Andrés Laguna,  Marrano Physician, 

and the Discovery of Madness

Norman Simms

Jan. 4, 2006

Crypto-Jewish or Marrano?

By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many Jewish physicians in Europe, including Crypto-Jews and New Christians,[1] began to manifest specific concerns about mental illness in the kind of terms modern psychiatrists and psychoanalysts recognize, even when, as with Andrés (Andrew) Fernandez a/de Laguna (1499/1510-1559/1560),[2] the discussion seems embedded in the translation of ancient Greek authors or their medieval Arabic, Hebrew and Latin versions and early Renaissance commentators.  Unlike so-called Old Christians, who were part of what Michael Hammer and Ynez Violé O’Neill call “the chaotic world of Renaissance medical humanism,”[3] these previously Jewish medical practitioners and theoreticians were placed in circumstances that tended to allow them to break away from many old ideas current in the society around them.  Schooled in Greek and Latin as one of those humanists (“la comunidad de los humanistas”[4]) in Spanish universities, Laguna also did his medical training at the University of Alcala and later also in France abd Italy; but, as was the custom,[5] he must have apprenticed himself to his physician father[6]—and thereby come into contact, both through the oral advice that came with such an intimate working relationship and through the Hebrew treatises on Jewish medicine (significantly exempted from the outlawing of all Jewish books after 1492 in Spain), with rabbinic lore and attitudes.  Jewish medical traditions had always leaned towards physical and physiological explanations of disease,[7] and in regard to mental illnesses also tended to seek organic causes.  Despite some mystical and folkloric tendencies characteristic of European Jewry as a whole, Jewish doctors mostly followed the Maimonidean tradition in eschewing astrology and other occult sciences, as well as in being wary of attempts to blame witches, wizards, demons and other evil powers for diseases—and as supernatural powers to be manipulated in treatment and cure.[8]

Part of the condition of being a Crypto-Jew or Marrano (the terms are not synonymous but close enough often to overlap)[9] was that these individuals did not feel comfortable with Christian concepts (especially in Counter-Reformation Catholicism), even when such ideas had deep roots in classical antiquity.  It is sometimes pointed out that his unquiet personality (“su personalidad inquieta) derives from his origins in converso origins.[10]  More than that, though, in personal histories of these physicians and their families there were characteristic phenomena that pushed them towards breaking away from rigid moral and spiritual categories underpinning most established and institutionalized views of illness.  Whether the individuals and families wished it or not, New Christians were burdened with the continuing stigma of conversions in the past and hence of continuing suspicions not only of their sincerity as members of the Church but of their tainted blood (la mancha).  Yet there was more than social exclusion and professional prejudices men like Laguna had to face: Tomás speaks of the “terrible pedagogia del miedo”[11] (terrible pedagogy of fear} that instructed New Christians to be always fearful of any misplaced word or casual gesture that could be misconstrued by familiars of the Inquisition or unpaid informers (malsines) as evidence of judaizantismo—the heresy of residual Jewishness. 

For that reason, what appears over and over again in the lives of these conversos and their relatives is a kind of rootless movement from one centre of medical studies to another and a series of new positions in cities and courts all around Western and Southern Europe. At any moment, no matter what they themselves might have believed, thought, or did, they could be denounced to the Inquisition by rivals, disgruntled patients or patrons, or merely by religious fanatics.  To them, therefore, the existential world was not a fixed, secure or safe place and they would experience their medical insights and shape their practices to take into account this imminence of hidden danger and insidiously threatening disease. 

As can also be seen in the radical difference in the date assigned for his birth—either 1499 or 1510—another feature characteristic of the Crypto-Jews and Marranos is their uneasy fit into normal biographical patterns: even more than their Christian contemporaries in Western Europe conversos tended to leave large blanks and manifest strange contradictions in their personal histories.  While extant records from early Modern Europe are never as complete or coherent as historians would wish them to be, the details of the New Christians seem to be far more fragmentary and unreliable, and this may be due less to the vagaries of archival record-keeping than to deliberate attempts to obscure, confuse and cancel out parts of their private and professional background.  This phenomenon, too, we shall argue, helps to shape the way in which such Crypto-Jewish and Marrano physicians viewed the nature of disease and the body’s susceptibility to illness, as well as its natural defences or its openness to certain kinds of treatment and therapy: the patient’s physiological and mental faculties do not so much seek a harmonious balance of humours or a state of moral equilibrium as they engage in a constant play of defensive and offensive measures to ward off attacks from without and, at times, conceal in certain symptoms that seem lethal or debilitating—such as vomiting, fevers, ulcers, sores, or trembling—but are actually defensive postures, that is, relatively minor or temporary phenomena, in order to ward off even more grave and permanent conditions.

