Women, Imagination and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France

Rebecca M. Wilkin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754661382
• eBook ISBN: 9781351871600
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Grounded in medical, juridical, and philosophical texts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France, this innovative study tells the story of how the idea of woman contributed to the emergence of modern science. Rebecca Wilkin focuses on the contradictory representations of women from roughly the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, and depicts this period as one filled with epistemological anxiety and experimentation. She shows how skeptics, including Montaigne, Marie de Gournay, and Agrippa von Nettesheim, subverted gender hierarchies and/or blurred gender difference as a means of questioning the human capacity to find truth; while "positivists" who strove to establish new standards of truth, for example Johann Weyer, Jean Bodin, and Guillaume du Vair, excluded women from the search for truth. The book constitutes a reevaluation of the legacy of Cartesianism for women, as Wilkin argues that Descartes' opening of the search for truth "even to women" was part of his appropriation of skeptical arguments. This book challenges scholars to revise deeply held notions regarding the place of women in the early modern search for truth, their role in the development of rational thought, and the way in which intellectuals of the period dealt with the emergence of an influential female public.

Chapter One
Common Sense: Johann Weyer and the Psychology of Witchcraft

My investigation into the deployment of gender distinctions by early modern intellectuals in order to define truth and to legitimate particular means of attaining truth begins in the mid-sixteenth century with the polemics surrounding the witch trials. The witch trials, long the purview of social historians, may at first seem remote from the philosophical inquiry that we associate with Descartes. This distance collapses, however, once we recognize that the late Renaissance obsession with demonology, a subject of intense interest to political theorists and physicians as well as theologians both Catholic and Protestant, mediated questions of philosophical as well as theological import. Stuart Clark has shown that to gauge the power of illusion wielded by demons was also to call into question the validity of human perception. Throughout the sixteenth century, vision was considered the most noble of the senses, but also the most vulnerable to demonically induced error. When Descartes in his Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641) established the foundations for future knowledge despite the possible distortions caused by a melancholic imagination or an evil demon, he was evoking a problem that had arisen in the demonological literature of the late Renaissance: how can we be sure that what we see is, indeed, outside of us? The attention that Descartes paid to optics in his mechanistic physics, and particularly his rejection of the Aristotelian doctrine of species, further reveals how important it had become by the early seventeenth century to ascertain finally the reliability of visual perception. The skeptical crisis of the late Renaissance, heralded by Charles Etienne’s 1562 translation of Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of pyrrhonism from Greek into Latin, was fueled by a pervasive loss of faith in the veracity of visual perception.¹

While the signs of the unreliability of vision were everywhere, one book brought the question of visual perception to a head: a treatise authored in 1563 by a Lutheran physician from Flanders in the employ of Duke Wilhelm of Jülich, Cleves, and Berg—the small but politically important duchy in the lower Rhine valley, not so far from where Descartes would later spend his most productive years. In De praestigiis daemonum, Johann Weyer (1515–88) condemned the witch trials as the unjust persecution of mentally unstable women. In the process, he modeled a hermeneutical stance designed to enhance the prestige of the physician. Combining the literalism redolent in Luther’s approach to the Bible with a traditional understanding of the practice of medicine as the discernment of the body’s ailments through the reading of signs on the exterior of the body, Weyer defined the search for truth as a hermeneutics of surfaces, wherein “common sense”—the inner faculty thought to synthesize sense impressions before passing them along to the understanding for analysis—served as the arbiter of truth. Thanks to an epistemology in which sense perception played the decisive role, the physician, whose expertise was usually circumscribed to natural phenomena, claimed a stake in the investigation of supernatural occurrences. However, in his eagerness to establish the physician’s authority in demonological matters, Weyer overlooked a contradiction in his argument: his emphasis on the Devil’s power to distort and deceive human perception undermined the authority he granted to the senses. De praestigiis daemonum advanced an untenable paradox: through sensual perception one could ascertain truth, but the Devil was a master of sensual deception.

