Abstract
This article attends to the act of speaking after death as it is explored by Étienne Dolet, François Rabelais, and surgeon Ambroise Paré. Dolet addresses a poem to Rabelais in 1538 – the year of Rabelais’s public dissection in Lyon – imagining a dissected corpse that is mute, in contrast to a garrulous, ineffective anatomist. This poetic consideration of voice and authority informs a new reading of Epistemon's resurrection in Pantagruel, where the exemplary value of Epistemon's testimony is reconsidered in relation to the overlooked medical feat of this episode, Panurge's suturing of Epistemon's neck. The article ends with a case history by Paré in which he sutured a patient’s slit throat well enough for him to speak. Speaking with the dead is reconfigured from rhetorical flourish to medical fact, from poetry to fictional narrative to medical case history, allowing for a reconsideration of interdisciplinary method for early modern studies and beyond.
Dolet
The dissection scene has become something of an emblem for scholarship on the relation between medicine and literature in the early modern period. The development of anatomy brought a newly vital attention on locating, labelling, and analysing of what lay below the skin surface; this attention, for Jonathan Sawday, in his study The Body Emblazoned, a mainstay of new historicist interest in dissection, emblematises a ‘culture of enquiry’ that is foundational to our modern ideas of scientific knowledge.Footnote1 Scholars have traced how dissection proved fertile analogical ground for writers: from poetic blazons where the object of desire is prized apart through to the use of ‘anatomical rhetoric’ where the interior body works to elucidate love, piety, or violence; from exhaustive displays of knowledge in encyclopaedia and lists through to narratives that contain modalities of encryption to demand steganographic reading, early moderns are said to be fascinated by the practice of dissection as interpretative device or key.Footnote2
This article examines a set of three sixteenth-century bodies of writing that explore the salience of dissection as an analogical, interpretative model for reading and for action. Between 1537 and 1538, Lyonnais printer and translator Étienne Dolet wrote two poems imagining corpses voicing their own dissection; the first of which, a parodic epitaph, employs the rhetorical form of prosopopoeia to give voice to a criminal corpse delighted that his fate has been diverted by the anatomical intervention of François Rabelais (who had performed a public dissection in Lyon in 1538). The poetic consideration of voice, authority, and the value of the particular in Dolet’s poems will inform a reading of Epistemon’s resurrection by Panurge in Rabelais’s Pantagruel which focuses on the overlooked surgical feat of the episode: Panurge’s suturing of Epistemon’s head back onto his body. Finally, the article will end with a case history composed by surgeon Ambroise Paré, in which elements of Rabelais’s fiction seem to come to life: in this account, Paré records how he sutured a patient’s slit throat well enough for the man to be able to speak again, in so doing to acquit his wrongly accused servant of the crime of attempted murder, by confessing his own suicidal intention. Reading these three texts in tandem, I hope in this article to attend to both the work of the surgeon’s knife and the tone of the patient’s voice, and in so doing to reflect on the relation between medicine and literature in early modern France and the interdisciplinary mode of scholarship that it demands.
Dolet’s parodic epitaph charts Rabelais’s dissected corpse from the scaffold to the anatomy theatre, reworking François Villon’s poetry in which men (including the author), hanging on the scaffold, look backwards and forwards to and from the grave, reflecting on and constructing their own posthumous presence.Footnote3 In this poem, however, Dolet employs the device of prosopopoeia to divert attention from the criminal’s legacy to that of Rabelais’s:
In his 1555 Rhetorique Françoise, Antoine Foquelin defines prosopopeia as a ‘fiction de personne […] par laquelle nous de nótre voix & action, contrefaisons & representons la voix & personnage d’autruy’.Footnote5 Emily Butterworth has observed the emphasis of artifice and invention in this definition, drawing on Gavin Alexander’s analysis of how there is something ‘intrinsically literary – fictive – about the creation of speaking voices’.Footnote6 Dolet’s use of prosopopoeia appears, at first, to amplify the particularity of the corpse’s experience, yet the corpse’s posthumous glory really belongs to Rabelais: Dolet subsumes this voice into a history of the learned knowledge that Rabelais as physician can both generate about the workings of the body, and communicate with such grace (‘medicus doctissimus planum facit, / Quam pulchre et affabre ordineque’), to conjure and justify, therefore, Rabelais’s presence in a history of medical progress.Footnote7 Giving voice to the corpse can be read, here, as part of the mock encomium tradition, in which a seemingly unworthy subject is praised: the criminal is given value only to promote Rabelais and his inclusion in a humanist medical community.Footnote8
Rabelais is glimpsed in the opening poem of Carmina’s second book, in which Dolet celebrates Lyon’s intellectual milieu, using the trope of bringing the dead back to life that was instrumental in structuring how early moderns conceptualised the rhetorical skill of conversing with the masters of the past:
Dolet’s parodic epitaph is compelling in how it matches his rhetorical skill in reanimating the corpse’s voice with that of Rabelais’s anatomical skill, suggesting that questions of voice, expertise, and fictionality are a useful conduit between these two arenas. Informed by this context, we can now turn to the second of Dolet’s poems concerning Rabelais and dissection. Shorter and sharper, this poem, dedicated to Rabelais, reads as follows:
Dolet renders the corpse’s voice in this poem both unresolved and relative. The corpse is first described as silent (‘silebat’) before the semantic ambiguity of mute (‘mutum’) – is the corpse unable to speak? or refusing to speak? – grants him a disconcerting agency compared to the corpse extolling their changed fate. If Dolet’s epitaph above engaged in the mock encomium tradition to praise Rabelais, here the epideictic rhetoric is turned to blame: Dolet exposes and condemns the garrulous professional physicians who are engaged in medical error and wrongdoing. The criminal corpse’s voice is only given value through association with Rabelais; when it is Rabelais’s rivals – inert and inept – who are at the anatomy table, the voice is troublingly lacking.
