A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Late Medieval, Reformation, and Renaissance Age

Susan Broomhall, Andrew Lynch

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350090927
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

The period 1300-1600 CE was one of intense and far-reaching emotional realignments in European culture. New desires and developments in politics, religion, philosophy, the arts and literature fundamentally changed emotional attitudes to history, creating the sense of a rupture from the immediate past. In this volatile context, cultural products of all kinds offered competing objects of love, hate, hope and fear. Art, music, dance and song provided new models of family affection, interpersonal intimacy, relationship with God, and gender and national identities. The public and private spaces of courts, cities and houses shaped the practices and rituals in which emotional lives were expressed and understood. Scientific and medical discoveries changed emotional relations to the cosmos, the natural world and the body. Both continuing traditions and new sources of cultural authority made emotions central to the concept of human nature, and involved them in every aspect of existence.

CHAPTER ONE

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Medical and Scientific Understandings

SUSAN BROOMHALL

Emotions were a fundamental part of medical and natural philosophical understandings of the human and natural world in the late medieval period and the sixteenth century. They underpinned theories about the corporeal and mental health of humans, animals, and the wider environment; made sense of relationships between these co-inhabitants of the natural world; and informed treatments for perceived imbalances and illnesses experienced by all forms of life. Furthermore, during the period 1300 to 1600, there were deep shifts in how emotions were theorized and practiced in the domains of medicine and natural philosophy in Western Europe. These came as a result of new bodily experiences, innovations in technologies and tools, and concepts of nature and the human that were informed by religious changes and encounters with others around the globe. Yet despite their importance to medieval and scientific thought and practice, emotions have only been haphazardly, and very recently, analyzed in the scholarship of this period. Discussion in these intellectual domains has tended to dwell on emotions as ideas and concepts, rather than analyzing them in modes of practice that informed scientific knowledge production, although it is now widely recognized that these modes were socialized and materialized in important ways. This chapter thus considers emotions within medicine and natural philosophy in a range of ways—as intellectual conceptualizations, as important influences within knowledge-production frameworks, as they were embedded in the bodily practices of medical and natural philosophical systems, and as they were experienced through individual bodies and social communities that included practitioners, their families and households, colleagues, patients, animals, and the natural world.

EMOTIONS IN THE PRODUCTION OF SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE

Emotions were implicated in all stages of the production of medical and natural philosophical knowledge that includes creation, confirmation, innovation, contexts, and exchange. Sociologist Karin Knorr Cetina has emphasized knowledge as a practice that occurs in specific epistemic settings (Knorr Cetina 1999) as does Simon Shapin whose 2010 monograph Never Pure reminds us in its subtitle of the need to carry out Historical Studies of Science as if it was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority. These knowledge practices include important emotional dimensions that structured, processed and communicated information to distinct communities in particular ways.

Conventions for knowledge making in the period were ritually defined by a particular set of emotions performed through processes of discovery. Chief among these was “wonder” and “awe,” which had been, since classical times, considered critical to ideas and practices of scientific enquiry and discovery (Daston and Park 2001). Far less charted, as Yasmin Haskell has recently noted, are more de-motivational emotions such as distraction, sloth, and boredom, which were also experienced alongside the inquisitive passions of enquiry (Haskell 2016: 259). Other feelings were typically linked rhetorically to the challenges and struggles of natural philosophical and medical endeavors. From 1300 to 1600, a significant shift occurred in sources of authority from texts to experiences of the human body and its senses. Increasingly, by the sixteenth century, knowledge-making through the body, in such practices as observation and fieldwork, was gaining authority (Ogilvie 2006; Daston and Lunbeck 2011). Brian W. Ogilvie has argued that natural history scholars in the 1530s and 1540s zealously pursued field studies to collect and document botanical matter, highlighting the physical and emotional hardships of their endeavor. Ogilvie notes that the “sober prose of natural history texts disguised this labor, except in the occasional prefatory remark, but it was an important means for the community of naturalists to constitute itself” (1996: 21). Emotional performance and knowledge production were clearly not only intertwined, but the “right” sort of performed emotions were necessary to produce knowledge acceptable to this scientific community.

Medical knowledge was likewise produced not only as an individual author’s experience with written texts and corpses for dissection, but through the living and feeling bodies of clients and their extended networks. These were complex, intimate negotiations between practitioners and patients. The latter, and their communities of advising family and friends who also endured the pain of others’ suffering, often accessed treatment beyond, or in addition to, professionally trained medical personnel, seeking intercession from saints, through pilgrimage, offerings and prayers, as well as a myriad variety of alternative health practitioners. This produced anxieties of status and authority among some practitioners, but also a sensitivity to emotional expression that would be appropriate in epistolary and face-to-face consultation, both to deliver what might be unwelcome advice and to engender confidence in what was often an uncertain business. Henri de Mondeville, physician to French kings Philippe Le Bel and Louis X, recommended that medical professionals should have any debate and disputes about a patient’s illness or treatment in a separate room where they could not be heard by others, and that the eldest or most senior should speak for all in interactions with the patient (Crisciani 2004). Nicolò Falcucci, writing his medical manual at the 1480s, advised that group consultations should include only those who were “animated by good intentions, denuded of envy and rivalry, and who did not seek vain glory” (Crisciani 2004: para. 23). The Strasbourg wound surgeon Hans von Gersdoff suggested in his 1517 Das Feldbuch der Wundarzney that those of his profession should be of “a humble disposition and of a chaster nature than other manual workers, because this art and practice touches on human life.… He should have a special love for the wounded persons as for his own body” (Zimmerman and Veith 1993: 214). Although advice in epistolary consultations was typically provided with stoicism, without explicit emotional expression by physicians, the Genevan-born physician Théodore Turquet de Mayerne assured one client that he took seriously the patient’s suffering from a melancholy humor and his own obligation to find relief for it, employing strong emotion rhetoric: “I was possessed with careful and troublesome thoughts by reason of the great and dreadful Symptoms described in your last letter” (Weston 2015: 273). Practitioners had to manage their own emotions—fears about illness, frustrations at recalcitrant clients or a lack of clear information about symptoms, and anxieties about professional failures and their moral duties to society—as well as their pain and grief in watching others suffer and die.

