Arielle Saiber
In this period in the Western world, literature and science were aligned in many questions and struggles. How do I disseminate my work (or keep it secret, as the case may be)? Should I write in Latin or the vernacular; should I follow the style and content of the “ancients” or the “moderns”? Does my work teach properly? How do I reconcile what I observe in the natural world and in human nature with Church doctrine? Is my “new” idea a discovery of what was already there/ known, or an invention? If I can invent, is the “new” a good thing, or dangerous? Is the contemplative life of scholarship (vita contemplativa) as important to society as the active life (vita activa) of civic duty? Does my work reflect the ideal proportions and harmonies – a Pythagorean/Platonic harmonia mundi – I see (or wish to see) around me? How do I present my work such that it pleases a patron and garners support? Why not say what I want to, how I want to?
When thinking about the links between literature and science in these centuries, a good place to start is with Martianus Capella’s fifth-century treatise on the liberal arts, De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii. A reasonable place to end is with the first decades of the 1500s, before Copernicus literally turns the world on its head with his De revolutionibus orbium coelestium in 1543 and Vesalius revolutionizes anatomical study with his De humani corporis fabrica in that same year. This is the period in which the arts and sciences began to become the disciplines we know today, developing subfields, new literary genres, and countless new technologies; when (beginning in the eighth century) Islamic learning migrated to Europe and contributed significantly to scientific and literary thought; when schools moved out of the Church and into studia, universities, as well as court workshops (even though the Church’s hand in controlling the production and dissemination of knowledge continued to be fierce); when transmission of information took a revolutionary leap with the advent of the printing press; when the “new world” was discovered and ignited literary and scientific imaginations and study; and when new technologies led to increased global trade and enlarged markets, the development of banking, a growing merchant class, an augmented pool of educated people, and men (and a few women) of learning being celebrated for their genius and virtuosity. The sciences and the arts were building their identities, and, to a great extent, they did so in step and in dialogue with one another. The very richness of their conversation marks this period of Western history as remarkable.
The trajectory of science from the Middle Ages through the Renaissance can be – and nowadays is, more frequently than not – seen as a continuity and precursor to later scientific developments. A similar trajectory can be traced in the history of literature. The energy devoted to the recovery, assimilation, commentary, translation, and promulgation of earlier authorities in both literature and science was accompanied by empirical and experimental work in the sciences, and active re-examination and reinterpretation of established sources in both science and literature. What is more, as we shall see, both fields had major shifts in thinking about the world and the self.
“Science,” scientia, in this period generally referred to “theoretical knowledge” of the physical world (sapientia was knowledge of the metaphysical, divine world). Debates around the Aristotelian distinction between scientia quia (knowledge of the fact) and scientia propter quid (knowledge through the cause) characterized scientia throughout the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. It even questioned its ultimate purpose as ancillary to theology, how much God wished to reveal to our minds, and when to use faith instead of Aristotelian syllogistic reasoning in thinking about the natural and divine worlds. “Art,” ars, on the other hand, was practiced or applied (and more refined than the craftsman’s technê). Both scientia and ars were part of “natural philosophy.” Medicine, for example, would have been considered a science and an art, because it required both theoretical knowledge and skill (surgery, on the other hand, was considered primarily a trade). Other fields of inquiry, such as mnemonics, alchemy, astrology, and magic were most often called arts, but in many contexts they were also thought of as sciences (not, as has been ascribed to them by some, as pseudo-sciences), and as part of natural philosophy.
“Literature” comprised not only epic, romance, love lyric, comic verse, short prose works, drama, and the like, but much religious, political, and philosophical writing. Generally, a work of “high” literature would have been penned for the educated elite, and often in Latin; “low” would have been designated for the masses, often in the vernacular, and often recited or performed, especially in the Middle Ages. Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) and other authors began to challenge these norms with new ideas about the nature and purpose of literature. However, the general acceptance of the vernacular in works of high literature as well as science happened slowly. The reasons for this are many, such as low literacy rates; feudal culture’s lack of a merchant middle class (although by the fifteenth century this class begins to emerge with court culture) educated and rich enough to afford hand-copied books; the elite’s desire to keep learning for the educated few; and an innumerable number of regional dialects that made Latin – the lingua franca – a much more sensible choice for communicating to an audience beyond one’s province. What is more, the writer of any text – literary or scientific, in Latin or in the vernacular – was informed, and often constrained, by other factors, such as the Church’s tight control of all circulating information through censorship and various edits, and the scholastic interpretations of Aristotle and a select group of ancient sources that dominated the day.
