Windows of the Soul: Physiognomy in European Culture 1470-1780

OXFORD HISTORICAL MONOGRAPHS j. maddicott j. harris j. robertson editors p. a. slack r. j. w. evans b. ward-perkins ...

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OXFORD HISTORICAL MONOGRAPHS j. maddicott j. harris j. robertson

editors

p. a. slack

r. j. w. evans b. ward-perkins r. service

This page intentionally left blank

Windows of the Soul Physiognomy in European Culture 1470–1780 martin porter

CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD

3

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Martin Porter 2005 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available ISBN 0-19-927657-9 Typeset by SNP Best-set Typesetter Ltd., Hong Kong Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd. King’s Lynn, Norfolk

43¢04 For my Mother, Barbara, my Brother, Ian, and in memory of my Father, Stephen Henry.

Nor is it not sayde without cause of antyke sage men, that the eye is the seate and place of the soule. Erasmus, De civilitate morum puerillium, trans. Robert Whytinton (1540), sigs. A3–A4. A particularly apt way of putting it is to say the eyes are the windows of the soul. David Laigneau, Traicté pour la conservation de la santé (Paris, 1650), 812. Physiognomy . . . nothing of the truth of which is openly professed by our Academians. Paracelsus, Opera omnia, 3 vols. (Geneva, 1662), i. 674.

PREFACE I This book is about something that is very difficult to capture in book form. It is about ‘physiognomy’ in early modern European culture. ‘Fisnomy’, another term with which the very fluid early modern notion of ‘physiognomy’ was often confused but integrally related, was understood at the time as the art of discovering the nature of a person by sight. During the early modern period, many attempts were made by people to capture the innate visuality of the phenomenon of ‘physiognomy’ in different media. Artists tried to express it in paintings, sculptures, engravings, and woodcuts; architects tried to etch it in stone; actors tried to bring it out in themselves; writers tried to capture it in words. In order to lay some sort of introductory foundation for future investigations of this ubiquitous subject, the following history is the by-product of an ‘archive’ it has created of the often heavily illustrated books on the theory of ‘physiognomy’ (physiognomony) which were in circulation, in manuscript and in print, throughout early modern Europe. That archive begins with the first appearance of physiognomony in printed form at the height of the Renaissance in northern and southern Europe in the 1470s. It ends, some three hundred years later, at the dawn of Romanticism, with the publication of a ‘book on physiognomy’, written by a Swiss Pietist minister named Johannes Caspar Lavater, that saw an extraordinary European-wide success. Those books were published incessantly throughout the period in most languages, be it Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Latin, or the many European vernaculars, from Russian to Spanish, and from Icelandic to Welsh. They were published in all formats, from cheap, ephemeral single-sheet pamphlets to the most lavishly illustrated, hand-painted vellum or leather bound folios, and distributed across Europe and later to America, far beyond the main printing centres of Europe’s urban growths, to a reading and listening audience made up of a wide range of ages, sexes, occupations, and incomes. Yet, for all their geographical and social ubiquity, the number of ‘books on physiognomy’ was a very small percentage of the literature published during the ‘age of print’. What was the basic appeal of these apparently marginal books to early modern readers? In a time when the modern scientific universe of ‘how?’ and the

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religious universe of ‘why?’ had still to be separated out from one another, men, women, and children of the early modern period used their own eyes and ears to try to ‘make sense’ of, and interpret and express, what they saw and heard, in themselves and in the world every day. Some tried to do this through what they read in, or heard read out from, books. Essentially, what manuscript and printed ‘books on physiognomy’ offered to early modern Europe’s relatively small group of textually literate readers was a ‘natural magic’. In the ‘natural magic’ of the language of physiognomy, the eyes, the face, indeed the entire human appearance, including the sound of a voice, and the character of a walk or a laugh, so often concealed beneath the artifice and culture of make-up, haircuts, wigs, dress, and elocution, were all natural ‘windows of the soul’. Many of the authors of ‘books on physiognomy’ tried to seduce their textually literate audience by putting forward the ‘natural magic’ of physiognomy as a natural extension of the common wisdom alluded to in a widely known proverb of the day: ‘the eyes are the windows of the soul’. As such, the ‘natural magic’ of physiognomony explicitly appealed to, and often struck a chord with, an innate hermeneutic faculty of visual and sonic literacy in their minds—their ‘fisnomy’. Like the force that drives the moth to the light, that ‘fisnomy’ was an intuitive and equally magical, inexplicable part of their own characters. In fact, together, fisnomy and physiognomony were thought mysteriously to open windows onto the ‘occult’, that is to say ‘hidden’ realm of the virtues and meanings thought to be discoverable in every natural body (not just the human one) in the microcosm and the macrocosm. Through its windows people thought they could come to discover, understand, even control themselves, their relations with others, the nature around them, and, in some cases, their gods. This book represents the first attempt to present a comprehensive study of the production, distribution, and consumption of the audio-visual scientia of ‘physiognomy’ contained in those early modern texts. Its aim is to provide a map of the wide-ranging workings and history of the so-called ‘natural magic’ of early modern ‘physiognomy’ and to offer an initial synthetic framework in terms of which readers might make their way through it. When perusing the pages of this book readers are required to put aside all commonly received, but fundamentally misconceived, ideas of ‘physiognomy’ as a so-called ‘pseudo’ or ‘occult science’ in which physiognomy is too readily dismissed as a form of ‘vulgar’, ‘esoteric’, backward-looking ‘magic’ or ‘superstition’ in comparison to an assumedly progressive, rational, science. As will become evident, writers from both within and outside the socially elite, textually literate, predominantly male world of early modern European academe produced many different types of ‘physiognomony’. Whilst many were

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penned by Neoplatonic ‘hermeticists’, still others by Jewish Kabbalists and Islamic mystics (all of whom are often disregarded by the condescension of posterity as esoteric ‘magicians’), some were penned by the most mainstream, pioneering, Aristotelian natural philosophers, protestant and catholic alike, seventeenth-century mechanical philosophers, as well as many ‘Grub Street’ hacks. A marginal body of writings in relation to the monumental ‘age of print’ this archive of ‘books on physiognomy’ may have been, but as this study will try to show, those books shed much light on the way in which the so-called ‘magical’ and the rational actively coexisted and interacted in the same literate and ‘illiterate’ minds and the ways in which they developed in tandem throughout the art and culture of the period so often identified as having laid the foundations of modern scientific rationality.

II If physiognomy is an ‘unbookish’ subject, the official word for the subject of this book is a particularly ‘unwordy’ word. Yet the tongue-twisting term, physiognomy, was much more familiar to the generations that made up Renaissance and early modern Europe than it is today. A Latin word of Greek origins, ‘physiognomia’, or the even more troublesome ‘physiognomonia’, crystallized in the Latin language sometime in the eleventh century, and gradually migrated into all early modern European vernacular tongues, be it the Romance languages of French, Italian, Spanish, and English, or the Germanic languages of Hungarian, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Dutch. In this book, present readers will encounter four closely related English words on which they are asked to focus, and between which they are asked to distinguish. The first of those four words was invented in 1556 when a short-bearded, Italian-looking writer from London named Thomas Hill began his prolific career as a popular author by publishing the first ever book printed in English devoted solely to the ‘art of Phisiognomie’. In that book he coined a neologism based on the word ‘physiognomy’ that does not appear to have travelled much further than his own lips; at least it is a word that has yet to find its way into the Oxford English Dictionary—the verb to physiognomate. As clumsy and inelegant as it sounds, this word will be recoined throughout this book to refer to some form of systematized ‘physiognomy’ (physiognomony) ‘in action’. Hill’s little verbal invention was part of a broader popularist aim to provide Renaissance readers with a term less tongue-twisting than one based on the classical term physiognomony. This is the second of the four words.

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Etymologically speaking, physiognomony derives from the Greek physis, meaning nature, and gnomon, meaning indication, knowledge, judgement, or essence. (In the early modern period, some authors claimed it meant ‘law’ or ‘rule’.) On the occasions it is used in this book, it refers to the theory of physiognomy as it was presented to early modern readers of books on the subject, what are being called in this work ‘treatises on’ or ‘books on physiognomy’. If Hill’s new verb was a gesture against the snobbery of the universityeducated ‘literati’, at the same time it was an attempt to distinguish his own literate subject from the early modern colloquial, but now equally obscure, term, fisnomy (sometimes spelt physnomy or physnamy). This is the third but in some ways the key word. It was an early modern ‘vulgarization’ of physiognom(on)y. It is a word that appears to have entered Middle English from Old French, and which Shakespeare used only once. In All’s Well That Ends Well, iv. v., the Clown, speaking to the temperamentally named ‘La Feu’, retorts playfully: ‘Faith, sir, a’ has an English name; but his fisnomy is more hotter in France than there.’ (In some editions of the play it was spelt fisnamy, but sounded who knows how.) Whilst this word was sometimes used to refer to the face, as well as the theory of physiognomy (the physiognomony contained in the texts under consideration), more often, and more significantly, it referred to a person’s natural physiognomical intelligence. In other words, it signified that general, intuitive, even unconscious ability that human beings (including those who are blind or deaf ) somehow have, which enables them to discover something about a person simply by looking at, and listening to, them. Whether it was understood as common sense or as a mystical skill given by God, fisnomy was an innate, universal visual and sonic literacy, a part of man’s instinctive physiognomical consciousness. In other words, fisnomy was an ontological fact. It was that natural, inexplicably intuitive physiognomical faculty in the mind that was cultivated (one might even say ‘hypnotized’), as much if not more, by the everyday experience of being alive and face-to-face with people and nature or representations of that nature, as by the reading of physiognomony in books. That is the predominant sense it is given throughout this work. The fourth word, physiognomy, like fisnomy, was often used in the early modern period to refer to the face or the physical appearance as a whole in a purely anatomical sense. This is a change known in linguistic jargon as semantic change through contiguity of object. At other times it was used in the more physiognomical sense of ‘countenance’, that is to say a physical feature expressing something. That is the most predominant sense it still carries today. It will be used in both of these ways at different times in this book. It will also be used as a convenient, slightly more pronouncable, synonym for the official theory,

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physiognomony, as well as providing the default term for the multi-faceted subject as a whole. Throughout all of these uses, the underlying sense is that physiognomy is a phenomenon that happens not only between people, but also between people and nature, and between people and representations of that nature, be it painted portraits, mirrors, or books. It is hoped that the context will make the intended meaning clear to the reader.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank Keith Thomas who supervised my doctoral thesis. Many thanks to Margaret Pelling whose close reading of a number of drafts saved it from many errors. Similarly, thanks to Peter Burke, Patrice Higonnet, and Charles Tilly all of whom read various early drafts of the manuscript. If their comments have not made it a better book, the fault is entirely mine. I would like to show my gratitude to The Wellcome Trust/The Wellcome Centre for the History of Medicine, which at one point kindly lent me a computer and some office space; to the European University Institute, Florence, for making me a Jean Monnet Fellow, then a Visiting Fellow, and the former Danmarks Humanistiskes Forskningcenter, Copenhagen, for making me a Senior Research Fellow. Sincere thanks to the helpful staffs of the many astonishing libraries, archives and galleries visited along the way, from the Bodleian to the Folger, from the Medici to the Warburg, and from the Huntington to the Clarke Memorial. I would also like to thank Ian Archer, David d’Avray, Laurence Brockliss, Jacques Le Goff, Martin Kemp, Yves Hersant, Lene Koch, the late Roy Porter, Jean-Claude Schmitt, Michael A. Screech, and Johannes Thomann. I am very saddened that I no longer have the chance to thank Conrad Russell who died as this book was being produced. The people who have helped me, from the Lane to Fiesole, from the North Park to Echo Park, from The Strand to The Sound and beyond, are too numerous to mention individually. However, I would like in particular to thank Elizabeth Boggs, Jennifer Boggs, Emily Green, Rosie Mestel, Eirinn Larsen, Jennifer Greensleeves, Mike Keating and Morten Djørup, as well as Lynn, Athena, Paul, Andy, Nathalie, Ute, Christoph, Cecile, Rebecca, Fiona, Yann, Poppie, Brooks, Tony, Colette, Alex, Marie, Peter, Sophie and Emmanuelle.

CONTENTS List of Illustrations List of Figures List of Abbreviations

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Introduction A Persistent Fisnomical Consciousness c.400 bce–c.1470 ce The Bookish Face of Physiognomy in Early Modern Europe The Troubling Emergence of the ‘Egyptian’ in Early Modern Europe The Physiognomy Captured and Lost in a Book Physiognomating by the Book Living Graffiti Conclusion

Bibliography Index

xiv xix xx 1 46 79 120 172 207 255 301 326 347

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 1. From Giovanni Battista Della Porta, De humana physiognomonia (Vici Æquensis: Iosephum Cacchium, 1586), 59. Private collection. 2. Engraving from Richard Saunders, Physiognomie, Chiromanice, Metoposcopie (1671), 311. (Photo: Warburg Institute.) 3. Engraving from Richard Saunders, Physiognomie, Chiromanice, Metoposcopie (1671), 289. (Photo: Warburg Institute.) 4. Guillaume de La Perrière, Le théâtre des bons engins, auquel sont contenuz cent emblems (Lyon, 1536), No. 53. (Cliché Bibliothèque Nationale de France.) 5. Hagecius ab Hajek, Aphorismorum metoposcopicorum libellus unus (Prague, 1564), 57. (Cliché Bibliothèque Nationale de France.) 6. Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), ii. De Macrocosmi Historia (frontispiece), 1. (Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Rés 107538 (1–3). Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.) 7. Sutton Nichols, ‘The Compleat Auctioner’, c.1700. Copper engraving, from S. Taubert, Bibliopola. Bilder und Texte aus der Welt des Buchhandels, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1966), ii., 77. (Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, FA hist 03 D t. 01-02. Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.) 8. Hans Baldung Grien, Woodcut of author, frontispiece from Johannes de Indagine, Introductiones apotelesmaticae elegantes in chiromantiam, physionomiam, astrologiam naturalem, complexiones hominum, naturas planetarum (Strasburg, 1522). (Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Rés 126655. Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.) 9. Sébastian Le Clerc (1637–1714), La Bohémienne, 1664. Engraving. (Cliché Bibliothèque Nationale de France.) 10. Jacques Callot (1592–1635), ‘At a Resting Place’, No. 3 from the series of four entitled The Feast of the Bohemians, after 1621. Etching and engraving. (Photo: Nancy, Musée des Beaux-arts, Cliché Claude Philippot.) 11. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573–1610), The Gypsy Fortune-Teller, 1596–7. Oil on canvas, 99 cm ¥ 131 cm. Pinoteca Capitolina, Rome. (Photo: Studio Fotografico Antonio Idini.)

4 7 8

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List of Illustrations 12. David Teniers (Antwerp, 1610–90), A Gypsy Fortune-Teller and Other Figures in a Craggy Landscape. Oil on canvas, 108 ¥ 135 cm. (Photo: Collection Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentarie (RKD), The Hague. Copyright: The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.) 13. David Teniers (Antwerp 1610–90), The Interior of a Grotto with Gypsies. Oil on canvas, 108 ¥ 135 cm. (Photo: Collection Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentarie (RKD), The Hague. Copyright: Trafalgar Galleries, London.) 14. David Teniers (Antwerp, 1610–90), Landscape with Gypsies telling Fortunes. Oil on panel, 36 ¥ 63 cm. Private collection, Switzerland (Photo: Zurich: David H. Koetser Gallery, Zurich.) 15. Hans Burgkmair the Elder, Gipsy Woman Telling Fortunes to a Market Woman. Pen and black ink 21.5 ¥ 31.8 cm. National Museum of Stockholm, inv.nr. NM H 132/1918. [Lower Rhine, Netherlands, c.1530s]. (Photo: Warburg Institute.) 16. ‘La vente des enfants’, early 16th-century tapestry from the ‘Series of Carrabarra’, woven in Tournai by Arnould Poissonier, designed by Antoine Ferret, Castle of Gaasbeek, Belgium. (Photo: Private collection.) 17. Jacob Duck [Dutch, c.1600–67], Interior with Gypsies. Private collection, The Netherlands. (Photo: Collection Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentarie (RKD), The Hague.) 18. J. Cossiers [Dutch, 1600–71], Gypsywoman Fortune-Telling, Another Woman Pickpocketing. Photo: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen.) 19. Christian Wilhelm Dietrich [German, 1717–74], Wirtsstube mit Zigeunern. (Photo: Neumeister Muenchener Kunstauktionhaus.) 20. Gypsy Boy Selling Manuscripts and Print [?], from S. Taubert, Bibliopola. Bilder und Texte aus der Welt des Buchhandels, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1966), ii. 41. (Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, FA hist 03 D t.01-02. Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.) 21. Marin Cureau de La Chambre, The Art How to Know Men (1665), frontispiece. (Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Rés 801896. Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.) 22. Arcandam, The most excellent, profitable and pleasant book to find the fatal desteny, constellation, complexion and natural inclination of every man and child by his birth. With an addition of physiognomy very pleasant to read (1592), sig. L7v–L8 Oxford: Bodleian Library, Ashm 556. (Photo: Oxford: Bodleian Library.) 23. Michael Scot, La physionomia natural di Michel Scotto (Vinegia, 1546), Rome: Biblioteca Vaticana, [Racc. Gen. Class. Ital. V 414], sig. Gvir. (Photo: Rome: Biblioteca Vaticana.)

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24. Diagram of the physiognomical syllogism, Giambattista Della Porta, De humana physiognomonia (Vici Æquensis, 1586), 27. Private collection.

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25. Woodcut of Cardinal Luigi d’Este, Giambattista Della Porta, De humana physiognomonia (Vici Æquensis: Apud Iosephum Cacchium, 1586), 4. Private collection.

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26. Urs Graf, ‘Monks Reading’, from Guigo de Castro, Statuta ordinis cartusiensis (Johann Amorbach, Basle, 1510). Wooduct. (Photo: Warburg Institute.)

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27. Cesare Revardino/Georges Reverdy [French, fl. 1529–57], Prudentia [B. XV. 481.28]. (Photo: Warburg Institute.)

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28. J. Kips, 17th-century English engraving of Prudence. (Photo: Warburg Institute.)

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29. Diptych. Right panel: Bust of Christ blessing. Left panel: Lentulus’ letter, Netherlands, 1490–9. Oil on wood, 38.5 cm ¥ 27.3 cm. Museum Cartharijneconvent, Utrecht (Photo: Ruben de Heer.)

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30. Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), i. De Macrocosmi Historia, 26, Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Rés 107538 (1–3). (Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.)

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31. Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), i. De Macrocosmi Historia, 29. Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Rès 107538 (1–3). (Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.)

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32. Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), ii. De Supernaturali, Naturali, Praeternaturali et Contranaturali Microcosmi historia, in Tractatus tres distributa, 117. (Photo: Warburg Institute.)

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33. Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), ii. Tractatus Primi Sectio Secunda (title page) ‘De technica Microcosmi historia’, 1, Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Rés 107538 (1–3). (Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.)

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34. Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), ii. Tractatus Primi Sectio Secunda, Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Rés 107538 (1–3). (Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.)

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35. Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), ii. Tractus Primi Sectio Secunda, Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Rés 107538 (1–3). (Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.)

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36. The Kalender of Sheephards (c.1585). A Facsimile Reproduction, ed. S. K. Heninger, Jr (Delmar, New York, 1979), 73, and 75, 80, 86, prepared from the copy in the Bodleian Library, Malone 17. sig. E5. (Photo: Oxford: Bodleian Library.)

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37. Giovanni Baptista Della Porta, Coelestis physiognomoniae libri sex (Naples, 1603), Rome: Biblioteca Vallicaliana, S.Borr.H.III.98, p. 78, K3v. (Photo: Mario Setter Biblioteca Vallicaliana.)

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38. Ciro Spontoni, La Metoposcopia Ouero Commensuratione Delle Linee Della Fronte (Venice, 1629), Florence: Firenze: Bibliotheca Nazionale, 1272.6, fol. 123 (Photo: Bibliotheca Nazionale Firenze.)

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39. Johannes ab Indagine, Introductiones Apotelesmaticae elegantes in Chiromantiam, Physionomiam, Astrologiam naturalem, Complexiones hominum, Naturas Planetarum (Strasburg/Frankfurt, 1522) (Photo: Basle: Bibliothek der Universität.)

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40. Johannes ab Indagine, Introductiones Apotelesmaticae elegantes in Chiromantiam, Physionomiam, Astrologiam naturalem, Complexiones hominum, Naturas Planetarum (Strasburg/Frankfurt, 1522). (Photo: Basle: Bibliothek der Universität.)

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41. Johannes ab Indagine, Introductiones Apotelesmaticae elegantes in Chiromantiam, Physionomiam, Astrologiam naturalem, Complexiones hominum, Naturas Planetarum (Strasburg/Frankfurt, 1522). fol. 29. Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Rés 126655. (Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.)

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42. The Kalender of Shepherdes, ed. H. O. Sommer (1892), sig. K iiii. (Photo: Warburg Institute.)

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43. Eglon Hendrik van der Neer (1634–1703), Portrait of a Young Lady Seated at a Table Holding an Open Book, 1665. Private collection. (Photograph courtesy of Richard Green Gallery, London.)

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44. Jan Luiken, Het leerzaam huisraad (Amsterdam, 1711), 54. (Photo: Warburg Institute.)

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45. Martin Engelbrecht, A Seller of Images, 1730. After S. Taubert, Bibliopola. Bilden und Texte aus der Welt des Buchhandels, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1959), ii. 103, Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, FA hist 03 D t. 01-02. (Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.)

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46. Theodore de Bry, Emblemata saeculario (Frankfurt, 1596), pl. 40. (Photo: Warburg Institute.) 47. Master of the Die (BXV.226.75). (Photo: Warburg Institute.) 48. Philipp Mey, Chiromantia et Phisiognomia Medica, wie auch Chiromantia Curiosa (1702). (Photo: Basle, Bibliothek der Universität.) 49. Abstract human shape drawn at bottom of the page, Oxford: Bodleian Library, Douce Fragm. d. 6, Kalendar of Shepherds, [1550?], sig. Bvii. (Photo: Oxford: Bodleian Library.) 50. Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Douce 45, fol. 50r. (Photo: Oxford: Bodleian Library.) 51. Bodleian Library, MS Digby 119, ‘Recepta varia alchemica’ (14th century), ff. 24r. (Photo: Oxford: Bodleian Library.) 52. Manuscript profile drawn by John Dee, Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1451 (15th–16th century), 53v. (Photo: Oxford: Bodleian Library.) 53. The Blake–Varley Sketchbook of 1819: In the Collection of M. D. E. Clayton-Stamm, ed. M. Butlin (1969). (Photo: Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.) 54. Abbé Desmonceaux (1734–1806) Traité des maladies des yeux et des oreilles (Paris, 1786), frontispiece. (Cliché Bibliothèque Nationale de France.) 55. Sigismund Elsholtz, Anthropometria (Padua, 1654), 28. (Cliché Bibliothèque Nationale de France.) 56. Sigismund Elsholtz, Anthropometria (Padua, 1654), 98. (Cliché Bibliothèque Nationale de France.) 57. Sigismund Elsholtz, Anthropometria (Padua, 1654), 88. (Cliché Bibliothèque Nationale de France.) 58. ‘Mirth for Citizens; or, A Comedy for the Country’, 17th century English broadsheet ballads. (Photo: by permission of the Houghton Library, Harvard University.)

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LIST OF FIGURES 1a. 1b. 2. 3.

‘Books on physiognomy’ printed in Europe, c.1470–c.1639 ‘Books on physiognomy’ printed in Europe, c.1640–c.1780 ‘Books on physiognomy’ printed in England, c.1470–c.1780 Annual book production in England, 1480–1700 (5-year totals). Derived from M. Bell and J. Barnard, ‘Provisional Count of STC Titles 1475–1700’, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume IV 1557–1695, ed. J. Barnard, D. F. McKenzie, and M. Bell (Cambridge, 2002), Appendix 1.

91 92 93

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

All books are published in London unless otherwise stated. Dates have been put into arabic numerals. bce ce MS RSTC

Before the Common Era Common Era Manuscript A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, first compiled by A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, 2nd edn., rev. and enl., begun by W. A. Jackson and F. S. Ferguson; completed by Katharine F. Pantzer, 3 vols. (London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–1991)

Introduction Physiognomy and Ancient Theology On 12 July, 1694, Samuel Jeake Esq. began to write a diary. Jeake, a merchant from the English town of Rye, in East Sussex, had long been used to the magic of quills and ink and words on paper. From his childhood days in the 1650s, his literate father had accustomed him to scribble things about himself and his life into notebooks. Now, having reached his forties, something spurred this astrologically obsessed Sussex merchant to sit down with those historical records he had been saving up and organize them into some meaningful form. Choosing 12 July, rather than the occasion of his forty-second birthday which fell a few days earlier, to commence his astrological diary was for him a highly symbolic act. To an English protestant dissenter of Dutch descent like Jeake, 12 July was the anniversary of the ‘Glorious Revolution’, the day when the English replaced a home-grown catholic English king with an imported Dutch protestant one. In fact, its symbolism was doubly suitable for a merchant. For the very same day that Jeake began raising a retrospective flag on his own existence, a royal proclamation was issued establishing the official flag of the new English Customs. It was a signal to the rest of Europe’s powers that the fresh-blooded economic policies of a new, increasingly rationalized, protestant regime were about to be unleashed. It was a fitting day for an English merchant to begin to take some sort of astrological stock-check, as it were, of his life. In his diary, Jeake included a number of curious passages which reveal something about what he actually looked like, something about his ‘physiognomy’. A series of entries show us that he had had his height measured on various birthdays throughout his youth, very probably by his mathematically inclined father—for they were always precisely calculated to the nearest eighth of an inch. Taken together they record how tall he was at different ages and allow us to see him growing up, from a 3-year-old boy to an 18-year-old young man. The first was taken on the day of his third birthday 4 July 1655: ‘Being 3 years old, my stature was 2 Feet 10 3/8 Inches’. Years later, having chosen to include this mathematical fact in his diary, our diarist evidently felt no urge to comment

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‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780

further on it. In keeping with the new, revolutionary Galilean mathematics of the day, he attached no retrospective symbols to its bare arithmetical bones. He did not add that he was as tall as a particular plant in the garden. He offered no conjecture about the sonic pitch that a piece of string the same length as his height would have produced upon the plucking. The merchant in him drew no strange medical or poetic analogy between those fragile three-eighths of an inch and the virtues in the size of the ‘3 Barlie cornes faire and round lying in length without the tailes’ which made up an inch in Scotland.¹ In fact, being the only entry for the next 365 days, the exact, purely arithmetical, nature of his stature seems to have been for Jeake the only thing of any significance about the entire third year of his being. Eleven years appear to have passed before his father took the rod to his son once more, in July 1666. By then, young Jeake had grown by 2 feet: ‘Being 14 years old my stature was 4 Feet 10 5/8 Inches’. His fifteenth birthday marked a much more symbolic moment. For the sole remains of the dynasty that Jeake senior had succeeded in generating was then embarking upon the third of the twelve ‘hebdomars’ that mapped out what was universally known as ‘the ages of man’. 1667 also marked a significant arithmetical event. Young Samuel Jeake had passed the 5-feet mark—if only just: ‘Being now, 15 years old my stature was 5 feet 1/8 inch’. Over the next four years, the outing of that measuring rod on Samuel’s birthday became an annual family ritual. In the course of that fifteenth year Samuel’s height shot up by a not insubstantial 2 inches: ‘Being 16 year old, my Stature was 5 feet 2 7/8 inches. About this time my beard began to appear.’ Though 1669 saw only half an inch increase: ‘Being 17 year old, my stature was 5 feet 3 –12 inches’, the pace picked up again in 1670, his eighteenth year, when he lengthened by over another inch: ‘Being 18 year old my stature was 5 feet 4 5/8 inches’. Years later, when the adult Samuel Jeake Esq. came to include this indisputable mathematical fact in the retrospective construction of his diary, something prompted him to use his author’s hitherto suspended privilege of hindsight. He added: ‘After which I never grew in heighth’. On his nineteenth birthday, in 1671, after a long period of illness during which he feared he might either die or at the very least lose his sight, the emerging young adult penned a more full-blooded description of his ‘physiognomy’ in words. He began it with a qualitative (that is, a less mathematical) expression of his height—one that somehow had a ring of finality (and disappointment?) about it: ¹ Alexander Huntar, A treatise of weights, mets, and measures of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1624), 5.

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My stature was short, viz.; the same that was noted July 4 1670. My Complexion Melancholy, My Face pale & lean, Forehead high; Eyes grey, Nose large, Teeth bad & distorted, No. 28. Hair of a sad brown, & curling: about this age and till after 20 had a great quantity of it; but from thence it decayed & grew thin. My voice grew hoarse after I had the small pocks. My Body was always lean, my hands & feet small, I was partly left handed & partly Ambodexter.

It was not the most detailed of self-descriptions, and distinctly less literary and self-conscious than the ‘character’ sketches with which the guests of Mademoiselle de Montpensier’s salon were amusing themselves around the same time in Paris.² In fact, it reads more like the physiognomical descriptions which the German authorities took whilst the accused was making his statement, the experimental consideration of which, under the Emperor Charles V, was made an official part of German criminal law in 1532, under article 71, ‘mala physiognomia’.³ It was also similar to the physiognomical descriptions of clients and wanted criminals which early modern astrologers noted in their manuscripts. There are no extant portraits of Samuel Jeake against which to compare his self-description. Despite a decent education in the liberal arts, Jeake never really mastered the art of drawing, so has left us no sketch of himself in the margins of the pages of his diary, such as those one finds in some manuscript ‘treatises on physiognomy’. Therefore, the closest we can now come to picturing Jeake’s adult physiognomy are by the images of his appearance that arise in the reader’s mind through these written words. Any physiognomical likeness he may have borne to his wife and daughter, whose portraits have survived, seems somehow beyond us. Similarly, with regard to a phenomenon of pressing concern to some of Jeake’s contemporaries, we do not know whether he bore a ‘resemblance’ to a particular animal, such as Della Porta’s widely known late sixteenth-century image of the owl-man, shown in Illustration 1. In fact, when one considers the rest of Samuel Jeake’s self-description, it seems curious that he appears to have gone to more trouble to describe accurately some of the hidden aspects of his physiognomy than he did to describe his head and his face—such as the moles on his body and the lines on the palms of his hands: In my right hand was found the perfect Triangle composed of the Vital, Cephalick, & Hepatick Lines, all entire; but the Cephalica broken in my left hand. The Moles or Naevi five: Viz. 1. one under the right arm almost as high as the armhole. 2. one in the ² See Chapter 5. ³ See M. Schneider and R. Campe, Geschichten der Physiognomik (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1996).

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1. As Jeake was reading his copy of Saunders’ book, Giovanni Battista Della Porta’s famous ‘owl man’ was the subject of Charles Le Brun’s Conferences in Pairs, 1670–1. Giovanni Battista Della Porta, De humana physiognomonia (Vici Æquensis: Iosephum Cacchium, 1586), 59. Private collection.

left hand upon the Mount of Jupiter. 3. one upon the right side, under the short Ribs. 4. one (the largest) on the Abdomen. 5. one, at the left side of the right heel.⁴

And yet all of this continues to beg one very important question: so what? An observation recently offered by two contemporary historians put the same question in the following way: ‘Give rich and detailed accounts of physiognomy, passions, habits, and regimens, and you will invite from academic readers (at least) puzzled inquiries about what all this can possibly have to do with “knowledge itself?” ’⁵ Is there really any real historical significance to be seen in the short, lean, grey-eyed, and pale-faced physiognomy of an obscure seventeenth-century English merchant? As curious, or even irrelevant, as it may seem to many readers today, many of Jeake’s early modern contemporaries would have understood why he so carefully located the moles on his physiognomy. For in many of their eyes those moles still carried some deep significance. That meaning was often astrological, ⁴ An Astrological Diary of the Seventeenth-Century, ed. M. Hunter and A. Gregory (Oxford, 1988), 86, 89, 92, 95, 103, 105, and 117–18. ⁵ S. Shapin and C. Lawrence (eds.), Science Incarnate (Chicago, 1998), 2.

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sometimes medical, sometimes divine.⁶ Evidence of the early modern concern with this sort of meaning can be seen in the many books in circulation throughout Europe which dealt with the meaning of moles, wherever they were situated on one’s anatomy. The authors of those books on moles came from much further afield than mid-seventeenth century England. In the classically educated Renaissance mind, one of the main figures associated with moles was the renowned classical Greek figure of Melampus. Melampus was one of the most famous ‘seers’ in Greek mythology. He was credited with the ability to talk to the animals. His association with moles was the result of the fact that he was often confused in Renaissance minds with another ‘seer’ named Melampodis. Melampodis wrote on another distinctly physiognomical subject, the divination from tremors in the body. Their hybrid was the alleged author of De naevis, a treatise on divination by moles widely read throughout Renaissance and early modern Europe.⁷ Similarly, Renaissance and early modern readers could turn to the writings of the medieval Arab physician Haly Abenragel, one of the most influential astrologers in the medieval Christian West. And even closer to Jeake’s own day, there was the early modern Italian physician and moral philosopher Lodovico Settala (1522–1631). Settala’s act of publishing a tract on moles in 1605 might place him among the ranks of the hermeticists or even the superstitious ‘quacks’.⁸ Yet he was, in reality, a distinctly practical person. His influential political treatise, Reason of State, dealt with some of the problems of imperial Spanish government in the midst of the Counter-Reformation, and he combined his medical and political interests as public health officer for Milan. As cheap and crude as some of these texts on physiognomy, chiromancy, metoposcopy, and moles were, and they certainly became increasingly so as the period moved on, there were also many which were expensive and seriously illustrated. On 29 September 1670, just a few months before the date of the original form of this self-description, Samuel Jeake had taken a book from his father’s library. It was entitled Physiognomie, Chiromancie, Metoposcopie. It also included a section on moles. It was written, in 1653, by Richard Saunders, an astrological physician based in London. Although his place in the history of English astrology and medicine has been overshadowed by the much more famous figures of Simon Forman, Richard Napier, and William Lilly, Saunders was quite well known in his day. Among his influential friends he counted the ⁶ Philippo Picinello, Mundus symbolicus (Cologne, 1715), Index, q.v. Naevi. ⁷ Melampodis . . . Divinatio ex nævis corporis, in Girolamo Cardano, Metoposcopia (Paris, 1658). ⁸ Lodovico Settala, Labyrinthi medici extricati (Geneva, 1687).

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prominent Oxford dignitary Elias Ashmole, godfather to one of his children and the purchaser of Saunders’s library when the astrologer died in the 1670s. Long since forgotten, Saunders’s name lived on in English reading circles for quite some time after his death. Isaac Newton had copies of his work in his private library, and Benjamin Franklin was among the regular readers of an almanac that was still being published under Saunders’s name in the eighteenth century.⁹ In the copy of this book that Samuel Jeake was reading that day was a section devoted to moles in which young Jeake could have empirically examined those on his own body by comparing them with the diagram in Illustration 2. Indeed, as Jeake read, an English publisher was preparing a second, enlarged edition, no doubt encouraged by the news of the rekindled interest in the subject sparked by the Conférence on physiognomie and painting held in Paris that year by Louis XIV’s court painter, Charles Le Brun.¹⁰ The publisher was aiming upmarket by including a tasteful engraving of the moles of the face (Illustration 3). In fact, as we try to imagine and picture Samuel Jeake sitting in his library at home in East Sussex, surrounded by his books, his diary open on the desk before him, peering into his looking-glass, it is worth remembering that the image we conjure up formed part of the emblematic culture of early modern Europe, such as the German version of it which was published in 1536 (Illustration 4). The verse below it reads: A small stain or mole on the face is sooner seen than a large one on the body: The face is open in all places, the body hidden and only seen from the outside. By this emblem we can remember, that we make more of the smallest of vices noted in a Prince, than a large one in the thin man. The vices of those of base stature remain unknown. But if the Kings and Lords, in all Kingdoms and Provinces, are mean, it is soon known.

Thus, in that sense, at the very moment that Jeake turned to his looking-glass to contemplate the moles on his face, he became the living embodiment of a widely known hieroglyphic enigma found illustrated in many of the ‘emblem books’ that were such a feature of early modern European reading and visual culture. The seventeenth-century English playwright James Shirley seems to have experienced one of the social implications of having a mole. According to the seventeenth-century historian Anthony Wood, William Laud, while still President of St John’s and before becoming the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘had a very great affection’ for Shirley, ‘but then [Shirley] having a broad or large mole upon his left cheek which some esteemed a deformity, that worthy doc⁹ Jeake, Diary, 108.

¹⁰ J. Montagu, The Expression of the Passions (New Haven, 1994).

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2. Engraving of the moles on the entire male body, from Richard Saunders, Physiognomie, Chiromanice, Metoposcopie (1671), 311. (Photo: Warburg Institute.)

tor would often tell him that he was an unfit person to take the sacred function upon him, and should never have his consent to do so’. Here Laud was simply invoking what had long been a part of Canon Law (based on Leviticus 21: 16–24), by which any person with any sort of physical deformity was not allowed to be ordained.¹¹ The late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century medical debates on the significance of moles are perhaps the most obvious evidence of the seriousness with which they were examined by early modern ¹¹ See Chapter 1.

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3. Engraving of the moles on a woman’s face, from Richard Saunders, Physiognomie, Chiromanice, Metoposcopie (1671), 289. (Photo: Warburg Institute.)

physicians and the hitherto unexamined role that they played, both positively and negatively, in the construction of modern medicine. By the standards of the new, late seventeenth-century natural philosophy, Richard Saunders’s book could be said to have been something of an anomaly. Contrary to the apparently more progressive claims being put forward at the time by philosophers such as Hobbes about the arbitrary and purely conventional relationship in language between words and the things they represented, Saunders was claiming that physiognomy was a ‘natural language’ descended from Adam through the written language of Hebrew. What he meant by ‘natural language’ was one in which there was a mysterious, natural link, a

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4. An emblem, known throughout Europe, and formed around the contemplation in the mirror of the moles on one’s face, from Guillaume de La Perrière, Le théâtre des bons engins, auquel sont contenuz cent emblems (Lyon, 1536), No. 53. (Cliché Bibliothèque Nationale de France.)

‘resemblance’, between the signifiers and the things signified. Those with eyes to see and read these ‘natural signatures’ properly could unleash the magic and efficacious power of these words and so manipulate the properties they signified—in some cases with the help of the good angels. Just as against the grain of things ‘modern’ as that strange conception of the power of language, was the fact that the physics of the universe laid out in its pages contained no traces of the revolutionary heliocentric conception of the universe that Copernicus had announced to the world over a century earlier, in 1543. Equally retrograde were

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the mathematical calculations which it contained. For they were far from the new geometry that Galileo had claimed was the language in which the ‘book of nature’ was written, and so at odds with the very thing that young Jeake set himself to learn the following month, in October 1670. On the contrary, the content of Saunders’s book was shot through with ideas and material about the ‘natural magic’ of the ‘book of nature’ as understood in the Neoplatonic hermetic views of the English magus Robert Fludd and the Paracelsian-influenced protestant natural philosopher Johannes Alsted. In this ‘natural magic’ every human, indeed every natural body, was irradiated with the potentially malleable celestial influence of the seven planets and the twelve signs of the zodiac—their early modern version of the claim made by contemporary astronomers and astrophysicists that we are made of the ‘stuff ’ of stars. The mathematics of that natural magic was embedded in strange notions of Pythagorean number mysticism and ideas of the efficacious, numerical significance of Kabbalistic combinations of letters.¹² Moreover, besides this very different sort of physics and mathematics, the religious character of the material seemed equally at odds with the protestantism which underpinned the natural philosophy of the likes of Alsted or the dissenting protestantism of a merchant like Samuel Jeake. For the majority of Saunders’s text had been lifted verbatim from a French book published originally in 1620 by a French curé named Jean Belot. Belot was an expert in the body of Jewish mystical texts known as the Kabbalah. Belot’s interest in physiognomy and the Kabbalah was in part the result of the influence of two late fifteenth-century Italian humanists, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola. Between them, they had tried to forge a religious synthesis between a variety of different religious mysticisms. Besides advocating the texts that made up the Kabbalah, they also used the writings of the allegedly Egyptian sage Hermes Trismegistus. The resulting cocktail came to form a part of what was known in early modern Europe as the ‘hermetic philosophy’. This movement pre-dated Copernicus’s famous claim that it was the sun and not the earth at the centre of the universe. None the less, when the famous historian of science Alexander Koyré wrote of the ‘the desire to re-conquer for man that central place in the universe which mystical theology assigned him’, his observation could be used as an accurate description of many adherents of hermeticism. At the very least, that hermetic philosophy, the influence of which was clearly evident in ¹² Luca Gaurico, Operum omnium (Basle, 1576), 2. The number of manuscript ‘treatises on physiognomy’ bound with works on the sphere of Sacrobosco is striking. For example, Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 26.

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the book that Samuel Jeake read that day, can be seen, metaphorically speaking, as part of man’s attempt to place the sun at the centre of himself.¹³ That heavily illustrated tome of hermeticism by Richard Saunders was not the only book on the curious subject of physiognomy that the Jeakes had in their library. There were three more. Moreover, the tiny corner of the library that the four of them constituted was less provincial than it seemed.¹⁴ Although all of Jeake’s editions were in English, each one was a translation of an earlier text written in, and widely read throughout, mainland Europe. The first of the other three, a 1638 edition of a work entitled The Compost of Ptholomeus, had been around in cheap print in England since the Reformation Parliament of 1530. Essentially it was an anglicanized version of a much more widely known French catholic devotional handbook infused with Arabic and hermetic mysticism originally entitled the Compost des bergiers. People in France and Switzerland as well as in the German-speaking territories who could read books had been reading it in printed form from the late fifteenth century onwards.¹⁵ The third of Jeake’s four ‘books on physiognomy’ was entered in the library’s register as ‘Three books viz: of Palmestry, Physiognomy, Nat[ural] Astrology’. This was a 1598 English edition of a book written by an early sixteenth-century German priest-astrologer from Hain bei Darmstadt named Johannes Rosenbach (1467–1537). In the midst of the German Lutheran Reformation, with its promotion of a new anti-idolatrous theology of images, Rosenbach had not only absorbed some of Ficino’s ideas on language and magic, he had even changed his name to the much more hieroglyphical ‘Johannes de Indagine’ (Latin for ‘sign’). Indagine’s book, which fused physiognomy with ‘natural astrology’ (as opposed to the much more controversial, future-telling ‘judicial astrology’), had first appeared in 1522 in the form of a heavily illustrated Latin folio edition. It was immediately translated into the German vernacular, and by the late seventeenth century Indagine’s ‘book on physiognomy’ had been widely diffused in numerous languages and cheaper formats throughout early modern Europe, particularly among the Northern protestant countries, despite the fact that it was put on the Index by Pope Paul IV.¹⁶ ¹³ A. Koyré, De la mystique à la science, ed. P. Redondi (Paris, 1986), 21. ¹⁴ A Radical’s Books, ed. M. Hunter, G. Mandelbrote, R. Ovenden, and N. Smith (1999), 134, 206, 216, and 266. ¹⁵ Here begynneth the compost of Ptholomeus ([1530?]); Le compost et kalendrier des bergiers (Geneva, 1497); Der Schapherders Kalender (Rostock, 1523). ¹⁶ Johannes de Indagine, Introductiones apotelesmaticae (Strasburg/Frankfurt, 1522), 15; Die kunst der chiromantzey (Strasburg, 1523).

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The last of the four, entered in the register as ‘Natures chief Rarities’, was an unrecorded 1660 English publication of a medieval Latin tract written at the thirteenth-century court of the German King and Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II (1194–1250), by a Scottish natural philosopher named Michael Scot. Of the four ‘books on physiognomy’ in the Jeake library, Scot’s work was the most widely known. Written originally as part of an enormously influential, often copiously illustrated, encyclopaedic work on the nature of the entire cosmos by Scot entitled Liber introductorius, it had been in circulation throughout medieval Europe in illuminated manuscript form. The physiognomical section had made the transition to print as early as the 1470s.¹⁷ By the turn of the sixteenth century, it had seen a multitude of Latin and vernacular forms, and was still falling from European printing presses during Jeake’s lifetime. Between the 1640s and the 1660s numerous Dutch publishers, encouraged by a European-wide re-emergence of interest in Paracelsianism and things ‘occult’, were publishing it in very small pocket-size (octavo and duodecimo) formats bound with a work on generation and menstruation entitled On the Secrets of Women (De secretis mulierum) by the thirteenth century dominican theologian Albertus Magnus—teacher of Thomas Aquinas and himself an author of a ‘treatise on physiognomy’. When taken together, the strands of this small textual cobweb in the Jeake library which I have just outlined conveniently symbolize the fact that throughout Europe there was something of a now forgotten, but at the time still active, shared ‘canon’ of literature on the subject of ‘physiognomy’ in circulation from the beginning to the end of the early modern period. Those ‘books on physiognomy’ contained, among many other things, claims about the ‘occult’ properties of all natural bodies, not just the eyes or the moles of a human being, be it the ‘occult virtues’ of a particular plant, the physical and mental attributes of a certain planet or sign of the zodiac, the occult phenomena of the ‘antipathy’ and ‘sympathy’ that regulated the relationships between those natural bodies, and, more specific to the physiognomy of the human body, the actual meaning (as opposed to, but not always exclusive of an explanation of the physiological or humoral mechanics) of a human being’s physical features. The latter took the form of claims or ‘conclusions’ that red hair was a sign of anger; that large foreheads were a sign of intelligence; that eyebrows joined in the middle indicated a dangerous person; that deep-set hollow eyes were a sign of a liar, long fingers a sign of an artistic nature, large noses or large feet a sign of large genitalia—or not, as the case may be. As curious, ‘supernatural’, even ‘superstitious’ ¹⁷ Michael Scot, Physionomia (Venice, [c.1477]).

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as such claims may seem, one gets a sense of how widely and deeply these physiognomical ideas and the philosophical framework of the natural magic which supported them penetrated early modern European culture by considering the words of another contemporary historian: If a sense of supernatural power, a curiosity to test the secrets of the occult tradition, a willingness to consider the occult as intelligible, and a confidence in finding explanations for insensible agents were ways that Renaissance magic prepared the ground for seventeenth-century science, these were more a central feature of natural magic independent of hermeticism, Neoplatonicism, and Kabbalah than of the more religiously motivated ideas of magic.¹⁸

In his book entitled De homine (Milan, 1490), the fifteenth-century Italian humanist Galeotto Marzio (1427/8–90), whose interest in the religiously hazardous mixture of Neoplatonicism of Ficino and Mirandola was encouraged and protected by King Mattheus of Hungary and Lorenzo il Magnifico, wrote: The eyes are the windows of the soul: almost everyone knows what their colour, what their restlessness, what their sharpness indicates. Something worth mentioning, though, is that people with long eyes are malicious and immoral. And if the white of the eye is widely extended and visible all round, this shows shamelessness; if it is concealed, not visible at all, this shows unreliability.¹⁹

Marzio is, in fact, just one example of how, by the beginning of the early modern period, the natural magic of the written ‘physiognomony’ that had been inherited from the Middle Ages in a variety of linguistic forms, had come to be thought to contain the Egyptian, hieroglyphic vestiges of the original, perfect, divine language by which Adam had named all of nature. That ‘language’ had been lost in the Fall as a consequence of original sin but could, somehow, be recovered and used to improve the world and the people in it. Another example was Hagecius ab Hajek, an astrologer and natural philosopher employed in Rudolf II’s late sixteenth-century court. Hajek wrote a book on the physiognomical subject of metoposcopy (a topic which was also discussed in the book that Samuel Jeake read in 1670). In that work Hajek not only described the lines on the forehead that were the language of metoposcopy as ‘signatures of the highest architect’, ‘vestiges of the impression of God’, such was the innate iconicity of its language, he illustrated them (Illustration 5). In fact, for Hajek, physiognomony was a part of what one scholar has described as an ‘ancient theology’—so much so that he supported the divinity ¹⁸ N. H. Clulee, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy (1988), 240–1. ¹⁹ M. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford, 1988), 58.

