Renaissance Studies Vol. 15 No. 2

Country medicine in the city marketplace: snakehandlers as itinerant healers

KATHARINE PARK

Historians of Renaissance medicine tend to study urban medicine in isola- tion from the countryside, or - when and if we look at healing in country and village life at all - to treat it as isolated, separate, a foil to conditions in the city. But the city wall, though an important juridical boundary, was in other respects highly permeable, perforated by gates through which hundreds of people passed every day. City and countryside were a single, larger system, interdependent not only socially, economically, and militarily, but also in terms of health care. People flowed through the city gates in both directions in search of healing. City folk, mostly patricians), sought the healthy air of the countryside, particularly in the summer, and the thera- peutic action of local healing springs.’ Country folk, mostly labourers, sought the medical services of the city’s hospitals, and the same hospitals constituted a large and insatiable market for rural produce - not only food for their inmates, but cartloads of medicinal plant and animal products, from charcoal to chamomile to leeches.* Finally, healers passed through the gates in both directions. At least in Tuscany, municipal surgeons and physicians retained to treat the poor had responsibility for inhabitants of the countryside, and one Florentine hernia surgeon spent so much time travelling in the countryside that he petitioned successfully for relief from city taxes.%

This paper, however, focuses on healers who moved through the gates in the other direction - people from the country who came to the city - and one group of healers in particular: men known for their ability to cure the bites of snakes and other poisonous reptiles. This group included, among others, the men who came in the late fifteenth century to be called puuliuni, or ‘of the

Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the Department of the History and Sociology of Medicine of McGill University, University of Pennsylvania/Princeton University Joint Colloquium in the History of Science, and the Colloquium of the Science, Technology and Society Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in addition to the Warburg/Wellcome conference; 1 am grateful to the participants for their comments and suggestions. ’ See, e.g., D. S. Chambers, ‘Spas in the Italian Renaissance’, in Mario A. Di Cesare (ed.), Reconsidering fhr Renaissance (Binghamton, NY, 1992), 3-27.

* See Katharine Park, ‘Hospitals and medical assistance in Renaissance Florence’, in Jonathan Barry and Colin Jones (eds), Medicine and Charify before Lhe Wel/re Sfafe (London, 1991). 26-45. ’ Archivio di Stat0 di Firenze, Provvisioni-Registri 85, 122’-123‘ (26 June 1396); Katharine Park, Doclors and Medicine in Early Renaissance Flurence (Princeton, 1985), 96.

0 2001 The Society for Renaissance Studies, Oxford Univenity Press

Country medicine in the city marketplace 105 house of St Paul’. As their name suggests, these men claimed to be descended from the apostle Paul and to have inherited from him an immunity to snake- bite; the basis for this claim was a passage in Acts that describes an episode on the island of Malta, where Paul was bitten by a viper without ill e f f e ~ t . ~

Much has been written on this group, from their ancient roots, described by writers like Pliny, Varro, and Solinus, to their modern incarnations in certain towns of southern Italy, where related stories and practices persisted until at least the middle of the twentieth century.“ The early modern portion of their story has been especially well described by Peter Burke, William Eamon, M. A. Katritzky, and David Gentilcore,6 drawing on paintings, prints, and written descriptions of the activities of the pauliani from the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; several well-known texts, by Scipione Mercurio, Tommaso Garzoni, and others, describe them as colour- ful swindlers, who worked the northern Italian urban marketplaces with well-established theatrical routines (see Figs 3 and 4, pp. 125-6). For example, in Garzoni’s description, which dates from 1585,

Master Paolo of Arezzo appears in the square with his great banner, where on one side you see St Paul, sword in his hand, and on the other a bed of snakes which, hissing, almost bite everyone who looks at them, even though they are only painted. Now he starts to recount the false origin of his house, his fictitious descent from St Paul. He tells of the story of when [Paul] was bitten on the island of Malta, he untruthfully declaims how that gift [of healing] [grazia] is present in all those of his family, he describes the trials made, the competition experienced, the victories received, the banners conquered, which are unfolded to show to the people. He picks up his boxes, and takes out a charcoal-black serpent, two yards long and thick as a pole, and then a madarasso, and then a viper, and he frightens the people with the horrible appearance of these beasts. . . . The vulgar curl in fear, the peasant trembles at the news, which is told with such ability that no one feels safe putting a foot out of the city if they have not first drunk a glass of powder given them by Master Paolo. . . .’ Acts 28:l-6.

‘’ Ernesto de Martino, La 7erra del Rimorso: Conln‘bulo a una Storia Religimo del Sud (Milan, 1961); Alfonso M. Di Nola, Gli Aspetti MagiroReligimi di una Cultum Suballerna Italiana (Turin, 1976); Lamberto Gentili. ‘Serpi e serpari: la tradizione popolare nel territorio di Spoleto’. Spoletium. 21 (1979), no. 24 ,7644; Angelo Turchini, Morso, Morho, Mortc: La TarantolaIra Culturn Medica c Tempia Popolare (Milan, 1987); Brizio Montinaro. San Paolo dei Serpenti: Analisi di una Tradizione (Palermo, 1996).