Let us turn to some examples of the conversations between literature and science, noting the strikingly similar issues with which both grappled in this 1,000-year period. We will look at the following major categories: liberal arts and the encyclopedia; mathematics; astrology/astronomy; physics and technology; medicine; and natural history. The sciences/arts of magic, alchemy, and music will be referred to only in passing. Readers will note a majority of Italian sources referenced. This is due to the extraordinary amount of production from the Italian peninsula in these centuries, but also to the author’s area of expertise.
As we know from a liberal arts education today, in the ideal curriculum courses are balanced between the arts and sciences. Scholars since antiquity have been in favor of this. Martianus Capella’s fifth-century De Nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii shows us the dominant disciplinary categories in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance. The text itself is written like an allegory, recounting the courtship and betrothal of Mercury, the fleet-footed god of commerce, eloquence, literature (and other things), to Philology, the studious lover of words. At the wedding, Philology’s seven handmaidens – Grammar, Rhetoric, Logic, Geometry, Arithmetic, Astronomy, and Music – each give a long monologue on the nature of their art. Capella uses beautiful and complex language for these descriptions, as well as revealing some misunderstandings of the workings of the arts. Flourishes and flaws aside, for centuries the text was the primary source for structuring curricula, with the first three “verbal” disciplines of the trivium and the following four “quantitative” ones of the quadrivium, comprising the seven liberal arts.
Capella did not invent this categorization. The Pythagoreans are thought to have been the first to have designated the four quantitative arts of the quadrivium (see Proclus’s commentary on Euclid’s Elements, Bk. I), although the term “quadrivium” arose much later, in Boethius (see De arithmetica I.i). The trivium would be given its name a few centuries later. Before one could go on to study higher disciplines – such as medicine, law, philosophy, or (especially) theology – he had to be trained in the arts of a “free” (liber) man. And whether he was studying in a monastery, cathedral school, or university, these arts were the building blocks. Many were the debates, however, about which of the arts should be studied first (especially intense were discussions over whether logic or geometry should come first), but most agreed that all seven served one another. Learning grammar, for example, would help one to learn arithmetic, and vice versa. Medieval study of the arts was known, in fact, as the circulares disciplina or the encyclius, implying a united “circle of disciplines.”
The belief that intellectual knowledge reflected divine knowledge and that it should (and could) be catalogued was the foundation of the encyclopedia. Massive tomes by thinkers such as Isidore of Seville, Brunetto Latini, and Vincent of Beauvais included entries on topics ranging from rainbows to rhetorical tropes. Isidore (c. 560–636), archbishop of Seville and prolific writer of theological and natural philosophy treatises, is considered the first of the great medieval encyclopedists. His Etymologies, a twenty-book text that endured for centuries, served as a source of great knowledge and authority, even if many of the etymological glosses – while often suggestive and fascinating – were fanciful and false. The chapters expounded on topics ranging from the liberal arts, medicine, Roman law, and the calendar, to elements of Christian doctrine, kinds of heresy, the Roman and Greek gods, languages, family, mythological monsters, animals, weather, architecture, mineralogy, agriculture, weaponry, military strategies, sports, food, and crafts. Isidore (and other classical, medieval, and Renaissance thinkers) believed that understanding the root of a word would help one understand the essence of the thing to which the word referred.
The three books of Latini’s Li livres dou Trésor (mid-1260s) comprised nearly 500 chapters. Book I covers the greatest number of topics, and it is this book that makes the Trésor one of the first scientific works in any vernacular. Similar to medieval bestiaries are descriptions such as the one for the basilisk, “so full of venom that it gleams on the outside; but its sight and its smell carry the venom far and near, and through this it spoils the air and destroys the trees. With its odor it kills birds in flight; and with its sight it kills men when it sees them” (I.140: 109). More lengthy and didactic are entries such as “How the world is round, and how the four elements are established” (I.104: 64–66) and “How one should choose land for cultivation” (I.125: 98–101). Many entries include stories or legends, such as the one in which “a child from Campania raised a dolphin on bread for a long time, and made him so tame that he could ride on his back, and finally the dolphin carried him out to sea, and there the child drowned, and finally the dolphin let itself die when it saw that the child was dead” (I.134: 106–7).
