HoP 457 - Take Your Medicine - Oliva Sabuco and Camilla Erculiani
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Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode: Take Your Medicine, Oliva Sabuco and Camilla Erculiani. Historians who want to uncover the achievements of women intellectuals in earlier times are often faced with problems of authorship. For all we know, some surviving pre-modern works are in fact by women, but not labeled as such.

And when works and ideas are ascribed to women, there's often some doubt about authenticity. There's no consensus whether Diatima, who delivers the culminating speech of Plato's Symposium, is based on a real person. Philosophical letters, ascribed to even earlier women of the Pythagorean school, are certainly not by them, as shown by the fact that the Greek language used in them dates from a later period, but maybe the authors were female nonetheless.

Things are usually a bit clearer for medieval women authors, but even here it has sometimes been suspected that male colleagues had a significant role in shaping the text ascribed to figures like Hildegard of Bingen. And just recently, when covering Elizabethan England, we saw a debate about the sonnets ascribed to Anne Locke, whom we may or may not choose to believe when she denies her own authorship.

In the bad old days, historians used to make the sexist assumption that more sophisticated texts were surely not written by women, even if they were transmitted under the names of female authors. Nowadays, the pendulum has swung in the other direction, since there is a healthy appetite to discover and study texts by pre-modern and early modern women thinkers. If you want to know how inclined you might be to give a putative woman writer the benefit of the doubt, then you can test yourself on the case of Oliva Sabuco.

For a long time, no one challenged her authorship of an unorthodox treatise called The New Philosophy of Human Nature, first published in 1587. It collects seven works in dialogue form, in which the main speaker is a shepherd named Antonio. This shepherd presents newfangled theories about nature, especially the human body and medicine, brushing away objections from more conservative interlocutors who are wedded to the authority of Hippocrates, Aristotle, and Galen. At this point, we can hardly be surprised to come across such a work.

The dialogue form had become standard thanks to the humanists, and we've seen plenty of irreverent departures from ancient natural philosophy and medicine, usually coupled with disdainful remarks about those who are bound to traditional ideas. More unexpected is that this innovative scientific work was written by a woman. Or was it? Back when the book was, as its title says, new, it was apparently universally accepted as being oliva sabucos.

In the 16th century, she was named along with figures like Isotta Nogarola and Christine de Bizan in a work in praise of women. And in the 17th century, she was hailed as a 10th muse, though by my reckoning she should really be the 11th muse because that honorific was already assigned to Montaigne's adoptive daughter Marie de Garnay. In the early 20th century, the scholar José Marco Hidalgo discovered archival evidence, casting doubt on her authorship.

In several documents, including his own will, Oliva's father Miguel insisted that he was the true author of the new philosophy. After he wrote the work, he explains, he allowed it to appear under his daughter's name and even with prefatory material emphasizing the novelty of seeing such a work come from the pen of a woman. He was at first happy to give her credit for writing it in order to grant her honor, but then realized he didn't want to forego the kind of credit that would turn up in a bank account.

He went so far as to make a notarized declaration that he, not she, was the author of the work and should be the one to receive any financial proceeds from sale of the book. Apparently, this blood relationship was a good deal frostier than the adoptive one between Montaigne and Desgarnes. Which is kind of appropriate given that, as we'll see, the new philosophy minimizes the importance of blood. Whichever Sabuco wrote the work, he or she, was not short on confidence.

The mouthpiece character Antonio declares, I will provide evidence showing that philosophy and medicine are wrong, that the world is deceived, and that the true philosophy and medicine are contained in this book of mine. The swaggering tone is not justified on the grounds of thorough training. To the contrary, the author admits having never studied medicine, and Antonio is described by his traditionalist interlocutor as a mere simpleton of a rustic who did not study medicine and with no books.

