Andrea A. M. Gatti

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CONCEPT OF MENTAL ILLNESS IN THEMEDICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL WRITINGS OF SIXTEENTH

TO SEVENTEENTH CENTURY SPAIN

The Warburg InstituteMA in Intellectual and Cultural History

September 2014

To Giacomo

THE EVOLUTION OF THE CONCEPT OF MENTAL ILLNESS IN THEMEDICAL AND ANTHROPOLOGICAL WRITINGS OF SIXTEENTH TO

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY SPAIN

Introduction: A Change in Mentality. .......................................................... p. 1

Chapter 1: Social Perception and Containment of Insanity

1.1. Awareness of a Common Problem …............................... p. 3

1.2. Perceptions of Insanity …....................................................... p. 5

1.3. The Strange Case of the Licenciado Vidriera …............................. p. 10

1.3.1. Synopsis of the Plot …........................................................ p. 11

1.3.2. Scientific and Literary Background …................................ p. 14

1.4. Bartolomé Sanchez against the Inquistion …................................ p. 20

1.5 Andreas de Laguna and the Reality of Witchcraft ….................... p. 25

Chapter 2: Scientific Understanding of Mental Illness

2.1. The Notions of Body, Soul and The Explanation of Mental Illness …. p. 30

2.2. Two Medical Problems …........................................................... p. 33

2.3. Paracelsus on the Generation of Fools ….................................... p. 35

2.4. Juan Luis Vives and the Role of Passions …................................... p. 42

Conclusion: An Ongoing Process …........................................................................ p. 50

Thanks to Aldo, Peter and Laura

Introduction:

A Change in Mentality

In the history of European scientific thought, the definition of insanity went through

considerable transformations. There are two main assumptions underlying a modern definition of

insanity, and they mark the difference with respect to the pre-modern concept of mental disease.

The first involves the adoption of the diagnostic method for the processes of thinking. The second

concerns the recognition of the role of social variables (and, particularly, of the moral education

received by the patient during childhood) in inducing a particular kind of mental disorder. As I hope

to demonstrate in this essay, the acknowledgement of these two principles is not an obvious fact and

the period between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century was crucial in determining these

changes.

As for the first evolution, the process was facilitated by the gradual recognition of insanity

as an illness with its own development and not only a side effect from other physical conditions.

The same modality that was used for the analysis of somatic conditions was assigned to the

processes of reasoning. Consequently, any anomaly in the understanding of reality started to be

considered as a disease and its manifestations as symptoms. The inclusion of these conditions into a

medical frame helped in detaching them from the common opinion that tended to see them as

consequences of moral faults. Instead, medical thought reduced them to purely medical conditions,

involving natural processes. It will be shown that this process did not follow a linear development

and was opposed by those intellectuals that refused to reduce mental alienation to material causes

only. This resistance would eventually lead to the debate on the reality of witchcraft that will be

discussed in the first chapter, and to the two medical problems that will be considered in the second

chapter.

The second aspect is determined and complicated by the first. The comparison of an altered

mental state with a disease implies a separation between a 'sane' majority and an 'insane' minority -

as if the typical contagion of physical diseases could also involve mental health. The efforts to

describe madness in medical terms coincided with an unprecedented political and legal interest in

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the subject and with the enactment of specific measures of containment and authoritative

organisation of the life of these individuals. Beside the traditional entrustment to familiar care, new

forms of social action were organised for the management of insanity. Hospitalization, expulsion

and suppression will be discussed in each of the three case studies that constitute the main body of

the first chapter.

I have decided to focus mainly on Spain because the discussion about this country offered

many advantages. At the time that I chose for my enquiry, the Spanish Kingdom was living his

'siglo de oro'. Its authority extended over approximately a third of the European territory, organizing

the civic life of very different people. On one side, the circulation of people through the domains of

the realm was organised and even encouraged by secular authorities. On the other side, the

penetration of ideas inside the mainland was highly regulated and subject to the active censorship of

the state-owned Inquisition. This was true for religious as well as for scientific themes. The

inclusion of Paracelsus's evolutionary model for biology has been motivated by the decision to

show a kind of knowledge that arrived in Spain with a long ideological delay.a At the same time,

Spain also provided Europe with its best physicians. The community here based had a strong

tradition and was now supported by a highly specialised academic system. Its general imprinting

was decisively based on Galenic medicine and Aristotelic physics.

The assumption of such a wide perspective has determined the structure of this essay. The

compilation of a full history of the notions about insanity that could be found in Spanish literature

and documentary sources would have required many years of research. Instead, I have decided to

limit my contribution to few relatively known examples that nonetheless could offer the more

complete image possible of the main ideas and currents about insanity that were circulating in

Europe by the time I have considered. Although many fundamental works will be touched just

briefly, this survey will try to reflect the immense horizon of such a subject and the relatively simple

instruments which intellectuals have used to explore its implications.

a GUERRERO RODRIGUEZ, J. Censura y Paracelsismo durante el reinado de Felipe II, Azogue, n.4 (2001),/http://www.revistaazogue.com.

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1Social Perception and Containment of Insanity

1.1. Awareness of a Common Problem

Although some early attempts to limit the anti-social behaviour of insane people in order to

preserve the tranquillity of social life could be found in documents produced by civic authorities in

many urban communities before the sixteenth century, it was not until then that these measures

became a constant worry for European societies.1 From the beginning of the early modern period, a

remarkable increase of the documentation testifying the adoption of practical and legal measures for

the containment of insanity can be attested. At the same time, an unprecedented interest was

displayed by intellectuals through the publication of numerous essays on this subject. The aim of

these publications was to provide a definition of what should be considered a disturbed mental state,

finding plausible causes for the manifestation of each form and suggesting a treatment that could

restore the mental health of the person affected. Owing to the variety of the conditions analysed, the

scientific rigour and the even diffusion on the continent, these studies should be regarded as the first

programmatic treatment of insanity as a matter of scientific interest per se in European cultural

history.2

While it might seem plausible that some kind of relationship must exist between these two

phenomena, it is not yet clear whether there was a more sophisticated and precise definition of

insanity that raised a new awareness of the problem as one pertaining to the action of social forces,

or whether there was such an increase of restrictive measures against insane people in sixteenth-

century Europe to call for a better comprehension of these conditions. On the one hand, the rise in

attention to this subject seems to naturally follow the general awakening of social studies that1 The restraining actions to which I refer here will be those analysed in the following pages: suppression, familiar

healthcare, expulsion and hospitalisation. Many books report the few proven examples of such practices in medievaltimes, often reiterating them with few exceptions. Most of them can be found in FOUCAULT, Histoire de la Folie al'Age Classique, pp. 13 – 55; ROSEN, G. Madness in Society, pp. 139 – 150.

2 Although we can find a number of references to the definition and treatment of mental illnesses from Antiquity, veryfew treatises were dedicated to 'diseases of the soul', i.e. to conditions of diseases chiefly affecting the ability to usereason. The most prominent exceptions were the book of Galen, On Melancholy and the thirtieth of Aristotle'sProblems, dealing with the same condition. See, KLIBANSKI, R. (et al.) Saturn and Melancholy, pp. 15 – 30.

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interested Europe in the same century which also included an effort to reduce the criminality in

towns or to impose hygienic practices amongst a wider range of the population.3 Undoubtedly, the

interest in finding more adequate and efficient ways of organising the life of the community

according to rational parameters responded to the need to upgrade of the methods of social

intervention in agreement with new humanistic ideals, better material conditions and a new political

order throughout Europe. On the other hand, the perception of insane people as a special category of

persons needing the attention of public institutions seems to be a new element in the history of

social welfare.

Instead of establishing the priority of one aspect over the other, we should consider these

instances as the two sides of the same coin, the concepts of 'sanity' (implying the ability of a rational

evaluation of reality) and that of mental 'illness' being connected through an inversely proportional

relationship. Therefore, it would be impossible to say whether the actual incidence of episodes of

madness in European cities increased in the sixteenth century or whether societies and their

institutions became more sensitive (though intolerant) towards anti-rational behaviour. If the effort

of education is directed towards the rational comprehension of a larger number of facts; and that of

political action is addressed to the ordering of both people's activity and the available resources

according to such criteria; it is clear that one action that can not be comprehended or accepted on a

rational level will cause a stronger reaction and will require a category of its own, allowing the

establishment to act upon it. In other words, the more a society is aware of its own education and

wealth, the less the expressions of spontaneous forms of thinking contradicting its universal mission

will find acceptance within the same society. The 'invention' of insanity as a category of the legal

system has to be related to the more systematic, all-encompassing, attempt ever made to build a

society whose rationalistic parameters must be accepted by each of its members.

The result of such a conceptual (i.e. scientific) and effective (i.e. legal) separation between a

sane majority entitled to rule the social life and an insane class of individuals reputedly unable to

make constructive choices was the progressive exclusion of the latter group from the social body.

This act of exclusion could be legitimate only if a scientific method were allowed to mark a definite

border between sanity and insanity by giving a rational explanation of the actual differences

between the minds of sane and insane people. These differences have been therefore related to two

main scopes: the biological constitution of the brain and the environmental conditions in which

patients were raised. We will refer to these two attitudes in deeper detail in the next chapter.

3 See MIKKELI, H., Hygiene in the early modern medical tradition pp. 98 – 118.

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However, it must be kept in mind that if the effort of the intellectual community ultimately had a

practical and positive impact on the actual manifestations of insanity on an individual basis (in other

words, it was aiming to find a universal definition of the causes, thus allowing the cure for

individual cases), this was functional to the ultimate needs of the community as such, whose

contingent aim was to control the phenomenon on a collective basis by means of repression of each

singular instance that could endanger social unity.4

In this chapter we will explore the various institutional forms that this exclusion assumed in

each of the three case studies that will be analysed. These examples reflect the image that different

social subjects projected upon these people and reveal whether substantial changes in the perception

of insanity had occurred compared with previous times. The first perspective to be assumed is that

of one of the most successful story-tellers of his times, Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. We will

focus on the character of Tomas Rodaja, the protagonist of the novella El Licenciado Vidriera, and

the strange disease that brought him to believe that his body had been turned into glass. Beside

providing us some very interesting details about how the mentally ill were treated, this story will

also give us the chance to connect the therapeutic practices found in Cervantes's writings to those

performed by physicians of the same period who described the same condition as existing in reality.

The second point of view will be that of Bartolomé Sanchez, a poor labourer from the small town of

Cardanete that believed himself to be a new Messiah. The story of his trial by the Inquisition tells us

a lot about how madness could also be used as a weapon to neutralize heterodox ideas. Finally, we

will consider the strong difference existing between the new arguments about altered states of mind

fostered by certain members of the intellectual élite and the opinions of the great majority of people.

The case in point will be the description made by Andreas de Laguna of a witch's ointment and its

effects, within the context of the age of terror that was concerning the most of Europe at that time.

1.2. Perception of Insanity

As these examples will clarify, the recognition of insanity as a disease was a long and

irregular process that went through forms of considerable resistance and the survival of previous

practices, implying an understanding of mental disease as a condition not so much regarding the

physical reality of the body, but rather the spiritual substance of the soul. In particular, the first4 Even though this danger could be easily underestimated from a modern perspective, we should keep in mind that

very serious threats to social unity could come from individual acts of protest that much resembled the outbursts ofcraziness performed by mentally ill people. Religion is a case in point. Many episodes of profanation or iconoclasmwere the result of individual initiatives that could lead to collective uproars. See ARNADE, P. Beggars, Iconoclastsand Civic Patriots, pp. 99 – 124.

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decisive change that occurred in the perception of mental illness was the detachment from the idea

that contracting it was the ultimate effect of a moral, therefore voluntary, decision.5 Making those

conditions a matter of anthropological interest (thus, of something pertaining to the human being as

such) separated them from being considered God's punishments (or assignment, for that matter).6 If

the idea of the intervention of incorporeal beings in causing permanent mental states survived for a

long time before being discarded, this was progressively detached from its moral implications and

was more and more often seen as an incident occurring independently from the patient's will.

In the first case, it will be shown the character of a 'fool' in his typical pre-modern social

context.7 Delusional states that did not imply a loss in the cognitive abilities of the subject were

believed to be the result of a different approach to reality. Therefore, these conditions were easily

connected to the revealing of parts of the truth that were not accessible through conventional

processes of thought. The medieval idea that extravagances in the behaviour could be accompanied

by a more acute spiritual understanding can be found in the lives of hermits and even in the writings

of the spiritual Fathers of monastic orders.8 As such, people engaging an obvious anti-social

behaviour could have been easily considered valid moral advisers for matters concerning social life

itself. The logic behind this reasoning was to consider them able to judge social relations from the

detached place they had chosen for themselves. This was not the case of our first character, the

Licenciado Vidriera, for his foolishness was all but a voluntary choice. Similar cases of incidental

loss of sense began to be studied for the clues they could provide to the understanding of

physiological reactions involving the brain as independent from the motions of the rational soul,

whose peculiarity was the use of free will. Therefore this first example will show a traditional

narrative frame in contrast with an innovative notion about the genesis of a mental disease.

For centuries, the reclusion of psychotics into buildings controlled by civic authorities was

enforced mainly when these were considered liable of criminal acts and therefore jailed.9 If these5 See, ZILBORG & HENRY, A History of Medical Psychology, pp. 175 – 176.6 The more convincing argument about this idea is given by Paracelsus in his 'Generation of Fools' by saying that not

even Jesus Christ has ever healed someone from an inborn condition, therefore implying that this had nothing to dowith redemption. Rather he considers those persons as abnormalities of nature, as it is for every other species,generated by its immense variety. See, PARACELSUS, On the Generation of Fools, p. 57.

7 It must be noted that the English term 'fool' had a broader definition in sixteenth-century literature, since it couldindicate both a person affected by a mental handicap or a 'buffoon', a professional entertainer that was used in thearistocratic courts. Tomas Rodaja seems to fit both these categories since he is first a village fool and then he is hiredby a noble man to entertain the Court of Valladolid. The Spanish language does not use, however, the sameidentification. Rodaja is always qualified as 'loco' from Cervantes, both when he is in the village and when he is inthe Court. See, CERVANTES DE SAAVEDRA, Exemplary Novels, p. 98; 109.

8 SAWARD, J., Dieu a la Folie, pp. 51 – 118 and, for an in-depth enquiry on 'holy foolery' origins in the East, seeIVANOV, Holy Fools in Byzantium, pp. 49-170

9 ROSEN, G. (as in n.1) p. 139 - 141 and BOARI, M. Qui Venit Contra Iura, pp. 75 – 109.

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citizens were not actually dangerous, they were usually left to the care of either their family or the

cloister.10 Another very frequent association was the one between madmen and beggars, who were

usually not a stable part of a community and conducted a wandering life, going from town to town

seeking assistance. The earlier foundations of hospitals in urban communities of the fifteenth

century were also connected to the accommodation of these people. Of course, that kind of measure

had the double function of providing humanitarian help as well as keeping them away from the

streets. Although their migrations have been connected to the sporadic accounts of expulsions of

groups of madmen from their native communities, a real connection between these two

circumstances has not been convincingly proved.11 However, it surely occurred that those people

who were considered to be unfit or unable to do any manual or intellectual work were often forced

to leave their native communities and find their sustainment elsewhere. Paradoxically, the social

pressure to leave (and consequently the assertion of his inability to social life) will be enacted on

Vidriera only after having being cured and lost his status as village fool.