Vincent’s Speculum Maius is a mammoth thirteenth-century summa numbering eighty books and nearly 10,000 chapters. It was considered the greatest (and largest) encyclopedia until the eighteenth century. The Speculum was originally divided into two parts, one on the natural world and one on history since Creation (later Vincent added one on the arts and sciences, and later still, a fourth volume was added by an unknown author). The Naturale covered all matter of natural philosophy known in Europe at the time. The Doctrinale discussed philosophy, all the liberal arts, medicine, rhetoric and poetics, economics (in the sense of maintaining one’s estate), and more. Vincent, like Isidore and Latini, mixed verifiable information with superstitious tales, legends, and myths, and this is what makes medieval encyclopedias so fascinating for discussions of literature and science. Modern scientific method had yet to be outlined, and understanding the natural world happened through weaving observed data and experiment with earlier authorities, Church doctrine, hearsay, aesthetic ideals, and the imagination.
The universe itself was thought to be an encyclopedic book, “bound by love into a single volume,” as Dante would say in the Commedia (Par. XXXIII, 86), with God as the author, the bookbinder, and the glue. Dante’s fourteenth-century Commedia, too, is often considered a work of encyclopedia scope, filled with medieval science and arts. Encyclopedia building continued through the Renaissance, aided by philology. Giorgio Valla, who was the first to translate Aristotle’s Poetics into Latin, produced the forty-nine-book De expetendis et fugiendis rebus of 1501, which included the first printed translations of fragments from Apollonius, Archimedes, Hero, and many other classical mathematicians.
The question of how to have all knowledge, both knowable and known, was linked to other metaphysical questions, such as that of seeing the macrocosm in the microcosm (and vice versa). These were not only theological and philosophical musings, but concerns for natural philosophers and writers of literature who described the natural world. Words were thought to hold great power, and had to be utilized with care. Nominalists such as William of Ockham contemplated the problem of how words “mean” and denote entities in the real world. Others, such as Erasmus, were more interested in questions of copia and varietas, that is, how to enrich one’s language and modes of describing the world and ideas. A fascination with Hebrew, hieroglyphics, and kabbalist theories about language also spread throughout Christian Europe, interesting great minds such as Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Johann Reuchlin, and Cornelius Agrippa. In these centuries, the many powers within and endowed by language led readers to study closely classical treatises on rhetoric (Cicero and Quintilian). They wove them tightly with theories of dialectic, and used them for exegeses not only of the text (the Bible), but of all texts, as well as of the natural world. The personification of dialectic, interestingly, was often depicted with a scorpion in one hand and a frond in the other, showing language’s ability to sting or to yield blossoms; or alternately, the ability to yield blossoms through the use of a pointed sting.
Of all the liberal arts, Capella gives geometry the honor of being the “most learned and generous,” and the mistress of the other six (vol. II: 272). Onto her robe are woven numbers and measurements, outlines of the planetary orbits, and the dark purplish hue of the earth’s shadow upon the golden orb of the sun. In singing the praises of Lady Geometry, Capella calls her the offspring of mythological architect Daedalus, and superior to Apelles and Polyclitus in their respective arts of painting and sculpture. Plato, it has been said, had an inscription over the doorway to his Academy stating that anyone ignorant of geometry should not enter. In Plato’s Timaeus, geometric forms were the fundamental building blocks of the universe (53c–55c). With Capella, geometry’s image as architect, artist, geographer, and guide-extraordinaire of the other arts is established for the Middle Ages. God himself comes to be portrayed as holding a compass or calipers: a fabrica mundi “disposing all things,” as described in the Bible, “according to measure and number and weight” (Song of Sol. 11:21; Prov. 8:27–28).