This description provokes Antonio to say that reading the standard authorities would only have confused him. He spent a full eight days consulting the works of Hippocrates and Galen, which was plenty to show him that they are hopelessly confused. In the prefatory material, and then again in the dialogues themselves, Sobuko points out that Hippocratic medicine has now been tried for 2,000 years, with at best mixed success. Why not at least try out this new medicine for only one year to see if it works?

Adding to this sense of a refreshingly outsider approach to the topic is the fact that the work is in Spanish, not Latin, though at one point the great Italian humanist Poliziano is quoted in Latin. At another point, the author complains about the fact that scientific works and law books are written in Latin. The language of reverence and self-proclaimed amateur status of the work fits with Sabuco's penchant for down-to-earth examples and topics.

The first dialogue begins with an almost literal bang, as a partridge falls dead at the feet of the interlocutors, having been frightened to death by a pursuing hawk. Later on, we get explanations of things like why feet are ticklish, and the pervasiveness of spiral motion in nature is illustrated with the way dogs lie down for a nap. This sort of thing makes the work convincing as the product of an attentive and curious non-expert.

On the other hand, the accumulation of details and examples, especially about animals, including animals neither Sabuko would have been likely to meet, like elephants, suggests that the book draws on the sort of material collected in commonplace books as we discussed when talking about Jean Baudin.

That impression is partially confirmed by a discovery made by the translator of part of the work, Gianna Pomatta, who showed that when Sabuco refers to earlier texts, the citations are usually drawn from a single earlier source, a treatise by the Spanish physician Francisco Valles. So, while this may be the work of an amateur, it is an amateur who likes to read. Indeed, we know that the father, Miguel, liked to collect books, and he was also an apothecary, which fits with an interest in science.

On the other hand, it's no stretch to think that his bright daughter, Oliva, could have picked up on these same interests living in his household. Either way, we're dealing here with an autodidact, albeit one who fits well into the shifting landscape of late-16th-century natural philosophy. The features of the text just mentioned may make it sound unsophisticated and unsystematic, but that is far from the case. The dialogues touch on many themes, not just medicine, but self-knowledge, society, and the emotions.

Yet, there is a running theme throughout, which is the fundamentally physical and embodied character of human life. This, I think, is why Sabuko mentions animals so often. Though we get the standard point that humans share sensation with animals and intellect with the angels, it becomes clear as one reads that, for Sabuko, humans are a lot more like animals, and vice versa. This is the point of starting with that frightened partridge. It illustrates the powerful effects of emotional reaction, which can also be lethal for humans.

Much is said about apes and elephants because they are apparently the most intelligent beasts. We learn that apes can play chess and enjoy dressing up, as do elephants, which give people hugs and can learn Latin and plot vengeance. We get a story about an elephant that was running riot, stopped when it saw a child in danger, calmly lifted the child to safety with its trunk, and then resumed its rampage. All of which is good fun, but also philosophically important.

Though this lesson remains largely implicit, I take Sabuco to be saying that the higher animals are very much like humans because their bodies are similar to ours. For, as the work teaches more explicitly, our thoughts and emotions are grounded in, if not wholly determined by, our physical states. There are a few allusions to the idea that God sends down the soul into the body, which suggests a background Platonism according to which the soul, in its own right, is an incorporeal substance that could survive without the body.

But the overwhelming sense is that all human behavior is to be understood physiologically. Powers like understanding and reason are seated in the brain. As a result, intelligence varies with bodily constitution. The ideal physical state is not a balance between the body's humors, as asserted by ancient doctors like Galen. Rather, the more intelligent people are the ones with the drier bodies. Emotions and even freedom and happiness are closely associated, if not identified, with states of the brain.

This is a major theme of the first dialogue, which gives advice about moderating and combating excessive emotional reactions. Some of this advice is genuinely good, like the suggestion of how to deal with an angry person who wants to retaliate against an enemy. Instead of arguing with them, just agree to help seek revenge, but not until tomorrow. Then change the subject. That will give the person a chance to calm down.