One compelling way of reading this second of Dolet’s parodic poems is to situate it within a broader tradition of contemporary serio-comic writings about doctors and anatomy.Footnote11 Rabelais writes that medicine is a ‘farce jouée à trois personnages : le malade, le medicin, la maladie’ in his letter to Odet de Chastillon, written to dedicate the Quart Livre to his patron; in the Tiers Livre, the figure of the doctor is targeted in a Pathelin-esque farce that Epistemon claims to have been performed by medical students (including ‘Rabelys’ himself) at Montpellier, prescribing ‘ne scay quelle pouldre’ and ‘ne scay quelz charmes’ to make a husband whose wife talks too much deaf.Footnote12 Dominique Brancher has explored the productive hybridity of comic verve and didactic vocation in medical prose, with a focus on how scientific, literary, and popular vocabularies interplay to unveil, in particular, female anatomy in texts such as the 1578 Erreurs populaires by Laurent Joubert.Footnote13 Joubert defends his occasional use of obscene terms by writing, for example, ‘aussi que le bon Homere aucunes-fois sommeille et resve, que je pensois (par aventure) parler à mes ecoliers, ainsi que je fais ès anatomies publiques’: making use of the commonplace derived from Horace’s Ars Poetica (first translated into French in 1541) of even Homer’s vulnerability to suffer a drowsy lapse of attention and so make a mistake, Laurent suggestively obscures his alternate motive for dissecting and then writing about the female body.Footnote14 The female corpse becomes for Brancher the object of both knowledge and desire for the writer and the reader, the medical text revealing itself to be a space of ‘plaisir discursif.’Footnote15 Joubert’s ‘error’ is, here, a ruse designed to reinforce a sexualisation of the female body that simultaneously pleases and binds into complicity his titillated students in the anatomy theatre, and his ‘ecoliers’-readers, too.
Yet in the second of Dolet’s anatomical poems, the giving of voice to the corpse and the exposure of an inept physician is not only for comic effect. The voice’s disconcerting agency suggests that it might have something useful to say about its own experience, if only it could be heard. The fictional anatomical encounter can be read, in this second poem, as more probatory, more concerned with the challenge of generating useful medical knowledge in practice. In so doing, Dolet’s poem shares a concern with a parallel and newly vital attention to the use of cases in the first half of the sixteenth century. Gianna Pomata and others have traced how a renewed interest in physicians in the uses of case histories in Hippocratic and Galenic texts converged, in this period, with a broader reappraisal of the value of the particular also evident in the development of corresponding forms in sister disciplines such as the legal consilia.Footnote16 The first mention of the term historia in early modern French medicine appears in the title of Symphorien Champier’s 1532 collection of extracts from Galen’s recorded case histories; such collections, later often called Observationes, exploded into an established genre in the latter decades of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, becoming a primary form of medical writing by the eighteenth.Footnote17 They developed initially as a form of self-advertisement or claim to authority, mirroring Galen’s publication of successful cases which worked to establish the credibility and expertise of the author in practice. This emphasis on practice as a source of knowledge is key to the developing use of case histories across the sixteenth century as physicians, drawing on the case notes in the Hippocratic Epidemics, began to focus on descriptive knowledge of patients through learned and detailed observation, to be shared among colleagues. These case histories are termed an ‘epistemic genre’ by Pomata for how they are deliberately cognitive in purpose, linked specifically to the practice of knowledge-making: direct and shared observations were used by physicians to proceed from particular to particular, to grope towards an understanding of the ‘norm’, to collectively set guidelines for the handling of future cases.
While careful to acknowledge that poetics and epistemology are often interconnected, Pomata’s argument on case histories as an epistemic genre starts with literary theorist André Jolles’s definition of the case, as a simple form that he considers an embryonic element of literature, before she suggests that the case has an ‘even more fundament[al]’ application to knowledge, including scientific knowledge.Footnote18 Pomata considers that conflating epistemic and literary genres risks missing the ‘distinctive and specific quality’ of epistemic genres as ‘vehicles of a cognitive project’, and ‘shaped by that project’.Footnote19 A poem like Dolet’s addressed to Rabelais considered above, however, prompts us to seek out the overlap – rather than hierarchy, or one-directional application that is evident in the analogy of ‘dissecting the text’ – between medical and fictional literary writing. It is striking that this poem not only reveals an interest in anatomy and dissection (as Dolet’s other poems do), but launches a probatory, contestatory enquiry into how knowledge about the dissected corpse is generated and transmitted. Dolet’s poem, I suggest, serves as a ‘vehicle of a cognitive project’ that is not easily categorised as either medical or literary; in other words, knowledge-making here happens in the poem as well as in the anatomy theatre.
