Cannibalism and contagion: Framing syphilis in Counter-Reformation Italy

Early Science and Medicine

Volumn 3, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 1-31

  Eamon, William ^a  

^a NEW MEXICO STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; CANNIBALISM; COMMUNICABLE DISEASE; FOOD; FRANCE; HISTORY; ITALY; RELIGION; SYPHILIS; WAR;

CANNIBALISM; CATHOLICISM; COMMUNICABLE DISEASES; FOOD; FRANCE; HISTORY, 15TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 16TH CENTURY; ITALY; RELIGION AND MEDICINE; SYPHILIS; WAR;

EID: 0031991894     PISSN: 13837427     EISSN: 15733823     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/157338298X00013     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (185)

1. Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, 2d ed. (New York, 1961), 73-4, 138;
2. J.N. Biraben, Les hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays européens et méditerranéans (Paris, 1976), 1-21;
3. Mirko D. Grmek, History of AIDS. Emergence and Origin of a Modem Pandemic (Princeton, 1990);
4. Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On. Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic (New York, 1987), 311-12.
5. Maureen Trudelle Schwarz, "The Explanatory and Predictive Power of History; Coping with the 'Mystery Illness'," Ethnohistory 42 (1995); 375-401.
6. Charles E. Rosenberg, "Framing Disease: Illness, Society, and History," in Explaining Epidemics and Other Studies in the History of Medicine (Cambridge, 1992), 305-18.
7. See also the essays in Social Construction of Illness, Illness and Medical Knowledge in Past and Present, ed. J. Lachmund and G. Stollberg (Stuttgart, 1992).
8. Ann Carmichael, Plague and the Poor in Medieval Florence (Cambridge, 1986);
9. Saul Nathan Brody, The Disease of the Soul. Leprosy in Medieval Literature (Ithaca, 1971);
10. Peter Richards, The Medieval Leper (Cambridge, 1977);
11. Michael Dols, "The Leper in Medieval Islamic Society," Speculum 58 (1983): 891-916; 912.
12. The debate on the origins of syphilis has continued almost unabated ever since the disease's first appearance in Europe. It is not my purpose here to argue the scientific merits of the New World origins theory versus other possibilities. A recent survey of the literature on the origins of syphilis demonstrates fairly conclusively that the Columbian theory best fits the available documentary, archeological, and medical evidence: Brenda J. Baker and George J. Armelagos, "The Origin and Antiquity of Syphilis: Paleopathological Diagnosis and Interpretation," Current Anthropology 29 (1988): 703-37.
13. In addition, see Iwan Bloch, Der Ursprung der Syphilis: Eine medizinische und kulturgeschichtliche Untersuchung, 2 vols. (Jena, 1910-1911);
14. Alfred W. Crosby, Jr., "The Early History of Syphilis: A Reappraisal," American Anthropologist 71 (1969): 218-27;
15. idem, The Columbian Exchange: Biological and Cultural Consequences of 1492 (Westport, Conn., 1972), 122-64;
16. Mirko D. Grmek, Diseases in the Ancient Greek World, trans. M. Muellner and L. Muellner (Baltimore, 1989), 133-51.
17. For a recent review of the medical issues involved, see the essays in Olivier Dutour, György Pálfi, Jacques Bérato and Jean-Pierre Brun, eds., L'origine de la syphilis en Europe: Avant ou après 1493? (Paris, 1994).
18. There are also useful essays in Guy Settipane, ed., Columbus and the New World: Medical Implications (Providence, 1995).
19. For a defense of the Old World theory, see Francisco Guerra, "The Dispute over Syphilis: Europe versus America," Clio Medica 13 (1978): 39-61.
20. Claude Quétel, History of Syphilis, trans. J. Braddock and B. Pike (Baltimore, 1990), 11-16.
21. The best study of syphilis in the Renaissance is Jon Arrizabalaga, John Henderson, and Roger French, The Great Pox: The French Disease in Renaissance Europe (New Haven and London, 1997).
22. For Italy, see A. Corradi, Nuovi documenti per la storia delta malattie veneree in Italia dalla fine del quattrocento alla metà del Cinquecento (Milan, 1884).