There is no extant evidence to prove one way or another whether Andrés Laguna was a Crypto-Jew, that is, someone who, though nominally and outwardly in his conduct and speech, maintains a secret faith in Judaism, no matter how attenuated or confused this belief might be in relation to rabbinic understanding; or a Marrano, that is, someone who stands precariously between or boldly and defiantly straddles the two faiths of Judaism and Christianity, either because he believes in both simultaneously or in neither and yet will not let go of them for reasons of strategy, nostalgia or intellectual synthesis.  Given the earliest date of his birth in Segovia, 1499—some seven years after the Expulsion of Jews from Spain—and the likelihood that his father was a converso[12] (although whether voluntary or forced is not known), Andrés would have grown up formally as a Catholic: and yet, precisely because his family were New Christians, so was he (the title did not only indicate the specific individual who converted, but the whole tainted genealogical line to which all persons with impure blood belonged), and therefore always suspect as a judaizer by church and state authorities, if not also by himself.[13]

Laguna’s Place in European Medical History

Though born in Segovia in Spain, a rich and cultured city, Laguna kept moving around, one Spanish source[14] listing the following places where, seeming to be endlessly in movement, this “converso errante”[15] studied or practiced medicine:

Salamanca, Alcalá, Toledo, Paris, Rouan, Lisboa, Londres, Middleburg, Metz, Coblenza, Colonia, Konigsberg, Nancy, Nuremberg, Bolonia, Génova, Pisa, Viterbo, Roma, Nápoles, Venecia, Padua, Trento, Augsburo, Bruselas, Malinas, Ambieres…

Finally, in 1559, weary and sick, he returned home to Segovia and, after a few trips to Guadalajara and Roncevalles, died while on a mission to receive Elizabeth de Valois, the intended bride of Filipe II.  This kind of pedagogical wandering (la peregrinatio) was, in one sense, typical of young Humanists moving from one university to another in search of teachers who would help in their formation as physicians outside the confines of the old Scholastic curriculum; but in another, as we argue, a different kind of rootlessness born of the need to keep one step ahead of possible denunciation to the Holy Office.[16]

Hardly mentioned elsewhere in early documents,[17] Laguna is nevertheless treated favourably by Amatus Lusitanus, himself one of the leading New Christian physicians, and who may have also been a Marrano, and in such a way that Harry Weidenfeld, the foremost historian of Jewish medicine in the first half of the twentieth century, considers him to have been a Crypto-Jew.[18]  “Neither his staunch devotion to the Church nor the high favour which he enjoyed at the hand of the emperor and pope is proof to the contrary, as is well known to all familiar with the history of Marranos in Spain.”[19]  Laguna’s rationalism and understanding that diseases of the mind arise from within the world of nature also help to place him in the tradition of Jewish medicine, which is not to say that Christians of the period were not also part of this return to Hippocratic principles, but certainly to indicate, when weighed up with the accumulated indicators set out in this essay, that the designation as a Marrano is more than an idle guess. 

Moreover, the document we are about to examine appeared eight years before the work of Johannes Wierus (1515-1588),[20] usually cited as the first major opponent of regarding witchcraft as a demonic event, was published. Unlike Jacobus/Johann Wierus/Weyer—or even the philosophical Jean Bodin[21]—Laguna is a scientific materialist who finds the aetiology of madness within the body and its external physical environment.  Though both Laguna and Weirus were both medical students in Paris in 1534, there is no record that they ever met.[22]  However, because of what is disclosed in the text, we are to analyze in detail soon it is hard to understand why other historians ask whether “Laguna contributed anything new or of lasting interest to the development of the medical sciences.”[23]   In fact, as we shall now show, Laguna far more deserves the title of founder of modern psychiatry—or even psychoanalysis—than Weyer (or Bodin) because of his focus on sexuality and neurotic projections as the basis of those symptoms described as witchcraft.[24]