ti David Gentilcore, Healers and Healing in Early Modern Ilaly (Manchester, 1998), 106-109; ibid. “‘Charlatans, mountebanks, and other similar people”: the regulation and role of itinerant practitioners in early modern Italy’, Social Hislory, 20 (1995). 197-314, esp. 309-11; M. A. Katritzky, ‘Was commedia dellhrte performed by mountebanks? Album amicorum illustrations and Thomas Platter’s description of 1598’, Theatre Research International, 23 (1998), 104-26; Peter Burke, ‘Rituals of healing in early modern Italy: essays on perception and communication’, in his The Historical Anthropology o/Early Modern Italy: Essays on Penepfion and Communirafion (Cambridge, 1987), ch. 15. esp. 209, 216-17; William Famon, Science and the Secrelr ojhralure: Boolrr ofSecrets in Medieval and Eady Modern Culture (Princeton. 1994). ch. 7, esp. 244-5. ’ Translated in Gentilcore, Healers and Healing, 108 (wording slightly altered); original in Turchini. Mono, Morho, Morte, 1.55.

106 Katharine Park This description includes elements that recur in most late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century literary descriptions of the activities of the pauliani: their use of painted banners and testimonials as advertising; their penchant for competition among themselves; their false claim of descent from St Paul; their snakehandling routine. By the time of Garzoni, this last was increasingly accompanied by musical and theatrical entertainment (see Katritzky’s paper in this volume, pp. 121-53). The point of the exercise, of course, was to sell the therapeutic ‘powder’, an antidote often called ‘St Paul’s earth’ or the ‘grace of St Paul’, which the pauliani had supposedly brought from their native land, in southern Italy. As Garzoni emphasizes, both the powder and the threat of snakebite were associated with the space outside the city walls.

My aim here is not to cover the ground mapped out by Gentilcore, Katritzky, Burke, and Eamon, but to ask another set of questions. These four historians focus primarily on the the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries - the period that begins with Garzoni - and read backward, in order to trace the origins of this kind of medical theatre. In this paper, I shall read forward, beginning with late medieval and early Renaissance sources, to see how the later accounts came to be, and why they took the form they did. Like contemporary images of the pauliani, the descriptions of Garzoni and those who wrote after him were mutually consistent and highly stereotyped, composed of a set of well-worn topoi: the avarice of the snakehandlers, their competitiveness, their deceitfulness, and their theatricality. I shall argue that this stereotype masks a complicated social reality, more readily visible in sources from before the stereotype was fully constituted, and that it is a complex rhetorical construction, which reflects at least as much the preoccupations of the northern Italian, urban, writers that elaborated it as it does the activities of the pauliani themselves. Finally, I shall suggest that the descriptions of the pauliani and their activities imply a model of the relations between city and countryside, interior and exterior, that reflects and rests on a broadly shared model of the relations between the body and its environment.

I

Evidence of Italian snakebite healing from before the middle of the sixteenth century reveals a wide range of practices and practitioners, only some of which were identified with St Paul. The earliest known texts rele- vant to these practices consist of magical formulae, or scongiuri, contained in various twelfth- and thirteenth-century Italian manuscripts, including the twelfth-century Salernitan treatise, On the Treatment of Illnesses. The most common formula, which appears in this manscript, recommends that

if you are told that somone has been bitten by a serpent or something of this sort, have the messenger stand in place, turn back the front of his shirt on the right side, and pour out a beaker of water three times, saying each

Country medicine in the city marketplace 107 time, ‘Cara, caruce, senael, emmanuel, paraclitus, in nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti, amen’ and the Lord’s Prayer. And give this water to the messenger, or to the patient himself, if he is present.”

A related, but somewhat more elaborate, ritual is described in another early fourteenth-century compilation from southern Italy. The practitioner pronounces a religious formula and then traces on the earth the outline of the right foot of the bite victim or his messenger, making a sign in the middle of the outline. After he repeats the formula three times over a container of water, he mixes the water with some earth scraped from the footmark and gives it to the victim to drink.’

Another contemporary remedy for, or prophylactic against, snakebite involved amulets or talismans impressed with the image of St Paul with snakes, sometimes accompanied by a verse from the gospel of Mark: ‘they will pick up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick; and they will recover’.’’ These amulets apparently circulated on the Italian mainland as well as in Malta, for Peter of Abano’s treatise On Poisons, from the early fourteenth century, describes an amulet with an image of a man girt by a large snake, holding the head in one hand and the tail in another.”

Finally, there are late medieval references to the descendants of St Paul themselves. The earliest I have come across is a petition to the municipal authorities of Reggio, dated 1325, in favour of one Roberto Bissi, who claimed ‘to have always treated men and animals against all poison, without charge, by virtue of a gift [gruzia] that his ancestors had received from St Paul and that he had inherited from them’.’‘ We know nothing of Bissi’s practice, except that he offered it for free, but there is no indication that he used any external products, such as earth or powder in his treatment; this would make him similar to the healers called cirauli mentioned in the 1429 Constitutions of the Sicilian Protomedicato, who are described as ‘operating without any medicines but the pure power of the Apostle St Paul which they received

” Salvatore De Renzi (ed.), Colkcfio s a l a i f a n a , 5 vols (Naples, 1852-9), 11, 382. Variations on this prayer, occasionally attributed to St Paul, appear in Italian and Greek manuscripts of the later Middle Ages, as well as in a work attributed to Arnald of Villanova. See Turchini, Mono, Morbo, Morte, 121-3, 146-7, 168-9; Adolf Franz, Die Rirchlicha Baedicfionen im Miffelalkr, 2 vols (Freiburg im Breisgdu, 1909), 11, 174-5; A. A. Barb, ‘Der Heilige und die Schlangen’, Milleilungen der anfhmpologischen CaelkchaJ in Wien, 82 (1952), 5-7 (for Greek); F. Novati, ‘Antichi Scongiuri’, in Miscellanea Ceriani: Raccolfa di Scrilti Mgina l i per Onorare la Memoria di M. Antonio Maria Ceriani (Milan, 1910). 69-86, on 74-80. ‘ Novati, ‘Antichi scongiuri’, 81.