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5. The innately visual language of physiognomy, including the lines on the forehead, often necessitated a pictorial representation in one form or another, from Hagecius ab Hajek, Aphorismorum metoposcopicorum libellus unus (Prague, 1564), 57. (Cliché Bibliothèque Nationale de France.)

of this physiognomical knowledge through quotations of passages of Scripture, such as the passage from Ecclesiastes 8: 1, ‘a man’s wisdom makes his face to shine’, which he placed on the title page of the book.²⁰ This view of the language of physiognomy was not the monopoly of authors of books on the subject. In the middle of the seventeenth century, Sir Thomas Browne spoke of the ‘characters’ found in the human face, the hands, and the forehead, indeed, all natural bodies, in exactly this way: for there are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry in them the motto of our Soules, wherein he that cannot read A.B.C. may read our natures. I hold moreover that there is a Phytognomy, or Physiognomy, not onely of men, but of Plants, and Vegetables; and in every one of them, some outward figures which hang as signes or ²⁰ Hagecius ab Hajek, Aphorismorum metoposcopicorum (Prague, 1564), 4–5; D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology (1972).

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bushes of their inward formes. The finger of God hath left an Inscription upon all his workes, not graphicall or composed of Letters, but of their severall formes, constitutions, parts, and operations, which aptly joyned together doe make one word that doth expresse their natures. By these Letters God cals the Starres by their names, and by this Alphabet Adam assigned to every creature a name peculiar to its Nature. Now there are besides these Characters in our faces, certaine mysticall figures in our hands, which I dare not call meere dashes, strokes, a la volee, or at randome, because delineated by a pencill, that never workes in vaine; and hereof I take more particular notice, because I carry that in mine owne hand, which I could never read of, nor discover in another.²¹

In seeing and describing the hieroglyphic nature of the outer world and the characters who populated it in this way, Sir Thomas Browne was simply the latest advocate of an understanding of the mystical language of physiognomy that was part of an ancient Hebraic exegetical tradition captured in one translation of Genesis 2: 19–20 as ‘and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof ’.²² In the book that young Samuel Jeake was reading that September day in 1670, Richard Saunders claimed that ‘you see the holy Scriptures full of Physiognomical expressions’, and discussed many of them in his preface. In so doing, Saunders claimed to have noticed something of a conspiracy: the fact that, with every successive translation of the Bible, the physiognomy that was such an important part of the original Hebrew version had been distilled out of it. For Saunders, St Jerome’s early translation was more physiognomical than any subsequent translations, but he suggested that the Hebrew original was the most physiognomical of all. He pointed out how, for example, in the Hebrew version, ‘God himself in Exodus for his Wisdom among the eleven Properties hath called himself, Great Nose . . . Longus Narium: as if he should say, Wise, Mercifull, and Long-suffering’.²³ There were many other physiognomical moments in the Bible which provided early modern writers with an authority with which to underpin this mysterious language and scientia of physiognomony. Two of the most popular were Isiah 3: 9, ‘the look on their faces testifies against them; they parade their sin like Sodom; they do not hide it’, or such as the passage from Job 37: 7 which the Elizabethan magus John Dee wrote out in Greek on the title-page of one of the ²¹ Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, ed. J.-J. Denonain (Cambridge, 1953), 90–1. ²² John Evelyn, Numismata (1697), 293. ²³ Richard Saunders, Physiognomie, Chiromancie, Metoposcopie (1653), Preface, sig. a1v and 139. The Hebrew cited by Saunders, ‘erekh apayim’, is normally translated as ‘slow to anger’. A literal translation would be long nose or long nostrils. See A Hebrew Lexicon of the Old Testament, ed. F. Brown, S. R. Driver, and C. A. Briggs (Oxford, 1955).

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numerous ‘books on physiognomy’ and ‘chiromancy’ which he owned: ‘He sealeth up the hand of every man that he may know his fate’.²⁴ Since at least the Middle Ages, physiognomony had formed part of sermons based on specific passages of Scripture, and on the early modern Continent, books were published dedicated entirely to the discussion of the meaning of such physiognomical passages in Holy Scripture.²⁵ Not all such passages were seen as so favourable to physiognomy. There were some passages of Scripture which could be interpreted as anti-physiognomical. In Wycliff ’s famous vernacular version of the Bible, he gave his translation of John 7: 24 a distinctly aphoristic twist, ‘Nile ye deme aftir the face, but deme ye a rightful doom’. But the fact that he felt his translation needed to be so evidently anti-physiognomical is significant enough.²⁶ Indeed, evidence that the physiognomy implicit in this passage was still an issue in the late seventeenth century can be seen in a 1677 sermon by Joseph Caryl, preacher to Lincoln’s Inn, rejecting what he claimed was a strict, chiromantical reading of the Hebrew for this passage: The Hebrew is, In the hand he will seal, or, sealeth every man. From which strict reading, some have made a very impious interpretation of this Text, thereupon grounding that (as most use it) most unwarrantable Art of Chiromancy, as if God did put certain Lines, Prints, or Seals upon the hand of every man, from whence it may be collected and concluded, what (as some call it) his Fortune or Destiny will be in the world. Which, as it is an opinion wicked in it self, so altogether heterogeneal to this place, the tendency whereof is not to shew how things shall work with men hereafter, but how they are often hindered or stopt in, or from their present work.²⁷

It is a passage made all the more revealing when one considers the holy physiognomical concerns expressed in the seventeenth-century English puritan literature on the family and civility, itself a part of the debate about the visibility of the invisible church in Samuel Jeake’s day: ‘The inward service of the heart therefore is not sufficient, unlesse it be expressed in the outward service of the body’: The visage is for the most part a Prognostication of Vertue or Vice . . . They that write of Physiognomie, discover certain conclusions demonstrable in the lines, and Symmetry of the face. And in Scripture we finde mention of the Proud, Angry, Wanton lookes; ²⁴ John Dee’s Library Catalogue, ed. R. J. Roberts and A. G. Watson (Cambridge, 1994), 109. ²⁵ J. Ziegler, ‘Text and Context: On the Rise of Physiognomic Thought in the Later Middle Ages’, in De Sion Exibit Lex et Verbum Domini de Hierusalem, ed. Y. Hen (Turnhout, 2001), 164 ff.; Franciscus Vallesius, De iis quae scripta sunt physicae in libris sacris (Lyons, 1592), 183–90. ²⁶ The Authorised version runs: ‘Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgement’. ²⁷ Joseph Caryl, An exposition with practicall observations continued upon the thirty-fifth, thirty-sixth, and thirty-seventh chapters of the Book of Job (1664), 478.

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because (by a Metonymie of the effect) thereby we bewray our Pride, Anger, Wantonnesse, &c.²⁸

The variety of different religious and philosophical (or epistemological) understandings of the language of physiognomony in Marzio, Hajek, Browne, and Saunders were in part a consequence of a controversial attempt to reconcile and synthesize a dominant Christianity with Egyptian and pagan Neoplatonic philosophy. It was a movement begun by the Italian humanists Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, and funded by Cosimo de Medici from the powerful banking family of Florence in the last quarter of the fifteenth century. A central part of their enterprise involved the translation and dissemination of a body of what they thought at the time to be an ancient Egyptian wisdom, slightly younger than the wisdom of the Hebrew patriarchs and prophets, but much older than Plato and the other philosophers of Greek antiquity, who had all—so the Renaissance magus firmly believed—‘drunk from its sacred fountain’.²⁹ As soon as the manuscripts containing it were discovered and brought to Cosimo de Medici’s attention, he felt them so important that he asked Marsilio Ficino to interrupt his epoch-making translation of the Greek manuscripts of Plato, which Cosimo had also recently obtained, in order to translate them immediately. Allegedly written by the ancient theologians Hermes Trismegistus, Orpheus, and Pythagoras, these texts, generally known as the Corpus hermeticum, were thought by Christian apologists to contain vestiges of the true Christian religion (prisca theologia). Some even claimed that they derived from no less a figure than Moses himself.³⁰ It is the influence of this hermetic movement upon the development of early modern European understanding and exploration of the audio-visual scientia of ‘physiognomy’ that will be the main subject of this work. Moreover, as this study will show, there was more to the spread of this ancient ‘Egyptian’ theology and the way in which it came to envelop physiognomony than literate humanists and manuscripts. At least forty years (and probably more) before these manuscripts arrived, a group of people appeared in early modern Europe practising a form of physiognomy— the ‘Egyptians’, or, as some called them, the ‘gypsies’. More to the point here is that the obscure English merchant Samuel Jeake provides us with clear evidence of the active exploration of ‘natural magic’ that was a pervasive part of the natural philosopher’s and the artist’s métier both during and long after ‘the great instauration’ of the allegedly more mathemati²⁸ John Downame, A guide to godlinesse (1622), 410; Matthew Griffith, Bethel (1633), 257. ²⁹ F. A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), 2. ³⁰ Walker, Ancient Theology, 1.

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cal, rational form of natural philosophy discovered in the course of the ‘scientific revolution’. Within that broader theme of the coexistence of, and the interaction between, the ‘magical’ and the ‘rational’ considerations and understandings of the ‘occult’ phenomena of the world, this book is a study of how the art of physiognomy became enmeshed in the spreading influence of that ‘Egyptian’ prisca theologia and Corpus hermeticum in early modern European culture. As medical as the subject of physiognomy is so often assumed to be, and indeed was, it will be argued that this should be understood from within the inter-disciplinary perspective of the history of Renaissance rhetoric, art, and poetry, or at least rhetoric used as a form of ‘medicine’. In other words, it will be argued that the art of physiognomy was part of the way in which Renaissance Neoplatonism ‘sought the Logos of a pre-text world using rhetorical and poetical tools’.³¹ In so doing it shows how, to put it simply and briefly, by the early seventeenth century, the language and rhetoric of the art of physiognomy became a form of mystical, self-transforming prayer, and by the beginning of the eighteenth century, simply a laughable, if amusing, game.

From the Fisnomy of the Microcosm to the Physiognomony of the Macrocosm From the very beginning of this work, readers need to understand one striking feature about the ancient physiognomical wisdom which these ‘books on physiognomy’ contained in the written and printed characters on their pages. In so doing I want to return to the phrase I used earlier when I spoke of the ‘audiovisual scientia of physiognomy’. For the moment, let us put aside their claims to be transmitting a part of the divine ‘Egyptian’ ‘language’ of an ancient theology that showed one the various ‘windows’ and ‘doorways’ into the soul of the individual as well as the soul of God’s created world. What I want to stress here is that each one of those works was, essentially, an attempt to capture, collect and organise in written and printed form, the conclusions and the grammar of a way of looking which, for the sake of brevity, might usefully be referred to at times as ‘the physiognomical eye’. In other words, what those books held frozen in textual form was a systematized audio-visual scientia—the divine or magical scientia of ‘physiognomy’, or, to use the more correct word to refer to it in its theorized form, ‘physiognomony’. ³¹ E. S. Watson, Achille Bocchi and the Emblem Book as Symbolic Form (Cambridge, 1993), 37.

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Furthermore, it was a scientia that appealed to the innate physiognomical consciousness of the human mind—a natural faculty of visual literacy referred to in the first edition of Cole’s English dictionary (1696) as ‘physnomy’: ‘Physiognomy: a discovering of men’s natures by their looks, also contracted to Physnomy’. A minor character in Andromana; or, The Merchant’s Wife (1660), an obscure Restoration play by an unknown author chosen at random, provides an indication of this visual faculty of ‘physnomy’ ‘in action’. At one point, when brought face-to-face with a rival, one character exclaims, ‘An honest fellow call you him? If he have not rogue writ in great letters in’s face, I have no physnomy.’ An indication of how ‘books on physiognomy’ tried to identify, indeed fuse, themselves with this innate faculty in the mind can be seen in one late fifteenth-century ‘book on physiognomy’ which claimed to contain the mystical wisdom of an illiterate shepherd: ‘Phyzonomy . . . ys oon scyens that shyppars kennys for to wnderstod the inclynacyon naturel good ore wyl of men & wemen & by sum syngys oonly in them oon for to be hold’. In both these aforementioned cases, the term ‘physnomy’ or ‘phyzonomy’ should be read as referring, not to the external signs, but to the internal, physiognomical instinct (‘fisnomy’). In the case of the late fifteenth-century shepherd at least, this skill was seen as a sign from God that he was blessed with this insight. It bore the influence of the Arabic notion of ‘fira¯sa’, described by one thirteenth-century Arabic physiognomist, Ibn Arabi (d. 1240), in the following way: ‘physiognomical intuition is the light transmitted by the word of the Prophet, the Leader, the Chosen Envoy’.³² For the hermeticist, one needed this inner light in order to see physiognomically. Through this light, the characters that constituted the words of the physiognomony printed on these pages had to be read, not simply with the physical eye but with the eye of the imagination and, as we shall see, the eye of memory. In stressing the natural magic of its language, many of the authors of these texts presented this printed physiognomical knowledge as an elaboration of exactly this natural, potentially divine, fisnomic faculty in the reader’s mind. In particular they saw this language, if not that innate faculty itself, as a living exegesis of the distinctly visceral, visual wisdom and common sense inherent in the aforementioned proverb known in various forms throughout early modern Europe and used as the title of this book, ‘the eyes are the windows of the soul’.³³ The passage from Marzio cited above is just one example. The proverb ³² The Kalender of Shepherdes, ed. H. O. Sommer (1892), sig. Kviv; M. J. Viguera, Dos cartillas de fisiognómica (Madrid, 1977), 31. ³³ The Church Father Lactantius was often associated with this proverb, De opificio dei, in Patrologiae Latina, ed. P. Migne, 217 vols. (Paris, 1844–55), VII, col. 38; Yates, Bruno, 7.

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itself took many different forms. In French it was often said that ‘the eyes are the mirror of the soul’. In 1504 the Italian professor of natural philosophy at Padua, Achillini, cited the Epistola ad Theodosium for the seemingly commonsense, but carefully worded, claim that that ‘the most intimate effect of the mind is betrayed by the face, it is announced in the front as in a mirror and is the image of the soul in the face’. In 1550, the Florentine humanist physician Simone Porzio coined his own version of it: ‘the eyes are the lanterns of the soul’. It was a common observation about the human eyes and face which was found in a wide variety of respected literature, be it poetry or Scripture. In 1601, in his book on the passions of the mind, the English Jesuit Thomas Wright quoted Ovid’s poetry to the same effect: ‘wherefore a Poet said wisely how hard it is, a fault with face not to bewray’. Wright complemented this by citing the Proverbs of Solomon ‘Cor hominis immutat faciem, siue bona siue mala: The heart of man changes his countenance, whether it be in good or euil’. He then interwove this with more general proverbial wisdom: according to the old proverb, Cor gaudens exhilerat faciem, a reioycing heart maketh merry the face. And questionlesse wise men often, thorow the windowes of the face, beholde the secrets of the heart, according to that saying of Salomon, Quomodo in aquis resplendent vultus prospicientium, sic corda hominum manifesta sunt prudentibus: as the faces of those which looke into waters shine vnto them, so the harts of men are manifest vnto the wise: not that they can exactly understand the hearts which be inscrutable, and onely open vnto God, but that by coniectures they may ayme well at them.³⁴

Whatever form it took, it was an observation based on the mysterious, ineluctable fact that, somehow, the characters of the human eyes and face made the realm of the ‘occult’ ‘manifest’. Such manifestations of the secrets of man’s heart in his physiognomy were part of the numerous empirically evident, but now uncapturable, ‘mira’ (as opposed to the miracles) of nature that one could catch glimpses of everyday and everywhere. To physiognomists such as Della Porta or Cardano, this was evidence of the ‘strange works of Nature’, a part of the traditional area of natural philosophy which dealt with the issue of ‘natural’, ‘preternatural’, or ‘magical’ (supernatural) causation. It was these physiognomical signs transmitted so evidently to the senses that the natural philosophers of this epoch-making period of ‘conceptual chaos’ and ‘categorical revolution’ set themselves the task to explain. Was the anger or intelligence emanating from a person’s eyes a prophetic sign of divine attributes, or merely the mechanical product of the mixture of the ‘sublunary elements’ which con³⁴ Bartholomaeus Cocles, Chyromantie ac physionomie anastasis . . . (Bologna, 1504), sig. Aaiii; Simone Porzio, De coloribus oculorum (Florence, 1550), 43; Thomas Wright, The passions of the minde in generall (1601), 49–50.

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stituted man’s physiology? Were they simply a consequence of the perceptual inaccuracy of the internal fisnomic sense itself through which they were experienced and perceived by the beholder?³⁵ To the visual literacy of those few early modern minds which had been transformed by the learning of a textual literacy and were open to persuasion, these ‘books on physiognomy’ offered to add a collection of authoritative, normative physiognomonical theory which complemented, or competed with, the physiognomical wisdom and knowledge embedded in the traditions of Holy Scripture and oral folk-lore. It was in the midst of all of this that the ‘magical’ power of the intuitive, physiognomical intelligence that formed the crossroads of their senses—their innate everyday-life ‘fisnomy’—was suspended as they made their way, literate and illiterate alike, through a predominantly face-to-face society. One way in which the early modern hermetic mind tried to systematize and make sense of this was through the metaphor of the totality of inter-connected correspondences that existed between the ‘macrocosm’ (the entire universe) and the ‘microcosm’ (man). It was this hermetic system that the English Neoplatonist Robert Fludd tried to visualize in the frontispiece to his encyclopaedia (Illustration 6). Yet whether or not these books contained traces of the ancient characters of the lost, universal, Adamic physiognomony that could be recovered and efficaciously tapped through the intricate pathways of the ‘occult’ hermetic labyrinth pictured by Fludd, they certainly contained the macrocosmic physiognomony of a universal, microcosmic fisnomy. The aforementioned description of the art of physiognomy as a way of looking needs to be emphasized from the outset in order to distinguish this study of ‘physiognomy’ from the recent trend for histories of ‘the body’. Physiognomical tracts certainly contain a great deal of information about how people understood their own and other people’s bodies. As such, many assume that the subject falls firmly within the post-modern realms of the history of corporeality. However, this present work is not a ‘history of the body’. Nor is it strictly speaking a close study of the changing understandings of the relationship between the body and the soul. Medieval and early modern discussions of the extent to which human beings and their alleged ‘free will’ were prisoners of a divinely pre-programmed, physiologically determined ‘complexion’, or an astrologically driven ‘inclination’, or debates about whether a person has some sort of ‘biologically’ innate as opposed to a learned talent for a particular vocation, are as important to understanding the intellectual, religious, social, and ³⁵ S. Clark, Thinking With Demons (Oxford, 1997), 251, 257, 263, 265.

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6. The hermetic route from the fisnomy of the microcosm to the physiognomony of the macrocosm, Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), ii. De Macrocosmi Historia (frontispiece), 1. (Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Rés 107538 (1–3). Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.)

cultural history of the art of physiognomy as they are for understanding contemporary debates about the nature and the working of human genes. However, in this work, detailed investigations of those philosophical issues are on the whole avoided, except for the light they bring to bear on a central theme of this work—the way in which a hermetic understanding of physiognomy, and the entire physics of the world that underpinned it, developed into a ‘technique’ of self-transformation that was, in itself, an empirical experiment in ‘applied physics’. By contrast, this study, like that hermetic technique, is

Introduction

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an attempt to reverse the perspective on the history of physiognomy and, approaching it through the history of reading, to posit that physiognomy as a part of the history of sound and vision, or even a history of the efficacy of art and poetry and music.³⁶ This ocular perspective is in part informed by what some historians call the ‘visual turn’ in contemporary historiography. Be that as it may, it is equally based on the fact that early modern writers on the subject were themselves familiar with the inherently visual nature of physiognomy. That innate visuality of the subject might explain why, in 1444, one early Renaissance scribe transcribed the word physiognomia as ‘visonomia’, just as it might clarify the form of some of the many English variants of the word found in the Oxford English Dictionary such as ‘vysonamy’, ‘visenomy’, ‘visiognomy’, and ‘visionogmi’. The writer of one late fifteenth-century English manuscript introduced his tract on physiognomy with the following words: ‘Here oues ceyteneu rewles of phisnomy to knowe by onely thoght when men lokes on any man of what condicions he es’. In 1550, the French author Antoine du Moulin made the connection much more explicit, defining physiognomy as ‘the knowledge that one has of the nature of each person by sight’.³⁷ Yet whilst this claim about the inherent visual nature of this ‘fisnomy’ needs to be understood from the start, it also needs to be qualified. This is due to the fact that an important element in the theory and practice of this art of physiognomating was the character of the sound of the voice. Many authors of ‘treatises on physiognomy’ followed the oldest Greek manuscript on the subject, the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica, and included a section devoted to the physiognomy of the voice. One seventeenth-century French author of an unpublished ‘manuscript on physiognomy’ was sensitive enough to the sonic qualities of physiognomy to have devoted an entire chapter to the physiognomy of silence. Furthermore, much evidence of the sonic aspect of physiognomy can be found beyond the pages of the ‘books on physiognomy’. Athanasius Kircher, the seventeenth-century Jesuit priest-philosopher, professor of mathematics and physics at the Collegio Romano, and famous for his work on hieroglyphics, provides one example. Kircher based a divinatory science on the physiognomy of sound, or ‘phonocritics’, that he called ‘Phonocriticam, seu Phonognomia’. A more practical example is that even complete blindness does not appear to have prevented the tutor of the son of the seventeenth-century English gentleman scholar Sir Kenelm Digby from physiognomating the ³⁶ B. Soldati, La poesia astrologica nel Quattrocento (Florence 1906, rep. 1986). ³⁷ London: British Library, MS Sloane 213, fol. 118v–119v; Antoine du Moulin, Physionomie naturelle (Lyons, 1550), 13.

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pupils under his supervision by the sound of their voices: ‘when he taught his scholars to declaim, to represent a tragedy, or the like, he knew, by their voice, whether they stood up or sat down, and all the different gestures and situations of their bodies; so that they behaved themselves before him with the same decency as if he had seen them perfectly’.³⁸ Even the most superficial glance at the canon of early modern European ‘books on physiognomy’ shows that, by the late seventeenth century, the sonic aspect of physiognomy had begun to disappear from the printed treatises on the subject. However, this was not a sign of its overall demise in the culture and society beyond the pages of those books. Sound did not just suddenly and simply stop meaning something and transforming people, however mysteriously it managed to do so in the first place. The eighteenth-century French materialist philosopher and physician La Mettrie, author of L’homme machine, provides a telling example of why not. As a prominent advocate of the modern, rational, mechanical philosophy that came to characterize Enlightenment science, La Mettrie is perhaps the last person historians might associate with the metaphysics of the misleadingly labelled ‘occult sciences’ like physiognomy. Yet in 1749 this arch automaton himself claimed that ‘alongside the physiognomy, the voice can help a Physician discover the character of his patients’. The fact that La Mettrie’s diagnostic medical gaze was concerned with the ‘character’ of the patient is significant enough for a physician at a time when learned medicine had become more concerned with what the English physician Thomas Sydenham called the ‘face of the disease’ than with the physiognomy of the patient. Even more striking is that La Mettrie, in his typically playful way, then explicitly cited a passage from the aforementioned writings of Athanasius Kircher: but the surest way would be to make them sing; the various nuances of the voice do not show themselves enough in talking; . . . But, you will say, what madness it is to make the sick sing! . . . One can judge characters by their voice, which is, according to Kircher, the first symbol of any character. Those people who have a high and strong voice and who always want to make themselves heard above all others, ordinarily reveal that they are endowed with the nature of the ass; they are indiscrete and petulant, just as we know that asses are indiscrete and petulant. Bass voices, very low voices, falsetto voices, or squeaky little voices appertain in the same way to different characters. The brutal man never has a sweet voice, and it is rare that a piercing voice is not caustic.³⁹ ³⁸ Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, MS Fr. 19953, fol. 53v; Athanasius Kircher, Ars magna lucis et umbrae, 2 vols. (Rome, 1646), i. 14; G. Douglas, Authentic Anecdotes (1829), 53. ³⁹ Thomas Sydenham, Opera omnia medica (Geneva, 1696); Julien Jan Offray de la Mettrie, Caractères des médecins (Paris, 1760), 97; Kircher, Ars magna, i. 144–6.

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As Sir Thomas Browne showed earlier, the sounds and visions of this early modern physiognomical way of looking and listening were not only experienced by people in the contemplation of the characters or ‘signatures’ of their fellow human beings. Physiognomy also burst into life through a person’s contemplation of the whole of nature’s natural bodies. In other words, physiognomy happened not only between people but also between people and nature, and between people and visual and sonic representations of nature—even representations of those natural philosophers who were issuing in a new conception of nature so different from the one that underpinned the ‘natural magic’ of physiognomy. In a letter to Thomas Hobbes from his French secretary dated 11 July 1645, Samuel Sorbière told Hobbes that he had asked de Martel to send him portraits of Hobbes, Gassendi, and Mersenne, ‘for I am moved and impelled to be virtuous not only by writings but also by the faces of great men; I feel, as it were, an emanation, a natural force which radiates from them to me’. The Italian hermeticist Giordano Bruno, executed by the church for his allegedly heretical Egyptian philosophy in 1600, would have claimed this as a part of ‘magic’, an example of ‘the virtues which transmitted themselves from subject to subject’. Some of them were manifest, such as heat and cold, whilst others were ‘occult’ or hidden, ‘such as joy or sadness, desire or disgust, fear or audacity . . . or those impressions produced by images thanks to the “intellectual” faculty with which man is endowed.’ For Bruno, it was this magic that was discernible in the way that ‘nature had imprinted in all things a sort of interior spirit (or, if one prefers, an internal sense) by which all species recognise their most redoubtable enemy thanks to a sort of signature’.⁴⁰ These words of Giordano Bruno are evidence of the fact that, as instinctive and as unscientifically subjective as such fisnomical experiences of nature may have been to some natural philosophers, and still appear to art historians, in other early modern eyes and ears it was a way of looking and listening that was theoretically underpinned by an entire physics. Indeed, despite its much misunderstood reputation both then and now as a ‘pseudo-science’ or a ‘natural magic’, physiognomy, be it in its Neoplatonic or its Christian Aristotelian form, was in fact one of the most sophisticated of sign theories of the early modern period.⁴¹ The medical theories of the German physician Paracelsus, what he called ‘Astronomia’ provide one early sixteenth-century example of the theories built around this instinct. ⁴⁰ The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, ed. N. Malcolm, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1994), i. 123; Giordano Bruno, De la magie, ed. D. Sonnier and B. Donné (Paris, 2000), 19–20. ⁴¹ I. Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 2002), ch. 8.

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The Astronomia of Paracelsus was very different from the new astronomy for which the Danish natural philosopher Tycho Brahe came to be most widely known, notwithstanding Brahe’s interest in and sympathy with Paracelsianism. In Paracelsus’s eyes, astronomy was a philosophy based on the knowledge of the invisible or the ‘occult’ aspect of nature, the central concept of which was ‘gestin’, or ‘star’. This notion of ‘gestin’ referred to the fundamental sidereal influence that, in Paracelsus’s understanding, pervaded and animated all material things. ‘Gestin’ somehow animated the actual stars, the earth, the elements and all its various bodies. At the same time, it was also the source of the ‘gestin’ or ‘star’ of man’s ‘inner light’, what Paracelsus also called a lumen naturae. It was through this ‘inner light’ that man experienced and perceived the signs of all of nature’s natural bodies—what Paracelsus called ‘signatum’. In Paracelsus’s theoretical system, signatum was one of the seven (sometimes Paracelsus said there were nine) ‘religions’ (or ‘faculties’) that constituted his astronomia. The ‘religion’ of ‘signatum’ was constituted by three things: habitus (synonymous in Paracelsus’s theories with what he sometimes called ‘proportion’); chiromancy; and physiognomy.⁴² Paracelsus’s ‘gestin’ had striking parallels with Marsilio Ficino’s notion of ‘spiritus’, just as his ‘signatum’ had with Ficino’s ‘religion of the world’. It was in many ways the antithesis of the seventeenth-century materialism and ‘mechanical’ philosophy that came to dominate natural philosophy in the wake of Descartes and a reinvigorated Lucretius, just as much as it was the source of inspiration for the Romantic visions of a ‘re-enchanted’ world. This ‘physics’ was the antithesis of that which Descartes was to use to underpin his understanding of the relationship between mind and body. For Descartes followed in the wake of the tradition of people like the Montpellier physician Jacques Fontaine. Following upon the anatomical work of Vesalius, Fontaine, like many other physicians, tried to approach the epistemological difficulties created by the occult qualities which the art of physiognomy somehow made manifest by focusing his investigation on what he called the ‘subalternate physics’ of physiognomy in terms of the ‘sublunary things’. That is to say he took what were understood to be the four ‘principal qualities’ (hot, cold, dry, and moist) and their secondary compounds, detached them from all astrological influence, and used the ordinary qualities involved with the Galenic doctrine of the temperament (based on the workings of the four humours) and Vesalian anatomical structures to explain the nature of the soul. William Harvey’s famous discovery of the circulation of the blood was a radical break ⁴² Paracelse. De la magie, ed. L. Braun (Strasburg, 1998), 18; Paracelsus, Opera (Strasburg, 1603), ii. 365.

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with this sort of explanation, but primarily in terms of the actual working of the body’s mechanics, not the basic, sublunary framework itself.⁴³ In his Encyclopaedia (1630), Johannes Alsted proposed a very different theorized physiognomy, which aimed at systematizing and understanding the same phenomenon of magic described by Giordano Bruno. In Alsted’s system of natural philosophy, physiognomy was the seventh part of physics, defined universally as ‘that which explains the nature of natural bodies from certain signs’. Physiognomy was that part of physics which provided ‘a way of knowing the internal affections of natural bodies through signs’.⁴⁴ As for the Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno, those physiognomical signs were to be found throughout the natural world, not just on the human body—from the size, shape, and colour of an apparently lifeless stone or a person’s motionless foot, to the light, the colour, and the motion of the natural bodies in the sky or the way a person walked. In Alsted’s universe, there was not only a human physiognomy (what Alsted called physiognomia anthropologia), there was a celestial physiognomy, a meteorological physiognomy, a mineralogical physiognomy, a botanical physiognomy, and a theriological (animal/zoological) physiognomy. Indeed, the implications this had for the literature and the ‘psychology’ of the period can be seen in the fact that there was even a physiognomy of the metaphysical archetypes of man which Alsted called physiognomia orta. The visual field of this part of the physiognomical eye involved the contemplation of the range of human ‘characters’, from the poet to the coward and from the hero to the gambler. It was these ‘characters’ that constituted the innate types or forms of the human condition so fundamental, not only to the workings of the physiognomical eye but also to the history of poetry from Chaucer to Blake, as well as the history of theatre, be it the stock characters of the Italian commedia dell’arte or the epochmaking acting technique of the eighteenth-century English actor David Garrick. In the eyes of many, these characters were understood within the natural magic of the mechanics of the celestial influence of the planets and the stars. ‘Books on physiognomy’ were marginal in early modern libraries and in early modern culture more generally. Physiognomical perception might seem primitive to art critics, and the subject of physiognomy may seem recherché to contemporary historians and readers. However, in early modern eyes, whether they could read books or not, ‘physiognomy’ was a central, if not an allpervasive phenomenon of their encounter with the universe. One late sixteenth-century English schoolbook defined physiognomy very simply as ⁴³ Jacques Fontaine, Phisiognomia Aristotelis (Paris, 1611), 7, 71. ⁴⁴ Johannes Alsted, Encyclopaedia septem tomis distincta, 4 vols. (Herborn, 1630), ii. 767–80.

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‘knowledge by the visage’.⁴⁵ For all that the ‘characters’ to which it gave rise may have been ungraspable, ephemeral phenomena intuited in the blink of an eye, just how ubiquitous was this ‘knowledge by the visage’ can be seen in the fact that everyone and everything under the early modern sun had a ‘physiognomy’ by which it could be known—including the sun itself. In Alsted’s system, this was more than what we today understand by a metaphor. For Alsted, the contemplation of the signatures of these potentially efficacious physiognomies of the macrocosm and the microcosm together constituted what he understood to be the seventh part of theoretical physics, something he called ‘collative physics, or, physiognomy’. Notwithstanding the specificity of the intellectual parallels of Alsted’s physics with the Paracelsian ‘doctrine of signatures’, or Ficino’s spiritus, or Bruno’s ‘soul of the universe’, or the even older notion of the ‘book of nature’, what is important to note here is that it was this physiognomony, this ‘collative physics’, that the 18-year-old Samuel Jeake was reading in Saunders’s ‘book on physiognomy’ in September 1670. For at the very same time, it was this ‘collative physics’, and as such an entire way of looking at and listening to, indeed being with, the world that was being eroded or at least transfigured under the growing influence and establishment of another, allegedly more rational, type of physics perpetuated by the seventeenth-century’s new natural philosophers. The advocates of that new natural philosophy were themselves by no means blind to the sounds and visions of this physiognomical universe. As Sorbière and La Mettrie showed, they too had fisnomy. However, the knowledge with which that innate physiognomical intelligence (their fisnomy) provided them was an aspect of their encounter with nature that they could not fit into their rational, scientific, framework. In other words, unlike Paracelsus and Alsted, they could not get from fisnomy to physiognomony. One such was Robert Boyle. In 1684, while contemplating water, Boyle had something of a physiognomical epiphany: And I have sometimes fancy’d, that there may be a kind of Physiognomy of many, if not most, other natural Bodies as well as of humane faces, whereby an attentive and experienc’d considerer may himself discern in them many instructive things, that he cannot so declare to another man, as to make him discern them too.⁴⁶

Boyle evidently felt the visual impulse of his physiognomical intuition. Yet, despite its evident empirical outer garments, the knowledge or truth offered by ⁴⁵ Edmund Coote, The English schoole-maister (1596). ⁴⁶ Robert Boyle, Short memoirs for the natural experimental history of mineral waters (Oxford, 1684), 46–7.

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this physiognomical discovery seemed the very antithesis of the objective of the new ‘science’. These physiognomical sensations, which Boyle experienced in his encounter with the faces and the world of nature around him, provided him with ‘many instructive things’. However, they could not be made into scientific knowledge because he could not demonstrate or make manifest to another person the knowledge and insight those ‘instructive things’ provided so as to make that other person see them in the same way that Boyle thought he could incontrovertibly demonstrate a vacuum to an audience of invited eyewitnesses.⁴⁷ And yet, ironically, it was the physiognomical experience and interpretation of the honourable and trustworthy presence of the physiognomy of Boyle’s persona that contributed to the trust and belief he inspired in the eyewitnesses to his distinctly theatrical experiments. The words of one of his contemporaries, Izaak Walton, echoing the aforementioned Samuel Sorbière, are again evidence of how this also extended to the contemplation of their portraits: ‘the beholder . . . shall here see the Authors Picture in a natural dress, which ought to beget faith in what is spoken: for, he that wants skill to deceive, may safely be trusted’. As one contemporary historian of the period has written, ‘the presentation of self as modest, sober, restrained, tolerant, and unconcerned for fame was considered effectively to enhance the credibility of what one claimed’.⁴⁸ Or, as one of the two old proverbs in terms of which the entire history of physiognomy could be conceived said, fronti multa fides—‘much faith in the face’; the other being fronti nulla fides—‘no faith in the face’. One result of this reconsideration of man’s physiognomical sensibility was a change in the intellectual status of physiognomy among the opinions of the seventeenth century’s most established natural philosophers. Yet that does not mean that the history of physiognomy can be understood by talking of it in terms of the decline of an antiquarian ‘superstition’ and the rise of a progressive science.⁴⁹ The intellectual light and ‘empirical’ experiences of the natural magic of the ‘occult’ physiognomical universe were not simply and universally obscured and numbed by the luminosity and mechanistic logic of the new rising sun of rationality. Natural philosophers like Boyle only distanced their scientific selves from a certain type of physiognomy, as the more hermetic Bruno and Kircher did so themselves. Locke could still see and sense the fear in a pupil’s eyes. In his writings on education Locke suggested that sheer wilfulness and obstinacy in a child was to be met with whipping and admonition, ‘till the ⁴⁷ S. Schaffer and S. Shapin, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton, NJ, 1985). ⁴⁸ S. Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago, 1994), 221–2. ⁴⁹ C. Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton (Cambridge, 1982), 1.

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Impression of it on the Mind were found legible in the Face, Voice and Submission of the Child’.⁵⁰ Indeed, those new natural philosophers who did reject ‘physiognomy’ out of hand as superstitious rubbish were contradicting part of the revolutionary intellectual vision of one of their mentors, Francis Bacon. In his scheme of things, as it would later be for Kant, physiognomy, for all it was an aspect of ‘natural magic’, was a genuine portion of the ‘continent of natural philosophy’, a genuine knowledge or ‘erkennen’ as Kant called it. It may not have been a science according to the new notion of what a science should or could be, but it was not to be amputated and discarded. How could anyone ever amputate or discard anything as simple and basic as wondering about the weather? In Bacon’s eyes, physiognomy, like its sister art the interpretation of dreams, ‘have of later time been used to be coupled with superstitious and fantastical arts, yet being purged and restored to their true state, they have both of them a solid ground in nature’.⁵¹ In Bacon’s opinion, one feature of that restoration required an investigation of the relationship between body and mind which physiognomy self-evidently articulated, less in terms of ‘discovery’ and more in terms of the new sense of a non-astrological, environmental, and cultural causality of ‘impression’—as evident in the passage from Locke just cited. Not that the explanations offered by such investigations can unproblematically be called correct. Whilst Bacon would not have seen Samuel Jeake’s shortness as a sign of anger or impatience, his own more environmental, physiological explanation would have raised as many questions as it answered. Notwithstanding, this environmental approach gradually gave rise to a new form of ‘natural history’. Robert Boyle’s model for writing a natural history of a county or region suggested first taking into account the climate, followed by the Hippocratic triptych of airs, waters, and places. Then the inhabitants themselves are to be consider’d, both Natives and Strangers, that have been long settled there; particularly their Stature, Shape, Features, Strength, Ingenuity, Dyet, Inclination, that seem not due to Education. As to their Women, their Fruitfulness or Barreneness, their easie or hard Labour, with their Exercises and Dyet; the Diseases both Men and Women are subject to, peculiar to themselves, compared with their Dyet, Air, &c. that do influence them.⁵²

Yet just how one was to differentiate between those aspects of their personae ‘that seem not due to Education’ Boyle did not state. Physiognomically speak⁵⁰ W. A. L. Vincent, The Grammar Schools (1969), 64. ⁵¹ Francis Bacon, Collected Works, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, 7 vols. (1857–9), III.i, 368. ⁵² Robert Boyle, General heads for the natural history of a country (1692), 9.

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ing, whilst these histories do not appear to have ever confined one particular form of the eyebrow with one particular moral characteristic and one particular region, none the less, these allegedly scientific investigations were repeating at the level of natural history the sort of ‘loose’, physiognomical connection found in astrology or humoral theory and their respective connections between a handful of physical features and a handful of vaguely related metaphysical features. Moreover, those investigations were the early modern predecessors of Darwinian evolutionism. If the latter is an intimation of the contribution of the role of thinking about physiognomy in the birth of ‘modern science’, a more ‘esoteric’ form of physiognomy can also be said to have contributed to the ongoing definition of the parameters of that developing scientific knowledge of nature. For side by side with the developments in the new natural philosophy, there was a continuous and developing conception of the more Neoplatonic hermetic physiognomical way of beholding the world and its ‘occult’ properties. These very different forms of physiognomy can be traced across the entire early modern European period: be it through seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists like Henry More; or the religious mystics of the post-Reformation period, such as the German mystic Jacob Boehme, the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg, and on the eve of the French Revolution and end of the early modern period, the Swiss Pietist minister and physiognomist Johannes Caspar Lavater.⁵³ These apparent mysticisms should not be thought of as purely ‘theological’ and examined as if they were detached from more rational scientific inquiry. In fact, even the so-called ‘scientific’ endeavours in this period were themselves still founded upon primarily religious notions. Indeed, with the dawn of Romanticism, both the sensitivity to, and the intellectual category of, the ‘physiognomy’ of a natural body found themselves once more on the horizon of religious, aesthetic, and scientific sensitivities and investigations. Lavater himself asked rhetorically ‘is not all nature physiognomy?’ The influential investigations into natural history by the famous German natural philosopher Alexander von Humboldt furnish just one notable example of a post-Baconian natural history in which a concept of physiognomy had gradually been cultivated. In his famous book Lavater had expressed a hope that enlightened scientific progress would one day establish a scientific physiognomy which would be able ‘to calculate and determine the forms of heads according to the principle of Physics and Mathematics’. Physiognomy, as we have seen, had long been linked to mathematics via Pythagorean number mysticism and Kabbalistic ⁵³ A. Koyré, La philosophie de Jacob Boehme (Paris, 1929); Jan Hall, ‘In Swedenborg’s Labyrinth,’ unpublished Ph.D. thesis (University of Uppsala, Sweden, 1995), pt. III.

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numerology very different from the concept of mathematics developed in the early modern Europe of Galileo. Yet even this new mathematics did not mean the end of a mathematical physiognomy. In fact, in the work of the Dutch anatomist Petrus Camper (1722–89), Lavater’s dream of the mathematicization of physiognomy had already begun.⁵⁴ What all of this shows is that conflicts over the allegedly mystical language of ‘physiognomy’, as well as the claims made for it being the original language of man before the Fall, were part of the history of the religious turmoil of early modern Europe. Debates over the nature of physiognomical knowledge were part of the history of the conflicting natural philosophies of the period. Different understandings of the ‘physiognomy of man’, the ‘physiognomy of nature’, and the ‘physiognomy of representations of nature’ constitute a hitherto unexamined element of early modern moral philosophy, natural history, and art history. Historiographically speaking, all of these form part of a number of modern grand narratives, be it the Weberian notion of the ‘disenchantment of the world’; Thomas Kuhn’s notion of a ‘paradigm shift’ in science from a qualitative to a mathematized and probabilistic approach to nature; Foucault’s argument about an epistemic shift from a grid of correspondences to a theory of representation; Arthur Lovejoy’s famous study of the ‘great chain of being’; Daston and Park’s notion of the cyclical life of ideas; or Warburg’s ‘historical psychology of human expression’. What is being emphasized in this study is that physiognomy is a subject that has to be understood in terms of the coexistence and the reciprocal relationship of the rational and the magical, and in terms of the innovative role that investigations into the so-called ‘magical’ and ‘occult’ played in the birth of modern art and science.⁵⁵ For all the seeming marginality and recherché nature of the subject of physiognomy, its history provides a micro-arena in which were played out some of the most fundamental religious, philosophical, artistic, and cultural changes that occurred between the autumn of the Middle Ages and the dawn of Romanticism. Indeed, as this study will try to indicate, not the least of those transformations was the role of physiognomy in the debate about the changing and changeable nature of the human self. As one author of a book on physiognomy put it: ‘my end aimed at herein is . . . to inform the Reader of that ⁵⁴ J. C. Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, 3 vols. (1789), i. 28, ii. 133; Petrus Camper, Dissertation physique (Utrecht, 1791). ⁵⁵ M. Weber, ‘Science as Vocation’, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York, 1946), 155; T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn. (Chicago, 1970); M. Foucault, The Order of Things (1974); A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cambridge, Mass., 1936); L. Daston and K. Park, Wonder and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York, 1998).

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ancient adage Nosce teipsum, of which Plato affirms, Difficillima res est, seipsum cognoscere [it is the most difficult thing, to know oneself ]. For most men are a terra incognita [unknown earth] to themselves’.⁵⁶ That this continued to be so throughout and beyond the period dealt with in this study can be seen in the work of the early nineteenth-century scientists Gall and Spurzheim. For their early nineteenth-century phrenology or ‘physiognomical system’ was nothing other than an attempt by modern science to redefine the human self: This system is commonly considered as one according to which it is possible to discover the particular actions of individuals: it is treated as an art of prognostication. Such, however, is not the aim of our enquiries: we never treat of determinate actions: we consider only the faculties man is endowed with, the organic parts, by means of which these faculties are manifested, and the general indications which they present. The object of this new psychological system, therefore, is to examine the structures, the functions and the external indications of the nervous system in general, and of the brain in particular. Thus does this science especially contribute to the knowledge of human nature.⁵⁷

However, it was not simply the materiality of the self that was being redefined, it was also the metaphysical side of the self. As we saw earlier, the physiognomical self in the work of Alsted was structured by the ‘characters’ that constituted what he called physiognomia orta. In the work of the early nineteenth-century scientist Alexander Walker, Physiognomy Founded on Physiology (1834), those ‘characters’ had been replaced by what he called ‘the 5 Principal Varieties of the Human Species’. Yet, despite the continuous tradition of this physiognomical view of the ‘occult’ properties of man and nature in the early modern period, and notwithstanding its coexistence and constant interplay with the ever-evolving rational and scientific conception of the same man in the same universe, Boyle’s aforementioned reaction to his own physiognomical sensibility is none the less an indication of a turning-point. That turning-point could be helpfully, if too neatly, characterized as the moment when physiognomy was shifted out of the realm of reason and into, temporarily at least, the realm of ‘curiosity’. The subject of physiognomy had traditionally formed part of the long-standing interest in ‘secrets’ and problemata out of which this later interest in ‘curiosities’ developed. Early modern authors of ‘books on physiognomy’ often introduced their subject in terms of the tradition of its being some sort of marvel or curiosity. The standard way of doing this was to speak of the wonderment of the variety and infinite particularity of faces in the world, of the fact that there were no ⁵⁶ Saunders, Physiognomie (1653), sig. b2v. ⁵⁷ The Physiognomical System of Drs. Gall and Spurzheim, 2nd edn. (1815), 1.

