught ‘"any maxim contrary to ancient and approved doctors"’, Paracelsians were protected by Richelieu around this time, and were especially prominent from 1624–42 (Medical World, 123–25).
95 Cited in Camporesi, Bread of Dreams, 47.
96 A Most Excellent … Work, 72–73.
97 See, for example, Pierre Pomet, A Complete History of Drugs, 3rd edn (1737), 229. Cf. also James Howell, Lustra Ludovici (1646), 5.
98 Unless otherwise stated, all biographical details on Bullein are from DNB article by Patrick Wallis. The relative novelty of some of Bullein’s therapies may have been partly responsible for an accusation of poisoning made against him in 1560.
99 The Greek word ‘theriac’, originally relating to venomous animals and later to antidotes, came to mean ‘treacle’ in the Middle Ages.
100 Bullein’s Bulwark Bulwark of Defence Against all Sickness (1562), 32r (third set of pages), 62v. Cf. also 62v for a mixture of ‘dragon’s blood, plantain water, madder’, ‘mumia, tempered together and drunk’ for ‘great bruises, bloody fluxes’, and (applied topically) to staunch wounds. ‘Cassiafistula’ is another name for senna leaves.
101 Bulwark, 12r–v, 38v (3rd page set). In the second case, the OED defines Bullein’s term ‘epithem[a]’ as ‘any kind of moist, or soft, external application’.
102 Bulwark, 62v. I have been unable to find out precisely what ‘mariarum water’ is.
103 A Needful, New, and Necessary Treatise of Chyrurgery (1575), 56r, 21r.
104 Antidotary Chyrurgical (1589), 3, 4, 5, 6, 9, 13, 14, 15, 22, 64, 69, 72, 89, 98, 101, 195, 208, 215; for ulcers and inflammations, see 14, 22, 89–90; for a Paracelsian plaster, see 265.
105 A Proved Practise for all Young Chirurgians (1588), 27–28, 49–50. On the friendship of Banister and Clowes, see I.G. Murray, ‘William Clowes’, new DNB.
106 Cf. Harkness, Jewel House, 83, who emphasises that Banister was ‘one of the few men in England’ licensed ‘to practice both physic and surgery’.
107 Although the Lumleian started in 1584, Gweneth Whitteridge argues that the first actual dissection was in 1588 (see William Harvey and the Circu
lation of the Blood (London: Macdonald, 1971), 86). When Holinshed states that the lectures were ‘to begin to be read in London, in Anno 1584, the sixth day of May’ (Chronicles, 3 vols (London, 1586), II, 1349, 1369) he could well be referring to purely oral lectures, without dissection (and this would also fit 6 May, a rather late, possibly warm, date for handling corpses). For more on the probable influence of the surgeons, see Elizabeth Lane Furdell, Publishing and Medicine in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: University of Rochester Press, 2002), 20–21.
108 Search made 15 March 2010.
109 Richard Hakluyt, Principal Navigations (1599), 201. For Turberville, see below.
110 Wecker, A Compendious Chirurgery, trans. John Banister (1585), 296–97, 311–12, 316, 347; Levinus Lemnius, An Herbal for the Bible, trans. Thomas Newton (1587), 37; A Brief Answer of Josephus Quercetanus, 2r, 6v, 33v–34r; The Sclopotary of Josephus Quercetanus, trans. John Hester (1590), 52, 69, 77; A Hundred and Fourteen Experiments of … Paracelsus, trans. John Hester (1596), 62, 67, 68; Cornelius Shilander his Chirurgery, C3r–v.
111 Cf., also, its titular self-description as ‘gathered from the most worthy learned, both old and new’. One of the few people in England to rival Hall’s early interest in Paracelsus was John Dee (see Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton, 5).
112 A Most Excellent … Work, 20, 21, 43, 61, 66. Petrus Andreas Matthiolus (1500–1577), was an Italian physician and author of a 1544 commentary on Dioscorides. For more on Matthiolus, see John M. Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (London: Harvard University Press, 1992), 149–51; Harkness, Jewel House, 78. For Banister, see Antidotary, 143, 265, 292. On the relative rarity of the word ‘mummy’ in the sixteenth century, see also: 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.
113 Harkness explains that Baker in fact received ‘an incomplete draft translation of The New Jewel from Thomas Hill, a collector of books and manuscripts and an avid student of nature who died before completing his project’ (Jewel House, 88).