A few centuries after Capella, Dante fuses geometry with poetry in his Vita Nuova (1292). Here, Love says to the bleary-eyed, long-suffering Dante that He (that is, Love) is the “center of a circle to which all points of the circumference are equidistant, and you [Dante] are not.” This idea may have been seeded in Dante’s mind from an earlier geometric definition of God, perhaps of ancient origin (Empedocles is often cited as a possible source) and in the air at the time; or from Alain de Lille in his Regulae theologicae (see the sermon De sphaera intelligibili); or perhaps from a twelfth-century pseudo-hermetic manuscript, Liber viginti quattuor philosophorum,as“God is a sphere of which the center is everywhere and the circumference is nowhere” (Def. II). For the medieval mind, God was seen as an eternity and the origin point of space and time; the point from which “all the heavens hang” (Dante, Commedia, Par. 28, 41–42).
Geometry, for the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, is emblematic of the interconnectedness between the arts and sciences – its debt to logic, which all proofs use, is evident – as well as central to philosophical and theological reasoning and imagery. A mere glance at both medieval gothic and Renaissance neo-classical architecture, with their strict proportions and symmetries – rose windows and spires in the Middle Ages and parallel lines and domes (elliptical and spherical) in the Renaissance – makes this clear. The presence of religious poetry reflecting geometric shapes, technopaegnia (see, for example, Hrabanus Maurus’s poems), further reinforces this connection.
At the end of the fourtheenth century and throughout the fifteenth century, the Italian humanists brought previously lost or unknown ancient mathematical works to the fore, treatises by Archimedes, Pappus, Apollonius, Hero, and Diophantus, as well as Euclid’s books on number theory (VII–IX) and solid geometry (X–XIII) – treatises which became part of both the humanist library and the mathematician’s repertoire. Powerful patrons like Cardinal Bessarion and the Farnese in Rome, the Medici in Florence, the Dukes of Urbino, and popes Pius II, Nicholas V, and Marcellus II encouraged the seeking out, translating, and printing of ancient works. Humanists Coluccio Salutati, Pier Paolo Vergerio, and Angelo Poliziano believed mathematics (especially geometry) crucial for training orators, writers, and philosophers. The overlapping use of terms such as permutatio, conversio, disjunctio in both geometric proofs and rhetorical figures was not lost on these scholars.
While mathematicians across medieval and early Renaissance Europe used some forms of abbreviation and notation for mathematical operations, symbolic conventions did not formally develop until the end of the sixteenth century. Most problems and solutions were written in words, and read, in a certain sense, like word problems. Occasionally, one even finds them written in verse. Mathematician Niccolò Tartaglia (1499–1557), for example, wrote the solution to an equation for the cubic as a poem. Tartaglia says that the fourteen lines in terza rima served to help him remember the steps in solving cubics; it also made it difficult for fellow mathematician and competitor Girolamo Cardano – who desperately wanted the solution – to extract it without Tartaglia’s aid.
Similar to encoding mathematics into words was the reverse, as can be seen in Leon Battista Alberti’s De cifris. Alberti’s 1466 treatise, written for a papal secretary, is considered the first-known on cryptography in the Western world, as well as offering the most advanced system for the next four centuries. Alberti opens the treatise with a discussion of grammar, spelling, and letter frequency in both Latin and Italian, outlining the relationship between the verbal and the combinatoric. Alberti was well equipped to do so, having written the first known grammar textbook for Tuscan Italian (the Grammatichetta), poetry, plays, fables, literary dialogues, as well as important mathematical and technical treatises, such as the mathematically focused De pictura (1435), which explained how to employ perspective into painting, enhancing its rhetoric of istoria, the tale it tells to move the viewer.
The language of algebra and abaco (accounting) were evolving in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Mathematician Leonardo Pisano (a.k.a. Fibonacci, c.1170–c.1250) – who was exposed to the Hindu–Arabic number system, the number/concept of zero, and much advanced mathematics during his childhood in North Africa and on many travels – was the main force in introducing the new way of writing numbers and the beginnings of algebra to Europe. His work moved European theoretical mathematics and accounting forward, as well as encouraged the Western imagination to explore a particular numeric series named after him, and what we now call the Golden Ratio. Approximately 1.618, the ratio (known now as phi) has been noted in the natural world, such as in the cells of a nautilus shell and the seed packing of sunflowers. Art, architecutre, music, philosophy, literature, and even theology reveal this period’s intense fascination with ratios.