23. Quétel, History of Syphilis, 50-1.
24. Cf. Pietro Rostini, Traltato di mal francese (Venetia, 1565), 87.
25. On the bewilderment of the physicians in the face of the disease, see Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, 45-7.
26. For early writings on syphilis, see Karl Sudhoff, The Earliest Printed Literature on Syphilis, Monumenta Medica, III (Florence, 1925);
27. Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, chap. 4;
28. and Quétel, History of Syphilis, 25-6.
29. Quétel, History of Syphilis, 53-7;
30. Anna Foa, "The New and the Old: The Spread of Syphilis," in Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective, ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (Baltimore, 1990), 26-45.
31. Fracastoro told the story of a shepherd in Hispaniola named Syphilus, who offended Apollo by overturning his altars. To punish him, Apollo sent the venereal disease which inhabitants of the surrounding countryside named syphilis in memory of the first person to suffer from it. See Fracastoro's 'Syphilis': Introduction, Text, Translation and Notes, trans. Geoffrey Eatough (Liverpool, 1984).
32. In addition, see G. L. Hendrickson, "The 'Syphilis' of Girolamo Fracastoro," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 2 (1934): 515-46;
33. and Mary B. Campbell, "Fracastoro's De Syphilis and the Discovery of the New World," in Crossing Cultures: Essays in the Displacement of Western Civilization, ed. Daniel Segal (Tucson, 1992), pp. 3-32.
34. Bloch, Ursprung der Syphilis, 5:63-5;
35. cf. Rostini, Tratlato di mal francese, 9.
36. In addition to such vernacular names, physicians suggested a number of Latin names for the disease under the assumption that syphilis was not new but one of the ancient epidemics, such as elephantiasis, lichenas, ignis sacer, and ignis persicus, all identified in the sixteenth century as syphilis. See Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, chap. 4.
37. Foa, "The New and the Old," 39-40;
38. Wilfrid Schleiner, "Moral Attitudes toward Syphilis and Its Prevention in the Renaissance," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 68 (1994): 389-410.
39. Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo y Valdés, Hisloria general y natural de las Indias, ed. José Amador de los Rios (Madrid, 1851), 1:55.
40. Bartolomé de las Casas, Historia de las Indias, 5 vols. (Madrid, 1876), 5:349;
41. Richard Holcomb, "Ruy Diaz de Isla and the Haitian Myth of European Syphilis," Medical Life 43 (1936): 270-315.
42. Foa, "The New and the Old."
43. On the assimilation of the New World into European culture, see Anthony Grafton, with April Shelford and Nancy Siraisi, New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of the New (Cambridge, Mass., 1992);
44. Michael T. Ryan, "Assimilating New Worlds in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries," Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (1981): 519-38;
45. J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New, 1492-1650 (Cambridge, 1970).
46. On the changing medical marketplace in early modern Europe, see Katharine Park, Doctors and Medicine in Renaissance Florence (Princeton, 1985), chap. 3;
47. Harold J. Cook, The Decline of the Old Medical Regime in Stuart London (Ithaca, 1986), pp. 28-69;
48. Colin Jones, "The Great Chain of Buying: Medical Advertisement, the Bourgeois Public Sphere, and the Origins of the French Revolution," American Historical Review 101 (1996): 13-40.
49. On "charlatans" in early modern Italy, see Andrea Corsini, Medici ciarlatani e ciarlatani media (Bologna, 1922);
50. David Gentilcore, "'Charlatans, Mountebanks and Other Similar People': The Regulation and Role of Itinerant Practitioners in Early Modern Italy," Social History 20 (1995): 297-314;
51. William Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, 1995), chap. 7. I hope to document Fioravanti's influence and reputation in a forthcoming biography.
52. "Mi parti della mia dolce patria Bologna, solamenta con intentione di andare caminando il mondo per haver cognitione della natural filosofia," Il Tesoro della vita humana (Venice, 1570), 17v. This work contains Fioravanti's "medical autobiography."
53. On the Incurabili hospitals, see Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, chaps. 7-8;
54. and P. Cassiano da Lagnasco, Gli ospedali degli incurabili (Genoa, 1938).
