Paracelsian Moments: Science, Medicine, and Astrology in Early Modern Europe (review)

Paracelsus (1493-1541) is a nonpareil figure in the history of medicine whose life and works soon turned into the alloy of European allegory. Like the legendary Faust and Mephistopheles, he was solitary, temperamental, tortured, restless, nomadic, and controversial in his own time; later, to the Romantics, he appeared to have been hewn out of their own spiritual chemistry. His mindset was polymathic, medical, mysterious, shrouded in the secrecy he lived to unravel. The fact that his mystique endured beyond the sixteenth century added large luster to his degree of allure and exoticism. By the time scholars assessed his niche in the nineteenth century, they themselves had shed the very empowered traits he himself possessed: magical dynamism, alchemical mystery, a hermetical mindset, sexual dissidence, Romantic solitude, the frenzied wanderlust to seek out nature's secrets.

Study of this figure thrives in a few remote corners only, especially if one judges from these "Paracelsian moments." But no one should think that it languishes altogether. The virtue of this anthology is its demonstration of how far-flung the remaining fields for study are. Societies dedicated to Paracelsus still flourish (one thinks of the Swiss network organized by Urs Gantenbein and his colleagues in Zurich). International medical conferences occasionally debate his legacy in modern medicine. Other types—novelists, poets, psychologists, artists—continue to be inspired by his theories. Books like this one expanding his horizons beyond the sixteenth century occasionally appear and suggest that despite the foreign languages needed to understand Paracelsus and his world (Latin, German, Danish, Italian), the attraction to him continues. The strength of this anthology is its broad but simultaneously concrete construction of Paracelsian contexts. Nothing here is slipshod or superficial; everything is studied in original languages.

The twelve papers originated in a 1999 conference in St. Louis, Missouri. In the first section they deal with the figure himself; the configurations of Paracelsianism within Renaissance contexts; the parameters of medicine in his middle-European world; the diffusion of his ideas in Germany, Denmark, and England; the implications for gender of his work; and his role in developing theories of the Western body. A second section deals with his contemporaries and heirs—Pico della Mirandola, Rabelais, Robert Boyle, Johannes Praetorius, Athanasius Kircher—and Paracelsus's legacy in the realm of Renaissance paradoxical thought. Particularly engaging is Heinz Schott's essay on Paracelsus's theory of imagination: Schott lucidly demonstrates how the theory broadly pertained to mind and body, being and seeming, reality and illusion, and enabled the imagination to stamp itself on matter. The imagination as sign and signifier had a troubled trajectory in the early modern world that cannot be comprehended apart from Paracelsus. It is extraordinary, more generally, how many Paracelsian ideas endured into the Enlightenment and Romantic epochs without ever having been identified as Paracelsian.

The fact that Paracelsian Moments emanates from Kirksville, Missouri, is a tribute to the sponsoring group (Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies Series) and supporting academic institution (Truman State University). The variety of approaches is worthy of this extraordinary figure himself. Paracelsus redivivus would have had much to say about the state of the humanities today, polymathic or not. He could not have endorsed the parlous conditions, especially linguistic, found today in large pockets of American academia, where everything has been sold out to technological innovation without reflection on the long-term consequences. Happily though, humanistic approaches are still surviving in Kirksville, Missouri, if Paracelsian Moments is any indication. The book is a success, a collection I hope to consult for a long time.