Mathematician Luca Pacioli (c.1445–1517) continued the discussion of these and other “divine” ratios in his De divina proportione (1509), a book that had great success in the arts and sciences throughout Italy and was illustrated by Paciolo’s friend, Leonardo da Vinci. Pacioli also moved the practical mathematics of accounting even further with the Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et proportionalita (1494), which offered the first description of double-entry bookkeeping in the vernacular. While not a visionary mathematician, Pacioli was an important compiler of mathematical thought; this skill, along with his use of the vernacular and newly born printing technologies, made his methods widely accessible and valuable. Mathematics was now becoming available not only to mathematicians and those who needed it for their trade, but also to the arts.
Astronomy (a.k.a. astrology) in this period came in two basic flavors: natural and judicial. The former was a mathematical art/science used to describe the movement of the stars and the heavens, and had practical application for agriculture, calendar making, navigation, cartography, and medicine. The latter, which made predictions about individuals’ lives, was considered by the Church to be dangerous and potentially linked to magic (of the demonic kind).
The interaction between literature and astronomical and cosmological science is among the most fertile not just in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but before and after. The sparkly things that move (or rather, seem to) above our heads and seem to affect our planet (tides, crops, etc.) have always been the subject of philosophical and poetic musing. The very word “consideration” contains stars – sidera – in it, and to consider is to “be with the stars.” Authors (literary and scientific alike) in the Middle Ages and early Renaissance wrote extensively about the beauties and powers of the heavens, often in verse (see, for example, Alain de Lille’s Rhythmus de Incarnatione and Cecco d’Ascoli’s L’acerba); and some through liturgical songs (see Hildegard of Bingen’s Symphonia armoniae celestium revelationum). Geoffrey Chaucer wrote a treatise on the astrolabe; and Ludovico Ariosto (1474–1533) depicted space travel when the knight Astolfo voyages to the moon astride a hippogriff in search of Orlando’s lost wits (Orlando furioso, Canto XXXIV).
The medieval and early Renaissance universe was “closed” and finite. Only God could be infinite. The physical cosmos was generally imagined as unbounded, but finite – adifficult space to imagine, but one depicted by the hyper-sphere-like architecture in Dante’s Commedia. The Ptolomaic cosmos located the earth (thought to be round, not flat) at the center and made it immobile. God in the heavenly Empyrean surrounded the earth, and the angels circled Him, and in their circling they moved the planetary spheres, which in turn influenced the earthly realm. The angelology of Pseudo-Dionysius, in particular, became the basis for numerous celestial systems of theologians and natural philosophers alike. Man was thought, in fact, to be a microcosmic version of the macroscopic universe. His body parts were associated with constellations; the movements of the planets and stars (angelic forces) could affect his physical and mental health. He could not control the universe, but he could adjust his behaviors to better his chances at well-being.
With the Renaissance, and the translation of Plato and hermetic texts, there came a greater focus on the notion of “man as a measure of all things.” While present in antiquity and the Middle Ages (see Vitruvius’s De architectura, and Hildegard of Bingen’s Liber divinorum operum, for example), the idea became increasingly popular, as did the focus on the beauty and perfection of man’s proportions, famously depicted in Leonardo’s Virtuvian Man. Natural astronomy helped man figure out his place in the world and how to live in and with it; judicial astrology helped him anticipate events (like conflict) and prepare himself, as well as make myriad decisions. The studies of astronomy/ astrology, along with cosmology and cartography, offered narratives about the genesis of the cosmos, the shape and contents of the globe, and one’s place within the universe. It could also help guide people in the writing, or narrating, of their own lives. Even in the seventeenth century, judicial astrology’sinfluence and Ptolomaic ideas of the universe’s architecture would still be present, and figures such as Kepler would not have an easy time convincing others – and even themselves, at times – what their observations were telling them.