I ” Mark I6:18. On these amulets, see Barb, ‘Der Heilige’, 1-3, and Montinaro, San Paolo dei Se7pafi , 130-2. A number can be seen in the collection of the Archaeological Museum of Perugia (Cristiano Martello, personal communication).

‘ I Pietro d’Abano, De uenenis, in Joannis Aquilanus (ed.), Conciliafor Dlljerenfiarum Philosophorum praecipueque Medicorum (Venice, 1521), 249. The Psilli and Marsi, forerunners of thepauliani, are described as selling amulets as early as the fourth century; see Montinaro, Sun Paolo dei Serpenti. 73.

1.. Cianni, ‘Un empirico tossicoialra del primo Trecento’, Rivisfa di Sforia Critica delk Scienre Mediche e Nafumli, 9 (1918). 407. Finding himself indigent, Bissi asked for, and was granted, the position and salary of a footsoldier in one of city’s military companies.

108 Katharine Park from birth’.’% Although the details of their practices are not recorded in these documents, other references suggest that these healers may have touched the wounds of bite victims, applied their saliva to them, or moistened a piece of bread with saliva, which they gave to their patients to eat.14 Such practices recall not only the activities attributed to the ancient Marsi and Psilli by Pliny and other classical authors, but also the work of the curadores described in fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Spanish sources as able to cure the poisonous bites of rabid dogs by their touch or their breath.15

Before the third decade of the fifteenth century, in other words, we find three different forms of snakebite healing associated consistently or intermittently with St Paul: magical formulae and rituals (one involving scraped earth); amulets; and the activities of men thought to heal by an inherited grace carried in their bodies and body products. When do the activities traditionally associated with the pauliani - theatrical snakehandling in connection with the sale of an earthen antidote - first appear? The first unambiguous representation I have found is visual rather than verbal: a painting on a Florentine marriage chest now in the Bargello Museum (Figs 1 and 2). This probably dates from the late 1420s and depicts on the far left a snakehandler performing for a small audience.16 The man’s banner shows a bust of St Paul - identifiable by his attributes of book and sword - in its upper register and a naked man surrounded by poisonous animals as its main image - a figure perhaps related to the amulet image of the man girt with snakes. The snakehandler holds something that looks like a casket in his left hand, probably a container for a product on sale.

Despite the clear similarities between this early fifteenth-century image and later images of the pauliani collected by Katritzky in this volume, textual evidence from the fifteenth century continues to be ambiguous, mixing elements from the several traditions I have described above. The earliest fifteenthcentury discussions come from the pens of medical writers. Sante Ardoini’s treatise On Poisons (1426) describes a version of the ‘Caro caruzet’ conjuration, as does Pietro Carario’s Question on Poisons (first published in 1476), attributing its efficacy to the magical powers of the imagination.” Carario also discusses amulets, including stones impressed with the image of the man holding a snake described by Pietro d’Abano; he attributes their

Gentilcore, Healcn and Healing, 107; Montinaro, San Paolo &i Serpenfi, 59 (quotation). 13

I’ Montinaro, Sun Paolo &i Serpenri, 81-2 and 100. I5 Fernando Salmon and Montserrat CabrC, ‘Fascinating women: the evil eye in medical scholasticism’, in

Roger French, Jon Arrizabalaga, Andrew Cunningham, and Luis Garcia-Ballester (eds), Medicinelram fhe Black Deafh lo fhe French Direare (Aldershot, 1998). 60, 67.

See The Cleveland Museum of Art, European Paintings Before 1500, Cafalogue 01 Painfings: Parf One (Cleveland, 1974), 128-9; Luciano Bellosi, ‘11 maestro della Crocifissione Griggs: Ciovanni Toscani’, Paragone, NS 17, no. 193 (1966), 44-58, on 53; Giacomo de Nicola, ‘Notes on the Museo Nazionale of Florence, VII: Two Florentine cassoni, (2) The feast of S. John in Florence at the beginning of the 15th century’, Burlingfon

”Sante Ardoini da Pesaro, Opus & Venenis a Mullis HactenvF Derideralum, in Ferdinand0 Ponzetti, De Venenis (Basel, 1561). 325; Pietro Carario da Monselice, Qusfio de venenis, in Pietro d’Abano, Concilialor, 253‘.

MU rim, 22 (1918), 218-26.

Fig. 1 Attr. Giovanni di Francesco Toscani, Feast of St John. Florentine marriage chest, Florence, Museo del Bargello (prob. c. 1428-9)

110 Katharine Park

Fig. 2 Snakehandler by the Florentine Baptistery. Detail of Figure 1.

