Disreputable Bodies: Magic, Medicine, and Gender in Renaissance Natural Philosophy (review)

Sergius Kodera, who teaches philosophy at the University of Vienna, has compiled several of his previously published essays into a volume centered on the perceptions of the human body by Renaissance thinkers. Those thinkers had newly available classic texts to ponder as well as fresh technologies (such as distillation and surgery) and contemporary customs (like folk medicine). They conceived innovative metaphors for their discussions, most of which, however, echoed and emphasized the ancient misogyny of Aristotle and Plato. Premier among the transmitters and rejuvenators was the Florentine translator Marsilio Ficino (1433–99), influential among intellectuals for several generations and the subject of at least four of Kodera’s previously published articles.

Chapter 1 examines inconsistent characterization of matter in Aristotelian natural philosophy, particularly a passage in his Physics which draws a parallel between matter and a sexually aroused woman. That analogy transmuted in the Renaissance into a comparison of matter and a nymphomaniac female, reflecting “the ambivalent assessment of the physical world characteristic of many philosophers of the sixteenth century” (13). In Chapter 2, Kodera discusses the role of different mirrors that Neoplatonists believed altered the forms they caught rather than reflected. Mirrors, associated from time immemorial with women, became a useful metaphor in describing physical bodies as unreliable containers of divine forms. Ficino also linked deceptive body images to the myth of Narcissus, fooled by his own reflection, and recalled Aristotle’s insistence that menstruating women would bloody mirrors with their gaze.

The drinking of human blood occupies Kodera’s Ficino-centered Chapter 3. Though Galenic medicine often prescribed bloodletting, Ficino, whose works went through thirty editions in 150 years, argued that since blood animates bodies, it should not be lost through venesection. Indeed, drinking blood, as witches do, helps maintain youthfulness; even intercourse can be a guard against female aging, as sperm is “the purest and highest manifestation of blood” (123). He pointed as well to established folk tales about female vampires, the lamiae, who trafficked in life-giving blood. Chapter 4 focuses on Renaissance Neoplatonic dualistic ideas about the elemental world, for instance that air mediates between the opposing poles of fire and earth, light and darkness. Kodera suggests that the process of distillation encouraged this dualism, demonstrating that matter can exist in different outward appearances. He also reinforces his claim that instruments themselves (like mirrors and distilleries) shaped Renaissance ideas about nature itself. He credits Ficino with reshaping the Aristotelian doctrine of four elements into a series of concentric, rotating circles, and ultimately with condensing the four elements to three, the subject of a short Chapter 5. Ficino’s challenge to Aristotle was taken up by Bernardino Telesio (1508–88), a naturalist at the famed Cosentian Academy.

The final three chapters, six through eight, deal with challenges to conventional interpretations about the human body. The Portuguese-Jewish physician Leone Ebreo (1465–1523) denied the negative images of the physical world created by many Christians, instead positing that bodies should rank as the ultimate achievement of divine creation. Likewise, philosophers diverged widely on the applicability of Plato’s Symposium since it dealt with same-sex relationships in a positive light; Kodera asserts that these disagreements reflected the varied anthropologies and religious beliefs of scholarly readers. Lastly, polymath Giambattista Della Porta (1535–1615) examined surgical intervention and its effects on patients. Combining concern with the mental as well as the physical results of altering or embellishing the human body, he accepted the physiognomic principle that ugly people have bad souls, while asserting that surgery could modify and improve a person’s fate. His Metoposcopia (c. 1590) contains illustrations of over four hundred irregularities in humans, eighty-four of them presenting different facial birthmarks that to Della Porta were “second stars,” indicators of supernatural talents.

While the production values of Kodera’s book are generally sound, I found a strange error in his own introduction. He omits any mention of his Chapter 5 (“Three Elements instead of...