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two faces in the world which were exactly alike. Indeed, for Athanasius Kircher, as for Giordano Bruno, this issue of the infinite variety of different faces, and the particularity of each person this fact expressed, underpinned the falsity of certain forms of the scientia of physiognomy.⁵⁸ None the less, in Robert Boyle’s eyes, for all there was something in physiognomy, it seemed to be an inexplicable aspect of nature. To that extent it at least deserved the then still respectable intellectual status of ‘curiosity’—at least until things were settled by those who had taken it upon themselves to do so. Boyle’s observation about the physiognomy of water was a sign that the rationality underpinning the new scientific investigations was refocusing the natural philosophical gaze. As the tangible realms of the seemingly more everyday experiences of the physiognomical consciousness discernible with the naked eye receded from its sight, so an entire, hitherto invisible, world was made increasingly more visible with the aid of the microscope, and its ‘magical’ workings were made increasingly more intelligible by the new mechanical philosophy. In fact, we can go further than this and say that, as Boyle’s use of the term ‘fancy’ intimates, the shifting of physiognomical knowledge—along with the hermetic view of nature with which it had come to be associated—from the realms of ‘reason’ to the realms of ‘curiosity’ was only a temporary stop on the way to their being permanently shifted into what was for many the more disreputable realm of the ‘imagination’—that is until the Romantic poets and painters made the imagination respectable once again, and Romantic scientists tried to conquer the hitherto unmanageable realms of physiognomy, despite Kant’s warnings. In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant’s explanation of why physiognomy, whilst it was a part of erkennen, could never become a science is something that Boyle himself may have been able to accept: If we are supposed to put our trust in someone, no matter how highly he comes recommended to us, we first look him in the face, especially in the eyes, so as to search out what we can expect from him. This is a natural impulse, and his repugnant or attractive air decides on our choice or makes us suspicious even before we have inquired about his morals. So it is incontestable that there is a characterisation by physiognomy. But it can never become a science, because the peculiarity of a human form, which points to certain inclinations or powers of the person under observation, cannot be grasped through conceptual description but only by intuitive illustration and presentation, or ⁵⁸ Pompeo Gaurico, De sculptura liber (Antwerp, 1609), 65; Hajek, Aphorismorum metoposciporum, sig Aii; Giordano Bruno, Opere Italiane ed. E. Canone, 4 vols. (Florence, 1999), 1231–4; Oeuvres Complètes, VI Cabale du Chevale pegaséen, trans. T. Dagron (Paris, 1994), 160; Kircher, Ars Magna, II.i, 96; Clark, Demons, 267 ff.

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by an imitation of it. This is how the human form in all its varieties, each of which is supposed to point to a particular inner quality within the man, is displayed to judgement.⁵⁹

This epistemological realignment of an ontological, physiognomical, experience—of the self and the physiognomical universe of which it was the centre—is what underlies the more wide-ranging ‘shift’ that will be alluded to throughout this book as the change from praying to playing.

Physiognomy in Libraries As ‘unbookish’ as the subject ultimately is, much of this present monograph will focus on a very specific form of physiognomy—physiognomy in books (physiognomony). However, rather than being an intellectual history of the different forms of physiognomy presented by the authors of those books, this study will be based on the following, more anthropologically oriented, question: what exactly was the place of the aforementioned common canon of ‘books on physiognomy’ in the reading (and visual) culture of early modern Europe? As will become evident, answering that question provides an insight into how this physiognomical way of ‘reading’ the universe functioned in society and culture at large beyond, but not always entirely independent of the books on the subject. Indeed, even before we open a single ‘book on physiognomy’, the libraries in which those books were placed can tell us much about the history of physiognomy in early modern reading culture. The French historian Daniel Roche once asked a distinctly physiognomical question about a library. It is a question in which literary historians will hear an echo of the contemporary debate about ‘intentionality’ and the ‘death of the author’: ‘is a library the state of a soul?’⁶⁰ Of course, not everything under the early modern sun was to be found in a book or a library, as the innately visual and sonic aspects of ‘physiognomy’ indicate. None the less, the contents of a library, just as much as its form, can reveal much about the mental universe of its owners, as well as the universe in which they thought they lived. Samuel Jeake’s father, being a methodical man, made a ‘register’ of all the books in his library—organized, as his modern mathematical inclination would have it, according to the new-fangled, mathematical, notion of ‘size’. ⁵⁹ Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. M. J. Gregor (The Hague, 1974), 161. ⁶⁰ D. Roche, ‘Un Savant et Sa Bibliothèque au XVIIIe siècle’, Dix-Huitième Siècle, 1 (1969), 44–88.

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That register may provide little idea of how the Jeake library looked or what specific books from his collection Jeake senior actually opened and when. However, its recent editors have described it as ‘one of the most remarkable library catalogues to survive from the early modern period . . . remarkable for the view of Jeake’s mental world revealed by its content’.⁶¹ As the following brief analysis of five different early modern libraries will reveal, Samuel Jeake was not unusual in having some ‘books on physiognomy’ in his library. In fact, these five libraries can be used as a microcosm of the changing place of ‘books on physiognomy’ in some quite specific areas of early modern reading culture. Taken together, the changes which they reveal add further support to the argument put forward in this study that the place of physiognomy in the human mind was shifted from reason to imagination, and that the nature of reading it in books shifted from praying to playing. Take, for example, the Italian Renaissance scribe Laurentius Benincontri, who finished transcribing a manuscript on the art of physiognomy for the Medici library on 10 May 1477. It was bound with other works on astrology and divination written by Alcabitius, the tenth-century Arab astrologer (d. 967), one of the most famous of astrologers in medieval Europe, whose works had long been used to teach astronomy at medieval universities.⁶² Today, from the ‘tavoletta’ (tablet of contents) attached to the side of the ‘pluteus’ (reading bench) designed for the library by Michelangelo in 1571, one can still see that this manuscript was chained to the bench marked ‘Philosophi Latini’. More significant is the fact that it was chained alongside two other works which contained physiognomy. The first of those was a fifteenth-century manuscript of Albertus Magnus’s Opera omnia. The other was a fifteenth-century manuscript version of a work of Arabic mysticism thought at the time to be by Aristotle, the Liber de secretis secretorum. Even more to the point for this study of the influence of Neoplatonism on the art of physiognomy is that all of these works were chained next to Marsilio Ficino’s epoch-making Neoplatonic hermetic writings.⁶³ In 1580, over a century after Benincontri had transcribed that manuscript, and around the same time as it was being rebound by the Medicis and placed in their newly designed Laurenziana, Gabriel Harvey (1550?–1630), the English writer and friend of Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser (1552/3–99), described the libraries and reading habits of ‘owr vulgar Astrologers’, especially those he termed ‘Cunning men or Artsmen’: ⁶¹ Jeake, A Radical’s Books, p. xiv. ⁶² See Statuti delle Università e dei Collegi dello Studio Bolognese, ed. C. Malagola (Bologna, 1888), 276. ⁶³ Florence: Bibliotheca Medicea Laurenziana Ms Plut. XXIX.3, fols. 59r–61v.

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I have heard sum of them name Jon de indagine. Theise be theire great masters: & this in a manner theire whole librarie . . . Erra Pater, their Hornebooke. The Shepherds Kalendar, their primer. The Compost of Ptolomeus, their Bible. Arcandum, their newe Testament. The rest, with Albertus secrets, & Aristotles problems Inglished, their great Doctours, & wonderfull Secreta secretorum.

All but one of the texts mentioned by Harvey contained physiognomy, two of them were in the Laurenziana in Florence in 1571, and three of them were on the late seventeenth-century shelves of Samuel Jeake’s library. Hence, a century after Ficino’s Neoplatonic hermeticism began to infuse understanding of ‘physiognomy’, sixteenth-century ‘books on physiognomy’ had become the Bible and New Testament for English ‘artsmen’ and ‘cunning men’. Two centuries afterwards they were still being read by English protestant merchants. As scathing as Harvey’s remarks might at first appear, it was the quality of the astrology that those works contained of which he was critical rather than the fact that they contained astrology and physiognomy per se. Like many other Christians, Harvey was a deeply religious advocate of the much more sophisticated physiognomical astrology found in the writings of the eminent Italian Renaissance astrologer to the pope, Lucas Gaurico (1476–1558). Lucas Gaurico’s own brother, the poet Pompeo Gaurico, had originally synthesized this hermetically influenced language of physiognomy with his ideas on sculpture first published in Florence in 1504.⁶⁴ Lucas Gaurico in turn incorporated physiognomy into his astrology, and later edited a collection of expositions of physiognomical doctrine that included his brother’s writings. Indeed, Harvey admitted that ‘my [method of ] physical prediction carefully corrected consists as much in stoicheology [the physics of the elements] and especially in physiognomy as in planetology or horoscopy’. In that sense, Harvey was similar to the Danish theologian Niels Hemmingsen, who included physiognomy in his understanding of what were ‘natural predictions’, as did Cardano, who described physiognomy as one the most pre-eminent of the three forms of natural prediction, indeed of all divination, in as far as it was approached with prudence.⁶⁵ If these libraries and book owners provide an indication of just how seriously the natural magic of physiognomy was taken by the most learned, reasoning, and religious of Renaissance minds during the course of the sixteenth century, the library of Sir Isaac Newton provides us with an exemplary ⁶⁴ Luca Gaurico (ed.), Aristotelis physiognomia adamantio interprete (Bologna, 1551); Pompeo Gaurico, De sculptura (Florence, 1504). ⁶⁵ V. F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey (Oxford, 1979), 168–9, fn. 58; Clark, Demons, 171; Girolamo Cardano, Opera omnia, 5 vols. (Lyon, 1663), i. 144.

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indication of how the place of this canon of physiognomical treatises in early modern reading practices had changed by the late seventeenth/early eighteenth century. On 31 August 1726, shortly before his death, Sir Isaac Newton was interviewed by his nephew John Conduitt (1688–1737). During that conversation Newton told his interlocutor about a book on astrology he had purchased from the midsummer fair at Stourbridge in the summer of 1663 when still a young student at Cambridge. Newton allegedly said that it was the incomprehensibility of that book which convinced him of ‘ “the vanity & emptiness of the pretended science of Judicial astrology” ’ and impelled him to study the books on geometry and calculus by Euclid and Descartes. It is not known for certain to which book Newton was referring. One of the books on astrology in Newton’s private library was an octavo entitled Palmistry dated the very same year as Newton’s purchase at Stourbridge fair, 1663.⁶⁶ That Palmistry was actually a distilled version of the same ‘treatise on physiognomy’ by the same Richard Saunders that young Samuel Jeake had taken from his father’s library in September 1670. Newton may not have owned the larger, more sophisticated work by Saunders. However, curiously enough, he did have a 1662 edition of the book from which Saunders had originally plagiarized most of his material, Jean Belot’s Oeuvres. An indication of just how deeply embedded Newton’s mind was in the contemplation of nature’s more ‘occult’ properties can be gained by looking at the rest of the books in his library. There were many other works that were, intellectually speaking, closely related to Belot’s Kabbalistic physiognomy. For example, Newton also owned a copy of the Harmonie mystique (1636), written by the French physician David Laigneau, who was himself the author of a tract on physiognomy.⁶⁷ Newton owned a 1651 edition of a work entitled Natural Magic, an English translation of a text written by the famous Italian physiognomist Giovanni Battista Della Porta. Moreover, besides the large quantity of the writings of Paracelsus, and an evident interest in the wisdom of the ‘occult’ properties of natural phenomena which permeated Thomas Vaughan’s Anthroposophia theomagica (1650), Newton also owned a copy of John Evelyn’s Numismata (1697), which, intriguingly for a Master of the Mint, also included a curious ‘digression on physiognomy’.⁶⁸ Notwithstanding the relatively poor quality of astrological theory in Saunders’s Palmistry, Newton’s attitude should not be seen as a sign of the gen⁶⁶ Richard Saunders, Palmistry, the secrets thereof disclosed (1663); R. S. Westfall, Never at Rest (Cambridge, 1980), 88 and 98; J. R. Harrison, The Library of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 1978), 232. ⁶⁷ David Laigneau, Traicté de la saignée contre le vieil erreur d’Erasistrate (Paris, 1635). ⁶⁸ Newton’s Library, 72, 98, 174, 176, 209–10, and 220.

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eral ‘decline’ or the imminent demise of both astrology and physiognomy by the late seventeenth century, even in the minds of the new natural philosophers who were constructing the new scientific universe. Newton’s ‘books on physiognomy’ are better understood as an aspect of his interest in alchemy, and as an example of the ongoing reconfiguration of physiognomy and the physiognomic in the aforementioned passage of physiognomy from the realm of Renaissance reason and genuine natural philosophical investigation into the more enlightened realm of an inexplicable ‘curiosity’ of nature. The library of another of the Enlightenment’s most famous scientists, Albrecht von Haller, the eighteenth-century Swiss physiologist, provides a convenient late eighteenth-century example to contrast with Ficino, Harvey, Jeake, and Newton—this time taken from the very eve of the publication of what became one of the most widely known books on physiognomy and the work with which this present study terminates, Lavater’s four-volumed and lavishly illustrated Physiognomische Fragmente, zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntniss und Menschenliebe (Physiognomical Fragments for the Promotion of the Love and Understanding of Mankind) (Leipzig and Winterthur, 1775–78). Indeed, in Haller’s library one can discern several aspects of the multi-faceted history of physiognomy in the early modern period, be it the shift from the realm of ‘curiosity’ to the realm of the imagination; from ‘science’ to poetry; from theology to entertainment; or, in other words, the shift from praying to playing. Like all of the aforementioned collections, Haller’s huge personal library contained the same physiognomical writings of the same Johannes de Indagine that Samuel Jeake—and Gabriel Harvey’s cunning men—had been reading during the course of the previous two centuries. Haller did not possess the Kabbalistic Belot or the Paracelsian Saunders, but his copy of Indagine took the form of an early eighteenth-century edition of a multi-authored work on physiognomy originally compiled by Guilelmus Gratarolus, a sixteenth-century Paracelsian-influenced Swiss professor, natural philosopher, and physician. In addition to this, Haller also had a copy of Helvetius’s Paracelsian-influenced Amphiteatrum physiognomiae medicum, as well as an edition of Della Porta’s De humana physiognomia. Haller may not have owned the Kalendar of Shepherds or the Secreta secretorum that were the Bible of sixteenth-century ‘cunning men’, yet he was obviously familiar with them. In the bibliography of over 50,000 anatomical and physiological works that the famous anatomist compiled, Haller thought and understood enough of the Arabic-influenced mystical wisdom of the shepherds to list the Compost des bergiers under the heading of works he labelled ‘Arabiste’.

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Of course, it could be argued that these latter works were, in Haller’s mind, simply the bibliographical equivalent of flies in amber. To the famous physiologist they may have been nothing more than an antiquated aspect of the history of the subject in which he was evidently so interested. His interest may have gone no further than the then fashionable Lamarckian desire to ‘classify’ them correctly. Yet, that very classification was a sign in itself of a change in the ongoing reinterpretation and understanding of physiognomy and the place of ‘books on physiognomy’ in one distinctly academic part of the ever-evolving reading culture of the early modern period. Indeed, Haller’s other ‘books on physiognomy’ are evidence of just such an enlightened, rationalized, and medicalized reworking of the subject. This is evident in such works as Giovanni Battista Fantoni’s Observationes anatomico-medicae (1713), Johann Hieronymus Kniphof ’s 1737 discussion of the place of physiognomy in medical semiotics, or Johann Oosterdijk Schacht’s 1752 inaugural lecture on medical physiognomy. These works are once again timely reminders of Charles Webster’s observation that the history of physiognomy is not one of decline of an ancient superstition and the rise of an allegedly progressive science, but an ongoing metamorphosis and continual re-conception of what physiognomy was understood to be.⁶⁹ Haller may have been happy enough to possess a copy of Von der Physiognomik (1772) by the famous Swiss ‘physiognomist’ Lavater. However, his reading of that book was undoubtedly influenced by the fact that he both knew and corresponded with its author. In fact, Haller’s correspondence with his friend Charles Bonnet is interspersed with comments that provide a very different picture of what Haller actually thought of the sort of physiognomy advocated by Lavater which he had on the shelves of his library. For Haller, Lavater was ‘riding his horse Pegasus and over-feeding it with oats’. Lavater was an ‘enthusiast . . . [whose] piety is so hot, he is nearly seraphic . . . I think that if you undertook to sound the foundations of [Lavater’s] doctrine on physiognomies, you would find them so ruinous that they would fall apart at the very instant . . . I agree with you that there is only a thin line between Enthusiasm and Incredulity: Nevertheless, I will not presume that our virtuous Diacre will cross it . . . He would need to study logic for a long time . . . I place no confidence in a man entirely governed by imagination . . . the poor Lavater has a hot imagination. He is a poet.’ ⁶⁹ Catalogo del Fondo Haller della Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense di Milano, ed. M. T. Monti, 13 vols. (Milan, 1983–94), Cat. nos. 985, 3620, 4499, 14173, 18231, 21031; Albrecht von Haller, Bibliotheca anatomica, 2 vols. (Zurich, 1774–7), i. 216, 150; C. Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge, 1982), 1.

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By the end of the early modern period, for a scientist and a devout protestant like Haller, physiognomy as Lavater represented it was neither science nor divine scientia. Indeed, for Haller, as polite as he tried to remain in his letters, Lavater’s dream of a scientific physiognomy was nothing more than a form of praying which ultimately seduced only the third-rate logic and the overheated imaginations of enthusiastic theologians and poets. Were it not for the serious dangers of enthusiasm, to a protestant scientist like Haller, physiognomy was at best too ridiculous to be anything other than the source of a little imaginative entertainment and ironical fun. Just how much so can be seen in the fact that the subject brought out a sense of self-ironic playfulness even in one as internationally straight-faced and pious as the renowned physiologist. Haller gives a fleeting glimpse of this in a letter he wrote to tell Bonnet that he had refused Lavater’s request to have Haller’s portrait in his Fragments. His justification for denying Lavater’s request had an air of pious humility: ‘I did not believe that my physiognomy merited a place’. However, Haller could not resist adding playfully, ‘I know how many good things he drew from your nose: He will not be able to draw as much from mine’.⁷⁰

Résumé of the Argument When Haller told Bonnet that Lavater ‘reads in the Bible the same way he reads in faces’, he made an observation that could be used as emblematic of these wider developments in the history of religion, science, philosophy, poetry, art, literacy, even satire, in terms of which the history of physiognomy could be explored by historians. A small, neglected corpus of texts in the ‘age of print’, early modern ‘books on physiognomy’ may be, but, as I hope I have shown in this wide-ranging introduction, they are capable of shedding light on many fundamental issues in the culture and history of the early modern period beyond the history of the book and the history of reading practices. Much of the rest of this study will concentrate on the extant copies of these books in order to examine the changes in the ways in which early modern readers read physiognomy in books, with particular emphasis on the influence of the Neoplatonic hermetic variety of physiognomy so often identified as being set in train in late fifteenth-century Florence by the Medici-backed Marsilio Ficino. Despite the apparent newness of these sorts of physiognomy, the early modern period saw neither any sudden awakening of interest in physiognomy nor ⁷⁰ The Correspondence between Albrecht von Haller and Charles Bonnet (Berne, 1983), 876, 830–1, 1230, 1236, 833, 1233.

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its disappearance from the realm of thought or practice. The history of physiognomy between c.1470 and c.1780 is one of an unstoppable epistemological metamorphosis of the scientia and culture of ‘physiognomy’ around the immoveable, ontological faculty of man’s ‘fisnomy’. In other words, in these attempts by early modern literate men to capture and articulate the part of natural philosophy that was ‘physiognomy’ in book form, we can see how the literate human self, male and female, came to understand and articulate ‘itself ’ and its relation to the world through a variety of different theological and philosophical prisms that arose from, and were built upon, an ineluctable, textually illiterate, naturally ungendered part of the human self. As a result of Ficino and Mirandola’s attempt to reconcile their Neoplatonic hermeticism with Christianity, their hermetic ‘Egyptian’ influence spread across the many different religious cultures long since embedded in an early modern Europe dominated, but not controlled, by a powerful, institutionalized Christianity already in the tumultuous process of adapting itself to, and being simultaneously transformed by, the coming of the printed word. A helpful twentieth-century analogy might be the spread (or decay) of Marxism through the world’s industrializing nations. Although the ‘natural magic’ of the art of physiognomy continued to be considered and examined and developed for a long time afterwards within the more traditional Aristotelian framework that the Renaissance had inherited from the Middle Ages, like that Aristotelian framework itself physiognomy soon became enmeshed in the spread of this hermeticism. Given all its implicit dangers of pagan polytheism and Islamic and Jewish mysticism, both church and state became concerned. However, their concern was neither simply caused nor driven solely by the manuscripts and books containing the physiognomy of this ancient theology. That anxiety was also caused by the ways in which this hermetic physiognomy was absorbed into what the church attacked as the ‘superstitious’ practices of the ordinary people that made up its often illiterate, and distinctly unmanageable, flock. Indeed, even before this Neoplatonic ‘Egyptian’ philosophy began to break across the relatively small number of minds in Europe who had acquired (and whose minds were being restructured by) the textual literacy necessary to read it, there was another sort of ‘Egyptian’ physiognomy that was equally, indeed in some ways even more, disturbing to the authorities of an established church occupied with trying to establish an order among its heterogeneous, ‘superstitious’ flock. This phenomenon took the form of a group of illiterate ‘seers’ found wandering among Europe’s large mobile population of dispossessed nomads and vagabonds, some of whom were known as the ‘Egyptians’, or the ‘gypsies’. They too were practitioners of a form of this ‘natural magic’, or, what

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to them was part of a religious medicine, even a religious poetry. That physiognomy was a part of their long-standing oral, ‘story-telling’, poetic métier, and tradition, with which they seduced, even hypnotized their audience. The anxious, established authorities reacted accordingly and tried, with one hand, to drive it out and, with the other, to appropriate and tame it. The exact nature of that gypsy physiognomy, being unwritten, is now lost and unknown. However, traces of it can be glimpsed, not only through the many, as yet unexamined, extant Sanskrit manuscript ‘treatises on physiognomy’ in circulation throughout the medieval and early modern Indian continent but also through the physiognomical aphorisms whose characters lined the written and printed pages of ‘books on physiognomy’ in the early modern West. For those texts were, to some extent, an attempt on the part of the guardians of the textual tradition to appropriate both that theology and that métier and replace them with a Christianized physiognomy of their own, despite the paradox of losing, if not destroying, the very thing they were trying to capture by writing it down in words. Those printed ‘physiognomics’ have to be seen and understood in the same light as the linguistic interest in the characters of hieroglyphics and emblems that developed from the early sixteenth century as a part of the troubling emergence of the ‘Egyptian’ in early modern Western Europe. As banal as they appear on the page, printed ‘physiognomies’ in themselves not only shed light on the developing understandings of language, or of sex, gender, and beauty in this early modern natural magic, they also offer an important insight into the main metaphysical, and in some cases distinctly gendered, building blocks of the early modern self. There was one thing common to all of the different forms of physiognomy in circulation in early modern Europe, whether it be the learned and not so learned physiognomy of the established Aristotelian or Neoplatonic authors or the story-telling ‘fisnomy’ of the wandering illiterate ‘fisnomiers’: the ‘natural magic’ of physiognomy was put forward as a way of achieving the ultimate rational Socratic dictum, and the famous magical Delphic oracle: ‘know your self ’. Thus, as marginal as the subject may now seem, conflicts over physiognomy in Western Christendom were not just intellectual battles over the exact nature of the knowledge provided by the scientia of physiognomy, over the rationality or the good and bad ‘magic’ in its model of ‘causation’, or the historical and astrological mythologies of its theology. They were a micro-arena of the battle over the essence and malleability of the metaphysics, indeed, the poetic, of the human self. The major events that are so often taken to characterize the early modern period, be it the print revolution, the Reformation, the ‘scientific revolution’,

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or ‘the Enlightenment’, all had an impact on the evolution of this physiognomical form of ‘natural magic’ and helped to bring about many changes in the religious and scientific understanding as well as the many social and cultural practices of physiognomy. In articulating some of those changes, this study concentrates primarily on the ‘fisnomy’ or ‘physiognomy’ that happened between the reader and the page. In other words it examines how the practice of reading the ‘natural magic’ of physiognomy in books in a non-academic, non-intellectual way underwent some fundamental transformations. Handin-hand with an examination of the graffiti found on those early modern physiognomical texts that have survived, it argues that, as a result of the spread of the Neoplatonic hermetic synthesis, the art of physiognomy was eventually developed into what Robert Fludd called a ‘technique of the microcosm’. Although Fludd never made explicit what he meant by this, he appears to have understood it as something that, when combined with the art of astrology and the art of memory, became a prayer-like form of self-meditation that was considered capable of bringing about a form of mystical re-birth, literally, a ‘re-naissance’. In other words, in the hands of these Neoplatonic magi, physiognomy was more than just a vehicle of self-knowledge. Its art was a potential means not only of marrying heaven and earth but of self-transformation, or what Giordano Bruno called ‘inner writing’. Fludd’s combinatorial approach to the art of physiognomy was, in the naturally magic eye of his imagination at least, a scientific experiment in applied physics which aimed at producing a real effect through a preternatural manipulation of the efficacy of ‘occult’ qualities. In Fludd’s case (and in this he was less modest and more esoteric in his approach to natural magic than Ficino), its aim was to tap the invisible spiritual and angelic powers above the natural celestial ones in order to bring about the influx of spiritus into materia . The manifest ‘effect’ it aimed at achieving and making intelligible and visible was what the Corpus hermeticum referred to as a ‘regeneration’—a notion which had as many medical, ethical, political, and religious implications for the individual as it had for the individual’s relationship to the population and society at large, as well as his or her relationship to nature and to God.⁷¹ Yet by the late seventeenth century, when what came to be seen as a passion for talking in enigmatic riddles seemed less mystical as well as ‘scientifically’ unacceptable, reading physiognomy in a book had been relegated to the same status as the perusal of a cabinet of ‘curiosity’ at best. By the early eighteenth ⁷¹ Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), ii. Tractatus Primi Sectio Secunda (title page) ‘De technica Microcosmi historia’, 1; F. A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), 108.

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century, reading ‘books on physiognomy’ had become for many nothing more than a bawdy parlour game. In other words, during what might be termed the long autumn of the Middle Ages, the art of physiognomy became a form of self-transformative praying. In the auroras of the Enlightenment, it had been transformed into a form of playing. With the dawn of Romanticism, some began to see once again, whether as a science, a religion, or even a poetry, that ‘physiognomy’ was no game.

1 A Persistent Fisnomical Consciousness c.400 bce–c.1470 ce The theory of this way of looking and listening, frozen in the four English ‘books on physiognomy’ in Jeake’s library, was not unique to early modern England. The aim of this chapter is very briefly to give readers a sense of the antiquity of ‘physiognomy’ in its written form (physiognomony). Whilst the word ‘physiognomia’ is a medieval Latin term, the written traditions which it was coined to embrace are indications of the persistence of man’s fisnomical consciousness from antiquity onwards. They contain indications of the basic elements which constituted the theorized structure and process of a particular way of looking and listening that arose through that physiognomical consciousness. Beside showing some important continuities with the written physiognomical traditions of antiquity, extant medieval copies of the classical, Arabic, and medieval texts also reveal some important changes which the theory of physiognomony, in what was philosophically speaking a predominantly Aristotelian form, had undergone long before becoming enmeshed, in the late fifteenth century, with the Neoplatonic hermetic influence of Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola.

Introduction In the late sixteenth century, when the Belgian physician and botanist Rembert Dodoens (1516?–85) was evaluating the notion of the physiognomy of plants that still formed a part of his discipline, he pointed out that it was without any classical foundations: That the faculties of plants can be known from the characters or signs which are in them or are sometimes to be observed in their parts, is a doctrine not found in the most trustworthy authors among the ancients; this has been discovered, or rather made up by several authors of later date and some of our own time . . . physiognomy is attested

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by Aristotle and other ancient philosophers; whereas the doctrine of the signature of plants has been attested by no one ancient writer who is held in any esteem.¹

He was correct to claim that the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise contained none of the physiognomy of plants or minerals that one finds, for example, in the Paracelsian notion of the ‘doctrine of signatures’. Dodoen’s observation allows us to grasp just how far from the parameters of the classical physiognomical eye were those of the physiognomical eye that one finds in the autumn of the Middle Ages. That reconfiguration of the physiognomical eye during the intervening period amounted to nothing less than a process of ‘totalization’. So much so that Dodoens was just one of many Renaissance natural philosophers, in a variety of different, but interrelated disciplines, who took it upon themselves to re-evaluate the place of physiognomy in their world. The early modern European printed tradition of physiognomy had been inherited from the Middle Ages and antiquity via the media of writing and orality. In medieval texts, famous figures from Greek and Roman antiquity such as Socrates, Plato, Hippocrates, and Galen were most frequently put forward as the ‘father’ of physiognomy. The Italian scribe of one late fifteenthcentury manuscript on physiognomy who claimed he was transcribing a text written by Hippocrates (‘Ippocras’) is just one example of how such claims continued to appear in early modern texts. One late fifteenth-century English manuscript said it was founded by the philosopher ‘Phisonomias’. However, those medieval claims are best seen as revealing more of the character of early modern Western Christianity’s very particular vision and understanding of history than of the truth of the origins of this physiognomy.² Despite the blinkered concerns of Renaissance humanists with the ancient Roman and Greek foundations of everything, theories of physiognomony, as well as a rich array of religious, social, and cultural practices associated with it, had roots in numerous civilizations beyond those represented by these classical Greco-Roman figures. The earliest extant complete Sanskrit text on the subject of body divination presented as independent technique, the Sa¯mudrikatilaka, may date from only c.1160. None the less, discussions of the physiognomical characteristics of prepubescent girls are found in the Gargasamhita, which dates from the first century bce to the first century ce.³ The principal Chinese ¹ Cited in I. Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 2002), 324–5. ² T. S. Barton, Power and Knowledge (Ann Arbor, 1994), 98–100, fn. 40, 101, fn. 45 and fn. 48; Florence: Bibliotheca Medicea Laurenziana, Ms Plut. XXIX.3, fol. 59v; Secretum Secretorum, ed. M. A. Manzalaoui, Early English Text Society (Oxford, 1977), 376. ³ D. Pingree, Jyotihsá¯stra. Astral & Mathematical Literature (Wiesbaden, 1981), 67–9, and 76–7; A. Caquot and M. Leibovici, La divination, 2 vols. (Paris, 1968), i, 118 and 127; K. G. Zysk, Conjugal Love in India (Leiden, 2002), 10 ff.

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‘treatises on physiognomy’ (hsiang shu) may date from only the fourteenth century, but this large work was a revision of an earlier work entitled ‘Complete Work on Physiognomy’ (Shen Hsiang Ch’iian Pien) compiled during the Sing dynasty in the tenth century. Moreover, numerous scholars have dated the antiquity of the Chinese physiognomical tradition as early as the ninth century bce, and have suggested a possible Indian influence.⁴ The first Japanese attempt at systematizing physiognomy appears to have occurred between the mid-fourteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries. Yet in Japan one also finds a more ancient tradition.⁵ Whilst a textual tradition of physiognomony appears absent from the various civilizations of the Mayas, the Aztecs, and the Incas, physiognomy in book form did have an important place in ancient Semitic mysticism. The Zohar, a body of Jewish mystical literature containing an exposition of some physiognomical theory, dates from only thirteenth-century Castile in written form, but it claimed to represent an earlier oral tradition. Moreover, the connection between physiognomy and the Jewish mystical texts which make up what is known as the Kabbalah is certainly earlier, dating from at least the third century ce. The so-called ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’, themselves currently the subject of an important re-dating to before the ‘common era’ (1 bce), contain a form of astrological physiognomony.⁶ In fact, the earliest known traces of textual physiognomony are the physiognomical omens which formed part of what was known to the Babylonians and Assyrians as ˇsumma alandimmû. They are to be found in a series of eleven Mesopotamian tablets found in an area which is today known as Iraq. Dating from the first half of the second millennium bce, each tablet consists of about 150 oracles concerning the physical appearance of human beings. The following are just two examples: If a man with a contorted face has a prominent[?] right eye, far from his home dogs will eat him. If a man has curly hair on his shoulders, women will fall in love with him.⁷

The first of these may seem to many readers to be, like ancient Mesopotamia itself, beyond what they consider to be their more rational comprehension. By stark contrast, the second brings the Mesopotamian physiognomical con⁴ J. Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, 7 vols. (Cambridge, 1956–98), ii, 346, 363 ff.; G. Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, 3 vols. (Baltimore, 1927–48), III.ii, 1232; W. A. Lessa, Chinese Body Divination (Los Angeles, 1968), 1, 10. ⁵ Kodansha Encyclopaedia of Japan, 9 vols. (Tokyo, 1983), vi, q.v. ‘Physiognomy’ (ninso¯ ). ⁶ J. M. Allegro, The Dead Sea Scrolls (1964), 127; G. G. Scholem, Kabbalah (Jerusalem, 1974), 14, 215, and 317 ff. ⁷ J. Bottéro, ‘Symptomes, Signes, Ecritures’, in J. P. Vernant (ed.), Divination et rationalité (Paris, 1974), 82 and 109; J. Bottéro, Mesopotamia, trans. Z. Bahrani and M. van de Mieroop (Chicago, 1992), 127.


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sciousness and thus its civilization so close as to seem universally self-evident, even to those who know nothing of the existence of medieval verbal descriptions of Christ as having hair which curled on his shoulders. As they now exist, these cuneiform physiognomical oracles provide us with no explicit sense of the thinking behind their construction, nor of the ‘grammar’ of their interrelationship. They are presented in the most basic and simple shopping-list form. If physiognomy is defined as the art of discovering a person’s character by that person’s physical appearance, then the concern of these two oracles with the future rather than with the character of a person might prevent them from being classed as part of the textual tradition of physiognomony. However, the dividing line between character and future, like the temporal line between past, present, and future, is thin, even permeable. Divining a person’s character is one very small step away from divining that same person’s future, if only in the sense of predicting how he or she is going to behave or the problems that that person will meet in life, or the career that person should follow, given the sort of character he or she has. In literature, this is often explored through the notion of ‘character as destiny’, and in modern genetics through ‘biology as destiny’. Moreover, given that the ancient, medieval, and early modern arts of physiognomy were often understood to be a form of ‘natural magic’, or even mantic disciplines, these tablets can be said to represent the earliest textual form of the more prophetic element in the art of ‘physiognomating’.⁸ Let us put aside the Chinese, Indian, and Mesopotamian traditions of physiognomy in written form, as well as the question of the exact nature of their relationship to what has come to be considered as the ‘Western tradition’. As scholarship now stands, the most authoritative textual foundation of the theoretical part of early modern ‘Western’ physiognomical intelligence rests primarily on four ‘pagan’ texts, all dating from the eight-hundred-year period between the fourth century bce and the fourth century ce. Most prominent of them all is the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica. Its influence in the West is a consequence of the fact that for a long time it was thought to be by Aristotle. Another is a treatise written by a Roman sophist named Antonius Polemon (88–145 ce) of Smyrna. Polemon was a wealthy and powerful political rhetorician in the Roman Empire successful enough to have been honoured by the Emperor Hadrian. Polemon’s treatise dates from the second century ce, but was for a long time known only in its Arabic form. The other two treatises date from the fourth century ce. One of them is an epitome of Polemon’s tract by an unknown but possibly ‘Jewish’ writer named Adamantius; whilst the ⁸ E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), 77, 207; Evans, ‘Physiognomics in the Ancient World’, 13.

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fourth is a compilation of the previous three with some new material added by an obscure physician named Loxus, and is known to scholars as the Anonymous Latin treatise.⁹ What changes do all of these earlier ancient and medieval ‘treatises on physiognomy’ suggest that this theorized form of physiognomical perception had already undergone by the end of the fifteenth century? Much detailed philological and philosophical investigation needs to be carried out in order to compare the cognitive content of the theory of the physiognomical scientia found in these textual traditions of the ‘Christian West’ in order to discover the extent of any mutual influence with those of the aforementioned ‘nonWestern’ tradition. The wide-ranging nature of the way of looking and listening that they contain, as well as the social and cultural practices that constituted it, ideally requires the universal approach to visual history along the lines developed by the late nineteenth-century German cultural historian Aby Warburg. It also requires one to look beyond the issue of the West’s classical inheritance from ancient Greece and Rome as well as beyond the texts themselves. However, even when considered in isolation from all of this, the four classical Greek and Roman texts on physiognomony can be used to provide a fundamental insight into an issue that has hypnotized both the Warburgian tradition and the Western art historical tradition—the classical inheritance of the pre-modern West. Those four texts can be used to reconstruct the intellectual ‘prism’ through which the theorized pagan physiognomical consciousness refracted its sense impressions when in the process of physiognomating. Moreover, the developments in the scientia of physiognomony which one finds in the treatises composed by the Arabic and medieval Latin authors provide us with some basic, but much needed, insight into the continuities and discontinuities involved in the metamorphosis of that theorized physiognomical intelligence over a period of eight hundred years. What will be suggested in the rest of this chapter is that that metamorphosis was characterized by six main developments. The first was the early medicalization of physiognomony. The second was one which turned out to be of central importance to the Renaissance hermetic understanding of the art of physiognomy—its development as a branch of the art of rhetoric. The third was the introduction of a divine element into, or the ‘theologization’ of the grammar of the ‘physiognomical eye’. The fourth was the deeper absorption of ⁹ Aristotle, Physiognomonics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1984), i, 1237–50; for Polemon and Adamantius, see Scriptores Physiognomonici Graeci et Latini, ed. R. Förster, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1894), i, 95–294 and 297–426; Traité de physiognomonie: anonyme latin, ed. J. André (Paris, 1981), 49–140.


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that medicalized physiognomy into astrological and mathematical theory. The fifth was its further medicalization through its absorption into theories of anatomy, embryology, generation, and the four humours. The sixth was the development of a theorized physiognomical scientia which went beyond man’s appearance as the primary reference point. In so doing it took in the contemplation of the entire ‘book of nature’ or what the fourteenth-century master from the faculty of medicine in Paris, Evrart de Conty (c.1330–1405), called ‘the face of nature’, and which later came to be identified with the Paracelsan theory of the ‘doctrine of signatures’—a process which, overall, might conveniently be referred to as a ‘totalization’.¹⁰

The Intellectual Prism of Classical Physiognomonical Scientia As innately visual as early modern physiognomy was considered to be, these classical texts reveal that the sense of vision was not the only sense used in the classical process of physiognomating. The pseudo-Aristotelian treatise provides the most complete list of the sources from which the rational, classical ‘physiognomical eye’ drew its sense impressions or ‘signs’: movements, gestures of the body, colour, characteristic facial expression, the growth of the hair, the smoothness of the skin, the voice, condition of the flesh, the parts of the body, and the build of the body as a whole.¹¹

Immediately we see that, besides the use of the sense of sight, the hearing was used to physiognomate the sound of the voice, and the sense of touch was used to physiognomate the condition and smoothness of the flesh—the latter being a possible consequence of the practice of buying slaves.¹² It also shows us that the basic information which constituted pagan physiognomical scientia was broadcast from all parts of the human body, and not just the face alone. The fact that the information processed by the classical physiognomical consciousness consisted primarily in visual and sonic sensations distinguishes it significantly from the medieval physiognomical consciousness in which, as will be seen below, the sense of smell was used. This list also shows that the primarily ¹⁰ E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953), 319–26; J. Ziegler, ‘Text and Context: On the Rise of Physiognomic Thought in the Later Middle Ages’, in De Sion Exibit Lex et Verbum Domini de Hierusalem, ed. Y. Hen (Turnhout, 2001), 159–82, 181; Charles Tilley’s comments on an early draft of this manuscript suggested the utility of this term ‘totalization’. ¹¹ Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 806a 25. ¹² Y. Mourad, La physiognomonie arabe (Paris, 1939), 55–7.

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audio-visual field of this theorized physiognomical intelligence was distinctly ‘anthropocentric’, although, as we shall also see, whilst that focus was primarily on the human being, it drew visual and mental analogies with animals. This is another way in which it differs significantly from the many other non-human natural bodies that later came to be used as potential objects of physiognomical perception that one finds much later, for example, in the writings of Paracelsus. However, despite these notable changes, these classical texts also reveal some important continuities between them and their medieval successors. One such was the articulation of the most important philosophical assumption that underpinned the theoretical process of physiognomation from ancient to early modern times: ‘Mental character is not independent of and unaffected by bodily process, but is conditioned by the state of the body . . . And contrariwise the body is evidently influenced by the affections of the soul.’ In other words, ‘soul and body . . . are affected sympathetically by one another’. This claim carried the authority of Aristotle, who, in his Prior Analytics, wrote ‘it is possible to infer character from physical features, if it is granted that the body and the soul are changed together by the natural affections’.¹³ No further philosophical claim is made in the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica about the location of the soul, the nature of the soul, whether or not it is immortal, a substantial form, what are its faculties, and so on. That only appeared in a ‘treatise on physiognomy’ when the fourth-century physician Loxus claimed that the seat of the soul was in the blood. This claim was in itself an indication of the first of the aforementioned developments—the way in which the scientia of physiognomy was gradually absorbed into medicine.¹⁴ Notwithstanding Loxus, the general absence of such claims within expositions of physiognomical doctrine tended to give the subject a philosophical simplicity. This simplicity had the paradoxical effect of underpinning the continuity of the essential structure and character of the intellectual prism of physiognomating, whilst simultaneously providing it with a chameleon-like quality which enabled it to adapt itself to a wide variety of otherwise conflicting philosophical perspectives. One outcome of this was the formation across the Middle Ages and the early modern period of an increasing number of different philosophical understandings of the same art of physiognomy. The sixteenth-century Italian ¹³ Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 805a 1, and i, 808b 10. Cf. Aristotle, Prior Analytics, in Complete Works, i, 70b 5. ¹⁴ E. C. Evans, ‘Physiognomics in the Ancient World’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s. 59: 5 (1969), 11; G. Misener, ‘Loxus, Physician and Physiognomist’, Classical Philology, 18 (1923), 4–9.


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physiognomist Michelangelo Biondo could think that the soul was located in the brain.¹⁵ Alessandro Achillini (1463–1512), professor of natural philosophy and medicine at Padua and Bologna, incorporated physiognomy into an Averroist framework, in which the individual conscious was part of a universal consciousness. However, these differences did not undermine physiognomy as a scientia. Similarly, the essentials of the art of physiognomy were just as easily accommodated within the Aristotelian claim that there was only one principal organ, the heart (associated with the spirit), the Galenic claim that there were three principal organs (heart, lungs, and liver), or the Neoplatonic notion of the tripartite soul that one finds in the work of Robert Fludd. Moreover, for all that the Galenic aphorism ‘the maners of the minde do followe the temperature of the bodie’ was the antithesis of the Aristotelian philosophical assumption in so far as it verged upon an out-and-out material determinism that implicitly called into question the existence of the soul, Galen’s aphorism was none the less often cited by numerous authors of ‘treatises on physiognomy’, and, more broadly, was often discussed within the framework of the issue of whether it was possible for the nature of man to be transformed.¹⁶ Pagan theorized physiognomical intelligence also contained a number of cells of logic which helped to determine its character and provided a sense of continuity in its transmission from the ancient to the early modern period. The pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica assumed a constant correspondence between a particular physical attribute and a particular mental or moral property: There never was an animal with the form of one kind and the mental character of another. Permanent bodily signs will indicate permanent mental qualities. Soft hair indicates cowardice, and coarse hair courage.

This passage also reveals what classical logicians referred to as the ‘syllogistic logic’ which sustained some aspects of physiognomation. The rhetorical figure that was particularly important in physiognomy was known as the enthymeme: X resembles a sea-monster. Sea-monsters are gluttonous, voracious and impious. X is gluttonous, voracious and impious.¹⁷ ¹⁵ Michelangelo Biondo, De cognitione hominis per aspectum (Rome, 1544), fol. 32v. ¹⁶ The most excellent, profitable and pleasant book of the famous Doctor and expert Astrologian Arcandam (1592), sig. L 4. ¹⁷ Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 805a 10; 806a 5–10; 806b 5. Cf. Aristotle, Prior Analytics, in Complete Works, i, 70b5–20.

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As crude as the physiognomical syllogism may seem, even the most intelligent of people succumb to its logic. Indeed, the second-century political orator Polemon made an entire career out of the rhetorical applications of this particular form of logic. To that extent, his treatise provides evidence of the second of the six main developments in theorized physiognomy during this period—its absorption in the theory and practice of rhetoric. It later became a form of logic central to the development of early modern medical semiotics.¹⁸ Another aspect of the physiognomony which one finds in the pseudoAristotelian Physiognomonica that distinguished it from many subsequent treatises on the subject was its discussion of the formal logic behind the aphorisms. Unlike the scholarly Renaissance commentaries, many early modern authors omitted this. One rhetorical consequence of this omission was that the physiognomical aphorisms often just lay there on the page, before the reader’s eye, like a shopping-list of self-evident, quasi-oracular truths. This lack of causal reflection contributed towards the development of what many saw as the (rhetorical?) magical or mantic character of physiognomy.¹⁹ One fundamental feature of the ‘grammar’ of the theorized classical physiognomical perception emphasized by most medieval and early modern treatises on the subject is that it necessitated any physiognomator to consider more than one sign in order to avoid a rushed judgement.²⁰ In practice, of course, this did not always happen. In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare uses Leonato to provide one early modern example of such physiognomical haste. Having been informed of the death of his daughter but suspecting murder, Leonato rushes in and exclaims: Which is the villain? Let me see his eyes That when I note another man like him I may avoid him. Which of these is he?²¹

In this passage Shakespeare quietly ironized an (empirical?) illogicality in Leonato’s statement by having him ask ‘Which of these is he?’ (If it was so physiognomically obvious then Leonato should not have to ask which one it was.) However, Leonato’s reaction does reveal the ease with which some minds could not only develop a private physiognomical dictionary independent of the printed tradition but also come to a physiognomical conclusion, with a ¹⁸ ¹⁹ ²⁰ ²¹

Barton, Power and Knowledge, 103–31; Maclean, Logic, esp. 4.3.3. See Förster, Scriptores, i, 210, ll. 18–23, for one of the very rare nuggets of physiological explanation. Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 807a 1 and 807a 25–30. William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (Cambridge, 1988) v. i. 226–8.


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potentially profound consequence, based on a single sign. It is also an indication of the need for studies of physiognomy ‘in action’. In turn, the classical pagan physiognomical eye had often to deal with contradictory physiognomical signs. The official ‘grammar’ suggested that any physiognomator must respect the inherent hierarchy in the physiognomical clarity of the signs. By far the most important of all the signs were those of the eyes: It will be found, moreover, in every selection of signs that some signs are better adapted than others to indicate the mental character behind them. The clearest indications are given by signs in certain particularly suitable parts of the body. The most suitable part of all is the region of the eyes and forehead, head and face; next to it comes the region of the chest and shoulders, and next again, that of the legs and feet; whilst the belly and neighbouring parts are of least service. In a word, the clearest signs are derived from those parts in which intelligence is most manifest.²²

One important innovation in the developing ‘grammar’ of the physiognomical eye, as far as these early texts indicate, occurred during the second century when Polemon introduced the very important concept of epiprepeia or ‘overall impression’ into this official grammar: The most powerful determining factor is the overall impression of the whole man that makes itself visible on all parts of the body. One must look upon this in all cases as if it were the seal of the whole. It has no rational principle, in and of itself, but the details, the signs of the eyes and all the rest, synthesise the complete appearance of the man.²³

With no ‘rational principle, in and of itself ’, Polemon’s epiprepeia opened physiognomical perception to the realms beyond the formal logic of the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise in the sense that this ‘overall impression’ hovered precariously between instinct and reflection. Polemon’s epiprepeia is not only evidence of a further development in the theorized understanding of physiognomony, but also of its practical applications—in Polemon’s case, as a form of politic rhetoric. With hindsight, it can also be seen to have prepared the conceptual ground for a further fundamental metamorphosis in the physiognomical eye in the late fourth century when this notion of the ‘overall impression’ was infused in Adamantius’s treatise with a divine element: ‘it speaks as if with signs, Nature announces the ways of each person, from some god-sent, unerring divination, the physiognomist knows the habits and inclinations of all men, so to speak’.²⁴ Adamantius’s understanding of epiprepeia thus linked it to ²² Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 814b1–5. ²³ Cited in M. W. Gleason, Making Men (Princeton, 1995), 34–5.

²⁴ Cited in Barton, Power, 107.