In her work on fictional case histories in medical texts, Brancher observes that ‘l’écriture du cas constitue aussi un laboratoire d’expérimentation de formes fictionnelles, proches notamment de la nouvelle, si l’on entend par fiction, au sens de Kate Hamburger, une modalité diégétique’; the medical writer, imagining the interior life of their patients, ‘développe une poétique du cas probable ou possible qui ouvre un champ fécond de recherche : non pas celui de la littérarisation des textes médicaux, mais celui de l’impact des formes médicales sur le style “littéraire” qui méconnait sa dette’.Footnote20 Putting Dolet’s writing into scholarly dialogue with Rabelais’s and Paré’s in what follows, I do not intend to suggest that Rabelais responds directly to Dolet’s poetic call in his reworking, nor to insist on Paré as a reader of Rabelais (even if that is likely to be true).Footnote21 But, rather, by exploring how speaking after dying is reconfigured from rhetorical flourish to medical fact, from poetry to fictional narrative, and on to medical case history, across these texts, I hope to build on Brancher’s call to reconsider how medical and literary writing mutually inform and question each other in sixteenth-century France.
Rabelais
In the heat of Pantagruel’s great battle scenes, Epistemon – Pantagruel’s tutor, who had accompanied him to war alongside several other companions – is found decapitated (‘tout roidde mort et la teste entre ses bras toute sanglante’) after a single strike (‘c’estoit de pierres de gryson, dont un esclat couppa la gorge tout oultre à Epistemon’).Footnote22 There is another decapitation in Gargantua, also inflicted on the battlefield in a single ‘coup’, but there described with ruthless anatomical precision by Rabelais:
Lors d’un coup luy tranchit la teste, luy coupant le test sus les os petrux et enlevant les deux os bregmatis et la commissure sagittale, avecques grande partie de l’os coronal, ce que faisant luy tranchit les deux meninges et ouvrit profondement les deux posterieurs ventricules du cerveau et demoura le craine pendent sus les espaules à la peau du pericrane par derriere, en forme d’un bonnet doctoral, noir par dessus, rouge par dedans. Ainsi tomba roidde mort en terre.Footnote23
Rabelais reframes his use of ‘roidde mort’ when describing Epistemon’s decapitation to deny the certainty generated by the Gargantua passage. After hearing the news of Epistemon’s death from Eusthenes and Carpalim, Panurge implores Pantagruel and his companions to ‘attend[re] un peu’ before seeing the body, which is shortly found: ‘Ainsi doncques comme [Eusthenes et Carpalim] cherchoient, ilz le trouverent tout roidde mort et la teste entre ses bras toute sanglante’.Footnote26 While the companions despair, Panurge responds triumphantly: ‘Enfans ne pleurez goutte, il est encores tout chault’.Footnote27 Pairing ‘trouver’ (rather than ‘tomber’) with ‘tout roidde mort’, here, Rabelais modulates this scene with a differently articulated temporality. Although, if read as an adjective, ‘roidde’ appears to confirm the fate that is perfectly legible to the other characters, Panurge’s will to hesitation and delay encourages an adverbial reading of ‘roidde’ whereby Eusthenes and Carpalim have been too quick to accept Epistemon’s fate, and by sight alone. Epistemon, still warm, now embodies the tension not only between death and life that is missing from the anatomical force of the Gargantua passage, but between careful observation and hurried conviction. This allows Panurge to establish himself as a corrective figure, a surgeon rather than an anatomist: ‘Je vous le gueriray aussi sain qu’il fut jamais,’ he promises.Footnote28
The inflated promise of this correction is evident when Panurge’s chosen method, suturing Epistemon’s head back onto his body ‘veine contre veine, nerf contre nerf, spondyle contre spondlye’, is compared with a demonstration of suturing in Paré’s monumental surgical manual.Footnote29 Representing the technique of dry suturing, where a layer of linen cloth is placed on the wound, Paré guides the surgeon to ‘[coudre] en les approchant l’une contre l’autre’ as soon after the incision as possible ‘à fin que les cicatrices ne demeurent laides’.Footnote30 The surgeon seeks to prosthetically amend the face and erase as much trace of this amendment as possible, to rectify both injury and repair. Yet Paré recognises that the smallest sign of correction will be visible in even the neatest scar; a fear particularly acute for his typical patients, represented in the surgeon’s book by the illustration of a woman which appears to be borrowed from the world of Renaissance portraiture: ‘les belles damoyselles’ who ‘craignent tel accident’.Footnote31 Nor are the women only fearful patients in the surgeon’s text: Paré takes care to acknowledge what he has learned from the practice of ‘les femmes’ (even if ‘les cousturiers’ refers only to men) who have proven useful in his own practical education.Footnote32 In the Gargantua passage above, the ‘bonnet doctoral’ was an object of medical knowledge, a symbol of learned, masculine, university medicine and of the distribution of power in the anatomy theatre. Here, Paré’s suturing thread reveals the development of the surgeon’s practical knowledge, and the diverse and differently gendered artisanal sources from which it draws.