'bezoaric power' - power against poisons - to celestial influences." He notes that humans can acquire a similar power, either artificially, like Mithridates, who gradually accustomed himself to a diet of poison, or naturally, like 'those that travel around claiming to be of the house of St Paul who eat snakes and touch them and excite them without being bitten. . . . And I myself have seen one who had with him many harmful serpents that he handled without being

For an overview of late medieval and Renaissance medical writing on poisons, see Lynn Thorndike, A Hislory oJMagir and Expen'menlal Science, 8 vols (New York, 1923-58). 111, ch. 31, and v, ch. 21.

I" Carario, Queslio de Venenis, 253'-". Bezoars were stones thought to neutralize poison; see Antoine Schndpper, Le Gbnl, la Licorne el In Tulipe: Collections el Collectionnatn dans la France du XVIIe .rtkle (Pans, 1988), 32.

Countly medicine in the city marketplace 111 wounded by them, and he sold a bread that he called bread of St Paul’.I9 Here, in 1476, we have the first clear verbal description of the paulianus as travelling salesman, though it is not clear if he is selling real bread, perhaps treated with his own saliva, or an early version of the earth that was soon to become the pauliani’s stock in trade.

The practice had not yet stabilized in the mid-l480s, when Teseo Pini, a clerical rather than a medical writer, wrote the first unambiguously critical attack on the pauliani, whom he called - for the first time - by that name. He contested their claim of descent from St Paul, on the grounds that the apostle must be presumed to have died a virgin; and he suggested that they falsely presented the snake tattoos they applied to their arms as natural signs of their special gift, and that they used various tricks to keep themselves safe from the snakes they used in their displays. Yet Pini’s pauliani had not yet assumed the classic aspect we find in the later sixteenth-century stereotype: although avaricious and deceitful, they did not compete with one another, and they healed using not earth, but cantilene, or incantations, which Pini refused to repeat for fear of corrupting the young.2”

Ferdinando Ponzetti, later cardinal of Melfi, took his readers one step closer to the pauliani of Garzoni, in his Book of Poisons, first published in 1521, though probably written a decade or so earlier. His chapter on the ‘house of St Paul’ was by far the most extensive treatment to date. Citing informants among the pauliani themselves, he recounted in considerably more detail than Pini their measures to protect themselves from the venom of the snakes they handled and the poisons they ingested during their act: anointing themselves with various herbal preparations, carrying coral, insulating their stomachs with food and drink, and taking Lemnian earth, whose dryness prevented the poison from spreading in their body. He noted that a paulianus also taught him the ‘Caro caruzet’ ritual and incantation, which he recalled having also seen in ‘some book of medicine’, though another claimed that it was a fraud.” Finally, Pini indicated that the pauliani in fact had a specific product to sell: ‘little stones’ (lapilli) from Lemnia, mixed with goat’s blood, to be taken with wine. Asked by Ponzetti what was ‘truly’ in this remedy, one said it was ‘sealed earth’ (terra sigillata), with juni- per seed and a little ‘Armenian mud’ (Zulus armenus) - a mixture of recognized pharmacological ingredients that Ponzetti believed would be efficacious, if it were in fact compounded as described.“

Here, finally, in the early sixteenth century, we have the first clear mention of the pauliani as sellers of earth - the earth that appears as the ‘grace of St Paul’ in documents from the 1520s, such as the license issued to Master Mario Galasso of Naples by officials of the duchy of Milan in 1523. This ducal

I!’ Carario, Qtcesfio de Vmenzs, 254’. Teseo Pini, Spculum cerrelanorurn, ch. 27, in Piero Camporesi (ed.), 11 l i h dei uagabondi: Lo ‘Specicbrm 211

Crrrelanuricm’ di 7 b e n Pini, ‘I1 Vagabondo’ di Rafaele Frianom ef allri l a l i di j%/tanleria’(Turin, 1973). 52-3. 2’ Fertlinando Ponzeiti, De uewnis. 2.5 (Basel, 1562), 533. ’‘ /bid.

112 Katharine Park patent, the first known licence of its sort, identifies Galasso as an inhabitant of Milan and ‘neutralizer of poisons and faithful adminstrator of Maltese earth, known by the vulgar . . . as the grace of St Paul’.‘3 It renews previous patents from the duke, the captain of justice, and the health tribunal that allowed Master Mario ‘to mount his bench, or . . . practise his art and profession in the piazza of the Broleto Vecchio, in whatever way he

These scattered references allow us tentatively to trace the emergence in the first decades of the sixteenth century of a market in the piazze of northern Italian cities for an earth-based preparation known commonly as the ‘grace of St Paul’. According to Ponzetti, the active ingredient in this preparation was supposedly Lemnian earth, a substance whose anti-poison properties were attested by weighty ancient authority; both Dioscorides and Galen described it as an effective emetic and antidote against poison, and Ponzetti was clearly drawing on Dioscorides’ own account, which also mentions goat’s blood and wine.25 This earth apparently fell into disuse in the Middle Ages - though it was mentioned approvingly by Latin authorities such as Peter of AbanoZ6 - to be revived again in the early sixteenth century. At the same time, we find the appearance for the first time of references to a new kind of earth, with similar properties: Maltese earth, which, according to Jean Quintin’s 1536 Description of the Island of Malta, was called by the locals ‘the grace of St Paul’.‘’