Beside their function as hospices, hospitals were also a place for the cure of sick. Again,

beside the charitable mission of providing relief to patients, one should also consider the practical

aim of avoiding the spread of diseases through the population. But if the containment of contagious

diseases was functional to the very state of health of the community, it must be noticed that these

institutions often hosted disabled people who, incidentally, were also more likely to become

beggars. Madmen, beggars and sick people were all deliberately considered equal and enclosed in

the same space within the city walls. The establishment of these institutions was mainly intended to

minimize the impact of individuals whose coexistence with the rest of society was perceived as

detrimental to social relationships and order. However, although all the more modern hospitals in

Europe were organized in order to keep the carriers of transmissible illnesses apart from other

inmates, very few of them were provided with special sections for psychotics or 'lunatics'. This, of

course, does not exclude that people had been previously treated in similar institutes for psychiatric

problems. Several mentions of the admission of people in monastic infirmaries for 'spiritual'

10 A very famous case where a detailed description of the treatment for a mental breakdown that was performed inmedieval cloisters is that of the painter Hugo van der Goes, who entered a phase of acute melancholy accompaniedby mystical hallucinations. In that case, the cure provided looked like those that are found in medieval medicalbooks such as those of Bartolomaeus Anglicus nel De Proprietate Rerum and consisting of isolation, music andconstant surveillance. See, HUNTER & MACALPINE Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry, p. 1 – 4. For sixteenthand seventeenth-century psychiatric treatment in female monasteries see also, HASKELL, Y (ed.), Diseases of theImagination and Imaginary Disease in the Early Modern Period, p.

11 Many critics have been moved to the reality of the 'navires des fous' on which this association has established itsfoundations. Foucault asserts their historical existence but fails to demonstrate that the mental illness of these peopleand not their lack of means was the reason for their expulsion. See FOUCAULT, M., (as in n.1) p. 18 – 24. For areview of the criticism to Foucault see n.2 in Shuger's essay in HASKELL, Y. (as in n.11), p. 182.

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sicknesses, or the explicit rejection to curing lunatics that is found in the rule of Saint John's

Hospital of Cambridge in the late thirteenth century, seem to prove the contrary.12 Moreover, the

examples of the small cells equipped for receiving 'les possedés' that were forcibly brought on

pilgrimage to the sanctuaries of Geel, Larchant, and other places in Northern France, constituted a

prototype for the later development of psychiatric hospitals in Northern Europe.13 Still, these

people's necessities did not seem to deserve any special attention. Many reports tell about the

traditional practices used to contain their outbursts.14 Beside these, we should believe that their

regular treatment was normally established on the very generic principles of Galenic medicine and

was based on the regulation of the six non-naturals. However, this lack of specific places within the

hospital's walls denounces the absence (at least at the level of public assistance) of a basic

therapeutic programme whose method was not entirely physiological and whose aim was the

scientific observation of the patients' behaviour in a controlled environment, where they could react

independently of the influences of their usual context. In fact, no documentary proof exists that such

a distinction was ever made until the fifteenth century, even though secular or ecclesiastic

institutions for the medical treatment of the 'sick and poor' had already been in use for at least two

centuries.

Spain was the first country in Europe to build special houses for the assistance and

internalisation of locos y locas, from Moorish prototypes.15 The first one to be erected was the

Hospital d'Innocents, Follcs i Orats, which opened in 1410 in Valencia, the most prosperous city of

the Kingdom of Aragon, of the time. Many other establishments followed in the major town of the

country: Zaragoza (1425), Sevilla (1436), Barcelona (1481) and Toledo (1483). This tendency will

continue all through the sixteenth and the seventeenth century also exporting this model in the New

World. According to the legend, the first asylum in Valencia was built because his founder, friar

Jofré, was moved to compassion in seeing a madmen being derided and stoned by boys (nothing

had changed in Cervantes's Salamanca two hundred years later). However, these places did not offer

specific medical treatment at this time, but limited their prescriptions to occupational therapy and

diet.16 The Hospital of Zaragoza, where our second case study ends, was different in two major

12 See DOLS, M. W., Majnun. The Madman in the Medieval Islamic Word, p. 114 and HORDEN, P. The Impact ofHospitals (300–2000) p. 361.

13 LAHARIE, M., La Folie au Moyen Age XI – XIII, pp. 189 – 191.14 HUNTER & MACALPINE (as in n. 10), pp. 1-50. See also LAHARIE (as in n. 14), pp. 179-197 and 201-219.15 Although many scholars refers to Bedlam as the first hospital in Europe to be dedicated to the cure of mental

illnesses for is the first to record 'lunatics' in his register as a separated category, its re-construction as an hospital(1330) was surely not connected to this exclusive function, nor we have proof that it had been converted to thispurpose before the sixteenth century.

16 BARRIOS FLORES, L. F. El Internamento Psiquiátrico en Espaňa. De Valencia a Zaragoza (1408 – 1808), p. 3.

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aspects. Firstly, it was an institution directly founded and financed by the Crown and not by private

(i.e. charitable) initiative.17 And secondly, beside being a help to “[…] avoid the insults to which

they were exposed”, its statute considered medical treatment in order to “improve their situation and

try to restore their judgement”.18

Finally, we will also deal with the most controversial and problematic form of exclusion

experienced by the sixteenth century, that is suppression. There is no evidence of any physical

eliminations of lunatics or 'furiosi' motivated only on the basis of their conditions. There was,

however, the tragedy of the programmatic extermination of witches and sorcerers, whose mental

conditions much resembled those of the hallucinated segregated in hospitals. At first glance, these

episodes could be seen as a residue of the obsolescent explanation of madness as a state induced by

the intervention of external and evil agents (demons), which in some cases was considered as

deliberate through actual pacts with the Devil. Nevertheless, these beliefs stayed on and the

phenomenon exploded precisely when parts of the scientific community seemed to be more

determined in rejecting the idea that these possessions could deceive anyone else but the possessed

herself or himself. In fact, very few prosecutions of witches can be documented before the great

intolerance of the sixteenth century.19 Similarly for hospitalisations, this does not exclude that such

brutal slaughters happened before, maybe even in a high number of cases. Still, the novelty

introduced by sixteenth-century witch-hunt is once again the attribution of a legal dimension,

providing us with a great amount of documents and a valuable proof of the prevarication of secular

power over scientific progress. Like insanity, witchcraft also introduced a special category for the

secular law.20

In the third case, we will look at the description made by a well-known physician of the

altered mental state of a woman who had been treated with an ointment found in a witch's hut. We

will see how the question of the reality of witchcraft was imposing a choice between two different

scientific models of understanding the relationship between the physical world and the individual's

mind.21 One considered the witches to be sane and in possession of psychic powers able to alter

17 TILGHMAN NALLE, S. Mad for God, p. 158 – 62.18 BARRIOS FLORES, L. (as in n. 17), p. 5. “[...] evitar los insultos a que se hallaban expuestos” and “mejorar su

situación y procurar restablecerles el juício.” All translation are mine own, unless otherwise stated.19 See KIERKHEFER, R. European Witch Trials, pp. 10-26.20 For a complete history of the legal evaluation of witchcraft in Spain, see HENNINGSEN, The Witches' Advocate,

pp. 1 – 25.21 These two opposite positions were exemplified in the polemic that opposed Johan Weyer and Jean Bodin, the

authors of two capital works in the debate around the reality of witchcraft. The first wrote De PrestigiisDaemonorum (1563) a lengthy book where all allegations against witches are refused, based on the premise of theinefficacy of any of their alleged psychic powers and reducing all their declarations to delirium induced by their

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nature and its processes; the other considered them to be insane and driven by grim fantasies (and

indeed capable of convincing anyone else), which have nothing in common with reality. These two

models represented respectively a world in which the human mind could overcome nature with the

help of supernatural forces (both evil and good) and a world where nature cannot be controlled and

the real battlefield of the forces of good and evil is the mind itself.22 The battle to detach the outset

of both physical and mental diseases from demonology and astrology and to explain natural

processes uniquely as mechanical reactions coincided with the struggle to separate the experience of

mental illness from moral responsibility. This battle was carried out by relating the forming of

mental images (of the witches) or physical diseases (of the 'victims') to biological processes which

could only be considered as voluntary when activated through the deliberate use of altering

substances.

1.3. The strange case of the Licenciado Vidriera

Although his contacts with the literary circles of Europe were less frequent than those of

many intellectuals of his times, the main themes one can find in the works of Miguel de Cervantes

are perfectly attuned to those of his contemporaries. Together with William Shakespeare, he is the

most acute observer of the grievous effects of the derangement of reason in his characters whose

bursts of frenzy are among the most memorable moments of European literature. A long distance

separates the fantastic description of Orlando's 'lost sense' given by Ariosto to those of these two

geniuses. Insanity is produced by the internal elaboration of an obsessive thought – for Don Quixote

chivalry, for King Lear the love of his daughters. Cervantes' novella El Licenciado Vidriera shows,

instead, the occurrence of a manic thought as the consequence of an accident. It was part of his

Novelas Ejemplares, which were published in 1613 and deals with the loss of sense in a young man,

a student in law called Tomas Rodaja, whose unintentional poisoning led him to believe that his

body was no more made of flesh and blood. Instead, he thought that it had been entirely converted

into glass. This story contains some very interesting indications about the medical notions then in

melancholic imagination, although affirming the existence of demons and the materiality of the Devil. Their legalresponsibility should be reduced to idolatry. Jean Bodin's Daemonomania des Sorciers (1580) lists very learnedarguments to demonstrate the actual possibility of an alliance between men and spirits and that the performance ofblack magic could actually have an impact in the natural world. See, CLARK, S. Thinking with Demons, p. 195-213.

22 In Spain, the controversy took an eminently scientific tone. The intellectual debate on witchcraft took its origins inthe astrological survey commissioned by Alphonse X and in the works of Arnaldo de Villanova on cabala and itsuses. Inquisition looked attentively also in universities in order to find people involved in magical practices. Whilethe trials multiplied in all Spain, an early polemic was issued by Fray Martin de Castanega with the Tratado de lasSupersticiones y hechizerias (1529). There will follow many other essays opposing the theories found in the MalleusMaleficarum (1486) and reprising the ideas of Jean Gerson, Tractatus de Erroribus. See GRANJEL, L. Humanismoy Medicina, p. 115-173.

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use to explain this hallucination, the ambitions of medical knowledge in curing his disease, the

social reactions of his friends and fellow-citizens to his pitiable conditions and the therapies that

were set forth in order to restore his mental health. What makes the whole situation even more

interesting for our purpose is that, in medical treatises dealing with mental illnesses that were

produced in the same years, this narrative device is described as an existing form of melancholy.

This circumstance give us an opportunity to challenge the authority of such texts in giving an

objective description of the disease, one that is based on empirical observations. If the story of a

delirious man who thinks that his body is made of thin crystal is nothing more than a literary topos

elaborated from previous sources by Cervantes, we could legitimately suspect that our physician-

writers might have had access to the same sources and that they used them uncritically, making their

conclusions less reliable for the purpose of scientific description. On the contrary, if Tomas Rodaja's

monomaniacal delusion corresponded to a description of a real pathology observed by physicians

and re-invented by Cervantes, and the narrative was actually 'based on a true story', it is likely that

the dynamics there described – Tomas' breakdown, the assignment of a new social role, the

therapies - would be at least plausible if not directly taken from reality.

1.3.1. Synopsis of the plot

The story begins with two students on their way to Salamanca, where they were to attend its

prestigious university. They found a young boy, aged eleven, who was sleeping under a tree. After

they had questioned him, he said that his name was Tomas Rodaja and that he was going to

Salamanca too, where he would find a patron to serve in exchange for the payment of his studies.

Moved by such determination, the two students decided to take the boy with them. After eight years

in which Tomas demonstrated a very bright intelligence and dedication to his masters, the two

returned to their home town in Andalucia. Tomas instead decided to stay in Salamanca and

complete his studies in law. Here, he met captain Valdivia, an official that was going to join his

company before leaving Spain and serve the king in his domains in Italy. The captain invited Tomas

to join his company and benefit of the many pleasures that Italy had to offer. He accepted but under

the condition that he would not be enrolled in the ranks, in order to be free to leave and not be

forced to join the army, which he disliked. They soon departed. At this point follows a long

description of all the cities of Italy that the contingent visited. After having left Italy and visited the

Flemish regions, Tomas decided, once again, to return to the academic life he had left behind in

Salamanca. He was there introduced to a young lady who is described as someone determined to do

11

everything and to dispose of anyone in order to have what she wants23. She immediately fell in love

with Tomas. Being scorned by the young man who preferred his books to her company, she decided

to prepare a love filter. With the help of a Moorish herbalist she put the potion into a quince fruit

and gave that to Tomas:

... in that fruit she gave him one of those contrivances called charms, thinking that she was thereby forcing him

to love her; as if there were, in this world, herbs, enchantments, or words of power, sufficient to enchain the

free-will of any creature. These things are called charms, but they are in fact poisons: and those who administer

them are actual poisoners, as has been proved by sundry experiences..24

Instead of having the desired effect, the potion gave to Tomas an apoplectic seizure that left him

unconscious for many hours. He eventually regained consciousness and denounced the lady who in

the meantime had ran away and never came back. After six months, Tomas had not yet recovered.

He lost weight and, what is even more concerning, the use of his faculties.

Every remedy that could be thought of was tried in his behalf; but although the physicians succeeded in curing

the physical malady, they could not remove that of the mind; so that when he was at last pronounced cured, he

was still afflicted with the strangest madness that was ever heard of among the many kinds by which humanity

has been assailed. The unhappy man imagined that he was entirely made of glass; and, possessed with this

idea, when any one approached him he would utter the most terrible outcries, begging and beseeching them not

to come near him, or they would assuredly break him to pieces, as he was not like other men but entirely of

glass from head to foot.25

The first reaction of his friends was to try to persuade him that his fear was unreasonable by

forcibly embracing him so that he could see by himself that his body did not shatter. But what they

obtained instead were even more desperate appeals and the relapse of the crisis. With the passing of

time, however, his delusion assumed also a positive connotation, revealing the existence of a sort of

coherent logic moving from the acknowledgement of his new condition as a glass-man. He started

to think that being made of glass, a more subtle and delicate matter than flesh, his soul was now

able to act more promptly and efficaciously than it used to be in his former body. To put his belief to

the test, people started to ask him suggestions in every delicate matter, to which he replied with

remarkable precision and acumen. His new condition actively empowered his cognitive faculties, to

the astonishment of professors of medicine and philosophers, and gave him a new social role. After

having worn the sombre dress of the student and the parrot-fashion uniform of the soldier, Rodaja –

23 CERVANTES (as in n. 7) p. 94 “de todo rumbo y manejo”24 Ibid., p. 95.25 Ibid., p. 95

12

now called Vidriera - put a third kind of clothes on, ample enough not to crack his fragile body. At

the same time, he embraced a different life-style, sleeping in a case filled with straw, eating nothing

but fruits and walking in the street taking extra care not to be hit by shingles that might have fallen

from the roofs. He became the more and more paranoid. He was regularly seen going out in the

fields and seeking loneliness. The boys of the town started to throw stones and small projectiles

against him to mocking and seeing his despair. Still, the wisdom that his transformation has instilled

in him, caused him to gain a solid respect from the adults of the town who consequently started

reproaching their kids for their rude behaviour to the poor man. A lot of people kept coming to him

to request his opinions. On no occasion did he show any reluctance but, always speaking frankly

and directly, he pointed at the vices of each one of his fellow citizens. His transparency (true for

him, allegoric for all the others) finally caused him to become the veritable mirror of the morality of

his community. His fame spread throughout the country and the witty observations coming from

such a weird character came to be requested at court. Although reluctant, he decided to move to

Valladolid. Here he was kept in an even higher reputation and discuss with the noblest members of

his nation. Tomas spent two years in these conditions since one monk “who had extraordinary

powers in the cure of lunacy, nay, who even made deaf and dumb people hear and speak in a certain

manner”26 decided to take care of his situation. Unfortunately, the author does not go into any detail

and the methods used by this expert to heal Vidriera remain mysterious. It seems quite clear that he

was not an exorcist nor a physician and that he had probably learned some method for teaching how

to communicate to deaf people (lip reading and speech therapy, maybe?) and for stopping the

delusions of psychotic patients with some other kind of method. However, Tomas returned to his

previous state. He left his bizarre costumes and started his new life in the city that was now his

home. Hoping that he could still work at the court, “he might now render himself as remarkable for

the force of his intellect, as he had before done for his singular folly”27, he now dressed as a scholar

and had changed his name into Licenciado Rueda – Doctor Wheel. But the confused people of

Valladolid could not understand his last transformation. Hundreds of people crowded around him

and silently surrounded him while walking in the street. They did not keep asking questions as they

used to. His recovered sense was an even more wondering attraction. Despite his heartfelt appeal to

leave him alone and his reassurance that they could still have his precious opinions as long as they

moved their requests from the streets to his office, the crowd did not diminish but his services as a

professional (and not as a fool) were scarcely requested. Losing his glass shell, his wit had become

a tedious matter in the eyes of the people. Leaving Valladolid, he gave this farewell: “Oh, city and

26 Ibid., p. 10927 Ibid., p. 109.

13

court! you by whom the expectations of the bold pretender are fulfilled, while the hopes of the

modest labourer are destroyed; you who abundantly sustain the shameless buffoon,while the worthy

sage is left to die of hunger; I bid you farewell.”28. Dismisseing his dress for the last time, he took

up his former uniform and left for the Flanders to join his friend capitain Valdivia, “leaving behind

him the reputation of a most valiant soldier and upright man.”29.