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a similar concept which one finds in the Arabic tradition discussed below, the notion of fira¯sa. The fourth-century Anonymous Latin treatise revealed another important grammatical development that had taken place in the eight hundred years since the fourth century bce which had an effect on the polyvalence of the physiognomical sign. When comparing contradictory signs with each other, the author of this fourth-century ce treatise said that the physiognomator was to ‘reduce the dominant signs in proportion to the contrary signs’. This was a vital development in as much as it introduced an elasticity into the relationship between the physical feature and the meaning that constituted any physiognomical sign. This was not provided for by the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise. In that sense, as we shall see, it brought the physiognomical sign closer to the early modern Paracelsian conception of the physiognomical sign, albeit one still without botanical or mineralogical analogies. In this way, the reason in the physiognomical consciousness began to meditate upon the genealogy of the often contradictory meanings attached to a single feature in order to reach a conclusion or synthesis. Similarly the same ‘synthesis’ could be rationally achieved by altering the individual meanings of different physical features in terms of each other and their place in the hierarchy. As a result, the eye-lashes of loquacity, the forehead of a thinker, and the eyes of raging madness might eventually be resolved into a loquacity which is less rude and a character which is impetuous rather than mad.²⁵ But perhaps most crucial of all for the theory of the pagan physiognomical consciousness was the temporal aspect of its ‘grammar’. The present-oriented aspect of physiognomating outlined in the classical pseudo-Aristotelian treatise involved a more facially oriented method which, it briefly says, ‘took as its basis the characteristic facial expressions which are observed to accompany different conditions of mind, such as anger, fear, erotic excitement, and all other passions’.²⁶ This is the equivalent of what today is referred to as pathognomy— the study of the facial configuration of transient emotions, now often identified historically with the famous Cartesian-inspired treatise on painting written by Louis XIV’s court painter, Charles Le Brun.²⁷ However, the absence of a clear distinction between this pathognomy and physiognomy is suggestive of an important temporal ambiguity. In the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise, the teleological point of that act of physiognomation was the elucidation of a ²⁵ André, Anonyme, 57–60. ²⁶ Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 805a 20–5. ²⁷ J. Montagu, The Expression of the Passions (New Haven, 1994).


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person’s ‘mental character’ rather than their future or past.²⁸ It could be argued that that ‘mental character’ appears to have been understood primarily in terms of the present. But the border between past, present, and future was, physiognomically speaking, permeable and fluid. By the fourth century ce one finds a physiognomical tract in which these temporal parameters have shifted and the prophetic aspect of the pagan physiognomical consciousness has been made much more prominent. In other words, the physiognomic, as a sign, developed a temporal as well as a semantic polyvalence. How empirical was the process of physiognomating? As described so far, these pagan physiognomical investigations were empirically driven in so far as they often began inductively, by receiving impressions from a person’s body. Yet, having said that, there were three other very important meta-elements in the ‘grammar’ which, taken together, constituted the more deductive aspect of this physiognomical way of looking and listening. Indeed, these deductive elements provide a sense of continuity in the development of the theorized physiognomical eye from the classical period to the end of the Middle Ages and on through the early modern period. The first two were based on what the Physiognomonica referred to as ‘the distinction between the sexes’, and the ‘various characters’: It is advisable, in elucidating all the signs I have mentioned, to take into consideration both their congruity with various characters and the distinction of the sexes; for this is the most complete distinction, and, as was shown, the male is more upright and courageous and, in short, altogether better than the female.²⁹

These two distinctions represented, in effect, a priori grids or micro-prisms through which one was to refract, or ‘elucidate’ the multiple signs presented to the senses. The pseudo-Aristotelian treatise makes explicit reference to the ‘distinction between the sexes’ but offers no detailed discussion of it or of how it was arrived at in the first place. Only in the fourth-century ce Anonymous Latin treatise does one find an extant physiognomical treatise containing a more detailed elaboration of this distinction.³⁰ Either way, it was a sexual distinction that was simply assumed to be a part of nature (physis), and hence the different sexes were presented as a priori categories. The aforementioned ‘various characters’ are part of a process of physiognomating that begins with the metaphysical or mental trait and works its way down to its physical embodiment. Thus, for example, signs of courage were given as ‘an upright carriage of the body; size and strength of bones, sides and ²⁸ André, Anonyme, 140 and sections 29, 31, 41, 53, and 82. ³⁰ André, Anonyme, 51 ff.

²⁹ Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 814a 5.

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extremities; the belly broad and flat; shoulder blades broad and set well apart, neither too closely nor too loosely knit’. ³¹ In this case the Physiognomonica presented a list of different mental/moral properties followed by the physical sign or signs of each of those properties. Taken together those signs had a tendency towards becoming fully fledged characters in the Theophrastian sense, such as ‘the sly man’ or ‘the gambler’. This constituted what might be termed the ‘characterological prism’ of the physiognomical consciousness, through which all physiognomators were to refract the empirical signs presented to their minds by their senses. In the long-term evolution of the process of physiognomating, it is the changes that took place in this a priori pantheon of characters that are among the most fundamental to the history of this physiognomical way of looking and listening, be it in the history of science or literature. It is of particular importance for the way in which it feeds into the birth of the discipline of psychology and later of clinical psychiatry. Furthermore, it is this that makes the ‘character’ literature of the early modern period so important to understanding the cultural history of physiognomical perception. But, above all, it is important for understanding the nature and function of what might be described as the categories which structured the unconscious physiognomical prejudices of everyday life of any person, society, or culture.³² The third a priori prism was based on the significance of those physiognomics attributable to the changes incurred by the ageing process. Though never described in any great detail, this question of age seems to have opened the way for the introduction into the physiognomical consciousness of yet another a priori prism of ‘characters’—those which make up what became known in the West as the ‘ages of man’. Having said that, these early textual traditions of physiognomy contain no indication that the belief in or adherence to the truth of physiognomy was connected to the age of the person doing the physiognomating, other than its often being stated in treatises that it was an art necessitating long experience. In the pseudo-Aristotelian tradition, the ultimate purpose of each of these three a priori prisms was to help the physiognomating consciousness in its negotiation of the classical philosophical problem of relating the universal and the particular. By cross-checking observations drawn from the inductive ³¹ As an offshoot of this, at one point the Physiognomonics offers a ‘new’ method by which the reasoned physiognomical consciousness might be able to deduce the presence of a particular trait which has no physical mark from the other signs that are present. This comes close to a genealogy of moral qualities, Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 807a 1–5. ³² Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 807a 35; Evans, Ancient World, 16; W. Ginsberg, The Cast of Character (Toronto, 1983).


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aspect, the ultimate aim of this physiognomical eye was to establish the particularities of the individual as opposed to the confirmation of any of these general ‘characters’, ‘for in physiognomy we try to infer from bodily signs the character of this or that particular person, and not the characters of the whole human race’. Another, more causally conceived, ‘prism’ was made up of distinctions between ‘various races of men (e.g. Egyptian, Thracian, Scythian) by differences of appearance and of character, and drew their signs from these races’.³³ This is not the place to go into what these authors meant by the term ‘race’. Biologically speaking, there is, of course, no such thing as ‘race’.³⁴ More to the point is the fact that this particular ethnological prism pointed towards the necessity of considering causal factors external to the person and hence the relationship of physiognomy to natural history. It was an aspect of introducing a method into the physiognomical consciousness which gradually found itself shored up by numerous popular sayings, as well as by the refinements of the theory of the klimata by which people were understood as being in a determinist relationship with their specific environmental, often regional, conditions, such as is to be found in the Airs, Waters and Places of Hippocrates. By these means, geography was linked to astrology. Particularly important for this link were Ptolemaic notions of regions and persons being under the determining influence of the planets and the signs of the zodiac. However, as will become clearer below, the deeper penetration of astrological theory into the Western art of physiognomy, as with its link with the doctrine of signatures, appears to have been a medieval phenomenon.³⁵ As was mentioned earlier, the focus of the ancient physiognomical eye may have been primarily upon the human face and body, however careful one has to be about describing the act of physiognomating as ‘anthropocentric’. Another fundamental aspect of classical physiognomical thinking was its consideration of the symbolization of the mental characters of animals through their bodily form. The anthropocentric form of this physiognomical symbolization then involved the inference that a man resembling an animal in body will also resemble it in soul. As the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise states, this element in the process of physiognomical contemplation took as the basis for physiognomic inferences the various genera of animals, positing for each genus a peculiar animal form, and a peculiar mental character appropriate to ³³ Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 807a 30, and i, 805a 25–30. ³⁴ R. Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity (1997), 48 ff. ³⁵ G. Dagron, ‘Image de bête ou image de dieu. La physiognomonie animale dans la tradition grecque et ses avatars byzantins’, in Poikilia: Études offertes à Jean-Pierre Vernant (Paris, 1987), 70.

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such a body, and then assuming that if a man resembles such and such a genus in body he will resemble it also in soul.

This analogical use of zoology played a fundamental role in the history of early modern physiognomy, and had particularly important consequences for the metamorphosis of conceptions of the human ‘self ’ and its relationship to the ‘animal’.³⁶ One final, but fundamental, transformation which these ‘treatises on physiognomy’ suggest that the physiognomical eye underwent between the fourth century bce and the fourth century ce was a form of medicalization. The pseudo-Aristotelian textual understanding of physiognomony is a relatively non-medical one. There is a hint of the influence of humoral theory, and in places some blatant physiological determinism: ‘Men of abnormally small stature are hasty, for the flow of their blood having but a small area to cover, its movements are too rapidly propagated to the organ of intelligence.’ There is even a hint of the signs of illness found in medical physiognomy, ‘A flaming skin, however, indicates mania, for it results from an overheated body, and extreme bodily heat is likely to mean mania’.³⁷ But this appears to be a consequence of the fact that the treatise itself originates from the separate pens of two authors who between them are simply trying to consider, in something of an interdisciplinary manner, the various potential rational foundations for a ‘scientific’ physiognomy. Physiognomy did not form part of the original Hippocratic or Galenic corpus. One scholar has suggested that the weight of physiognomical literature is not Hippocratic. The word physiognomy does not appear in the Hippocratic corpus except as a part of the titles in the book on Epidemics, and those titles were given by the librarians at Alexandria rather than Hippocrates himself.³⁸ The same scholar further suggests that Galen did not even know of the pseudoAristotelian treatise and though he was aware of some physiognomical texts he was critical of them. A medical conception of physiognomy is more discernible in the fourth-century Anonymous Latin treatise, as a consequence of the fact that parts of it were written by Loxus the physician.³⁹ All of this suggests that physiognomy was not originally a medical subject, but a subject which became medicalized. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that there may ³⁶ Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 805a 20. Cf. Aristotle Prior Analytics, in Complete Works, ii, 70b 10–15; I, Bk. I, Sec. 8, 491b 10. ³⁷ Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 807b 5–10, 807b 30–5, 808a 1, 808a 15–20, 808b 1–5 and 812a 10–15; 813b 5–35; 812a 20–5. ³⁸ A divisive issue here is the extent to which it is thought that the concept can exist without the word. ³⁹ Misener, ‘Loxus’, 5.


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even have been an antagonism between physiognomy and medicine in antiquity.⁴⁰

The Arabic Textual Traditions By the tenth century the texts containing this theorized Greek ‘physiognomical eye’ were circulating in Muslim lands, where they were translated into Arabic, and mixed with an already long-standing Arabic physiognomical tradition. The Arabic and Islamic physiognomical tradition is a vast and complex subject which awaits its scholar.⁴¹ Central to the understanding of the grammar of the Arabic physiognomical eye is the term fira¯sa. One authoritative lexicographer defined fira¯sa as Insight; or intuitive perception; or the perception, or discernment, of the internal, inward, or intrinsic, state, condition, character, or circumstances, by the eye [or by the examination of outward indications etc.,] . . . a faculty which God puts into the minds of his favourites, in consequence whereof they know the states, conditions, or circumstances, of certain men, by a kind of what are termed [thaumaturgic operations], and by the right direction of opinion and conjecture: and also a kind of art [such as physiognomy] . . . learned by indications, or evidences, and by experiments, and by the make and dispositions, whereby one knows the state, conditions, or circumstances, of men.⁴²

The Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg has noted that the Arabic notion of fira¯sa, which constituted such an essential element in the Islamic physiognomical tradition, was ‘none other than the organ of conjectural knowledge’, referring to it as a form of ‘low intuition . . . [which] . . . binds the human animal closely to other animal species’.⁴³ It must be repeated here that this notion of fira¯sa bears a strong ‘family resemblance’ to the concept of epipepreia (‘overall impression’) as put forward in the fourth century by Adamantius, as well as to the faculty of perception that is being described in this book as ‘fisnomy’. Moreover, it had a scriptural authority in passages of the Qur’an such as XLVII, 30, ‘And if We wish it, We shall make thee see them [the false Muslims]; thou shalt recognise them by their physiognomy [sima-hum]; thou shalt recognise them ⁴⁰ Private conversation with J. Thomann. ⁴¹ D. Jacquart and F. Micheau, La médecine arabe et l’occident mediéval (Paris, 1990), 15; Mourad, La physiognomonie arabe, 25 ff. ⁴² E. W. Lane, An Arabic–English Lexicon (1874), s.v. Fira¯sa. ⁴³ C. Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. J. Tedeschi and A. Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1989), 125.

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by their lapsus linguae (lahn al-kawl)’; or XV, 75: ‘Behold in this are signs for those who by tokens do understand’.⁴⁴ As Ibn Arabi (d.1240), a thirteenthcentury Arabic author of a ‘treatise on physiognomy’ put it: Physiognomical intuition is the light transmitted by the word of the Prophet, the Guide, the Chosen Envoy. Whoever possesses this intuition receives it from the eyes and ears of God himself, who is the One, the Originator and the Initiator. The result is that it allows one to contrast the things that are known, in the invisible and in the visible.⁴⁵

Although this study focuses on the theory of physiognomony, there were many practical applications of this physiognomical theory hitherto unexamined by historians. Just as the Greek ‘treatises on physiognomy’ provide intimations of specific practices with which physiognomy came to be associated, from slave trading and horse breeding, to political oratory, astrological prophesying, medical diagnosis and prognosis, the choice of marriage partners, rulers, or novices, there were numerous ‘sciences’ and mantic disciplines subsumed under this Arabic notion of fira¯sa. Despite the vague generality of the phrase ‘outward indications’ in Lane’s definition, many were mantic and anthropocentric. The oldest of those disciplines was the practice of kiyafa—the recognition of signs of paternity.⁴⁶ To take just one example, the significance of this latter aspect of the physiognomator’s repertoire of arts at a time when blood tests to establish parental lineage were unavailable helps to explain the following ancient oracle: ‘the wife of that man, pregnant by another man, will not cease to implore the goddess Isˇtar, and say to her while looking at her husband: “May my child look like my husband!” ’⁴⁷ It was not until the famous, epoch-making wave of twelfth- and thirteenthcentury translations from Arabic into Latin that the Greek/Arabic treatises appear to have arrived in the ‘West’.⁴⁸ Among them were two works of Arabic origin by Arabic authors containing an exposition of physiognomical doctrine. These works can be said to have been primarily responsible for the dissemination of the Arabic physiognomical tradition in the West. Both of these Arabic texts were translated into Latin in the twelfth century. The first of the two to arrive was Rhazes’s Liber ad regem Almansorem (or Liber almansoris) translated by Gerard of Cremona (d. 1187) in the twelfth ⁴⁴ The Holy Qur’an, trans. Abdulla Yusuf Ali (Maryland, 1983). ⁴⁵ M. J. Viguera, Dos cartillas de fisiognómica (Madrid, 1977), 31. ⁴⁶ Mourad, La physiognomonie arabe, 1; P. Nwyia, Exégèse coranique et langage mystique (Beirut, 1970), 296–7. ⁴⁷ Bottero, Mesopotamia, 132. ⁴⁸ See Mourad, La physiognomonie arabe; A. Ghersetti, ‘Una tabella di fisiognomica nel Qabs al-anwa¯r wa Bahg˘at al-Asra¯r attribuito a Ibn “Arabı¯” ’, Quaderni di Studi Arabi, 12 (Rome, 1994), 15–49.


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century.⁴⁹ Relatively little is known about the author Rhazes, other than that he was a physician, born in Rayy, a Persian town a few kilometres south of Teheran, who in the last years of the ninth century arrived at the court at Baghdad, and took up the practice of medicine.⁵⁰ Rhazes’s exposition of physiognomy, as presented in Book II of his text, was heavily influenced by the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica, even to the point of containing descriptions of the ‘various characters’, or the very same physiognomical aphorisms, such as, for example, that the small, narrow forehead was a sign of stupidity.⁵¹ However, like the second-century bce treatise of the Roman orator Polemon, and unlike the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica, Rhazes presented his physiognomy in the much more simplistic form of a list of physiognomical aphorisms or ‘signs’ without any discussion of their philosophical or logical assumptions. The absence of the analogies between man and animals that one finds in the Greek texts suggests a greater anthropocentric emphasis in the focus of Rhazes’s physiognomical eye, an anthropocentrism made all the more striking by a more detailed discussion of the ‘distinction between the sexes’, particularly Rhazes’s examination of the eunuch. In addition to this, the fact that all of the material which surrounds the chapter on physiognomy is explicitly and unambiguously medical suggests that Rhazes’s tract contributed to furthering the process of the medicalization of physiognomy that began in ancient Greece, including the physiognomy of the members of the human body that one finds in the thirteenth-century physiognomical theory of Albertus Magnus discussed below. Indeed, given the importance of fira¯sa to the Arabic physiognomical tradition, Rhazes may have been attempting to render the formerly instinctual Islamic physiognomical inspection more ‘rational’ and empirical as well as more medical, and in that sense can be seen as a precursor to a movement so often identified with Renaissance theorists in part because of the latter’s anti-Arabic and anti-Islamic religious persuasions.⁵² The actual impact of Rhazes’s physiognomy on Western medicine and religion in the Middle Ages remains unclear. Whilst the influence of Rhazes’s medical writings began to be felt after 1270, particularly in Paris, Montpellier, and Bologna, it was always less discernible than that of another Arabic writer, Avicenna, whose Canon ‘shaped and formed anew the medical thought of the ⁴⁹ Förster, Scriptores, i, pp. clxxvii–clxxviii, and ii, 161–79. ⁵⁰ L. I. Conrad, ‘The Arabic–Islamic Medical Tradition’, in L. I. Conrad, M. Neve, V. Nutton, R. Porter, and A. Wear (eds.), The Western Medical Tradition 800 B.C. to A.D. 1800 (Cambridge, 1995), 112–13. ⁵¹ Cf. Rhazes, in Förster, Scriptores, ii, 168, ll. 15–16 and 167–8, ll. 21 ff, with Aristotle, Physiognomonics, 806b 25–30 and i, 811b 25. ⁵² Cf. Jacquart and Michean, La médicine arabe, 60 and 255.

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early thirteenth century’ even more than Galen.⁵³ The role of physiognomy in Avicenna’s medical theories remains unexamined by medievalists. Notwithstanding, the impact of Rhazes’s medicalized Arabic physiognomy must have been limited by the fact that the Liber almansoris appears to have been most widely known through Book IX, which does not contain any physiognomy. The other Arabic text responsible for the dissemination of some of the Arabic tradition of physiognomy was the Secretum secretorum. This text was long thought to be an Aristotelian work, despite the absence of any extant Greek original.⁵⁴ It is, in fact, a translation of a ninth- or tenth-century work of Arabic origins known as the Kitab sirr al-asrar, whose more proper title should be translated as The Book of the Science of Government; or, The Good Ordering of Statecraft. By at least the middle of the tenth century, it included a section devoted to physiognomy. The work as a whole is presented as the mystical advice which Aristotle sent to Alexander the Great during his conquest of Persia, a presentation possibly intended to symbolize the moment of a synthesis of Greek and Arabic instrumental rationality and mysticism. The first three discourses derive from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Elsewhere, it shows the influence of Hippocrates in its material on humoral theory and the seasons. The physiognomy in this work can be said to contain nothing new. Like the Liber almansoris, the distinctly anthropocentric aphorisms are presented in a simple list form. As with Rhazes’s physiognomy, the most fundamental differences lie not so much in the exposition of physiognomical doctrine itself, but in the context of the rest of the material with which that theoretical physiognomy is presented. With the addition of layers of scientific and occult material, the Secretum secretorum grew, by a ‘process of accretion’, from ‘a Mirror for Princes’ into ‘an encyclopaedic manual’. One of these ‘additions’ along the way was an exposition of physiognomical doctrine.⁵⁵ Like Rhazes’s Liber almansoris, the Secretum is explicitly written for a king, but with a different purpose. Despite the medical material which surrounds it, the physiognomy is presented as a mystical scientia which the prince should know in order to rule his subjects successfully and to choose his ministers correctly. In that way, the emphasis which the Secretum places on the scientia of physiognomy presents it less as a self-reflexive medical scientia, and more as a form of political science with an obvious ⁵³ Jacquart and Michean, La médecine arabe, 175; M. R. McVaugh, ‘Medical Knowledge at the Time of Frederick II’, Micrologus, ii (Turnhout, 1994), 7. ⁵⁴ Secretum Secretorum, ed. M. A. Manzalaoui, Early English Text Society (Oxford, 1977); S. J. Williams, ‘The Scholarly Career of the Pseudo-Aristotelian “Secretum Secretorum” in the 13th and 14th Century’, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (Northwestern University, 1991). ⁵⁵ Manzalaoui, Secretum, pp. ix–xi.


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practical application—the choosing of ministers by physiognomy as opposed to their automatic assumption of their duties due to the privilege of birth. Another fundamental difference between the Secretum and Rhazes’s Liber almansoris is that during the Middle Ages, unlike Book II of Rhazes’s Liber almansoris, the Secretum experienced what Alexander Murray has described as an ‘extraordinary European diffusion’. More recent scholars, describing it as a text which weds ‘ethics and alchemy’, suggest that it ‘probably ranks amongst the most widely read and most often copied or translated works in the Latin West in the Middle Ages’.⁵⁶ It was translated into Hebrew in early thirteenthcentury Spain, if not before, possibly by the poet Judah al-Harizi.⁵⁷ The extant versions of it in Castilian, Catalonian, French, English, Welsh, German, Italian, Portuguese, Hebrew, Icelandic, Russian, Croatian, and Czech, many of which take a poetic form, are a further suggestion of the extent to which physiognomy entered medical, religious, and political cultures across a vast geographical area.

The Medieval Latin Textual Traditions The art of physiognomy in the Dark Ages Medieval Christian ‘physiognomy’ is often assumed to have begun with the wave of Latin translations of Arabic works which took place in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This wave certainly brought the Physiognomonica, the Anonymous Latin, as well as the aforementioned Arabic Liber almansoris and Secretum, to the Latin West. As no manuscripts have been found dating from earlier than this, it is often assumed that this theoretical physiognomical eye dates from the same time. Moreover, it is around this time that the term physiognomia entered the written Latin language. However, before we move on to examine those works, it must be said that even the most superficial glance suggests that there is some evidence, albeit at present inconclusive and in some cases distinctly tangential, alluding to some form of physiognomical practice, if not theory, during the Dark Ages, which should not be so readily dismissed. For example, in 1546 John Bale (1494–1563), bishop of Ossory, celebrated bibliophile and radical religious polemicist, ⁵⁶ A. Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1985), 83; S. Gentile and C. Gilly (eds.), Marsilio Ficino e il ritorno di Ermete Trismegisto (Rome, 2000), 197–8. ⁵⁷ A. I. Spitzer, ‘The Hebrew Translations of the Sod ha-sodot and its Place in the Transmission of the Sirr al-Asrar’, in W. F. Ryan and C. B. Schmitt (eds.), Pseudo-Aristotle, the Secret of Secrets (1982), 34–54.

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attacked Theodore (602–90), the late seventh-century archbishop of Canterbury who was responsible for adopting the Roman centralized model for the English church. In addition to criticizing him for this, Bale also blamed Theodore for introducing into England many ‘vayne & craftye scyences’ including ‘Phisnomy, Palmestrye, Alcumye, Necroma[n]cye, Chyroma[n]cye, Geomancye, & wytherye’ through the famous school of St Augustine’s he set up with Adrian the abbot of the monastery of Saints Peter and Paul—a school which produced, among others, the venerable Bede (673–735). An early modern protestant religious polemic it may have been, but it was an educated polemic by someone who knew about the history of written and printed texts. For astrology was certainly taught at the school set up by Theodore, as it was in the medieval universities, and wherever one finds astrology one often finds some form of physiognomy.⁵⁸ Indeed, given Archbishop Theodore’s Byzantine education, one contemporary scholar can think of no reason why he would not have been familiar with Aristotle, and perhaps even the Physiognomonica or the Secretum.⁵⁹ The absence of the actual word ‘physiognomy’ and its many derivatives from those Anglo-Saxon and Old English Latin glossaries that have been edited by recent scholars confirms the lateness of the arrival of this neologism. Yet it is hard to accept that ‘physiognomy’, or ‘fisnomy’, only exists where one finds these words for it. From this perspective, those glossaries do include some interesting, potentially physiognomical, material mixed with proverbial wisdom. For example: ‘A hairy forehead. For as long as you shall have a hairy forehead. That is the day you have divinity. That is as long as you shall have friends.’⁶⁰ This may be described as nothing but physiognomical folklore due to the fact that no direct link with any literary source can be established. Yet that is no reason to dismiss its importance. Moreover, the Church Fathers were certainly aware of physiognomy even earlier than this. Origen speaks, albeit disparagingly, of the physiognomical ability of Zopyrus, the physiognomist who famously examined Socrates. Cassian also uses the term in talking of Socrates.⁶¹ Moreover, whilst the Coptic texts carry no specific mention of physiognomy, they do provide evidence for something that sounds very much ⁵⁸ John Bale, The actes of Englysh votaryes (1548), i. 37v–38v. Cf. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), 331 ff. ⁵⁹ Private conversation with Professor J. Kraye, the Warburg Institute, October 1994. ⁶⁰ J. H. Hessels, ed. An Eighth-century Latin-Anglo-Saxon Glossary (Cambridge, 1890); J. H. Hessels, ed. A Late Eighth-century Latin-Anglo-Saxon Glossary (Cambridge, 1906); T. Wright and R. P. Wülker eds. Anglo-Saxon and Old-English Vocabularies (1884 , repr. 1968); R. T. Oliphant, ed. The Harley Latin–Old English glossary (The Hague, 1966), 199. ⁶¹ J. Cassian, Collationes, in Patrologia Latina, ed. P. Migne, 217 vols. (Paris, 1844–53), v. 49, col. 905a.


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like a form of fira¯sa, or what in Jewish mysticism was referred to as hakkarath panim—perception by the face. In one text, Paul says ‘I looked at each one of those that entered [the church] to see in what state were the souls that went in. All those who entered had joyful faces and their looks were glad, so that the angel of each one rejoiced with him’. For he had this gift from God, to see how each one was, in the way that we see the faces of one another.⁶²

Just as the Qu’ran acted as a textual authority for fira¯sa, so the Holy Bible provided numerous scriptural authorities for Christian ‘physiognomy’. Mention was made in the Introduction of Ecclesiastes 8 : 1, ‘a man’s wisdom maketh his face to shine, and the boldness of his face shall be changed’. Similarly there was Isaiah 3 : 9, ‘the shew of their countenance doth witness against them; and they declare their sin as Sodom, they hide it not’, and even Leviticus 21: 17–24, ‘for whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach’ (v. 18.). Indeed, this last passage from Leviticus raises the issue of a hitherto unexamined and distinctly physiognomical practice in the history of Christian ordination. That is the one which, by the fourth century, saw the exclusion of the physically deformed from ordination officially enshrined in canon law, with all of the hitherto unexamined physiognomical implications that this apparent notion of the purity of the priesthood had for social make-up of the leaders of the church and state.⁶³ Of those texts certainly known in the Anglo-Saxon period, Isidore’s Etymologies contained much of the humoral material on which certain conceptions of physiognomy were based. Given how medicalized physiognomy had become by the fourth century, this demands much further investigation. In addition, Oribasius at least mentions Adamantius, and both Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations as well as his De fato would have made Anglo-Saxons familiar with Socrates’ famous encounter with the physiognomist Zopyrus.⁶⁴ Given the innate nature of some forms of physiognomical perception, and given that physiognomia was a Latin term coined to refer to the textualized, systematized, form of an audio-visual phenomenon, it would be either naïve or pedantic to assume that ‘physiognomy’ only began in the medieval West with the arrival of these manuscripts. Furthermore, it has yet to be established that there was no oral body of physiognomical theory which pre-dated this GrecoArabic textual tradition, an oral physiognomical culture into which the ⁶² G. G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York, 1961), 48–9. V. MacDermot, The Cult of the Seer in the Ancient Middle East (1971), 417, 420. ⁶³ Gratian, Decretum, Dist. XXXV, I, 1, Dist. L, 59, Dist. LV, 1, and Gregory IX, Decretales I. XX, 3. 6, in Corpus juris canonici, ed. E. Friedberg and A. L. Richter, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1879). ⁶⁴ J. D. A. Ogilvy, Books Known To The English 597–1066 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 113, 166, 208.

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textual tradition was inserted or converted. Let us take just two examples. First, Daniel of Beccles (fl. c.1180) used the phrase ‘frons faceto’ to describe the countenance as expressive of feeling. Second, the proverbs ascribed to Alfred the Great include the famous physiognomical aphorism about red hair: ‘The rede man he is a quet [wicked man]; for he wole the thin uvil red [will give thee evil counsel’].⁶⁵ But here, once again, we come upon a historical brick wall, as it is an aspect of the history of this subject that no historian has yet considered closely, and a problem for which the available sources might not in any case suffice. All that can be said is that until further scholarship is carried out in this area, Dark Age physiognomy remains something of an unexplored abyss. Nevertheless, in the light of a 1596 English schoolbook definition of physiognomy as ‘knowledge by the visage’, a single entry in an Anglo-Saxon glossary is suggestive of what a rewarding area of investigation it might be: ‘Vultus: Contemplatio’.⁶⁶

The art of physiognomy in the Middle Ages The art of physiognomy in the Middle Ages is yet another aspect of the history of physiognomy which, as I write, still awaits its scholar.⁶⁷ It should prove a fruitful area of research. It was during this period, perhaps more than any other, that physiognomy can be seen to have undergone a rich intellectual transformation. The proliferation of physiognomical treatises in manuscript from the thirteenth century onwards was part of a complex process that, from both an intellectual and a practical point of view, had particularly profound consequences for the medieval Christian understanding of, among other things, religion, natural philosophy, medicine, and art. This involved the assimilation of the Greco-Arabic medical tradition, as well as the arrival of the newly translated corpus of Aristotelian writings, particularly the corpus vetustius (which sometimes included the Physiognomonica). Such an approach emphasizes only the ‘Christian’ tradition. Equally important for the dissemination of physiognomical theory in the Middle Ages, as well as for the history of religious conflict in the period, was the diffusion of the extremely influential late thirteenth-century Hebraic encyclopaedia, the Book of Splendour (Sefer hazohar), otherwise known as the Zohar, written in Castile and containing the physiognomy of the Secretum. As Scholem has written, ‘alone among the whole ⁶⁵ Manzalaoui, Secretum, 276; The Proverbs of Alfred, ed. E. Borgström (Lund, 1908), 25, ll. 661–2. See also 24, ll. 639–40. ⁶⁶ Edmund Coote, The English schoole-maister (1596); Hessels, Latin–Anglo-Saxon Glossary, 122. ⁶⁷ J. Agrimi, Ingeniosa scientia nature (Florence, 2002).


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of post-Talmudic rabbinical literature it became a canonical text, which for a period of several centuries actually ranked with the Bible and the Talmud’. Two centuries after its first appearance, the Zohar had been raised from obscurity ‘to the foremost eminence in Kabbalistic literature’.⁶⁸ In addition to this more intellectual approach, there is much to be learned about the role of the art of physiognomy in the wider sphere of medieval culture and society, from practising physiognomists, university education, religious rituals, or even medieval art and poetry. For the moment it has to be said that there appear to have been four treatises that dominated the medieval Christian tradition. Three of them were written in the thirteenth century, within the sixty-five-year period c.1230–c.1295. Moreover, with one exception, they are all treatises that later made the transition from manuscript into early modern print. There are no doubt other treatises which made more significant contributions to the development of the medieval theory of physiognomy but which only ever circulated in manuscript. One such is the extensive treatise purportedly written by ‘Roland Scriptoris’. But a full understanding of the exact contribution of all such manuscripts to the intellectual development of medieval physiognomy will have to await their scholarly editors. Notwithstanding, the following will simply try to highlight the most basic innovative feature of each of the medieval treatises. In so doing, it will be argued that these developments, cumulatively speaking, contributed to what I want to argue was a broadening of the focus of the physiognomical eye in a process that, by the end of the Middle Ages, might be described as the realization of its totalizing potential. The first, and possibly the most influential, of those medieval physiognomical treatises was written by Michael Scot, as already mentioned most widely known as the court astrologer of Frederick II from about 1228 to c.1235, in whose court he wrote this most original of his works. Scot’s Liber phisionomie was the third book in a work entitled the Liber introductorius. Like the earlier Arabic Secretum, Scot’s work is a veritable encyclopaedia of the more Arabicinfluenced ‘medical’ aspects of natural philosophy.⁶⁹ Until this text is studied in greater detail by a medievalist, all that can be said here is that the originality of Scot’s contribution to the written tradition of physiognomy can be said to have had three aspects. The first is that he coined many of his own physiognomical aphorisms. It is not yet known if they were ⁶⁸ G. G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York, 1974), 156–60. ⁶⁹ P. Morpurgo, ‘Michele Scoto tra scienza dell’anima e astrologia’, Clio. Rivista trimestrale di studi storici, 19 (Rome, 1983), 441–50; ‘Il capitolo “de informacione medicorum” nel “Liber introductorius” di Michele Scoto’, Clio. Rivista trimestrale di studi storici (Rome, 1984), 651–61.

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formed through some sort of ‘empirical’ observation of the people around him. Yet, irrespective of how they were formed, their effect was to introduce some fundamental changes into the structure and nature of the physiognomical aphorism. In Scot’s treatise, the genealogy of the metaphysical meanings attached to the physical feature in all of the physiognomical aphorisms is much more complex. As a result the sign became much more polyvalent. As contradictory as many of them seem, what Scot in fact did was to introduce new families of related moral/psychological meanings. Given the extent to which physiognomy was an art that authors often claimed led one to self-knowledge, an issue that will be explored in greater detail in Chapters 3, 4, and 5, this re-combination of the metaphysics of the self as symbolized in the physical features had important implications for the self that was to be known by this art. Scot’s second innovation appears to have been to forge a much stronger conceptual link between physiognomy, issues of hereditary, embryology, and generation, which he articulated through astrological ideas of conception.⁷⁰ Moreover, it was an intellectual innovation with a very practical basis, as the many later editions of his treatise on physiognomy which begin with a chapter entitled ‘The Utility of Physiognomy’ indicate.⁷¹ In Scot’s case, one very practical impetus behind his conceptual link between physiognomy, embryology, and generation was the fact that Scot may have been trying to help Frederick II choose his second wife.⁷² As such, it was a medieval Christian version of a practice also found in medieval India in which the physiognomist was accompanied by two brahmins in the examination of the potential wife.⁷³ The third aspect of the originality of Scot’s treatise lay in the fact that he seems to have been the first to include the sense of smell in the phenomenon of physiognomical perception. In Michael Scot’s treatise one finds the following passage: ‘the fetid breath of a man signifies an illness of the liver, often lying, vain, lascivious, fallacious, of a tenacious capacity, of a gross intellect, a seducer, envious, desirous of the goods of others’.⁷⁴ This connection with generation and reproduction as well as the extension of physiognomical perception to the realm of smell might be taken as another intimation of what appears to have been the most overarching change that occurred in the structure of the ⁷⁰ S. J. Williams, ‘The Early Circulation of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Secret of Secrets in the West: The Papal and Imperial Courts’, Micrologus, 2 (Turnhout, 1994), 127–44. ⁷¹ See, for example, Michael Scot, Rerum naturalium perscrutatoris, de secretis naturae (Frankfurt, 1565). ⁷² D. Jacquart, ‘La physiognomonie à l’époque de Frédéric II: Le traité de Michel Scot’, Micrologus, ii (Turnhout, 1994), 34. ⁷³ Professor K. G. Zysk, private conversation, August 2003. ⁷⁴ Michael Scot, Liber phisionomie magistri Michaelis Scoti (Basle, after 1485), [65].


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physiognomical eye as it developed in the period between classical Athens and late fifteenth-century Europe—its totalization.⁷⁵ Thirty years later, in the 1260s, came the next major scholastic exposition of physiognomical doctrine. This was written by a theologian at the very heart of the established church, the famous thirteenth-century Dominican philosopher and bishop of Regensburg, Albertus Magnus (d. 1280). As obscure as he appears these days, the intellectual reputation of Albertus Magnus throughout medieval Europe was staggering. As master of theology at the University of Paris, he taught Thomas Aquinas. Like Scot, Albertus Magnus’s reputation was ruined by accusations of his being a ‘magician’. However, unlike Scot, Albertus Magnus was finally canonized in 1931. The work which contained his exposition of physiognomy was his De animalibus. Like Scot’s work, this also bears the strong influence of Arabic authors. Book XII, for example, is based largely on Galen’s De complexionibus but via the Canon and De animalibus of the Arabic physician and philosopher Avicenna. However, unlike Scot, Albertus Magnus took his physiognomical aphorisms verbatim from a version of Loxus’s fourth-century treatise, interspersed with citations taken verbatim from the physiognomy found in the Arabic Secretum. Thus, once again, we find an author whose contribution to the development of the physiognomical eye was not to change its inner grammar or language, but to embed it in a new conceptual context. In the case of Albertus Magnus, he interwove these physiognomical aphorisms with material on the anatomy of animals and humans, in a similar vein to the zoological writings of Aristotle, but much more systematically. In that sense he widened the hitherto more anthropocentric parameters of the physiognomical eye. The exact nature of that intellectual connection between anatomy and physiognomy in Albertus, however original, remains as yet unexplained, as does its relationship to his theology. It is possible he was attempting to find a way of circumventing the problems of syllogistic thinking inherent in physiognomy. Similarly, he may have been implying the need for a physiological causal explanation, as opposed to an astrological one, which would link anatomy and physiognomy.⁷⁶ It is also conceivable that he saw physiognomy as a way of linking the high-ranking Aristotelian natural philosophy and the often scorned lower ranking mechanical art of medicine, with the aim of incorporating both into devotional practice. Interweaving the anatomy and physiognomy of man so ⁷⁵ See M. R. McVaugh, Smells and the Medieval Surgeon (forthcoming). ⁷⁶ E. Synan, ‘Albertus Magnus and the Sciences’, in J. A. Weisheipl (ed.), Albertus Magnus and the Sciences (Toronto, 1980), 6–8. However, see N. Siraisi, ‘The Medical Learning of Albertus Magnus’, in Weisheipl, Albertus Magnus, 382–3.

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blatantly with that of the animals, it could be argued, brought physiognomy closer to the doctrine of signatures—the next conceptual step after this theriological physiognomy being the development of an analogical botanical physiognomy. It is in that sense that the work of Albertus on physiognomy can perhaps be considered, retrospectively, as a stepping-stone in the gradual totalization of the physiognomical eye. The third significant medieval contribution to the canon of physiognomical writings came from the quill of the famous Italian natural philosopher and physician Pietro d’Abano (1257–1315?). Professor of philosophy, medicine, and astronomy at Paris and Padua, Abano’s most famous and influential text was known as the Conciliator differentiarum philosophorum et praecipue medicorum. It was an ambitious attempt to reconcile a variety of opposed philosophical views, in particular Arab medicine and Greek natural philosophy. It was a work which commanded respect and authority well into the sixteenth century, and helped to further Padua’s reputation as a centre of medical study.⁷⁷ Yet Abano remains something of a controversial figure. He was tried twice by the Inquisition on charges of heresy, and accused of questioning the holy miracles and practising magic. His interest in astrology and alchemy, and his claims as to their usefulness in medicine, alongside his interest in things Arabic, only added to the determination of the Christian Inquisition to get a conviction. He was acquitted at the first trial, but found guilty at the second trial, which took place after his death. His reputation has never really recovered since. Abano’s ‘treatise on physiognomy’, entitled Compilatio Physionomiae, was written in Paris c.1295. Like so many of the treatises in this canon of physiognomical writing, much of the grammar and conclusions of his physiognomical doctrine are not so original in themselves. It is, in fact, a compendium of all earlier works. It is a less anthropocentric physiognomy than that found in Rhazes and the Secretum. Abano sees physiognomy as an art which compares the human aspect with that of the animals, as well as helping with understanding the difference between men and women. Like Scot, Abano emphasizes the utility of physiognomy. In Abano’s eyes that utility goes beyond the buying of horses and slaves, the preservation of health, the political rhetoric of Polemon, the political scientia of the Secretum, and its choosing of élite ministers or the choosing of a mate put forward by Scot. Abano explicitly states that physiognomy can help one to discern friends from enemies. In that sense, from the point of view of physiognomy as a political science, Abano extended its utility ⁷⁷ N. Siraisi, ‘Pietro d’Abano and Taddeo Alderotti: Two Models of Medical Culture’, in Medioevo, 11 (Padua, 1985), 162.


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across the entire polis, to cover what might today be termed the ‘public sphere’ between the home/family and the guardians of the state. Yet besides broadening its practical applications, Abano’s contribution to the evolution of the physiognomical eye lies in the intellectual connection he makes between physiognomy, astrology, mathematics, and the idea of the ‘necessary proportionality of cause and effect’.⁷⁸ This is an extremely complex idea that cannot be discussed in any detail here, but which goes back to the Aristotelian notion of ‘proportion’ in the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise. Suffice it to say that whilst Abano was not the first to link physiognomy with astrology, he did explore this link in more detail than any previous writer in the physiognomical canon.⁷⁹ In Ptolemaic astrology, there were specific, if loose, physiognomical indications attributed to the planets. Abano joins this physiognomy to the physiognomical descriptions of zodiacal types, and includes notes about their state of health as well as their preferences, their colours, and their fortunate days. He placed all of this within a framework governed by the notion of ‘proportionality’—a mathematical law that was thought to determine the reciprocal harmony of the universe, including the relationship between body and soul, and the foreseeing of the primary and secondary causes. In this way, not only did Abano further contribute to the medicalization of physiognomy (in which physiognomical diagnosis allowed one to determine the state of health, the predisposition to illness, longevity, or imminent death), he also contributed to reinforcing its place in the realm of the mantic disciplines.⁸⁰ The final work which will be considered in this section is one of the manuscripts of the Western medieval physiognomical tradition which was never printed. It was a text written sometime before 1450 and entitled Speculum Phisionomia. Its author was Michael Savonarola (1384–1464), a professor at the University of Padua until his fifty-fifth year, who spent the last twenty-five years of his life as court physician to the Estes. Savonarola dedicated his text to Leonello d’Este, an ancestor of Cardinal Luigi d’Este, to whom the sixteenthcentury physiognomist Giovanni Battista Della Porta would dedicate his De humana physiognomia over a century later, in 1586. Savonarola’s Speculum Phisionomia continues the process of the medicalization of physiognomy. Like Albertus Magnus, Savonarola took most of the physiognomical aphorisms from Loxus’s fourth-century treatise. With regard to his specific intellectual contribution to the development of physiognomical ⁷⁸ E. Paschetto, ‘La Fisiognomica nell’enciclopedia delle scienze di Pietro d’Abano’, Medioevo, 11 (Padua, 1985), 97, 98, 105. ⁷⁹ R. Pack, ‘Auctores incerti de physionomia libellus’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Age, 42 (Paris, 1975), 113–38. ⁸⁰ Paschetto, ‘La Fisiognomica’, 109 and 111.

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theory, Thomann has shown the rich intellectual range of Savonarola’s treatment of the subject. In particular, the treatise contributed, among other things, to the development of the mathematical notion of the mean, and explored this through art.⁸¹ But Savonarola’s originality also lies in the degree of specificity with which he seeks to correlate the doctrine of the temperaments and the law of the four elements with physiognomy. He attempts to determine the corresponding temperament of each physiognomical sign as well as offer a physiological explanation of the particular physical feature before giving its psychological meaning. For Savonarola, the physiognomists said what it is, but did not explain how or why it is—he thought that was something only medicine could explain. Yet for all its intellectual subtlety, like Abano, Savonarola also stressed the practical aim of physiognomy. He thought it would teach Leonello to know the character and secret inclinations of the hearts of men, as well as the temperaments and the diseases to which they were predisposed, the marvellous secrets of nature, the proportions of the human body, some principles of the physiognomy of animals, particularly horses, and, in the tradition of the Secretum Secretorum and Abano, he thought it could act as a guide to help Este’s sons in choosing their entourages.

The Textual Presence of Physiognomy before Print Catalogues of medieval libraries show that manuscript versions of all of these ‘treatises on physiognomy’ were familiar material in libraries throughout Europe from the twelfth century onwards.⁸² The earliest surviving catalogue of an Austin library, a list of fifty-seven volumes of part of the conventical library at Ratisbon in 1347, is just one of many examples of such libraries. The only ‘Aristotelian’ work it contains is a ‘Liber secretorum’. Yet it was not only the Latin-reading élite who had access to such treatises. Of those few manuscripts which have survived, many are written in a European vernacular, and their original provenance ranges across the continent. Some can be traced to specific religious orders, if not specific monasteries. There is, for example, a thirteenth-century Latin manuscript of the Anonymous Latin treatise which may have been written at Evesham. There are others in English and Latin ⁸¹ J. Thomann, Studien zum “Speculum physionomie” des Michele Savonarola, Ph.D. thesis (University of Zurich, 1997). ⁸² Williams, ‘Scholarly Career’, 89, 92 ff., and 124; K. W. Humphreys, The Book Provisions of the Medieval Friars 1215–1400 (Amsterdam, 1964), 119 and 125; J. N. Hillgarth, Readers & Books in Majorca, 1229–1550, 2 vols. (Paris, 1991), ii. 95.