At this point, then, in the 1520s and 1530s, we find the gradual conver- gence of the elements that will come to compose the figure of the paulianus: the man who, usually with one or more associates, put on some kind of display with snakes in the city piazza, in order to sell a type of earth, called ‘the grace of St Paul’, which was in some way associated with his con- stitutional immunity to poison. The emergence of earth as the commodity in question seems to have come out of the interaction and convergence of two separate traditions: the medieval incantation involving the earth scraped from beneath the foot of snakebite victims or their proxies, and the renascent interest of fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century learned medical writers in ancient accounts of Lemnian earth. The latter attained new prominence with

Archivio Storico Civic0 di Milano, Fondo Materie, 2.55, fasc. 7, as dated; cited in Turchini, Morso, Morbo, Morle, 157.

24 Ibid. The document refers to the ducal patent as dated 10 April 1523. Galasso’s practice was clearly successful and became well established, for a pamphlet published in Milan in 1584, containing recipes fbr remedies against poison and various illnesses, identifies its author as ‘Master Mario Galasso. of the grace of Saint Paul, living in Milan, in the parish of San Vivo in Pasquirolo’. See Nuorm Rrcellarifi, if Qmk P Inlilolulo Thorn de Poveri . . . (Milan, 1584). I owe this reference to William Eamon; the pamphlet is in the collection at the University of Wisconsin.

F. W. Hasluck, ‘Terra leninia’, Annwrl o/lhr Erilirh School al Alhens, 16 (1909-lo), 221. It was also called ’sealed earth’, because the Lemnian authorities attested its authenticity by stamping it with the image of Arteniis: see ibid.

23

Pietro d’Abano, De Vpnenis, 249”. Pli

27 Giovanni Quintino Eduo (Jean Quintin d’Autun). Insulae Melilae De.scriplio ex Commmlnrri.s Kprurn Quolidianarum (Lyon, 1536), paragraph 21; cited in Montinari, Mono, Morbo, Morle. 100; on the history o f this earth, and St Paul’s cave, from which it was extracted. see ibid. 99-1 17.

Country medicine in the city marketplace 113 the appearance in northern Italian cities of an earth from Malta, which was revered by locals for its healing properties and which appears to have gained credibility among both lay people and medical men as analogous to - and cheaper than - Lemnian earth.“ The new emphasis on the earth seems to have overshadowed, though not entirely displaced, the older practices associated with the ‘house of St Paul’, of using touch or saliva, either directly on the victim, or to transform bread or wine into poison antidotes, which originally seem to have been given away, but which could also be sold.

In sum, therefore, we see the supplementing of a form of healing located in the bodies of particular individuals, and inherited by birth, by one located in a commodity; with this shift, the immunity of the pauliani, demonstrated by their shows of snakehandling, began to acquire a different meaning - as a demonstration of the efficacity of their product rather than of an inherited gift. There is no indication that either of these forms of healing was practised exclusively by itinerants: the early fourteenthcentury inhabitant of Reggio, who healed for free, and the sixteenthcentury Mario Galasso and Biagio della Grazia di San Paolo, who sold their remedies in Milan and Venice respectively, were both clearly fixtures in their urban communities.2g Nor was either form of healing seen as necessarily fraudulent by either clerical or medical writers; while unimpressed by claims of descent from the Apostle Paul, all agreed that particular people could possess intrinsic anti-poison properties, either innate or acquired.

This last belief found visual expression in a painting of a paulianus in the Palazzo del Te in Mantua from 1527 (Fig. 3).’” This roundel forms part of the decorative programme of the palace’s Room of the Winds, which, as Ernst Gombrich has shown, is based on late antique astrological texts. The roundels refer to particular constellations and the powers they confer on those born under their influence. This one, which shows a paulianw, illustrates the following passage from Firmicus Maternus: ‘In the first degrees of Capricornus rises the snakeholder (Ophiucus). Those born when this constellation rises will be Mursians who charm poisonous snakes by sleeping spells or charmed herbs.’” In other words, the erudite humanist who com- piled the decorative programme for the Room of the Winds did not contest the powers of the pauliani (here identified with Pliny’s Mursi), but attributed it to purely naturalistic causes - particular stellar influences that came into

28 For later sixteenth-century discussions of this earth, see e.g. Michele Mercati. Melallolheca, 1.12 (Rome, 1717), 17 (‘De Melitensi terra, vulgo petra S. Pauli‘), and Ferrante Imperato, Dell’hislona nalumk libri XXVIII, 5.37 (Naples, 1599), 149. Both emphasize the ‘vulgar’ nature of the belief in the efficacy of the earth.

Battista was condemned in 1543 and again in 1548 for selling without a licence remedies to be taken by mouth; in 1548, he was allowed to administer only ‘his grace o f St Paul’. See Archivio di Stato di Venezia, Provveditori alla Saniti, Notatorio 729,40‘-’ (28 February 1543, rn.v.) and 16.7’ (9 Septeniber 1548); I owe these references to Michelle Laughran.

Egon Verheyen, The Pularro del Te in Manlua: Images o/love and Polifics (Baltimore, 1977), 119; Frederick Hartt, Giulio Romano, 2 vols (New Haven, l958), I, 115-22.