Scientific knowledge confirmation was also layered by emotions. It required accreditation by others within particular scientific groups that were exclusive communities of belonging. In 1300, medical faculties within universities were just establishing their claim to be the pre-eminent places for training and transmission of medical knowledge. Over this period, the university community demanded particular forms of documentation of this knowledge both in textual genres and within a manuscript form that they controlled. The elite group of men who formed this latter community limited knowledge access and creation to those who shared their life, social status and educational experience. This instilled a sense of trust in the knowledge developed by others in their community. Moreover, as their knowledge confirmation systems underwent a series of pressures from the turn of the sixteenth century, increasingly, as Peter Harrison suggests, “tests for the trustworthiness of observers stressed social status, education and training, personal virtues, and institutional settings” (Harrison 2011: 124).

The emergence of a range of new technologies and global experiences opened up claims to knowledge production to a far greater range of individuals, of both sexes and different classes. By the sixteenth century, the university-based knowledge confirmation framework was under pressure by those with alternative ideas and concepts, spread widely in print. This created new articulations of emotions among medical and natural philosophical writers, expressing anxieties over control of information among their own community and access to it by others without their shared training and experience. With the 1543 publication of De corporis humanii fabrica, the Flemish clinical anatomist Andreas Vesalius challenged one of the classical pillars of medical theory, Galen. Not only casting aspersions on the university medical schools in which he had trained, he also claimed knowledge by direct observation of human bodies, with numerous details of the labour-intensive processes by which he manipulated corpses to reveal the workings of the human body. Dissection involved affective rituals as much as observational and corporeal ones, as Rafael Mandressi has explored, where distinct feeling cultures among professional groups had to be negotiated in the production of anatomical knowledge (Mandressi 2016; Carlino 1999). Vesalius’s conclusions were interpreted as an affront to contemporary medical knowledge delivered in the universities. Jacques Dubois (Jacobius Sylvius), renowned anatomist at the University of Paris, and Vesalius’s former teacher, returned an emotional salvo denouncing Vesalius’s findings in print and calling him “Vaesanus,” a mad man (Sylvius 1551). Although Vesalius also had his admirers, attacks from within the medical fraternity continued. In 1562, Francesco dal Pozzo, with thinly veiled personal ambitions, aligned himself with Vesalius’s attackers in delivering a stinging rebuke on the insane, mendacious, vile and impudent anatomist who could only read Galen through Latin, not the Greek original as he himself could (Castiglioni 1943: 139). Contemporaries were entirely alert to the deep emotional foundations that underpinned responses to Vesalius’s new ideas. Gabriel Cuneus, then Chair of Anatomy at Pavia, in a defense of Vesalius, suggested that Sylvius’s response had been strongly motivated by his feelings: “he was seriously perturbed at the writing of Vesalius, who for three years had been his most devoted discipline and diligent student. Many people taunted Sylvius because of these writings.” Cuneus concluded that the episode revealed “just how much power truth possesses over a violently enraged and self-tormenting mind” (Castiglioni 1943: 144–5). Renatus Henerus of Lindau, who was a student in Paris in Sylvius’s last years, considered his teacher

completely upset by observing the prestige he had sought had gone to Vesalius, and it became his earnest desire to make everyone thoroughly despise the great and useful labors of [Vesalius] […] we were forced to endure a constant stream of abuse and virtually incessant and furious invective against Vesalius. It wearied our ears and aroused the indignation of many of us.

—O’Malley 1964, 246, n. 92; 247, n. 93

These emotionally driven and laden printed attacks within the scholarly community were largely communicated in Latin, a language that obscured the strong feelings that they voiced from much of the wider populace and held them within a community that, despite divergent views, still shared strong elements of common identity.

Medical and natural philosophical knowledge was created and communicated within particular emotional contexts and sociabilities, forged by family, faith, and friendships. The breakdown of what was understood to be an emotional relationship between the father figure, Sylvius, and his intellectual progeny, Vesalius, was clearly perceived to l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• General Editors’ Preface
• Introduction: Emotional Cultures of Change and Continuity, 1300–1600
• 1 Medical and Scientific Understandings
• 2 Religion and Spirituality
• 3 Music and Dance
• 4 Drama
• 5 The Visual Arts
• 6 Literature
• 7 In Private: The Individual and the Domestic Community
• 8 In Public: Collectivities and Polities
• Notes on Contributors
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Copyright