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whose provenance was originally English Benedictine and Augustinian. The Franciscans at Oxford owned at least one such manuscript, which Roger Bacon and John of Wales both used. Hiltgart von Hürnheim, a young Cistercian nun of the convent of Zimmern in south Germany, set a precedent for all Cistercian communities with her translation of the long Secretum into German in 1282 (which entitled the section on physiognomy ‘on the knowledge of the qualities of man by spiritual signs which is called the phisonomia of Aristotle’), as Albertus Magnus had done for the Dominicans. There are fragments of evidence which suggest that these manuscripts were not simply left chained and unread in the monastic library. One monk who had a physiognomical manuscript in his private possession was Simon of Bozoun, prior of Norwich (1344–52), who had his own copy of the Secretum. Nuns also had their own private copies. A good example is the manuscript of Lydgate’s versified Secretum, in a version compiled by John Newton on 25 October 1459, at Rhodes, Lancashire. It was held in Syon, Middlesex, in the Abbey of St Saviour and St Bridget. The Brigittine nuns were particularly important in the transmission of ‘mystical’ texts. This particular mystical text appears to have been passed down through the private hands of the sisters. Until 1531, one of its owners was a sister called Anne Colville. After her death in 1531 it became the property of Clemencia Thraseborough until her death in 1536. These manuscripts could also be found in lay hands. One was included in the seven volumes donated to the Benedictine cathedral priory of St Cuthbert in Durham by one ‘Master Herbert the Doctor’. Moreover, those who did not possess their own copy or never visited the library may have heard one read out in the Refectory. Such may have been the case with Hiltgart von Hürnheim’s translation of the Secretum, in which she addresses both ‘readers’ and ‘listeners’. In other words, the text was written to be read out aloud to a group of people.⁸³ By the late Middle Ages, the art of physiognomy was being taught at numerous universities throughout Europe. Indeed, it was taken so seriously at the University of Freiburg that in its mid-fifteenth century statutes physiognomy was actually prescribed to be read. The seriousness with which physiognomy was considered in the syllabus of the scholastics is what the mid-seventeenth century English radical John Webster was trying to remind the educated world of when he pointed out that the loss of physiognomy from the syllabus of the ⁸³ Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 339A, fol. 105r–117v; Thomann, Thesis, Appendix; Hiltgart von Hürnheim, Mittelhochdeutsche Prosaübersetzung des “Secretum Secretorum”, ed. R. Möller (Berlin, 1963), 4, 34; English Benedictine Libraries, ed. R. Sharpe et al., Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues (1996), ii, 303; Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 416, fol. 253; David N. Bell, What Nuns Read (Michigan, 1995), 195 (Syon A. 35e); Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 18, 6. 11, fol. 82r–84v; D. H. Green, Medieval Listening and Reading (Cambridge, 1994), 80, 96, and 152.

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scholastics was a major wrong turning-point in the development of élite education: There remaineth diverse excellent discoveries of many mysterious things in nature that do properly belong to Physicks, which yet the Schools take small or no notice of, and as little pains in, either to know, teach, or improve them; and so are a witness against them of their sluggishness, and deficiency of their too-much magnified Peripatetick Philosophy. As first, they pass over with a dry foot that laudable, excellent, and profitable science of Physiognomy, which hath been admired, and studyed of the gravest and wisest Sages that have been in many generations: which is that Science which from and by certain external signs, signatures, and lineaments, doth explicate the internal nature and quality of natural bodies either generally or specifically.⁸⁴

Intellectually or taxonomically speaking, throughout medieval Europe, physiognomy was a seemingly unstable, unclassifiable, subject. On the whole it hovered between being conceived of as a rational Aristotelian scientia, and a more mystical, so-called ‘occult’ scientia, and, in either case, was always a somewhat medicalized and astrologized scientia. This intellectual ambiguity is embodied in the extant manuscripts themselves. For example, one finds expositions of physiognomical doctrine at one and the same time in Aristotelian florilegia, collections of occult sciences, or bound with manuscripts devoted to astrological/medical material, often beside expositions of chiromancy. If the binding of one manuscript of the Secretum secretorum with another manuscript on the coronation of kings is more than a random accident, it is perhaps understandable in terms of the tradition of Mirrors for Princes. However the binding of another manuscript on physiognomy with a manuscript on some sort of either literal or metaphorical ‘travel’ or ‘journey’ (itinerarium), if not completely fortuitous, seems much more curious.⁸⁵ If the status of medicine as a scientia was still very much disputed during the Middle Ages, the status of physiognomy as a scientia was even more ambiguous for Aristotelians. Charles Schmitt has argued that by the fifteenth century, with the rise of more rigorous critical methods, the lack of a Greek original meant that a hitherto supposedly Aristotelian work, such as the Secretum, would be deemed to be spurious. Indeed, Williams has clearly shown that whilst some scholars took the Secretum very seriously, as early as the fourteenth century most school-men had questioned its paternity, and by the late fifteenth ⁸⁴ Agrimi, Ingeniosa, ch. 3; Maclean, Logic, 319; John Webster, Academiarum examen (1653), 76. ⁸⁵ Williams, ‘Scholarly Career’, 92 ff. and 124; London: British Library, MS Sloane 213; Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Digby 95; Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Douce 95; Sharpe, English Benedictine Libraries, B58 #26 (303).


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century, this doubt was quite widespread. In the case of the Secretum, this then followed through in its printing history. It never appeared in any Latin edition of the Aristotelian Opera. Indeed, like the Chiromantia, the Secretum was ‘the only work of any size attributed to Aristotle . . . which never went into a printed edition of the Opera’, and by the sixteenth century ‘it was no longer worth discussing whether or not it was by Aristotle’.⁸⁶ Yet for all that scholars might argue about the authenticity of the Aristotelianism of the Secretum, this does not mean that the Secretum was not able to stand on its own authority, even if that authority was an Arabic one and suffered all the more for being so. More to the point, this does not mean that the credibility of physiognomy itself was dismissed. Physiognomy retained the significant theological, medical, and philosophical authorities of Albertus, Rhazes, Scot, and Abano. And if these were considered by some as dubious, marginal, figures in themselves, the art of physiognomy could still claim an Aristotelian authority. Not only were there numerous genuine works of the Stagyrite which contained some physiognomical doctrine, be it the Historia animalium, the Prior analytica, as well as the Problemata, there was an original Greek manuscript of the Physiognomonica. Moreover, unlike the Secretum, the Physiognomonica appeared in numerous printed Greek editions of the Aristotelian Opera as well as numerous Latin editions. Having said that, despite this Aristotelian authority that physiognomy retained, the criticisms of it by Jean Buridan, one of the leading fourteenth-century commentators on Aristotle, are perhaps a good example among many of the ambiguity one can find in the as-yet-unexamined medieval attitudes towards physiognomy.⁸⁷

Conclusion The Renaissance and early modern period did not see a sudden ‘awakening’ of interest in physiognomy per se. The coming of print saw the distribution of earlier physiognomical doctrine in a new medium to a wider audience. Notwithstanding the earlier ‘non-Western’ influences, the continuity of the medieval tradition with the classical tradition is evident in some of the basic philosophical and logical assumptions, as well as the various a priori ‘prisms’ which underpinned the basic structure of the more deductive aspect of the ⁸⁶ Williams, ‘Scholarly Career’, 90; C. B. Schmitt, ‘Francesco Storella and the Last Printed Edition of the Latin Secretum Secretorum (1555)’, in Ryan and Schmitt, Sources and Influences, 125. ⁸⁷ L. Thorndike, ‘Buridan’s Questions on the Physiognomy ascribed to Aristotle’, Speculum, 18 (1943), 99–103.

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physiognomical eye. However, the theory of this physiognomical eye underwent various adaptations and transformations between the fourth century bce and the fourth century ce which brought about the fusion of a divine, temporally all-encompassing, medicalized, zoologized, astrologized physiognomical eye and ear with the hermeneutic tradition expressed in the idea of the ‘book of nature’. As a result of that totalization, everything in nature came to be seen as having some sort of systematized physiognomical significance. It is this process which is echoed in the distinctly Boethian sub-title of one late fifteenth-century Venetian edition of Michael Scot’s physiognomical treatise, Tractatus de scientia phisonomie, siue de consolatione naturae ( [Venice, 1490 ?] ).⁸⁸ In the early modern period, this more total form of physiognomy came to have its own, carefully elaborated, Neoplatonic physics which the seventeenth-century natural philosopher Johannes Alsted referred to as ‘physica collativa, or physiognomy’.⁸⁹ ⁸⁸ London: British Library, IA.25095. ⁸⁹ Johannes Alsted, Encyclopaedia septem tomis distincta, 4 vols. (Herborn, 1630), ii, 767–80.

2 The Bookish Face of Physiognomy in Early Modern Europe In this chapter I want to expose the assumptions upon which the archive of early modern ‘books on physiognomy’ used as the foundation of this study was created. I shall then use it, initially, to produce a tangible, material sense of the presence of this corpus of physiognomical writings in early modern Europe. I shall try to show how much of this textual physiognomy was in circulation in early modern Europe, how much it cost, and who was reading it. In arguing for the social and geographical ubiquity of this small corpus of text, I shall also offer some suggestions about the evident dynamics of its production and consumption.

Textual Presence Inventing an archive An archive is not only discovered, it is also ‘invented’. In the historian’s hands, the four ‘books on physiognomy’ from Samuel Jeake’s library become a handful of documents in an ‘invented’ archive. That ‘invented archive’is part of a longue durée global process of exchange of textual knowledge that was intensified by the work of medieval scribes in the twelfth century, and which exploded with the invention of the printing press at the end of the fifteenth century. Jeake’s ‘books on physiognomy’ thus were riddled with utterances and observations accumulated across centuries. But in each text, those utterances were ‘translated’ into the mentality and the culture of medieval and then early modern contemporaneity in the form of this ‘canon’ of ‘books on physiognomy’. As was shown in the Introduction, this ‘canon’ was known and read throughout the European mainland in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and various early modern vernaculars. Thus, taken as a whole, the texts under consideration here were not the product of any one, specific organization, or any one person’s

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writings or lifetime. The ‘archive’ they form in this work was not found chained to the walls of a secret corridor under the Vatican library with an inscription above the doorway reading ‘what we saw when we looked into their eyes’. They do not form a self-evident series of documents and cannot now be said to exist in the form of an archive with an in-built beginning, middle, and end, or an obvious, innate unifying feature. Yet an authentic historical archive with no obvious coherent form in and of itself can be constituted as such. However, it can only be ‘invented’ on a reasoned basis, with the limitations of the assumptions underpinning it fully exposed to rational criticism.

Geographical framework A rough impression of the textual presence of ‘treatises on physiognomy’ can be established through a laborious process that was inconceivable to Renaissance minds—by making a graph of the chronology and volume of ‘books on physiognomy’ published throughout the period. This way one can at least provide some tangible sense of the actual physical presence of physiognomy in its textual form in early modern Europe. It is this aspect of the project that requires the ‘invention’ of an archive. It immediately raises two questions of its own and begs a third. Where, both temporally and spatially speaking, does one begin and end this bibliographical mapping? Why does one begin and end there? And what does the graph depict? With regard to the first question, when George Sarton, the historian of science, was mining the archives for works of Arabic medicine and science, he wrote of how he kept stumbling across Arabic ‘treatises on physiognomy’ even when he was not looking for them.¹ A similar thing happens when one looks in the library collections of America and Europe. With regard to the geographical delineation of the inquiry, this particular study restricted its search to those ‘books on physiognomy’ published in England, France, Germany, Italy, the Low Countries, Switzerland, and Spain. However, there were others published in countries further north and east. In 1594, Lorentz Benedicht in Copenhagen published an octavo in Danish entitled Astronomical Description, containing information about the nature and inclination of man.² Further east in Cracow, Hieronymus Viebores published Joannes Glogoviens’s Phisionomia hinc inde ex illustribus scriptoribus . . . recollecta, in a short quarto format in 1518. An octavo of Szymon z Lowicza’s Enchiridion chiromantie compendiosum published by ¹ G. Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, 3 vols. (Baltimore, 1927–48), III.i., 258. ² Astronomische bescriffuelse: huor vdi tilkiende giffuis menniskens natur oc tilbøielighed (Copenhagen, 1594).

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Florianum Vnglerium in Cracow in 1532 suggests that Glogoviens’s book was by no means the only physiognomical treatise published in Central and Eastern Europe. In carrying out this bibliographical mapping of early modern printed ‘treatises on physiognomy’ in Europe, it was decided to arrange them according to the country of publication. However, those very ‘national’ distinctions upon which the lists are calculated are, of course, rather arbitrary. The political reconfigurations of the German-speaking territories and the Italian kingdoms and republics during the early modern period are obvious examples of the problem of using the term ‘nation’ at this time as though it were a stable, unproblematic, analytical category. As for the more banal concerns of book publishing, even at the most simple, geopolitical level, the constant redrawing of territorial boundaries raises the question of whether, for example, one should include books published in Strasburg in the ‘French’ or the ‘German’ bibliography. From a linguistic perspective, the problems are even greater. With regard to England, strictly speaking, the first printed exposition of physiognomical doctrine in English (1503) was not only written in ‘Scottish’, it was published in France from where it was then imported into England. Should this text be included in both the English and the French lists, or a separate Scottish list? In the sixteenth century, even a work written in French would not have been seen as foreign to an English person. William Warde, the Cambridge professor of anatomy and original translator of the first English version of a physiognomical treatise widely known at the time as Arcandam (c.1564), described the work as ‘now newly turned out of our French into our Vulgar Tongue’.³ Paulo Pinzio’s Italian translation of the French Neoplatonist Antoine Du Moulin’s 1549 Latin physiognomical treatise, Fisionomia con grandissima brevità raccolta da i libri di antichi filosofi, was actually published in Lyon, by Jean de Tournes in 1550. Does this mean it should be included in the French list or the Italian list? These problems of classification do not only arise with works in the vernacular. The same can be said of works written in Latin. Robert Fludd’s large encyclopaedia Utriusque cosmi . . . historia (1617–21) may be considered as the writings of an English occult philosopher. But not only was it written in Latin, it was published in Oppenheim. Should it therefore be included in the English list or the German list, or both, or a separate early modern Latin reading/speaking ‘nation’ of its own? Moreover, by concentrating on the place or the language of the publication of physiognomical treatises in any one country, one is in danger of overlooking ³ Arcandam, The most excellent, profitable and pleasant book, of the famous Doctor and expert Astrologian Arcandam, trans. William Warde [c.1564], title-page. My emphasis.

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the more important and difficult issue of gauging the actual presence of ‘books on physiognomy’ in any one geographical space. Works published in one country circulated widely in another, because book-buyers often preferred the physiognomy in books produced outside their own country. A 1503 French edition of the Calendrier des bergiers in the Radcliffe Science Library in Oxford has manuscript zodiacal and calendrical comments in an early sixteenth-century English hand.⁴ The seventeenth-century gentleman scholar John Aubrey swore by the Bolognese professor Camillo Baldi’s huge Latin commentary on the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica, which was printed in Bologna. In addition, the historical records are littered with off-the-cuff remarks suggesting just this sort of interchange of physiognomical texts, such as Samuel Hartlib’s note to the effect that ‘Mr. Smith of Christ’s College’ commended ‘Finella’s Physiognomia Planetaria’ while Rozencreutzen commended another entitled ‘Anatomia et Physiognom[i]a simplicium’. In Richard Symonds’s notebooks we can actually see some of these books in transit on board a boat heading for England from Italy. Symonds informs us that he bought his Latin versions of the treatises on physiognomy by Della Porta and Ingegneri while he was in Rome and had them sent back home in a special trunk.⁵ Notwithstanding the translation of many early modern European ‘books on physiognomy’ into the various European vernaculars, this apparent instability in any strict understanding of the ‘national’ categories on which the invention of this bibliographical archive is based is aggravated by the fact that the actual content of much of the physiognomy in these books has an important and hitherto unexamined relationship with the wide diversity of ancient written traditions of physiognomy dating back to ancient China and ancient Mesopotamia, as highlighted in Chapter 1. This suggests that not only is a wider spatial conception of ‘Europe’ necessary, but also a non-Eurocentric understanding of the term ‘book on physiognomy’. Indeed, as part of the ongoing, international exchange of textual knowledge intensified by the discovery of the printing press, there is a case to be made for seeing this invented archive of early modern ‘books on physiognomy’ as part of the early modern period’s contribution to what is often today termed as ‘the growing globalisation of media, communication and culture’. Given the innately visual, even ‘non-literate’ nature of the faculty of fisnomy, ‘books on physiognomy’ are perhaps particularly appropriate to be thought of along the lines suggested by ⁴ C. Brotherton-Ratcliffe, ‘Illustrations of the Four Last Things in English Pre-Reformation Books of Devotion’, Ph.D. thesis (University of London, 1994), 256 ff. ⁵ Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Aubrey 10, fol. 47v; The Hartlib Papers (Ann Arbor, 1995), 28/1/80a and 31/22/29a; London: British Library, MS Harley 943, fol. 110v–111v and 260v–261r.


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Walter Ong with regard to the restructuring of thought effected by those technologies.⁶

Temporal framework With regard to the temporal framework of this archive of physiognomical texts, we saw in Chapter 1 that ‘books on physiognomy’ were not new to early modern Europe. In fact, the many attempts made to record some form of physiognomy in writing or in print represent an enormous textual cobweb stretching from the Neo-Babylonian era to the present day. The invention of print has simply been chosen because it provides the most convenient startingpoint for this graphic calculation. Put like that it can be said that the first printed physiognomical treatise was a late fifteenth-century edition of a medieval text written originally in 1295 by the Paduan philosopher and physician Pietro d’Abano, and published in Padua in around 1471 under the title Decisiones physiognomiae. An equally convenient cut-off point for this present study is around 1780. The mid-1770s onwards witnessed the phenomenal European-wide success and translation of the physiognomical writings of an obscure Swiss Pietist minister named Johannes Caspar Lavater. Published originally in German in 1775, his text was soon translated into other European vernaculars.⁷ Indeed its impact brought about a publication by a German scholar that could provide an even neater terminal point for the temporal framework of this study: Johann Georg Friedrich Franz’s Scriptores physiognomoniae veteres (Altenburg, 1780). Franz’s study was the first major scholarly retrospective on the art and science of physiognomy that had been carried out in the two hundred years since the Italian natural philosopher and playwright Giovanni Battista Della Porta had published his famous Renaissance treatise De physiognomia humana in Naples in 1586.⁸ But it was not the last. A hundred years later, near the end of the nineteenth century, in the midst of what was then the increasing institutionalization of the new ‘physiognomical’ science of physical anthropology and the growing ‘physiognomical’ concern with the biological question of ‘degeneration’, another German scholar, Richard Förster, undertook a formidable philological and palaeological investigation into the ancient and classical foundations of physiognomy. In both cases, it was something that needed to be done. For, as implied in the title of a satirical attack upon Lavaterian physiognomy, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s (1742–99) Über physiognomik, after the ⁶ W. J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982). ⁷ J. C. Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente, 4 vols. (Leipzig and Winterthur, 1775–8). ⁸ Giambattista Della Porta, De humana physiognomonia (Vici Æquensis, 1586).

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appearance of the famous Swiss physiognomist, physiognomy was never quite the same.⁹

Defining a ‘treatise on physiognomy’ If this is the geographical and temporal framework for both the archive and the actual calculation of the presence of ‘books on physiognomy’ in early modern Europe, one fundamental question still needs to be answered: what is a ‘book on physiognomy’? In 1617, in response to the question ‘what is physiognomy?’, the controversial German Calvinist professor Clemens Timpler (1567–1624) wrote: ‘in defining human physiognomy, the philosophers do not agree amongst themselves’.¹⁰ It would be equally difficult to get them or historians of the book to agree on what is meant by a ‘book on physiognomy’. One of the defining features of the most authoritative classical and medieval ‘treatises on physiognomy’ was that, for all the diversity of material they contained, they all included a simple list of physiognomical aphorisms (physiognomics), running, usually, from the head to the feet. As this represented the most basic element and the most consistent feature of expositions of physiognomical doctrine, it was decided that any early modern text that incorporated a textual exposition of physiognomical doctrine in the form of a list of physiognomical aphorisms would be included in the calculation. This covered a diverse range of texts, from the printed versions of the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica to those late eighteenth-century English chapbooks like The New School of Love (Glasgow, c.1786) in which one finds lists of physiognomical aphorisms presented in an extremely contracted form.¹¹ This decision introduces as many problems as it solves. For what of those innumerable works, by the likes of the well-known Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, or the less well-known Antonius Zara, the bishop of Pedena, which show a very learned familiarity with the art of physiognomy, its history, and its textual authorities, but whose relatively brief discussion of the subject does not include a systematic presentation of the lists of physiognomical aphorisms that constitute what might be called a classical exposition of physiognomical doctrine?¹² ⁹ Scriptores physiognomonici Graeci et Latini, ed. R. Förster, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1893); D. Pick, Faces of Degeneration (Cambridge, 1989); Georg Christopher Lichtenberg, Über Physiognomik (Göttingen, 1778). ¹⁰ Opticæ systema methodicum (Hanover, 1617), 134. ¹¹ Aristotle, Physiognomonics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1984), i, 1237–50; The New School of Love (Glasgow, 1786). ¹² Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, De incertitudine et vanitate omnium scientarium & artium liber (1530), edition consulted (Geneva, 1630), 142–4; Antonius Zara, Anatomia ingeniorum et scientiarum (Venice, 1615), 184–6, 99–100. See 46, for the essence of what, two hundred years later, became phrenology.


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Should this calculation also include the work on the colour of eyes written in 1550 by the Florentine Galenic humanist Simone Porzio? Although Porzio’s text is dominated by anatomical issues, he does include some very revealing passages on physiognomy. If Porzio’s work is to be included, what about the more provincial ‘Dr. Gwither’s Discourse on Physiognomy’, which was communicated in 1693 to the Philosophical Society in Dublin by the secretary, Mr Owen Lloyd? If these works are to be included, what about the discussion of physiognomy by the Roman physician Giovanni Maria Lancisi (1654–1720), pontifical doctor to Innocent XI, which was later added to the anatomical writings of an advocate of physiognomy in medicine, the professor of anatomy at the University of Turin, Giovanni Fantoni? And what of the numerous discussions of the art and science of physiognomy that were published throughout early modern Europe, such as the late eighteenth-century thesis of one Swiss doctoral candidate entitled Whether the physiognomy of man is exhibited through the consideration of the four temperaments?¹³ One might reconcile oneself to the exclusion of some of the aforementioned works on the grounds that they are more academic discussions of the subject rather than straightforward expositions of physiognomical doctrine. Yet that still leaves the problem of those works which do not contain an exposition of physiognomical doctrine but which it would be ludicrous to omit from any attempt to calculate the presence of, or constitute an archive of, ‘books on physiognomy’—if only for the light they shed on the distinct limitations of the present approach to the subject and the necessity of exploring it via the broad issue of the ‘physiognomatical’ rather than the more restricted realms of ‘physiognomony’. One such text, known throughout Europe in Latin and numerous vernacular translations, is a distinctly physiognomical text in which the term physiognomy, let alone any list of physiognomical aphorisms, was not employed but which is central to the history of physiognomy. It was written in 1575 by the Spanish physician Juan de Dios Huarte Navarro (1529–92), and entitled Examen de ingenios para las sciencias, donde se muestra la differencia de habilidades que hay en los hombres, y el género de letras que a cada uno responde en particular (Baeza, 1575). The search for a person’s vocation was often understood in physiognomical terms. After all, in terms of physique and temperament, there were only so many things any one person could do or become in life. Any early modern private library that contained a ‘book on physiognomy’ ¹³ Simone Porzio, De coloribus oculorum (Florence, 1550); The Royal Society of London. Philosophical Transactions, 17 (1693–4), 118–20; Joannes Baptista Fantonus, Observationes anatomicae–medicae [. . .] accedunt ejusdem D. Lancisii dissertationes II, quarum prior est de physiognomia, posteriore de sede cogitantis animae (Venice, 1713); F. Rosé, Physiognomia hominis ex consideratione quatuor temperamentorum exhibita (Fribourg, 1768).

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also usually had a copy of this work. Similarly, there is much to be said for the view that Jacques Pernetti’s Philosophical Letters upon Physiognomies, which was translated into English in 1751, five years after its first appearance in French in 1746, and into Italian slightly later than that, might actually reveal much more about the nature and understanding of the art of physiognomy in mideighteenth-century Europe than many of those much less sophisticated considerations of the subject contained in an exposition of physiognomical doctrine as defined here. Another such work is Charles Le Brun’s internationally famous Conférence sur l’expression des passions held at the Académie Royale in the 1670s, or indeed any one of the many tracts on art and the drawing of heads which it inspired, such as the progessively expressionistic examples presented in Benjamin Ralph’s The School of Raphael; or, The Student’ s Guide to Expression in Historical Painting (1759). And if one includes these more obviously aesthetic works, one could make a case for including the entire corpus of painted and engraved portraits from Van Eyck to Hogarth, particularly if one takes notice of Vasari’s claim that painters must have ‘besides long practice in the art, a complete understanding of physiognomy’.¹⁴ In addition to which one should also include all of the editions of Theophrastus’s Characters, alongside the large body of ‘character’ literature that it spawned. This is a corpus of writing that provides fundamental evidence for the early modern development of what was referred to in Chapter 1 as the ‘characterological prism’ of the early modern physiognomical eye, particularly in the context of the early modern changes in physiognomy which led to the development of the discipline of psychology and underpinned the evolution of literature. And what of those texts in which one finds nuggets of physiognomical thinking, some of which are recognizable fragments from an exposition of physiognomical doctrine proper? Such works represent quite a large variety of interrelated texts just beyond the fringes of this definition of a ‘treatise on physiognomy’.¹⁵ One often finds such nuggets of physiognomical thinking in sixteenth-century anatomical treatises. Conceiving of a ‘book on physiognomy’ in the way it is being treated here means excluding popular late seventeenth-century works which can tell one much about the history of the art of physiognomy. In England, for example, A New Academy of Compliments (1772) contained a nugget of physiognomical wisdom under the section headed ‘Signs to chose Husbands and good Wives’: ‘an extraordinary long Chin, with the Under-Lip larger than the Upper, signifies a cross-grain’d Person, fit for little ¹⁴ Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. L. S. Maclehose, 2 vols. (1907), i, p. xxx. ¹⁵ See V. E. Neuberg, Chapbooks (1964).


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Business, yet given to Folly’. Another section consists of a small fortune-telling game entitled ‘As to what Kind of a Husband a Widow or Maid Shall have’. Some of its conclusions are clearly physiognomical: A handsome Youth be sure you’ll have, Brown hair’d, high Nose, he’ll keep thee brave, Fair, ruddy, bushy-hair’d is thy Love, He’ll keep thee well, and call thee still his Dove.¹⁶

Mother Bunch’s Closet advised young men not to choose a wife with ‘a long nose, a scoldy brow, and thin lips: for in such there is great danger’. It might further be argued that such was the general ‘culture’ of physiognomy in many of these English chapbooks that fragments of physiognomical aphorisms even entered the material on dreams. To dream, for example, ‘that you have long hair, in seemly order, is good for a woman; but if in disorder, it shows trouble and heaviness. . . . [to dream] that you have a fair great nose, is good to all, except sick persons, it being a sure token of death’. Indeed, this last implicit reference to the Persian notion of the great nose of kings and the Hippocratic ‘facies’ is a reminder of the fact that the New Academy of Compliments, which sold itself as ‘suitable to all Constitutions and Complexions’, had a distinctly physiognomical conception of the audience at which it was aimed. It also recalls to mind the fact that Francis Bacon thought that the art of physiognomy the sister art of the interpretation of dreams. Given this, and given the existence of some early modern books entitled ‘The Phisiognimye of dreames &c’ (John Wolfe, 30 April 1591), and ‘The phisiog[o]mony of Dreames’ (George Purslo[w]e, 2nd November 1613’, one could make a case for including them and all dream books in the calculation.¹⁷ If one can happily exclude the latter as being just beyond the fringes of the conceptualization that supports the analytical framework of this bibliographical map (if not of the wider framework of this ‘invented archive’), that still leaves one important problem. What is to be done with the many books in circulation throughout Europe that dealt with the meaning of the lines in the palm of the hand (chiromancy) as well as the lines on the forehead (metoposcopy)?¹⁸ They all dealt in one way or another with the same physiognomical ¹⁶ Oxford: Bodleian Library, Harding E 329 (1772), 57, 61–3. ¹⁷ Mother Bunch’s Closet Newly Broke Open [c.1790], Oxford: Bodleian Library, Douce PP 176 (10), 16; Dreams and Moles, with their Interpretation and Signification [Manchester, n.d.] Oxford: Bodleian Library, Douce PP 162 (17), 3–4; Oxford: Bodleian Library, Harding E 328 sig. A3v; A Transcript of the Register of the Company of Stationers of London 1554–1640, ed. E. Arber, 4 vols. (1875–94), ii, 273, and iii, 245. ¹⁸ Some even dealt with the lines on the feet (pedomancy). See ‘Explication du Pied’, Paris: Bibliothèque St Genéviève, MS 2327, fol. 22r.

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phenomenon. That is to say, they were all expositions of the doctrine dealing with the meaning discoverable (physiognomatically) in the eyes and all the physical features of a human being, from the head to the feet, moles and all. As the professor of elementary mathematics at the University of Wittenberg, Nicolas Pompeius, noted in a series of lectures he gave on the subject of chiromancy around 1653, ‘Chiromancy is a part of Anthropological Physiognomy, by which, from the inspection of the hand, one makes useful conjectures not at all unworthy of notice about various things in human life’. Pompeius was not alone in this view, nor was it a view that was only expressed in printed form. The author of one seventeenth-century manuscript now in the Royal Library at Copenhagen entitled ‘Compendium Chiromantiae’ wrote out these very same words by hand.¹⁹ Moreover, in addition to Pompeius’s coupling of chiromancy and physiognomy, there were others, such as Johannes Praetorius, who also saw metoposcopy as a species of physiognomy: That part of natural science, which considers the members of the human body, the face, the eyes, the nose, the lips, the ears, the back, the hand and the feet, is called Physiognomy. Of which there are two main species, Metoposcopy, which mainly conjectures from the face of man; and Chiromancy, which observes the constitution of the hand.²⁰

Nor was this conceptual distinction, so troublesome to the calculation, new to the seventeenth century. In fact, Pompeius, in riding the wave of new-found interest in the theories of Paracelsus just at the moment when the new mechanical science was intensifying its grip, was attempting to salvage an understanding of physiognomy that had been lost during the course of the seventeenth century. The earliest known edition of Andree Henrici’s very brief work Chyromancia doctoris (1514) contains chapters devoted to ‘The Physiognomy of the lines on the head’ and ‘The Physiognomy of the hand’. This not only provides an intimation of how the term physiognomy was often used and understood to refer to a theory of natural signs: it also suggests that this conceptual distinction was a long-standing notion.²¹ Notwithstanding the medieval manuscripts highlighted in Chapter 1, there was a considerable number of such works which had already begun to appear as early as the end of the fifteenth century, and not only in Latin but also in the vernacular. One of the first seems to have been Johannes Hartlieb’s Das nach ¹⁹ Copenhagen: Royal Library, MS Thott 835 [unpaginated, fol. 3r]. ²⁰ Johannes Praetorius, Lvdicrvm chiromanticum Praetorii (Leipzig, 1661), 216. ²¹ ‘De Phisonomia linee capitis’, ‘De phisonomia manuum’, Andree Henrici, Chyromancia doctoris (n. pl., 1514), sigs. Avir and Ciiv.


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geschriben büch von der hannd [1475].²² Similarly, as was pointed out in the Introduction, treatises on moles are essentially physiognomical in conception, and from 1540 onwards, tracts on palmistry and moles often appeared printed alongside expositions of physiognomical doctrine in the same work. Indeed, from the late seventeenth century onwards, the texts containing expositions of palmistry, moles, dreams, and fortune-telling but not physiognomy are much more numerous than those which include physiognomy. Yet, generically speaking, they all dealt in one way or another with ‘windows of the soul’. All in all, whilst as many as possible of the works on chiromancy and metoposcopy have been included, many of the earlier-mentioned works (in which the physiognomy appears in fragments) have been omitted from the calculation, if not permanently excluded from the archive. However, if all of them were to be referred to generically as ‘books on the art of physiognomy’, then the overall total figures reached of works published in each country would be significantly affected. None the less, for all its conceptual untidiness, the ‘books on physiognomy’ concentrated upon in this calculation—those with an exposition of physiognomical doctrine in the form of a list of physiognomical aphorisms—are arguably the most physiognomically dense of those works which could be included. Yet it must be borne in mind that even they cannot entirely indicate the nature of physiognomy in books in the early modern period as a whole. Indeed, from a conceptual or taxonomical point of view, it must also be borne in mind that many so-called ‘books’ or ‘treatises on physiognomy’ would be more accurately described as astrological treatises, treatises on moral philosophy, treatises on aesthetics, medical works, or chapbooks. As Chapter 1 has shown, as Chapters 3 and 5 will show, and as will be discussed further below, the analytical virtues of a much more rigid definition prevent one from understanding the inherent fluidity in the medieval and the early modern conception of physiognomony, as well as, more broadly speaking, the innately multifaceted, interdisciplinary subject of physiognomy. But notwithstanding the problems inherent in choosing to concentrate this calculation on works containing an exposition of physiognomical doctrine in the form of a list of physiognomical aphorisms, the choice seems to have at least one virtue. It provides some sense of consistency and unity to the calculation, as well as to the analysis of how they were read, allowing one to constitute a series of documents and etch a straight, if limited, pathway through an otherwise unruly forest of ²² London: British Library, I.B.8; C. Burnett, ‘The Earliest Chiromancy in the West’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 50 (1987), 189–95.

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material. In so doing, it allows for some sort of foundation to be laid which might help, and be corrected by, any interested scholars in the future.

Problems of calculation We can now ask how many such ‘books on physiognomy’ were in circulation in each of the respective countries between c.1470 and c.1780. Were there any periods that saw a greater volume produced than others? How can the dynamics of this chronology be explained? Calculating the overall volume of physiognomical treatises published in the early modern period may be, in the last resort, a question of one’s empirical temperament. Beyond the aforementioned conceptual problems of defining a ‘treatise on physiognomy’, there are also numerous difficulties involved in the process of quantification. The English bibliography of ‘books on physiognomy’ is probably the most exhaustive of all those compiled here for the various countries examined. The following calculation is therefore based on a chronologically arranged list of English ‘books on physiognomy’ which is being taken as typical and representative of the others. When trying to use tables 1a and 1b to calculate a total figure one encounters numerous problems, whether it be problems of dating undated books or what to make of the gaps as well as the consecutive years which did or did not see the publication of a ‘book on physiognomy’. It also requires an understanding of the rules of the early modern publishing game and the ways in which those rules were circumvented.²³ Suffice it to say here that when calculating volume, bibliographers today normally opt for a figure of between 1,000 and 1,500 for an average print run. Taking the list of English physiognomical treatises at face-value, and assuming a print run of 1,000 for each, produces a total of about 185,000. This is not a very large figure. However, there are a number of other factors which necessitate increasing this figure.²⁴ To begin with, given that it was not possible to examine every single extant copy of every English work, then there may be some that do not contain any physiognomy. However, since a number of the texts in the ‘invented archive’ were stumbled upon haphazardly, it is very likely that there are others extant which have not been included. With regard to the continental publications, the problem is even more considerable. It has not been possible to examine all existing copies of ²³ For more detail on this, see M. H. Porter, ‘English “treatises on physiognomy” c.1500–c.1780’, D.Phil. thesis (Oxford, 1998), ch. 2. ²⁴ For under-estimations in such calculations, A Ledger of Charles Ackers, ed. D. F. McKenzie and J. C. Ross ( [Oxford], 1968), 18.

30 Italy

Germany

France

England

Low Countries

Switzerland

Spain

Number of extant editions

25

20

15

10

5

0 1470– 1479

1480– 1489

1490– 1499

1500– 1509

1510– 1519

1520– 1529

1530– 1539

1540– 1549

1550– 1559

1560– 1569

Decade of publication

1a. ‘Books on physiognomy’ printed in Europe, c.1470–c.1639

1570– 1579

1580– 1589

1590– 1599

1600– 1609

1610– 1619

1620– 1629

1630– 1639

30 Italy

Germany

France

England

Low Countries

Switzerland

Spain

Number of extant editions

25

20

15

10

5

0 1640– 1649

1650– 1659

1660– 1669

1670– 1679

1680– 1689

1690– 1699

1700– 1709

1710– 1719

1720– 1729


1b. ‘Books on physiognomy’ printed in Europe, c.1640–c.1780

1730– 1739

1740– 1749

1750– 1759

1760– 1769

1770– 1779

1780– 1789

70 14 –14 80 79 – 14 14 90 89 15 –14 00 99 – 15 15 10 09 – 15 15 20 19 15 –15 30 29 – 15 153 40 9 15 –15 50 49 15 –15 60 59 – 15 15 70 69 15 –15 80 79 15 –15 90 89 – 16 15 00 99 16 –16 10 09 16 –16 20 19 – 16 16 30 29 16 –16 40 39 16 –16 50 49 – 16 16 60 59 16 –16 70 69 16 –16 80 79 16 –16 90 89 – 17 16 00 99 17 –17 10 09 17 –17 20 19 – 17 17 30 29 17 –17 40 39 – 17 17 50 49 17 –17 60 59 – 17 17 70 69 17 –17 80 79 –1 78 9

14

Number of extant editions 16

14

12

10

8

6

4

2

0


2. ‘Books on physiognomy’ printed in England, c.1470–c.1780

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these texts even in the small handful of libraries around the world that were actually visited for this study. Some have no doubt been included in these lists erroneously. For example, extracts of Michael Scot’s Liber physiognomiae appeared in some early printed versions of the medieval collection of medical works known as Ketham’s Fasciculus medicinae but not others. Only an examination of all extant copies would reduce such error. On the other hand, numerous works, or even particular editions and issues of known works, have no doubt been completely overlooked. The colophon of one 1599 edition of Livio Agrippa’s Discorso sopra alla natura, & complessione humano, et alcuni preservativi dal mal contagioso di peste (Brescia: Vincenzo Sabbio, [1599] ) suggests that it was also published in Venice, Milan, Verona, Carmagnola, Turin, and Pavia, though no copies of these issues have yet been found. Secondly, these bibliographies/graphs represent only those treatises for which a copy has survived or for which some record of a published edition has survived. Indeed, since most of the English ‘books on physiognomy’ are examples of ‘cheap print’, then the numbers which have not survived and for which there is no extant trace might be even more considerable than with hardier products.²⁵ The English graph, for example, does not include all those entered in the Stationers’ Register. On 31 May 1594, the Register records an entry to James Roberts for the printing of Thomas Hill’s ‘palmestry and physiognomye’. However, no copy of this edition has survived—assuming it was ever printed in the first place. Registering and not publishing was also an everyday part of the cut-throat strategies of the early modern publishing world.²⁶ Thirdly, the English bibliography itself (like Samuel Jeake’s library) provides evidence of no longer extant editions, and many of the late eighteenth-century penny chapbooks may have been printed in runs larger than 1,000. This last point, in turn, raises the question of the extent to which expositions of physiognomical doctrine circulated in the form of very cheap printed pamphlets. If so, where and when? There is some very suggestive evidence that they did. The pamphlet by Johannes Roehnus, Moderatore summo fortunate, physiognomiam anthropologicam (Wittenburg, 1670), was only eight pages long. However, it was not an exposition of physiognomical doctrine in the sense used here to define a ‘book on physiognomy’. The Physiognomonica Aristotelis latina facta a Iodoco Willichio . . . addita est euisdem interpretis oratio in laudem physiognomoniae, published in 1536 and 1538, was not a pamphlet. However, it was printed as a small octavo by Nicolaus Schirlentz of Wittenberg, one of the major printers of the 1530s German pamphlets in the Freytag collection. If this ²⁵ Spufford, Small Books, 48.

²⁶ Arber, Register, ii, 308. See also ii, 273, and iii, 245.


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remains circumstantial, there is other evidence that cheap pamphlets devoted to the art of physiognomy in the German vernacular were available from the early sixteenth century onwards. Mention has already been made above of Henrici’s very short Chyromancia doctoris of 1514. Less disputable is the ‘complexionbuch’ In disem biechlin wirt erfunden von complexion der menschen zu erlernen leibliche unnd menschliche nature, ir siten geberden und nayglichayt zu erkennen und urtaylen, published by Mathis Hüpfuff in Strasbourg in 1511, and by Hans Schönsperger in Augsburg four years later, in 1515. They were only three small, poor-quality sheets long.²⁷ Just how many more such pamphlets were published for which no evidence has survived, it is impossible to know. However many there were, they were very probably printed in numbers larger than 1,000.²⁸ Similarly one has to take into account the unquantifiable fact that many of the medieval manuscripts on physiognomy were still being read, whilst others were still being produced. In 1525 one ‘T. Wall alias Wyndesor’ purchased a manuscript copy of the Secretum from ‘Henry at the taverne within buschops gate at London’. In 1556, the English Renaissance magus John Dee borrowed a manuscript claiming to be Avicenna’s ‘physiognomia’ from the library of Peterhouse, Cambridge, and never returned it. Thomas Hill advertised his ‘Two pleasaunt Bookes of Paulmestrie’ as being available in manuscript. Whilst his translation of Thaddeus Hagecius’s Metoposcopie was ‘in a readinesse to the printing’, it too was available in manuscript: ‘if any be desirous to enioy a private Copy of this, let them resort unto maister Barkers shop, and there they shall common with the Translatour, and knowe his minde for the writing of the Pamphlet’. It was nothing new. A fifteenth-century manuscript of Lydgate and Burgh’s Secretum carried the following inscription on the inside back cover: ‘John Bevyn of Stroud Inne for my Master Poulet or ellis enquere for Thomas Warreyn of Tantoun’. Indeed, Hill’s Metoposcopie, a work which does not appear to have been printed, may only have circulated in manuscript. The single surviving manuscript fragment of Hill’s writings is a slightly modified titlepage to his 1571 physiognomical treatise. However, it looks more like a fragment of an ‘authorial holograph’ than ‘a copy made by a specialist scribe’ or ‘the copy made by an individual who wished to possess the text’.²⁹ But this ²⁷ See also Trattato di humanita fisonomia (Viterbo, 1617) Paris: Biblothèque Nationale, VP 18618. ²⁸ Harvard: Houghton Library, Phil. 6012.9 is a German physiognomical pamphlet, possibly printed in Strasbourg around 1576. ²⁹ Die Handschriften zu Lydgate’s Book of the Gouernaunce of Kynges and of Prynces, ed. T. Prosiegel (Munich, 1903), 4–16; Roberts and Watson, Dee’s Library, M24; Thomas Hill, A contemplation of mankinde (1571), fols. 234v–235r; Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 673; Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 417, fol. 74r–v. These categories are from H. Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth Century England (Oxford, 1993), 46.

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practice of transcribing printed works continued well beyond the sixteenth century. Around 1700 a certain ‘A. Howe’ not only began to read the second edition (1671) of the 1653 ‘treatise on physiognomy’ by Richard Saunders that young Samuel Jeake had begun to read thirty years earlier in 1670, but actually transcribed large sections of it. Transcribing manuscripts from printed editions reduced prices and circumvented the limitations of print-runs and official proscriptions. Besides this sort of pirating, official orders for transcriptions could range from 250 to 500 copies. In addition, there are many unpublished manuscripts on physiognomy in libraries around the world, some of which appear to have been the writer’s own invention. Such is the case with a manuscript penned in 1665/6 by one James Boevey entitled ‘Of the art of discerning of men’. Just how representative these examples are is neither easy to say nor possible to quantify for the present calculation. If Sir Hans Sloane’s collection of manuscript ‘books of secrets’, a genre with which the art of physiognomy was so closely linked, was ‘the tip of a huge iceberg’, the same might be said of manuscript ‘treatises on physiognomy’.³⁰ Notwithstanding all of these problems, and however preliminary such figures must be, can any total figures be offered? Let us take the English case as representative. By way of taking into account all of these factors, an addition of 30 per cent (roughly 60 editions) to the total number of unregistered editions, plus the eight editions suggested by the bibliography, raises the total output to about 250,000. By way of making up for the fact that some of them saw print runs greater than 1,500, one might calculate the overall total using an average print run of 1,500. This would bring the total to around 400,000. To err on the conservative side, an estimated total figure would be 300,000 English ‘books on physiognomy’.³¹ The other bibliographies are much less complete. However, using the English total as a guide, then one might suggest the following figures for Europe. By the same rough calculation, there appear to have been only about 30,000 published in Switzerland. But this is not a fair comparison because this Swiss figure is based on those published before the end of the sixteenth century, not over three hundred years. Moreover, when one considers that by the end of the sixteenth century there had been about 50,000 printed in England, then the output of the Swiss presses seems relatively large for such a small country, a sign of the important role of Swiss publishers in the spread of the high Renais³⁰ London: Wellcome Library, MS 4370; D’Amico, ‘Manuscripts’, 21; Love, Scribal Publication, 37; London: Wellcome Library, MS 699; Cambridge: University Library, MS Dd 15. 28; W. Eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature (Princeton, 1994), 4. ³¹ For more detail, see Porter, ‘English “treatises on physiognomy” ’ (Oxford, 1998).


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sance and the Reformation. The number of Spanish publications so far unearthed is also very small overall. Yet for all its incompleteness, the fact that there were about 43,000 of the treatises published between 1570 and 1650 alone suggests an output equivalent to that in England. Similarly, the present overall figure for the early modern period in the Low Countries is about 100,000, less than a third of the English total. However, about 30 per cent of them date from before 1520 and 50 per cent from between 1630 and 1700, both of which figures are actually greater than the equivalent output by English presses, reminding us once again of the importance of the Dutch publishing industry in the period of Dutch economic supremacy and in making the early modern period the ‘age of print’. The numbers of ‘treatises on physiognomy’ printed in Italy and France were certainly larger than the present findings suggest, and thus larger than the number published in England and, indeed, anywhere else. By the end of the seventeenth century alone there had been about 480,000 copies published in Italy, and about 200,000 in France. Moreover, given the relative continuity in the publication of such works in eighteenth-century England and Germany, there are probably many more to be discovered as having been published in eighteenth-century France and Italy. The figures for Germany are in a healthier state and suggest that, as with the Low Countries, the overall volume of such publications was significantly larger than in England and France, if not Italy. The numbers unearthed so far suggest a figure of about half a million, and this too is certainly an under-estimation. Yet, however inaccurate these conservative figures are, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that physiognomical treatises were, numerically speaking, relatively insignificant, even taking into account the small percentage of the population endowed with the textual literacy to read them. This is made clearer when one considers these figures in relation to the overall textual output of nearly three hundred years of the age of print’s printing-press activity. All of these total figures for ‘books on physiognomy’ pale in comparison, for example, with the number of Bibles, ABCs and catechisms, or almanacs, that were printed during this period. Books of secrets were one very popular genre under whose attractive rubric some physiognomical treatises were sold, such as Les secrets d’Albert le Grand. But most books of secrets, like most astrological works, did not contain an explicit and distinct exposition of physiognomical doctrine.³² Next to the Bible, almanacs were one of the most common forms of printed word in the early modern period, often exempt from the usual limited ³² Eamon, Secrets, appendix.

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print-run. But few of the texts in this ‘archive’, besides the Compost of Ptholomeus, can be considered almanacs. Nor does this impression of a marginal presence of physiognomy in textual form change much when one compares the respective outputs with the overall volume of output of other publications to which they might be seen as related. The English bibliography illustrates this quite clearly. One study of the popular medical literature that was printed and published in England between 1480 and 1603 provides helpful light for this perspective. It has suggested a total figure of 400,000 actual books published. For the same period there are only 34 extant English physiognomical treatises. If one adds the customary 30 per cent to this figure as well as the assumed print run of 1,000, it leaves one with an overall volume of around 45,000 for roughly the same period of time. Thus, if a ‘book on physiognomy’ is considered as a ‘medical’ work, then the medical works which contained some form of exposition of physiognomical doctrine were outnumbered by non-physiognomical medical works by about 9 to 1. By sheer coincidence, this is roughly the same ratio one could apply to Rhazes’s Liber almansoris, the medical work of a medieval Arabic physician made up of nine books, the other eight of which were more widely known than the one book it included on the subject of physiognomy. An even more sobering perspective is provided by the fact that medical works in themselves only constitute about 3 per cent of the total printed output of the sixteenth century in England.³³ A single European comparison reveals the same sort of proportions. At the 1569 Frankfurt Book Fair, Michael Herder sold 108 Planetenbüchlein, among which were a number that could be called ‘treatises on physiognomy’, such as Das Gross Planeten Buch. Darin das erst Theil sagt von Natur, Zeichen des Himels. . . . Das dritt Theil melt die Physiognomi, und Chiromanci (Frankfurt, 1556), of which he sold 19; and Das Kleyn Planeten Büchlin (Strasburg, n.d.), of which he sold 7. Yet the total number of physiognomical works sold was half the number that he sold of a general medical work entitled Das Handbuechlin Apollinaris (which, at 227, was his second bestseller behind Die siben weisen Meister (233) ). Moreover, even this was only a small percentage of the 5,918 books he sold overall during the Lenten Fair. By far the most popular of all were romances of chivalry, and especially didactic narratives and funny stories.³⁴ ³³ P. Slack, ‘Mirrors of Health and Treasures of Poor Men: The Uses of Vernacular Medical Literature of Tudor England’, in C. Webster (ed.), Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1979), 237–74: 239–40. ³⁴ Henri Estienne, The Frankfurt Book Fair, ed. J. Westfall Thompson (Chicago, 1911), 34, 181, and 187.


