Citations from antiquity in Renaissance medical treatises on love

Citations from antiquity in Renaissance medical treatises on love Axiomatic to humanist thought in the Renaissance was the primacy of ancient texts and the importance attached to consulting them for the authority they might lend to virtually any subject chosen for investigation. It was as though no progress could be made, even in the areas of science, without the anticipations and confirmations that could be drawn from the Greeks and Romans. Such a practice, of necessity, becomes a part of then investigative methodology, and a matter of considerable concern to scholars interested in the origins and transmission of Renaissance ideas, insofar as these citations are often borrowed from 'alien' contexts, yet advanced as norms, and in turn, become fixed parts of the analytical traditions that are passed on, in cumulative fashion, from scholar to scholar. Such discourses take on a certain complexity because of then tendency to be driven from two rhetorical centres, whereby experience becomes both what is necessary in terms of contemporary observation and what is endorsed by earlier observers. In rhetorical terms, it is as though nothing could be new that was not already known. Even Renaissance medical phUosophers were given to these procedures, and nowhere was this more the case than in the examination of those conditions deemed to be diseases of the soul, conditions that lent themselves to exemplification from ancient literary texts. With regard to the state of amor hereos or lovesickness, whether as a form of mania or of melancholy, the late Renaissance medical philosophers devised a complex symptomatology together with diagnostic techniques that were developed in a close relationship with a select number of classical literarytexts.Paradoxically, pathogenic love was still an emerging idea, but methodologically, its component parts were invariably traced back to hints and intimations furnished by the ancients, whose descriptions of lovers were taken for case studies. The topic of the following study is the use of classical texts by Renaissance writers of love treatises and Renaissance physicians in the scientific definitions and diagnostics of pathogenic eroticism. Early in the eleventh century, Avicenna wrote the Canon medicinae. The work was destined to become one of the seminal medical texts in the Latin West. A m o n g its contributions was a description and diagnosis of P A R E R G O N ns 12.1 (July 1994) 2 D. Beecher erotic melancholy. Avicenna defined this state as a self-induced form of mental anguish caused by thinking continuously about a beautiful object, about its nature and features, accompanied by intense desire.1 Although not inherendy a disease, such love could produce psychosomaticrepercussionsin the body. Hence, Avicenna joined his discussion of this condition to his discussion of melancholy diseases and lycanthropy. H e admitted that it was related to sexual appetites as well, thereby allowing as a material cause a surfeit of seed.2 The principal cause of the crisis, however, was the mental faculty of imagination, the imaginativa or phantasma, through its continuous representation of the beloved object to the appetites. Moreover, because lovers are secretive and often do not seek medical help for then desperate condition, physicians must master the symptoms whereby love can be identified: according to Avicenna these were hollow eyes, constantly in motion, arhythmicity of the pulse, profound depression, sleeplessness, love of solitude, irregular respiration, occasional giddiness or weeping, depending on the ethos of the imagination, and dessication of the body.3 Of these, the irregularity of the pulse at the mention of the beloved remained the most valuable diagnostic sign. Avicenna refined the techniques for detecting causes by questioning the patient while holding the pulse. As he approached the truth of the matter, the rate would, of course, increase.4 Just how this generic description of erotic love was transmittedtothe Latin West and gained currency in medieval Europe involves a complex tale of translators, commentators, medical schools, and scholastic thought.5 * • Liber canonis, IB. 1.4.23, Latin translation by Gerard of Cremona, Venice: Juntas, 1555, f. 206v . 2 For an earlier authority see Galen, On the Affected Parts, VI.6, trans. Rudolph E. Siegel, Basel, 1976, pp. 184, 197. 3 Liber canonis, in the same place as n. 1 above. See...