A New Version of Disocorides

One of the key tasks Laguna set himself in his project as a medical theorist and practitioner was to translate, annotate, correct and update the recent edition by Pier Andrea Mattioli (1501-1577) of the Greek text of Dioscorides, “the greatest and most reliable of the ancient herbalists,” according to  Chrostopher Hobbes.[25]. Pedanios Disocordes of Anazarbus (a city in Cilicia, today southern Turkey, Asia Minor) was born early in the first century of the Common Era and studied medicine with Areios at Tarsus and was then appointed military physician to the Roman armies under Nero, Caligula and Claudius.[26] Disocorides wrote Περι ύλής ιάτρχής (usually known by its Latin title, De material medica) sometimes between 50 and 70 CE. Johnston remarks that “[t]he work served as the cornerstone for western pharmaceutical and herbal writing for the next 1500 years and was early translated into Syriac, Arabic, and Persian, as well as Latin, exerting a profound influence on the development of medicine in the Near East as well as in Europe.”  This ancient study of various plant and animal substances useful for medicinal purposes[27] provided the Marrano physician with an opportunity to correct many errors he saw in previous editions of the Greek text, especially that of Mattioli, and to insert into his own commentary insights from his extensive travels, along with reports gleaned from European discoveries in the New Worlds of America and Asia and his personal experiences as a physician over his long career.

Thus after first publishing a collection of corrections, Anatationes in Dioscoridem (Lyon, 1554) to Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s Italian translation of Dioscorides’ treatise in 1540, an effort which brought him the enmity of the great botanist and his disciples and political supporters, Laguna did his own translation into Castilian with a new commentary.  Not only did Laguna work from Greek and Arabic sources to create a better edition of Dioscorides, but, unlike Mattioli (who was a closet scientist), Laguna, in the tradition of Garcia d’Orta, another New Christian scholar, travelled across Europe and into the Middle East to study the plants he was writing about.[28] 

The section of the Dioscorides Laguna prepared that we find most indicative of his attitude towards witchcraft, demonology, and related occult topics appears when he starts a digression consisting of several brief personal anecdotes from his field experience as a physician.  The digression begins at the point where the text mentions delusions which witches are supposed to believe in.  In his commentary, Laguna cites Dioscorides and says, “if a dram of the root of nightshade (carrier of madness) is drunk with wine there will be produced certain vain phantasmagorias which are at the same time very agreeable,”[29] by which we may presume he is referring to libidinous feelings that arise in conjunction with the antinomian and anti-social pleasures that such persons crave in the midst of their otherwise drab and uncomfortable lives.  Laguna then goes on, “it is to be understood that these visions are produced during sleep,” yet it is not clear whether this means these are ordinary night dreams or trances induced in individuals or groups as part of the delusionary experience.  The significant thing is, of course, that along with several other advanced, Humanist scientists of the period,[30] Laguna here credits the activities and beliefs of witchcraft, not to the devil or some other malevolent spiritual agency, but to the workings of chemical substances in minds predisposed to fantasies.  The standard view of the Church was that witches combined malevolent (black) magic with heresy (worship of Satan), while Weyer and others opposed to this view went only so far as to believe witch hunts were misguided attempts to punish harmless and crazy old women “depraved through sin.”[31]  Because the devil acted directly in the world, the witch hunters risked punishing the wrong people, while allowing the forces of evil to continue; and indeed, part of the devil’s plan was to disrupt Christian society through such popular hysteria.  According to Slattery, “Weyer undermined one of witch hunting’s purposes by asserting that witches (and magicians) could do no physical harm.”  Jan Ehrenwald explains Weyer’s position more fully:

He was a disciple of Cornelius Agrippa who himself had denounced “the vanity: of the sciences—both medical and theological—of his time.  Weyer was a devoted physician and at the same time a loyal churchman,  but his clear clinical insight could not help bringing into direct conflict with the superstitions held by most of his contemporaries.  To him, apparent diabolical possession was an indication of a disordered metabolism and a deranged mind.  So were the fantasies of “melancholic women: who “while lying on their backs asleep thought they were raped by an evil spirit. [32]

Laguna, on the other hand, as our reading of his text makes evident, although he remains close in many ways to what Weyer will say almost a decade later, did not deny that witches and wizards did real harm to themselves and others, with their depraved conditions arising from external and internal factors, and Laguna also took the symptoms of the delusion as real—but on both sides, amongst the supposed victims of the demonic powers and the perpetrators of the witch hunts. 