The structure of Panurge’s promise to cure Epistemon (‘Je vous le gueriray aussi sain qu’il fut jamais’) reveals its hyperbolic nature: the futur and passé simple tenses coalesce against the single value, ‘sain’, as if to promise a complete correction of this interruptive injury that Paré warns is impossible.Footnote33 The claim is quickly mocked in the text itself: ‘Si je ne les guery je veulx perdre la teste,’ Panurge boasts, claiming a medical expertise that he has not yet displayed in the narratives by way of a bet that is risky, given the circumstances of Epistemon’s injury; ‘(qui est le gaige d’un fol)’ follows a withering aside, agreed by Rabelais’s editors to be from the narrator Alcofribas.Footnote34 The discourse of medical error and expertise explored in Dolet’s poetry is animated at the level of narration itself, as Panurge’s self-fashioning as bold surgeon is interrupted and undermined by the other characters. The complete cure which Panurge promised does prove, as Paré’s text predicts, impossible – Epistemon is resurrected ‘excepté qu’il fut enroué plus de troys sepmaines, et eut une toux seiche, dont il ne peut oncques guerir, sinon à force de boire’ – yet this characteristically Rabelaisian, and possibly happy, side effect motivates Mikhail Bakhtin’s reading of the scene as a confirmation of the final victory of life over death, where codpieces can cure (Panurge had used his codpiece to warm Epistemon’s head, before he began to suture), and wine, the image of the banquet, prevails.Footnote35 Panurge’s status as a ‘fol’ is, in Bakhtin’s argument, ‘ambivalent abuse’; the trickster Panurge can prove the other characters wrong, can pull off this exceptional surgical feat.Footnote36
When Epistemon’s voice is restored, he sets himself up as a further corrective figure:
[J]e prenois (dist [Epistemon]) un singulier passetemps à les veoir.
Comment ? dist Pantagruel.
L’on ne les traicte pas (dist Epistemon) si mal que vous penseriez : mais leur estat est changé en estrange façon.Footnote37
Paré
Ambroise Paré incorporated hundreds of case histories in his surgical manual, including the ‘cas memorable’ of an unnamed German patient, given as an example for how to treat wounds to the throat. The case deserves close attention in this context. The patient is found with a slit throat and presumed dead before, ‘par le benefice de la Chirurgie’, he is kept alive to speak for three days; long enough to correct further presumptions about the circumstances of his injury. I propose that this case history shares key elements with the literary texts examined so far, allowing for a final reflection on the ‘epistemic’ quality of Dolet’s and Rabelais’s writing. Worth citing in full, the case unfolds as follows:
La troisieme histoire presque semblable d’un Allemand, pensionnaire d’un banquier nommé Perot, demeurant à la rue des Noyers en ceste ville de Paris, lequel par une phrenaisie, et folle opinion, la nuict se coupa la gorge d’un cousteau, et se donna plusieurs autres coups, tant au Thorax qu’au ventre, dont aucuns penetroyent au dedans, & les autres estoyent superficiels. Le lendemain matin, aucuns de ses compagnons le voulans visiter, le trouverent fort mal, avec grande quantité de sang respandu autour de luy. Et voyant tel spectacle, croyoyent et pensoyent que c’eust esté son serviteur qui luy avoit fait tel excés, par-ce qu’il couchoit en sa chambre : lequel fut prins & mené prisonnier au Chastelet, en luy mettant sus avoir ainsi meurdry son maistre. Or je fus envoyé querir pour visiter & penser le malade : et voyant la Trachee artete & l’Œsophague coupé, avec plusieurs autres playes, n’eu aucune esperance de sa vie : parquoy fu d’avis qu’on appelast Estienne de la Riviere, Chirurgien ordinaire du Roy, & Germain Cheval, Chirurgien juré à Paris, et fut conclu entre nous, qu’il falloit recoudre la playe de la gorge, comme il a esté recité cy devant. Promptement la playe cousue et bandee, ledit patient Allemand commença à parler : et confessa que luy-mesme s’estoit fait tel excés, et deschargea du tout son pauvre serviteur en nos presences, et de plusieurs autres, et principalement de deux Notaires, et d’un Commissaire du Chastelet : par ce moyen fut mis ledit serviteur hors de prison, et absous entierement par la confession que fit son maistre : Et vous puis asseurer qu’il vescut quatre jours […] Seulement je t’asseurerary, que par le benefice de la Chirurgie, fut donné moyen audit Allemand, de parler par l’espace de trois jours : qui fut cause que son serviteur, et son hoste, furent du tout deschargez, et la verité du faict entierement cogneue.Footnote40
The opening line of the case history sees Paré himself grappling with the legal complexity of this case in which the German man, ‘lequel par une phrenaisie & folle opinion’, Paré suggests, ‘la nuict se coupa la gorge d’un Cousteau’. Suicide would be a mortal sin in canon law; it could be speculated that Paré’s Protestant faith motivated him to diagnose a ‘phrenaisie & folle opinion’ of his patient, offering in anticipation a form of medical absolution.Footnote43 This sense of anticipation is important: Paré had initially feared that his patient was all but dead; it was only after Paré consulted surgeons Estienne de la Riviere and Germain Cheval, and they successfully collaborated on his treatment that the German man was able to confess his part in his own injury: ‘[il] fut conclu entre nous qu’il falloit recourdre la playe de la gorge, comme il a esté recité cy devant : promptement la playe cousue & bandee, ledit patient […] commenca à parler’. By offering ‘phrenaisie & folle opinion’ as a possible explanation, Paré draws attention to the peculiar status of the medical expert witness in a legal setting, trusted as having the capacity to reveal, consolidate, or justify his patient’s version of ‘verité’ in the court.Footnote44
More importantly still, by reconstructing the chronology of the encounter within his history to offer this explanation, Paré narrativises his surgical endeavour as repeatable for the benefit of his colleagues and students. Placing this explanation first, he immediately confers to his readers the capacity to anticipate the realisation that he, in truth, only makes midway through the case, after consulting with his colleagues: the German man is not dead; he is still treatable, and so becomes a patient. Paré creates, in other words, a reading experience which models the possible future experience that his apprentice surgeon readers may one day have themselves. In framing the temporality of his case history in this way, Paré enables his readers to prepare to better navigate a similar case in their own practice, and in their own time.