The debates around imitatio (stylistic and thematic imitation of classical writers), mimesis (copying or imitating nature), and human artifice – in both literature and science – involved questions as to whether something made by man could ever be anything other than artificial, and thus inferior to what God made. Subsequently, scholars explored whether or not it was even licit to make new things, since they were not naturally occurring, and not, it would seem, ordained by God. Were the mechanical arts simply imitators of nature, or could they actually be something more sinister, or merely a form of trickery? Interestingly, Hugh of Saint Victor divides mechanical arts into seven: fabric making, armament, commerce, agriculture, hunting, medicine, and theatrics. Theatrics? He, like William of Conches in De philosophia mundi, explains that entertainment is a technology essential to human life, keeping man’s mind sharp and allowing his body to rest (Didascalicon, Bk. II, Ch. 20; Ch. 27). And like theater, poetry was of human making, an inferior version to that of God’s making. The word “poetry” comes from the Greek poiesis meaning “to make,” and poets knew themselves to be artificers. Not only could it be flawed, but it could be dangerous – it could seduce one to distraction and/or to commit sin (see the famous Paolo and Francesca episode in Dante’s Inferno, Canto V). And what is more, the Muses were known to be capricious – able and willing to lie.
Yet even with all the anxiety around the making of new things, human invention would not stand still. Machines, chemical compounds, tools, and literary forms continued to proliferate, and the artisan and the scholar often collaborated (see, especially, Alberti). The magnifying lens, for example, had been known since the early eleventh century (see Alhazen and Roger Bacon), but in the 1280s it began to be used for correcting vision. Italy, a center for commerce in the Middle Ages, was also a center for the study of optics (and later for the art of linear perspective; see Alberti here, too). With increasing literacy came an increasing need for lenses that could aid in reading. Francesco Petrarca (1304–74), Europe’s first poet laureate and arguably the first humanist scholar, in his famous Letter to Posterity mentions his need for such a device.
The printing press – preceded, importantly, by the introduction of the bound volume and paper making – was perhaps the most glorious technological achievement of the early Renaissance. In the 1470s, the German mathematician Regiomontanus would begin his printing program for a long list of treatises on mathematics and natural philosophy. The humanists helped Regiomontanus’s project with their recent recoveries, commentaries, and Latin translations of ancient mathematical texts. They also contributed to printing technology in suggesting moveable type font designs, based on the proportions of classical lettering (Aldo Manuzio’s italic font and Roman capital letters, used for the famed, erotic dream narrative Hypnerotomachia Poliphilii of 1499, is an example of precisely this).
Equally revolutionary in their impact were the inventions of gunpowder and automata. Roger Bacon was among the first to note the former in writing. The development of weapons that used gunpowder changed the way battles were waged, and those who followed the chivalric code did not approve. Soldiers would attack each other from a distance, which seemed cowardly and even déclassé. Writers of chivalric epic, such as Ariosto, whose own patron, Alfonso d’Este, was a famous cannon enthusiast, expressed their disdain. In his Orlando furioso he calls the cannon a “cursed, abominable device, cast … by the hand of evil Beelzebub” (IX.xci). Like gunpowder, self-moving mechanisms or automata were celebrated, disdained, and feared as some sort of magic. Items such as flying machines can be traced back to the Greeks (and elsewhere), and seen equally in scientific writing (see Leonardo’s notebooks) and in literature (see Chaucer’s “The Franklin’s Tale”). No doubt, myths, fairy tales, and many early thought experiments hold within them seeds of the extraordinary mechanisms that exist today.
In a period remembered often for its spate of plagues, its struggle to achieve an effective regimen sanitatis, its restrictions on human dissection, and its frightening remedies, the medical profession certainly had its challenges. Medical writing of this time was closely linked with herbology, astrology, alchemy, natural magic (as opposed to demonic), and theology, as well as with literature. The consilium, for example, was a common written means to respond to a medical question, such as a given plague. It consisted of advice from different authors and sources, bound in a collection. Consilia were used for both the teaching and practice of medicine, and they show how much medicine then, as it does still today, relied on reportage, anecdote, and storytelling for the transmission of information.
