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  • Mandrake and Monarchy in Early Modern Spain
  • Emily Kuffner (bio)

In 1673 Tomás de Murillo y Velarde, a personal physician to the Spanish royal family, published a treatise on medicinal plants entitled Tratado de raras, y peregrinas yervas (Treaty on rare and migrating herbs). His ostensible purpose was to demonstrate the differences between the medicinal plant abrotano (Artemisia abrotanum), a species in the Asteracaea family, and its lesser variant bupthalmo (another species of Asteracaea) with, as the full title announces, "some annotations" on the subject of mandrake, a plant associated with love magic and fertility.1 Murillo's "annotations" are not an afterthought to his main text, as the title insists, but instead compose roughly half his narrative. Forty-five of his 126 pages address the uses of mandrake, which he claims cures infertility, and sections on mandrake and fertility-related topics appear in other portions of the treatise, particularly in the final chapters. Murillo promises the reader that "this plant has the virtue and effect … of making fecund and fertilizing what is sterile" (50r). This bold declaration departs from contemporary botanical treatises, such as vernacular translations and commentary on Dioscorides, whose descriptions of mandrake are generally short and mention its use as an aphrodisiac or fertility aid as one element among many uses; these treatises do not give fertility the prominence that Murillo does. This article explores Murillo's fascination with mandrake's potential as a fertility drug, a subject that he returns to repeatedly throughout the text, even in sections not ostensibly on mandrake.

Fertility was a subject of paramount consequence to the Habsburg court in which Murillo served. In 1665 King Philip IV of Spain died, leaving a sole legitimate son and heir, Charles II, who suffered a number of physical infirmities that would now be attributed to inbreeding.2 Following Philip's [End Page 335] death, his wife, Mariana of Austria, assumed the regency, a state of affairs that continued even after Charles reached the age of majority at fourteen. Despite two marriages, Charles II died childless in 1700, predeceased by all potential Habsburg successors. His death sparked the War of Spanish Succession (1701–14), after which the monarchy passed to the Bourbon line, ending Habsburg rule in Spain. Although marital negotiations were under way, Charles was merely thirteen years old when Murillo wrote, and therefore Murillo's attention to mandrake and its potential to cure infertility is not necessarily aimed at the monarch. The textual fixation on fertility more likely reveals a broader concern for the future of the Spanish state, which, as Murillo wrote, was under the leadership of a queen regent whose son was nearing the age of majority even as the king's illegitimate son, John Joseph of Austria, attempted to wrest influence over his half-brother from her.3 In this article, I examine Murillo's construction of a protonationalist relationship between Spanish herbal medicine and Spanish fertility, arguing that Murillo presents the science of botany as a masculine terrain that could not only cure infertility but also reinvigorate the empire. In doing so, Murillo endorses mandrake as a legitimate and theologically licit medicine despite its association with witchcraft and love magic, and he displaces anxiety about perceived Spanish decline onto concerns about gender and sexuality.4 Murillo expresses his impassioned defense of mandrake as a fertility drug using a series of female metaphors for Spain, promising a return to splendor through spiritual devotion and optimal use of Spanish herbs. [End Page 336]

In order to make this argument, I first introduce Murillo and the practice of botany in seventeenth-century Spain. I then turn to Murillo's remarks about mandrake. This plant was often sexualized and anthropomorphized, frequently depicted nude, and used as a fertility aid, as well as in love magic, a practice associated with women. Murillo's scholarly treatise seeks to distance mandrake from superstition and defend its use as a legitimate and theologically licit medicinal plant. In order to do so, he relies on humoral theories of the body and theological understandings of the harmony of nature. This background reveals that magical and medical uses of the plant often do not differ...

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