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But neither the obscurity of the subject, then as now, nor the smallness of numbers automatically reflects historical insignificance. The historiographical traditions of the ‘history of the margins’ and ‘history from below’ have made that clear to most of the profession of history. Indeed, the resonance of these physiognomical treatises in early modern culture may have been out of all proportion to their number. One example of how this may have been so is provided by considering the very close and often very confused relationship between physiognomy and two of the most widely disseminated bodies of knowledge (textual and non-textual) in the early modern period—astrology and the doctrine of the four humours. Just as the presence of a ‘physiognomical treatise’ should not be automatically taken as a reflection of the presence of physiognomy, so physiognomy was present in places where there were no manuscript or printed physiognomical treatises.³⁵ Indeed, one very different indication of the danger of underestimating their historical significance as presented by this mathematical calculation of their stature can be seen in the annotations which Archbishop Cranmer made to Henry VIII’s Institutions of a Christian Man. Written around 1538, in the midst of the epoch-making religious and political storm of the Reformation, the king at one point attacked numerous superstitions of the ‘superstitious folk’, who ‘infame the creatures of God’, including those people which by lots, astrology, divination, chattering of birds, physiognomy, and looking of men’s hands, or other unlawful and superstitious crafts, take upon them certainly to tell, determine and judge beforehand of men’s acts and fortunes, which be to come afterward.

Although the king then erased some of this statement, something made the ever vigilant Archbishop Cranmer later annotate this passage with the following words of caution: Whereas the same is stricken out, it seemeth more necessary to remain, forsomuch as the common people do in nothing more superstitiously. Likewise of astrology, and specially physiognomy.³⁶

That ‘something’ will be discussed in more detail later. Suffice it to say here that it was evidence in itself of how the authorities of the day understood that there was more to physiognomy than simply books on the subject. Cranmer’s concerns indicate an anxiety not to underestimate the religious, political, and social implications of that very fact. Leaving that aside for now, let it simply be ³⁵ See Ch. 4, final section. ³⁶ Thomas Cranmer, Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, ed. Revd J. E. Cox, Parker Society (Cambridge, 1846), 100. My emphasis.

100 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 said that the relative scarcity of mystical texts about the physiognomical link between astrological and humoral knowledge appears to have been sufficient to keep an interest in this sort of scientia before the reading public, but distant enough to safeguard its awe of secrecy and mystery—as long as its status as a respectable mysticism and body of ‘secret’ knowledge remained reputable enough.

Chronological dynamic What can the abstract features of the graphs in Figure 1a and 1b of the overall textual presence of physiognomical treatises in early modern Europe tell us about the chronological dynamic of this corpus of textual knowledge? How are the features of that dynamic to be explained? Generally speaking, the large number of medieval manuscripts and incunables (pre-1500 printed editions) again suggests that there was no sudden ‘anastasis’ or ‘awakening’ in the printing of ‘books on physiognomy’ in the beginning of the sixteenth century. Similarly, the relatively continuous publication of ‘books on physiognomy’ in eighteenth-century England and Germany might be used as more general evidence to suggest that Lavater’s epoch-making work did not fall from the European presses into a physiognomonical vacuum. As with the ‘Renaissance’, the primary motor behind the distinctly less epoch-making phenomenon that was the publication of physiognomical treatises was Italy, particularly up until about the 1620s, with Germany never very far behind. During the late fifteenth century this seemingly polygenetic phenomenon of the printing of ‘books on physiognomy’ spread at one and the same time from Italy and Germany first to France, then on to the Low Countries, Switzerland, and Spain. Geography and transport costs might be the primary factors which explain why England was the last of the main European printing centres to begin publishing them, beginning only in the early sixteenth century, over thirty years after the Italian, German, and French presses. Given the incompleteness of the bibliographical data, it is dangerous to rest too much weight on the narrative implicit in the output of physiognomy in any particular country. For example, the high volume of output of such works in late fifteenth-century Spain makes it difficult to believe that there were no Spanish publications between 1520 and 1560. Similarly, it is equally hazardous to assume that there was none published in either the Low Countries or Germany in the 1570s. The largest peaks, which occurred in Switzerland in the 1480s, in Spain in the 1600s, in Italy in the 1620s, in France and the Low


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Countries in the 1660s, and in Germany in the 1690s, are probably a distortion stemming from the random survival of the evidence and the problems of conceptualization underlying the bibliographies, rather than the reflection or consequence of any wider historical phenomenon. In addition to the smallness of their numbers and their incompleteness, the obscurity of both the subject and the texts themselves only adds to the difficulties of offering solid causal explanations for the apparent peaks and troughs. Sometimes there are obvious reasons internal to book history for such apparent variations. For example, the recorded fall in England between 1700 and 1710 is likely to have been the result of the changes in the licensing laws. But this affected printing in general and cannot be said to have been specific to physiognomical treatises. More intriguing is the apparent exceptional bursts of interest in England in the 1510s and between 1555 and 1575, both of which appear to have been slightly behind the Continental peaks which, prior to the eighteenth century, came roughly speaking during the periods 1480–1500, 1540–60, 1610–20, 1660–80. Given that most of the English physiognomical treatises were translations of Continental works, then one might be tempted to conclude that England was always behind and following the rest of the Continent. If so, then the fact that the late seventeenth-century peak in England coincided with a peak on the European Continent suggests that, by that stage, Albion had caught up with Europa. A comparison of the output of physiognomical treatises in England (Figure 2) with the output of printed material as a whole in England c.1500–c.1700 (Figure 3) is illuminating, for one sees that the peaks in the output of English physiognomical treatises of the late 1550s and 1660s, as well as that of the last decades of the seventeenth century, occur at times which saw a relative decline in the overall numbers of books published. Why? Given the marginality of ‘books on physiognomy’, to talk of movements in demand for physiognomical treatises would be something of a misnomer. None the less, I would argue that some of the dynamics of this chronology can be explained, from a purely intellectual point of view, via the rise and fall of interest in Neoplatonic hermeticism, the science of the ‘occult’, and in Paracelsianism more generally. The influence of the hermetic and the Paracelsian will be discussed in more detail in the following chapter. When considering the apparent dynamics of the output of ‘treatises on physiognomy’ from a more material perspective, it seems more profitable not to concern oneself too much with trying to explain the short-term rises and falls in the demand or the output, but rather to concentrate upon explaining the sustained existence of this physiognomical language in terms of the material structures of early modern everyday life. As

3. Annual book production in England, 1480–1700 (5-year totals) 5-year period 1700'

1675' 1680' 1685' 1690' 1695'

1655' 1660' 1665' 1670'

1635' 1640' 1645' 1650'

1615' 1620' 1625' 1630'

1580' 1585' 1590' 1595' 1600' 1605' 1610'

1530' 1535' 1540' 1545' 1550' 1555' 1560' 1565' 1570' 1575'

1520' 1525'

1500' 1505' 1510' 1515'

1480' 1485' 1490' 1495'

Total number of books 12,000

10,000

8,000

6,000

4,000

2,000

0


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intangible as such explanations often are, the sustained interest in celestial physiognomy, botanical physiognomy (the ‘doctrine of signatures’), or theriological physiognomy (the zoological aspect of this codified language of physiognomy) might be in part explained by the closer, more conscious, proximity of the sky, natural light, plants, and animals to man’s life as lived in a still predominantly agricultural, indeed ‘pastoral’, society.³⁷ Indeed, one might even take this further and look to the weather for the causes of certain intellectual forms of the art of physiognomy. Such a causal connection seems less ludicrous when one considers the intellectual proximity of physiognomy and weather prediction in sixteenth-century sign theory as exemplified by Gulielmus Gratarolus, the sixteenth-century Swiss natural philosopher. Gratarolus not only wrote a learned ‘treatise on physiognomy’, he published it with a tract he also wrote on predicting the weather from natural signs. The Danish theologian Niels Hemmingsen ranked physiognomy alongside the forecast of rain as a form of natural prediction.³⁸ Similarly, the crystallization of an occult, visual art of physiognomy, driven by the light of a theosophic eye and embedded in a religion of the sun in Florence at the end of the fifteenth century, may have an intangible (but visually very obvious) causality in the luminosity of the sun in that region of the world.³⁹ Notwithstanding these relatively longue durée reasons for the persistence of a particular form of the language of physiognomy, are there any material causal explanations for any of the sudden shifts in output indicated by the graphs? One such explanation suggests itself when one considers that two of the most significant English peaks occurred during periods in English history which saw two of the great plagues of London (1563 and 1665).⁴⁰ A causal relationship between the two seems more conceivable when one takes into account how interrelated this archive of books shows physiognomy and the plague to have been in the early modern period. Many authors of ‘books on physiognomy’ also wrote books on the plague, such as the aforementioned Swiss professor Gratarolus, or the French popularizer Antoine Mizauld. In fact, there were a number of texts throughout the period in which the art of physiognomy and advice on how to avoid the plague were actually part of the same text. One finds this in some of the early editions of Michael Scot. One also finds it in various editions of Ketham’s Fasciculus medicinae. The latter was a collection of texts made by Hans von Kircheim of Swabia (fl. 1455–70), professor of medicine in ³⁷ ³⁸ ³⁹ ⁴⁰

K. V. Thomas, Man and the Natural World (1983). S. Clark, Thinking with Demons (Oxford, 1997), 171. Marsilio Ficino, De sole opusculum (Strasburg, 1508). P. Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1990), 54.

104 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 Vienna, and first printed in Venice in 1491. The main theme of Kircheim’s text was that most fundamental of all inseparably physical and metaphysical concerns, health and salvation. In the seventeenth century Livio Agrippa da Monteferrato’s tract explicitly declared this family resemblance between good health, plague, and physiognomy in the title of his physiognomical treatise: Discorso sopra la natura, & complessione humano, et alcuni preservativi dal mal contagioso di peste (Brescia, Vincenzo Sabbio, [1599] ). And even as late as the mid-eighteenth century, editions of Albertus Magnus’s writing about the process of female conception and the virtues of stones were interwoven with Scot’s physiognomy and advice on ways of preserving oneself against contracting the plague and other malignant fevers.⁴¹ These books signal the fact that the early modern understanding of the plague was distinctly physiognomical in conception, in so far as particular temperaments (the most fundamental state of the health of one’s body and mind) and particular families (even particular regions) were thought to be more susceptible to developing the plague. Within this causal framework, the intellectual interdependence of physiognomy with concerns about the generation of children, as well as the virtues in stones evident in such works as the aforementioned Secrets of Albert, can also be seen in various aspects of early modern cultural practice. For example, young men often offered a solitaire to their fiancées which they were to place on the third (ring) finger of their left hand—to protect them against the plague. Another possible reason why more people turned to physiognomy at a time of plague lay in the fact that it was long thought that the plague could be caught via the look, or what some referred to as the spiritus, which was thought to come from the eyes of the sick and transmit itself to the eyes of those surrounding them. This was why, for example, Charles Delorme, the physician of Louis XIII, wore crystal spectacles when he visited those who were infected by the plague.⁴² I would argue that it is within this wider cultural context of plague and the tendency to moralize illness that the following physiognomical imperative which many ‘books on physiognomy’ contained should be understood: First we advertise that one ought to beware of all persons that hath default of members naturally, as of forehead, eye, or other member, though he be but a cripple, and specially of a man that hath no beard, for such be inclined to divers vices and evils, and one ought to eschew his company as his mortal enemy.⁴³ ⁴¹ G. Gratarolus, Pestis descriptio (Paris, 1561); Antoine Mizauld, Singuliers secrets et secours contre la peste (Paris, 1562); Johannes von Ketham, Fasciculus medicine (Venice, 1500); Albertus Magnus, Les admirables secrets d’Albert le Grand . . . (Lyons, 1752). ⁴² J.-N. Biraben, Les hommes et la peste en France, 2 vols. (Paris, 1975–6), ii, 185 and 23. ⁴³ The Kalendar & Compost of Shepherds [1508], ed. G. C. Heseltine (1932), 152.


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This imperative was distinctly reminiscent of Leviticus 21: 16–24: ‘For whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach: a blind man, or a lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or anything superfluous’ (v. 18), which, as was shown in the Introduction and Chapter 1, had long been at the basis of Canon Law preventing anyone with a physical deformity from being ordained. All in all, given the nature and role of plague in early modern society; given the way in which disease and physical deformity were heavily moralized; given the urgency of the notion of salut (health/salvation) in societies dominated by the religious preoccupation with death, not to mention the high mortality rates among children; and given the extent to which the physiognomical aphorisms in these texts rarely have anything good to say about anyone, it is easy to understand how readily people could come to see other people as some sort of physiognomical danger or even disease in which they lived. In this anxiety lay the utility of physiognomical ‘prudence’ by which these texts offered to provide readers with a way of looking, a visual tool with which they could forewarn themselves in the battle to distinguish good (healthy) from evil (sick), all the more so during periods of particularly intense danger. It was this religiomedical utility that can be heard in the overtone of the extended title of one French edition of Michael Scot’s ‘physiognomy’, Phisionomia magistri Michaelis Scoti. Si Prudentiam. Si Sanitatem. Si Cautelam. Si Fiduciam.⁴⁴

Price and Distribution The closest we can now come to visual footage of the distribution of a ‘treatise on physiognomy’ being sold in a book fair takes the form of a late seventeenth/early eighteenth-century engraving of a second-hand book sale by the English engraver more renowned for his maps, Sutton Nichols. As satirical as it may be in intent, the sixth book from the left on the front row bears the title of one of the most popular eighteenth-century books with physiognomy in it: ‘Aristotle’s Masterpiece’. How much did ‘treatises on physiognomy’ cost in the early modern period? Who would have been able to afford them? How widely available were they beyond the main printing centres of Europe? The sparse evidence for the prices of ‘treatises on physiognomy’ suggests that, by the late seventeenth century, and probably long before, they were available along the full range of the price spectrum and therefore available to people from across the social/income spectrum. In the case of a popular text from the earlier part of the period, such as the Kalendar of Shepherds, no price ⁴⁴ Michael Scot, Phisionomia magistri Michaelis Scoti ( [Paris], [1509?] ).

106 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780

7. The sixth book from the left is marked ‘Aristotle’s Masterpiece’, a text which normally contained an exposition of physiognomical doctrine, Sutton Nichols, ‘The Compleat Auctioner’, c.1700. Copper engraving, from S. Taubert, Bibliopola. Bilder und Texte aus der Welt des Buchhandels, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1966), ii., 77. (Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, FA hist 03 D t. 01–02. Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.)

details have survived. However, it is possible to estimate its market value. It has been suggested that between 1560 and 1635 the price of normal, new, unbound books printed in pica or larger type was usually a halfpenny a sheet. Whilst it is likely that the Kalendar cost over 1 shilling prior to 1540, there are numerous early seventeenth-century Kalendars whose paper, type-face, and woodcuts have all the attributes of a cheap edition published a century earlier by the English printer Robert Wyer. At around 18–20 sheets in length on average, this may


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have priced some pre-1540 versions of the Kalendar at around 9 d. This estimate does not take into consideration the numerous woodcuts in any edition of the Kalendar. However, the 1522 inventory of a Parisian bookseller, Jean Janot, which valued 150 undated quarto copies of the Kalendar at ‘69 s’, might be seen as supporting this calculation.⁴⁵ On 14 March 1547, an inventory was made of the library of M. Jean Le Fenon, a lawyer of the Parlement de Paris, at his home in the cloister SainteOpportune. It listed a ‘Phisionomia Aristotellis, cum commanto Micaelis Scoti’. This refers to a leather-bound folio edition which contained the physiognomies of Aristotle, Scot, and Cocles, which had been published in Pavia some thirty years earlier, in 1515. In the inventory it was given an estimated value of ‘12 s’. At this price it was much more expensive than the Kalendar, and provides an insight into how expensive the Renaissance was in comparison to the Reformation. In fact, notwithstanding inflation, it was roughly the ‘same’ price as the physiognomical treatise which young Samuel Jeake picked up to read in 1670; in 1671, the bookseller Nathaniel Hawthorne was advertising the second edition of Richard Saunders’s Physiognomie and Chiromancie at ‘12 s’, if bought bound, and ‘10 s’ unbound. In the case of the latter, the size and quality of the paper (it was a large folio) plus the large number of woodcuts and the couple of engravings drove up the price of its production. But in both these cases, be it in 1515 or in 1671, some of the very same physiognomy of Scot and Saunders was available, word for word, in much cheaper, smaller formats for those who could not afford such large, expensive folios. Another of Saunders’s books available in the mid-to-late seventeenth century, such as the Palmistry that Newton bought, cost ‘1 s 6 d ’. This put it in the middle of the price-range of the fad for leather-bound octavos that were being sold in England for ‘1 s’ from the 1660s onwards. The top end of that particular market was another physiognomical tract, Vulson’s Court of Curiosities, which cost ‘2 s’ in 1672 and ‘18 d ’ in 1681. Physiognomical texts like octavos of The True Fortune Teller, Indagine, and Wits Cabinet all sold in this format for ‘1 s’, whilst in 1699 Aristotle’s Legacy; or, His Golden Cabinet of Secrets (‘illustrated with above 60 cuts’) was being sold, bound, for 6 d.⁴⁶ Inventories of booksellers provide a further insight into how books were priced. In some cases, they suggest that some of these physiognomical treatises were available at even lower prices. When the appraisers visited the English ⁴⁵ F. R. Johnson, ‘Notes on English Retail Book Prices, 1550–1640’, The Library, 5th ser., 5 (1950), 83–112; 84; Oxford: Bodleian Library, Vet A2 c.52; R. Doucet, Les bibliothèques parisiennes au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1956), 102 (item no. 139), and 144 (item no. 438). ⁴⁶ The Term Catalogues, 1668–1709 A.D, ed. E. Arber, 3 vols. (1903–6), i, 15, 62, and 454; ii, 148; iii, 130.

108 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 book-trader Charles Tias’s warehouse in 1665 after his death, they noted in their inventory 600 copies of ‘Books of Palmistrie’ (presumably the treatise by Johannes de Indagine) which they valued at ‘2 –12 d each’. Whether this is based on estimated wholesale prices or prices at which they were actually sold is difficult to say. The fact that the English diarist Samuel Pepys had ‘a pair of duodecimo Art of Palmistry books from Tias’s cheapest titles amongst his collection’ suggests the latter.⁴⁷ Indeed, in the eighteenth century, the English chapbooks which incorporated small expositions of physiognomical doctrine, such as the School of Love, or the Groatsworth of Wit for a Penny, were sold in very large quantities at prices even cheaper than 2 d. Much the same can be said for works published earlier. Robert Fludd’s 1617–21 multi-volumed encyclopaedia probably cost far beyond the 12 s of Saunders’s single folio. Yet, as far as physiognomy in printed form was concerned, from the mid-1550s onwards, some of Thomas Hill’s works were priced as low as 2 d and 3 d, and 6 d.⁴⁸ The same spread of prices can be found on the Continent. Antoine Gerard’s 1493 edition of Le compost et kalendrier des bergiers, which was printed on vellum, illustrated with sixty-six hand-painted miniatures and presented to Charles VIII, no doubt cost well above ‘12 s’ to produce. Cornelio Ghiradelli’s Cefalogia fisionomica, published in Bologna in 1630, though a smaller size than Saunders’s work, was longer and contained even more engravings and so probably cost an equivalent amount. Yet the most common format of those examples that have survived is the much cheaper, pocket-size octavo illustrated with cheap woodcuts—the most widely read being the Physiognomiae & chiromantiae compendium of Bartholomaeus Cocles. Of those examples I have consulted, interestingly enough, none contains any details about price—a suggestion of how flexible pricing was in the early modern market. But, on the whole, they must have been relatively cheap, and no more than the ‘1 s’ octavos so popular in England in the mid-seventeenth century. In fact, given the quality of the paper on which they were printed, as well as the basic nature of the woodcuts, they were probably in the same price range as some of Thomas Hill’s popular texts, i.e. 2 d–5 d. Who would have been able to afford them? There were obviously great variations in the state of early modern economies, and discrepancies in the disposable incomes of the different people who made up those economies. Generally speaking, some historians have argued that books became more and more affordable as the early modern period progressed. According to one calculation, prices in England remained steady between 1560 and 1635, when the ⁴⁷ Spufford, Small Books, 93.

⁴⁸ Johnson, ‘Book prices’, 104.


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prices of other commodities nearly doubled and wages rose between one half and two thirds, and that after 1635 prices suddenly rose by about 40 per cent, ‘without any corresponding increase in the general level of prices in the same period’). ‘Books on physiognomy’, generally speaking, were coming down in price.⁴⁹ In 1560 a builder could earn 8 d–10 d per day. Therefore, one of these books would have cost him a day’s wages. By 1600 he was earning 1 s, and by 1640 this had risen to 16 d. One historian’s suggestion of a basic subsistence level of £10–14 for a relatively poor family in a normal year, with the wages of a labouring man totalling around £9–10, leaves little if anything to spare for books. However, an early seventeenth-century husbandman holding 30 acres of arable land might have around £3–4 surplus, which is an average of 14 d–18 d per week. Thus in one study of English print it has been suggested that ‘a lesser yeoman with £40–50 income a year would hardly have to think twice about buying pamphlets or ballads, and probably represented a more regular market’.⁵⁰ If this provides a picture of the distribution of these texts along the full range of the income spectrum, what was the extent of their geographical distribution? The small library in the church of St-Bonnet-le-Chateau, a little village deep in the Loire region of France, is one example that might be taken as typical of the intriguing network down which this information was passed. The collegial which is attached to the church has a small library. That library contains a 1654 copy of Jean Belot’s Oeuvres—a French version of the text which Samuel Jeake had in his own library in an English version plagiarized by Richard Saunders, and the very same text which Sir Isaac Newton had in his library. The book itself is marked ‘Ex dono D. de Maysonneuve’. Gabriel de Maisonneuve was a priest of St-Bonnet who gave several works to the library in 1717 once they started to renovate it. Of course, consideration of the proximity of St Bonnet-le-Chateau to Lyon, a major printing centre, might make this a less-telling example. In that case, more suggestive of the ubiquity of physiognomical knowledge in textual form is a manuscript in the Royal Library in Copenhagen. It contains a manuscript ‘treatise on physiognomy’, written in 1751, in Iceland, in Icelandic, by a cleric named ‘H. Blom Proust’.⁵¹ Thus the simple answer is that this invented archive of ‘books on physiognomy’ may have been a marginal corpus of texts in the age of print, but it was ⁴⁹ Johnson, ‘Book prices’, 93; E. H. Phelps-Brown and S. V. Hopkins, ‘Seven Centuries of the Prices of Consumables compared with Builder’s Wage-Rates’, in E. M. Carus-Wilson (ed.), Essays in Economic History (1962), ii, 179–96. ⁵⁰ K. Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (1982), 32–4; Watt, Cheap Print, 262. ⁵¹ Jean Belot, Les œuvres de m. Jean Belot (Lyon, 1654); Copenhagen: Royal Library, Ms Thott 289.

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a distinctly ubiquitous one. They appear to have been distributed to, and later printed in, some of the furthest corners of early modern society. There were a number of routes down which they appear to have been disseminated besides the bookshops in the major European cities. The most famous mechanism, of course, was the Frankfurt Book Fair. In addition to this there was a relatively large second-hand book market all over Europe. Booksellers who did not have direct trade connections with the provincial sellers could rely upon pedlars and hawkers.⁵² From at least as early as the 1570s onwards, and probably long before, these hawkers were growing in numbers, ensuring a distribution of cheap printed texts from big city publishers to the furthest reaches of any country. They were a truly remarkable phenomenon. Indeed, for the highly sceptical among the readers of this book, evidence that the hawkers sold treatises on physiognomy can be found in one early eighteenth-century edition of an English ‘treatise on physiognomy’ in which the bookseller included a catalogue of the works he had on sale including ‘all sorts of Chapmen’s Books whatsoever’. By the later eighteenth century their métier was being eroded somewhat by the rise of regional presses, which, among other things, also began to print physiognomical chapbooks: printers such as J. Turner in Coventry, England, who produced an ‘11th edition’ of a text containing physiognomy entitled A Groatsworth of Wit for a Penny published alongside another entitled Nine Pennyworth of Wit for a Penny.⁵³ Indeed, by this time such works were also being published in Scotland, Ireland, and America.⁵⁴

The Audience Who was in the audience for the sounds and visions of the self, the world, and the virtues and vices of its soul as it was articulated in, and seen through, the windows of these early modern ‘books on physiognomy’? The authors themselves had a broad vision of the public at whom they aimed their writings. In 1528, Robert Copland suggested his book of secrets was ‘also veray good to teche chyldren to lerne to rede Englysshe’.⁵⁵ One hundred and thirty years later, a prefatory verse in Saunders’s 1653 text was addressed ‘To the deserving ⁵² L. Fontaine, Histoire du colportage en Europe (XVe–XIXe siècles) (Paris, 1993). ⁵³ Spufford, Small Books, 125; Taubert, Bibliopola, ii, 25, 33, and 35; Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, *AG104 E72 1739. London: British Library, 11621.b.26 (6); London: British Library, 1078.k.22 (3 and 4). ⁵⁴ The new book of knowledge . . . A brief collection of the members of man physiognomiz’d . . . (Boston, Mass. [1767?] [Harvard: Lamont Library: Microfiche W 2571 (10699) ]. ⁵⁵ Manzalaoui, Secretum, 388.


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Ladies Satyrically’, in which reference was made to ‘the Strand | And Ladies of the great Co-vent’. Similarly, in 1669 the translator of Vulson’s Court of Curiositie opened his text with an address ‘To the Ladies of our British Isle’. In 1653, Saunders claimed that physiognomy was ‘a science very necessary for Ministers and Physitians, in their visitation of the sick’. In 1665, the translator of La Chambre’s treatise thought it a knowledge particularly suited to ‘persons entrusted with the management of Embassies, and the most important Transactions of Crowns and Scepters, and consequently, oblig’d to treat with People of different Tempers and Climates’. To all of the above, another author expanded the potential utility of physiognomy to include such people as Doctors of Divinity . . . the Natural Philosopher . . . the Moral Philosopher . . . the devout Preacher . . . Orators. . . . Ambassadors, Lawyers, Magistrates, and Captains, and all others, that would perswade a multitude . . . Gentlemen and prudent Politicians [who wished to be master of ] a most complaisant deportment and presence.

Finally, in an age which had discovered both the ‘New World’ and the ‘Far East’, in which the Grand Tour was an institutionalized duty of the privileged, and in which the features of future imperialisms are clearly discernible, the same author also recommended physiognomy to the traveller, who, ‘when he travels into forrain parts, he may discover to what passion the people are most inclinable’. In fact, to anyone engaged in the hazardous process of building up a social network and trying to work out who they could trust ‘it is a matter of great moment in society, to understand the inclination of the company you associate with; and that conversation cannot but be agreeable, where the passions of the parties are moderated’. Moreover, if physiognomy helped one to police one’s self and one’s associates, it was also useful for those who formed the eyes of the policing and judicial arms of the growing state apparatus: ‘I will say nothing of Magistrates, who may by Physiognomy understand the disposition and inclination of their Inferiors and Subjects’.⁵⁶ As rhetorical as these claims were, to what extent did these ‘treatises on physiognomy’ actually hit their mark? This question is answered by turning to a number of other, very different, historical sources such as inventories of books collected after a person’s death, or the catalogues of private libraries, as well as the names of owners inscribed on the extant texts themselves (‘marks of provenance’). ⁵⁶ Richard Saunders, Physiognomie, Chiromancie, Metoposcopie (1653), sig. B5, sig. a2 [pagination erratic]; Marc Vulson, The Court of Curiositie (1669), sig. A3, 110–13; Marin Cureau de la Chambre, The Art How to Know Men (1665), sig. A4r–v.

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It should be said from the outset that a superficial glance at a random sample of all of these sources suggests that these texts were indeed owned by people from across the social and income spectrum, by clerics and by lay persons from across the religious divide, by professionals and non-professionals, by adults and children, male and female. The following is just a representative, analytical sample to illustrate some of the early modern social pathways along which this textual form of physiognomy migrated as it was transmitted from the late fifteenth century to the end of the eighteenth century. Many of the names found written on these books are of people who can no longer be identified. However, those that can provide us with an idea of the sociology of ‘books on physiognomy’, as well as of numerous, potentially rich areas of further investigation into the place of physiognomy in their intellectual and cultural life. The list of such names is extensive. The following are just a few representative examples taken from across early modern Europe. Given what was said in Chapter 1 about the medicalization of physiognomony as it migrated through the Middle Ages, it is not surprising to find that the names of medical students and physicians are particularly prominent among the owners of these works. Three contemporary Parisian libraries possess numerous manuscript ‘treatises on physiognomy’ dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, many of which appear to have been written, copied, or owned by physicians.⁵⁷ Marcus Aurelius Severinus (1580–1656), professor of medicine and surgery in Naples, wrote one entitled ‘Iatrophysiognomia, Physiognomia medica cum symbolis alteris’. Conrad Gesner owned a copy of Rhazes’s translation of the Secretum secretorum, whilst the midseventeenth-century physician and philosopher Joannes Christophorus Sleebus owned a 1658 folio Latin edition of Cardano’s Metoposcopia.⁵⁸ Thomas Newton (1542–1607), English poet, physician, rector of Little Ilford in Essex, and translator of The touchstone of complexions (1576), owned an edition of Hill’s physi-ognomical work, A contemplation of mankinde (1571).⁵⁹ A 1629 Venetian edition of Ciro Spontoni’s La metoposcopia was in the library of the Roman physician Georgius Baglivi (1668–1707). The frontispiece of one copy of the 1522 Latin folio edition of Indagine’s famous text bears the names of what appear to have been three very different élite owners, two of whom were medical practitioners. They read ‘Thomas Morgan’ (1543–1606?), the Welsh catholic conspirator, ‘Caroli Bernard’, most probably Charles Bernard (1650–1711), the Tory and high churchman (and friend of Swift), and master of ⁵⁷ See Bibliography. Paris: Bibliothèque Saint Genéviève, MS 2241. ⁵⁸ Rome: Biblioteca Lancisiana, MS 2. LXXIV.3 (1612); Zurich: Zentralbibliothek, Inc.311; Zurich: Zentralbibliothek, LL.12. ⁵⁹ Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 13487.


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the Barber Surgeons Company, and ‘John Shipton’ (1680–1748), the steward of anatomy at the Barber Surgeons Company in 1704, and the Brook Street practitioner who was called in to treat Caroline (the wife of George II) when she was mortally ill of a strangulated hernia.⁶⁰ The sale catalogues of the private libraries of numerous late eighteenth-century French physicians, such as Theodore Hyacinthe Baron (1707–87), Pierre Jean Burette, and Anne Charles Lorry, also show that they too had their share of printed ‘books on physiognomy’.⁶¹ As physiognomy was a subject which dealt with the union of body and soul, it is hardly surprising to find ‘books on physiognomy’ in the possession of numerous clerics throughout early modern Europe. One cleric named ‘bartholomai girai’ owned Achillini’s entire Opera (1508), including his writing on physiognomy and chiromancy.⁶² A 1540 Greek edition of Adamantius was owned by a mid-sixteenth-century doctor of divinity named ‘Domino Viro Ardusero Antonius Stoppa’.⁶³ John Beaumont, the late sixteenth-century canon of Westminster and master of Trinity, owned a 1546 edition of the Cocles compendium.⁶⁴ A copy of Giovanni Battista Della Porta’s Coelestis physiognomoniae (Neapoli, 1603), found its way into the library of the Florentine Franciscans in Fiesole.⁶⁵ Indeed, given the physiognomical gaze for which the Inquisitors were known, there are no doubt many more examples of Jesuits, besides Athanasius Kircher, who dabbled in the art of physiognomy.⁶⁶ One clear example of this is the fact that a significant number of ‘books on physiognomy’ now in the Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon in France came from the library of the local College of Jesuits. A brief survey of some late eighteenth-century sale catalogues dating from between 1764 and 1779 of the libraries of various French and Low Countries Jesuit colleges showed that this was not unusual.⁶⁷ Evidence of textual intercourse between these aforementioned professions can be seen in one very early folio edition of Indagine which was owned by a (Swiss?) cleric who then gave it to a Swiss physician named ‘Jacobi Bruli[s?]ouar’ in 1573.⁶⁸ Such exchanges also took place among the lower ranks of the clergy and the schoolteaching profession. Thomas Butler, vicar of Holy ⁶⁰ London: British Library, 1606/313, title-page. ⁶¹ Catalogue de la bibliothèque de feu m. Baron (Paris, 1788); Catalogue de la bibliothèque de feu m. Burette (Paris, 1748); Catalogue de la bibliothèque de feu mm. Lorry (Paris, 1791). ⁶² Florence: Biblotheca Nazionale, 9.4.2, fol. 118v. ⁶³ Basle: Bibliothek der Universität, D.C.VIII.8a. ⁶⁴ Leedham-Green, Cambridge Inventories, ⁶⁵ Florence: Biblotheca Nazionale, 30.6.4.28. ⁶⁶ P. Redondi, Galileo: Heretic, trans. R. Rosenthal (1987), 5. ⁶⁷ Oxford: Bodleian Library, Mus-Bibl. III 8o 551. ⁶⁸ Basle: Bibliothek der Universität, Da.III.21.

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Trinity, Wenlock (1534–5), was given a copy of the Secretum by Walter Westbury, formerly master of the abbey school of St Peter and St Paul in Shrewsbury.⁶⁹ Europe’s other profession, the lawyers, are also to be found among the owners of ‘treatises on physiognomy’. In 1652, the Basle lawyer Remigius Faesch (1595–1667) bought a 1601 edition of Porta’s De humana physiognomia to add to a collection that included numerous physiognomical treatises.⁷⁰ In fact, Faesch’s 1534 folio edition of Indagine’s Chiromantia was bound with an anonymous work entitled Epitome Trium terrae partium, Asiae, Africae et Europae compendium locorum descriptiones (Zurich, 1534), linking the language and art of physiognomy with the issue of foreign travel, the physiognomy of the ‘other’, and, historically speaking, the birth of anthropology. Indeed, whilst on the subject of professional travellers once again, one English version of Indagine’s treatise claims to have been owned by ‘Captain Blyth of the Bounty’.⁷¹ Historiographically speaking, all of this is further evidence of ‘natural magic’s considerable significance in [and beyond] early modern intellectual circles’. Given the presence of physiognomical treatises in a large number of eighteenth-century private library catalogues, it also bleeds into the historiographical debate about the slowness of the diffusion of the famous texts synonymous with the ideas of the Enlightenment, and the continued importance of third-rate writers as well as the more ‘hermetic’ and ‘occult’ concerns of enlightened rationality.⁷² To take just one of many possible examples, Antoine Danty D’Isnard (d. 1743), was a physician from Montpellier and botanist at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. As a correspondent of Linnaeus, D’Isnard was at the coal-face of the intellectual developments that moved the natural philosopher’s and the natural historian’s eye away from a concern with the physiognomy of natural bodies as understood and theorized by the likes of Paracelsus, Robert Fludd, and Johannes Alsted, to the new classification of natural bodies as espoused by Linnaeus. D’Isnard’s awareness of the physiognomical view of nature was evident in his library. He not only owned three copies of Della Porta’s Phytognomonica, as well as a 1669 edition of De secretis mulierum by Albertus Magnus (containing Scot’s physiognomy), he also had a large section specifically devoted to physiognomy which contained many of the most widely known ‘books on physiognomy’ from the ‘canon’.⁷³ Such catalogues ⁶⁹ E. Armstrong, ‘English Purchases of Printed Books from the Continent 1465–1526’, English Historical Review, 94 (1979), 268–90, 274–5. See London: British Library, IA. 49240 (E 2a). ⁷⁰ Basle: Bibliothek der Universität, HI.VIII.33. ⁷¹ New York: New York Public Library, KB 1543. ⁷² Clark, Demons, 228; D. Mornet, Les origines intellectuelles de la révolution française (1715–1787) (Paris, 1933). ⁷³ Catalogue des livres de feu m. Danty d’Isnard (Paris, 1744).


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certainly call for future studies to go beyond these relatively superficial facts of mere ownership, into a detailed, qualitative assessment of the intellectual interface which they suggest.

Intellectual and Environmental Dynamics of Production Finally, a word should be said on how library catalogues and marks of provenance suggest various intellectual and social dynamics driving the development of that consumption of physiognomy across the entire period. One intellectual dynamic is suggested by the different categories under which books on physiognomy were catalogued. Library catalogues grew out of simple inventories with a relatively simply administrative goal, often organized originally according to accession (by name of donor and not necessarily in chronological order of accession), or by author, or, increasingly, by location.⁷⁴ By the early modern period, classification by subject-matter was more or less normal procedure, even if in practice those categories varied enormously. Whilst the library classification systems of Conrad Gesner, Gabriel Naudé, Gabriel Martin, and Prosper Marchand were influential, it is not always certain who was responsible for the system used in any particular catalogue, let alone how closely it reflects the actual classificatory order of the books as they were stored in the libraries themselves, or how the author of any work would have categorized his own text. Thus, as textual documents, catalogues raise another aspect of the problem of author ‘intentionality’.⁷⁵ As in many medieval monastic libraries, early modern ‘books on physiognomy’ were often classified under ‘astrology’ and ‘philosophy’. In 1766, Mallard, an ‘advocat au Parlement’, had lots of books on physiognomy under ‘astrology’. The rising influence of Gabriel Martin’s cataloguing categories reinforced this. For example, in the Abbé Favier’s 1765 catalogue the Compost des bergiers was placed under ‘Sciences and Arts (Astronomy and Cosmos)’, whilst Albertus Magnus’s De secretis mulierum (1669) and Della Porta’s Physiognomia (1650) were listed alongside Pernetti´s Lettres (1746) under ‘Physics and Natural History’. Indeed, even the most superficial glance at library catalogues shows that early modern ‘books on physiognomy’, like their medieval manuscript predecessors simply refused any consistent classification. For example, in the catalogue of the public library at Orleans, founded by M. Prousteau, the law professor at the University of Orleans, books on physiognomy were shelved ⁷⁴ A. Derolez, Les catalogues de bibliothèques (Turnhout, 1979). ⁷⁵ C. Berkvens-Stevelinck, Prosper Marchand et l’histoire du livre (Bruges, 1978).

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respectively under ‘Astrology’, ‘Medicine’, and ‘Morale’, whilst the aforementioned Mallard had his La Chambre (1660) under ‘Logic and Dialectic’, whilst in 1775 the Abbé Desessarts, like Sandras, the avocat en Parlement, had them under ‘Metaphysique’. By the end of the period one finds catalogues which gave ‘books on physiognomy’ a section of their own. An anonymous catalogue of 1805 has them all in order. Yet even this gives one an impression of the diversity implicit in the subject. One section full of books on physiognomy was labelled ‘Physiological, philosophical and moral treatises on physiognomies’, and had a sub-section on ‘Chiromancy and Geomancy’, with others under ‘Moral treatises on the Virtues and Vices’, and still others under ‘Oracles, dreams and hermetic philosophy and magic’.⁷⁶ Hand in hand with the dynamic evident in this explicit development of a workable taxonomy, the practical problem of the nature of the book and its storage (what name should a composite manuscript be placed under, or a text of multiple authors) gave rise to a different, implicit classification system with a dynamic of its own, the influence of which could be brought to bear on the question of how a work was read. Indeed, it was this implicit dynamic that Enlightenment schemes of classification were trying to curtail. Those schemes were aiming at a system of classification that would not allow anything to be left in the realms of the indeterminate and would spare readers the inconvenience of sometimes finding the same work in several different classes. In other words, it would be the end of what the Encyclopédie described as ‘a labyrinth full of confused routes’. Despite this utopian rationality, the catalogues of private libraries in France from the last fifty years of the eighteenth century show that the art of physiognomy continued to experience a classificatory ambiguity and fluidity. Having said that, one notable aspect of the history of the practice of the library classification of ‘books on physiognomy’ is the persistence of its inclusion under ‘theology’—evidence in itself of the way in which the early modern interest in physiognomy was driven by its relationship to ‘the ancient theology’ so beloved of hermeticism. For example, the physiognomical manuscript transcribed by Laurentius Benincontri on 10 May 1477 may have been bound with other works on astrology and stored under Latin philosophy.⁷⁷ However, it was catalogued in, and chained to, the same section of the library that contained Marsilio Ficino’s Platonicae Theologiae de immortalitate animorum, his com⁷⁶ Catalogue des livres de la bibliothèque de feu monsieur l’abbé Favier (Lille, 1765); Catalogue des livres de feu m. Mallard (Paris, 1766); Catalogue des livres de la bibliothèque de feu m. Sandras (Paris, 1771); Catalogue des livres de la bibliothèque de feu monsieur l’abbé Desessarts (Paris, 1775); Catalogue des livres de la bibliothèque publique fondée par m. Prousteau (Paris, 1777); Catalogue des livres . . . provenant de biblothèques de mm. D** et de V*** (Paris, 1805). ⁷⁷ Florence: Bibliotheca Medica Laurenziana MS Plut. XXIX.3, fol. 59r–61v.


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mentary Mercurii Trismegisti liber de potestate Dei, and Pico della Mirandola’s Opus de amore divino. The inventory of the book collection of the sixteenthcentury English surgeon John Perman (d.1544) suggests that he may have shelved his copy of Cocles’s ‘physiognomia and chiromantia’ next to ‘de Sphera Johannise de Sacro Bosco’ and under ‘Theologi’.⁷⁸ The first catalogue of the Bodleian library shows how this same classification arose implicitly from the logistics of book storage. Some time between 1550 and 1600, a 1509 edition of Simonetta’s Opuscula varia, which contained a tract on chiromancy and physiognomy, was bound with a copy of the 1504/5 edition of the Achillini/Cocles Anastasis (as well as a 1550 edition of Euclid’s geometry). It was presented to the Bodleian library in 1600 by one William Gent. The first printed catalogue of the Bodleian Library (1605) records it as having been shelved under theology.⁷⁹ The 1765 sale catalogue of the private library of the Abbé Favier, a priest from Lille, contained about 2,500 books. One of them was Vulson’s Le palais des curieux (1660). It was listed as the last book in the theology section under the sub-section headed ‘The abuse of theology and religion, superstition, magic, cabal and astrology’. Francis Bacon was correct to claim that physiognomy ‘hath been inquired and considered as a part and appendix of Medicine, but much more as a part of Religion or Superstition’.⁸⁰ Indeed one anonymous catalogue of 1805 included a book entitled Le parnasse divin . . . contenant le grand microcosme, la phisionomie, la chiromancie, le rosaire mystique, le miroir ardent, la paraphrase sur l’Évangile de S. Jean (Tolouse: A. Colomiez, 1653). It was written by De Clermont, a priest from the convent of Nazareth, and was placed under ‘Poètes français’—an echo of Albrecht von Haller, the famous anatomist’s description of Lavater as a theologian and a poet, and a sign that, as in Ficino’s vision of things, the scientia of physiognomy was more theological and poetic than scientific. The marks of provenance on these extant texts provide at least one pattern which suggests something of a dynamic behind the ownership of ‘books on physiognomy’—an increasing gap between the date of the signature and the age of the text itself. Not surprisingly, the evidence of these signatures shows that many owners were contemporary with the texts they owned. In 1665 ‘Johannes Kappesig Montano-Hambergensis’ owned a 1662 Amsterdam edition of Albertus Magnus’s De secretis mulierum, which also included Scot’s physiognomy.⁸¹ At 10 years of age, Narcissus Luttrell (1657–1732), later ⁷⁸ Leedham-Green, Cambridge Inventories, 51. ⁷⁹ Oxford: Bodleian Library, Th. S. 7. 5; N. Ker, Fragments of Medieval Manuscripts (Oxford, 1954), 212, fn. 4. ⁸⁰ Francis Bacon, Collected Works, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, 7 vols. (1857–9), III.i, 368. ⁸¹ Basle: Bibliothek der Universität, ls522.

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annalist and bibliographer, was the owner of a 1665 edition of the Indagine treatise.⁸² Yet it appears that from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries onwards, one often sees a significant time-lapse between the year of the publication of the text and the date of these signatures, suggesting a shift in the status of these texts from curiosity to antiquity. One representative example of this is the antiquarian William Meek, who, on 24 July, 1775, was the owner of a, by then, century-old edition of the Indagine treatise. ⁸³ Such examples suggest the development of a more antiquarian or bibliomaniac interest in, and interaction with, an old printed book rather than any particular living interest in physiognomy itself. Having said that, the British Library has a 1503 edition of the Kalendar which bears the name of one ‘John Polotkley’ scribbled on the page over two centuries later in 1711: not the usual attitude of an antiquarian.⁸⁴ Another discernible dynamic which suggests itself through these marks of provenance is that one begins to see more evidence of female and child owners from the early seventeenth century onwards. It would be rash to see this as a consequence of the intellectual demise of physiognomy. Children had been reading such works for a long time. Copland advertised his 1528 ‘book of secrets’ as useful for teaching children to read. Furthermore, these texts could also have been used by adults who were learning to read. Indeed, there is one copy of the Erra Pater the frontispiece of which bears the inscription ‘Edward Collins fifteen years of age, January the 23 in 1734’. The same owner has signed his name thirty-two years later in 1766, thus suggesting that in later life he came back to a book of his youth—unless of course the second signature was that of his son.⁸⁵ This was not a peculiarly English affair. A copy of Gratarolus’s ‘book on physiognomy’ which eventually made its way into the collection of the seventeenth-century Swiss lawyer Faeschl carries the names of the scholar Henrico Adorno and his son.⁸⁶ All in all, the degree of distortion in the surviving evidence and the relatively random nature of its collection make it almost impossible to frame a definitive statement about this. None the less, if one brings the two aforementioned dynamics together it becomes interesting that as those ‘books on physiognomy’ increasingly take on the air of an antiquarian ‘curiosity’ from the later seventeenth/early eighteenth century onwards, there appears to be a pattern of more and more children and women who were reading them. When this pat⁸² ⁸³ ⁸⁴ ⁸⁶

Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, I 142. Los Angeles: William Andrews Clarke Memorial Library, *BF 910 I38 1697. London: British Library, C.70.g.2, sig.Iii. ⁸⁵ Cambridge: University Library, 5180.e.72.1. Basle: Bibliothek der Universität, LR.II.11.


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tern is joined with the dynamics evident in the taxonomy, then one begins to see how something that was once considered theology had taken on the air of a thing less serious, a poetic entertainment for women and children.