If Dolet’s poetry took aim at Rabelais’s medical rivals, then Paré’s reference to his surgical colleagues serves in this case history to consolidate his inclusion into the Parisian surgical community. Both de la Riviere and Cheval had examined Paré (then ‘chirurgien ordinaire du roi’ himself) for his ‘maître en chirurgie’ in 1554, and Paré went on to be appointed ‘premier chirurgien du roi’ in 1562; these surgeons were not only colleagues, therefore, but key allies in Paré’s medial career. De la Riviere had not long before been embroiled in a dispute with Charles Estienne who wanted to publish, without acknowledging de la Riviere’s contribution of dissections and illustrations, De dissectione partium corporis humani; a parallel narrativisation of the value of surgical skill, and of its publication in the vernacular, is part of Paré’s self-promotion as part of this community here, too. Paré, in framing his interpretative work as grounded in the seeking of guidance – rather than the boastful authority-building of trickster Panurge, for example – exemplifies and promotes the value of collaborative investigation while also extending potential inclusion of the medical community to his readers. The German man’s case is introduced as a ‘memorable’ history, but its exceptionalism is reworked by Paré’s narrative re-ordering, his studied reframing of his and his patient’s experience so as, to redeploy Nancy Siraisi’s compelling pairing, to be at once both ‘probative and exemplary’.Footnote45
Dolet animated Rabelais’s dissected corpses by deploying prosopopoeia; his experimentation with both the rhetorical and medical norm revealed the value given to particular experience in early modern medicine, and how it is shaped by the physician’s expertise, authority, and, sometimes, error. Rabelais’s fictional narrative in Pantagruel stages a real rather than rhetorical resurrection, and it is through this lens of exceptionality that he launches a comparable examination. Panurge performs an unlikely surgical feat to the amazement of the other characters; Epistemon is, then, able to relay his own experience of death in a narrative feat. But the status of his experience as constituting a useful case history proves complicated: Epistemon does successfully demonstrate Panurge’s prowess, but he cannot become exemplary in the way the dead of the underworld are accustomed to being read, precisely because he has left their memorable company to return to this contingent world. His resurrection is not so much exemplary as singular, and so Epistemon’s retelling of his experience works to further transform Rabelais’s narrative into a space which interrogates the complex ways in which medical, and literary, knowledge is displayed, generated, and transmitted. Paré redeploys literary strategies still further, using his experience to bolster his own credentials and those of the Parisian surgical community to which he belongs, while, at the same time, re-imagining the case history as exemplary in so far as it exemplifies the kinds of interpretative practical skill that his students need to emulate.
The analogy of dissection as reading with which this article opened relies on seeing the ‘medical’ as a form of master model which can be applied to the ‘literary’ text. I have traced through this article a common theme: how the dead, the nearly dead, and the resurrected speak. Attending closely to these various speaking figures has significance for how we understand the epistemic quality of the literary writing, and the literary quality of the epistemic case histories, which house them. I have explored how the voices of these speaking corpses and patients have been animated by literary strategies across all three writers; strategies that launch an investigation into – rather than simply reflect – the questions of experience, particularity, exemplarity, and authority that animated the conditional and contingent world of practical medicine in the early sixteenth century. Dolet’s, Rabelais’s, and Paré’s texts have emerged as spaces in which knowledge about medicine is generated, consolidated, and complicated; knowledge-making that shapes and is shaped by the literary tools at each writer’s disposal.