Claiming that Weyer was the first to identify those women persecuted in early modern Europe for being witches as misunderstood hysterics, a disease label that had no currency until the nineteenth century, Gregory Zilboorg called Weyer “the father of modern psychiatry.”² Less anachronistic, certainly, would be to call De praestigiis daemonum a foundational text for early modern “psychology”, a term first employed in the 1580s by Catholic demonologists like Noël Taillepied, the Canon of Pontoise and author of Psichologie, ou Traité de l’apparition des esprits (1588). “Psychology” for Taillepied is the science of distinguishing perception from illusion with the aim of affirming the existence of demons, souls separated from bodies, ghosts, prodigies, and other “spirits.”³ In his Quatre livres des spectres (1586), probably the most important work in the subgenre of demonology that was “psychology” (as Taillepied defines it), Pierre Le Loyer (1550–1634) refutes four kinds of doubt expressed with respect to specters. One of these is doubt in the trustworthiness of the senses.⁴ We recognize Weyer’s argument here, pushed to its logical extreme: the Devil’s power of illusion is so great that we can never be sure of what we really see, hear, feel, or sense in any other way. De praestigiis daemonum left its readers with an urgent problem. If Luther’s “repeated insistence on the reality and presence of the Devil and his assault on humans, and his detailed and frequent testimonies of the Devil’s physical and spiritual assaults on himself” made the Devil the intimate moral foe of each and every Christian, Weyer in De praestigiis daemonum can take credit for making the Devil an epistemological enemy of unavoidable proportions.⁵

De praestigiis daemonum was symptomatic not only of the epistemological trouble of the late Renaissance, but also of the gender strategies through which enterprising intellectuals like Weyer sought to capitalize on such instability.⁶ The words and bodies of the women whom Weyer claims are falsely accused of witchcraft serve as “texts” through whose “reading” the physician demonstrates the pertinence of his literalist, sense-based hermeneutics. Anyone can see that these socalled witches are simply deranged, the physician insists; to go prying beyond what is easily apparent is perverse and cruel. We might imagine that knowledge gleaned through common sense, unlike book learning, would be within reach of everyone, just as we might suppose that the Devil’s illusions would be universally misleading. Weyer, however, claims that certain people are naturally more vulnerable to demonic deception than others. The essentially melancholic imagination of women, he argues, makes them incapable of the sense perception to which he assigns pride of place in the search for truth. The madness with which Weyer diagnosed witches thus masked the contradiction that vitiated his plea. Identifying the susceptibility to demonic illusion as a feminine trait was to compartmentalize it, to limit implicitly the damage that the Devil could inflict elsewhere—for instance, on the perception of learned physicians. Those who refuted De praestigiis daemonum rejected the hermeneutical advantage that Weyer claimed for himself. To the gender strategy by which he claimed this advantage, however, they did not object. Weyer’s vociferous adversary, Jean Bodin, decried the physician’s medical diagnosis of witches; nevertheless, he called upon woman to embody his opposing hermeneutics. The phenomenon that Clark has felicitously termed “thinking with demons” was thus, I argue, inseparable from another thought process: “thinking with women.”⁷

Making Sense of Misogyny

Weyer’s defense of women accused of witchcraft rested on a diagnosis: they were melancholic. Although the diagnosis was conventional, what is striking in De praestigiis daemonum is the way in which Weyer generalizes that diagnosis to all women. Extrapolating from medieval concerns regarding the discernment of true mystical experience from delusion, Italian jurists and physicians of the early sixteenth century emphasized the difficulty of distinguishing witchcraft from possession facilitated by melancholy.⁸ Melancholy was known as the Devil’s bath (balneum diaboli), a dark humor that facilitates the Devil’s infiltration of minds and souls. That is why, according to the Italian naturalist Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525), “the first exorcists, whom they call praecantatores or enchanters, before the conjuring, would purge the possessed victims’ bodies of black bile.”⁹ Legally, the problem was that under the influence of melancholy, one who was possessed might sincerely believe that she was a witch. She might, therefore, be punished as the Devil’s accomplice when in fact she was only his victim. The physician, mathematician, and magus, Girolamo Cardano (1501–76) emphasizes the resemblance between melancholic witches and the possessed in De rerum varietate (1557). Weyer cites him at length: “[Witches] are misshapen, pale, and somewhat gloomy-looking; one can see that they have an excess of black bile in them just by looking at them. They are taciturn and mentally infirm, and they differ little from those who are thought to be possessed by a demon.”¹⁰ Melancholy blurred the line between illness and evil, victimization and accountability; as a result, the jurist Andrea Alciati (1492–1550) simply recommended hellebore, a purgative prescribed for melancholy, for women supposed to be witches.¹¹