Ernst Gombrich, ‘The salu dei uenli in the Palazzo del Te’, in his Symbolic Images: Studies in the Art o/lhe Renuissunre (Chicago, 1972). 109-18 (quotation on 113).

On Mario Galasso, see note 24 above. 29

90

114 Katharine Park

Fig. 3 Attr. Cirolamo da Pontremola, Snakehandler. Mantua, Palazzo del Te, Sala dei Venti (1527)

play in the natal horoscopes of particular individuals - rather than to descent from a long-ago saint.

Late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century writers had yet other reasons to credit the powers of contemporary pauliani, even as they doubted the genealogical explanation. As Galen and Dioscorides had testified, Lemnian earth - and, no doubt, earth from certain other places as well - could purge poison by emesis and by stopping its spread within the body.'* Both the astrological ex- planation, which centred on the inborn nature of particular individuals, and the contemporary interest in Lemnian earth meant that the claims of the pauliani were plausible within a naturalistic framework. Thus Pini and Ponzetti both emphasized the tricks of many pauliani, without in any way

'* Hasluck, 'Terra lemnia'

Country medicine in the city marketplace 115 contesting the possibility that some men, including presumably some men among the pauliani, could do exactly what they claimed.

Pier Andrea Mattioli, the last author I shall discuss in this context, repeated most of these points in his influential Discourses on Dioscorides (first edition 1544). Like Ponzetti, he took particular pleasure in detailing the tricks used by the pauliani to keep themselves safe during their ‘marvellous spectacles . . . in the public piazze’.’’’ But there is an important new element in Mattioli’s dis- cussion, which would become part of the later sixteenthcentury stereotype: the fact that the pauliani commonly engaged in snakehandling competitions, in which they exchanged snakes, sometimes with fatal or near fatal results. There was apparently a core of historical truth to this element of the topos. In 1541, the Florentine authorities had condemned to death a snakehandler from Leccio for ‘having killed with snakes’ another snakehandler, ‘Master Alessandro ciurmatore’. (Ciurmatore, or ‘charmer’, was the term commonly applied to snakehandlers in Florence.) According to the relevant document, each man claimed descent from St Paul and denied the claim of the other. They had requested a licence to hold a snakehandling competition, which the police magistracy had denied as too dangerous; the two nevertheless went ahead with their contest, which culminated in the death of Master Alessandro. Master Francesco was condemned both for flouting the authorities about the licence and, above all, because his servants informed the police that he had come to Florence, vowing to kill any ‘Lombard ciurmatore’ he found there, and that he had fixed his snakes with a lethal poison, to be sure of his goal.’4 This kind of competition quickly became part of the topos of the paulianus, presumably through the influence of Mattioli’s treatise, which appeared in several editions, in Latin as well as in Italian translation. Mattioli in fact claimed to know of two other contests of this sort, in Trent and Perugia. He said that he was an eyewitness at the latter, and that the participants would have died, if Mattioli’s own surgery instructor, Caravita of Bologna, ‘had not cured them with oil of scorpions. . . . Nor would they have been helped by their stone [i.e. the earth], which they give to people as a certain remedy.’’.”

I1

What are we to make of the snowballing stories of fraud and wrongheaded competition that increasingly characterize the descriptions of the pauliani in the learned literature beginning in the late fifteenth century? One possibility, though it seems unlikely, is that significant numbers of charlatans

’”’ Pier Andrea Mattioli, I Discorsi ne i Sei Libri &lla Mafmia Medicinale di Pedacio Diosroride Anararbeo (Venice, 1557), 727. ’‘ Alfonso Andreozzi, Le Leg@ Penali &gli Anfichi Cinesi: Discono Pmmiale sul Diriffo e sui Limili del Punire (Florence, 1878), 47-9. The date of 1451, which appears in the rest of the secondary literature, is based on Andrea Corsini’s mistranscription of Andreozzi, in his Medici ciarlalani el ctarlalani medici (Bologna, [ 19221). 47 note 1 . ’’.’ Mattioli, Discorsi, 727.

116 Katharine Park with more avarice and hubris than common sense regularly put their lives in danger, either by trusting in the good will of murderous colleagues, or by a misplaced confidence in their own claims. I think it is more plausible, however, to approach the topos of the charlatan, as it developed over the course of the late fifteenth century in the work of Pini, Ponzetti, and Mattioli, and culminated in the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century descriptions of Garzoni, Mercurio, and others, primarily as a literary trope, rather than as a reliable description of how the pauliani actually behaved. By the 1520s, there were no doubt men, commonly referred to as ciurmadori, who engaged in snakehandling demonstrations in various urban piazze, and sold some kind of earth, which they called the ‘grace of St Paul’, though the evidence does not support the usual view that they were necessarily itinerants, or even from southern Italy; the ciurmadore who died in Florence was described as a Lombard. They seem to have coexisted, and perhaps overlapped, with another group of healers, who used charms and magic rituals of various sorts against poisonous bites. Beyond that, it is difficult to say much about who they were and what they did. Certainly, they appear to have been much more varied - in their places of origin, their modes of commerce, and their healing practices - than acknowledged in the literary text. At the same time, however, the literary topos certainly helped to shape and homogenize both the appearance and the practices of late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century sellers of St Paul’s earth, as did their emergence as a staple of entertainment directed at tourists, particularly in Venice, as Katritzky has described in this volume. The tourist trade seems to have played a powerful role in standardizing such practices, as visitors from other regions expected (then as now) to see scenes, such as the spectacles of the pauliani, that both the guidebooks and the souvenir albums described by Katritzky held up as ‘typical’ of a particular area or city. In this context, the pellets of earth, or ‘little stones’, sold by the pauliani must have served to reinforce visitors’ expectations; like the paintings in the albums, they functioned as souvenirs that reminded tourists of what they had seen on their travels and told potential tourists what to expect when they made their own trips.

