Bruce T. Moran

Eloquence in the Marketplace: Erudition and Pragmatic Humanism in the Restoration of Chymia.

This chapter focuses upon the relation between textual and social practices that influenced the formation of a communal approach to acquiring chemical knowledge in the early seventeenth century. It also describes the utilitarian purpose of a humanist-inspired program of chemical learning that blended practices of textual/linguistic expertise and artisanal know-how. Humanism, made pragmatic, sought to define the principles for “making things well.” In the design of Andreas Libavius (ca. 1555–1616), interpretive intuitions resulting from practiced reading of ancient and medieval texts combined with a knowledge of workshop language to build consensus about chymia’s tools, procedures, and materials and to define its principia artificialia.

Preserving the Cutting Edge: Traveling Woodblocks, Material Networks, and Visualizing Plants in Early Modern Europe

This study examines changes in the epistemic status of recycled botanical woodblocks brought about by shifts of social, economic, and intellectual purpose. Unmoored from their original intent, some woodblocks, once created, began to travel, finding their way into sites remote from their places of origin, and influencing processes of visualizing the world by fitting, with renewed purpose, into the space between the objects of nature and the imagination. As traveling objects of representation and as embodiments of plant depictions, woodblocks figure into the material culture of shared practices in the early modern era, transmitting specific images for diverse purposes while communicating the artistic and artisanal practices embedded in them as artifacts. They constitute in this way a relatively stable material source of visual imagery; physically fixed but culturally mutable objects that help revise and reshape the perception of the natural world.

Book Review: “Alkühmisten” und “decoctores”: Grimmelshausen und die Medizin seiner Zeit

This is a study that relates to issues of medical “intertextuality” (defined in the broad sense of textual influence and allusion) in the work of the German Baroque author Hans Jacob von Grimmelshausen (1621/22–1676), best known to English readers as the creator of the satirical Simplicius simplicissimus. The main questions are these: how far do the concepts of health, sickness, prophylaxis and therapy expressed by Grimmelshausen through the figures and narrative voices within his writings correspond to medical understanding and debate in his own day? And do the episodes and satirical comments related to his characters indicate personal criticisms of medical theory and/or practice? The book thus takes a place among other efforts to explore the relation between literature and medicine. In many of these the focus is upon establishing the meaning of illness within a specific time and place or upon determining the role that medicine plays in constructing particular themes and structures. Doms, however, selects another, more specific, task—to determine the most likely sources for the medical elements in Grimmelshausens writings and to ascertain something of his own medical-critical views. While some light is shed in relation to the first undertaking, the second, Doms admits, remains obscure. Although careful not to assume too much about Grimmelshausens personal knowledge of individual medical texts, Doms maintains that there is enough evidence to suggest connections, directly or indirectly, to a variety of medical sources. These include more or less contemporary German language texts and translations, especially those falling into the genre of advice literature, as well larger, more encyclopaedic medical accounts. Grimmelshausen must also have been aware of older, well-established texts such as the Regimen of health (his source, Doms thinks, for information about the six non-naturals and diet), and earlier sixteenth-century works, especially the pharmaceutical texts of writers like Christof Wirsung, Hieronymus Bock, Johann Coler, Walther Ryff, Lorenz Fries, and Hieronymus Brunschwig. References to Paracelsian medicines stem most likely from Oswald Crolls Basilica chymica (1609). A passage from Grimmelshausens Satyrischer Pilgram indicates that he viewed medicine as divided into five parts: physiologica (human anatomy, physiology including the theory of humours and temperaments), hygiaena (the six non-naturals), aethiologica (causes of illness and concepts of disease), simiotica (symptoms and courses of illness, also diagnostic practice), and trapestica (methods of treatment, including diet, medicaments, and surgery), and the main part of Domss study follows these divisions. In none of Grimmelshausens writings are there descriptions of medical proceedings that contradict the medical practices of his time, although there are instances in which he uses satire to illustrate contemporary controversies regarding medical opinion and procedure. Yet, even here, Doms is hesitant to draw any clear conclusions, and simply acknowledges the difficulties in determining the focus (for example, treatments themselves or the persons and/or professions offering them) of satirical attacks. Nevertheless, while unable to make absolute judgements concerning Grimmelshausens evaluation of Galenism, Paracelsianism, and learned medicine, it is clear that he regarded a balance of humours and attention to the six non-naturals as fundamental to health. His characters also reveal a mistrust of iatromagic and sometimes relate Paracelsian approaches to avarice and deceit. Most interesting are the instances in Grimmelshausens stories in which health and illness are related to a persons moral situation. This pertains as much to the treatment of ones own body as to the relation between the physician and the sick. Anabaptists, for instance, reach a more advanced age because their moral commitments help shape a healthy body. Given the varieties of causes of illness, including miasmas, contagions, an imbalance of humours, immoderation as well as divine affliction, Grimmelshausen seems to have concluded that diagnosis, prognosis, and therapy required a lot from the physician making healing as much a disciplinary as an ethical challenge.

