The Siren and the Satyr as Spiritual Curatives in Jacob Meydenbach’s Hortus sanitatis

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr Anna Welch, Senior Librarian, History of the Book and Arts, State Library Victoria, for her helpful advice regarding incunables and bibliographic conventions.

Notes

1 Lucia Tongiorgi Tomasi and Tony Willis, ‘Late Medieval Herbals’, in An Oak Spring Herbaria: Herbs and Herbals from the Fourteenth to the Nineteenth Centuries: A Selection of the Rare Books, Manuscripts and Works of Art from the Collection of Rachel Lambert Mellon, ed. Mark Argetsinger (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2009), 3–27.

2 Hortus sanitatis (Mainz: Jacob Meydenbach, 23 June 1491), imperfect, ISTC ih00486000. The University of Melbourne, Rare Books Collection, George McArthur Bequest, 1903. UniM Bail SpC/RB, MTC/20 Incunabula.

3 Copies of Meydenbach’s 1491 Hortus sanitatis are held internationally in 157 institutions, including London’s Wellcome Collection; Cambridge University Library; the Biblioteca Queriniana in Brescia, Italy; Vatican City’s Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana; and Harvard University’s Countway, Houghton, and Arnold Arboretum libraries.

4 These conservation treatments are documented in Wilson and Sloggett, ‘Hortus sanitatis’, 13.

5 Tomasi and Willis note that an earlier illustrated scientific encyclopedia, entitled Buch der Natur, was published in 1475 by Johann Bamler in Augsberg, Germany. Bamler’s Buch der Natur, while not technically a herbal, contained the earliest instance of the botanical woodcut.

6 Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature:1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 41.

7 Jessica Hughes, ‘Dissecting the Classical Hybrid’, in Body Parts and Bodies Whole, ed. Katharina Rebay-Salisbury, Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, and Jessica Hughes (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2010), 101–102.

8 Janetta Rebold Benton, Medieval Menagerie: Animals in the Art of the Middle Ages (New York: Abbeville Press, 1992), 15.

9 Lynn Ramey, ‘Monstrous Alterity in Early Modern Travel Accounts: Lessons from the Ambiguous Medieval Discourse on Humanness’, L’Esprit Createur 48, no. 1 (2008): 85.

10 David Williams, Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Medieval Thought and Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996), 108.

11 Joyce E. Salisbury, The Beast Within (London and New York, Routledge, 2011), 83.

12 Benton, Medieval Menagerie, 17.

13 Theobald, Physiologus: A Metrical Bestiary of Twelve Chapters, ed. Alan Wood Rendell (London: John and Edward Bumpus, 1928), 53.

14 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, trans. D.W. Robertson (Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs Merrill, 1958), 50–51.

15 Faye Marie Getz, ‘Charity, Translation, and the Language of Medical Learning in Medieval England’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 64, no. 1 (1990): 2–10.

16 Peter Murray Jones, ‘Image, Word, and Medicine in the Middle Ages’, in Visualising Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200–1550, ed. Jean A. Givens, Karen M. Reeds, and Alain Touwaide (Aldershot, UK, and Burlington, Vt: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), 17.

17 George Christian Anderson, ‘Medieval Medicine for Sin’, Journal of Religion and Health 2, no. 2 (1963): 156.

18 Edward Hanna, ‘The Sacrament of Penance’, in The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 11 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1911).

19 Cyprian of Carthage, Treatise 3, ed. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson and A. Cleveland Coxe (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1886).

20 Augustine, Confessions, ed. Albert C. Outler (Dallas, Tex.: Southern Methodist University, 1955), 143.

21 Jones, ‘Image, Word, and Medicine in the Middle Ages’, 17.

22 William S. Keezer, ‘Botanical Sources of Early Medicines’, Bios 34, no. 4 (1963): 185–191.

23 Unlike Pliny’s Historia naturalis, which documented myths, superstitions, and fantastical beasts, Dioscorides’ work relied upon the observation of real plants in their natural environment and on their practical identification and use. These uses were not only medicinal but also cosmetic: the entry on the Kupeiros, or cyperus alternifolius plant, for example, described the plant’s usefulness in hair removal. Pedanius Dioscorides, De materia medica, ed. Tess Anne Osbaldeston (Johannesburg, Ibidis Press, 2000), 5.