Weyer claims, like Alciati, that witches are women who suffer the delusions of black bile and whose “eyes are blinded.” He invites his reader to consider “the thoughts, words, visions, and actions of melancholics” to “understand how in these persons all the senses are often distorted when the melancholic humor seizes control of the brain and alters the mind.”¹² He compares the illusions wreaked by Satan to those resulting from black bile. Witches are women whose imaginations are corrupted by Satan “just as we see it happen that the mind is wounded, troubled, and filled with various fantasies and apparitions in those whose brains are fogged up with melancholy or by its vapors.”¹³ Mixing melancholy with devilish hallucinations, the Devil cloaks himself, Weyer explains, in the inky shadows of melancholic smoke to facilitate his illusions: “From black and melancholic vapor something horrible appears—a demon-image, as it were; accordingly, the Devil loves to insinuate himself into this vapor, as being a material most suited for his mocking illusions.”¹⁴ As for his female victims, they may be melancholic or just melancholic-like, but the important thing is their susceptibility to persuasion. Thus the sly Devil may win over women who are (among other things) melancholic: “[T]hat crafty schemer the Devil thus influences the female sex, that sex which by reason of temperament is inconstant, credulous, wicked, uncontrolled in spirit, and (because of its feelings and affections, which it governs only with difficulty) melancholic.”¹⁵ Or the evil one has as easy a time persuading women as he does persuading melancholics: “[T]he sort of person most likely to be attacked is one who … is so moved by external or internal causes … that as a result of specious inducements he will readily present himself as a suitable instrument of the demon’s will. Melancholics are of this sort.” So, too, are “old women not in possession of their faculties, and similarly foolish women of noted malice or slippery and wavering faith.”¹⁶

As a medical diagnosis, Weyer’s assessment is inconsistent. His hesitation between either diagnosing women as melancholics or comparing them to melancholics betrays his awareness that melancholy was a condition associated with (male) genius. Weyer apprenticed for three years with the occasional physician, occult philosopher, and alchemical dabbler, Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim (1486–1535), who in De occulta philosophia (1531–33), relates the thesis of Aristotle’s famous Problem 30: “[B]y melancholy … some men are made as it were divine, foretelling things to come, and some men are made poets … all men that were excellent in any science, were for the most part melancholy.” Agrippa furthermore claims that the melancholic temperament predisposes “men’s bodies” to receiving “celestial spirits”—a claim that would lead many of his critics to suspect him of trafficking with the Devil.¹⁷ I return in Chapter Two to the controversy engendered by Weyer’s attempt to associate melancholy with women. Here it is enough to note that his diagnosis served the purpose of the legal defense he crafted. H.C. Erik Midelfort has shown that Weyer’s defens...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Note on Translations
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Dedication
• Introduction
• 1 Common Sense: Johann Weyer and the Psychology of Witchcraft
• 2 The Touchstone of Truth: Jean Bodin’s Torturous Hermeneutics
• 3 Masle Morale in the Body Politic: Guillaume du Vair and André du Laurens
• 4 The Suspension of Difference: Michel de Montaigne’s Lame Lovers
• 5 “Even Women”: Cartesian Rationalism Reconsidered
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index