1.3.2. Scientific and Literary Background

This short story was an occasion for Cervantes to give an account of his own memories of

Italy and to insert his apotegmas – aphorisms in the form of quick notes – in a narrative framework.

But, as Astrana Marín rightly observed, there is much more than this.30 The main feature of

Vidriera's social role as the village fool is to speak through aphorisms and acute sayings. This

feature is a defining character of the literary fool as such and could be traced back to Antiquity.31 As

literary critics have pointed out, from the fifteenth century through the sixteenth and on, especially

in Northern European countries, the common place of the fool assumed a relevance that it had never

had before in every form of cultural expression.32 Through the particular point of view on the events

that he could assume thanks to his peculiar ability of thinking 'out of the box', the narrative function

of the fool is usually that of revealing the truth that any one else on the scene is trying to avoid or

could not see because of their own obsessions and hopes. Because of this quality, his role is to

establish a link between the action that takes place on stage and the expectations of the public, who

also live beyond the mindset of the characters. Apart from his allegorical meaning, the traditional

association embodied by the fool was one between foolishness and carnal pleasures. The reason

why the wise words of the fools are not taken into consideration is because of their obscene

behaviour and the refusal of the most basic sense of self-restraint. Their existence is two-fold. They

embody the moral image of the consequences of lust, that is social exclusion, but at the same time

they also reveal the image of those who are fooled themselves, because of the contempt they hold

against morally-ill people. One should not look at the fool but listen to him. In these respect, Tomas

Rodaja is an unconventional kind of fool. He is no sinner and he demonstrates, before and after his

breakdown, he has a solid conscience and a remarkable self-control. He is a victim of the insane

desire of a woman and of the incompetence of her helper.33 The cause of his delirium and,

28 Ibid., p. 110. 29 Ibid., p. 110.30 ASTRANA MARÍN, Cervantes, v. 16 p. 125.31 See WELSFORD, E. The Fool, pp. 3-52.32 See PINSON, Y., The Fool's Journey, pp. 9–25.33 A similar remark against the remedies offered by the traditional medicine of the Moors is also found in the report of

14

consequently, of the empowerment of his own cognitive faculties is totally contingent.

The emphasis on the accidental nature of the mental breakdown of Rodaja seems to reflect

an idea of madness as a condition detached by moral reasons and essentially due to physical causes.

This was also the lead that many scientists dealing with mental illnesses were discovering. Their

intent was to explain the manifestation of these conditions from the point of view of the

physiological reactions within the body of the subjects. Therefore, they were assuming a

perspective based on an analysis of observations that did not much consider morality as a variable,

but rather a by-product of insanity. In the next chapter, we will go into greater details to see the

implications that such a materialistic reading brought to the evaluation of mental disease. However,

particularly in the Licenciado Vidriera, Cervantes seems to be very aware of the progress of

medicine. There is one episode among those reported by Juan Huarte de San Juan in his 1575

Examen de Ingenios para la Ciencias that has many points in common with our narrative:

[…] If a man falls sick of any distemper [of the four qualities], that changes the temperament of his brain on a

sudden (as in madness, melancholy and frenzy) he would loose in a moment, though he were once wise and

understanding whatever wisdom, understanding and knowledge he had and would utter a thousand

extravagances; on the contrary, though he had been once an ignorant fellow he would be inspired with more

wit and ability than ever he had before. [...] a page of a Spanish grandee when delirious, though in his health

he was reckoned a fellow of small wit, yet in sickness he made such agreeable discourses and such pertinent

answers to whatever was asked him forming withal so fair an idea of the government of a kingdom (of which

he conceited himself king) that all who came to see and hear him were surprised, nay his own master, who

never stirred from the bedside, wished he might never be cured. As afterwards appeared more plain, when the

page was recovered of his sickness, for the physician that cured him, going to take leave of his Lord not

without hoping of receiving some gratuity [...] instead of that, met this welcome: “I assure you master doctor, I

never was so vexed as I am now to see my page cured, because it seems unreasonable to me to change so wise

a folly into such a stupid understanding as his is when he is well. I am of opinion that of a wise and sober youth

which he was you have made him an errant sot […].” The poor physician […] went to take leave of the page

and […] the page said to him: “Sir, I thank you heartily for the great good you have done me in bringing me

recover to my understanding but, I swear to you by my faith, it is not without great regret I am cured. For

whilst I was frantic, I had the pleasantest enjoyments in the world conceiting myself a grand signor and that

there was no king on Earth but was my vassal. And what signified it, though it was imaginary, since I took as

much pleasure in it as if it had been really true. My condition is much worse at this present for I find myself in

the interesting case of the serious wound to the head of Don Carlos, which involved the very best doctors of Europeand displayed all possible therapies, included the herbal application of a Moor herbalist. As Garcia Ballester haspointed out, the university system (to which Cervantes was very close) dismissed the traditional knowledge of Arabmedicine (and especially pharmacology) that has been predominant for the previous centuries. Such denigrativecampaigns and restraint towards traditional medical practices are not uncommon in the medical literature of thehumanismo medico that tended to foster a more analytical and less empirical attitude to illnesses. See VILLALON,L. J. Putting Don Carlos Together Again, p. 355; GARCIA BALLESTER, L. La Medicina en Espana p. 10 - 13.

15

reality but a poor page, that must tomorrow morning begin to serve him [...] 34

This is followed by a polemic attack against those who think that such extraordinary abilities, that

could be obtained through delusional states are the result of demonic possession rather than a

consequence of the dynamics of natural philosophy. It is the imbalance of temperament between the

three faculties (understanding, reason and memory) of the rational soul to cause the supremacy of

one over the others.35 In the case of the page, it is the soreness of understanding to explain his

excellence in reasoning.

The same 'materialistic' perspective seems to be endorsed by Cervantes who held a copy of

the Examen in his library.36 He also limited the breakdown of his character to poisoning caused by

the inexperienced control of the delicate balance of cerebral physiology. The special place that

medicine in general, and psychiatry in particular, occupy in Cervantes's works had been the object

of a number of dedicated studies.37 Being the son of a surgeon he must have had a family

background empowered by notions of medical practice. We also know for sure that in his frequent

movements for his job as a tax collector, he surely came in contact with hospitals for the cure of

mad people. In the 'ingenioso'38 Don Quixote, Cervantes remembers his encounter with some

characters of the 'Casa de los Locos en Sevilla' underlying their condition of being subject to the

scorn and abuse of society by calling them 'locos innocentes'.39 Moreover, the description that

Cervantes makes of the seizure that almost kills Tomas (and finally transforms him into Vidriera) is

very close to those found in many essays dealing with the affections of the nervous system, which

were produced in the same period.40 Another book in the author's library, El Dioscorides (also

known as Materia Medica, 1555) an extensively annotated translation into Spanish from the Arab

text of the famous herbarium of Pedanius Dioscorides (ca. 65 AD) by Andreas de Laguna, contains

34 HUARTE DE SAN JUAN, J., The Tryal of the Wits, pp. 113 – 118.35 HUARTE DE SAN JUAN (as in n. 35), p. 112 – 113.36 LOPEZ MUNOZ, F. et al., Locos y Dementes en la Literatura Cervantina, p. 492 – 493.37 See, for example, LOPEZ MUNOZ (as in n. 39) and REVERTE COMA, J. M. La medicina en el Quijote, 16

(http://www.gorgas.gob.pa/museoafc/quijote/16quijote.html)38 The concept of 'ingenio' is developed by many Spanish authors in the sixteenth century. The attribute that Cervantes

decided to give to his Quixote in the first edition of his masterpiece is usually compared with the 'Ingenios' byHuarte that Cervantes known very well (v. n. 39). However, the description of ' ingenio' contained in De Anima etVita by J. L. Vives seems to be even more adapt to the case of Quixote. He says that intelligence is the ability of thespirit to correct the facts reported by the senses. Since the quality of our sensations is directly proportional to thequality of our general complexion, the ability of combining the excesses of each complexion with the more subtlesubstance of our reason will produce the work of genius. This was believed to be particularly true for a melancholiccomplexion (the thickest of all humours). Reprising a common place of Platonic origin and reiterated by Aristotle(Problems, XXX, I), he affirms: 'no hay ingenio sobresaliente sin manía'. See VIVES, J. L. Tractado del Alma, pp.1201 – 1202.

39 CERVANTES, Don Quixote, p 484.40 See MONTALTO, Archipatologia, pp. 169.

16

very similar warnings.41 We will present shortly de Lagunas's opinion about the abuse of drugs and

herbs and its connection with the occurence of mental disease.

If the works of Huarte and Laguna had allegedly acquainted Cervantes with medical notions

in order to give more credibility to his characters, we have not yet discovered whether Cervantes

built its story upon a clinical case. A tight relationship with Rodaja's could be noted in the

observation of a same disease in the work of Antonio Ponce de Santa Cruz, member of one of the

most influential and powerful families of physicians in Spain. Antonio, was a catedratico of the

medicine faculty of the University of Valladolid and a contemporary of Miguel. His father, Alfonso,

who was the court's physician and cartographer under Philip II, had written a small treatise on

melancholy, the Dignotio et cura affectuum melancholicorum that is regarded as the first Spanish

work on mental illness and its treatment. Alfonso's book was left unpublished until Antonio

included it as an appendix to his general study about Avicenna, which was released in 1621 in

Madrid. Although no evidence of the friendship of Miguel and Antonio Ponce survives, many ideas

that could be found in the Dignotio and in Cervantes's works, have led the scholar Rojo Vega to

postulate that he could have had access to this essay before it was published.42 In relation to our

narrative, this passage particularly seems to be very fitting:

So it is, and I rejoice telling some of them for the sake of entertaining and so that your memory could firmly

remember the caution that I had to use towards these lunatics when removing these hallucinations from their

mind. First, at the Academy in Paris, there was a certain teacher of mine – a man of a solid reputation in our

profession and quite expert – who had a very important melancholic man in his care. This person thought that

he was a jar made of glass. If someone approached in order to talk with him, he promptly and quickly

moved away thinking (or rather fearing) that he could be shattered by the touch or contact with anyone. This

delusion remained in the insane man for a while, augmenting his great hatred against everyone else who were

convincing [him of] the opposite of his delirium. However, one day this very prudent physician went near and

said to him: “Most illustrious prince, I can not stop laughing at all those who deny that you are indeed a glass

jar, which is as evident as the Sun shines in the sky. For this reason it shall be convenient that tonight you

could sleep in a bed made only with straw. There you will be safe and remain unbroken. This, in fact, is how

all merchants do with their glass vases, when they carry these vases not to break or crack them.43

41 See PEDANIUS DIOSCORIDES, De Materia Medica, p. 4 – 8.42 ROJO VEGA, A., Erasmismo tardío en la medicina española del siglo XVII: Antonio Ponce de Santa Cruz , vol. 4:

85-97.43 DE SANTA CRUZ, A., Dignotio et Cura Melancholicorum, IV, p. 16. Ita res se habet & placet aliquas enarrare, tum

animi recreandi gratia, tum etiam ut memoriae tuae fixa maneat cautela, qua erga hos, in dimovendis dementes istis,a suis imaginationibus usi fuimus. In primis in Parisiensi Academia praeceptor quidam meus in arte hac nostrainsignis vir, & satis expertus, curam cuiusdam illustrissimi viri melancholici habebat. Qui quidem se vas vitreumesse extimabat. Accedente tamen aliquo, ut illum coloqueretur, statim diligentia & velocitate maxima discedebat,existimans, aut potius timens, ne alicuius accessu aut contactu frangeretur. Dementi hac imaginatione aliquandiupermansit, odio magno prosequendo omnes, qui contrarium huius delirii profitebantur. Tandem prudentissimus hic

17

The rest of the story is even more interesting. The sly physician, pretending to look for something

he had lost under the patient's straw-bed, set that on fire and promptly locked the door behind him.

The bed was soon in flames and the patient started to bang violently the door begging the physician

to open it. He calmly asked the prince how was it possible that with all that beating on the door he

was not already broken in many pieces. When the prince understood that he could have died, he

suddenly dismissed his 'false imagination' and was cured. The mixed use of compliance, the

instilment of fear and good sense manifesting the evidence to the patient's eyes were the only

therapeutic devices that early modern physicians knew.

However, if the description of the case seems to be a direct source for El Licenciado

Vidriera, we could not be entirely sure that Alfonso has in his turn taken his observatio from a real

circumstance. This was not the first description of a similar case. Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, Pope

Pius II, was the first to report of someone who believed that his body was entirely made of glass. 44

He was Charles VI of France, also known as 'le fou'. The location and the reference to an

'illustrissimus vir', together with the other famous story of an incendiary outburst of the mad king

(the so-called 'bal des ardents') might lead us to think that Alfonso could have re-adapted the whole

story for the sake of 'animi recreandi gratia', with an undeniable use of a certain amount of literary

complacence. Another possibility is that the example described here is that of a French prince

suffering of the same symptoms and portrayed by André du Laurens, physician to Henry IV, about

which we have but a scanty report.45 However, many other mentions of this same hallucination also

come from other sources both literary and scientific and all written around the same period. In these

cases, the settings and the symptoms varies. So we have, for instance, Walkington (Optike Glasse,

1607)46, van Beverwyk (Schat der Ongesontheyt, 1642) and the Danish poet Thomas Bartholinus

(Historiarum anatomicarum rariorum centuria, 1654) telling about people believing that their

buttocks could break when sitting. The archetype for the Northen European version of the story is

however the account of a patient given by Levinius Lemnius (De Habitu et constitutione corporis,

1561).47 Tomaso Garzoni (L'hospedale dei pazzi incurabili, 1586) refers of one person who was

medicus quadam die ad illum accessit, cui dixit: “Illustrissime Princeps, non possum non irridere omnes hos qui tevitreum vas esse negant quod quidem ita verum est ut Sol nunc lucet. Quapropter operae pretium est te noctu diuquein lecto quodam ex solis paleis constructo iacere, ibi secure & absque laesione eris, sic enim mercatores omnesistorum vasorum itinerando sua portant vitrea vasa, ne collidantur aut frangantur.