Conclusion This ‘invented archive’ has provided a general geographical and social survey map of the material presence of textual physiognomy in early modern Europe. ‘Books on physiognomy’ were produced constantly throughout the early modern period, in all languages from Greek to German and from Hebrew to Icelandic. They were published in all of early modern Europe’s main, as well as some of the more obscure printing centres, from Cracow to Copenhagen and from Venice to Valencia. Quantitatively speaking, this cobweb of ‘books on physiognomy’ was relatively small. However, it is made up of books in all formats and at all prices, aimed at and read by an audience spanning the entire age, gender, social, income, and professional spectra. The geographical and social ubiquity of ‘books on physiognomy’ is evidence of the widespread early modern interest in ‘natural magic’. This alone makes it deserving of a closer, more inquisitive look. In the next chapter this closer look will take the form of an analysis of this map of the ‘books on physiognomy’ in early modern Europe, from the other end of the process of communication, that is to say from the point of view of some of the factors driving their production.

3 The Troubling Emergence of the ‘Egyptian’ in Early Modern Europe This chapter will weave its argument around two classic Burckhardtian features of the Renaissance, the ‘re-discovery of antiquity’ and the ‘discovery of the individual’, that can be discerned in the dynamic contours of early modern attempts to capture fisnomy in books. A third feature, overlooked by Burckhardt and usually associated with the ‘discoveries’ of Victorian excavators, affects our understanding of the first two—that is, the troubling emergence of the ‘Egyptian’ in Western Christendom. From a purely philosophical perspective, most ‘books on physiognomy’ continued to be characterized by the development of the Aristotelian framework inherited from the Middle Ages. However, some of the early modern ‘books on physiognomy’ absorbed the influence of the ‘Egyptian’ hermetic wisdom which the writings of Marsilio Ficino had helped to spread throughout Europe. I shall further argue that that same rise of interest in all things ‘Egyptian’ during this period, from hieroglyphs and pyramids to the notions of physiognomical ‘regeneration’, was in part a response to a forgotten, but in some ways remarkably illiterate, social phenomenon, the coming of the ‘gypsies’. All in all it will be suggested that these very different blends of physiognomy contributed to the gradual metamorphosis, rather than the decline, of ‘physiognomy’ across the early modern period. Moreover, that metamorphosis was part of an ongoing religious and ‘scientific’ battle, not only over the instinct, characters, and the mythologies that constituted the very essence and nature of man’s self-knowledge but also over the transformability of the nature of the human self.

Features of a Renaissance Inside the material reality and mundane factuality of the publication of a book, there lies a narrative of ‘who?, what?, when?, where?’ struggling to get out. With

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or without the ‘why?’ such narratives are often, ultimately, as unavoidably mind-numbing as watching the final edition of a newspaper for a day on which nothing happened roll endlessly off the wheels of a modern automated press. But for a historian armed with an array of other historical information, the dead bones of that catalogue of bibliographical events can be brought to life. What follows is a résumé of the archive of texts upon which this study is based, written this time from the point of view of some of the factors behind their production. With hundreds of works, incorporating many different types of physiognomy, and three hundred years of history to cover, it does not represent the entire picture. It is based on a selection of those works that support its main concerns. To reassure those alarmed that this might propel the elements forward in something of a single direction, given the state of scholarship in this field, it is hoped that its inevitable errors will generate multiplicity by encouraging others to pursue more detailed studies in this neglected area.

The ‘re-discovery of antiquity’ To begin with, traces of two classical, intellectual features of the movement or period known as the ‘Renaissance’ can be discerned in the contours of this ‘invented archive’. The first is the interest in re-discovering the ancient Greek and Roman origins of, in this case, the physiognomical texts that had long been familiar reading material among Western Europe’s literate classes. Yet if physiognomy can be said to have had such a ‘renaissance’, it was a distinctly ‘medieval’ affair, some of which gestured towards an antiquity in ancient Persia. Hints of the re-discovery of the classical antiquity of physiognomy’s ‘renaissance’ in the north can be seen in the printing of the fourth century bce pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica that was included by Arnold Ther Hoernen in the collection of Aristotelian treatises he published in Cologne around 1472; and in another such collection published by Lucas Brandis in Merseberg on 20 October 1473. Having said that, the ambiguity of the place of the art of physiognomy in the official Aristotelian Renaissance scheme of things can also be seen from the very beginning of its printed life. The presence of other pseudo-Aristotelian works with which the Physiognomonica was printed in these collections is suggestive of a deliberate effort on the part of some printers to ignore humanist attempts to create an official Renaissance corpus of Aristotle. Nevertheless, the overwhelming sense of the persistence of ‘medieval’ physiognomy is seen clearly south of the Alps, where the visible transition in textual physiognomy from scribal calligraphy to printed typeface began with an edition of the medieval Italian philosopher and physician Pietro d’Abano’s De

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physiognomia in Padua in 1471[?], followed by another in Mantua in 1472, and again in Padua in 1474. Elsewhere, north and south, the ‘books on physiognomy’ which appeared most often and earliest in print were the work of another medieval writer, Michael Scot. Scot’s distinctly Aristotelian Liber physiognomiae was one of the first texts printed by the newly established printing press in Besançon in France in 1477. By 1480, the Swiss printer Michael Wenssler had produced a quarto of Scot’s work in Basle. Though the first printed physiognomy in the Low Countries was the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum secretorum published in 1480, four years later a printed version of Scot’s text had been published in Louvain. Indeed, one could go further than this and say that not only was the printed Renaissance of physiognomy a ‘medieval’ affair, it was a distinctly early vernacular phenomenon as well. For, whilst the bulk of the humanist ‘Renaissance’ of the classical texts tended to be kept locked up in the relative obscurity of the Latin and Greek languages, the age of print soon brought physiognomy in books to people who could read a vernacular language. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, vernacular French editions of the Secretum and the Calendrier were falling from Dutch presses, and by 1510 the German language had an anonymous ‘Complexionbuch’, replete with physiognomy, entitled In disem biechlein wirt erfunden von complexion der mensch zu erlernen leibliche vnnd menschliche natur ir siten geberden vnd naygli chayt zu erkennen vnd vrtaylen (Augsburg, H. Schoensperger, 1510). In Italy, a book by Girolamo Manfredi explaining ‘the why of everything’, with its numerous passages explaining the elemental physiological reasons of various physiognomical signs (such as the small wisdom of the large fat nose, the luxuriousness and irascibility of the broad nose), was published in Italian in Bologna as early as 1474 under the title Liber de homine. Moreover, in the dawning of this medieval and vernacular Renaissance, the light of Michael Scot’s medieval and distinctly Aristotelian physiognomy was very prominent. The first Spanish vernacular treatise entirely devoted to physiognomy may have been Sylvester Velasco’s Liber de fisiognomia (Hispali, 1517). However, extracts of Scot’s physiognomy had already been translated into Spanish and placed in Johannes de Ketham’s Compendio de la salud humana published in Burgos in 1495. In fact, whether in Latin or the vernacular, whether in compendia or under other authors’ names, it was Michael Scot’s physiognomy, much more so than even the Secretum secretorum, which appears to have been the most widely known in sixteenth-century Europe. (Having said that, it must always be borne in mind that Scot’s physiognomy was influenced by the Arabic Secretum.) It was translated into Italian by 1530 and into


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French by 1540.¹ The first Dutch vernacular ‘book on physiognomy’ so far unearthed was a cheap octavo published in Antwerp by Jan Roelants in 1554 entitled Nieu complexie boeck. But the physiognomy in this work was that of Michael Scot. The same goes for physiognomy printed in Spanish. The work that more or less dominated the Spanish physiognomy that was captured in texts was Jéronimo Cortés’s Libro de phisonomia natvral (Madrid, 1589). This was simply a Spanish translation of Scot. Indeed, one of the most widely known texts throughout Europe, both in Latin and numerous vernaculars (in German by 1547, in French by 1548, in English by 1556), was thought at the time to have been written by Bartholomaeus Cocles, a late fifteenth-century physiognomist from Bologna. Cocles’s name may well have graced the title-page, but the contents of the physiognomy were actually Michael Scot’s published under Cocles’s more famous name. One historian of Renaissance philosophy, Charles Schmitt, has claimed that ‘Aristotle still provided the overarching principle for the textbooks from which Christians from all parts of Europe and all shades of belief learned their philosophy and science’. Recent historians, in reconsidering the role of so called ‘natural magic’ in the development of early modern natural philosophy, have followed suit by emphasizing how frequently ‘natural magic’ was discussed by those with a Christian Aristotelian epistemology—itself often taken to be the area of the most innovative intellectual activity that brought about what used to be called ‘the birth of modern science’. The same appears to be true for early modern physiognomy. In this, scholars in the Italian- and German-speaking territories were the pacemakers. In the latter, commentaries on the pseudoAristotelian Physiognomonica were published as early as 1517 and again in 1538.² By the late 1530s, Spain had also made a significant contribution. This was symbolized when Andrés de Laguna (Segovia, 1499–1559), a converted Spanish Jew, renowned physician to Emperor Carlos I of Spain and Charles V of Germany as well as Phillip II and Pope Julius III, and a prominent, but unjustly neglected, figure in the history of European Renaissance natural philosophy and medicine, had his commentary on the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica published in Paris in 1535.³ Notwithstanding the many other commentaries that remain unpublished and unexamined in manuscript in Germany and Spain and elsewhere, the primary generator of this discussion was the natural philosophy faculty at Padua, whether the humanistic commentary on ¹ Michael Scot, La phisionomie de maistre Michel Lescot (Paris, 1540). ² Aristotle, Liber de physiognomia [Matthias Weißmann] (Leipzig, 1517); Aristotle, Physiognomonica Aristotelis Latina Facta (Wittenberg, 1538). ³ Aristotle, Physiognomonicis liber I. Andrea Lacuna interprete (Paris, 1535).

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physiognomy of Pomponazzi, or in particular Augustus Nifo’s more extended commentary on the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica. These writings show how commentaries on physiognomy feed in to some of the central historiographical debates over the role of Paduan Aristotelianism in laying the foundations of some of the most fundamental aspects of the naturalistic scientific mindset so often identified with the seventeenth century. Those aspects include the Renaissance reconsideration of the Galenic corpus, the issue of probability in the physiognomical eye, or the anti-Arabic prejudices driving the rejection of the Averroistic understanding of Aristotelian physiognomy advocated by one of the contemporaries of Nifo and Pomponazzi from the University of Bologna, Alexander Achillini. This Aristotelian interest in physiognomy continued long into the seventeenth century. It can be seen, for example, in the work of the natural philosopher Clemens Timpler (1567–1624), author of Opticæ systema methodicum (Hanover, 1617). Timpler was one of the most important and controversial Calvinist metaphysicians, writing in a tradition which disappeared from the German territories as a consequence of the Thirty Years War. Excluded from the University of Leipzig because of his Calvinism, he went to Heidelberg where he befriended another Calvinist metaphysician, Bartholomeus Keckermann. He taught at the gymansium in Steinfurt from 1595 until his death. Timpler’s definition of human ‘physiognomy’ shows that he saw it as an art which dealt with the ‘occult’: ‘the art that deals with those external signs, from which the internal and hidden (occultae) affections of man can be known’. Yet his text bears a strong Aristotelian influence, discernible in, for example, the lists of signs of particular characters from the ‘characterological prism’ referred to in Chapter 1 of this study, and which Johannes Alsted called physiognomia orta. The following are the signs of the audacious man: a dark, cloudy forehead, long eyebrows, firm, blood-red, open, vibrant and shining eyes, an austere, staring face, a long nose extended to the mouth, a large protruding mouth, long, thin, sharp robust teeth, a short, cropped neck, a broad chest, large shoulders, copious arms which can be extended to the knee, and thick short digits.⁴

This particular case of an Aristotelian interest in the ‘occult’ would benefit from a much more detailed analysis relating it to Timpler’s Calvinism, and to the way in which his creation of a rupture in philosophical thought between theology and ontology contributed to the changing notion of man’s self and man’s relationship to nature and God. Timpler would also provide an illumi⁴ Clemens Timpler, Opticæ systema (Hanover, 1617), 129, 230. Cf. Johannes Alsted, Encyclopaedia septem tomis distincta, 4 vols. (Herborn, 1630), ii. 767–80.


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nating comparative study with the catholic Aristotelian physiognomy that was being considered by Camillo Baldi (1550–1637), professor of natural philosophy at the University of Bologna in the 1620s and 1630s. Custodian of the Museo Aldrovandi, Baldi was also a member of the Accademia dei Gelati. Often credited with inventing graphology (a physiognomy of handwriting), his other writings included such subjects as friendship, civility, and lying. They too provide fascinating and hitherto unexplored aspects of his Aristotelian interest in the art of physiognomy and its relation to his alleged Averroism. The only reservation to be made with regard to Schmitt’s argument is that, with regard to some of the more popular, vernacular texts, the presence of a clear Aristotelian framework depends on how Aristotelian Scot’s physiognomy is taken to be. This becomes all the more pertinent when one considers that in many of the more popular versions of Scot, particularly those put out under another name such as the small octavos published with Bartholomaeus Cocles’s name on the title-page, the Aristotelianism was not so evident as it was in its original form as part of his Liber introductorius or in the earlier editions of his Liber physiognomia that were published under Scot’s own name and included the surrounding material on generation and embryology. Indeed, as will become apparent in the next section, some of those works, such as Thomas Hill’s, tended to be tinged with a hermetic influence. Indeed, by way of a transition to the consideration of those ‘books on physiognomy’ influenced by the spread of hermeticism across early modern Europe, it must be said that if the first forty years of the sixteenth century produced so many significant ‘commentaries’ on the ‘Aristotelian’ tradition, then the 1540s—the decade so famous for the publication of the epoch-making works which challenged the Aristotelian world-view, such as Vesalius’s De fabrica, Copernicus’s De revolutionibus, and the first printed edition of the Qu’ran—also appears to have witnessed humanist scholars’ questioning of the purely ‘Aristotelian’ sense of antiquity and classicism in this sort of bookish physiognomy. This is evidenced by the Latin version of Adamantius, thought by some to be a sophist, by others to be a Jew, which was published in Paris in 1540, and which by 1556 was circulating in a French vernacular version with commentary by Jean Lebon.⁵ If this can be called ‘non-Aristotelian’ physiognomical classicism, it was soon taken up in protestant and catholic centres elsewhere. In 1544, the Basle printer Robert Winter put out an octavo of Adamantius’s treatise in Greek, and the following year another Basle printer ⁵ Adamantius, Adamantii Sophistae physiognomonica (Paris, 1540); La Phisionomie d’ Adamant Sophiste (Paris, 1556).

126 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 published an edition of the Roman orator Polemon’s physiognomy. Michelangelo Biondo’s humanistic physiognomical retrospective De cognitione de hominis per aspectum (1545) came out in the same year as a Greek edition of both Adamantius and Polemon (1545) was published in Rome.⁶ It is perhaps not insignificant that the time which saw the re-discovery of this ‘non-Aristotelian’ classicism also witnessed the appearance of the corpus of writings by Paracelsus. As will become more evident below, all of this, and perhaps even some of the commentaries on the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica themselves, may have been given some of their innovative impetus by the need to respond to two other forces: one intellectual and ‘literate’; the other social and ‘illiterate’, but both fundamentally religious. The first was the impact of the re-discovery of an aspect of antiquity that was thought at the time to be the ancient ‘Egyptian’ wisdom of the Corpus hermeticum, translated and interpreted by the Florentine Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino. The second was a social phenomenon far beyond all such ‘discourses’—the arrival of those ‘Egyptians’ otherwise known as the ‘gypsies’.

The ‘discovery of the individual’ Before turning to discuss those issues, a word first about another fundamental characteristic of the Renaissance discernible in this map of ‘books on physiognomy’—what the nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt called the ‘discovery of the individual’. This is most evident around the 1520s–1540s in the appearance of tracts on the art of physiognomy penned by a range of new, identifiable, named individual authors, lodged in, and broadcasting from, a variety of very different but equally influential niches of the early modern communications network. One distinctly visual, indeed innately physiognomical, sign of how involved the art of physiognomy was in that multifaceted process of the ‘discovery of the individual’ is evident in the fact that, from the early sixteenth century onwards, the physiognomies of individual authors began to appear on frontispieces of their texts. In the case of ‘books on physiognomy’, the most widely disseminated was that of a 1522 woodcut of the German author Johannes de Indagine (Illustration 8). The concept of ‘individualism’ and the question of its origins is a muchdebated issue in Western historiography. As will be argued in the final section ⁶ Adamantius, Physiognomonicum, id est de naturae indiciis cognoscendis libri duo (Basle, 1544); Michelangelo Biondo, De cognitione hominis per aspectum (Rome, 1544); Adamantius, Physiognomonicum, idest, de naturae indiciis cognoscendis (Rome, 1545); Claude de Préneste Ælien, Aeliani variae historiae libri XIIII. (Rome, 1545).


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8. Some readers hand coloured this woodcut portrait in order to make it more lifelike, Hans Baldung Grien, Woodcut of author, frontispiece from Johannes de Indagine, Introductiones apotelesmaticae elegantes in chiromantiam, physionomiam, astrologiam naturalem, complexiones hominum, naturas planetarum (Strasburg, 1522). (Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Rés 126655. Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.)

of this chapter, physiognomy was a vehicle of some form of self-awareness and thus ‘individualism’. However, all that is being emphasized here is that the very attempts by some authors to identify themselves with a magical, even mystical, scientia that was innately collective, and to put it forward as their own, are evidence in themselves of some form of ‘individualism’. Indeed, it is significant that this fashion for literate, individual, physiognomating magi occurred in the early-to-mid sixteenth century, when physiognomy had still not been entirely

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rejected from the agenda of learned natural philosophy. This burst of individual physiognomical celebrity and individuality only lasted about one hundred years. In the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century, when physiognomy was being absorbed into cheap literature on general knowledge, fortunetelling, entertaining riddles, and parlour games, compiled by the hacks of Europe’s ‘Grub Street’, these individuals were nowhere to be seen. In Germany, for example, from the seventeenth century onwards, one saw much more physiognomy published in between the covers of small, cheap anonymous pamphlets, such as Physiognomia curiosa (Nuremberg, Albrecht, 1709). In England it took the form of texts like Aristotle’s Last Legacy (c.1700). Indeed, it is surely no coincidence that the appearance of individual physiognomators coincided with the Neoplatonic magi associated with the most sophisticated versions of Neoplatonic hermeticism, such as Bruno and Fludd, as well as the arrival of ‘the fisnomiers’—the ‘gypsies’. Similarly, it is no coincidence that the disappearance of these individual magi-like physiognomators coincided with the gradual ‘rejection’ of physiognomy by the mainstream, established, scientific community and the subsequent demise of its intellectual status within the minds of the broader public. Yet this apparent demise or textual debasement of physiognomy actually brought it closer to its origins. For due to the overwhelming audio-visual, ‘unbookish’ nature of fisnomy, as well as what I shall argue in the next chapter were the more collective oral traditions of ‘physiognomy’, what many of these texts were expressing was the fact that the subject itself, physiognomy, was something which no individual author could easily come to identify himself with, nor grasp in its entirety, scientifically or otherwise. In that sense, the natural magic of both fisnomy and physiognomy was similar to ‘mystical knowledge’ for the genuine Kabbalist, for whom it ‘is not his private affair which has been revealed to him, and to him only, in his personal experience. On the contrary, the purer and more nearly perfect it is, the nearer it is to the original stock of knowledge common to mankind’.⁷ For all the Renaissance authors who tried to write upon the subject, it was anonymous pamphlets and scholarly compendia of earlier physiognomical writings that dominated the dissemination of textual physiognomony from the beginning to the end of the early modern period. The extant copies of one German vernacular work entitled Complexionbuch are dated 1511, 1512, 1513, 1514, 1515, 1516, 1517, 1519, 1530, 1533, 1534, 1535, 1536, 1537, 1539, 1540, 1541, 1546, 1548, 1550, 1551, 1554, 1555, 1556, 1560, and 1698. There were, undoubtedly, many others. The physiognomy ⁷ G. G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York, 1974), 21.


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among its contents may have come from Michael Scot and the Secretum, but it was published as an anonymous body of knowledge. The art of physiognomy was much more widely known than any of its authors. Similarly in France and England. One ‘book on physiognomy’ popular with French- and English-reading audiences was a vernacular version of a Latin work first printed in Paris in 1542. In its earliest days attributed to the obscure compiler Richard Roussat, in 1564 it was translated into English by a student of medicine at King’s College, Cambridge, named William Warde (1534–1604?), who went on to become the regius professor of physic at Cambridge.⁸ Warde’s translation continued to be published in England until at least the late seventeenth century. Yet neither his name nor Roussat’s name ever became synonymous with it. In both France and England, the text was most widely known as Arcandam. Physiognomy was bigger than any ‘individual’. Many of the later works carrying identifiable authors’ names are simply scholarly compendia of earlier writings. For example, Jean Taisnier’s Opus mathematicum (Cologne, 1562) had Taisnier’s name on it but was a late sixteenth-century compilation of Scot, Indagine, and Gratarolus. Joannes Praetorius’s seventeenth-century Thesaurus chiromanticus (Leipzig and Jena, 1661) was a quite exhaustive compilation of all previous writings on chiromancy. However, Praetorius did not do the same for physiognomy because that compilation had already been done by the most famous ‘individual’ physiognomist of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe, Giovanni Battista Della Porta. Della Porta’s De humana physiognomia (1586) was basically a collection of the opinions and physiognomcial traditions of the earlier authorities. In that sense his work was a vehicle for what literary scholars today call heteroglossia—a multiplicity of authorial voices from different eras and places. Of course, with that very claim one might still argue that Della Porta is therefore the individual whose name, until the arrival of the next one, Lavater, came to be synonymous with physiognomy. However, even Lavater’s success owed much to a time in which there was a more firmly established sense of individualism and a culture characterized by a new obsession with the notion of ‘genius’. In either case, the respective success of Della Porta and Lavater only serves to show how exceptional they were. Throughout the early modern period, if there is one consistent feature of physiognomony, or physiognomy, or fisnomy, particularly the hermetic variety, it was that it not only remained beyond the grasp of any individual quill, it was also beyond ‘writing’ itself. ⁸ Richard Roussat, Arcandam doctor peritissimus ac non vulgaris astrologus, de veritatibus, & praedictionibus astrologiae (Paris, 1542).

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The Spreading Influence of the ‘Egyptian’ The illiterate ‘seers’ If history is understood as context, context, and more context (as described by E. P. Thompson), then there is one part of the context of these ‘books on physiognomy’ that has been neglected by the more strictly history-of-ideas approach that has so often characterized the scholarly histories of the role of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonic hermeticism in early modern Europe, and the discussion of their respective contributions to the birth of modern science. Moreover, it is a part of the context that takes us into the ‘unbookish’ and distinctly visual realms of the social and religious history in terms of which the physiognomy that was captured by the writers and philosophers in those books has to be understood. One gets to it by asking the following question: besides the authors of ‘books on physiognomy’ who were the ‘physiognomators’ in early modern European society? Despite their absence from the history books, physiognomators were familiar figures in early modern society. Erasmus referred to them in his Apophthegmes (1542), linking them, in true Renaissance humanist style, with their classical ancestor Zopyrus, but not mentioning a fact which he surely knew, that Zopyrus was Syrian and not Greek. In that work Erasmus defined a physiognomer as a feloe hauyng sight in phisiognomie (who professed and openly tooke upon hym, by the complexion and pleeight of the bodye, and by ye proporcion & settyng, or coumpace of the face or visage, to bee hable unfallibly and without myssyng, to fynd out & iudge the naturall dispocicion of any manne).⁹

Paracelsus gave another sort of insight when he referred, albeit critically, to a story-telling figure called the ‘physiognomer’ and ‘physiognomantier’: Now the physiognomer also does the same thing, putting forward a story which does not make us cry because he also talks about the health of people without realising there are 4 entities he does not understand. This is because what he does wrong is that he talks about the natural entity and doesn’t say anything about the others, and that doesn’t really tickle us.

Unfortunately Paracelsus is not very specific about what this ‘story-telling’ involved other than suggesting that, whilst the pyromantier deals with the spirit, the theologian with God, and the astronomer with the stars as the cause ⁹ Desiderius Erasmus, Apophthegmes (1542), fol. 32v.


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of things, ‘the . . . physiognomantier bases his judgements on the nature of the human self ’.¹⁰ There is other evidence to suggest that these physiognomators were not a figment of Paracelsus’s admittedly rich imagination. They were distinct and familiar enough figures in England, for example, to merit special mention by name in a schoolbook that was first published in 1519. Warning children away from numerous impieties, the author thought it important enough to have the children translate into Latin and recite, catechism-like, ‘I beleve nat the reders of dremes and fisnomiers’. Later in the same schoolbook, the same schoolchildren were warned to avoid those people ‘that make them selfe wyse and connuyng to a rede destynyes by lokynge in the strakes of ones hande or forheed and circles and other fygures in the grownde and drawynge of lottis and redynge of dremes and prophecyenge and suche other make men foolis: that beleue them’.¹¹ Whoever these ‘fisnomiers’ were, the same author reveals various aspects of their story-telling techne of the human self—chiromancy (the lines in the palm of the hand), metoposcopy (the lines and circles on the forehead), and possibly even what Francis Bacon later called physiognomy’s sister art, the interpretation of dreams. Despite this evidence of his or her existence, there are a number of reasons why the figure of the early modern ‘fisnomier’ is, on the whole, missing from early modern history books. Apart from the usual problems of the erosion of the historical record, there is the equally insurmountable difficulty of distinguishing the ‘fisnomier’ from the ranks of other more recognizable early modern figures such as astrologers, physicians, empirics, quacks, wizards, cunning men and women, the rare glimpses of whom provided by the historical record suggest that they all practised some form of physiognomy. To take just one example, in 1578, Pierre Nodé, a minim friar, in a passage denouncing ‘Les Empiriques Medecins, les Urinaires, ou Phisionomiastres, les Pronosticqueurs, & Almanatistes suspects en Sorcellerie’ wrote that sorcery ‘has no small affinity with the disciplines of medicine and astrology, to such an extent that it makes one fear that there are those, even in these very times, imbued with this magic, who, by only the inspection of urines or of physiognomies, judge, without listening to the patients, of the truth of all sorts of illnesses in all parts of the body’.¹² Yet, unlike the academies of the esoteric and textually literate such as the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome which was inspired by the academy in Naples ¹⁰ Paracelsus, Werke, ed. Will-Erich Peuckert (Stuttgart, 1965–8) 1, 193–4. ¹¹ William Horman, Vulgaria (1519), fol. 19r and 21v. ¹² Pierre Nodé, Declamation contre l’erreur (Paris, 1578), ch. 10 (pagination erratic).

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set up by the Italian natural philosopher, playwright, and physiognomer Giovanni Battista Della Porta, there was no Royal College of fisnomiers in the early modern period which accumulated a library of their manuscripts. Even so, the main reason for the relative lack of historical records on the early modern fisnomiers is not that their manuscripts or the books they read did not have the protection of a library. It was because many of them were textually illiterate and thus have left no manuscript records of their consultations or their métier. Indeed, I would argue that the very absence of extant evidence can be taken to suggest the existence of an early modern European tradition of textually illiterate fisnomiers. Given that the literacy required for the métier of these physiognomical ‘seers’ was primarily visual not textual, it is very likely an indication that they explicitly chose not to record their consultations in textual form. Paracelsus, much as he used the pen himself, is just one example of the fight against the tyranny of books and ‘bookishness’ that was such a fundamental social and cultural feature of the age of print. The rare occasions when actual fisnomiers stumble into the textual historical records confirm their textual illiteracy and provide further insights into the wandering figure of the fisnomier. Take the following two examples, in which there is no mention of books. In 1556, so the surgeon John Hall (1529?–1566?) tells us, there appeared in Maidstone, England, a ‘diviner’ named ‘Robert Haris’. His method of divination was ‘by only lokyng in ones face, all secrete markes and scarres of the bodie’. Four years later, a person named Valentyne Staplehurst arrived in Maidstone in Kent, claiming that ‘he could tel all thinges present, past, and to come; and the very thoughtes of men, and theyr diseases, by onlye lokinge in theyr faces’.¹³ Neither Harris nor Staplehurst is referred to as a fisnomier, but that is undoubtedly what they were, at least in part. Moreover, their appearance in this historical record not only suggests that many a fisnomier may have been illiterate, and that the métier was often seen as the equivalent of a ‘diviner’, the mention of their arrival in Maidstone shows that they were at least itinerant, if not nomadic, figures. Thus, one can begin to conclude that the early modern fisnomier was, originally, an illiterate, or at least an ‘unbookish’, vagabond diviner. When put like this, the figure of Paracelsus once more begins to loom large on the horizon, but not only Paracelsus. An intriguing parallel to these early English examples is provided by the records of the first sighting of Faust in Europe, dated 20 August 1507 and 3 October 1513, respectively. Both texts suggest that he too was something of a wandering diviner. More to the point, they ¹³ K. V. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), 285; J. Halle, An historiall expostulation (1565), ed. T. J. Pettigrew, Percy Society (1844), 6 and 11.


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make explicit reference to his physiognomical skills (chiromanticus) as would Goethe years later. Furthermore, they show the extent of the hostility of the church towards that physiognomical skill. Conrad Mundt, a canon of Gotha, and author of the second sighting, issued a declaration of war on a wandering fisnomier which is revealing not only of the intensity of this hostility but of the popularity that such wandering physiognomers established among the peasants: ‘Eight days ago there came to Erfurt a Professor of Palmistry, named Georgius Faustus Hemitheus, Hedebergensis, a braggart and a fool. His art, as that of all diviners, is vain, and such physiognomic science lighter than a waterbug. The vulgar are lost in admiration for him. Let the theologians rise against him.’¹⁴ This hostility towards Faust was synecdochic of the church’s increasingly hostile attitude towards these fisnomiers in general. Having said that, it must be remembered that the figure of the wandering seer, notoriously the subject of much rhetoric, was a powerful phenomenon that people had been flocking to see since the Middle Ages. Whilst posterity has been drawn to the legendary male figure of Faust, there were, in fact, many real, existing holy women, such as Clare of Montefalco and Angela of Foligno, who may have been ranked among these fisnomiers. As one recent historian has written, these women were often said to be endowed with ‘penetrating prophetic insight . . . which enabled them to see into people’s hearts, inducing them to confession, repentance, and good deeds but also identifying sinners and heretics; and these insights were supported, guided, and confirmed by their visions’.¹⁵ At this point, I want to come back to the point mentioned in Chapter 2 about the danger of underestimating the historical significance of ‘books on physiognomy’ as presented by the arithmetical calculation of their stature. There, mention was made of the annotations which Archbishop Cranmer made to Henry VIII’s Institutions of a Christian Man around 1538. It is worth repeating here that, in the midst of the epoch-making religious and political turmoil of the early sixteenth century and the Reformation, popular religion came under severe attack by the members of the religious establishment, usually armed with the claim that what the populace was doing was ‘superstition’ not religion. ‘Superstition’ was often equated with ‘magic’ by hostile churchmen. It was essentially a pejorative term used in the early modern period by those wishing to describe religious ideas and practices that were not their own and of which they did not approve. Historians should avoid being blinded by ¹⁴ W. C. Coupland, The Spirit of Goethe’s Faust (1885 ), i. 9–11. ¹⁵ C. Frugoni, ‘Female Mystics, Visions and Iconography’, in D. Bornstein and R. Rusconi (eds.), Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, trans. M. J. Schneider (Chicago, 1996), 130–64.

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the innate prejudice in both terms. This is all the more important given the extent to which ‘superstition’ became such a taboo during the early modern period, with increasingly sinister, indeed demonic, connotations. As one English historian has recently argued, the issue of ‘superstition’ was more important in early modern Europe ‘than any other time in European history’. Moreover, as many historical studies have shown, the people who were offering these so-called ‘superstitions’ were very much in demand.¹⁶ This was all the more disturbing to the established church given that it was not always so easy for people to distinguish the so-called official ‘church men’, or medical men for that matter, from the so-called unlawful ‘cunning men’ who, as Gabriel Harvey claimed, had for their Bible and New Testament, a couple of books full of astrology and physiognomy.¹⁷ It is in the light of this equation of ‘superstition’ with ‘religion’ that Henry VIII’s list of the ‘superstitions’ of the ‘superstitious folk’ that broke the very first commandment—the ‘lots, astrology, divination, chattering of birds, physiognomy, and looking of men’s hands, or other unlawful and superstitious crafts’—needs to be considered, as does the king’s dismissive description of them as taking ‘upon them certainly to tell, determine and judge beforehand of men’s acts and fortunes, which be to come afterward’. Although the king erased some of this statement, Archbishop Cranmer reinstated those ‘superstitions’ that he thought were most alarming: ‘whereas the same is stricken out, it seemeth more necessary to remain, forsomuch as the common people do in nothing more superstitiously. Likewise of astrology, and specially physiognomy.’¹⁸ Cranmer wrote ‘specially physiognomy’ because he knew the dangers of underestimating the religious, political, and social implications of the very fact of its popularity.¹⁹ So much so that I would argue that it is the anxiety of the authorities about physiognomy and its related ‘superstitions’ that provides us with a major cause of the relative invisibility of the fisnomiers in the historical record. The theologians were ‘rising up’ against them. As will become evident below, the lawyers were passing laws against them. With the learned medical establishment increasingly distinguishing and institutionalizing itself and lending its weight to the wrath of the church and the laws of the state, the fisnomiers, as weavers of some sort of unwelcome theology, had necessarily to go ‘underground’. ¹⁶ See Clark, Demons, 474, 479, 457, n 1. ¹⁷ See Introduction. ¹⁸ Thomas Cranmer, Miscellaneous Writings, ed. Revd. J. E. Cox, Parker Society (Cambridge, 1846), 100. My emphasis. ¹⁹ Cranmer owned a 1531 folio edition copy of Indagine’s Chiromantia. See The Library of Thomas Cranmer, ed. D. G. Selwyn, The Oxford Bibliogrpahical Society (Oxford, 1996), 124–5.


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Yet, despite their understandable elusiveness, there are fragments of evidence that reveal glimpses of this underground profession in action. If Valentyne Staplehurst, Harris, Faust, and indeed Paracelsus himself all reveal the wandering aspect of the fisnomier’s métier, can these elusive, underground ‘seers’ be glimpsed among the mythical, indeed the distinctly biblical ranks of the ‘wanderers’? The number of ‘wanderers’ in the early modern period is impossible to calculate. One of the reasons for this is that the term is so difficult to define. Early modern Europe’s growing populations could be split into the ‘mobile’ and the ‘immobile’. But are the ‘mobile’ necessarily the ‘wanderers’? Are the early modern journeyman in search of work (an innate feature of the early modern economy), or the illegitimately pregnant girls exiled from home, or the hawkers and pedlars who sold mirrors, and cheap physiognomical pamphlets and prints across Europe, or the dispossessed poor all to be ranked among the ‘wanderers’? Was the Grand Tour nothing other than an aristocratic form of ‘wandering’? What about the mendicant priests or the hermits? In 1571 Peter Severinus (1540–1602) advised those seeking truth to ‘sell your lands, your houses, your clothes and your jewellry; burn up your books. On the other hand, buy yourself stout shoes, travel to the mountains, search the valleys, the deserts, the shores of the sea, and the deepest depressions of the earth’. The Paracelsian physician Joseph Duchesne (1544–1609) thought physicians should travel in order to learn about local diseases.²⁰ Should they also rank among the ‘wanderers’? And what about wandering artists like Albrecht Dürer? Whatever the exact scale of the problem of the ‘wanderers’, one group of people who undoubtedly do qualify for inclusion among them is the ‘vagabonds’. In fact, like the term ‘superstition’, the early modern use of the word ‘vagabonds’ was something of a catch-all description, which also included the idle, the poor, beggars, errant scholars, as well as the aforementioned pilgrims, mendicant friars, even journeymen, and so on. Another ‘family resemblance’ of this group, besides their mobility, was that they were all the target of hostility, if not persecution. Some hostility was based on a more economically inclined, moralized prejudice that these people were without employment, begging when they were fit for work, or looking for financial help from a parish that was not their own. Some of it was driven by religious prejudices. The Dutch historian Johannes Huizinga noted this when he wrote of the fifteenth-century contempt levelled at the mendicant orders.²¹ Other aspects of this hostility were driven by prejudices about contagion. In a plague-ridden society, the wanderers were notoriously regarded as carriers of the fatal malady. ²⁰ A. G. Debus, The French Paracelsians (Cambridge, 1991), 8–9. ²¹ J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924), 161 ff.

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One has only to take a cursory glance at early modern proverbs to see that most of them are detrimental towards these people. As one scholar has written, ‘a proverb-by-proverb examination of the most widely used compilation of the century . . . reveals a thoroughly conservative outlook and an often Machiavellian cynicism with repeated condemnations of social mobility and the aspirations of the poor’.²² The fact that many of these wanderers were peddling what appeared to be some sort of religious medicine, their own brand of opium for the people, did not endear them to the learned medical establishment increasingly determined to establish and institutionalize its unsteady monopoly. One good example of the scale of the problem as well as the generally hostile attitude of all early modern authorities towards ‘vagabonds’ comes again from England in 1530, and helps to shed further light on Cranmer’s aforementioned anxiety. In the middle of instigating the acts of parliament that would bring England into line with the religious revolution that Luther is so often assumed to have begun on the Continent, the Reformation parliament also found time to pass an act entitled ‘An Acte conc[er]nyng punysshement of Beggers & Vacabund[es]’. Yet under this rubric of ‘beggars and vagabonds’ were included not only all of those groups mentioned above, but also others who had prevoiously been allowed to travel, such as ‘Shypmen’, ‘all Proctors & Pardoners’, and ‘Scolers of the Universities of Oxford & Cambridge’. Thus there were some highly educated and therefore possibly dangerous people wandering among the poor and dispossessed, all the more so given the fact that scholars were also often religious proselytisers. One other notorious group of illiterate, heretical, wandering, persecuted diviners it did not mention was the ‘Egyptians’, or ‘gypsies’. Yet it is by looking more closely at the ranks of the ‘gypsies’ who wandered among the crowds of vagabonds traversing Europe’s forests and fields that we can catch sight of some of the aforementioned and hitherto forgotten fisnomiers in action. It is, of course, extremely difficult to separate myth from reality in the history of the ‘gypsies’. Their origins, the date and place of their first arrival in the different countries of Europe, their number, appearance, religion, ways of earning a living, and their alleged practice of palm-reading have all been the subject of conflicting opinions, many of which stem from the early modern period.²³ The term ‘Egyptians’ appears to have been in use from at least the mid-fifteenth century onwards to describe the ‘Egipcianos’ seen in Barcelona in 1447, the ‘Egypsienen’ in Bruges in 1459, the ‘Egiptenaers’ seen in Liers in Belgium in 1474 , the ‘Egipteners’ in Haarlem in 1476, the ‘Egiptiacos’ in Tran²² D. Kunzle, ‘Bruegel’s Proverb Painting and the World Upside Down’, The Art Bulletin (1977), 197–202, 199. ²³ F. de Vaux de Foletier, Mille ans d’histoire des tsiganes (Paris, 1970).


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sylvania in 1476, the ‘Heiden oder Egiptiers’ (‘Heathens or Egyptians’) seen in Greece 1473, the ‘Égyptians and Égyptiennes’ seen in France in 1498, and the ‘Egipcianos y extrangeros calderos’ in Spain in 1499, to name but a few instances.²⁴ However, an analysis is made no easier by the number of different terms used to refer to the ‘gypsies’ in the different European vernaculars, be it Saracens, Sarazenen (German), Zigeuner (German), Ziginer (Swiss German), Zygeuner (Slovenian), Gitanos (Spanish), T , igani (Romanian), Cingano (Italian), Bohémians (French), Boemianis (German), etc., assuming that these are the same ‘people’. In addition to that difficulty, the epithet ‘gypsy’ and many synonymous terms such as ‘vagabond’, ‘papist’, ‘Paracelsian’, and ‘superstitious’ were thrown around in the early modern period as general terms of abuse, often used to attack those other itinerant or nomadic, marginalized groups, such as the aforementioned ‘poor’, ‘beggars’, ‘vagabonds’, ‘wanderers’, ‘heathens’, ‘errant scholars’, ‘mendicant friars’, ‘pilgrims’, and so on. In early modern society, the categories of ‘wanderer’, and ‘gypsy’, like the condition itself, were evidently something of a ‘free-floating signifier’. This is perhaps yet another indication of the need to try to understand them as being beyond the discourses that were trying to capture them. However it is defined, the size of this group, which in itself may have made it the source of anxiety to the early modern authorities, is now impossible to calculate. Yet the seemingly democratic nature of the métier of the fisnomiers among it may also have been the source of some consternation. One historian has shown that the techniques of the diviners and healers among them were, in principle at least, accessible to all.²⁵ The same could be said of the sonic and visual literacy of the fisnomiers among them. Indeed Addison pointed this out as late as 1711: There are several Arts which all Men are in some measure Masters of, without having been at the Pains of learning them. Every one that speaks or reasons is a Grammarian and a Logician, though he may be wholly unacquainted with the Rules of Grammar or Logick, as they are delivered in Books and Systems. In the same Manner, every one is in some Degree a Master of that Art which is generally distinguished by the Name of Physiognomy; and naturally forms to himself the Character or Fortune of a Stranger, from the Features and Lineaments of his Face.²⁶

Given this, could it be that an equally disturbing feature of the fisnomiers among this nomadic part of society was the fact that, whilst the early sixteenth century was seeing the coming of the book and an increasing distinction ²⁴ R. Gilsenbach, Weltchronik der Sigøjner, 2nd edn. (Frankfurt, 1997), 83, 90, 97, 98, 114, 116, 119. ²⁵ R. Muchembled, La Sorcière au village (Xve–XVIIIe siècle) (Paris, 1979), 24, 26, 49. ²⁶ The Spectator, ed. D. F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1965), ii. 365 (No. 86, Friday, 8 June 1711).

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between those with and those without the literacy to use them, the physiognomy brought by these fisnomiers was a naturally ‘magic’ ‘religion’ for which everyone, literate or illiterate, had some sort of innate faculty? Scholars are now beginning to agree that many of these ‘Egyptians’ came from north-west India, the product of a fragmentation of nomadic tribes of the Indus Valley region that occurred around 1000 ce, and that the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century saw a proliferation of those on the move.²⁷ Moreover, scholars suggest that many of those Indians who came to the West were of very high rank. This suggests that there may have been more to the ‘Duke Michael of Egypt’, who, with his wife and his daughter were killed by one ‘Rom Filippo’ in Milan in June 1457 than the elevated title that many such itinerants seem to have assumed. If the ‘Cingano’, who on 4 February 1469 so impressed Borso d’Este (1450–71) with his zither playing as to move the Italian aristocrat to give him a little money, was indeed something of a nobleman himself, then, instead of dismissing Borso d’Este’s action as revealing the prejudice, widely held, that such people were normally untalented barbarians, the ‘Cingano’ in this story might be seen as exemplifying the sort of humility Jesus expressed in washing the feet of his disciples.²⁸ However accurate such claims are, it is surely not without significance that the ‘Egyptians’ begin to be sensed in the historical record long before the arrival of the manuscripts bearing the ‘Egyptian’ wisdom contained in the corpus of writings by Hermes Trismegistus. The register of the bishopric of Arras for the year 1421, to take just one example at random, has the following entry: ‘Marvel: Strangers came from the land of Egypt’.²⁹ While the West knows nothing of how important its discovery (as some sort of ‘new world’?) by these ‘Indians’/‘Egyptians’ was for the ‘Indians’/‘Egyptians’ themselves, the impact of the ‘Egyptians’ was powerful enough to have created an image that stayed in the minds of some of the New World voyagers (wanderers?) trying to make sense of the equally astonishing and epoch-making appearance of the newly discovered indigenous Indians of that ‘New World’. One French voyager described the New World ‘Indians’ for his French audience upon his return, ‘wearing coats of flowing braids, skin and feathers, like those of the Egyptians and Bohemians in this country, except that they are much shorter’.³⁰ In the case of the ‘gypsies’, it was not only their clothes that ²⁷ A. C. Woolner, ‘The Origins of the Gypsies in Europe’, Journal of the Punjab Historical Society, 2:2 (1914), 118–37. The Corpus hermeticum, in the section entitled ‘Egyptian Reflection of the Universe in the Mind’, stated ‘command your soul to be in India’,Yates, Bruno, 32 ²⁸ Gilsenbach, Zigeuner, 90, 95. ²⁹ De Foletier, Tsiganes, 7. ³⁰ B. de Gonneville, Campagne du Navire l’Espoir de Honfleur (1503–1505), ed. M. D’Avezac (Paris, 1869), 96.


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shocked. Their ‘swarthy’ physiognomy was distinguished enough to be the subject of analysis in some of the physiognomical treatises themselves. Equally disturbing was the nature of their textually illiterate, story-telling religion which, as we have seen, included palm-reading and the interpretation of dreams as well as the art of physiognomy. Thus, like early modern astrologers, the gypsies ‘sold meaning’.³¹ The textual tradition of physiognomony in India provides an illuminating parallel here, for it is thought to have derived from Indian poets who were the saintly figures who could mentally reach ‘the end of the great ocean called Kala-purusa, that is, astrology’.³² Whether or not scholars are correct in claiming they all came from India, ‘their’ identity was very often conflated with that of the Jews. Given the expulsion of Jews and Muslims from Spain in 1492, there may have been some real basis for the confusion. Luther himself linked the ‘gypsies’ with the Jews. In a chapter on Egypt in his 1547 book Andrew Borde claimed ‘Egipt is a countrey ioyned to Jury’ and the following chapter dealt with the Jews. Moreover, like the ‘wandering’ Jews, the ‘gypsies’ seem to have constantly borne the brunt of Christian detestation and religious persecution. One marginal comment on the Acts of the Apostles (17: 6) in the Geneva Bible referred to the subversive nature of the gypsies and linked them with the Jews. Physiognomating ‘gypsies’ appear in medieval art, particularly in folklore concerning the Holy Family dating from the Middle Ages. There is even one gypsy folk-tale in which a gypsy (physiognomist?) holds up a lantern to Christ’s face in the betrayal scene in the garden.³³ However, if there is one fundamental feature of ‘their’ wandering narrative, it is that they were more or less constantly persecuted all over Europe throughout the entire early modern period. As one early modern author put it: They are a people more scattered than Jews, and more hated. . . . A man that sees them would swear they had all the yellow jaundice, or that they were tawny Moors’ bastards, for no red-ochre-man carries a face of a more filthy complexion. Yet are they not born so, neither has the sun burnt them so, but they are painted so; yet they are not good painters neither, for they do not make faces, but mar faces.³⁴

As with the Jews, by as early as 1492 in Spain, an edict was passed for the ‘extermination’ of the ‘gypsies’. Francis I passed an edict for their expulsion. ³¹ Cited in O. Grell and A. Cunningham (eds.), Religio Medici (Aldershot, 1996), 68. ³² A. M. Shastri, India as Seen in the Brhatsamhita of Varahamihira (Delhi, 1969), 349–51, 362. ³³ Liber vagatorum (Wittenberg [but actually Nuremberg], 1528); Andrew Borde, The first boke of the Introduction of knowledge (1547), chs. 38 and 39; C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (1972), 32; R. Partington, ‘The Gypsy and the Holy Family’, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, 3rd Ser., 35 (Liverpool, 1956), 1–10, 10. ³⁴ A. V. Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld (1930), 344.