Rabelais’s particular persuasiveness as a writer derives in part from the fact that he encourages his readers to question inherited categories of learned discourse and interpretation; his work is distinctly interested in the categories of the medical and the fictional, and how the two intersect, drawing interest and legitimacy from each other. Setting this reading of Rabelais in dialogue with that of Dolet and Paré, and vice versa, I have tried to map out the contours of an agile interdisciplinary method, one which emerges organically out of what texts of this period demanded of their readers; and one which also suggests what early modern literature can afford modern readers operating across the medical humanities.
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Rachel Hindmarsh
Dr Rachel Hindmarsh completed her DPhil at Trinity College, University of Oxford, in 2022. She is now a Stipendiary Lecturer in French at St Catherine’s College and New College, University of Oxford. She also works as a Public Engagement Facilitator for the multi-disciplinary Wellcome-funded project 'Thanks for the Memories', run by the Nuffield Department of Medicine, University of Oxford, and the Royal Northern College of Music.
Notes
1 J. Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995).
2 A key example is: D. Hillman and C. Mazzio, eds., The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1997). For readings that engage thoughtfully with anatomy and gender, see: K. Park, Secrets of Women: Gender, Generation, and the Origins of Human Dissection (Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books, 2006) and H. Cazes, ‘Plaisir de l’anatomie, plaisir du livre : La Dissection des parties du corps humain de Charles Estienne (Paris, 1546),’ Cahiers de l’association internationale des études françaises, 55 (2003), 251–74. For a revival of Sawday’s examination of the relation between anatomy and literature, see: R. Sugg, Murder after Death: Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007). Dominique Brancher’s conceptualisation of anatomical writings as a space of ‘plaisir discursif’ will be discussed in relation to Dolet later in the article.
3 For example: F. Villon, ‘Ballade de Merci,’ in ‘Le Testament Villon’, Œuvres complètes, ed. by J. Cerquiglini-Toulet and L. Tabard (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2014), pp. 29–167 (pp. 164–67); see also ‘Le Lais François Villon,’ pp. 3–29. For an illuminating discussion of Villon’s speaking corpses, see: H. Swift, Representing the Dead: Epitaph Fictions in Late-Medieval France (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016), p. 46; for a reading of how the lack of certitude around Villon’s death in this poem impacts his posthumous presence that complements Swift’s analysis, see J. Patterson, Villainy in France, 1463–1610: A Transcultural Study of Law and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 80–96. Neil Kenny persuasively explores early modern attitudes towards posthumous survival through tense usage, demonstrating that the presence of voices from the dead – in a range of texts including epitaphs, like Dolet’s, and Rabelais’s narrative fictions – reveals a complex and variable relation to the past. It is worth noting that Kenny does not consider Epistemon in his chapter on Rabelais in the book. Neil Kenny, Death and Tenses: Posthumous Presence in Early Modern France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
4 E. Dolet, Carmina (1538), trans. by C. Langlois-Pézeret (Geneva: Droz, 2009), pp. 592–95. Langlois-Pézeret’s interpretation of Dolet’s poem is provided for comparison. The title of the poem is: ‘Cuiusdam Epitaphium, qui exemplo edito strangulatus, publico postea spectaculo Lugduni sectus est, Francisco Rabelaeso Medico doctissimo fabricam corporis interpretante’.
5 Rhetorique françoise d’Antoine Foclin (Paris: André Wechel, 1555), pp. 85–6.
6 E. Butterworth, The Unbridled Tongue: Babble and Gossip in Renaissance France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 703–04; G. Alexander, ‘Prosopopeia: The Speaking Figure,’ in Renaissance Figures of Speech, ed. by S. Adamson, G. Alexander, and K. Ettenhuber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 105. For further examination of prosopopoeia as a disguise (following the etymology of the Greek prosopon as the giving of a face or mask) and its need for interpretative decoding (‘déchiffrement’), see C. La Charité, ‘La Prosopopée chez Rabelais,’ in Savoirs et fins de la représentation sous l’ancien régime, ed. by A. Cloutier, C. Dubeau, and P.-M. Gendron (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 2005), pp. 9–19 and B. Perona, Prosopopée et persona à la Renaissance (Paris: Garnier, 2013).
7 Rabelais’s public dissection was carried out just as the practice of dissection (of criminal corpses) was beginning to be more highly valorised; in the Montpellier medical faculty where Rabelais trained, for example, four dissections of criminals a year were permitted from 1550, compared with only one a year (which had been permitted from the late fourteenth century). Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World in Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 96.
8 On the mock encomium tradition, which enjoyed widespread popularity in early modern France, see P. Dandrey, L’éloge paradoxal : de Gorgias à Molière (Paris: Herman, 2015). Annette Tomarken also examines mock encomium in relation to medicine; the most popular subject for mock praises being gout. A. Tomarken, The Smile of Truth: The French Satirical Eulogy and its Antecedents (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014). The praise of Rabelais’s anatomy is strategic for Dolet, too: it allowed him to demonstrate his ideological support for this growing practice of medical humanism, and to promote Rabelais commercially (Pantagruel and Gargantua would be published by his printing press in 1542).
9 E. Dolet, Carmina (1538), trans. by C. Langlois-Pézeret (Geneva: Droz, 2009), pp. 382–83. See T. Cave, ‘“Enargeia”: Erasmus and the Rhetoric of Presence in the Sixteenth Century,’ L’Esprit créateur, 16 (1976), 5–19 for a compelling example of scholarship on the commonplace of early moderns conversing with the past.