44 SPEAK, G. 'El Licenciado Vidriera' and the Glass Men of Early Modern Europe, p. 852.45 DU LAURENS, A. De la Conservation de la Veve, p. 29b – 30a. 46 WALKINGTON, T. The Optik Glasse of Humors, p. 139. Walkington's cases studies seem to be modelled on these

of Du Laurens.47 LEVINIUS LEMNIUS, De Habitu et Constitutione Corporis, p. 180

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afraid of everyone because he was convinced that his head was made of earthenware and the

smallest contact could break it.48 As Gill Speak's article shows, all the symptoms displayed by these

glass-men are consistent with those usually referred to melancholy. Isolation, fear of persecution,

and a bright intelligence were all characters of a melancholic disposition. This state was well

symbolized by the properties of glass. On the one hand, the soul loving the light and subtlety of

matter would be more free in a transparent container. On the other hand, the extreme fragility of

glass (or earthenware, 'testa' in Latin)49 also means the precariousness of this gift and the ease of

losing reason itself: “The heart of the fool is a broken jar”50 warned the book of Sirach, a passage

reprised by the very popular mystics Juan de la Cruz (Cantico, Cancion IX) and Teresa d'Avila

(Camino, Chapter 19).51 So, if the motif of a glass-man could well have been chosen by Cervantes

for its symbolic value (very suitable to the declared moral purpose of his short stories), should we

dismiss all the other reports (describing these delusions as medical issues) as merely mnemonic

images created for the purpose of showing the most common traits of mental afflictions connected

to melancholy? The fact that this melancholic condition was frequently quoted among others

equally 'symbolic' psychosis - such as the 'lonesome' werewolves, the 'absent-minded' cock-men or

the hypochondriac believing that he is 'brooding vipers in his guts' –52 but also with conditions more

identifiable for us, seems to exclude that. Rather, it seems to suggest that both patients and

therapists shared the same symbolic landscape and that the former group could easily confuse the

allegory with the reality. It is the social context that provides the mad with the images of his

delusion. The metaphorical language of the common use is the raw material for the fictional world

of the madman. If we have to believe to the evidences brought by all these 'observations' 53 of

authoritative doctors, we should conclude that the forms that a mental disease could assume directly

depend from the accepted definition of what a mental illness is, even though the cognitive actions,

in this case metamorphosis, will remain the same through the ages. Therefore, it is quite probable

48 GARZONI, T. L'Hospidale de' Pazzi Incurabili, p. 254.49 The popular association between earthenware and mental disease is echoed also in El Licenciado Vidriera. When the

boys of Salamanca threw stones against him, he remarked them with these words: “Am I, perchance, the MonteTestacio of Rorne, that you cast upon me so many potsherds and tiles?” (Exemplary Novels, p. 98) This artificialmound of ancient Roman pot-shells was tightly associated in Medieval times with the Carnival and many satiricalgames were performed in his premises.

50 Ecclesiasticus 21,17.51 SPEAK, G. (as in n. 45), p. 856.52 DE SANTA CRUZ, A. (as in n. 44), p 17. The case of 'hypochondriac melancholy' is particularly interesting. When

considered in itself this condition was related to a disturb of the hypochondrium, or the upper part of the abdomen(see Blanchard, Lexicum Novum, p. 316) and only later it became to be identified with the melancholic fear of beingaffected by any disease. Johannes Freitag's De Hypochondriaca Melancholia (1687) is dedicated to this peculiarvariation of melancholy. It is interesting to notice that, between these opposite – mental and physical - values, in theobservatio of Santa Cruz, the self-convinced sick laments an imaginary disease that is however connected to the realorgan.

53 On the meaning of 'observationes' for sixteenth-century medical practice, see SIRAISI, N., History, Medicine andthe Tradition of Renaissance Learning, p. 68 – 69.

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that real cases have constituted the foundations for both Cervantes' narrative and the other

variations reported by other writers, scientists and literates. Even today among the clinical cases that

a therapist (or a plastic surgeon) could be asked to take care of, there are people genuinely believing

of being someone else (the stars of cinema and television), animals or even objects. However, we

should not think of those as typical cases that could have been faced by physicians in everyday

practice. Their success as a topos of literature (and indeed of medical literature as well), should

have been due to their memorable eccentricity – a feature that has always helped learning – and for

the sake of completeness.

1.4. Bartolomé Sanchez against the Inquisition

The evidence for establishing the madness of Bartolomé Sanchez was much more difficult to detect.

His symptoms were not as clear as those of Tomas Rodaja because his supposed delirium concerned

a topic over which the greatest confusion predominated at the time when it manifested itself. This

was, of course, religion. In her book Mad for God, Sara Tilghman Nalle gives a detailed account of

the trial of a fifty-year old wool carder from the small village of Cardanete in Castilla versus the

local Inquisition for a presumed case of heresy.54 The trial started in 1553 and ended five years later

with a sentence declaring Bartolomé Sanchez mad and ordering his reclusion in the Royal Hospital

of Nuestra Seňora de la Gracia in Zaragoza. The indictment that started the process was issued by

the parish priest of Cardanete after the labourer had been repeatedly sacrilegious in public and had

spread dangerous ideas among his fellow-citizens. In the previous two years, he had performed

multiple strange acts of protest while attending Mass, particularly during Lent. When the

investigation began within the walls of the Holy Office headquarters in Cuenca with the questioning

of the accused, the Inquisitor Pedro Cortes found that he was dealing with a very complicated

situation that required further in-depth analysis. His prisoner expressed his contempt for the

Catholic Church, its rites and clergy in the most open, though restrained, way. In addition to that, he

started to expose also a personal theology whose foundational elements were the refusal of the

traditional Trinity substituted with a new one composed of Father, Son and Mother united by the

Holy Spirit ; the rejection of any form of worship of images; the belief in the coming of a second

54 A similar case is proposed in the 1976's classic book by Carlo Ginzburg, Il Formaggio e I Vermi where the story ofDomenico Scardella, aka Menocchio, is told. The two examples, happening in the same years, differ however intheir conclusion, Menocchio being found guilty and therefore executed by the Inquisition. On the one hand, thiscould reflect a different degree of awareness of insanity in relatively comparable rural contexts, but placed undervery different social and political conditions. On the other hand, some of the ideas that Bartolomé expressed seemedto fit the idea of a 'cosmogony' of pre-Christian practices that have been preserved in a rural society. SeeGINZBURG, C. Il Formaggio e I Vermi, p. xxii–xxiii.

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Messiah who would have taken revenge on behalf of Jesus Christ; the uselessness of the Sacraments

imparted by ecclesiastics, and that God's will was revealed through his Word, not through the

symbols of bread and wine; therefore, the necessity of confessing only to God. He said that he had

started to elaborate these thoughts since he had a vision, two years before, of two men and a woman

embraced by the wings of a bird hovering over their heads. He later recognised the vision in a

picture of the Coronation of the Virgin that he found on a Book of Hours, but added that no one of

the 'wise and learned' ecclesiastics he consulted seemed to have an explanation of the meaning of

his vision, or could tell him whether this had been a true vision from God or a fascination contrived

by the Devil. The acknowledgement of such arguments by a barely literate labourer was a matter of

the highest importance for the Inquisitor. The thesis that Sanchez was exposing was a collection of

heterodox ideas that much resembled some of the arguments used by alumbrados. Also Sanchez's

tolerant attitude towards Jews and Moors might have recalled Erasmian ideas.55 However the man

repeatedly swore that his conclusions were entirely original and that no one have instructed him

apart from God himself.

As Nalle has argued, we have no reason to doubt him when he said that he had formed his

opinions without any indoctrination whatsoever.56 The acquaintance of Sanchez with the procedures

of tribunals could be explained by the troubles that involved Cardanete in his youth and had

involved many of the villagers as accused or witnesses. The sympathy with Jews and the hate for

the Inquisition could also arise from the infamous treatment reserved to the converso Montero

family whose descendants had been persecuted without any factual reason. As for the more

specifically theological ideas, which seemed not to be very detailed but firmly impressed in his

mind, Sanchez could have taken them from here and there, once his private quest for an explanation

of his vision had led him to question priests and friars of the whole region about its meaning.

Underneath the surface of conformity, there were many dissident interpretations on the most

delicate matters, such as the cult of images and the nature and efficacy of sacraments, of which

Sanchez might have been made aware. His work led him to move quite frequently from town to

town and to have contacts with all sorts of religious orders and their exponents. If it is unlikely that

he could have confronted any Protestant intellectual, it is entirely possible that he met some

Huguenots fleeing from France.57 His knowledge of biblical passages was remarkable. The absence

of eschatological themes in his answers to Cortes's questions and a very strong accent on social

justice and the advent of an era of egalitarianism seems to point towards Franciscans rather than

55 Ibid., pp. 65 - 66.56 Ibid., pp. 55 – 72.57 Ibid., p. 66

21

Dominicans as his main influence. The Carmelites' preachings probably acted upon his memory too;

exalting the figure of the prophet Elijah, as we will promptly see, would have made the most vivid

impression on him. Too autonomous in his reasoning and too peculiar in his conclusions to have

been indoctrinated by only one person, his meditations brought him to put many elements together.

By reading in the acts the pertinence of the answers given to the more learned Inquisitor Cortes, one

cannot fail to see in him a remarkable intelligence. He formed in his mind a clear picture not only of

social reality but also of the cosmic order behind that. And he put himself right at its centre.

In the continuation of Sanchez's questioning a new element was added to the previously

uttered heresies. He soon declared himself to be the new Messiah whose name was Elijah and

whose aim was to avenge the betrayal of Jesus Christ by destroying the Church of Rome whose

ministers were the descendants of his executors. The biblical Elijah was the revolutionary prophet

who led back the people of Israel to the faith in God by defeating the priests of Baal on the Mount

Carmel.58 He was seen by both Jews and Christians as a prefiguration of the Messiah. Theories

about his return on Earth stated that he was going to start a new era of justice. As such, his identity

had been assumed by other messianic leaders, such as Melchior Hofmann in 1534 Münster or

l'Encobert in Valencia in the early 20s. As the new 'Son of Man', he also predicted that he would be

released from his imprisonment on All Souls' Day and that in that day God's judgement would hit

the Inquisition.

The date passed with no consequences. Instead of dismissing his identity as new Messiah, he

assumed that the Father was putting him to test and waited for the accomplishment of his destiny.

Many attempts were made by the Inquisitor to make his prisoner repent; all in vain. Cortes was not

inclined to condemn Sanchez for heresy. Partly because he was not convinced that Sanchez was

responsible for his own opinions. Partly because he thought that Sanchez did not belong to any of

the categories of people that were usually condemned and executed in the Act of Faith, mainly

'judaizing' conversos for heresy and witches or sorcerers for profanation. If he had not been

corrupted by any bad teacher, he might have been crazy. Cortes excluded the possibility that

Sanchez could have been possessed. Regarding his vision he said to Sanchez: “Often when the devil

wants to fool man, he creates their inspirations by showing signs of the angel of light; but when

men, with pure hearts, commend themselves to God as you said you did, His divine Majesty does

not allow them to be deceived as you were... Your error has come to you from some other place

58 1 King, 25 – 46.

22

[...]”.59 To exclude also the eventuality of Sanchez's madness, he started an investigation about his

mental state during the time he had been imprisoned and in the years previous to his arrest. Beside

the blasphemies that he pronounced every time religion came up as a topic of conversation,

everyone who spoke and dealt with him confirmed that his behaviour was that of a sane man 'in his

right judgement'. Since also this extenuating circumstance could not be allowed, the sentence of

death was unavoidable. The date of the next Auto de Fe was set for April 29th, 1554 and Bartolomé

was the only living person to be sentenced to the stake. After his sentence was read and a minute

before stepping onto the gallows, he retracted everything he had said against the Catholic Church

and about himself as a Messiah and begged for mercy. The sentence was then suspended. His

consecutive interrogation gave no further reason to proceed. Sanchez retracted every single word of

his own religion. He started blaming the devil for having suggested him all the articles of his

personal faith. Although Cortes could not accept this explanation, Sanchez was released a few days

after the Auto. The punishment for his heresies however was not light. He was forced to wear the

sambenito and to confess regularly, beside being deprived of any legal rights.

The case was closed. The judge Pedro Cortes died in June 1555 and we don't have any

further news of Bartolomé Sanchez until autumn came and some neighbours saw the wool-carder

secretly make an obscene fig-gesture to the statue of the Virgin while returning from work. The act

was repeated and when the rumour spread through the village, Sanchez stopped saluting the statue

at all; an even more offensive outrage. His behaviour was reported to the Inquisition that did not

take any measures. Soon after, he performed another scandalous act in public. He burned his

sambenito in the central square and delivered a speech against the cult of the Cross to the

amazement of those who came to stop him. He later reported that he was returning from one of his

penitential confessions when, as soon as he took communion, a great anguish pervaded him and

conflicting thoughts started to come to his mind. In his deposition he said that he knew that he was

doing something wrong and that he struggled against himself to avoid doing it, but the unhappiness

that seized him was too painful and eventually won over his will. Arrested by the Inquisition, he

repeated to judge Moral everything he had retracted, saying that he was Elijah and that he had

repudiated his beliefs for fear of death, just as Saint Peter did. However, he looked much more

confused now and his talking was now excited and abstruse. He set up a new theory according to

which God wanted man to marry and procreate only with his own sisters or daughters. The case was

re-opened. A lawyer, Doctor Muňoz, was assigned to Sanchez's defence. He wanted to recover the

argument of Sanchez's insanity. With the discussion of religious issues being the only occasion in

59 TIGHMAN NALLE, S. (as in n. 18), p. 103.

23

which Bartolomé showed signs of derangement, the plea offered for lunacy or foolishness was not

feasible. There only remained possession. Sanchez retracted everything again, this time saying that

he had never been conscious while saying the things he had said and that someone else was talking

through him the entire time. In the time he was free from those “anxieties, imaginings and

persuasions”60 he prayed God to help him in his fight against those unknown forces that made him

preach things that “nobody taught me, nor did I hear it from someone, nor did I read it” saying

“God help me, I'm crazy”61. The Devil was held responsible for Sanchez's heresy. Muňoz gave a

philosophical explanation for his assumptions explaining that the Devil penetrated through the air

and, with God's permission, in Sanchez's brain and harmed his potentia imaginativa finally driving

him crazy. The defence was not entirely convincing but it was effective. As it has been observed by

Shuger, the Inquisition was extremely careful in admitting insanity as an excuse. The possibility that

the accused could feign his condition to escape prosecution was real.62 The Court decided to punish

him for the combustion of his penitential vest but, as for the relapse into heresy, they released

Sanchez reserving judgement until his mental state was not established with more precision.

After a year, Sanchez's prosecutor, the mayor of Cardanete bachiller Serrano started pushing

for a resolution of the case. When the Inquisition answered to his petition saying that they had more

important things to deal with, Serrano decided to appeal the case to the Suprema Corte of Madrid.