In truth, though, the most memorable parts of the work are not about ethics and the emotions. Instead, it is Sabuko's description of the human body that really makes the book stand out. As promised, this theory does away with Aristotelian and Galenic ideas about anatomy and anthropology. According to the classical theory, life is sustained by vital heat, which is carried by blood, the most important of the four humors.

For sabuco, the crucial substance is instead "xile" in Spanish "chilo" from the Greek "hulos" meaning "juice". This is a milky fluid which gathers in the brain and is then sent down through the spinal column to nourish the other organs. It keeps the body cool, not warm, and is transformed into other fluids like blood, breast milk, and semen. Illnesses and death are in many cases caused by a disruption in this hydraulic system.

For example, plague kills people by causing a sudden fall of chile from the brain to the rest of the body. On the other hand, the brain can also check in on the rest of the body by sending its juices out, something Sabuko compares to a worried mother sending letters to her child. Complementing the brain with its ruling power is the stomach, which is of course responsible for digestion, but also provides moisture to the brain to sustain the distribution of chile.

Another important factor in health is the balance between the cool brain and the warm stomach. The stomach's heat is kept in check by drawing in cooling air through respiration. If we're looking for evidence that this theory is the brainchild of a woman, then it isn't too hard to find. Remember that women were standardly thought to be cooler and moister in bodily constitution than men. And here, we have an anthropology that gives the crucial role to chile, a cool and fluid substance, and warns against the dangers of excessive heat.

Furthermore, Sabuko draws a link between the hile and the moon, which of course is symbolically feminine in contrast to the masculine sun. The moon is said to have a powerful effect on moisture, which is why the meat of oysters swell under a full moon. Wounds also heal better at that time of the month. Sabuko also closely associates hile with milk. It is milky white in appearance and as we've already seen, the stuff from which breast milk is made.

Strikingly, the work also refers to the pains sometimes felt by nursing women. Of course, it's not impossible to imagine a male author knowing about that, but the whole account can plausibly be read as a kind of feminist response to Aristotelian and Galenic theory. Our thoughts, emotions, health, and disease are all determined by a nurturing, one might even say lactating, principle of cool moisture, which disseminates its benevolent juice to the rest of the body.

Drawing on an old analogy, Subuko compares the human to an upside-down tree, because the system of hile has its roots in our heads and then branches downwards through the rest of the body. But is it really historically plausible that a woman could have written this remarkably innovative set of dialogues? Here, the answer can only be yes.

Not only were there plenty of other women writing around this same time across Europe, like the aforementioned Anne Locke, and not only were some of them writing dialogues that explore natural philosophy, like Moderata Fonte, there was even an Italian female apothecary who wrote about natural philosophy around the same time as Sabuco was putting pen to paper. This was Camilla Eculiani, who was most definitely the author of several letters that were published in Krakow in 1584 with a dedication to the Queen of Poland.

We might also compare her to the aforementioned Isotta Nogarola, who wrote a dialogue on the relative blameworthiness of Adam and Eve, because Eculiani's letters also comment on a story from the Old Testament. She uses the ideas of natural philosophy to explain why the floodwaters rose, forcing Noah to gather together the animals on his ark. The fact that Eculiani was an apothecary is certainly relevant here, as is the fact that she lived in Padua.

She ran a medical dispensary there along with her husband, and her letters confirmed that she was involved in the compounding of drugs following instructions found in Galen. This suggests that she would have associated with doctor-philosophers in the environment of Padua's university. And remember, Padua was one of the more cutting-edge institutions in Europe. It was here that Renaissance Aristotelians pushed the boundaries of rationalist philosophy by flirting with the provocative ideas of Averroes.

Paggio was also a center for groundbreaking work in anatomy, and had a professorial chair devoted to the kind of materia medica that would have been sold at apothecaries. These pharmacies became gathering places for scientifically-minded freethinkers, a mindset that is certainly reflected in Erguliani's writings, and for that matter, Sabuco's. As I mentioned, the father, Miguel Sabuco, also worked as an apothecary.

