The Body in History, Culture, and the Arts

Justyna Jajszczok, Aleksandra Musia?, Aleksandra Musia?

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429559426
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The aim of this book is to explore the body in various historical contexts and to take it as a point of departure for broader historiographical projects. The chapters in the volume present the ways in which the body constitutes a valuable and productive object of historical analysis, especially as a lens through which to trace histories of social, political, and cultural phenomena and processes. More specifically, the authors use the body as a tool for critical re-examination of particular histories of human experience, and of societal and cultural practices, thus contributing to the burgeoning area of body history in terms of both specific case studies as well as historiography in general.

Part I
The Liminal Body

1
Fortunio Liceti’s Strategic Use of Lusus Naturae in De Monstris (1634–1665) and the Self-Assured Semiology of Naturalized Early Modern Science

William Leeming

Introduction

Anne Blair (2003) has drawn attention to an immense surge in the printing of encyclopedic compilations between 1550 and 1700 in Europe that amounted to, in her words, an “information overload.” She indicates that, by the end of the sixteenth century, there was a widely held belief that there were too many books in the world for any single scholar to read and remain well-informed of all available knowledge. This fueled “the production of many more books, often especially large ones, designed to remedy the problem—from new genres like the universal bibliography and the book review to new (or not-so-new) contributions to well-established genres, including the florilegium, the dictionary, and the encyclopedic compilation” (Blair 2003, 12). At the same time, as Brian Ogilvie (2003, 2008) has shown, pre-Linnaean approaches to sorting and arranging the knowledge found in the almanacs, chronicles, and encyclopedic compilations of the period bore little resemblance to a taxonomic science in the modern-day sense. Indeed, in the context of the encyclopedic compilations on monsters, authors and publishers often trawled ancient annals, medieval chronicles, travelers’ reports, and other documentary sources in a random and haphazard manner. Rudolf Wittkower went so far as to complain that “the sober and scientific approach was often overshadowed by the indiscriminate discussion of the available ‘cases’: mythological creatures, imaginary monsters and general descriptions in literature were allowed to rank on the same level as direct observations, and a number of standard illustrations were repeated in scores of books for more than a century to represent different monsters” (1942, 46).

Among the earliest of the encyclopedic compilations on monsters was Jakob Rueff’s Trostbüchle of 1554 which, in Germany, was followed soon thereafter by the Wunderzeichen of Job Fincel in 1556 and Conrad Lycosthenes’ Wunderwerck in 1557. Other well-known German encyclopedic compilations appeared in the seventeenth century by Christoph Irenäus, Andreas Engel, Johannes Wolf, and Johannes Prätorius. Similar encyclopedic approaches were taken in France, notably the Histoires prodigieuses of Pierre Boaistuau (1560) and Des monstres tant terrestres que marins, avec leurs portraits of Ambroise Paré (1573). Compilations were also beginning to appear in Italy at that time, including Fortunio Liceti’s De Monstris.

Fortunio Liceti (1577–1657) was a physician born in Genoa and chair of Aristotelian Philosophy at the University of Pisa before moving nine years later to the University of Padua. His De Monstrorum Causis, Natura et Differentiis was first published in 1616. A lavishly illustrated second edition was subsequently published in Padua in 1634, including an engraved frontispiece by Giovanni Battista Bissoni. A further edition was produced in Amsterdam in 1665 with the title De Monstris. The two volumes that make up De Monstris mostly include accounts of monsters and monstrous births selected from ancient annals, medieval chronicles, and travelers’ reports. The images feature monsters in the state of nature, either standing, walking, or running in grasslands and forests. Most of the monsters are missing or have supernumerary limbs. There are numerous images of conjoined twins. A small collection of figures of the monstrous races of antiquity are interspersed among the illustrations of Book II, including blemmyes (folio131v), cyclops (folio133v), and hairy wild men (folios149v, 158r). An appendix follows with texts and illustrations taken from the work of Nicolas Tulp, the Dutch surgeon made famous in Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, and Thomas Bartholin, a Danish physician, mathematician, and theologian who became famous for his anatomical studies of the lymphatic system in humans.