Under political pressure from the authority to close the case, the judges Moral and Riego, who ruled

over the second trial, replied that they were reluctant to consider him a sane man. They asked to

Juan Ybaneta, the secretary of both trials, to produce a statement stating his point of view. Ybaneta

seems greatly to exaggerate some details and to depict Sanchez's own deposition, that he had

himself redacted, with great emphasis on the illogical details of his reasoning and the strangeness of

his manners. According to his reconstruction, Cortes had asked him to take note only of those things

that could have been indictable and to leave outside all the rantings and nonsenses that Sanchez had

said. Vergara, the bishop's representative, said that he had voted for Sanchez's condemnation just

because he was sure that the fear of death would have made him capitulate and repent and that after

his conversion he would have worked very hard to cure him. The account given by Vergara and

Ybaneta that the acts of the first trial had been redacted inaccurately could look like a manufactured

response to the Suprema's pressures, and seems to have been opposed by the other secretary, Juan

de Gaviria. However, Sanchez continued with his heretic routine. Arrested for a third time, he again

admitted that he had lied in order to save his life but that he still believed himself to be Elijah. Other

60 Ibid., p. 124.61 Ibid., p. 124.62 HASKELL, Y (ed.) (as in n. 10), p. 188 – 189.

24

witnesses were heard and they all confirmed his latest blasphemies.

Although Sanchez appeared to be sane in some ways, nonetheless they [Moral and Vergara] were truly

convinced that he was insane and possessed. [...] Although they used the word 'possessed' in the same breath as

'insane', clearly the inquisitors did not believe that Sanchez was possessed, at least at any way that could be

helped by priestly intervention, that is an exorcism. Instead they thought that the explanation for Sanchez's

madness was to be found in medical science. His sickness was not in his soul but in his body. […] They

ordered the wool-carder to be placed at one of three hospitals not just so to be confined but in order that the

humour afflicting him could be removed and he could be cured of his insanity.63

Whether the final reports of Ybaneta and Vergara were true or not, one could not doubt that

the wool-carder was not a fool; neither was he physically dangerous to himself or others. His only

preoccupation was religious truth and, in two different investigations into his mental state, he was

found to be 'in his right mind' in all other respects. It does not seem either that the Inquisitors ever

perceived him as an actual threat to communal orthodoxy, since he never hid his convictions but he

also never tried to find acolytes nor he appeared to have ever revealed himself as the Elijah-Messiah

to anyone else, except for the Inquisition. Diabolical possession had completely different

characteristics because it featured the suspension of the individual will of the vehicle. Lunacy, from

its part, was characterised by the inability to have normal social interactions. While the periodical

occurrence of his manic behaviour alternated with periods of appropriate demeanour and also his

repentance seemed genuine. The various delays and the postponement of a decision about Sanchez's

final destiny reflect the embarrassment of the local institution of a small village in front of a new

kind of social misfit; one that could not be entirely blamed for his unorthodox positions but could

not even be accepted as the eccentric exponent of a different way of approaching reality. Religion

was a matter of social unity and the effort to maintain uniformity and to show severity through any

form of dissent required an exclusion from the social body that did not contemplate a physical

elimination by means of a cathartic religious act of faith. Bartolomé Sanchez managed to escape

from the hospital of Zaragoza and to get back to Cardanete. The exasperated Inquisition ordered

once again for him to be brought back to perennial isolation. Whatever happened next remains

mysterious.

1.5 Andreas de Laguna and the Reality of Witchcraft

The intellectual debate about the reality of witchcraft was the final, and indeed more violent,

63 TIGHMAN NALLE, S. (as in n. 18), p. 136.

25

expression of the deep crisis that involved a millennial-long way to understand the occurrence of

any illness as a general condition involving simultaneously the body's biological cycle and psychic

life as a same and indissoluble substance.64 In its wider dimension, this debate reflected the more

radical developments that philosophic and scientific thinking was experiencing with regard to the

relationship between body and soul. But on a practical level, the aim of such a controversy was to

establish whether the pacts with the Devil and the sacrilegious and lustful rites that were described

by the same witches as real events were actually performed in the physical world. If things like

flying or having sex with demons were happening in physical terms, then it would have been also

possible that these people could overcome the rules of natural law in other ways. On the contrary, if

these supernatural acts happened only in their imagination, they should be considered nothing more

than illusions provoked by a damage in the brain's faculties. It is interesting to notice how, by the

very terms in which this question was posed, the identification of 'material' and 'real' was an already

acknowledged notion while, on the opposite, the visions appearing as a consequence of the internal

work of imagination were downgraded to the level of 'unreal' and subjective illusions. However, the

first question of this debate was to determine if the Devil himself had the power to overcome the

rules of the natural world directly and to be perceived by sane, unaltered, senses; or rather he

needed to act on the psychic health of ill-intentioned people first in order to persuade them to carry

out his own plans.

The next problem was to decide whether the knowledge that the Devil - either in a physical

or in a visionary form - allegedly passed to the witch or the sorcerer would allow them to harm from

a distance (through invocations, spells or other kind of incorporeal means) or this was only possible

by means of the actual poisoning of the victim obtained through the manipulation of natural

substances. From a legal point of view, it was doubtful whether the enactment of a conscious

intention to subvert the rules of nature along with the 'simple' use of a specific code or language

would have permitted individuals to have a direct and necessary control over matter. If this was the

case, the witch or the sorcerer should have been prosecuted as directly responsible for the material

consequences of her or his psychical actions. If this was not the case, the act of cursing or invoking

demonic forces to act upon reality alone was not prosecutable, for its efficacy could not be proven

satisfactorily. Therefore, the accusation of the witch or the sorcerer could be legitimated only when

a material intervention had been proved. In this perspective, the power of imagination would be

reduced from being an active force intervening on the natural world to a simple representative

64 For a short introduction to the 'holistic' relationship between body and soul in classical Galenic literature, and to theproblems that Galen's theory left opened to the discussion, see GARCIA BALLESTER, Alma y enfermedad en elobra de Galeno, pp. 117 – 152.

26

faculty, with no actual effect on the physical reality.

The example that Andreas de Laguna chose to describe in his Dioscorides is an early

instance of the defence of this latter opinion.65 He was one of the most successful physicians of his

times, being at the service of the Emperor Charles V and of two different Popes, Paul III and Julius

III. Being also as a catedratico in both the universities of Valladolid and Toledo, he probably had

contacts with Alfonso de Santa Cruz while his writings were well known by Cervantes who

explicitly talked about his work on herbs in Don Quixote.66 Being a convinced Galenist, his

scientific background led him to explain diseases in general as conditions determined by the

material exchanges between the body and the external elements of the natural world, the absorption

of which would disturb the inner temperament of the primary qualities within the body itself.

The arguments of those who denounced witchcraft as an existing practice among certain

people who lived at the edge of society lied primarily on the confessions that these same persons

gave when asked about their alleged powers.67 Put in front of the interrogations of both the

Inquisitors and the officers of the civic tribunal, they often firmly confirmed all the charges by

saying that they had been indeed seduced by the Devil, initiated to his cult by rejecting Christianity

and to have finally assumed him as their teacher for all kind of black magic, both for what

concerned the preparation of filters and for the recitation of spells and rites. In order to explain his

view on the reality of these confessions, Andreas de Laguna chose to talk about this subject in the

section of the herbarium that dealt with Solanaceae (or nightshades), a group of common plants

whose hallucinatory properties were known since Antiquity. His aim was to demonstrate that the

fantasies which these people acted out as protagonists were simply induced by the assumption of

very cold ointments prepared with hallucinatory herbs. Nightshades particularly would produce

extremely vivid hallucinations that these people faithfully believed had really happened. Moreover,

the reason why they confessed to having committed specific crimes in their community was that, by

repeated assumption of these drugs, they started confusing the real with the fantastic world, from

which they continuously came in and out; convincing themselves of being the authors of the things

they could hear from their neighbours – murrains, newborns' deaths, the sickness of a high-ranking

65 Friedenwald notices that de Laguna's criticism is six-years antecedent to Weyer's De Prestigiis (1563), that alsoseems to make use of similar arguments. FRIEDENWALD, H., The Jews and Medicine, vol. 2 p. 427.

66 CERVANTES DE SAAVEDRA, Don Quixote, p. 145.67 There was very few mentions to witchcraft in the Bible. The usual passages quoted were Exodus 22, 17 in

combination with the Parable of the Tares (Mt. 13, 24-27). Weyer (see n. 67) wished to demonstrate that the Exoduspassage was referred to poisoners and not actual witches. His exegesis was in turn refuted by Bodin (De laDemonomanie des Sorciers, p. 523).

27

citizen. It was the prejudicial quest for a scapegoat that allowed the authorities to find in these social

outcasts – at the same time creating and confirming their irrational theories - an easy target and a

convenient way to elaborate social traumas.

The case in point was that of an old couple who was accused of having caused through

sorcery the illness that was killing Duke Francis of Lorraine. After being arrested and tortured, the

couple confessed to all the charges. In the old man's words, the malady of which the Duke was now

suffering was a revenge that he wanted to take over the nobleman for not having washed his feet

during Maundy Thursday. His master, the Devil, suggested that he infected the Duke by breathing

(sic!) on his face so that he could afterwards restore his health with a medicine that the Devil

himself had taught him to prepare, and win back the Duke's gratitude and favour. In the hope of

receiving this medicine from the old man, the Duke spared his life (not that of his wife who was

burned at the stake) and indeed granted him favours and gifts. The day after, the old man was found

dead from suffocation. After few days, the Duke died too. De Laguna reports the two versions of the

events that circulated at the time to explain the strange circumstances. Some believed that the Devil

had killed the man to prevent him from curing the Duke. Others believed that the old man's death

had to be attributed to the peasants' hatred for him and that he was assassinated by them. However,

Doctor de Laguna managed to obtain a sample of the ointment that was found in the couple's hut

and decided to do an experiment. Once in Metz, he tried the ointment on the hangman's wife, who

was already in a very fragile mental condition for a form of maniacal jealousy of her husband that

kept her awake at night. As soon as she was covered with the ointment she fell into a very deep

sleep. Andreas managed to wake her up after thirty-six hours. She first blamed him for having

interrupted her dream of “all the pleasures and delights of the world”68 and then she turned to her

husband and, smiling, she told him that she had cheated on him with an handsome guy all along,

firmly believing that her fantasies had actually taken place. The conclusions that the doctor drew are

very interesting:

From which we can conjecture that whatever witches may say or do is only a dream caused by cold drinks and

unguents. The witch corrupt the memory and the imagination in such a fashion that they make the timidest

person imagine and firmly believe that he had done things which in truth he only dreamed while sleeping.69

He then adds that although every confession includes sexual fantasies, these do not give any

pleasure to the participants because of the frigidity that is said to be felt during the acts with the

68 FRIEDENWALD (as in n. 65), p. 425.69 Ibid., p. 426.

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Devil and that de Laguna attributes to the coldness of the ointment instead. He continues:

Therefore such people as these, granted that they are scandalous and merit exemplary punishments for making

pacts with the Devil, utter, in truth, only vanities for neither in spirit nor in body do they ever quit the spot

where they fall overcome with sleep; and this is the opinion of the majority of the theologians and of many

Holy Councils. We must realize that the Devil cannot work except through natural causes, applying active

[passivis]70. Therefore, because of his wisdom and shrewdness he knows the virtues of such unguents, and

he teaches them to the foolish witches in order to make them dream and imagine an infinite number of

stupidities and vanities. I maintain this despite the fact that some pious gentlemen take for granted that thedevil

can transform these witches into a hundred thousand phantoms and take them up into the air, both in spirit and

in body.71

In relation to the two questions that this debate posed to his contemporaries, Andreas de

Laguna shows to have had both a negative and an affirmative answer. He certainly does not believe

that immaterial causes could produce material effects. As also in Cervantes's short story, even

mental illness (being a disease of the material soul) needs a physical cause and the experiment he

had conducted proved that incontrovertibly. On the other hand, his answer about the reality of the

pact with the Devil is partly affirmative. The Devil's work is inside the natural kingdom (not upon

it) and requires mediators to be performed. Still, this is not what was described in trials, for he just

demonstrated that the witches' fantasies about Sabbaths and sexual feasts and flying brooms are all

the result of hallucinations induced by the drugs. This pact takes place in the mind of these persons

and should be rather regarded as an intention to do evil. De Laguna seems to exclude that the Devil

could be sensibly perceived without the use of particular substances, making his seduction only a

matter of mental suggestion; not any less real though. In fact, there must be a reason why all these

people had very similar hallucinations, and this must be that their fantasies were consistent with

their intentions. Excluded that they could harm anybody if they were not put in the material

conditions to do so (assuming drugs or poisoning others), their moral responsibility was reaffirmed,

although its effects involved only them, for their wickedness was real and their right punishment

was the mental alienation that pushed them apart from the communion of social life. In the account

of Andreas de Laguna, we witness a change in the evaluation of 'irrational' practices. From the

perception of an actual efficacy, motivating a sense of fear and culminating in physical suppression;

to the perception of an actual deviancy, leading to moral scorn and ending with social exclusion.

70 See GRANJEL, L. p. 135. Gaspar Navarro (Relectionum Theologicarum, II) defines activa passivis as the power ofaffecting human health by means of application of remedies and medicine to the sick part of the person who is sickwithout showing any visible sign of the disease.

71 FRIEDENWALD, (as in n. 65), p. 426.

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2Scientific Understanding of Mental Illness

2.1. The Notions of Body, Soul and the Explanation of Mental Illness

In the previous chapter, I have analysed some significant case studies of insane people who

were recognised by intellectuals and public functionaries as particularly representative of this

category. For each case, I have attempted to establish whether in their stories there had been a

change in the common evaluation of insanity compared to previous times. By focusing on the social

perception of these insane men and women, however, we have not yet considered the scientific

implications connected to these examples. In the same chapter, we have also assumed that the work

of the scientific community ran parallel to the evolution of the legal evaluation of insanity. The

methodical definition of insanity as an abnormality in the development of the body had contributed

to establish a conceptual boundary between the sane and the insane that, once crossed had, almost

invariably, no return. On the opposite side, the effort to better understand these conditions was not

always matched by an equally paced evolution of social habits. Nevertheless, the origins of the

changes in the social attitude towards insane people over a long period of time need to be sought in

the acknowledgement of new scientific notions, which slowly changed the common perception of

mental diseases. In this chapter, I will give some examples that will illustrate these ideas.

In giving a medical definition of insanity, Aristotle observed that this condition pertained

exclusively to human beings.1 Thus, this affection had to be related to the very distinctive property

of humans, that is rationality. The fundamental sources available since classical Antiquity that

referred to the relationship between body and mind were Plato's Timaeus and Phaedrus and

Aristotle's De Anima. Unlike the Platonic dialogues, Aristotle's treatise had the advantage of

referring mental illnesses to the humoral theory that constituted also the practical basis for Galenic

medicine. If the mental condition became serious enough to affect the body, the Aristotelian system

appeared to be the more suitable instrument for intervening on the causes. From a biological point

1 ARISTOTELE, De Anima I, 1, 402b-403a. Same opinion is found in Paracelsus (On the Generation of Fool, p. 57).

30

of view, the physical support for reason was the rational soul. This was a uniquely human

dimension of the more general soul, which was present in every living being and was structured

with progressive degrees of complexity according to the nature of the organism in which this was

found. The function of each soul was to organize the rough material of any body into its proper

form. The properties that the soul transmitted to the body allowed to compare all the individual

elements of one kind, although in an infinite number of variations, according to their structure and

functions.2 Although some minor differences concerning the functionality of these levels could be

found in the various studies that were dedicated to this topic, natural scientists generally agreed on a

division according to the classification of living beings in the natural kingdom: the vegetative soul,

ruling over the internal processes of growth and physical sustainment; the animal soul, which

presided over movement and was characterized by the use of cognitive processes - imagination,

judgement and memory - whose activity allowed the elaboration of sensations into a recurrent

scheme of reality;3 finally, the rational soul, which was the specific dimension of humans and that

permitted to further compare the representations provided by senses and cognitive faculties to the

idea of truth, represented by God. The soul was the principle of life itself and was considered to be

a substantial entity pervading the whole body.4 Galenic physicians believed that its substance was

different from that of any other part of the organism, because it was not made of any of the natural

elements which constituted the material world. Therefore, it did not suffer the same deterioration to

which these parts were subjected.