55. Tesoro, 27r-v. Fioravanti says that in Palermo he was regarded as "un'altro Esculapio," 21v.
56. On the seige of Africa, see Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, 2 vols., trans. Siân Reynolds (New York, 1973), 2:907-11;
57. Horatio Nucula, Commentariorum de hello Aphrodisiensi libri quinque (Rome, 1552);
58. Pedro de Salazar, Historia de la guerra y presa de Africa (Naples, 1552);
59. P. Alberto Guglielmotti, La guerra dei pirati e la marina pontificia dal 1500 al 1560, 2 vols. (Florence, 1876), 2:183-243.
60. Leonardo Fioravanti, Capricci medicinali (Venice, 1582), 80v-81r.
61. Fioravanti had returned to Bologna in 1568 and received a medical degree from the Bologna Medical College. See Giuseppe A. Gentili, "Leonardo Fioravanti Bolognese alla luce di ignorati documenti," Revista di storia delle scienze 42 (1951): 16-41.
62. Archivio di Stato, Milan, Autograft, Medici, Carpetta 215, fasc. 15. The letter is published in Eugenio Dall'Osso, "Due lettere inedite di Leonardo Fioravanti," Rivista di storia (telle scienze mediche e naturali 47 (1956): 283-91, p. 288.
63. See also Nicola Latronico, "Una disawentura milanese di Leonardo Fioravanti," l'Ospedale mamore 29 (1941): 481-2.
64. Gianna Pomata, La frromessa di guarigione: Malati e curatori in antico regime (Bari, 1994), 133-4.
65. In addition, see Marie-Christine Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages, trans. Rosemary Morris (New Brunswick, 1990), 17-18. The Venetian archives reveal that the city's health board enforced this stipulation on numerous occasions; see, e.g., Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice, Ms. It. VII. 2342, 9v; Archivio di Stato, Venice (hereafter ASV), Proweditori alla Sanità, reg. 733 (1576-1577), c. 4; Museo Civico Correr, Veníce, Mariegola 209, vol. 1, Collegio di Speziali, c. 78. Barbers and surgeons were, on the other hand, routinely licensed to sell powders, unguents, and other remedies to be applied externally; e.g., ASV, Sanità, reg. 732, c. 9r-v (an unguent against rogna, 1574); reg. 733, c. 77v (a powder to cure worms, 1576); reg. 734 c. 99 (a petition by Zuan di Fiori for a privilege to sell "una polvera petfeta et miracolosa per il mal fransozo," 1578). For examples from Rome, see ASR, Camerale II, Sanità, b. 2, (Acta Prothomedici, 1547-1570).
66. Capricci medicinali, 48.
67. Fioravanti was not alone in contesting the New World origins theory. Indeed, there was strong resistance in the Renaissance even to the possibility of there being new diseases. The eighteenth-century physician Jean Astruc recorded a number ot fabulae that were advanced in the sixteenth century as explanations for syphilis, from Pietro Mainardi's claim that the disease resulted from the union of a Spanish prostitute and a leper to Antonio Musa Brasavola's attribution of the disease to a prostitute affected by a uterine absess. For other alternative accounts by contemporaries, see Foa, "The New and the Old," 39-40;
68. Quétel, History of Syphilis, 37-40;
69. and Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, chaps. 4-6.
70. Capricci medicinali, 49.
71. Capricci medicinali, 49v.
72. Capricci medicinali, 50v.
73. Capricci medicinali, 50v-51.
74. Capricci medicinali, 51.
75. Cf. Nicolas Monardes, La historia medicinal de las cosas que se tram de nuestras Indias Occidentales, intro. by Jose Maria Lopez Pinero (Madrid, 1989), 20v. (avellanas); 14v-19v (salsaparilla).
76. Edward Muir, "The Cannibals of Renaissance Italy," Syracuse Scholar 5 (1984): 5-14;
77. Anthony Pagden "Cannibalismo e contagio: Sull'importanza dell'antropofagia nell'Europa preindustriale," Quademi Storici 50 (1982): 533-50;
78. Frank Lestringant "Catholiques et cannibales. Le thème du cannibalisme dans le discours protestant au temps des guerres de religion," in Pratiques et discours alimentaires a la Renaissance, ed. Jean-Claude Margolin and Robert Sauzet (Paris, 1982), 233-45;
79. idem, "Le cannibale et ses paradoxes: Images du cannibalisme au temps des guerres de religion." Mentalités 1 (1983): 4-19.