Hence Laguna continues his analysis: “That must be too (as I believe) the virtue of some unguents with which it was customary to anoint witches…” Here the incomplete passive construction makes ambiguous who applies these medicaments, whether the people who believe themselves to be witches or the ecclesiastical officials who are investigating their supposed blasphemous or heretical acts.  Laguna then writes: “the extreme cold of these unguents induced sleep, and during this lasting and very deep sleep impressed visions, so that on awakening they would confess to that which they had never done.”  Again it is not clear whether the “confession” here stands for a rather general “said among themselves aloud” or represents a formal admission to inquisitorial authorities of their communication with the forces of evil.  In either event, what stands out is that this Crypto-Jewish physician never doubts the natural, physical aetiology of the fantasies, and hence that the witches are deluded men and women, rather than sinners or manifestations of evil.

The Witch, the Wizards and the Duke

Even more interesting views are expressed when Laguna recounts a personal anecdote to illustrate the argument he has been making.  The event described is said to have taken place in 1545.[33]

When I was municipal physician for the town of Metz, I visited Duke Francis of Lorraine, who was ill in Nancy in the year MDXLV.  At that time there appeared before his Lordship the town council demanding justice and vengeance against two unfortunate old people, who were husband and wife and who lived in a hermit’s cabin a half a league from that city, because (according to popular rumor) they were notorious wizards, burning all the new-sown land, killing all the live stock, and sucking the blood of the children, and had done terrible damage.  When he had heard these serious charges, the Duke sent to arrest them and put them to the torture; they thereupon confessed all the charges, and among other frightful deeds they affirmed that they had murdered the Duke’s father, Duke Anthony; they also stated that they had given him, Francis, the grave malady which little by little was destroying him.[34]

We assume that the Crypto-Jewish physician tells his personal anecdote in order to expose, at least by implication, the way in which folly, superstition, and group-fantasy are associated, and in order to undermine any argument that credits the deluded couple, who are specifically called “unfortunate old people”, with performing the sinful crimes they confess to under torture as supernatural events.  It is also important to note his daring in questioning the motives both of the civil officials and the Duke himself, for it is the additional mark of the outsider able to pierce through the “unquestioned” assumptions of the dominant culture that also marks the New Christian tradition.  Distrust of human authority and antinomianism characterize those who have experienced the persecutions of the Church and State in Iberia.

 The accusation brought by the city council on the basis of rumour also suggests that this popular charge is more than just a whisper linking the unfortunates with fantastic crimes committed—or presumed to have been committed—in the region.  The identity of the old man as a “wizard” further suggests that he and his wife are known to be local shamans or folk-healers in the neighbourhood. There is a rising sense of panic among the country people, so that this pair sought refuge in their hut from a mob prejudiced against them or at least searching for figures whose homelessness, decrepitude, and eccentricity have stigmatized them as “the other”, in other words: those traditionally singled out for scapegoating.  Their widespread notoriety further indicates that the popular mind has identified them as dangerous and guilty and so brought their alleged activities to the attention of the civil government, although it is also likely that they benefited from their role as traditional healers in this country district and the nearby town.[35]  Yet now their very marginal (“liminal”) role between rural and urban, traditional and civilized stigmatizes them as sources of pollution, rather than helpful and familiar local wonder-workers.

While the first two charges against them—“burning all the new-sown land, killing all the live stock”—may have some credence to it, despite the superlative “all” which puts the charges beyond the capacities of these two feeble elderly persons—the third reduces all the accusations to the projection of popular fears: “sucking the blood of the children”.  We may assume, therefore, that at a time of crop failure, even of wild fires in parched fields, and with the loss of cattle and flocks due to lack of rain and fodder, the agricultural community panicked and sought for scapegoats, persons to blame.  They needed a rationalization that would not depend on either a naturalistic understanding of poor weather or a moral or spiritual flaw within themselves that the Church would interpret as deserving of divine punishment.  The vampirical slaying of children, however, is of a different order.[36]  But without indicating who or how many victims there were, the accusation clearly signals that the rumour (probably induced by some panic-driven trance) itself is part of a collective fantasy in the neighbourhood that arises either from local folklore or from a literary (elite) delusion that has been imported into the region by the clergy or some other intellectual agency. 

That these charges and counter-charges, as we shall see when the situation becomes clearer in Laguna’s description, are in themselves delusionary may be seen by the treatment accorded by the Duke.  For under torture, this poor old couple confess to crimes that are specifically associated with the Duke himself and deal with matters he may have deep personal guilt over, namely, the recent death of his father, Duke Anthony.  Whatever the situation in the countryside that brought the local people to denounce these old folks to the city council and then they in turn felt compelled to bring these witches to the attention of the Duke, the implication of the couple’s involvement in the ducal household is totally fantastic and can only have arisen in the mind of his Lordship himself. 

