Donald Beecher

Concerning sex changes: The cultural significance of a renaissance medical polemic

This article examines the medical literature of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries concerning the sexual transmutation of females into males. One explanation for the phenomenon, the so-called one-sex model attributed to Aristotle, does not figure prominently in the writings of the early physicians after 1575. That such a transformation was even possible was entirely discounted by 1600. By implication, those studies of Renaissance culture and thereafter, particularly pertaining to the presumed anxiety associated with cross-dressing, are now due for reexamination to the extent that sex change case studies were employed as the basis of that anxiety concerning sexual plasticity and uncertainty.

Mind, Theaters, and the Anatomy of Consciousness

Among the most perplexing challenges for cognitive philosophers are those pertaining to representationalism, Gilbert Ryle’s denial of the “ghost in the machine,” the languages of cognition, and the “self” as the one-time audience and author of consciousness.1 Each of these topics can be discussed metaphorically in terms of the theater. The mind is a kind of acting space in which thoughts and images are in some fashion prepared and represented in rapid sequence. Consciousness is a theatrical machine behind which there is a director who helps to determine how the narrative of the mind will play itself out. The discrete “I” is not only the prompter of consciousness, but its audience, receiving all that is played in the mind’s theater. Or, in the words of C. S. Sherrington, “each waking day is a stage dominated for good or ill, in comedy, farce or tragedy by a dramatis persona, the ‘self,’ and so it will be until the curtain drops.”2 The problem, however, is that in matters so difficult to comprehend as the workings of the human brain and the mind operations attached to it, metaphors develop vectors of their own that shade and nuance understanding in ways that obstruct the plasticity of analysis. For this reason, theater analogies in relation to consciousness have been widely endorsed in characterizing its distinctive operations, yet widely criticized for epitomizing the philosophical thinking in the past (and the present) that detaches consciousness from the emotions, the body, and the material world. For the latter reason, the metaphor of

An Afterword on Contagion

The word ‘contagion’ contains a buried metaphor pertaining to ‘touch’. But the notion has been generalized to express all manner of pathogenic transmission through proximity, and then generalized again to express moral contamination, imitative emotions or the psychology of crowds. Through such analogical applications, the history of contagion becomes even more extensive, one that relates not only to the best scientific and philosophical explanations from the ancients to the early moderns concerning the spread of diseases, but, by extension, to an analysis of the psychodynamics of groups. Given that microbiology belongs only to the last two centuries, earlier thinkers were challenged to account for contagion according to their ‘received’ philosophies of nature, or in terms of what they presumed to see and verify prior to an understanding of microorganisms. Consequently, they had no choice but to turn to the language of correspondences, occult and spiritual forces, environments and temperaments, poisons, vapours, stares and the polluting touch. But when these operations were applied to the transfer of passions and ideas it was no longer for a lack of understanding of the microbiological world, but of the emotional and cognitive mechanisms whereby minds copy passions and belief structures in seemingly spontaneous, subconscious and often destructive ways. These are socio-psychological phenomena merely resembling pathogenic operations; the relationship would appear to be one of pure metaphor.

Ariosto today : contemporary perspectives

Ludovico Ariostos Orlando furioso is one of the masterpieces of the Renaissance, a work which, many argue, signalled the apogee of Renaissance fancy on the precipice of irony and decline. This collection of essays brings together twelve noted Italian and American scholars to provide a complete picture of Ariosto and all his works, covering topics such as historical criticism relating to Ariostos place and time; philological investigations into the varying literary styles of the author, especially outside of the Furioso; Ariostos extrinsic relationships with other literary traditions; and formal and thematic excavations of the immanent aesthetics of the Furioso. Each essayist acknowledges the fact that Ariostos creations are charged with allusions and allegiances variously inviting recognition or demanding the status of record. This reading of his works reveals that Ariosto was not a writer who believed, as it was previously thought, that literature is something escapist or fantastic in nature, but one who, in writing and re-writing his works, tried to re-interpret literary tradition while incorporating the new literary instruments that were available to him at the time: Ariostos literary production is an integration of tradition and invention. This new reading of his work will be essential to any Italianists library.

Ficino, Theriaca and the Stars

This chapter talks about Theriaca that was based on one of the most complex and exotic of pharmaceutical formulae, and by dint of its ritualistic and often public preparation in Renaissance Europe was one of the most arcane, hence most potent, most costly, and most sought-after drugs of the Christian era. Originally it was conceived as an alexitere or antidote to poisons and venoms, especially those caused by vipers and scorpions. The theriaca survived the Middle Ages to become the prima donna of Renaissance pharmaceuticals. Marsilio Ficino was in full agreement with those who prioritized natural laws in describing and diagnosing diseases. Nevertheless, he also felt compelled, as others were, to accede to the probable existence of remoter forces, namely the stars, demons, and practitioners of natural magic who employed the occult to effect their goals through natural law, the bodily spirits, the balance of humors, or the organs themselves. Keywords: christian era; Ficino; Marsilio Ficino; Renaissance Europe; Stars; theriaca

Nostalgia and the Renaissance Romance

Nostalgia expresses a mind state saturated with emotion, an enduring appetite, adaptive and presumed beneficial when it does not paralyze agency in the real social world. The endeavours of romance are suffused with this abiding and guiding undercurrent—a matter of destiny and a matter of volition combined. Hence the link between genre and the phylogenetic and instinctual orientation toward home, particularly as it is represented in the romance-inspired stories of the Renaissance.