It seems to me, however, that the literary trope also points to another set of issues. It is customary to account for the criticisms of empirical practitioners by medical writers like Mattioli as a reaction on the part of learned physicians to perceived competitors and an attempt to monopolize the business of healing from above. While there are elements of this in the accounts I have discussed above - Mattioli’s reference to his surgery teacher’s success in curing the bitten pauliani is a good example - I do not think that it is the whole, or even necessarily the principal, point. Rather, the stories about the pauliani seem to me a complicated and indirect reflection of a more general concern on the part of urban writers about the city as a moral and economic environment and about the business transacted in the urban marketplace. It

Country medicine in the city marketplace 117 is important to keep in mind that no one seems seriously to have doubted that men with powers of immunity and healing traditionally attributed to the pauliani existed, or that earth from particular areas could cure the bites of at least some venomous animals. The problem was rather whether the particular men who claimed to have such powers did indeed possess them, and whether the earth they actually sold was in fact Maltese or Lemnian earth. In other words, the real issue was fraud: whether you could believe the representations of the men you traded with in the piazza every day.

This was not, of course, a problem confined to the clients of itinerant snakehandlers and vendors of antidotes; it was faced by urban merchants, traders, and consumers on a daily basis. How do you know with whom you are dealing and whether you can trust them to be who they say they are and to be selling what they claim to sell? One well known manifestation of this concern was the creation by late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century medical colleges and guilds of official pharmacopoeiae and commissions to monitor the quality of the preparations dispensed by apothecaries.’6 But medical men did not have a monopoly on such concerns. In this sense, the paulianus, in his stereotypical form, was a lightning conductor for more general anxieties about an increasingly monetarized economy and market society, trading in unfamiliar goods from distant places.

In this reading, the stereotype of the paulianus reflects the uncertainties in dealing with strangers of unknown status and unattested identity, which commerce of this sort invariably involved; coming from outside the city, and selling an unfamiliar product, he embodies the disorienting anonymity of the marketplace - a world of mobile persons, mobile products, and of potentially universal fraud. These concerns are visible in many other contemporary sources. One late fifteenth-century proverb collection includes a host of rhyming examples (which lose much of their wit in translation):

Buy in Puglia and sell in France, if you want to prosper.

More wolves than asses go to market.

One lives half the year by falsehood and trickery, and the other half by trickery and falsehood (‘Con falsid et inganno se vive la mezza parte dell’anno; con inganno et falsitP se vive l’altra

These proverbs suggest that the literary figure of the paulianus embodied yet another feature of the marketplace: its cut-throat competitiveness. This is perhaps the reason for the prominence of deadly contests in the literature about them. Writers like Mattioli downplayed the competitive nature of their own commercial dealings, preferring instead to project this onto the strangers in their midst. ” Alfonso Corradi, Le Prime Farmarope Italiane ed in Parlirolare & z Rirellari Fiorenlini, 2nd edn, ed. A.

“7 Bihlioteca Univeisitaria de Bologna, Cod. 306 (250); cited in Camporesi, Introduction 10 I1 Liho &i Giorclano (Milan, 1984).

Chgahonrli. Ixxwix.

118 Katharine Park Interpreting the paulianus as a figure of the dangers of commerce and the

marketplace helps to explain one final aspect of his literary portrayal: his appearance in carnival songs as an itinerant seducer of women and seller of contraceptives and abortifacients. Machiavelli's version, in which a snake- handler addresses the ladies of Florence lays out these themes:

We are enchanters [ciurmadori] who enchant by our nature, Ladies, and we wander, subject to chance. We are descended from the house of St Paul And were born a long way away from these parts, But when we came here, we were taken By your loving nature. We are all born with a sign down below, And the one who has the largest one is the most learned; If you saw it you would immediately see What lovely things nature can make. . . . You see, this serpent grows if you squeeze it. . . . These snakes hide in the grass Or under rocks, or in small holes, . . . And you have to be very careful When you sit down, That you don't get a wound of a nasty kind. But if you don't want to fear them, Drink this wine And carry this stone. . . . You will be so charmed [ciurmate] That you can sit anywhere, And the bigger the snake you find, The luckier you'll feel.'"

Mobile, rootless, and therefore anonymous, the paulianus need never be accountable for his actions. He can enter the city, corrupt its women, cuckold its men, and depart without consequences, and his impunity is a sign of the vulnerability of city society itself. Once the symbol of a pure descent, he has become the potential adulterator of city lineages." Thus the paulianus is in the city but not of it. Rather, he embodies both the physical dangers of the countryside and the healing power of its natural products. The carnival songs portray him as a seductive and sexualized figure - nature itself.