Although prompted by real occurrences, the situation becomes toxic as confused and hurt feelings on both sides collide with one another.  Thus Laguna continues:

…they also stated that they had given him, [Duke] Francis, the grave malady which little by little was destroying him.  The Duke asked them in what manner and form they had caused his malady.  The old man said that it was because His Excellency had not washed his feet on the preceding Maundy Thursday; he had been one of the twelve poor to appear for the ceremony, as was the use and custom of the land, and he had fallen into great melancholy when the ceremony was not performed.  When he saw the Devil in his circle afterward he was asked by the Devil to tell the reason for his sadness.  Having heard the story, the Devil asked him whether he wished to be avenged of the Duke, and if he did to take the worm the Devil offered him, and when he saw the Duke pass by his hermitage to throw it before the hooves of his horse and this would make the horse stumble and crush the Duke.  But if he did not wish to kill him, but only to have him fall sick, then to go up to him on the road as though to beg alms then to contrive to breathe in his face; “then,” said the Devil, “I shall be at your back and I shall breathe on the back of his head and I shall so infect him that only you will ever be able to cure him again.”  In this fashion, said the wizard, he had infected the Duke, with the intention of curing him soon after with a secret remedy which his master the Devil had taught him.[37]

The narrative is told in such a way that it would seem the confession of the old man under torture reveals an elaborate plot against the Duke based on a failure in the Maundy Thursday ritual in which the royal (i.e., sacred)  person plays the role of Jesus washing the feet of His disciples, a ritual also connected with the so-called “royal touch” as a display of the sacred authority of the local prince.[38]  That the Duke overlooked the so-called wizard—and we must wonder why this dangerous malefactor should have been chosen to appear before the Duke with his wife at a time when he was already notorious for magical deeds among the farming people—occasioned some sort of guilt, perhaps because of rising doubts as to the validity of the ritual itself; but, more likely, this complex fantasy is also a back-formation of feelings having to do with the malady that afflicts the “royal person” by both the Duke and the wizard.  It may be that the magicians were invited precisely because of their reputation as wonder-workers but then, in the event, during the ceremony, the Duke lost his nerve, refusing to touch the old man when he approached.  To touch that magician would also mean to be touched by him.

            In addition, what is adduced by torture is here called “melancholy” or “sadness”, or as we would say “depression.” There is also the attendant suggestion, that the wizard’s hurt feelings were the motivation of the harm done to the Duke—so that the situation is one in which both parties have offended the other, feel aggrieved, and seek for a remedy of some sort.  By motivating the condition of the contagion (“infection”) in the highly charged emotional relationship between Duke and wizard—calling it “melancholy”—indicates that Laguna sees the whole affair as psychological rather than theological, and hence medical instead of juridical.[39] 

In other words, there seems to be a multiple set of factors involved in this collective fantasy or delusion.[40]  First, the depression of the country folk and civil councillors, that is, their concerns rising when crop failures and field fires hold out the prospect of famine and eventually plague.  Second, this rising sense of panic turns away from rational or theological explanations and falls back on a belief in witches and wizards.  Third, this irrational search for scapegoats then runs into the panic/ depression and infection/sensitivity of the old man whose traditional powers and respect in the community are under threat by the new ideas of the age, a fear exacerbated by the public humiliation of having the Duke turn away from him on Maundy Thursday.   Fourth, the guilt and confusion in the Duke’s own attitudes towards his father’s recent death, intersecting with the turmoil in Central European politics during the Reformation and the religious conflicts it engendered, and probably his own insecure feelings about the dogmas of the Church.  These over-determined pressures seem to emerge in Laguna’s next few lines:

And then, although the council was resolved that both of them should be burnt, the Duke showed mercy to the old man because of the hope of a cure for his malady.  Thereupon the old witch was reduced to cinders in the presence of her husband, who was given gifts by the Duke and favored by him; and the Duke spared his life, although he kept him closely watched. [41]

The behaviour of the Duke and the community seems particularly bizarre, with the sentence of death at the stake carried out only for the old woman but not for her husband, thus at once seeming to satisfying the mob’s lust for death in a manner sanctioned by the ecclesiastical authorities for those who communicate with the Devil and at the same time permitting the Prince to safeguard his one probable chance for surviving the devilish threat against himself.  The Duke’s “mercy” is, of course, no mercy at all, and to the outsider confirms his Lordship’s own collusion in the fantasy through this attempt to control the evil powers within the wizard. 