80. Cronaca della città di Perugia dal 1492 al 1503, ed. Ariodante Fabretti, in Archivio storico italiano 16 (1851), parte II: 151.
81. Anthony Pagden, "The Forbidden Food: Francisco de Vitoria and José de Acosta on Cannibalism," Terrae Incognitae 13 (1981): 17-29, p. 20.
82. The incident is recounted in Rosario Villari, La rivolta antispagnola a Napoli. Le origini (1585-1647), (Bari, 1967), 44.
83. See also Muir, "The Cannibals of Renaissance Italy," 7-8.
84. Muir, "The Cannibals of Renaissance Italy."
85. Michel de Montaigne, "On Cannibals," in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. D. M. Frame (Stanford, 1958), 150-59, at 155.
86. The literature on the essay is quite large. Most helpful for my work has been David Quint, "A Reconsideration of Montaigne's Des cannibales", in Karen Ordahl Kupperman, ed. America in European Consciousness (Chapel Hill, 1995), 166-91.
87. Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975), 324n.100.
88. See also Lestringant, "Catholiques et cannibales";
89. Janet Whatley, "Food and the Limits of Civility: The Testimony of Jean Léry," Sixteenth Century Journal 15 (1984): 387-400.
90. Lewis A. M. Sumberg, "The 'Tafurs' and the First Crusade," Mediaeval Studies 21 (1959): 224-46.
91. This according to Rodulfus Glaber: Sumberg, "The 'Tafurs'," 245-6.
92. For other reports of medieval cannibalism, see Jill Tattersall, "Anthropophagi and Eaters of Raw Flesh in French Literature of the Crusade Period: Myth, Tradition and Reality," Medium Aevum 57 (1988): 240-53.
93. Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Delle navigationi et viaggi (Venice, 1535-37), 3:317.
94. Edwin Sandys, Sandys Travels (London, 1673), 186.
95. Francis Bacon, The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols. (London, 1857-1874), 2:348.
96. The French physician André du Laurens, writing in 1587, also reported hearing, from an old man in a hospital in Naples, the story that syphilis was caused by cannibalism during the famine that accompanied the French invasion. Arrizabalaga, Henderson, and French, The Great Pox, 268.
97. Carleton Gajdusek, "Unconventional Viruses and the Origin and Disappearance of Kuru," Science 197 (1977): 943-60.
98. Leonardo Fioravanti, Delia fisica (Venice, 1582), b2v.
99. Capricci medicinali, 31.
100. Capricci medicinali, 29-30.
101. Pietro and Ludovico Rostino, Compendio di lutta la cirurgia, ed. and amplified by Fioravanti (Venice, 1588), 169-70.
102. Caprici medicinali, 56: "il mal francese è un morbo corrotto, e putrido, i quale offende tutte le parti del corpo."
103. Schleiner, "Moral Attitudes toward Syphilis," 389-410.
104. Capricci medicinali, 51v.
105. On the ancient Empiricist school, see Sidney M. Edelstein, "Empiricism and Skepticism in the Teaching of the Greek Empiricist School," in Ancient Medicine, ed. O. Temkin and C. L. Temkin (Baltimore, 1967), 195-204;
106. G. E. R. Lloyd, Revolutions of Wisdom. Studies in the Claims and Practices of Ancient Greek Science (Berkeley 1987), 158-65.
107. Leonardo Fioravanti, Del compendio de i secreti medicinali (Venice, 1564), 26.
108. Ludwig Fleck, Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact, ed. T. J. Trenn and R. K. Merton, trans. F. Bradley and T.J. Trenn (Chicago, 1979), 38.
109. Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology (Cambridge, 1982), 80-7;
110. John H. Moffitt and Santiago Sabastián, O Brave New People: The European Invention of the American Indian (Albuquerque, 1996);
111. Michael Palencia-Roth, "Cannibalism and the New Man of Latin America in the 15th- and loth-Century European Imagination," Comparative Civilizations Bulletin 1 (1985): 1-27.
