Soixante-trois: la peur de la grande année climactérique à la Renaissance par Max Engammare (review)

This interesting book follows the fortunes in the Renaissance of the idea that the sixty-third year of life — the grand climacteric — is particularly critical. Climacteric years were multiples of seven or nine, so sixty-three (the product of seven and nine) was usually considered especially dangerous, threatening great changes to the body or the soul, and hence illness and even death. Max Engammare tracks the idea of the climacteric year from its rebirth in the final third of the fifteenth century, through to its gaining of momentum in the final third of the sixteenth, and then its decline in the mid-seventeenth century. Climacteric years are investigated in a wide range of domains — lexicography, astrology, medicine, history, literature, politics, and theology — and in writers as diverse as Marsilio Ficino, Rabelais, François de La Noue, and Simon Goulart. While, in accordance with the sources from Antiquity (Pliny the Elder, Aulus Gellius, Censorinus, Julius Fermicus), climacteric years primarily affected human bodies, bodies politic could also be vulnerable, as indeed could the world itself. Jean Bodin, in his Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (1566) and Les Six Livres de la République (1576), explained that bodies politic were especially at risk in climacteric years; later, as a ligueur, Bodin modified this idea so that it could be employed to justify the death of the sixty-third king of France. The Danish Lutheran Heinrich Rantzau, the author in 1576 of one of the first treatises on the climacteric year, described 1588 and 1589 as climacteric years in which the entire world might be subject to ‘une fatale mutation’ (p. 171 n. 225). Soixante-trois focuses, however, on the anxiety occasioned by particular years of human life, which affected even Genevan theologians. Calvinist theology, with its emphasis on Providence, encouraged the Christianization of climacteric years, that is as Simon Goulart explained, every year could be considered climacteric because it is in God’s hands. Furthermore, Engammare suggests, theologians such as Goulart and Théodore de Bèze might have been expected to face death with nothing but tranquillity. However, rendered especially vulnerable by the interest in Protestant circles in astrology and hermetic signs, they were anxious about the sixty-third year in their own lives and in the lives of others. Engammare’s ordering of material is sometimes surprising, not least the fact that the discussion of Ficino is reserved for the final chapter, even though the author asserts that it was Ficino (rather than Petrarch) who was primarily responsible for the rebirth of the climacteric year. Soixante-trois proceeds by the descriptions of key individual texts, which contain a rich wealth of detail, although a greater drawing together of broader trends would have been helpful. For general conclusions the reader should turn to the penultimate section, ‘Les Lecteurs de Ficin et de Firmicus Maternus’ (which, contrary to expectations, does not argue that writers on climacteric years were influenced by these authors in particular). Engammare’s wide-ranging survey of the grand climacteric should be of interest to both general and specialist readers.