But these were emergent meanings that accreted around the pauliani over the course of many decades; the topos itself did not appear in fully developed form until the middle of the sixteenth century. These associations should not be projected backward into the earlier period, when the practices and

Niccolo Machiavelli, I1 Teafro e Tutfi gli Smifti Lefleran, ed. Franco Gaeta (Milan, 1965), 338-9. For another example, see Charles Singleton (ed.), Canfi Cornascialischi del Rinascimenfo (Bari, 1936). no. cdi, 191-2; the manuscript, Riccardiana 2731, was copied in 1548.

The emphasis on the legitimacy of descent has ancient roots; Pliny describes the way the ancient predecessors of the Marsi tested the legitimacy of their children and the fidelity of their wives by exposing their offspring to snakes; Nafuml Hisfory, 7.2.

I X

39

Count9 medicine in the city marketplace 119 identities ascribed to snakebite healers were more varied and more positive. In this vein, I will return to the first known visual representation of a snakehandler, on the Florentine wedding chest from c. 1428 (Fig. 2) . What can we infer from this image about the cultural meaning of the snakehandler in the early fifteenth century, a hundred and fifty years before Garzoni? Given the absence of documentation associated with the chest, there is very little to go on, apart from the context in which the paulianus appears (Fig. 1). The scene is easily identified: it depicts Florence's most sacred festival, the feast of St John, at its ritual epicentre, the piazza San Giovanni, between the cathedral (on the left) and the Baptistery (on the right), which was covered for the occasion by a blue cloth canopy. The central meaning of this celebration, as Richard Trexler has convincingly argued, was 'the articu- lation, demonstration, and reformation . . . of the manifold contracts binding male citizens to each other and subjects to citizen~'.~" The religious aura was sufficient to coerce adherence to the innumerable agreements - commercial, familial, political - drawn up during the festival and on which the peace of the city depended. In this way, 'everyday communal anxieties gave place to confidence in an established order; from distrust came trust, from dishonor the honor of mutually recognized and sacralized relationships'." All this was centred on the piazza, the 'place of contract' itself.4'

What does this context tell us about the snakehandler in the corner? With the benefit of hindsight, drawing on the late sixteenthcentury image of the paulianus, it might seem plausible to see him as a carnivalesque figure, the rogue and trickster who exposes the fragile foundations on which the illusion of commercial and political trust is built. But I think such an interpretation would be anachronistic, incorporating associations and assumptions that had not yet coalesced in the early fifteenth century. Rather, it makes sense to see him in a more solemn light - as a quasi-sacral figure, dispensing a product that purged the physical body of its poisons, as the social body of the city was purged of its conflicts and dissensions by the annual festival of St John.

But the painting as a whole suggests yet another set of meanings, for it is not a generic portrayal of the festival as a whole. Rather, it shows a particular part of the proceedings, which took place on the morning of 24 June: the tributary offerings of Florence's subject territories to their rulers.45 These consisted of the banners of the most important territories - Pisa, Arezzo, Pistoia, Volterra, and so forth - carried by men on horseback, followed by enormous towers made of gilded wax and sculpted, in the words of one early fifteenthcentury observer, with 'animals, and birds and various types of trees, fruits, and all things that delight the sight and the heart'.14 At the end of the

Kichard <;. Trexlei-, Puhlic Lije in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca, 1980). 215-24 and 240-78; quotation on 411

264. " Ihid. 267. " hid . 277.

De Nicola, 'Notes', 225-6. Goro di Stagio Dati, Histmy olFlorencejmm 1380 lo 1405, in Cesare Guasti (ed.), Le Fesle di San Giouanni

4 1

44

RaLisla Dewil le in P m a e in R i m da Cmlemporunei (Florence, 1884), 7 .

120 Katharine Park procession, these offerings were hung on the interior walls of the cathedral - on the right of the painting - where they served as a perpetual reminder of Florence’s military and economic conquests. This portion of the festival, in other words, thematized the relationship between the city and its territory, the urban capital and the space outside the city walls. From this point of view, the snakehandler on the left functions as a foil to the horsemen with their banners. If they represent the city’s power over its territories, he acts as a reminder of the limits of that power. The countryside, with its snakes and scorpions, can never be fully subdued, but remains a place of persistent uncertainty for the inhabitants of the city, always threatening to bite back.

Indeed, the uncertainties of the city’s relationship to the countryside mirror the uncertainties of the body’s relationship to its environment. The city is separated from its surroundings by a clearcut boundary, which is nonetheless perforated by a host of gates. These reveal the city’s autonomy as illusory; it can sustain itself only by a perpetual flow of people, goods, and produce, from outside the city walls. In the same way, the body exists in total dependence on the world outside it, for air, food, water, and the like. As Gianna Pomata has argued, this model rests on a very specific, but widely shared view of health.45 Like the health of the city’s economy and society, personal health was thought to require a constant, unimpeded flow between the outside and the inside; any obstruction risked leading either to starvation or to the internal corruption of the body’s humors, with resulting illness and death. Both city and body were bound to their surroundings, and in both cases, this was a source of concern as well as strength. Food comes from the outside, but so does poison; relations between inside and outside are never without risk.

Harvard University

45 Gianna Pomata, Confrarfing a Cure: Palienls, Healers, and the Law in Early Modern Bologna, trans. by the author, with the assistance of Rosemarie Fay and Anna TarabolettiSegre (Baltimore, 1998), 129-39.