112. Donald W. Forsyth "Three Cheers for Hans Staden; The Case for Brazilian Cannibalism," Ethnohistory 32 (1985): 17-35;
113. John Hemming, Red Gold: The Conquest of the Brazilian Indians (Cambridge, 1978), 31-4, 91.
114. On the controversy over the historical accuracy of New World cannibalism, see: William Arens, The Man-Eating Myth (Cambridge/New York, 1979);
115. Donald W. Forsyth, "Three Cheers";
116. idem, "The Beginnings of Brazilian Anthropology: Jesuits and Tupinamba Cannibalism," Journal of Anthropological Research 39 (1983): 147-78.
117. Ramusio, Navigationi et viaggi, 3:51v.
118. Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, pp. 80-9;
119. idem, "Forbidden Food." Girolamo Manfredi, in his popular Il Perche, noted that no other food is more familiar or more conformable to the human body than human flesh
120. "were it not for the abomination that nature has for eating it." Libro intitolato Il Perche (Venezia, 1591), 15.
121. Cannibalism was by no means the only vice Europeans attributed to the Indians. Man-eating was but the most shocking of a catalog of depravities that supposedly made up the American character. The Indians were also condemned for their superstitious nature, for their cruelty, and for being sodomites, polyga-mists, and incorrigible Hers, while their supposed sexual wantoness was legendary. See Moffitt and Sabastian, O Brave New People, 273-5.
122. Moffitt and Sabastián, O Brave New People, 275.
123. Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, 177.
124. Rosario Romeo, Le scoperte americane nella coscienza italiana del Cinquecento (Bari, 1989) 85-99;
125. Giuseppe Bellini, "La scoperta del Nuovo Mondo e la culture italiana del Cinquecento," in La scoperta colombiana e la cultura Europea contempora-nea (Palermo, 1992).
126. Perhaps the most influential Italian work on the discoveries was Ramusio's Navigationi et viaggi, a collection of the writings of Spanish and Portugese voyagers to America. On Ramusio, see Antonio del Piero, Delia vita e degli studi di Gio. Battista Ramusio (Venice, 1902);
127. and more recently, Marica Milanesi, "Giovanni Battista Ramusio e le 'Navigationi e viaggi' (1550-1559)," in L'epopea dette scoperte, ed. Renzo Zorzi, Civiltà Veneziana, Saggi, 40 (Venice, 1994), 75-101. Works by Oviedo, de las Casas, López de Gomara, and other Spanish voyagers were also available in Italian.
128. On the political and moral significance of Fioravanti's therapeutics, see William Eamon, "'With the Rules of Life and an Enema': Leonardo Fioravanti's Medical Primitivism," in Renaissance and Revolution: Humanists, Scholars, Craftsmen, and Natural Philosophers in Early Modern Europe, ed. J. V. Field and F. A. J. L. James (Cambridge, 1993), 29-44.
129. Fioravanti wrote, concerning the healing properties of the herb gratia dei (Gratiola officinalis, a violent purgative which is toxic in large doses), "a mere scruple of the powder of this plant causes much vomiting and unburdening of nature, ⋯ therefore it has great virtue against those who are possessed, because it cleans the stomach and body so thoroughly of corruption that nothing wicked can remain within." He goes on to say, "I remember reading an author who said, and proved by reason, that evil spirits and worms cannot remain anywhere clean and pure, and for this reason the possessed are always made to vomit." La cirugia (Venice, 1570), 63-4.
130. Capricci medicinali, 237v-238;
131. Dello specchio di scientia universale (Venice, 1572), 140-45;
132. and Fioravanti's audacious letter to the duke of Ferrara, Archivio di Stato, Modena, Archivio per materie, Medici, b. 19 (95), described in Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature, 180.
133. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (New York, 1973), 93-112; p. 93.
134. See also idem, Purity and Danger (London, 1966), esp. ch. 7, pp. 114-28.
135. Dorothy Nelkin and Sander L. Gilman, "Placing Blame for Devastating Disease," Social Research 55 (1988): 362-78.
136. Foa, "The New and the Old," 35-7.
137. Gabrielle Falloppio accused the Spanish of intentionally chasing prostitutes into the French camp; Grafton, New Worlds, Ancient Texts, 181.