Among the dominant ways of thinking about health in this period was humoral theory, as outlined by Galen and in Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine and Book of Healing, which transmitted the Hippocratic corpus of learning, as well as theories from Asia and the Middle East, and was a mainstay in the teaching and practice of medicine through the seventeenth century. Sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, or melancholic: these were the four basic categories of a human’s physical and mental state. An illness came from an imbalance of these influences (which could be due to the planets’ alignment, intake of certain foods, weather conditions, etc.) and all manner of remedies were devised to reset the balance. Depressed people (often writers) were believed to have an excess of black bile, the invisible substance for which melancholy is named. Medici physician and renowned philosopher and translator of Plato (among other Greek authors), Marsilio Ficino, recommended, for example, that these saturnine people avoid foods which were “hard, dry, salted, bitter, sharp, stale, burnt, roasted, or fried; beef and the meat of the hare, old cheese … anything that is black,” as well as “darkness … and strenuous exercise” (De vita I.x: 133).
While medicine could aid the writer, the writer could also provide means for healing. Some viewed poetry as a narrative prophylaxis. The frame of Giovanni Boccaccio’s fourteenth-century Decamerone is ten noblemen and noblewomen taking to the hills outside Florence to escape the plague and distract themselves by telling stories. Literature was thought to have twin purposes: delight and education. Petrarca defended poetry’s social utility in an invective against doctors who thought otherwise (see the Invectiva contra medicum, 1357). In 1530 renowned physician Girolamo Fracastoro published his long epic poem on syphilis: the “French disease” (known as the “Italian disease” in France, the “Spanish disease” in Holland, etc.). He sets his description of the disease’s origin, symptoms, and cures within two myths, the second about a shepherd named Syphilus, who apparently offended Apollo and was the first to be punished with the disease (Bk. III). Yet Fracastoro, even in pointing out that “Since Nature’s then so lyable to change, / Why should we think this late Contagion strange; / Or that the Planets where such mischiefs grow, / Should shed their poison on the Earth below?” (Book I: 13), recognizes how the disease is transmitted, although he does not state its venereal nature in the poem, as he would in 1546 in his influential De contagione.
Speaking of Venus, the ars amandi, art of courtly love (first formally articulated in the twelfth-century work of Andreas Capellanus), and its accompanying lyric – both amorous verse (see provençal, troubador, Minnesänger, and Sicilian lyric, for example) and chivalric epic (see the Roman de la rose, for example) – were also tied to medical theories. Pursuing a love interest could easily tip one into an unbalanced humoral state. Reason (the highest faculty of the human soul) and restraint were needed to control and guide love’s flames. Love was thought to be experienced by the “sensitive” part of the soul (more precisely, the “bodily spirit,” as “soul” usually designated the immaterial, eternal something that gave life), which dwelled between the “vegetative” (physical) and “rational” (intellective) parts, often serving as a bridge between them. Medieval psychology, based firmly in Aristotelian and Galenic tradition (although variations of the Stoic and Epicurean sort were certainly discussed), studied the movement of the bodily spirits that composed the “psyche.” Love physically heated up and expanded the heart, and could be ignited when spiritelli, little spirits, escaped from the eyes of the beloved, entering the eyes and then the heart of the lover. Guido Cavalcanti, stil novo poet, for example, often discussed the entrance and exit of spirits. In his sonnet “Pegli occhi fere un spirito sottile” every verse has the word “spirit” in it, a means to tracing the many ways spirit is shared between people’s hearts and minds.
Related to questions of the physics and psychology of amorous love was the metaphysical discussion of coincidentia oppositorum (the coincidence of opposites). Perhaps Pythagorean in origin, this idea fueled work in medicine (for example, Johannes Peyligk, Compendium philosophiae naturalis, 1499) and many arts and sciences, as it did literature. Opposite entities, be they physical elements, emotional states (or many other things) were thought to seek harmony – concordia discors and reconciliation. In the natural world, this harmony was a desired and good thing. The coinciding of opposites in such literature as the amorous poetry of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, however, was often a fraught one. The lover was frequently described as suspended in the liminal space between life and death, burning and freezing, ecstasy and rage. Petrarca’s Sonnet 134 of the Canzoniere offers a good example: “I find no peace, and yet I make no war: / and fear, and hope: and burn, and I am ice: / … I see without eyes, and have no tongue, but cry: / and long to perish, yet I beg for aid: / and hold myself in hate, and love another. / I feed on sadness, laughing weep: / death and life displease me equally: / and I am in this state, lady, because of you.”
