Meravigliosi ragni danzanti. Interpretazioni del tarantismo nel Seicento ed. by Manuel de Carli (review)

The rich and encompassing approach of this book aims to shed light on the multifaceted phenomenon of tarantism, a mass psychogenic illness causing fits of dancing, through considerations of the debates which arose around it in the seventeenth century. This is an historical overview of the thought of several personalities regarding the question of tarantism, across the scientific and humanistic community of the 1600s. In the process, the book investigates the common grounds and ontological roots uniting various disciplines, such as medicine, philosophy, literature, astrology, and alchemy.

The core topic of Meravigliosi ragni danzanti is the evidence of an interdisciplinary tradition—spanning history, sociology, ethnology, anthropology, and philosophy—within which the history and interpretations of one of the more sensational phenomena both in the Italian collective consciousness and in the cultural folklore of the country were debated. Tarantism likely assumed its unique features thanks to its climatic and geographical setting, broadly speaking the whole of southern Europe, but certainly manifested most dramatically in Apulia.

This work is organized into seven chapters, each dedicated to one European scholar of the seventeenth century. These scholars of tarantism are presented and examined by experts: Giovanni Battista della Porta (1535–1615) by Donato Verardi, Tommaso Campanella (1568–1639) by Maurizio Cambi, Epifanio Ferdinando (1569–1638) by Adele Spedicati, Athanasius Kircher (1602–1680) by Silvia Parigi, Wolferd Senguerd (1646–1724) by Manuel De Carli, Antonio Muscettola (1628–1679) by Marco Leone, and Giorgio Baglivi (1668–1707) by Gabriella Sava. Collectively, they form the cornerstones of an international network of scholarly dialogue and research, conceptual and empirical knowledge. The connections between these scholars were established in private libraries, where texts were passed around and ideas were confronted, interacting with each other. While the spatial and temporal details of the debate provide important context in these studies, perhaps more important are the key concepts and patterns presented throughout the collected papers.

One of the shared conceptual motifs in this work is the opposition between the occult and the manifest, especially in the studies of Della Porta (17–45), Campanella (47–81), Ferdinando (85–118), Kircher (121–64), and Senguerd (149–81). This dichotomy refers to the account of the occult by the Peripatetic school, still very much trending in the seventeenth century, to which were ascribed those qualities susceptible neither to the senses nor to the human intellect. This was a common but not universal framework used for the analysis of tarantism. While some natural historians, such as Senguerd and Baglivi (221–28), relied on philosophico-scientific axioms of mechanistic-corpuscular inspiration (closer to Descartes and Bacon) and therefore saw no use in the category of the occult, the physician Epifanio Ferdinando, on the other hand, accepted the theorization of occult matters from an Aristotelian-Galenian perspective. In addition to the question of "mechanism," this dichotomy between the occult and the manifest could be found in the theoretical, conceptual, and empirical work on hypothetical cures for the condition. A question that is particularly central in the book regards the interpretation of the therapeutic tools against tarantism as operational within either the realm of magical rituality or of scientific practice. A paramount example of this is the supposed therapeutic power of music. In essence, the idea that the symptoms were expressed in the agitated bodily movements and stimulated by the external agent (spider's venom) became a central subject of discussion in many fields. Initially, the connection between the body and the spirit was debated, including the question of how spider venom could come to affect the victim's animus. Later, immaterial links between the spirit of the animal and the spirit of the victim were hypothesized, in ways that might depend on certain circumstances, periods of time, climatic variables, or the patient's feelings. The symptoms were eventually understood with the help a broader social analysis of the phenomenon, and were particularly attributed to the lower classes in the society...