Toxic Airs: Body, Place, Planet in Historical Perspective

1. Corrupt Air, Poisonous Places, and the Toxic Breath of Witches in Late Medieval Medicine and Theology

1 “Fair is foul, and foul is fair, / Hover through the fog and filthy air.”1 So chant the Weird Sisters in the first act of Shakespeare’s Macbeth as they stare into the vaporous gloom, gleaning premonitions of horrific events yet to unfold. Although appearing only sporadically, the witches drive the play’s narrative, much as the winds they command drive sailors and their ships at sea to be “tempest-tost.”2 The parallel between the haggard and foreboding witch and the violent and pestilent wind is a commonplace found in many of Shakespeare’s sources. Perhaps the most famous is Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1577), in which the Weird Sisters are described as “three women in strange and wild apparell, resembling creatures of elder world,” and “endued with knowledge of prophecy by their necromantical science.”3 Holinshed attributes the witchy woman’s command over the natural world to her mastery of arcane wisdom; other sources contemporary with Shakespeare, however, paint a far darker portrait of the witch, a wicked and poisonous hag whose maleficent powers stem from her diabolical pact with Satan himself. In his Daemonologie (1597), James I of Scotland describes the witch as an evil creature who can suddenly and violently “rayse stormes and tempests in the aire, either upon Sea or land,” an 1 CORRUPT AIR, POISONOUS PLACES, AND THE TOXIC BREATH OF WITCHES IN LATE MEDIEVAL MEDICINE AND THEOLOGY Brenda Gardenour Walter 2–––Brenda Gardenour Walter act made “verie possible” because of her master Satan’s “affinitie with the aire as being a spirite, and having such power of the forming and mooving thereof.”4 Martin Castañega’s Treatise on Witchcraft (1529) and Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584), both of which offer a far more skeptical treatment on the topic, nevertheless served to reinforce deeply embedded and longstanding cultural associations between the witch and the “foul and filthy air”—whether she be riding upon it, directing it, or poisoning it with her own corrupt breath. The strange union of witch and pestilent air found in the witchcraft treatises and concomitant witchcraft culture that informed Shakespeare’s Weird Sisters was not a creation of the early modern period. Instead, the foundations for the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Satanic witch, with her corrupt and melancholic body, poisonous breath, and command of the air, can be located in the academic milieu of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, where theologians and physicians shared a language of discourse and a set of epistemologies rooted in the logic and natural philosophy of Aristotle (ca. 350 BCE).5 Aristotle’s Logic as well as his Prior Analytics and Posterior Analytics provided scholars with rhetorical tools for theoretical investigation and argumentative proof of both supernatural and natural phenomena , while his Libri Naturales, including the Physics, On the Heavens, Meteorology, and On the Soul provided them with a framework of natural law by which the behavior of creation was bound.6 For medieval natural philosophers , physicians, and theologians, the air in all of its expressions was a topic of critical investigation because of its unique properties. One of the four theoretical and therefore imperceptible elements that formed all matter, air might also physically manifest in tangible, if still mostly invisible, forms such as mild and tempestuous winds as well as fair and foul breath. Air could ascend to the ethereal realms to mingle with the divine, then descend to earth to permeate and change the very nature of the unbounded medieval body. Because of its fluidity, its invisibility, and its association with the supernatural, the air—be it the atmosphere, wind, or breath—was ascribed great power. The amorphous and transformative power of air was the subject of discourse for Aristotle, Hippocrates (ca. 400 BCE), and Galen (ca. 150 CE), the latter of whose authoritative works served as the foundation for learned medicine in the medieval university. Galen’s theory of pneuma, in which air taken in through the lungs becomes imbued with vital and psychic spirits, both provided air with an increased role in human physiology and the etiology of disease and linked internal bodily air with the spiritual realm. Ga- Corrupt Air, Poisonous Places, and the Toxic Breath of Witches–––3 len’s pneuma, when conflated with the soul, provided scholastic theologians versed in medical theory with one more discursive tool in the theological construction of the human and superhuman body. Under...