10 Dolet, pp. 364–65. A further avenue of study could be to compare the corpse’s voice in this poem to the images of corpses demonstrating their own anatomies, most often interpreted as a bid on behalf of the author of the medical text to show some form of complicity between the corpse and the anatomist. Such an argument has been proposed by Sawday, pp. 111–36 and L. Gent and N. Llewellyn, eds., Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture, c.1540–1660 (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), pp. 124–27.
11 These serio-comic writings extend into the seventeenth century: see Hugh Roberts’s research on farceur and prologuer Bruscambille, who wrote a ‘Prologue de la teste’ about opening up and rummaging around in his own head: ‘une anatomie sans mort sur une vive anatomie’. H. Roberts, La tête de Bruscambille et les métaphores mentales au début du XVIIe siècle,’ Revue d’Histoire littéraire de la France, 3 (2007), 541–57.
12 Rabelais, Quart Livre, ‘À mon siegneur Odet, cardinal de Chastillon’, p. 518; Rabelais, Tiers Livre, ch. 34, p. 460. Alice Berry discusses the letter to Odet de Chastillon in: Alice Berry, ‘The Mix, the Mask, and the Medical Farce: A Study of the Prologues to Rabelais’s Quart Livre,’ Romanic Review, 71 (1980), 10–28. Historian of medicine in Montpellier, Louis Dulieu has unearthed the ‘fetes estudiantines’ enjoyed during the period of carnival in the city: a banquet, he writes, would be preceded by ‘un cortège carnavalesque à travers les rues de la ville, à la lumière des torches’ before a ‘moralité’ would be performed ‘sur des tréteaux dressés en un lieu fréquenté de la cité, en général au carrefour de la Peyre, là où la Grand’rue débouche sur la rue de la Loge’. L. Dulieu, La Médecine à Montpellier (Avignon: Presses Universelles, 1975), pp. 78–80.
13 Brancher’s main study on this topic is: D. Brancher, Équivoques de la pudeur : fabrique d’une passion à la Renaissance (Geneva: Librairie Droz S. A., 2015). Further writing includes: D. Brancher, ‘L’Anatomiste pornographe : narration obscène et figuration de soi dans la littérature médicale renaissante (1580–1630),’ Studies in Early Modern France, 14 (2010), 161–88; D. Brancher, ‘Jeux de la médiation dans les Erreurs populaires de Laurent Joubert,’ in Vulgariser la médecine : du style médical en France et en Italie (XVIe et XVIIe siècles), ed. by Andrea Carlino and Michel Jeanneret (Geneva: Droz, 2009), pp. 213–43; and D. Brancher, ‘L’anatomie par le rire : Les Erreurs populaire de Laurent Joubert,’ in Théâtre de l'anatomie et corps en spectacle: Fondements d’une science de la Renaissance, ed. by I. Zinguer and I. Martin (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2006), pp. 139–58.
14 L. Joubert, Erreurs populaires (Bordeaux: Simon Millanges, 1578), p. 14. The original Latin is: ‘indignor, quandoque bonus dormitat Homerus’ (l. 359); Horace, Ars Poetica, ed. by Friedrich Klingner (Los Altos, CA: Packard Humanities Institute, 1991) <https://latin.packhum.org/loc/893/6/0#0> [accessed June 20, 2020]. It is not only Joubert’s texts which display this same discursive pleasure; see Hélène Cazes, ‘Plaisir de l’anatomie, plaisir du livre : La Dissection des parties du corps humain de Charles Estienne (Paris, 1546),’ Cahiers de l’association internationale des études françaises, 55 (2003), 251–74.
15 Brancher, Équivoques de la pudeur, p. 330.
16 On ancient case histories, for example, see: G. Petridou and C. Thumiger, eds., Homo Patiens: Approaches to the Patient in the Ancient World (Leiden: Brill, 2015). For early modern case histories, Gianna Pomata’s meticulous body of work is exemplary. See, notably: G. Pomata and N. Siraisi, eds., Historia: Empiricism and Erudition in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005); G. Pomata, ‘The Medical Case Narrative: Distant Reading of an Epistemic Genre,’ Literature and Medicine, 32 (2014), 1–23; G. Pomata, ‘Sharing Cases: The Observationes in Early Modern Medicine,’ Early Science and Medicine, 15 (2010), 193–236. See also I. Maclean, ‘Evidence, Logic, the Rule and the Exception in Renaissance Law and Medicine,’ Early Science and Medicine, 5 (2000), 227–56 and C. Crisciani, ‘Histories, Stories, Exempla and Anecdotes: Michele Savonarola from Latin to Vernacular,’ in Historia, pp. 297–24. For an exemplary study of the relation more broadly between the domains of history and medicine, see N. Siraisi, History, Medicine, and the Traditions of Renaissance Learning (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008).