All this attracted unfriendly attention from the authorities. Apothecaries frequently ran into trouble with the Inquisition, something that plays a role in the stories of both Sabuco and Equiliani. In the case of Sabuco, the new philosophy was corrected several times by Inquisitorial scribes. With Equiliani, things got more serious, and she was actually charged with heresy.

We are fortunate to have notes for the defense written by her lawyer, who states that she was only "speaking philosophically, not theologically," when she put forward her theory about Noah's flood. Of course, the lawyer reassures us, she does accept that the waters rose as a punishment for sin, but this need not stand in the way of trying to understand the physical mechanism by which God caused it to happen. Eculiani's case was not passed on to Rome, which suggests that the Inquisition was satisfied with this defense.

This confirms something we found before, that church censorship was more nuanced or just less effective than we often suppose. As the introduction to the translation of Akuliani's letters puts it, here was a woman who put the heretical ideas of foreign graduates of the University of Padua in print in her published letters and published in Freethinking Krakow.

The inability of the Paduan Inquisition to condemn Aquiliani under these circumstances reminds us how little we still understand about how Catholic institutions grappled with defining orthodoxy. The fact that Aquiliani was a woman may have helped her avoid punishment. Her lawyer openly suggests that readers would be less likely to take scientific proposals seriously if they come from a female author, which brings us to those proposals and how seriously we should take them.

Equiliani's fundamental idea is that human bodies contain a large proportion of the element earth. She points to evidence in the Bible itself to show that people in the time of Noah had grown very large physically, to the point of becoming giants. With so much earth being incorporated into their bodies, there would have been less earth under their feet. The floods were then caused not by rising waters, but by falling earth.

This is a rather outlandish theory, and I have to admit that reading it, I wondered whether it might be meant satirically. It comes off as a playful humanist parody of the ambition to use natural philosophy as a tool of biblical exegesis.

Also typically humanist is the format of the work, a set of letters between Ekuliani and male correspondents, whose appreciative but tentative responses to her proposals may in fact also have been written by Ekuliani herself. So here we have the opposite situation of Sabuco, the parts supposedly written by men are possibly by the female author.

I have to admit, though, that Eculiani remains straight-faced throughout, and her lawyer did not suggest in his defense that she'd only been kidding. So on balance, I think we should take this as a sincerely meant explanation of the flood, inspired by the methodological principle that such phenomena must have some natural explanation or other, as she explicitly says at one point. The elements are created so as to be in balance with one another, so water would not just overwhelm earth unless the earth under the seas were diminished.

The idea of human bodies absorbing a lot of earth also gives Equiliani a chance to explore themes like those found in Sobucco. She talks about the effects of aging upon the body and how character traits and desires arise out of our physical condition because the body has such a powerful effect on the activities of the soul. She also shows her knowledge of philosophy, mentioning Plato's idea that the soul pre-exists the body and learns by remembering what it saw before its embodiment.

Perhaps then the larger goal of Equiliani's letters is not satire, but to prove a point that would be undercut by her lawyer's defense. Women too can do natural philosophy and even use it to understand scripture. This is borne out by the opening remarks in her book, which say that she wrote it to shed glory on women and through my studies to let the world know that we, like men, are capable in all areas of knowledge.

Unwittingly echoing the self-presentation of Sabuco as an unlearned woman, Eculiani emphasizes that she was able to devise her theory without the chance to study books, and while burdened with child-rearing duties. Both Sabuco and Eculiani wear their amateur status as a badge of pride, in tune with the Renaissance trend of valuing ideas developed outside the sclerotic and hidebound scholastic tradition. Just how far outside, we'll see next time.

In what will be a rather unusual episode, we'll be considering a notable work of modern scholarship about the 16th century and asking how its method could enrich our approach as historians of philosophy. I have to admit that what's on the menu for the next episode sounds rather unappetizing since our discussion will concern the cheese and the worms, a famous study by Renaissance scholar Carlo Ginzburg. Well, you have to get earth into your body somehow. That's next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.