            The subsequent events are also interesting in Laguna’s account.  There first occurs the death of the two remaining principal figures, the wizard who suffocates after a hearty meal, despite being under strict surveillance by the Duke’s men, and then “the Duke dies only a few days after this,” with no reason being given.  “The people said,” however, “that the Devil had twisted the neck of the villain in order that he might restore the Duke to health.”  Again the ambiguous pronoun “he” which may make the Devil’s intention to save the prince through the sacrifice of his erstwhile agent or may suggest an ironic “twist” that the wizard was himself responsible for this act against himself on behalf of the Duke who, though he had had the old wife executed, had spared his life and then showered favours on him.  Or, looked at more cynically, it could be that this “Devil” is an officer of the Duke who, with or without the express orders of his master, attempted to force the issue by garrotting the prisoner….  Or rather, since this first statement arises from what “[t]he people said”, this supernatural event is tied to the otherwise unexplained death of the Duke and ironically terminates both lives by a complex and devilish plan; by killing the old man, Satan makes certain, for his own nefarious purposes, that there remains no way to save the Duke from the earlier curse put on him by the wizard.[42] 

            Laguna does not let the popular opinion stand unchallenged, however.  “Others,” he writes, “believe that the peasants of that place, because of the hatred they had for him, had given him poison.”[43]  These unnamed “others” seem more pragmatic men at the court who impute base motives to the villagers who had already been hunting down the wizard and his wife for the crimes in the countryside and who now seek to correct the miscarriage of justice, in their eyes, manifest in the Duke’s refusal to burn the old man along with his witch-wife.  Note, too, that instead of a magical explanation, Laguna’s reading is based on the giving of poison.  Jacobus Weyer a few years later would draw a major distinction between witches and poisoners or magicians/wizards,[44] as Slattery explains: “[m]agicians tried to overcome the laws of nature, and attempted to predict the future in forbidden and superstitious ways.  Whereas witches were merely the devil’s dupes, magicians were his agents because they wittingly negotiated evil in exchange for greater powers and helped the devil spread illusions.” 

That Laguna would seem to be in accord with this alternative explanation appears in the question he next asks, a question that takes him back to his starting point in the discussion of a passage in Dioscorides concerning medicinal plants: “But what has this story to do with nightshade?”  This break from the narrative allows the New Christian author to make his sustained commentary on the anecdote just recounted.

Among other things found in the hermitage of the two wizards was a pot half full of a certain green unguent like white poplar ointment with which they anointed themselves.  The odor of this unguent was so heavy and oppressive that it seemed to be composed of the very coldest and soporific herbs: which are the cicuta, the nightshade, the henbane and the mandragore.[45] 

In a sense, this is information that should have been provided earlier in the narrative digression, as it would have given a more logical, scientific explanation based on humoural medical theory for the events that followed.  But, as in rabbinical discourses, the movement of Laguna’s argument is less than straightforward and involves the apparent cutting from one discursive line to the next until, finally, the return is made to the original proof-text (in this case, Dioscorides) and then apparent contradictions are resolved, illogical gaps filled, and supposedly implicit moral lessons drawn. 

The Judge and his Wife

At this point, Laguna re-enters his text in the first person to make a second point, already implied in the counter-text of the alternative explanation for the death of the wizard—what the other people said. 

The judge, who was a friend of mine, got me a good sample of this ointment with which, later in the city of Metz, I had the wife of the executioner anointed from head to foot who, because of jealousy of her husband had completely lost the ability to sleep and who had become half insane because of it.  She was a very good subject for experiment because an infinite number of remedies had been tried in vain and it seemed to me that this was the correct one and I could not resist trying it, and because of its telltale color and odor it was easy to concoct.[46]

The whole point of the anecdote about the wizard and the Duke thus seems only to turn on the access Laguna had to the ointment he can now experiment with in the case of the woman in Metz who is going mad with jealousy of her husband.[47]  The ointment may have been some concoction based on opium or datura.[48]  The judge, unheard of before, functions as a narrative bridge between the two stories by providing the wizard’s green unguent to the good doctor. 

In what seems a completely other and unconnected anecdote, the executioner’s wife has become notorious for her sleeplessness and, after many attempts to cure her by, we are to presume, reputable physicians in the city and district, as well as a variety of apothecaries and other more popular healers, the opportunity arises for Laguna to try his experiment.  The connections already visible are of two sorts: (a) the superficial one of executioner and wife criss-crossed back to the executed wife of the wizard and the Duke as judge showing mercy to the old man; and (b) the search for an explanation and cure for insanity by means other than those provided by popular superstitions and the ecclesiastical reliance on satanic conspiracies. 