De Monstris is mostly celebrated in the history of science and medicine as a ground-breaking work in descriptive teratology, i.e., the study of abnormalities of embryonic development and congenital malformations as well as other forms of anomalous physiological development (Fisher 1866; Wittkower 1942; Daston and Park 1998; Bates 2001). Indeed, Isidore Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, who coined the neologism “teratology” in the 1830s, credited Liceti as having pioneered the discipline (Lazzarini 2011, 427). Specifically, Liceti’s system of two principal categories of monsters has been regarded as a crucial early example of a pre-Linnaean taxonomy for the scientific observation and clinical anatomy of teratology. But, that being said, Liceti’s propensity for an ambivalent analysis of the monstrous included an investigation of what lies behind the temporal and spatial heterogeneity of monsters and what humans could expect to comprehend in terms of Nature’s ingenio, as well as the presence of recurring forms in nature that reenact their own conditions of possibility. I focus on the latter in this chapter.

The chapter begins with background to the way Europeans approached the problems of monstrosity and monstrousness prior to the seventeenth century. There follows a brief account of the taxonomic principles of De Monstris. The main focus of the chapter, however, is an investigation of what I refer to as Liceti’s strategic use of lusus naturae (i.e., a “joke of Nature”). I argue that lusus naturae appears in De Monstris alongside the serio ludere (i.e., “serious play”) of scientific investigation. I contend that the liminal space in which lusus naturae appears brings with it the potential for breaking away from colloquial understandings of the empirical presence of natural phenomena.

The Problems of Monster, Monstrosity, and Monstrousness

As Georges Canguilhem (1962) was quick to point out, historical use of the terms “monster,” “monstrosity,” and “monstrousness” has not been interchangeable. For Canguilhem, monstrosity is the effect produced or caused by monstrousness. And monstrousness is to be found in the act or acts believed to cause monstrosity during formal investigation and with a view to normative judgment.

The etymology of “monster” leads to the Latin monere and the idea of warning (Dorrian 2000, 312). Etymologically, to be a monster is to be a sign, a portent, or display. This accurately describes European accounts of monsters prior to the sixteenth century, which tended to focus exclusively on religious interpretations of what a monster prophesized (Niccoli 1990; Daston and Park 1998; Hsia 2004; Cheng 2012; Verner 2016). Monstrous births were time and again interpreted as evidence of divine providence, representing signs from God “in response to perceived lapses in moral order” (Bates 2005, 141). Indeed, early accounts of monsters and monstrous births were almost always interpreted as “signs of the wrath of God toward man and his sins, a source of deep anguish that had little to do with the ‘amazement’ that the other unusual wonders of creation aroused” (Cusumano 2013, 158). The allegorical figure of the monster in the sixteenth century presumed a fixed identification of what was illustrated; the problem was to assign meaning to what it was that was actually being depicted (Hampton 2004, 184). By locating the specific interpretation of the given sign, one could find its corresponding meaning in the larger chain of signs. The world could be read like a text whose words were meaningful to those properly trained in its language. For Europeans living in the period, all created things were linked together in a world of microcosms and macrocosms (Ashworth 1990).

By way of an example, in 1523 Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchthon published a pamphlet that featured two woodcuts by Lucas Cranach the Elder entitled The Papal Ass of Rome and The Monk—Calf as “reproofs of monastic and papal corruption” (Daston and Park 1998, 187) (see Figure 1.1). The Papal Ass exemplifies a genre of allegorized composites with its head of a donkey, scaled limbs, cloven and taloned feet, a trunk-like hand, and a womanly torso. The Monk—Calf, on the other hand, was reportedly based on the actual birth of a calf with a

Figure 1.1 (a and b) Lucas Cranach the Elder, woodcut illustrations for Martin Luther and Philipp Melanchon, Deuttung der Czwo Grewliche[n] Figuren Bapstesels czu Rom und Munchkalbs zu Freyberg ijnn Meysszen funden (1523)

Image courtesy of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Res/Slg.Faust 115, fol. A1 verso and recto. (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

cowl-like flap of flesh on its neck. Luther and Melanchthon proclaimed that the calf was a prophecy that “the monastic state was ‘nothing other than a false and lying appearance and outward display of a holy, godly life’” (Daston and Park 1998, 188).