138. Delia fisica, 302.
139. On the European "discovery" of the shaman, see Carlo Ginzburg, "Gli Europei scoprono (o riscoprono) gli sciamani," in L'epopea delle scoperte, 395-414.
140. Pagden, Fall of Natural Man;
141. Margaret Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia, 1964).
142. For the limitations of Montaigne's supposed proto-anthropological view in Des cannibales, see Gérard Defaux, "Un Cannibale en haut de chausses: Montaigne, la différence et la logique de l'identité, " Modem Language Notes 97 (1982): 919-57.
143. While visiting Spain in 1576, he came across Nicholas Monardes's La historia medicinal de las cosas que se traen de nuestras Indias Occidentales, which he cites repeatedly in Delia fisica. But Fioravanti's interest in the New world is evident from his earliest writings. See, in particular, Delia fisica, 56-58 (experiments on tobacco), 307-10, 352.
144. On the kidnapping and "collecting" of New World Indians, see Christian F. Feest, "The Collecting of American Indian Artifacts in Europe, 1493-1750," in Kupperman, ed., America in European Consciousness, 324-60;
145. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago, 1991), 106-8, 112-14.
146. The essays in Christian F. Feest, ed., Indians and Europe (Aachen, 1987) are also helpful, although none deal specifically with Spain.
147. See Eamon, "'With the Rules of Life and an Enema'."
148. Allen Grieco, "La gastronomia del XVI secolo: Tra scienza e cucina," in Et coquatur ponendo: Cultura delta cucina e della tavola in Europa tra medioevo ed età moderna (Prato, 1996), 143-54.
149. A. D. Wright attributes this "Manichean" conception of the world to a revival of Augustinianism in late-medieval and early modern Europe, thus tracing it back to Augustine's own Manichaean background; The Counter-Reformation: Catholic Europe and the Non-Christian World (New York, 1982), 41-2.
150. See also H. Outram Evennett, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation (Cambridge, 1968).
151. On the Counter-Reformation and science, see William B. Ashworth, Jr., "Catholicism and Early Modern Science," in God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter between Christianity and Science, ed. David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers (Berkely, 1988) 136-66;
152. Pietro Redondi, Galileo Heretic (Princeton, 1987);
153. William Eamon, "Natural Magic and Utopia in the Cinquecento: Campanella, the Delia Porta Circle, and the Revolt of Calabria," Memorie Domenicane n.s. 26 (1995); 369-402.
154. John Bossy, "The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe," Past and Present 47 (1070): 51-70.
155. For the Tridentine Church's efforts at social disciplining, see Paolo Prodi and Carla Penuti, eds., Disciplina dell'anima disciplina del corpo e disciplina delia società ira medioevo ed età moderna (Bologna, 1994);
156. William Hudon, "Religion and Society in Early Modern Italy-Old Questions, New Insights," American Historical Review 101 (1996) 783-804.
157. In addition, see Mary O'Neil, "Magical Healing: Love Magic and the Inquisition in Late Sixteenth-Century Modena," in Inquisition and Society in Early Modern Europe, ed. Stephen Haliczer, (Totowa, N.J., 1967) 88-114.
158. Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1978).
159. For Borromeo's reforms in Milan, see Ferdinando Taviani, ed., La Commedia dell'arte e la società barocca. La fascinazione del teatro, La Commedia dell'arte: Storia e testi documenti, vol. I. (Rome, 1970), 3-43.
160. Pietro Castelli, Emetica, in qua agitur de vomitu et vomitoriis (Rome, 1634), 1.
161. Zefiriele Tomaso Bovio, Flagello contro dei Medici communi detti Rationali, in Opere di Zefiriele Tomaso Bovio (Venice, 1626), 4, 52
162. "scaccio il male, sostento la natura." On Bovio, see Alfonso Ingegno, "Il Medico de' disperati e abbandonati; Tommaso Zeffiriele Bovio (1521-1609) tra Paracelso e l'alchimia del seicento," in Cultura populare e cultura dotta nel seciento (Milan, 1985), 164-74;
163. and Antonio Dal Fiume, "Un Medico astrologo a Verona nel '500: Tommaso Zefiriele Bovio," Critica storia, 20 (1983) 32-59.