Medieval bestiaries, herbals, and lapidaries – like medieval tapestries adorned with unicorns and fruit tree topiaries – delight with all manner of flora and fauna, aquatic and geological substances, real and imagined. These, along with genres/modes such as travel writing, hunting manuals, and heraldic catalogues, are some of the ways in which the natural world came into print. Hugely popular throughout the Middle Ages and early Renaissance, the bestiary was at its height in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century England and France, increasingly written in vernacular verse and prose. Among the early sources for these bestiaries are Aristotle, Galen, Pliny, the anonymous Physiologus, Albertus Magnus’s De animalibus, the encyclopedias of Isidore of Seville and Vincent of Beauvais, and to some degree travel logs – food for the imagination that they were – like those of Marco Polo, Cristoforo Colombo, and missionaries to faraway places.
While presenting common, exotic (or simply less known), or magical-mythical creatures to their readers, bestiaries were also intent on conveying wisdom or morals. Like classical fables and medieval fabliaux (see Marie de France), bestiaries used the device of allegory to entertain and edify. Some, like Richard of Fournival’s thirteenth-century Le Bestiaire d’amour, turn their attention to a specific topic, such as courtly love. Leonardo da Vinci himself – excellent observer of nature that he was and omo sanza lettere [man without letters] that he claimed to be – wrote a series of fables in his notebooks that read like bestiaries. In one he writes, “When an ant found a grain of millet and picked it up, it cried out: ‘If you do me a great favor and let me achieve my desire to sprout, I shall give you a hundred of me.’ And that’s what happened” (11: 283).
One can similarly find scores of plants and minerals, not to mention exquisite menageries or gardens (formal, or secret; filled with topiaries and/or mathematical in design; a safe place for amorous encounters or a place for evil to insinuate itself) decorating chivalric poetry, love lyric, and novellas, as well as pharmacological herbals (interestingly, the ancient way of identifying plants that resemble the part of the body they can be used to cure was called the “doctrine of signatures,” as if the plants were “signed” by the hand of nature for specific medicinal purposes). In Wolfram von Eschenbach’s thirteenth-century epic Parzival, descriptions of the many herbal, animal, and mineral remedies employed to extract venom from the Fisher King’s wound are recounted in striking detail (Bk. IX). None succeeds, and supernatural aid (such as effluvia from paradise, and the garnet/ruby “carbuncle” under a unicorn horn) is sought. In Guido Guinizzelli’s thirteenth-century “Al cor gentil” love and a noble heart are like magnets and iron. And crusade knights Astolfo and Ruggiero are lulled into letting their guard down in Alcina’s garden in Ariosto’s Furioso (Cantos VI–VII), only to be subsequently seduced by her magic.
As with biblical stories, classical myths, legends, and fairy tales, medieval and early Renaissance literature (bestiaries included) was rich with curious creatures and monstrous generations. John Mandeville’s fourteenth-century Travels depict marvelous, invented animals and curiously formed people (see Ch. XXII), as do many of the Alexander legends. These creatures, like the gargoyles decorating European buildings, reveal a fascination with hybridity and metamorphosis (Ovid’s popularity in these centuries cannot be overemphasized). Italian “macaronic” poetry (in Germany they called it Nudelverse, and Johann Fischart’s Die Geschichstkslitterung of 1575 is a good example) formalized this interest, including not only weird creatures and foodstuffs, but a raucous, clever language fusing Latin and Italian vernacular (syntax and semantics), dialect, and a cornu-copia of neologisms. What exactly these humorous, hybrid texts are satirizing (“satire” originating from the word for “medley”) is not the right question: what they are not would be a better one. Teofilo Folengo’s Baldus (1521) is the most renowned example of the ars macaronica. The tale of Baldus, the ever-famished hero of the mock epic (Carolingian, given Baldus’s supposed relation to Charlemagne himself), begins not with an appeal to the Olympian muses, but to the chubby macaronaeam musae, who “ladle out” their arts via platters of pasta and polenta (Bk.I: 1–16).
The desire to master a comprehensive knowledge of the workings and order of the natural world so as to better understand its beauties, its monsters, wonders, and powers, and what they teach us or give us; the dance between elite knowledge and vernacularization, popularization, and dissemination; the increasing confidence in the empirical and the positive value of the man-made – these are what characterize the literature and science of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance.
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