In the same way as the human soul had in itself every other dimension of organic life, the

physical material which constituted the human body was believed to be made of all the natural

elements in the inorganic world.5 Following the four-fold division of the fundamental elements

composing the chemical structure of every composite body, the mixture which formed human

organism was divided in four sub-categories, according to the preponderance of one element over

the others.6 The different proportion of the humours in the body determined the general

'complexion' of the individual.7 Each complexion caused a different relationship between the

operations of the organs and the external environment, according to the universal law of sympathy

2 ARISTOTELE, II, 1, 412a.3 HUARTE DE SAN JUAN, J. The Tryal of the Wits, p. 100.4 The soul was believed to be extended to the whole body. This view was consequent to the Aristotelian doctrine of

the entelechia according to which every single part having a specific function within the body are animated (DeAnima II, 1, 412b-413a). However a very long-lasting controversy was settled about which place in the internal bodywas the origin of the unity of the soul itself and of sensation, the sensorium communis.

5 See n. 25.6 Melancholy corresponded to Earth; Blood to Air; Phlegm to Water; Yellow Bile to Fire.7 See, KLIBANSKY, R. (et al.), Saturn and Melancholy, pp. 3-15.

31

that regulated the processes of absorption or rejection of every substance that was introduced in the

body itself. These interactions were motivated by the common sensitivity of elements and humours

to the primary qualities (cold, heat, dryness and moisture) which were the very principles of every

change in nature.8 Thus, the state of well-being of an individual depended on the interplay of these

two variables, determining the body's 'temperament', the balance of which represented the goal of

the physician's intervention.9 The assumption of the more appropriate substances for someone's

complexion would not only benefit the work of the vegetative soul, ruling over the physiological

development of the body, but also that of the cognitive faculties of the animal soul, since their

activities were strictly connected to the efficiency of the external senses.

While the work of the body was described in terms of mechanical operations, the soul was

perceived to be the inner intelligence which regulated the chemical processes towards their organic

development. Strictly speaking, there were not different kinds of souls within the same species, but

different kinds of bodies, the distinctive characters of each individual being determined by the

peculiar disposition of his or her complexion in relation to the surrounding environment. For

humans accordingly, the general complexion of humours was the decisive parameter which

determined how much of the 'first actuality'10 (that is the designated function) of the soul could be

accomplished within a lifetime. Because the information of the formal features that were

transmitted from the species to the individual was identical for each generation and did not

contemplate any evolution, the work of the soul could only be affected as a consequence of an

inherent malformation or a damage to the material composition of the body in which it was found.11

In fact, since the spiritual substance from which the soul was made was indifferent to the rules

which governed the interactions between physical elements, this could never be altered in its

essence. The eventual inability of the soul to give the appropriate form to whatever part of the body

was always the consequence of a corruption in the material development of the part itself. In the

case of mental diseases, the damage was located in a bad temperament of the brain, this part being

assigned to elaborate the information coming from the senses and therefore responsible for our

perception of the external reality.

Beside a purely biological description of the possible causes of illness, a further influence

could be discussed because of its effects over the natural world. Since the periodical movements of

8 Ibid., pp. 4 – 5.9 PAGEL, W. Paracelsus p. 128.1 ARISTOTLE, I, 1, 412b. actus primus1 VIVES, J. L. Tratado del Alma, p. 1171.

32

the planets presided over all processes of mixture and dissolution between the elements on Earth

according to the passing of time, some scholars believed that the relative position of the astral

bodies at the moment of the generation of a new human being might have a direct incidence on his

or her personality. Their movement would involve both the quality of the parents' generative cells –

the gametes - and the external environment continuously accompanying the physical development.

Astrology thus provided a further tool for diagnosis and an additional possibility to prevent the

occurrence of ill-fated unions or to monitor over the quality of food, drink and air, helping in

containing epidemics.12 The contribution of horoscopes to psychology relied on the importance that

was given to the periodicity of the seasonal changes in leaving a physiological – psychological as

well as physical - imprint on humans.13 A further form of classification of human types based on the

astrological correspondences between natural elements and the astral bodies was added and made

congruent to the elementary classification given by the humoral system, enriching it with more

details. The same scheme was also applied to single parts of the body (melothesia), each one

corresponding to an astrological sign, and even on certain diseases, whose periodic outbursts were

soon reported to the influence of planetary influence.14 The presence of a mental retard as well as

the outcome of a psychosis were reflected and could be deducted by the configuration that the

firmament assumed in relation to both the features of the local environment and the individual

complexion of the humours.

2.2. Two Medical Problems

The main limitation for both the biological description of mental diseases and its astrological

contextualisation, was that recurring to the deficiency of material processes could not always offer a

sufficient reason for all forms of mental illnesses. This was particularly true for inborn mental

retards and for the insurgence of psychosis that were not connected to a physical accident but that

manifested themselves progressively and even under a strict medical supervision. In the first case,

medicine could not explain why the union between two sane and healthy parents could produce a

person suffering of a mental handicap (or the other way round), especially when he or she did not

show any other physical affliction. In the case of progressive psychosis, the quest for material

causes could have been prolonged indefinitely without finding any contingent reason. Taking for

granted that a physical cause had to exist for both occurrences, physicians looked for the answer to

such situations in the continued behaviour and habits - of the parents, in the first case, and of the

1 2 See, LEVINIUS LEMNIUS, Gli Occulti Miracoli, p. 40 and 160.1 3 AKASOY (et al.), Astro-medicine, p. 221 4 Ibid. p. 22. The recurrence of diseases according to times was the subject of Galen's On Critical Days.

33

patients themselves in the second.

Even though the physical and mental state of both parents had always been optimal, the

moment in which the sanity and health of the new-born was decided once for all was procreation.

Not only the slightest indisposition of one of the parents could cause a damage to the foetus but

even more influential was the role played by imagination. Cognitive faculties, such as imagination,

were primarily an expression of the animal soul. As such, mental images were projections that

developed spontaneously according to the physiological state of the vegetative soul and the material

provided by the senses.15 In accordance with the moral strength of the individuals, these could

ultimately be controlled and used to serve the aim of the rational soul, that is spiritual perfection.

For this reason a sexual union that was motivated only by following sensual impulses or prefiguring

material purposes would have caused an excess of heat, fatal to the regular development of the

forming body of the baby.16 As for what concerns the outcome of mental diseases that have no

incidental cause, these were usually explained through postulating a progressive stratification of the

noxious effects of a bad regimen, either regarding food, work habits exposing the organism to a

particular substance, dissolute sexual mores or other kinds of material causes.17 Still, these were

usually explanations a posteriori and could not provide an universally valid scheme that would

allow a necessary connection between mental disease and a physical deterioration of brain tissues.

The two texts that will be analysed in this chapter both tried to find a different approach to

solve these problems. Both of them moved away from the conventional model of the materialistic

theory of mental illness in order to find alternatives to what was perceived by both authors as an

inadequate explanation. The first text will be a short treatise by Paracelsus, De Generatione

Stultorum (1530, first published in 1567) and it will deal with the problem of inborn mental

conditions. This text has distanced itself from the Aristotelian tradition and is radically original in

its language and content. The fundamental observation of this work is that the outcome of any type

of disability, both physical and mental, is independent from any moral responsibility of the parents

and is instead the consequence of the degeneration of a mere natural process. Abnormalities are an

1 5 LEVINIUS LEMNIUS, (as in n. 12), pp. 8-14.1 6 TATE, R. Políticas Sexuales: de Enrique el Impotente a Isabel maestra de Enganos , pp. 165 - 176. This was a

recurrent theme in Palencia's Crónica del rey Enrique IV. That the physical aspect of the baby would have reflectedthe imaginations of the parents (and especially that of the mother) was a common notion and it could be found alsoin Vives (ibid. p. 1171) and Lemnius (as in n. 12), pp. 32-37.

1 7 This was the general assumption underlying all the observations made by Galenists on singular cases. We couldfind the same aetiology in Santa Cruz (Dignotio et Cura Affectum Melancholicorum), and in Felix Platter's PraxeosMedicae De Vitiis (1625) that is a rich repository of clinical cases, many of which regard psychosis or other forms ofmental illness.

34

essential and unavoidable character of every natural form. As such, the occurrence of a mental

retard is not a divine punishment for a bad behaviour or for a wicked imagination, nor this seems to

be connected to a material origin. It is the revelation of a different relationship between the

cognitive faculties and our reason, or between our animal soul and our rationality. Secondly, he also

reflected with great originality upon the role of astrology and its reliability for medicine. The

second text is a more complex and systematic work by Juan Luis Vives called De Anima et Vita

(1538). This work, which mixes an Aristotelian structure with Neoplatonic themes, is composed of

three books that deal with the definition of human soul, aiming to give a detailed description of both

its essence and functions. The first two books offer a thorough synthesis of the faculties and

properties that were attributed to each degree of the soul. The third book is the most original part

and deals with the decisive introduction of a new aspect of human mind that had been previously

neglected by the scientific community as irrelevant to the purpose of a medical description of the

soul. This is the role played by passions. Vives wanted to demonstrate that the cognitive faculties,

although operating in a physically intact organism, are indeed influenced and affected by these

spiritual emergencies, which cause a continuous oscillation in our awareness. Because they are

independent from all particular sensations, passions pertain to the rational soul alone, their learning

not being the result of a cognitive operation and preceding to any sensory experience. Their inner

reason must be sought in the individual morality.

2.3 Paracelsus on the Generation of Fools

The criticism of Paracelsus concerning the traditional humoral system was based on his

scepticism towards the idea that the cause and origin of any disease were to be found in an

endogenous imbalance of the internal equilibrium of the humours supporting the normal operation

of the organism.18 The simple structure of the four humours could not explain the variety of forms

that a disease could assume within the body, while the primary qualities, which were believed to be

the actual cause of ailments, were instead accidental appearances of a more complex process which

happened at an elementary level.19 Instead, Paracelsus thought that the number of diseases was

equal to the number of noxious substances that could enter the body from the outside. Since the

simple addiction of internal humours through diet, or their withdrawing through purgation, could

not offer a sufficient therapy, external substances should be fought back with other external

substances with opposite properties. The four elements – water, air, fire and earth – are the

1 8 PAGEL (as in n. 9) p. 1281 9 Ibid., p. 107.

35

fundamental states of matter (the 'matrices'), but these are not the elementary components of the

objects that are instead composed by the qualities that he refers to as the three primal matters ('tria

prima'), which are sulphur (combustion), mercury (fluidity) and salt (solidity).20 The processes of

change in the organic world are caused by the continuous activity of an inner virtue of the matrices

that is visualized through the analogy with a craftsman (Vulcanus). His aim is to bring the matter

from a stage of potential 'prime matter' to its complete fulfilment as 'ultimate matter'. The encounter

of matrices and tria prima propitiated by Vulcanus, and generating the general form of the species,

is however not enough to give form to an individual living being. Its individuality is called Archeus,

who lies in every limb of the body whose purpose is very close to Vulcanus's, of whom he takes the

place in conducting the now living matter to its own state of perfection. Archeus is a spiritual

principle that is at the same time universal, for it is an emanation of the divine intelligence as well

as individual because it lies and acts into an individual body.21 The development over which he

presides is informed by the continuous work of spontaneous imagination “a process not connected

with formal logic, but with the spirit-conscious or subconscious and in a broader sense embracing

all strata of the personality.”22 Generation is therefore the encounter between the earthly mother-

elements, already containing the female semina, and the heavenly masculine principle (Astrum) that

starts the transmutation.23

In the preface to the small treatise on the generation of 'fools', Paracelsus poses the question

of why God permitted a disease affecting the very ability to understand his own works and gave to

man such an ignominious affliction of his noblest part, that is reason. He also remarks that although

man can find a cure for any other disease in the natural world by means of his own knowledge,

there is no possible cure for such a condition. Not even Christ ever healed a mental handicap, as it is

by nature impossible.24 In fact, there is no medical reason for such a disability. As such, there is no

difference between a fool and a wise man from the point of view of their physiology. The only real

difference between them is within the 'animal reason' (i.e. cognitive faculties), the use of which is

pure foolishness in relation to the truth:

2 0 Ibid., p. 128.2 1 Ibid., p. 111. 2 2 Ibid., p. 111. Through the figure of Archeus, Paracelsus resolves the problem of the relationship between the

rational soul of the individual and the universal rational soul of the world. Vives will use the image of the ray oflight compared to the Sun. The same image will also be used by Miguel Servetus (De Trinitate Erroribus, p. 59) inrelation to the concept of 'monad', or absolute individuality.

2 3 Ibid., p. 117. It is interesting to notice that the Paracelsean theory of generation relate to both the organic andthe inorganic world. As such, spontaneous generation not only could produce living beings from inorganic thingsbut also 'counterfeit' human beings that are not made by the limus terrae and have no soul from the union of themothers/matrices and heavenly spermata. These are the spirits and fantastic creatures – gnomes, fairies, giants andothers.

2 4 See n. 6.

36

“[…] this wisdom [i.e. the animal reason] is nothing before God, but rather all of us in our wisdom are like

fools. And whatever we contrive and devise in our animal soul is all like these fools […]; likewise as we are

kinsmen and one in the blood, thus we are of the same blood also in our reason with our wisdom before God.

[…] now one blood is there, thus also one reason, one is as noble as the other, thus also in animal reason, one is

as intelligent before God as the other”.25

After having made clear that the possibility of reaching the truth is not compromised by this

condition, in the first book Paracelsus explains the sufficient reason for the existence of this state in

nature. Man was conceived by God without sin and was put in a paradise, called Ebron, in which

there was no corruption nor generation. The original sin, or Leviathan, spoiled this perfect spiritual

unity from which every evil was generated. It is interesting to notice that here Paracelsus connects

to the original sin both the occurrence of physical disease and of 'moral' diseases, positioning the

'fools' between these two groups. The corruption in humankind is an inevitable condition that

concerns every individual of our species (“Whether it be inside or be outside”).26 The subjection of

our mind to natural elements, planets and various fantasies put us in a state of perennial anxiety. The

fruits of our imagination are never certain.

Further on, the author starts defining his theory about the generation of 'fools' from the point

of view of their specificity, that is the inability of using cognitive faculties. As such, their problem

must be first a spiritual problem, therefore regarding the work of the soul primarily and only

contingently that of the body. In order to explain why the formation of the soul has not been

completed perfectly, he appeals to a hierarchy within the workshop of Vulcanus, that is the

informative principle of the elements over the primary matter. The brain of the 'fool' is, he says, the

result of the work of “heavenly apprentices and immature master craftsmen.”27 Every 'mature'

Vulcanus will never fail in shaping his bodies, but he will necessarily go through errors and trials

when he is an apprentice himself and needs assistance to his own work. In so doing, Paracelsus

opposes to the Aristotelian idea of the unchangeable nature of the soul the concept that also the

organizing principles of a species (or of any other kind of concept)28 could also evolve in their

forms such as the artistic forms evolve from one generation of artists to the next:

What is there that does not grow up young again? And what is there that remains fixed for ever and ever? Or

2 5 PARACELSUS, On the Generation of Fools, pp. 59-60.2 6 Ibid., p. 62.2 7 Ibid., p. 63.2 8 Ibid., p. 64: “Thus, the regions have their vulcani, the buildings have their vulcani, the events their vulcani, the

seasons their vulcani; he who does well, does well.”