164. On the ideological implications of these empiricist practices, see Eamon, "'With the Rules of Life and an Enema'."
165. Rosenberg, Explaining Epidemics, 12.
166. See also Colin Jones, "Plague and Its Metaphors in Early Modern Europe," Representations 53 (1996): 97-127.
167. Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Renaissance Medicine. An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago, 1990), 104-6. This is not to gainsay that purgatives were occasionally prescribed in Galenic medicine; but the frequency with which Fioravanti and other empirics used such remedies is one of the characteristics that distinguishes them from the orthodox practitioners.
168. Charles E. Rosenberg, "The Therapeutic Revolution: Medicine, Meaning, and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America," in Explaining Epidemics, 9-31.
169. Rosenberg's findings suggest that this style of therapeutics was especially characteristic of the "everyman's guides" to medicine, such as Gunn's Domestic Health, or Poor Man's Friend (1830) by John Gunn of Knoxville, Tennessee. The parallels between Fioravanti's practice and that of Gunn are striking, suggesting a continuity of vernacular healing traditions going back to the sixteenth century. See Rosenberg, "John Gunn: Everyman's Physician," in Explaining Epidemics, 57-73.
170. A similar therapeutical approach was taken by the eighteenth century empiric and ciarlatano Buonafede Vitali. See Michelangelo Ferraro, Scienza, retorica e mito di un medico ciarlatano: Buonafede Vitali (1686-1745), Tesi di Laurea, Università degli Studi di Bologna (1994-95).
171. Capricci medicinali, 53-54.
172. Piero Camporesi, Bread of Dreams. Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe, trans. D. Gentilcore (Chicago, 1980) 151-62. Fioravanti recalled causing forty-three "large and small" worms to be expelled from an eleven year old boy in Rome. Tesoro, 75v-76.
173. Filippo Arcioni of Viterbo wrote that after taking a dose of Fioravanti's dia aromatica, "there came over me a vomit so great that I vomited the meal along with ten pounds of choler and phlegm. And among other things, I threw up a worm with a hairy cap as long as a palm and a half, a marvelous thing to behold. And immediately I began to get much better." Tesoro, 103v. Cf. Antonio Benivieni, De abditis nonnullus ac mirandis morborum et sanationem causis, trans. C. Singer (Springfield, 111., 1954), 21-3, 167.
174. For the parallel between exorcism and contemporary healing practices, see Mary O'Neill, "Magical Healing";
175. Peter Burke, "Rituals of Healing in Early Modern Italy," in The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge, 1987), 207-20;
176. Piero Camporesi, The Incorruptible Flesh. Bodily Mutation and Mortification in Religion and Folklore, trans. Tania Croft-Murray (Cambridge, 1988), 1234, 164-8;
177. Eamon, "With the Rules of Life and an Enema'";
178. David Gentilcore, "The Church, the Devil and the Healing Activities of Living Saints in the Kingdom of Naples after the Council of Trent," in Medicine and the Reformation, ed. Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham, (London and New York, 1993), 134-55, pp. 135-6.
179. On diseases caused by demons, see Francesco Maria Guazzo, Compendium malleficarum (1608), trans. E. A. Ashwin (New York, 1988), 105-11.
180. Menghi, Girolamo, Compendia dell'arte essorcistica (Venetia, 1605), 129.
181. On Menghi, see Giovanni Romeo, Inquisitori, esorcisti e streghe nell'Italia della Controriforma (Florence, 1990).
182. Florian Canale, Del modo di conoscere et sanare i maleficiati (Brescia, 1614), 25.
183. Douglas, Natural Symbols, 93-112.
184. On disease as metaphor, see Susan Sontag, Disease as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors (New York, 1990).
185. On the image of Native Americans as threatening, embodied mainly in accounts of atrocities inflicted on Europeans, see Moffitt and Sebastian, O Brave New People, 287-9, 302-17.