What comes next in the text is the results of Laguna’s experiment with the green unguent on the executioner’s wife:

Now as soon as this lady had been anointed, with her eyes open like a rabbit’s and appearing very much like a cooked hare, she fell into such a profound sleep that I never thought I would be able to awaken her.  However, by means of strong ligatures and rubbing of the extremities, [azeyte ostino (?)] officinal spurge, fumes and vapors to the nose and finally by means of cupping I got along so well that at the end of thirty-six hours I restored her to her sense and her memory.[49]

The grotesque juxtaposition of domestic analogies and technical scientific terms should not at first put us off, although merely to say that these were the normal discursive elements (jargon) of seventeenth-century medical science only begs the question. This juxtaposition of incongruous elements (in our terms—or in those of the eighteenth-century rationalists)[50] points back to the way in which the popular superstitions and panic in the city council joined in the Duke’s own strange dispensation of justice in burning a witch at the stake but showing mercy to a wizard who can cure him of a curse brought on by a fault in the performance of a royal ritual.  After congratulating himself on affecting the cure for the woman’s acute insomnia brought on by jealous fits, Laguna goes on to report:

The first words that she uttered were, “Why in an evil hour did you awaken me?  I was in the midst of all the pleasures and delights of the world.”  She then turned her eyes toward her husband, and smiling all the while said to him (he was standing there gaping like a man on the gallows), “Knave, I want you to know that I have put horns on your head and with a younger and handsomer gallant than you.”  And she said many other strange things and asked us to leave her and let her fall asleep again, from desire we diverted her, but she ever after had some of these fanciful things in her head.[51]

It is clear here that what the wife announces to her husband is a delusion, something she dreamed rather than actually performed.  Nevertheless, for her to imagine that the man she used to cuckold her husband is none other than the Devil himself, indicates that her delusion was not one that derives from inner mental derangement alone: she identifies her sexual partner by using one of the psychological alters (to use Lloyd deMause’s phrase to indicate a projection into biographical narrative of unsustainable psychological tensions) acceptable to her society; and which, because so accepted, brings into her own private experiences the baggage—and justification or rationalization—of cultural values, negative and positive.  In more modern terms, drawn from psychoanalytic experience, it is possible to say that the woman’s neurotic symptoms—her sleeplessness and then her intense extended sleep induced by the green ointment—have articulated in somatic terms what she could not speak directly to her husband until, in the presence of Laguna and probably other attendants and assistants, she awakens.  In fact, Laguna’s experiment serves as a therapeutic event.  It is by inducing sleep with the green ointment that the wife is allowed to dream and experience the erotic pleasures she is otherwise deprived of; and, at the same time, by dreaming to express poisonous feelings against her husband, and then after purging herself through speaking the forbidden hate-filled words, to return to sleep.[52]  This event also confirms Laguna’s view that witchcraft is not a devilish craft nor a mere self-delusion, but rather a real illness with physical causation, symptoms, and cure. It conforms to the Galenic notions of humoural imbalances[53] effecting mind as well as body, and the consequent need of the physician to restore the proper balance to the patient.  However, it also extends and even transforms the conventional notion of humours from the relatively paradigmatic fixity of the Galenic system taught in the medical schools of Renaissance Europe.

Meanwhile, the executioner-husband stands there like a man at the gallows, not only an apt posture for his profession but, again, an interesting cross-reference to the first anecdote, albeit with minor differences between a stake for burning and a place for hanging . His wife’s harsh words were meant to hurt him and to make him suffer like one of his own miserable victims.  Yet her ability to speak out loud against her impotent or unpleasant husband is not a total cure for her diseased mind, as she both wishes to return to her dreams to be in contact with her fulfilled wishes (for sexual gratification which is also revenge against her husband) and continues to suffer, albeit in a milder form, from “fanciful things in her head.”   Though Laguna does not fully recognize all the modern psychoanalytic implications or aspects of his experiment—How could he?—nevertheless, he does see more than Weyer could see eight years later in the sexual delusions of the pathetic wretches he watched confessing their pacts with the devil to the inquisitors.  Laguna searches for an explanation to an organo-psychic event (in Henri Ey’s terms); he does not try to argue away a fantasy.  The wife suffers real pain and anxiety, and expresses real anger, which her husband also feels somatically as well as emotionally.