Gianna Pomata and Nancy G Siraisi (eds), Historia: empiricism and erudition in early modern Europe , Cambridge, MA, and London, MIT Press, 2005, pp. viii, 490, £32.95,

This is an excellent collection of essays focused upon the relation between the textual and linguistic expertise of humanist scholars in the early modern period and the development of empirical proficiency in natural history and medicine. The missing link between the two is a genre of works related to both human and natural subjects collectively called historia. Focusing upon various forms of historia the collection forcefully makes the case that the observation and description of nature in the early modern era was interwoven with practices relevant also to displays of humanist erudition. In the Renaissance, the study of nature is, as the editors claim, inseparable from the study of culture. The fact that antiquarian studies, philological learning, as well as civic and religious histories should have something in common with observationally based natural philosophy and medicine may seem baffling. Yet, it is just such a relationship that each essay in this collection skilfully helps to bring to light. The primary fault of many edited volumes is usually a lack of a clearly defined problem that holds focus throughout. This is manifestly not the case in this collection. Much of the reason why has to do with its origin—a workshop sponsored by the Max Planck Institut fur Wissenschaftsgeschichte that kept a specific question consistently in view. Was there a link between the practices of early modern physicians and naturalists in their use of historia and the earlier Renaissance discussion of historia as antiquarian knowledge? This volume clearly demonstrates that such a connection existed in a rich variety of forms. In their essays, Anthony Grafton first illustrates that some traditions of the Renaissance artes historicae emphasized empirical knowledge, while Brian Ogilvie highlights the shared moral and didactic purposes that existed between the portrayal of human deeds and the honest description of natural particulars. Both Ian Maclean and Gianna Pomata address the Aristotelian context in which historia gained new meanings. Maclean traces a revised empiricist outlook among humanists to a rethinking of the value of descriptive knowledge in Aristotles zoological works. Pomata, on the other hand, looks carefully at the uses of historia among anatomists and physicians in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These were Aristotelian trained writers who, she argues, looked at historia as descriptions of individual parts of the body and who gave such descriptions a preliminary role in the pursuit of traditional questions about function and final cause. Antiquarianism is more centrally the focus of Martin Mulsows essay, which describes the humanist creation of a new historia of religion that combined traditional interest in texts with attention to the description of material artefacts and the customs of peoples. In his contribution, Donald Kelley connects shifts in the meaning of human history to the re-evaluation of historia, with the result that history itself emerged as a more methodical and system based subject. The second part of the collection focuses upon “the working practices of learned empiricism” and gives us specific examples of how some early modern writers joined erudition and empiricism in works related to natural philosophy and medicine. Laurent Pinon discusses the meaning of historia in Conrad Gesners important Historia animalium, noting Gesners emphasis upon practical utility (as opposed to explanation or classification) in an account of animals based both upon contemporary observation and historical reports. Ann Blair uses a study of Theodor Zwingers inventory of types of human actions, his Theatrum humanae vitae, to illustrate the value of the ars excerpendi, a tradition of excerpting individual sections from various texts in order to recontextualize them for new purposes. In the writings of the humanist physician Michele Savonarola, Chiara Crisciani focuses upon how the role of a court physician who was both healer and counsellor helped to connect the writing of civil history with writing historia medica. In both cases historia meant casus (case study) and the description of particulars (exempla). The same emphasis upon casus underscores Nancy Siraisis examination of several Roman medical authors from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. For these doctors case histories blended with natural history and antiquarian knowledge as different aspects of the practice of historia, each requiring attention to material evidence in the discussion of texts, ancient or modern. Finally, Peter Miller offers a compelling study of the day-to-day practices of Nicolas de Peiresc, who in many ways represents the full development of the learned empiricist, effortlessly moving between the description of nature and the study of ancient customs and artefacts, and bringing together the skills of both language and observation as a combined approach to knowledge. These are first-rate essays, interesting and instructive in their own right and expertly combined by the editors into a collection that makes the whole greater than the sum of parts. The subject of early modern empiricism once again enters the spotlight with this volume and what one sees as a result is the emergence of a scientific sensibility that, rather than being set off from intellectual tradition, results from a synthesis of disciplines.