37

what is there that does not wax and wane? All things that there are renew and go from youth into their old age.

As the moon, visible indeed to every farmer, becomes old wanes again and dies, passes away, and gets the sun

with a young moon; in her youth until her old age, there is a great difference in her potency, impression, quality

and manner; far apart they are. Thus, as with the moon, thus is also with the vulcanus.29

In Paracelsean terms, it is impossible to know or to control whether the material contribution

provided by man to the natural process in order to generate a new life would end in the skilful hands

of the master or in that of these apprentices:

[…] man sows man, but he does not make him. He who sows must have a maker. The farmer sows the seed but

the grain he does not make. Thus man sows man and the vulcanus makes him, nor the vulcanus either, the

vulcanus, though, and the father. As a carver makes a statue, not he alone, though; the wood out of which he

makes it, together with him, the wood and he. This has to be understood thus: the seed of the wood is sown and

grows, that much is what contributes to in his sowing […]; thereupon the carver begins; as the wood is, thus he

makes a statue out of it. […] However, here in the carving and forging of the fools vulcanus himself is not

there, but rather it is apprentices who mar it. The fool is a marred statue. […] Thus the world is arranged and

man has no power over himself, that he might make his children as he wants to make them, he has no more

contribute than the wood.30

While congenital deformities in the material body could be more easily transmitted from parents,

their active responsibility in those kind of issues is therefore excluded. The differences (either

physical and psychological) between men could be therefore explained by the differences between

the many Vulcani of humankind, each one having a personal level of ability, an aesthetic taste and a

different set of tools. No logical explanation exists for the artistic genius of the Vulcani, the variety

of their forms is unpredictable. His rejection of astrology as a tool for predicting these conditions is

categorical: “[…] their ascendant is not explainable, nor his nativity. Therefore astronomy, astrology

is a fallible art. […] For in truth, such a devious thing is in the vulcanery, and such a strange

forging, that up to now no one yet has learned to know the master craftsman, even less the young

ones...”31 The frequent association between mental handicap and malformation, finally, is explained

by giving separate causes for these two things. The lesser quality of their bodies depends in fact by

the metals present in the water of the region in which those malformations are more recurring. 32

With feeble bodies it will be even more easier for trainee Vulcani to commit fatal errors.

2 9 Ibid., p. 64.3 0 Ibid., pp. 63-64.3 1 Ibid., p. 65.3 2 Paracelsus made use of his own experience. He refused the explanation given by Galenist about the recurrent

idiocy of people from Valcamonica and Valchiavenna (also reported by Garzoni) and those in Carinthia in a famouscontroversy. He attributed to the metals in the water the reason of these illnesses rather than 'occasional'accumulation of phlegm. See, p. 172

38

Once the process of generation has been expounded in consideration of how the

abnormalities of a species should be regarded in relation to its normal features (that is, as a formal

variation and not as a material difference), Paracelsus's now explains in what this variation consists

of. By deciding to commit the original sin, man has lost his similarity with God's image so that

now: “[...] we man carry an image in which all the animals' manner, nature, also blood and flesh

combine and is, inasmuch as we let precede within us that which is animal.”33 As animals, we need

to use our cognitive faculties to survive in the world. The rational soul uses these faculties as

instruments, but it receives these faculties by the Vulcani producing them at the moment of

generation:

If the subiectum [what is subjected to the inner man, i.e. the animal soul] degenerates, the man within it also

has degenerated. For the instruments make fools, inasmuch as they are not usable. As a man is to be pure and

clear in his reason. Now that he is thus, the true man within him may use these [the instruments] to his

advantage. But if it [his reason] is good for nothing, thereupon it [the animal body] has been marred for the

inner man, for he has not the instrument he is to use.34

The 'inner man' (or 'true man') is no other than the Archeus, or the individual reason. Every single

Archeus, being man in his essence, stands in the image of God and is therefore perfect and

incorruptible. The only difference separating the Archaei of sane and insane people lies in the

instruments they have to use, where the sane could “make his human power prevail through the

instrument and the foolish man may not make his man prevail in the animal body.”35 However, no

man on Earth can possibly use the instruments of his animal body completely and perfectly. Here

also lies the difference between people born with mental handicaps and psychotics (lunatici and

stulti). The latter have degenerated for having abused of their animal reason, hence suggesting a

relationship between psychosis and a wrong elaboration of reality. Although the animal body is

subjected to natural forces and planetary influences, the necessity of its evolution through the

perfection of his form, the reason or 'inner man', is above every other imperative given by nature

(“man breaks heaven and is above heaven”.)36

Paracelsus now has to face the problem of the particular personality of these people, the

obscene and scandalous behaviour (the 'tricks') about which they seem not to be embarrassed and

3 3 Ibid., p. 66.3 4 Ibid., p. 66.3 5 Ibid., p. 67.3 6 Ibid., p. 68.

39

which constitutes the more typical trait of the social life of the 'fool', according to common

perception. He promptly justifies their actions by saying that it is their animal body that makes them

indulge in doing so, rather than not their 'inner man'. Like he had stated before, both animal and

man have their own astrological position. If man cannot control the animal, these two personalities

shall be forced to live together and manifest themselves alternatively. He also adds a further

biological reason. Since every process of development of organic matter requires moisture, the

appointed Vulcanus makes the foetus drink 'wine' in the womb. 'Wine' is any moist substance that

makes things grow, as rain is for the seed, dew for the blossom and rime for the leaves. Accordingly,

every part of the body of man has its own wine and this is its own 'constellation from heaven'. The

brain's wine is therefore an 'astral wine' that is supposed to nourish the brain in his first

development and then be digested by the Archeus once its development is complete. However, if the

Vulcanus has misshaped the brain, this will never be absorbed and will keep the animal body

forever drunk. It is not clear to which spiritual substance Paracelsus is referring, but the use of the

term 'wine' to indicate a moist substance for the brain is well established for the description of the

development of the brain and of mental illnesses accordingly.37 The fool's actions are therefore a

product of his drunkenness.

Now that the personality of the animal within the 'fool' has been outlined, Paracelsus wants

to demonstrate the vitality and perfect health of the fool's reason. Inasmuch as being a spiritual

entity, the 'inner man' may know all spiritual things as long as the animal body does not hinder him.

The 'inner man' never stops trying to overcome the resistance that the animal body puts in front of

him and sometimes he manages to find the right moment to come out into the open and express

himself: “But because he is a fool, it [the spirit] is mocked and derided, for they go forth silly,

foolish and disrespectful. Also nobody suspects withal in such people also a man to lie hidden, as if

both body and soul were a fool.”38 A new problem arises, that of the social acceptance and

perception of the insane. He then continues: “Therefore know ye that not all the tricks are of the

animal body, but rather that some are of the inner one. For there is nothing as a fool with them but

only the mortal body which the worms eat; that which is eternal within him is without any folly and

simplicity. Only that it might not come out and be agreeable to the people.”39 The spirit's lack of

experience in ruling the animal body makes it break out with an impetus similar to that used by the

animal body itself in relations to its drunkard's tricks. The reason given by Paracelsus for the greater

3 7 The first analogy between melancholy and wine is found in Aristotle's Problems XXX, 1 (KLIBANSKY as inn. … p. 18 - 29);

3 8 PARACELSUS, (as in. 27) p. 70.3 9 Ibid., p. 70.

40

lucidity and honesty of their suggestions compared to those of wise men is revealing because it

sheds light on his view about human beings in general and the conditioning of their behaviour in

society:

[...] if the wise man has a reasonable animal body, then he trusts it and puts it before the true body, and has it

that the animal body knows more than the true body. He thereupon covers up his wisdom, and uses a fox or

wolf within his animal body; therefore he becomes there weaker than a fool. Because the fool has no power

over his animal body but is drunk and reels. Thereupon in his reeling the inner body does have so much power

over him that he talks out of himself that which the inner body asks for, and this remains for him unadulterated

and not mixed with the animal reason. For the fool is not so shrewd as to be able to lard it like as the wise man,

who does have such reason, so that he talks that which pleases him, whether it comes from the true [right] or

from the false [left] body.40

The wisdom shown by the wise men is often nothing but a disguise with which they conceal their

true opinion. The fool is more frank for it has no social restraint. It follows the observation that even

the prophets were made crazy in their animal bodies by God in order for their spirit to express itself

more truthfully. The wisest sayings are those who are not meditated upon or put in an ordinate

fashion because “deliberating, contemplating, etc. proceeds from the animal spirit and not from the

true man, whether the outcome be good or bad.”41.

The social dimension that he evokes gives him the pretext to make a final plea for not to

scorn the fool and to remember that they are closer to the spiritual life than we are. The insanity of

their cognitive faculties is nothing compared to the power of limiting spiritual life and its freedom.

Learning is for animals and education is both an instrument and a limitation. Reason, instead, deals

with the contemplation of the truth and its expression, which is the final transformation into a

complete human being. Paracelsus chose to dedicate his last paragraph to the moment of these

people's death, where the 'firmament' of the animal soul vanishes and the inner man is alone before

death. The final separation of the spirit from the animal body will mean redemption as well as the

end of every 'foolishness' for we will all be equal in front of God.

In conclusion, it is clear that Paracelsus's attitude through this particular mental diseas is

much more focused on its spiritual implications than on a material explanation of its causes. Mental

handicap is an affection of the animal soul, for it pertains to cognitive processes and compromises

exclusively the functions of representation of reality, leaving the development of both the body and

4 0 Ibid., p. 70.4 1 Ibid., p. 71.

41

the inner existence of reason intact. Given that its occurrence is accompanied by an actual damage

in the development of the brain, the primary cause for that is not an unbalance in the material

composition but an error in the necessary tenuousness of the natural process itself. Forms evolve

through time and require adaptation, the unpredictability of which is absolute. The idea of a moral

responsibility of the parents has to be completely rejected, while the particular condition of the

animal soul gives to the 'fool' a fundamental social role, for he or she is able to express a form of

organic thinking that is the most direct access to spiritual truth. By excluding a material basis for

mental disease and, at the same time, affirming an inherent ability to the use of rationality,

Paracelsus opens the way for a different interpretation of inborn mental conditions. Firstly he

declares the impotence of medicine. Secondly he recognizes the formal nature of the diseases and

its fortuity. Finally, he illustrates how communication is possible between the rational part of the

patient and the external world. His plea to listening to the fool and to create around him a tranquil

social environment, along with these conclusions, will be the fundamental instructions for therapies

based on the observation of the patient's perception and his or her representation of reality,

independently from physiology.

2.4. Juan Luis Vives and the Role of Passions

With the term 'humanismo medico', the historians of Spanish scientific thought usually refer

to the attainment of a renewed social status for medical profession between the sixteenth and the

seventeenth century.42 During this period, medicine gradually lost its main connotation of practical

discipline to be perceived more and more often as a systematic science, whose high-level practice

required the assimilation of a humanistic culture allowing the access to newly-available primary

sources. This localised version of a wider European cultural movement was indeed one of the more

advanced among similar instances that were concerning other countries, and is considered to be one

of the most defying development of the Spanish 'siglo de oro'. The age that goes from the reign of

Charles V (1519 – 1556) to that of Philip IV (1621 – 1665) is not only the period of greater

territorial expansion and economic wealth of the Spanish Kingdom, but also one that saw the most

intense development in any field of scientific knowledge. The academic system became more and

more diffused on the national territory. The ancient and renowned universities of Alcalá and

Salamanca maintained their international prestige and the services of their best students were

requested in the courts all over Europe.43 Physicians in particular could count on the support of a

4 2 GRANJEL, L. Medicina Espanola, pp. 15-20; GARCIA DEL REAL, La Medicina en Espana, pp. 53-78; 161;210-211; 271-276.

4 3 GARCIA DEL REAL, (as in n. .), p. 55-63. Montes's and Gracia's article Los Estudios de la Facultad de

42

century-old tradition of excellence in the practice of medicine. This tradition had its foundation in

the immense contribution made by the large Arab and Sephardic minorities to this specific field,

which had preserved the classical works on medicine facilitating their transmission to the rest of

Europe. The authority of Jewish or Moor practitioners never decreased in the sixteenth century

despite the persecutions and the restrictions enacted against them.44 The academic system helped in

creating a distinction between diagnostic physicians on one side and practitioners and healers on the

other, the latter's work being based on standard practices and a rudimentary knowledge of herbs.

The former group, instead, received a more complex education about human physiology, natural

sciences and their connections. Their method relied on the solid faith in the humoral theory of

Galen and Aristotelian physics. The practical remedies to be employed in relation to a specific

condition were deducted from the joint interpretation of few fundamental texts as well as from what

the physician knew about the qualities of substances and environmental variables regarding the

lifestyle of the patient – the so-called six non-naturals.45 The highest education received by

physicians, together with the mainly speculative character of their work (the actual cure was often

left to less qualified practitioners),46 resulted in them being involved in domains that exceeded the

simple attention to the contingent state of health of the patient. Therefore, the newest contributions

that physicians of this period brought to medical theory were essentially conveyed through three

main lines of research. One was dedicated to the general description of the body in its operations

and functions. The more significant developments in this sense came from the revolution that

followed the first anatomical observations made in the universities. Spain has been quite late in

accepting the principle of the dissection of dead bodies in public places and these lessons were

accepted only after Charles V was received in the major Italian universities.47 The classification of

illnesses was another aspect towards which the effort of physicians were directed. The numerous

epidemics that broke out in the fifteenth and the sixteenth century everywhere in Europe had

convinced physicians that there were illnesses never previously described by classic authors (such

as syphilis) or not sufficiently specified. Finally, there had been books where the general physiology

of man was explained according to its organic functions. At the core of these works was the medical

observation that the mechanical functions of the body were made intermittent by the cognitive

Medicina en la Universitad de Salamanca de Finales de Siglo XVI (pp. 37–50) interestingly points out that thenumber of student was quite little and was mainly limited to a homogeneous circle of conversos. The role of Jews tomedicine especially in Spain in the subject of the fundamental work by Friedenwald, cited below.

4 4 FRIEDENWALD, The Jews and Medicine, vol. 2, pp. 613 – 773.4 5 1. Quality of the Air; 2. Food and Drink; 3. Movement and Rest ; 4. Quality of Sleep; 5. Retention and

Evacuation of Waste; 6. Perturbations of the Mind and Emotions.4 6 One recurrent work was that of the barbero or sangradores, appointed to blood purgation. Cervantes's father

started as one of them before getting a licence to be cirujano. Garcia del Real (as in n. 45, p. 105), marks theirimportance for the early development of anatomy in Spain.

4 7 GARCIA DEL REAL (as in n. 45), p. 104 – 106.

43

direction of the mind. A strong will can control appetites, which are detrimental to physical health.

Or, on the other hand, a feeble mind is governed by desires and more prone to falling ill. The soul's

activity was reputed to be as important for medicine as it was for philosophy, for it sustained both

bodily health and spiritual sanity and could be affected in both dimensions by external and material

factors as well as by ignorance.