Conclusions

Therefore, the question inherent in Laguna’s text becomes more insistent: what is the connection between the green unguent used by the executioner’s wife and the source in the wizard’s hermitage?  This medicinal ointment, here used to cure a woman of her sleeplessness, was presumably the same substance used by the peasants to poison the wizard—and perhaps used by others to commit the various crimes he and his wife were accused of in the countryside in the weeks or months prior to their arrest.  Thus at this point Laguna begins to draw everything together and to make his first generalized explanation for the natural causes of what have otherwise been credited to witchcraft and hence to mere fantasy:

From which we may conjecture that whatever witches may say or do is only a dream caused by cold drinks and unguents: the which 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.[54]

Putting aside any discussion of how Laguna and the sixteenth century would have interpreted such key words as dream, memory, and imagination, the argument is firmly one that rejects supernatural explanations.  Something happens in the mind and something happens to the body, and there is a natural relationship between the mind and the body, so that individuals both interact with one another and with the world around them through a form of physical and psychological contagion.

            The second generalization that Laguna the Marrano physician makes is now more extensive and yet we need not follow it through in as much detail as the earlier portions of the text.  He explains that the wife of the executioner, like “all others who have practiced such infamous conduct have always confessed (as may be seen in the trials) that they have known the devil carnally,” although “if they asked whether they have enjoyed special pleasure in this they have always answered no.”[55]  Rather than being able to follow through in post-Freudian terms to see that the Devil as social alter represents one of the split-off images of a primal abuser—perhaps a father or older brother who raped her, so common in pre-modern and traditional societies—Laguna offers a basic materialist explanation deriving from Renaissance versions of humoural theory: “And the reason for this is that they feel a frigidity in the diabolical parts, from which (as it appears to them) there comes a humour as cold as ice which enters into their intestines like hail stones.”  This frigidity has been induced, Laguna proclaims, by the application of the “unguent which pervades their whole bodies and enters the marrow.”  For that reason, though, such self-deluded persons “are scandalous and merit exemplary punishment 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.” 

This seems at first very close to Weyer’s position, but veers away because of its sense of a world in flux and always ready to strike out against the unwary by unseen (secret, disguised) means to inflict debilitating worries and incapacitating torments.  Even more, finally in his analysis, Laguna says: “the Devil cannot work except through natural causes, applying active [passivis] (?).”[56]  He adds, perhaps making formal concessions to the Church and the theology of evil that is promulgated, in order to avoid upsetting the Inquisition—and perhaps, too, because, as a Marrano, he also does believe what he says—that it is the Devil “because of his wisdom and shrewdness” who “teaches them to the foolish witches in order to make them dream and imagine an infinite number of stupidities and vanities.”  In particular, “[o]pium performs this same cooling function throughout all Turkey” and all this “accords with all that Dioscordies has said about nightshade.”[57]  

The difficulty a modern biographer faces with what Laguna, “un notorio converso,”[58] actually says, if he is more than a Humanist physician typical of the Renaissance, is that  the narrator seems unable to sustain his own argument, and may be hinting, if he is aware at all of kabbalistic theories which have more in common with psychohistorical theories than Tridentine theology, that the cause of mental illness comes from a diversion of the “flow” of energies from the normal or healthy structures of the sefirotic tree representing the human body to the sitra ahra (the other side) whose structures are a pernicious parody of this proper development and binding of body and soul, mortal and immortal elements.

NOTES

Norman Simms was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1940, grew up and educated in the USA, and then moved to Winnipeg, Canada with his new wife. There he had his first university position and raised two small children. In 1970 he moved the family to New Zealand and began teaching at the University of Waikato in Hamilton, where he has been ever since: except for several shorter and longer periods of study-leave (Romania, UK, Spain, Mnalaysia, Singapore, Fiji, Netherlands) and visiting lectureships (France, Israel, Canada, USA). He has founded and edited several scholarly journals (e.g., Mioriþa, The Glozel Newsletter, Mentalities/Mentalités) and literary or cultural magazines (e.g., Pacific Quarterly, Outrigger, Rimu, Rashi, Matrix). He has published scores of essays, articles, and books, the latest of which is Masks in the Mirror: Marranism in Jewish Experience (New York: Peter Lang, 2005)

Links:

A Preference for Horses: Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Luis de Carvajal el Mozo’s Autobiography

An Essay by Norman Simms in two parts:
Part One: Maria Sibylla Merian in the Cocoon: Childhood Confusions
Part Two: Maria Sibylla Merian: Crises in Spirit, Intellect and Marriage