As Barbara Maria Stafford has argued, the use of analogy is “a demonstrative or evidentiary practice—putting the visible into relationship with the invisible and manifesting the effect of that momentary unison” (1999, 23–24). Analogy supports the vision of ordered relationships “articulated as similarity-in-difference” (Stafford 1999, 9). The veracity of the accounts of The Papal Ass and The Monk—Calf are to be judged by their nearness to the truth, i.e., truthlikeness, rather than their verifiability. The religious and political upheavals of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century occasioned the use of a strategy Jerome Bruner has dubbed “coherence by contemporaneity”; that is, the “belief that things happening at the same time must be connected” (1991, 19). This was related to “connecting the lot into one coherent whole — connecting, not subsuming, not creating historical-causal entailments, but winding it into story” (1991, 20). The concept of the monster held the key to the unfolding space of signification of which experience and expectations may or may not form a part. Moreover, the monster is a prolepsis, the representation or assumption of a future act or development as if presently existing or accomplished. As an event, on the one hand, it is never-to-be-repeated. On the other, as an episode of monstrousness it represents a heterochrony (i.e., many times existing at the same time).

The understanding of what it meant to be monstrous is said to have changed by the early eighteenth century. Janvier Moscoso, for example, has written that monstrosity became naturalized in the sense of “attempts to explain away, or naturalize, the sentiment of wonder” (1998, 362). The natural world could “take on odd shapes and sometimes seem to reverse the ordering of imperfect and perfect, so that the ‘prose du monde’ becomes either self-referential, pointing not at something invisible and ideal but rather at itself as form” (Randall 1996, 3). What is meant to be a monster was rationalized in the eighteenth century to the extent that moral and metaphysical explanations of monstrosity were spurned in favor of what could be observed and classified (Wolfe 2005; Cusumano 2013). Even so, I will argue in what follows that the path to what was becoming naturalized and rationalized did not lead, as one might expect, to a consensus about general rules by which a given phenomenon might be included in a category of monstrousness.

The Science of De Monstris

As already noted, Fortunio Liceti was chair of Aristotelian Philosophy at the universities of Pisa and Padua. Suitably, his approach to theorizing reproduction, conception, and generation was closely aligned with what Aristotle had written. It is noteworthy that Aristotle offered two approaches to studying embryonic development. First, the structure (matter) of the animal is preformed and grows larger (preformationism) and, second, that structure develops progressively (epigenesis). At the root of the Aristotelian preformation/epigenesis dichotomy lay the division of the nature of all biological substances into their “formal nature” and their “material nature” (Henry 2006, 426–427). The salient point for purposes of studying monstrosity is that a robust theory of four causes (material, efficient, formal, and final) for scrutinizing the course of action for the transmission of characteristics from parents to offspring was vigorously worked out and incorporated into the teaching of medicine in Europe using tracts from Aristotle’s De Generatione Animalium and Physics (Boylan 1984, 93–95).

The material cause affected what is to be formed and the range of all possible outcomes in embryonic development. At the point of conception, the action of the father of a child represents an efficient cause. The efficient cause is what puts the whole process in motion. But efficient cause is itself incomplete. Rather, all efficient causes are regulated by formal causes. And this is regulated by Nature. Nature provides the formal/final causes in conception. Nature “as end” brings about the organism’s fully developed form (i.e., infant through to maturity or adult form) while nature “as mover” refers to the potentiality that exists a priori inside the developing embryo that directs the process toward its end. On the one hand, teleological activity arises from the individual’s internal organic form. Form is not independent of matter. It is embodied in matter. The individual maintains its organic form by holding its end within itself. Moreover, what exists a priori inside the developing embryo includes inherited properties from its ancestors. This, in turn, suggests what Norman Crowe called a “timelessness within the temporal”: the existence of a persistent or recurring structure or object that reenacts its own conditions of possibility (1997, 156). The materiality of such a substance or process is sustained across time by the tacit substitution of its parts in a manner that suggests both metachronism (i.e., the placing of an event after it has occurred) and prochronism (i.e., the placing of it before). And while the Aristotelian mind-set stressed the union of matter and form as constituting an independent entity, the substantial form of the entity represented what it has in common with its kind, what made it a member of a class of beings. In effect, an entity’s distinctive features made it unique (i.e., an individual) by accident: “Accidental form… can change while its substantial or specific being remains unaffected. Accidental forms are perceptible; they can be analyzed in terms of the manifest properties associated with the elements. Substantial form in itself, as opposed to its effects, remains hidden from the senses” (Copenhaver 1990, 273; italics in the original).

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, discussion of an entity’s uniqueness became focused and nowhere more clearly than i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction: “The Past Is Written on My Body”: Bodies and History
• PART I The Liminal Body
• PART II The Modern Body
• PART III The Visual Body
• PART IV The Punished Body
• PART V The Entangled Body
• List of Contributors
• Index