The works of many physicians were indeed aimed to find a solution to the philosophical

problem of how much reason can moderate cognitive processes and biological functions. De Anima

et Vita (1538) by Juan Luis Vives was one of the first treatises of this kind to be written in Spain and

created a precedent for many other works to come.48 Vives was not a physician, but his use of the

physiology of sensation is precise and up to date with the more recent theories. The book is divided

in three volumes. Rather than following the tripartite subdivision of the soul according to Aristotle,

he significantly divides it in 'alma de los brutos', 'alma racional' and 'las pasiones'.49 The first book

brings together the 'vegetative' and the 'animal' soul and its content covers the vital functions, the

senses and the self-awareness ('conocimiento interior') of sensations. He relates only the first

faculties to plants and the other two to animals, although in different proportions. Self-awareness in

particular, contains in itself all the faculties that are peculiar to the animal soul: “in the soul of both

humans and animals exists a faculty to receive the images that have been impressed by the senses,

and for this reason it is called imagination; there is another one that serves to retain them, which is

memory; there is a third one that serves to refine them – fantasy - and, to conclude, the one that

discern those according to approval or dissent and that is estimation.”50 The inclusion of 'fantasy' in

the traditional count of the faculties is significant because it transcends the simple recording and re-

presentation of past sensations, but it attributes to this level of the soul a creative dimension, one

that “[...] if [it] is not governed and contained by reason, could impress and disturb the soul as a

tempest on the sea. And this surveillance will put in motion the senses and also the same state of the

organism, in the very same way as both the good and the evil angels intervened to excite this

faculty, applying very gently the actions of the natural things, that way too easily frustrate and

cancel the awareness of the senses and our own judgement.”51 Imagination and fantasy are however

4 8 The most influential successors were of course Huarte's, Examen (1575) (and Velasquez's polemical replyLibro de la Melancholia, 1585) and the very popular Tratado de la Naturaleza de l'Hombre (1587) variouslyattributed to Olivia Sabuco or to his father, Miguel (see, GRANJEL, Humanismo y Medicina pp. 20-74).

4 9 Ibid., p. 1148.5 0 Ibid., p. 1170. “[…] tanto del hombre como de los animales, existe una facultad que impresas en los sentidos, y

que por esto se llama imaginativa; hay otra facultad que se sirve par retenerlas, y es la memoria; hay una tercera, quesirve para perfecionarlas, la fantasia, y, por fin, la que las distribuye segun su asenso o disenso y es la estimativa”

5 1 Ibid., p. 1171. “Y así es que si no anda gobernada y contenida por la rázon, impresiona y perturba el alma comal mar la tempestad. Ese gobierno ponerle en movimiento los sentidos y tambien el estado del organismo or aquellamanera misma con que los seres espirituales, como son los ángeles buenos y malos, intervienen para excitar aquella

44

two sides of the same coin, since by similar means tend to opposite results. Both of them have the

power to actively shape the form of the body, as in the case of the fantasies of pregnant women

determining the aspect of the child. The appetite is the subject matter of estimation, inasmuch as

this determines our benefit or detriment, and it is also the incentive of movement, for it drives the

body towards its physical needs.

Such, Vives says, is the greater awareness to which the animal soul could aspire. These

abilities alone are enough to create a recurrent representation of reality, allowing survival. The last

part of the book is dedicated to setting the difference between animal and rational soul and to giving

a definition of soul that includes both degrees of awareness into a single life principle. The

difference between animals and men is a logic synthesis of all sensations and their elaboration by

cognitive faculties, that is the mind. The mind is not a static representation of external reality but

one that is directed towards a final purpose and is introduced into the temporal dimension. Its aim is

the truth, therefore it is able to distinguish between true and false. It perceives as an obstacle the

variations of material conditions and looks for an universal validity of its intentions. Its instrument

is logic and its prepositions are expressed through language.

However, the principles of life itself – senses, cognitive functions and rationality – are to be

found in a substance “so close to be nothing that is almost nothing itself”52, a substance without

mass and not made of any element of the material world. As such, the forms of the species can

never evolve and are always the same through generations.53 The ultimate mystery of this substance

is hidden from our senses, therefore we have to infer his nature from its operations. Its function is to

shape the body according to their form, and this form is the ruling principle of our actions. We only

perform those actions which are consistent with our own form. Therefore its presence and existence

must be between form (unsubstantial and intellectual) and matter (material and inertial); or between

species and character. It is clear that it would be fruitless to try to find it in a particular place in the

body. Vives's final definition of the soul refers to “an active, essential, principle inhabiting one body

apt to life.”54 It is 'active', because it uses the instruments provided by the body. 'Essential', because

its ability does not depend on these instruments. It inhabits the body because it corresponds to it and

is not just contained in it.55 In accordance with Aristotle, he places the 'origin' of the soul in the

facultad, aplicando con suma delicateza las acciones de las cosas naturales, que con harta facilidad frustran y anulanel conocimiento de los sentidos y nuestro propio juicio.”

5 2 Ibid., p. 1173. “[...] una cosa tan próximaa la nada que casi es la nada misma”.5 3 Ibid., p. 1174.5 4 Ibid., p. 1177. “el alma es un principio activo esencial que mora en un cuerpo apto para la vida”.5 5 Vives establishes a difference between possessions, which occupy the body; and the soul, that is in every part

45

heart, because it is there that the first and the last act of life take place.

The second book is dedicated to the rational mind. Reason is composed of three 'operations'

which act over the cognitions coming from the senses. The first is the will to unite with the good.

The second is the intelligence to know what is good. And the third is the memory to integrate the

actual knowledge with the representation of absent objects. The knowledge, or intelligence, is of

two kinds: a simple intelligence that perceives the singularity of the object in relation to the species;

and a more complex intelligence that has the task of organising the concepts through the

comparison with other concepts retained in the memory and recovered through reflection,

recollection and reminiscence. An interesting observation Vives made about memory is its

fallibility. There are different types of lapses that can be devised by memory itself in accordance

with its inner logic (complete cancellation, partial, hidden by the form of the question or put 'under

a veil'). These variations in mnemonic contents could be the product of both a physical illness or

passionate excitement, anticipating the main argument of his third book.56 However, all the

intellectual activities of the mind could only be stopped by means of a physical obstacle. Vives's

opinion is similar, in this sense, to that of Cervantes and de Laguna: “[…] the fatigue of

drunkenness, the adverse vapours of stupefaction, all obstacles which, together with other similar,

are of a violent and contrary nature to the spirit's nature. When their resistance ends, automatically

the soul goes back to its usual functions.”57 In the same way, opposing intelligence to will would be

impossible, because intelligence is a spontaneous process and cannot be stopped. Therefore, it

would be worthless trying to think about nothing. The result of this attempt would engender even

more thoughts and distractions, leading to an authentic alteration of mental health. Another

interesting reflection Vives makes is about the role of dreams. Like the thoughts made during the

waking hours, dreaming is a continuous activity which is opposite to that of the rational thought.

Here the images coming from memory are assembled without order or coherency. Fantasy here

takes control over the mind's activity. Vives seems to conceive the cognitive activity as the

battlefield between rational (i.e. logic) mind and fantasy “the latter dragging the soul towards

corporeal things, while the mind rising with energy towards the most elevated things.”58 Fantasy is

of the body, similarly to the Paracelsean Archeus. It is singular that he does not only talk of demonic but also ofdivine possessions, a concept reminiscent of his Neoplatonic tendencies. Ibid., p. 1178.

5 6 Demonstrating a remarkable modernity, Vives anticipates the psychoanalytical concept of subconsciousassociation. To illustrate the autonomy of the mind over the individual will, he reports an anecdote. He says that hehas not been able to eat cherries for a long time because of an illness he contracted when he was young and that hehad assimilated to the memory of cherries. See, ZILBORG & HENRY (as in n. …), p.191.

5 7 VIVES (as in n. ...), p. 1220 “[...] el mareo de la embriaguez, los vapores contrarios en la estupefacion,impedimentos todo ellos que como algún otro analogo, son de indole violenta y opuestos a la naturaleza del espiritu;cuando cesa su resistencia el alma vuelve a su usada laboriosidad.”

5 8 Ibid. p. 1173. “ […] ésta arrastra el alma hacia lo corporeo, al paso que la mente yerguese con brío hacia las

46

therefore the irrational force that drives the intellect to err, but its existence is necessary because it

enables us to tell the true from the false, within the confusion produced by sensible stimuli.

As we have seen, Vives has so far described the common structure of the soul, but did not

give any cause for the individual variations which exist in the species. His enquiry on the action of

the soul would not be finished without the expounding the decisive function of human reason, that

is free will. The freedom of choice determines the differences which constitute the inner variety of

humankind. In the introduction to his third book, Vives declares that this is the most difficult part,

because of its inherent complexity59 and because no one before him had ever attempted such a

systematic treatment of the subject. The subject in question is an unnamed faculty which presides

over any other faculty and is the foundation of rationality itself. This is the knowledge of good and

evil which allows us to aspire to happiness and reject the pain. The actions that this faculty performs

are the passions which instinctively brings us to flee from what we think is evil and to incline to

what we believe is good. To establish what is good or bad is a duty of the judgement which is the

faculty that gives form to our passions. However, this process of judgement of reality is necessarily

tied to our personal abilities: “Truth is something congruent with understanding in the same way as

good is with will.”60 All these passions are prompted by an external influence and they all have a

real impact on physical health, altering our sensations. Although they are formed by previous

judgement, their action anticipates that of judgement. This is the prejudice that accompanies every

new experience. However, both our passions and opinions can change according to the experience.

This could happen either through reasonable arguments or through imagination. Again, it is fantasy

that drives them in every direction and creates instability. If the judgement is not cleared from the

confusion produced by fantasies, these passions are able to destroy the balance of our humours and

therefore to compromise our state of physical health. But, they are also able to generate “obsessive

thoughts, the overwhelming, difficult and harsh studies that burden the melancholic person; the

opinion that we form about the things of reality...”61 as well as “all intentional, mandatory,

challenging, pleasant, annoying, difficult, plain and simple activities and occupations.”62 The

function of these passions is to stimulate and restrain the soul from inactivity or lust and are “the

cosas mas elevadas [...]”5 9 Vives is deeply aware of the vagueness of passions. He also recognize the mixed nature of some of them,

anticipating the psychoanalytical conclusions to which Freud will come more than three hundred years later. SeeZILBORG & HENRY (as in n. …), p. 190-192.

6 0 Ibid., p. 1199. “La verdad es una cosa congruente con el entendimiento, come el bien con la voluntad”6 1 Ibid., pp. 1245-1246 “A esto se agregan los pensamientos obsesionantes. Los estudios grandes, dificiles,

arduos, tornan a las pesonas melancólicas. La opinión que tenemos de las cosas [...]”.6 2 Ibid., p. 1246. “los negocios y los actos intencionales, vehementes, laboriosos, agradables, molestos, díficiles,

placidos, ligeros”.

47

foundation of all moral doctrine, either private or public...”63. The movements ('impetus naturales')

to which the soul is subjected as a consequence of the action of passions could vary from moderate

to uncontrollable. This latter state is the actual confusion that is at the origin of mental illnesses.

Moreover, a reiterated emotional response of the soul to certain objects is called a vice, because its

persistence is instigated through a violent and continued action. Some of these 'bad habits' are the

result of our physical constitution. The purer and more elevated the faculty of judgement is, the

easier will be to control passions.

According to Vives, passions are not features of any particular faculty of the soul but are the

most essential character of any individual soul. Their introduction as a variable in a scientific

allocation of the soul's faculties is entirely innovative because it implies the possibility that

alterations in the state of consciousness could be provoked by exclusively moral instances. The

ultimate cause for a disease of the imagination is an erroneous evaluation of what is good or evil. As

such, the cure for a mental disease could not be effective unless we consider the moral priorities of

the patient. Before Vives, the movements of passions were considered by Galenic medicine to be

one of the six 'non-naturals' and were compared to all the elements which were not inherent to the

individual, but relative to the external environment. Therefore, they were treated as accidents, as it

was the case of the treatment of a typical 'moral' insanity in medical treatises, such as the amantium

insania.64 In Vives, the analogy between the medicine of the body and that of the soul is completely

established. The relationship between passions and the conditions of the body is now two-fold. Not

only our physical condition could influence our mental state; but also our mental state could

influence our state of physical health. Like physical symptoms lead to the diagnosis of a general

distemper, outburst of insanity could signal a vice in our judgement upon reality, which in turn

could be influenced mainly by past experiences and only incidentally by logical thought. Vives

envisaged a model of the mind where reason had a small part and a huge responsibility. Not

everything that is perceived passes his inspection and approval. 'Fantasy', or the irrational and the

creative power of our imagination, has a prominent place in our psychic life and its definition much

resembles the later formulation of the concept of subconscious according to modern psychoanalysis.

In conclusion, the originality of Vives's reconstruction lies in its acknowledgement of

instability as an inherent feature of the mind. The soul is no longer an immovable and unalterable

substance. Its own oscillation and instability directly affects our ability to judge, remember and

6 3 Ibid., p. 1148. “el fundamento de toda la doctrina moral, privada o pública”.6 4 See for instance, MONTALTO, Archipatologia, pp. 381–386.

48

produce mental images. Therefore, the individual person's character is not only defined by his or her

physical structure and inherent cognitive abilities. His or her perception of reality is also modified

by the continuing emotional reaction to sensations and their retention in the memory. Vives's

rational soul, the mind, is individually determined and largely spontaneous. Its unpredictability

would determine the physical as well as the mental health of the individual. Far from being a mere

consequence of his material composition, a man's personality is shaped by the quality of his

judgement and the strength of his will. Then, the responsibility of the individual is not to repress all

instances of unreasonable thought, but instead to enhance his faculty of judgement through

education and experience.

49

Conclusion:

An Ongoing Process

The period between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century marked a significant evolution in the

consideration that the social body was keeping towards insane people, either suffering of an inborn

condition or being afflicted by a progressive loss of their cognitive faculties. The two main

assumptions that we have identified as fundamental for a modern definition of insanity – the

recognition of a medical dimension for the processes of thinking and the acknowledgement of the

influence of social factors that determine insanity -, were still far from being integrated in one

discipline considering both variables. One the one hand, a biological reading of mental conditions

still excluded the intervention of behavioural instances as decisive to originate a mental disease. In

the view of the most materialistic exponent of Galenism, morality was still a by-product of the

general complexion of the individual. Against them, Paracelsus tried to propose an alternative

explanation considering the mutability of natural processes, but he needed to use an allegorical

language dense with philosophical concepts. On the other hand, a more anthropological attitude

could not exclude morality as a cause. The reason for insanity lied in an erroneous mental scheme

of reality, derived from the degeneration of the madman’s moral priorities. Even when the passions

were included in the function, a moral judgement of these people’s behaviour was still in use. This

was evident in the debate about witchcraft, unanimously blamed whether they were believed legally

responsible for their crimes or just hallucinated persons. However, we have seen that also the

committal of insane people to hospitals was not always motivated by the will of enhancing their

conditions and their exclusion from society benefited primarily the conformity of the sane majority

of society. The synthesis of these two currents was finalised in the twentieth century with the

elaboration of the psychoanalytical method, the structure of which gave necessity to some complex

emotive reactions and separated neurologic problems from individual life experience. However, the

progresses made by European intellectuals between the sixteenth and the seventeenth century, to

which the Spanish community contributed significantly, lied the foundations for the idea of mind as

a spontaneous activity from which does not only depend our moral judgement but also the

expression of our personality and attitude towards other people.

50

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