24 Getz, ‘Charity, Translation, and the Language of Medical Learning in Medieval England’, 9.

25 In the early fifteenth century, text and illustrations were cut in relief from the same block to create short ‘block books’ or xylographica. With the invention of movable type, printers were able to set up text alongside illustrative woodcut blocks and pass both through the press simultaneously. Jutta Buck, ‘A Brief History of Botanical Art’, The Botanical Artist 15, no. 4. (2009): 32.

26 William A. Locy, ‘The Earliest Printed Illustrations of Natural History’, The Scientific Monthly 13, no. 3 (1921): 238.

27 Joseph Frank Payne, ‘On the Herbarius and the Hortus sanitatis’ (paper presented at the Bibliographical Society, London, 21 January 1901).

28 Williams, Deformed Discourse, 183–84.

29 Ambrose, ‘Exposition of the Christian Faith’, book 3, chapter 1.3, trans. H. de Romestin, E. de Romestin, and H.T.F. Duckworth, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. 10, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1896), 373.

30 Ibid., book 1, chapter 6.47, 318.

31 Augustine, Confessions, 77.

32 Elizabeth Eva Leach, ‘The Little Pipe Sings Sweetly while the Fowler Deceives the Bird: Sirens in the Later Middle Ages’, Music and Letters 87, no. 2 (2006): 192.

33 Roberta Milliken, Ambiguous Locks: An Iconology of Hair in Medieval Art and Literature (Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland and Company, 2012), 124.

34 Ibid., 123.

35 Homer, The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York, London, Toronto, and Sydney: Harper Perennial, 2007), 190.

36 Silvio Bernardini, The Serpent and the Siren: Sacred and Enigmatic Images in Tuscan Rural Churches (Siena, Italy: Editrice Don Chisciotte, 2000), 65.

37 Leach, ‘The Little Pipe Sings Sweetly’, 197.

38 Ibid.

39 Ambrose, ‘Exposition of the Christian Faith’, book 3, chapter 1, 373.

40 Jerome, ‘Letter 54: To Furia’, trans. W.H. Fremantle, G. Lewis, and W.G. Martley, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, second series, vol. 6, ed. Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1893), 203.

41 Isidore, The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, ed. and trans. Stephen A. Barney, W.J. Lewis, J.A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 245.

42 Milliken, Ambiguous Locks, 130.

43 Ibid.

44 Isidore, Etymologies, 112–190.

45 Ibid., 352.

46 Anderson, ‘Medieval Medicine for Sin’, 161.

47 Jones, ‘Image, Word, and Medicine in the Middle Ages’, 19.

48 Brian Spencer, Pilgrim Souvenirs and Secular Badges (London: Boydell Press, 2010), 16–17.

49 Ibid., 317.

50 Géza Róheim, ‘The Evil Eye’, American Imago 9, no. 3/4 (1952): 359.

51 Williams, Deformed Discourse, 161.

52 Jerome, ‘The Life of Paulus the First Hermit’, in Treatises, in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, series 2, vol. 6, ed. Philip Schaff (Michigan: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, 1886–1900), 695.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid., 698.

55 Karl Steel, ‘Centaurs, Satyrs, and Cynocephali: Medieval Scholarly Teratology and the Question of the Human’, in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, ed. Asa Simon Mittman and Peter J. Dendle (Surrey, UK, and Burlington, Vt: Ashgate Publishing, 2012), 258.

56 John Block Friedman, The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2000), 24.

57 Ramey, ‘Monstrous Alterity in Early Modern Travel Accounts’, 85.

58 Ibid.

59 Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 66.

60 Ibid., 60.

61 Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson (London: Penguin, 1984), 976.

62 Jennie Friedrich, ‘Saint Christopher’s Canine Hybrid Body and its Cultural Autocannibalism’, Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural 6, no. 2 (2017): 192–93.

63 Ibid., 190.