17 S. Champier, Claudii Galeni Pergameni historiales campi … in quatuor libros congesti, et commentariis … illustrati. D. Symphoriani Campegii … clysteriorum camporum secundum Galeni mentem libellus … Ejusdem de phlebotomia libri duo (Basel: Andreas Cratander and Bebel Johann, 1532) <https://ezproxy-prd.bodleian.ox.ac.uk:2082/docview/2090360475?&imgSeq=10> [accessed September 5, 2022].
18 Pomata, ‘The Medical Case Narrative’, p. 2.
19 Ibid., p. 3.
20 D. Brancher, ‘Opiacées et déshabillés. La psyche sous l’oeil de la médecine (XVIe–XVIIe siècles),’ in La représentation de la vie psychique dans les récits factuels et fictionnels de l’époque classique, ed. by Marc Hersant and Catherine Ramond, Faux Titre, vol. 405 (Leiden: Brill/Rodopi, 2015), pp. 327–43 (pp. 328–29).
21 There is an important body of work done by the following scholars in relation to anatomy in Rabelais, most notably on the dizzying dissection of Quaresmeprenant: R. Tomlinson, ‘The Limits of Textual Dissection: The Case of Quaresmeprenant in Rabelais’s Le Quart Livre,’ in The Flesh in the Text, ed. by T. Baldwin, J. E. Fowler, and S. Weller (Bern: Peter Lang, 2007), pp. 21–39; P. J. Smith, Dispositio: Problematic Ordering in French Renaissance Literature (Leiden: Brill, 2007); M.-M. Fontaine, ‘Quaresmeprenant : l’Image littéraire et la contestation de l’analogie médicale,’ in Rabelais in Glasgow, Proceedings of the Colloquium held at the University of Glasgow in December 1983, ed. by J. A. Coleman and C. M. Scollen-Jimack (Glasgow: Department of French, University of Glasgow, 1984); and D. Brancher, ‘Un Monstre de langage : l’anatomie de Quaresmeprenant,’ Versants, 56 (2009), 115–37. As I make clear in what follows, I have chosen to change focus from dissection to the case history, in order to rethink critical assumptions about ‘dissecting the text’ as a model of interpretation for early modern literature.
22 F. Rabelais, Pantagruel, Œuvres complètes, ed. by M. Huchon in collaboration with F. Moreau (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1994), ch. 29, p. 320. All future citations to Rabelais’s texts will refer to this edition.
23 Rabelais, Gargantua, ch. 43, p. 120.
24 The comic discrepancy between the medical register and detail of the description and the violent nature of this death recalls the mock encomium tradition discussed above: the ‘bonnet’ is a mock encomium in miniature.
25 ‘Roide,’ in Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London: Adam Islip, 1611) <http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/cotgrave/832smallsmall.html> [accessed July 12, 2020]; Jacques Amyot, for example, describes fast-flowing water as such: ‘Il trouva la riviere si enflée et courant si roide, qu'il ne s’oza approcher du fil de l’eau,’ <http://dictionnaire.sensagent.leparisien.fr/cours/fr-fr/> [accessed July 12, 2020]. When early modern dictionaries record the example of ‘tuer quelqu’un tout roide’ as ‘tuer quelqu’un tout net, d’un seul coup’, they register this adjectival and adverbial slippage between finality and rapidity: Trésor de la Langue Française, <http://stella.atilf.fr/Dendien/scripts/tlfiv5/advanced.exe?8;s=484690485> [accessed July 13, 2020].
26 Rabelais, Pantagruel, ch. 30, p. 321.
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Ibid., p. 322. This (short) list has received little critical attention in comparison to the anatomising description of Quaresmeprenant, and its array of vertiginous, unlikely comparisons. There, Rabelais employs an increasingly fragile ‘comme’ to compare body parts to a whole range of quotidian objects, taking the descriptive capacities of language to the brink.
30 A. Paré, Les Œuvres, Volumes I à IV, ed. by E. Berriot-Salvadore, J. Céard, and G. Pineau (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2019), p. 1138.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 Rabelais, Pantagruel, ch. 30, p. 321.
34 Ibid.
35 M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World, trans. by Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 383.
36 Ibid., p. 382.
37 Rabelais, Pantagruel, ch. 30, p. 322.
38 See, for example: Raphaël Cappellen and Paul J. Smith, ‘Entre l’Auteur et l’éditeur : la forme-liste chez Rabelais,’ L’Année rabelaisienne, 1 (2017), 121–44.
39 C. Blum, La Représentation de la mort dans la littérature française de la Renaissance (Paris: Classiques Garnier Numérique, 2006), p. 355.
40 Paré, pp. 1149–50.
41 Ibid.
42 For more on early modern French legal testimony, see A. Frisch, The Invention of the Eyewitness: Witnessing and Testimony in Early Modern France (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in the Romance Languages and Literature, 2004).
43 With warm thanks to Ian Maclean for his help in understanding the legal complexity of suicide in Canon Law, and its differing interpretation in the Catholic and Protestant faiths.
44 Brancher discusses medical witnesses, and connections between the legal and medical case history, in: Brancher, Équivoques de la pudeur, p. 396.
45 N. G. Siraisi, The Clock and the Mirror: Girolamo Cardano and Renaissance Medicine (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), p. 205.