140 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 Moreover, ‘at the Assembly of the States of Orleans, in 1561, all Governors of cities received orders to drive them away with fire and sword’. It has been suggested that they arrived in England around 1512—just seven years before the first mention of the ‘fisnomier’. The 1530 English act concerning beggars and vagabonds made no mention of ‘gypsies’. However, their presence in England was perceived to have been disturbing enough by 1530 for the Reformation parliament to have singled them out for special treatment by passing an ‘An Acte concernyng Egypsyans’. This act charged the ‘gypsies’ with the practice of palmistry. It made no mention of physiognomy. But the act against ‘vagabonds’, a group with which the ‘gypsies’ were so often identified, did, condemning all people goyng aboute in any contrey or abydyng in any Cytie Boroughe or Towne, some of them usyng dyvers & subtyle craftye & unlawfull games & playes & some of them feyning themselfes to have knowledge in Physyke, Physnamye, Palmestrye, or other craftye scyence wherby they beare the people in hande, that they can tell theire destenyes deceases & fortunes & such other lyke fantasticall ymagenacions.

And once the persecution began it did not stop. The ‘gypsies’ were ruthlessly pursued by the authorities throughout the entire early modern period. The practice of physiognomy in England was continuously outlawed. The second of the two 1530 acts was repeated in 1572 under 14 Elizabeth, c.5, again in 1597 under 39 Elizabeth, c.4, under Queen Anne in 1713 (13 Anne 2, c.26), and under George II under 17 George 2, c.5. Indeed, it was not until the vagrancy act of 1874 that all reference to physiognomy was dropped. Even then it still referred to palmistry. A similar story could be told for many other countries.³⁵ But all of this still begs the question: what proof is there that the ‘gypsies’ practised ‘physiognomy’, that they were the ‘fisnomiers’ of the early modern period? They were certainly perceived as doing and being so. In a minor late 1530s English poem, Hyeway to the Spittle hous, the porter on the gate of a London hospital allows us some sort of insight into their alleged technique: Than wyll he feyne merueylous grauyte And so chaunceth his hostes or his hoost To demaund, out of what strange land or coost Cometh this gentylman? forsothe hostesse Sayth his seruaunt. and is a connyng man For all the seuen scyences surely he can ³⁵ J. Hoyland, A Historical Survey (York, 1816), 62 and 78; 22nd Hen.VIII, c. 10, The Statutes of the Realm, 9 vols. (1817), iii. 327 and iii. 330. It was repated under Phillip and Mary (IV. i, 242), and Elizabeth (IV. i, 448); Statutes of the Realm, IV.1, 596; V, 899; IX, 976; The Chronological Index to the Statutes of the Realm from Magna Carta to the end of the reign of Queen Anne (1828), 248.


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And is sure in Physyk and Palmestry In augry, sothsayeng, and vysenamy So that he can ryght soone espy If ony be dyspossed to malady And therfore can gyue such a medycyne That maketh all accesses to declyne.³⁶

The poem itself bears such a striking structural resemblance to the 1530 statute that it should be seen more as an aestheticization of that repressive legislation rather than a description based on any observation of ‘gypsies’ in action. None the less, claims about the physiognomating skills of the ‘gypsies’ persisted. In 1586, one person said that among their ranks one could find numerous ‘practisers of physiognomie, and palmestrie, tellers of fortunes’. Nor were these physiognomating ‘gypsies’ an English, or a purely European, phenomenon. In Germany, to take just one of many examples, in 1599 Georg Rudolph Widman published a book about the legendary Dr Faust in which he claimed that Faust had learned his chiromancy from the ‘Zigeunern’. Indeed, the connection between ‘Egyptians’ and palm-reading went back in Germany at least as far as 1418, whilst in France it was known in 1427, long before the arrival of the Corpus hermeticum, and, as the manuscripts and printed ‘books on physiognomy’ show, where one finds palm-reading one usually finds physiognomy. Moreover, in 1671, John Ogilby’s translation of Montanus’s writing on China projected this same image onto ‘the ‘gypsies’ in China: Some (after our manner) pick Pockets by calculating Nativities, and from thence tell the Fortune that shall attend a Man in his whole Life; Other wheedle them out of their Money, by Phisiognomy and Palmestry, and such Gipsie-like tricks; others by Dreams; some from certain words which they observe in speaking; divers from the shape of the Body, or sitting of a Person, and innumerable many actions more.³⁷

Yet all of these textual descriptions could, of course, be read as being either imitations of previous descriptions, or based on traditional, perhaps inaccurate, anti-gypsy rhetoric, rather than any observation of reality. If this is how the surviving textual evidence tends to distort our image of the gypsies, is there any more reliable visual evidence? The iconography of the ‘gypsies’ is a huge and hitherto neglected subject in which one encounters the same problem of evidence as one encounters with ³⁶ Robert Copland, Poems, ed. M. Carpenter Erler (Toronto, 1993), 187–245, 202, ll. 359–71. My emphasis. ³⁷ John Awdeley, The Fraternitye of Vacabondes, ed. E. Viles and F. J. Furnivall, Early English Text Society, extra series, 9 (1869), pp. xii–xiii, 23; Gilsenbach, Zigeuner, 213, 54, 57, 69, 73, 88, 125, 128, 195, 205; John Ogilby, Atlas Chinensis, 2 vols. (1671), ii. 586.

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the textual descriptions—that is, the extent to which one visual representation is simply ‘reflecting’ an earlier representation rather than being any real image of the way the ‘gypsies’ were. None the less, there is one motif which seems to dominate the following random sample of visual representations of the ‘gypsies’ from early modern Europe—the outstretched palm of the clients in the act of having their palm read. In 1664, the French engraver and pupil of Charles Le Brun, Sébastian Le Clerc, provided a typical example of the way in which the ‘gypsies’ were identified with palm-reading (Illustration 9). Moreover, in keeping with the anti-gypsy rhetoric in the textual descriptions, other likenesses not only show them doing some sort of palm-reading;

9. In this representation, the gypsy appears lost in the contemplation of her client’s hand. Sébastian Le Clerc (1637–1714), La Bohémienne, 1664. Engraving. (Cliché Bibliothèque Nationale de France.)


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they also show them pick-pocketing the client at the same time. Earlier that same century, another French engraver, Jacques Callot, who is said to have left France for Florence in Italy with a band of ‘bohemians’, made a famous series of engravings in 1621 which provide a typical example of this. In the group of people just to the right of the archway of the house in Illustration 10, one of them is having his palm read and his pocket picked at one and the same time. The verse itself satirically refers to that danger when it talks of the client being seduced by the gypsies’ words, whilst the verse on the following plate continues in the same vein, making a reference to their Egyptian origins: ‘When all is said and done, they find that their fate is to have come from Egypt to this feast’. Yet despite all of this iconical emphasis on palm-reading, there is another hitherto overlooked motif frequently depicted in representations of the ‘gypsies’—the act of physiognomating. The painting by Caravaggio (1571–1610) entitled, according to some catalogues, The Gypsy Fortune-Teller (1598–9) shows a young man extending his hand to a ‘gypsy’ woman (Illustration 11). However, in this image she is not reading his hand, she is touching it. It is his face that she reads, or rather ‘beholds’. (The lighting scheme used by Caravaggio, by which the source, a window on the left, casts the gypsy’s face in shadow and illuminates the young man’s face, itself suggests this.) The same facereading feature can just about be seen in the Callot engraving. Moreover, this

10. To the right of the archway, a man is having his palm read and his pocket picked at the same time. Jacques Callot (1592–1635), ‘At a Resting Place’, No. 3 from the series of four entitled The Feast of the Bohemians, after 1621. Etching and engraving. (Photo: Nancy, Musée des Beaux-arts, Cliché Claude Philippot.)


11. The light scheme emphasizes that it is the young man’s face which the gypsy beholds. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573–1610), The Gypsy Fortune-Teller, 1596–7. Oil on canvas, 99 cm ¥ 131 cm. Pinoteca Capitolina, Rome. (Photo: Studio Fotografico Antonio Idini.)

face-reading can be found in many other visual representations of ‘gypsies’. Moving north, the three paintings by the seventeenth-century Dutch painter David Teniers, shown in Illustrations 12, 13, and 14, provide good examples. Although most widely known for his ‘realistic’ images of the culture of inns and peasant life, he also often portrayed ‘gypsies’. He painted them in a variety of very different landscapes, from secluded grottoes to open lanes. Whilst the outstretched hand might seem to dominate the scene in all of these representations due to the unusual symbolic nature of the ritual, in each of these plates the ‘gypsy’ is actually examining—I would argue physiognomating—the face of the client.³⁸ Moreover, this act of physiognomating is a feature of representations of ‘gypsies’ that can be found in numerous media throughout the period, be it engravings like the early sixteenth-century one by Hans Burgkmair, shown in Illustration 15 or in the tapestry from the late fif³⁸ This contradicts the claim that it was usually the women who were the chiromancers, A. Fraser, The Gypsies (Oxford, 1992), p. vii, 47. The palm-reading technique of Gypsy Lee of St Giles’s Fair in Oxford (September, 1993) appeared to the present writer to involve just as much face-reading as hand-reading.


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12. David Teniers (Antwerp, 1610–90), A Gypsy Fortune-Teller and Other Figures in a Craggy Landscape. Oil on canvas, 108 ¥ 135 cm. (Photo: Collection Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentarie (RKD), The Hague. Copyright: The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.)

teenth century shown in Illustration 16. Just what the ‘gypsies’ looked like, and whether or not they looked the same throughout the entire period, would be a rich area of study in the history of costume. More immediately, I would argue that these changing representations of the ‘gypsies’, in addition to showing how the ‘gypsies’ were practising fisnomiers, also provide a visual counterpart to a theme that will be explored in more detail when we return to the early modern ‘books on physiognomy’ in the next section—the simultaneous persecution and appropriation of the gypsy métier by the literate establishment. One might see an intimation of this appropriation in the very act of commissioning a painting of the wild ‘gypsies’ from a painter like Teniers in order to hang it on the wall of a comfortable, established sitting room. Another step in that same process of appropriation, what might be called the domestication of the ‘gypsies’, can be seen in a painting by Jacob Duck, shown


13. David Teniers (Antwerp 1610–90), The Interior of a Grotto with Gypsies. Oil on canvas, 108 ¥ 135 cm. (Photo: Collection Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentarie (RKD), The Hague. Copyright: Trafalgar Galleries, London.)

14. David Teniers (Antwerp 1610–90), Landscape with Gypsies telling Fortunes. Oil on panel, 36 ¥ 63 cm. Private Collection, Switzerland (Photo: Zurich: David H. Koetser Gallery, Zurich.)


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15. Hans Burgkmair the Elder, Gipsy Woman Telling Fortunes to a Market Woman. Pen and black ink 21.5 ¥ 31.8 cm. National Museum of Stockholm, inv.nr. NM H 132/1918. [Lower Rhine, Netherlands, c.1530s]. (Photo: Warburg Institute.)

16. The face-reading gypsy can be seen at the top right of the image. ‘La vente des enfants’, early 16th-century tapestry from the ‘Series of Carrabarra’, woven in Tournai by Arnould Poissonier, designed by Antoine Ferret, Castle of Gaasbek, Belgium. (Photo: Private Collection.)

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17. Jacob Duck [Dutch, c.1600–67], Interior with Gypsies. Private collection, The Netherlands. (Photo: Collection Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentarie (RKD), The Hague.)

in Illustration 17. In this painting Duck has portrayed the ‘gypsies’ using all the usual motifs, the palm-reading, the pick-pocketing, and, as I would argue, the face-reading. Some readers would no doubt claim that this is not an act of ‘facereading’ but more likely evidence of how the gypsies tried to catch the attention of their ‘victims’ before pick-pocketing them. Whilst that may have happened at times, to dismiss this evidence in this way would be to reiterate the prejudice so often depicted. Furthermore and notwithstanding, this image also suggests that, by the 1660s, the curious physiognomical skills of the ‘gypsies’, for all they had been persecuted since their arrival in the fifteenth century, had, temporarily at least, been allowed in from the secret grottoes of the wilderness to the outer chambers of aristocratic and prosperous households. The same thing happened to the medicine of Paracelsus around the very same time. If this is a step towards the appropriation and domestication of the ‘gypsy’ métier it provides an interesting tension in the interpretation of the following paintings by the seventeenth-century Flemish painter Jan Cossiers (1600–1671) and the eighteenth-century German painter Christian Wilhelm Dietrich (Illustrations 18 & 19). The much more high-brow appearance or ‘physiognomy’ of the gypsy in Cossiers’s portrayal appears to take Duck’s portrayal of their shoddy presence in


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18. J. Cossiers [Dutch, 1600–71], Gypsywoman Fortune-Telling, Another Woman Pickpocketing. (Photo: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen.)

19. Christian Wilhelm Dietrich [German, 1717–74], Wirtsstube mit Zigeunern. (Photo: Neumeister Muenchener Kunstauktionhaus.)

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aristocratic interiors a step further by suggesting, as I will argue with respect to some of the books discussed in the next section, that the physiognomical métier of the gypsy was simultaneously attacked and appropriated by the mainstream, more textually literate, and socially acceptable fisnomiers of the early modern period. In the light of this argument, Dietrich’s mid eighteenthcentury portrayal of seemingly less-established ‘gypsy’ fisnomiers takes on a new significance. Be that as it may, the most fundamental point being made here is that the ‘gypsies’ were fisnomiers. Whilst posterity has associated them with palm-reading (in itself a physiognomy of the hand), that palm-reading was part of a larger physiognomical, story-telling, religious, and medical métier. It is this that explains why, in his play Le Marriage forcé, when Molière has Sganarelle go to see the ‘Égyptiennes’ to ask if he will have a good fortune, he receives the following reply: ‘You have only to give us your hand . . . and we will tell you things for your profit’. He is then told: ‘you have a good physiognomy, my good Sir, a good physiognomy . . . Yes, a good physiognomy: the physiognomy of a man who will one day be something.’³⁹ They were not simply looking at his hand. Having said that, all of the above argument still carries the danger of overstating the assumption that these gypsy physiognomators were illiterate. The large number of hitherto unexamined early modern Sanskrit manuscripts on physiognomy provide one indication of the role of textual physiognomy in the Hindu tradition. Moreover, the engraving in Illustration 20, in which the young boy bears all the physiognomical features of a vagabond/gypsy, articulates just this possibility for those ‘gypsies’ who came to the West. However, with no extant records of the details of the physiognomical examinations carried out by the gypsies, one cannot dismiss the possibility that it was a physiognomy that was very different from that captured in the ‘books on physiognomy’ that are the basis of this study. Similarly, for all the serious problems in ascribing some sort of homogeneous, illiterate, ‘gypsy’ identity to these wandering ‘fisnomiers’, the point is that they were a very real social phenomenon in terms of which the transmission of the ‘Egyptian’, of ‘books on physiognomy’ as well as the textual literacy required to read them during the religious and social troubles of the so-called ‘age of print’ have to be understood.⁴⁰ ³⁹ De Foletier, Tsiganes, 144–5. ⁴⁰ For contemporary wandering medical men in India (Baidya or Vaidu) who face read, see T. S. Randhawa, The Last Wanderers (New Jersey, 1996), 183.


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20. Could this gypsy boy read what he was selling? Gypsy Boy Selling Manuscripts and Print [?], from S. Taubert, Bibliopola. Bilder und Texte aus der Welt des Buchhandels, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1966), ii. 41. (Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, FA hist 03 D t.01–02. Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.)

The coming of the hermetic It was argued earlier that the early modern art of physiognomy was beyond the quill of any individual author. Similarly the history of early modern printed and manuscript treatises on the art of physiognomy is beyond the pen of any single historian. That can only come once scholars have become aware of the subject and the potential richness of these texts and their contexts. The evidence surrounding the production and publication of most ‘treatises on

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physiognomy’ is often as scant as the evidence about ‘gypsies’. This makes much of their individual contexts, and thus their histories, irretrievable. Thus, rather than try to contextualize all of the ‘books on physiognomy’, I want simply to point to one or two of those works which can be taken as representative of some of the more significant turning-points in the ongoing metamorphosis of physiognomy in the early modern period. I want to do this by addressing the other side of the historiographical debate which has arisen around the issue of the continued importance and vitality of the Aristotelian natural philosophy throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and which represents another aspect of the emergence of the ‘Egyptian’ in early modern Europe. What was the impact of Ficino’s Neoplatonic hermeticism on early modern ‘books on physiognomy’? Immediately it could be argued that the impact of Neoplatonic hermeticism can only be fully understood in terms of some sort of prepared ground, for example, a fashion for the investigations of the ‘occult’, if not necessarily the ‘hermetic’, among the literate élite. This can be seen in some early editions of the Secretum in as far as their appearance was an early intimation of a growing interest among such reformist circles in the first half of the sixteenth century in the works of the medieval philosopher of the ‘occult’, Roger Bacon.⁴¹ An even earlier text, first produced in the late fifteenth century, that had absorbed the art of physiognomy into its pages, is suggestive of the route by which that art gradually became enmeshed in the work of religious, philosophical, and hermetic synthesis begun by Marsilio Ficino. That text was a French vernacular tract entitled the Compost et Kalendrier des Bergiers. One of the few ‘new’ publications buried among the medieval texts that dominated the first century of printed physiognomy, very little is known about it or its author. It was published anonymously in Paris by a ‘priest-artist’ named Giout Marchant on 2 May 1491, twenty years after the first printed edition of Ficino’s Latin translation of the hermetic Pimander. It was, in essence, a pre-Reformation handbook of devotion. Having a section on physiognomy taken from the Secretum secretorum made it a handbook of devotion which synthesized Roman Catholic liturgy with an Islamic or perhaps even a Jewish mysticism—for the Secretum secretorum also formed part of the Zohar. In that sense it bears traces of Ficino’s and Mirandola’s syncretic sense of religious traditions. The appearance of the Kalendar/Compost in print just one year before the fall of Muslim Granada is itself suggestive of the extent to which elements of either Islamic or Jewish mys⁴¹ C. Webster, ‘Alchemical and Paracelsian Medicine’, in C. Webster (ed.), Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1979), 301–34.


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ticism had permeated relatively popular Christian thought and practice, and hence helps to explain the severity of the official Christian backlash which began in 1492 with the expulsion of the Muslims, Jews, and, as we saw earlier, the ‘gypsies’ from Spain. What little context it can be given suggests that, like most things in print, it was cultivated originally in relatively élite circles. For example, the first ‘English’ translation was the work of Alexander Barclay (1475[?]–1552), a Scottish divine who became a Benedictine monk. Little is known about Barclay other than that among his textually literate friends and patrons were Cardinal Morton [d. 1500], Thomas, duke of Norfolk, Richard, earl of Kent (d. 1523), and Sir Giles Alington. In the late fifteenth century, printed books, like the Kalendar of Shepherds, were distinguished by the cultural status of the newness of print per se and of the textual literacy that was required to read them. Thus, what is all the more significant about the Kalendar of Shepherds is that it was a form of literacy which was given its life in printed form in such socially élite, literate, bookish circles in France and England, yet sold itself throughout Renaissance northern Europe as the mystical wisdom of an illiterate star-gazing shepherd: As here before time there was a Shepherd keeping Sheep in the fields, which was no clerk neither had no understanding of the literal sense, nor of no manner of scripture nor writing, but of his natural wit and understanding.⁴²

That very claim made an implicit gesture towards some sort of oral tradition and in part no doubt helps to explain the ridicule it received from the wellschooled bishops of the day.⁴³ Moreover this gesture towards its oral origins was, alongside the physiognomy the text contained, another thing it had in common with the traditions of the Kabbalah and the Zohar in Jewish mysticism that Pico della Mirandola was trying to syncretize with his Neoplatonic hermetic Christianity. A more explicit sense of the ‘Egyptian’ or the hermetic in its intellectual framework will be made clearer in Chapter 5. Here we should note that the connection with hermeticism is perhaps most immediately evident in the fact that the shepherd was a key figure in the wisdom of Hermes Trismegistus. One possible further contextual explanation of the traces of hermetic influence in this text is suggested by the fact that Pico della Mirandola was in Paris at this time, hiding from the wrath of the papacy, who, in the 1490s, had attacked the hermetic synthesis in religion that he, along with Ficino, was trying to achieve by bringing together different religious and mystical traditions. ⁴² The Kalendar & Compost of Shepherds [1508], ed. G. C. Heseltine (1932), 1. ⁴³ For Bishop John Jewel’s derision, A replie vnto m. Hardinges answeare (1565), 552.

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Indeed, it is in the light of the catholic church’s persecution and purging of the Islamic and Judaic mystical influences deep in the heart of its own church that the work of the Italian cleric Bonifacio Simonetta (b. 1430?), abbot of the Cistercian monastery of San Stefano al Como (in Lodi), might be considered. Around the same time the church was attacking Muslims and Jews, Simonetta was reflecting upon the persecution of Christians by the Romans. Among his writings which date from this time is a hitherto unexamined text entitled Astronomica, chiromantica et physiognomica (Milan, 1492). This was surely no coincidence. The date of this work alone suggests some sort of connection in Simonetta’s mind between physiognomy and the intensification of both the dissemination (via the Corpus hermeticum) and persecution of things ‘Egyptian’. Moreover, Simonetta’s printed formulation of the divinatory physiognomical technique was one that had by that time, as we have just seen, come to be associated with that other Egyptian phenomenon discussed above, the ‘gypsies’. Indeed, at this point we return to the argument about the appropriation of the ‘gypsy’ métier. Simonetta’s work is a very early precursor of numerous attempts throughout the early modern period by early modern ‘individual’ contributors to the tradition of physiognomy in books to textualize, and thus appropriate, the illiterate physiognomical métier of the ‘Egyptians’ or ‘fisnomiers’. Traces of this appropriation of things ‘Egyptian’ by the Christian West’s literary élite can be seen in the next major contribution to this corpus of early modern books on physiognomy. Its author, Bartholomaeus Cocles, or Della Rocca (1467–1504), provides a striking Renaissance example of an intellectual collaboration between high and low, and possibly between literate and illiterate physiognomy, or even between the educated establishment and the marginalized ‘gypsies’. The dedication of the work describes him as ‘an illiterate man who proved to be a fruitful wood’.⁴⁴ According to Cardano, Cocles was an illiterate (literarum ignarus) vagrant (mendicus) barber (tonsor).⁴⁵ Whether or not we should consider the fact that Cardano’s use of the term ‘mendicus’ beside ‘tonsor’ may have implied some sort of relation to the ‘mendici’ who, as Cicero informs us, were the priests of Cybele (literally ‘she of the hair’), the Phrygian Mother of all Gods who was associated with ecstatic musical rituals; and notwithstanding Cocles’s geographical origins, it appears that it was whilst walking the streets of Bologna that he found protection and patron⁴⁴ Bartholomaeus Cocles, Chyromantie ac physionomie anastatis (Bologna, 1504), sig. aai. ⁴⁵ L. Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New York, 1923–58), v. 51; Girolamo Cardano, Opera omnia, 5 vols. (Lyons, 1663), v. 468; Paolo Giovo says Cocles was born in Bologna, Elogia virorum literis illustrium (Basle, 1577), 106.


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age under the wings of Alessandro Achillini (1463[?]–1512), the aforementioned avowed Averroist professor of natural philosophy and medical theory in the Universities of Bologna and Padua (the latter chair he shared with Pietro Pomponazzi (1462–1525) ). The apparent result of this astonishing encounter between high, literate professor and low, illiterate vagabond was that Cocles learned how to read and write and penned a commentary on the physiognomy from the Secretum secretorum. His patron, Achillini, provided the approving and supportive methodological introduction, claiming that Cocles had even made ‘experiments’. Although it has not yet been the subject of any in-depth study, this text urgently needs to be examined in terms of this context of the penetration of more hermetic influences so commonly identified with Mirandola and Ficino into the heart of Western academic natural philosophy, particularly in comparison with Nifo’s work on the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica. If the Kalendar of Shepherds is evidence of the creeping influence of a Neoplatonic hermetic art of physiognomy at the heart of early sixteenth-century popular meditation and devotional practice, Cocles and Nifo are timely reminders that these occult influences were also to be found in the development of the natural philosophies and medical theories at Padua that were slowly giving birth to the modern scientific mentality, and—with, for example, Pompanazzi’s view on the immortality of the soul—modern conceptions of the self. As such, they seem to bring both the Aristotelian and the Neoplatonic together and confirm what Charles Schmitt called the ‘invasion of hermetic material into Aristotelian contexts’, and what Kessler described as a ‘continuous dialogue’ between early modern Aristotelian and Neoplatonic natural philosophy.⁴⁶ Beyond the natural philosophical conflicts, these ‘physiognomies’ were also deeply embedded in the political and cultural milieu of high Renaissance Italy and have to be examined as such. In this particular case, for example, Achillini was a fervent supporter of Giovanni Bentivoglio (1443–1508), the famous patron of the arts and head of the family that ran Bologna until they were forced out by Pope Julius II’s henchmen in 1508.⁴⁷ The ‘book on physiognomy’ that was the result of this ‘gypsy’/professor collaboration was dedicated to Alessandro Bentivoglio’s ‘immortality’. One sign that this mixture may have proved too controversial was the murder of Cocles on 24 September 1504, days after the joint publication of his ‘book on physiognomy’. The explanation of his murder which has been handed to down to posterity was that he had ⁴⁶ C. B. Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 97–101; E. Kessler, ‘The intellective soul’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. C. B. Schmitt, Q. Skinner, G. Kesser, and J. Ranye (Cambridge, 1988). ⁴⁷ C. M. Ady, The Bentivoglio of Bologna (Oxford, 1937).

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predicted misfortune for the head of the famous Bentivoglio family by reading his face and palms. As always with politics, there was probably much more to it than meets the eye, but it none the less shows how there was something very real and important at stake in all of this philosophical inquiry. One aspect of this which demands a more thorough investigation but which I would like to draw some passing attention to here are the implications that a more hermetic variety of physiognomy had for the production and consumption of art. In fact, this very connection between the natural magic of physiognomy and the physiognomy of art was being sounded in nearby Florence by a young 18-year-old humanist poet and former Paduan student named Pompeo Gaurico. Gaurico was noteworthy enough at the time to have won a place in Paolo Giovio’s famous Elogia. On Christmas day 1504, just three months after the murder of Cocles, Gaurico published his translation of the physiognomy he found in a Greek manuscript of the Adamantius treatise. But it was not simply a translation that he published. He incorporated or ‘appropriated’ that physiognomy into a work on the art of sculpture. Gaurico was not the first person to connect the natural magic of physiognomy with art. Many medieval manuscripts contained a version of the legend of the encounter between the famous face-reader Zopyrus and Socrates, in which it is told as an encounter between Zopyrus (or ‘Philemo’) and a painted image of Hippocrates. As such, this legend is perhaps the first clear intimation that the art of physiognomy was involved, in one way or another, with the making and viewing of images. However, Gaurico was the first to incorporate an entire exposition of physiognomical doctrine into a printed tract on art, and this, significantly enough, from the pen of a Neoplatonic poet.⁴⁸ Another aspect of this ‘Egyptian’ influence was expressed in the earliest ‘new’ ‘book on physiognomy’ by an ‘individual’ author that appeared in the north, the one written by the aforementioned German reformist priest named Johannes de Indagine (1467–1537). Little is known of Indagine other than that he accompanied Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz during his visit to Rome in 1514, and was the astrologer consulted for the dating of the election of the emperor in 1519 in which he predicted a success for Charles V.⁴⁹ The obvious context in which to locate Indagine (and his change of name from Rosenbach to the more hieroglyphic pseudonym Indagine) is the spread of the influence of Ficino’s and Paracelsus’s ideas, to which Indagine alludes in his Preface. ⁴⁸ See Ch. 4 for a discussion of Gaurico’s hermetic physiognomical understanding of sculpture, and its relationship to art, memory, and history. ⁴⁹ F. Herrmann, ‘Der Astrolog Johannes Indagine, Pfarrer zu Steinheim a. M., und die Frankfurter Kaiserwahl des Jahres 1519’, Archiv für hessiche Geschichte und Alterthumskunde, 18 (Darmstadt,1934), 274–91.


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Indagine’s physiognomical treatise, first published in a Latin folio in Strasburg on 7 May 1522, went on to enjoy an enormous European-wide success. By 1523 it had been translated into vernacular German,⁵⁰ by 1536 into Dutch,⁵¹ by 1545 into French (which saw at least twenty-three different editions between 1545 and 1666 alone), and by 1558 into English, the latest extant printed copy so far brought to light being dated 1697. It was a milestone in the textual development of this mystical physiognomical language, if only because it was the first time that a printed ‘book on physiognomy’ had been illustrated with woodcuts of particular physiognomies. More to the point here is that it appears to have been a deliberate appropriation of the ‘Egyptian’ combination of physiognomy, astrology, and palmistry. Indagine’s physiognomical aim was traditional: to know ‘the inward motion and affections of the minde and heart, with the inwarde state of the whole bodie: as also our inclination and aptnes to all our external actions and doings’. However, the method appears to have been ‘Egyptian’: I loke upon the hand, and therwithall beholde the whole bodye, with the lyneamentes, and proporcion of the same, whiche is called his Phisiognomie . . . then I caste my minde to the hour of Nativitie, moneth, daye, or yere: the whiche knowen, I referre strait to the rules of naturall Astrologye . . . then plainely iudging none of these by themselues sufficiente.⁵²

It was more or less the reverse of the method described in the equally popular Arcandam in which the physiognomator began with a calculation of the nativity based on the relation of the person’s name to a preordained set of numbers. If this work by Indagine provides yet another reason why the absorption of Neoplatonic hermeticism into sixteenth-century European culture can only fully be understood in terms of its social and cultural context, one finds a similar sense of this sort of appropriation a century later, only by that time the appropriation included an explicit antagonism towards the rival physiognomy practised by the gypsy. In the text which Samuel Jeake was reading in April 1670, its author, Richard Saunders, distinguished himself as face- and handreader by presenting himself as a serious ‘student of physick’ whilst castigating the chiromantical practices of ‘those miserable Vagabonds, which we call Gypsies’.⁵³ Indeed it was this same concern to distinguish this literate type of physiognomy in books from the type ‘peddled’ by the ‘gypsies’ which also ⁵⁰ Die Kunst der Chiromantzey (Strasburg, 1523). ⁵¹ Chyromantia . . . (Utrecht, 1536). ⁵² Joannes ab Indagine, Briefe introductions, both naturall, pleasant, and delectable unto the art of chiromancy, or manuel divination, and physiognomy (1575), sigs. *ii(v) and Aiiii(v). ⁵³ Richard Saunders, Physiognomie, Chiromancie, Metoposcopie (1653), sig. a2.

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shows itself in those ‘books on physiognomy’ from the corpus of works that are the focus of this study, that could be said to have contributed most to the reconfiguration of physiognomy and to the continued interest in the subject throughout the Enlightenment. In particular, one such ‘book on physiognomy’ was entitled in its English translation The Art How to Know Men (1664), by the French natural philosopher Marin Cureau de La Chambre (1594–1675). La Chambre achieved a brilliant reputation in his time. In 1634 he was chosen by Cardinal Richelieu for the Académie Française, and may even have been consulted by Mazarin and Louis XIV.⁵⁴ In 1666 he became one of the first members of the Académie des Sciences.⁵⁵ First published in Paris in 1659, after he had already published on the subject of chiromancy, his book was translated into English for the earl of Carlisle in 1664 by John Davies (1625–93), a Presbyterian dissatisfied with the growing success of Cartesian philosophy. By 1668 it was available in German, with a second edition in 1672 and an edition as late as 1794.⁵⁶ Moreover, it was conceived as part of an entire corpus of work by which La Chambre contributed to the gradual redefinition of the self that was being fought out among Europe’s natural philosophers, in the wake of the ‘scientific revolution’, the rise of Cartesianism, and the accompanying spread of mechanical philosophy. Yet that contribution has to be understood in terms of an increasing tension between the rationality of those new mechanistic and increasingly materialistic philosophical paradigms and the older ‘hermetic’ ones. The attack on the ‘gypsies’ and their physiognomy was carried out iconically through the frontispiece to all the various translations of La Chambre’s The Art How to Know Men. (Illustration 21.) In this image the mathematically precise scientist is portrayed at work in the safety and rationality of his private laboratory in stark contrast to palm-reading (and thieving) ‘gypsies’ portrayed in the act of bamboozling the gentilhomme bourgeois in the more hazardous realm of the public highway.⁵⁷ This process of simultaneous persecution and appropriation is a reminder that it would be a distortion to see this hermetic physiognomy as being perpetuated outside and against the established church. One particularly telling example of the importance of physiognomy in Renaissance astrological theory and the questions of self-determination being asked in the highest niches of European catholicism was the Italian astrologer Luca Gaurico. Brother of the ⁵⁴ Abée A. Fabre, Chapelain et nos deux premières academies (Paris, 1890), 32; B. Haureau, Histoire littéraire du Maine, 4 vols. (Paris, 1870–7), iii. 298. ⁵⁵ Nouvelle biographie générale (Paris, 1858). ⁵⁶ The earliest extant Italian copy so far discovered is dated 1700. ⁵⁷ This attack on the gypsies might be seen as an attempt to distance himself from Jean Belot, the expert in the Kabbalah and counsellor to Louis XIII, who was also a member of the Académie Française.


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21. The rationalization of an irrational metier. Marin Cureau de La Chambre, The Art How to Know Men (1665), frontispiece. (Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Rés 801896. Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.)

aforementioned Pompeo, Luca Gaurico was one of the most prominent, theoretically sophisticated, and sought-after astrologers in Renaissance Europe. Moreover, as personal astrologer to Pope Paul III (Alessandro Farnese), he was lodged at, and broadcast from, the heart of the established church. In 1551, a collection of tracts on physiognomy and chiromancy edited by him was published entitled Aristotelis physiognomia adamantio interprete (Bologna, 1551), including the writings of his brother Pompeo, as well as two others entitled Alia hominis physiognomia, and Chyromantiae axiomata. Its publication is

160 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 evidence in itself that church attitudes towards the occult in general, and physiognomy in particular, very much depended upon who was pope at the time. None the less, it could be argued that the spread of the hermetic influence, albeit in a more distilled version, owed more to popular writers than to the more established, heavyweight magi such as Ficino and John Dee, and that these writers deserve just as much historical attention as the likes of Achillini and Gratarolus. Indeed, many of the popularizers were outside the university system, but they were never far from more powerful and prominent practitioners of the occult and the hermetic philosophy. This seems to have been particularly the case in France, Italy, and England. Take, for example, the author of one ‘treatise on physiognomy’ published in mid-sixteenth-century France, Antoine du Moulin (1510?–51). He was a member of a circle of Platonic humanists and poets in Lyon dating from about 1540 to 1560, centred on Maurice Scève, including the female poet Louise Labé, and Guillaume Aubert (1534?–1600?), publisher of the poetry of du Bellay. Du Moulin not only edited the legendary French poet Clement Marot (1496–1544), and Aesop’s Fables; the humanist in him vernacularized Epictetus from the Greek. More to the point, his contribution to the spread of ‘occult’ and hermetic thinking in early modern Europe lay in the popular French translations he made of works on such occult subjects as dreams, divination, astrology, chiromancy, and medicine, as well as the art of physiognomy. His closest English equivalent was a London writer named Thomas Hill (c.1528–c.1576). Though not university-educated, Hill was a prolific translator and popularizer of everything from almanacs to cosmetics and gardening texts, which sold in large numbers and continued to be popular well into the seventeenth century. His A brief epitomye of the whole art of physiognomie, published in 1556, can be credited with being the first ever printed treatise in English devoted solely to physiognomy, and an enlarged edition appeared fifteen years later in 1571 and again in 1613. The less immediately poetic circle of Hill’s patrons and friends included Henry Dethick (d. c.1613), chancellor of the diocese of Carlisle;⁵⁸ George Keable, a noted practitioner of physic and surgery;⁵⁹ Henry Finch, a London merchant; and Sir Henry Seamer, either the son of Sir Thomas Seamer, prominent member of the Mercers’ Company and lord mayor of London in 1526, or Henry Seymour (d. 1578), younger brother of Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset (1506?–52). Hill also appears to have had a connection to Sir William Cecil.⁶⁰ If du Moulin was involved in spreading ⁵⁸ Dethick’s opulent family was of Dutch descent. See Dictionary of National Biography. ⁵⁹ F. R. Johnson, ‘Thomas Hill: An Elizabethan Huxley’, The Huntington Library Quarterly, 4(1944), 329–57, 337, fns. 22 and 23. ⁶⁰ Thomas Hill, The gardener’s labyrinth (1577).


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Ficino’s hermetic influence through French literary culture, Hill, despite his less occult philosophical stance, was doing the same in England. Moreover, in this, Hill was initially encouraged by the English equivalent of Marsilio Ficino, the Elizabethan magus John Dee. In the 1571 edition, dedicated to the duke of Norfolk, Hill makes explicit and distinctly defensive reference to Dee: Mayster Dee, by whose helpe and ayde at the beginning, I receyued such monuments and principles, as gaue me great light unto this knowledge . . . for that he wisheth well unto his Countrie men, and hath taken great paynes to do his Countrie good.⁶¹

In fact, this spreading of the hermetic at the popular level appears to have been something of an international concerted effort. The connection between du Moulin and Hill, for example, is evident in the commendatory verse which du Moulin wrote for Hill’s 1571 version of his ‘physiognomy’. Natural philosophers, such as Luca Gaurico and Guilelmus Gratarolus, were perpetuating and disseminating a more philosophically intense sense of hermetic physiognomy from some of the most prestigious and influential nodes of communication in early modern society. At the same time translators such as du Moulin and Hill (such identifiable popularizers seem to have been less of a phenomenon in sixteenth-century Germany) were in part responsible for embroiling the art of physiognomy in the more popular assimilation of late Renaissance hermeticism and occultism and the wider assimilation of Paracelsianism between 1560 and 1600. Furthermore, as Charles Webster has pointed out, this was all ‘nurtured within the context of the more generalised alchemical movement’, in which John Dee played ‘an active part’.⁶² All of this can be seen to have culminated in the most famous physiognomist of the later sixteenth century, the Neapolitan natural philosopher and playwright Giovanni Battista Della Porta. Della Porta’s variety of writings on human, animal, plant, and celestial physiognomy were translated into numerous vernaculars and many editions. He also worked through the academies that were being set up across Europe as alternatives to the established university tradition. Indeed, with regard to physiognomy, this same pattern continued in the seventeenth century. Some authors, such as Camillo Baldi, pontificated openly about physiognomy from the seats of the most prestigious chairs of natural philosophy in early modern Europe’s universities. However, Baldi does not appear to have been typical. A great deal many more talked about it in secret midnight discussions around the tables in some of the academies that continued to spring up around Europe as part of a critique of the established syllabi. ⁶¹ Thomas Hill, A contemplation of mankinde (1571), Preface, sig. qq v–qq vv. ⁶² Webster, ‘Alchemical’, Health, 323.

162 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 One English example of the development of an occult and hermetic art of physiognomy outside the university was Robert Fludd (1574–1637). Fludd’s writing on physiognomy is to be found in his Utriusque cosmi . . . historia which he probably began at St John’s College in Oxford in the 1590s. By that stage he was referring to his attempt to construct a science based on hermetic revelation, and the correspondence between the macrocosm and the microcosm, as ‘Theosophy’.⁶³ It was a conscious attempt to develop some of the ideas put forward by John Dee, himself greatly influenced by Ficino, in his Mathematical Praeface (1570). In that famous work, John Dee attempted to create the art of all arts, the interdisciplinary study of all that is in man. The term he suggested for it was ‘Anthropographie’. It was a concept of art to which the art of physiognomy had its contribution to make. You must of sundry professions, borow or challenge home, peculier partes hereof: and farder procede: as God, Nature, Reason and Experience shall informe you. The Anatomistes will restore to you, some part: The Physiognomistes, some: The Chyromantistes some. The Metaposcopistes, some: The excellent, Albert Durer, a good part: the Arte of Perspectiue, will somwhat, for the Eye, helpe forward.⁶⁴

As will be examined in more detail in Chapter 5, it is in Fludd’s text, more than any other, that one detects the deepest and most sophisticated hue of Neoplatonic hermeticism. In developing this notion, Fludd placed physiognomy among what he called the ‘techniques of the microcosm’: a combination of a number of arts of the ‘occult’ which Fludd labelled Anthroposophia and thought to be all the knowledge man can have of himself and the universe.⁶⁵ Yet there were many lesser known seventeenth-century Italian and French authors who provide just as important an insight into the spread of a more hermetic sense of physiognomy. Among the Italian writers are figures such as Livio Agrippa, Antonio Pellegrini, Francesco Sansovino, and Ciro Spontoni, about whom little else is yet known other than their relatively popular publications. As obscure as they are, some of them had connections to more established nodes of communication in early modern society. Giovanni Ingegneri, author of Fisionomia naturale, was also the bishop of Capo d’Istria, and Domenico de Rubeis dedicated his Tabulae physiognomicae (1631) to Cardinal Richelieu. A particularly rich example is the early seventeenth-century Italian physiognomator Cornelio Ghirardelli (d. 1637), whose Cefalogia fisonomia was dedicated to Lorenzo Campeggi, the Bolognese governor of Ancona, and was replete with ⁶³ F. A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972), 96, 98, 148. ⁶⁴ F. A. Yates, Theatre of the World (1969), 190. ⁶⁵ S. Hutin, Robert Fludd (1574–1637) (Paris, 1972), 83–4.


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references to the contemporary writers who were a part of Ghirardelli’s circle. Ghirardelli’s interest in astronomy/astrology led him to the Accademia dei Vespertini in Bologna, which used to gather at nightfall in the house of Ovidio Montalbani, the professor of Astronomy and Mathematics at the University of Bologna. Indeed, Ghirardelli originally wrote his physiognomical treatise for distribution within the Vespertini. It was his connection with Girolamo Onofrio, professor at the University of Bologna from 1613 to 1639 and consultor to the Inquisition, which led to its publication at a time when the church was particularly suspicious about the arts of divination. On 12 April 1630, under the aegis of Pope Urbano VIII, Ghirardelli, himself a member of the order of Franciscan minors, was named pater provinciae Venetae. As the legate of Bologna, Ghirardelli had participated in the election of Cardinal Alessandro Ludovisi as Pope Gregory XV on 9 February 1621 in succession to Pope Paul V. The existence of a physiognomical eye among these electors prompts many questions, not only about the intellectual nature of their understanding of physiognomy but also about the uses to which Ghirardelli and his friends put their physiognomical skill. This spread of the influence of a hermetic physiognomy can also be seen in the rise of an interest in Paracelsian medicine and Paracelsianism more generally throughout Europe around this time, particularly in the Low Countries and Germany. One ‘treatise on physiognomy’ firmly embedded in all of this was written by Johannes-Frederic Helvetius, the physician to Prince William of Orange. Entitled Amphitheatrum physiognomiae medicum (Heidelberg, 1660), and dedicated to his prince, it was a detailed presentation of the astrological physiognomies that made up the human race. It mapped out their physical appearance, the state of their characters when their internal soul was in harmony with the natural virtues of their corporeal constitution, and the herbs and medicines particularly suited to each. This can be seen in turn as part of a wider movement of writers attempting to save the increasingly beset theories of astrology and what might today be referred to as ‘alternative medicine’. Another physiognomist who was attempting to save a medicalized version of astrological physiognomy was Philipp May: Medicinal physiognomy is a science that teaches (with the help of Chiromancy), the way in which one can conserve one’s health, to know, avoid or at least diminish present and future illnesses, and by which one can know whether a person will suffer a natural or a violent death.⁶⁶

⁶⁶ Philippe May, La chiromance medicinale (La Haye, 1665), 119.

164 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 Indeed, with clear intellectual distinctions yet to be established between the philosophy of the occult, natural philosophy, religion, and science, all of this would seem to confirm the claim that Neoplatonism and hermeticism were ‘vital ingredients of advanced thought into the last decades of the seventeenth century’.⁶⁷ But that is not to say that by the late seventeenth century the Aristotelian sense of physiognomy had faded from thought. Even amidst this Europe-wide rise of interest in Paracelsus in the 1660s, or the hermetic ‘physiognomy’ in the writings of such Cambridge Platonists as Henry More and Ralph Cudworth, there were still some more traditional, more Aristotelian, perspectives on physiognomy being articulated at the very same time. One example is a collection of hitherto unknown seventeenth-century manuscripts by James Boevey Esq. (1622–97) (pronounced Boovey), a seventeenthcentury merchant-lawyer from Cheam in Surrey. They provide one potentially very rich area in which a much more detailed investigation of the intellectual and practical interaction between the hermetic, the ‘occult’, and the new seventeenth-century understanding of rationality and reason can be carried out in one very specific social and cultural context. The youngest son of a large Dutch family who had fled to England at the end of the sixteenth century when the Spanish duke of Alva invaded the Low Countries, Boevey’s father was an elder of the Dutch church at Austin Friars in London and a prominent financier. James Boevey himself soon became involved in that world of merchants and financiers, starting out as cash-keeper for numerous prominent dignitaries connected to his father. After his Grand Tour, Boevey became an international merchant before then joining Temple Inn to become a lawyer, but not before a series of litigations had brought him the experience of a few spells abroad in prison. From his childhood years, Boevey developed a habit of continuously scribbling things down in notebooks. He always had a candle beside his bed to do this. One of the manuscripts he wrote was a two-volume entitled, ‘Of the art of discovering of men’⁶⁸ Together they constitute a very original ‘treatise on physiognomy’ from the middle of the early modern period. Part of its richness and originality lies in the fact that it was one of thirty-two manuscripts that Boevey penned between 1665 and 1666 while hidden away in the safety of his isolated country house deep in Exmoor far from the ravages of the Great Plague and the Great Fire that affected London during those years. Each one of these manuscripts constituted a building-brick in a private philosophical system to which ⁶⁷ Clark, Demons, 157. ⁶⁸ Cambridge: University Library, MS Dd 15. 28 and London: Wellcome Library, MS 699. See also the article on James Boevey in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).


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Boevey gave what might be seen as the distinctly Aristotelian name ‘Active Philosophy’. A full list of titles which Boevey sent John Aubrey provides a further idea of the intellectual framework into which physiognomy was incorporated: 1. The Characters, or Index rerum: in 4 tomes. 2: The Introduction to Active Philosophy. 3: The Art of Building a Man: or Education*. 4: The Art of Conversation. 5: The Art of Complyance. 6: The Art of Governing the Tongue. 7: The Art of Governing the Penn. 8: The Government of Action[*?]. 9: The Government of Resolution. 10: The Government of Reputation. 11: The Government of Power: in 2 tomes. 12: The Government of Servients. 13: The Government of Subserviency. 14: The Government of Friendshipp*. 15: The Government of Enmities*. 16: The Government of Law-Suites*. 17: The Art of Gaining Wealth. 18: The Art of Buying and Selling. 19: The Art of Preserving Wealth. 20: The Art of Expending Wealth. 21: The Government of Secrecy. 22: The Government of Amor Conjugalis: in 2 tomes[*?]. 23: Of Amor Concupiscentiae. 24: The Government of Felicity. 25: The Lives of Atticus, Sejanus, Augustus. 26: The Causes of the Diseases of the Mind[*?]. 27: The Cures of the Mind, viz. Passions, Diseases, Vices, Errours, Defects[*?]. 28: The Art of Discerning Men*. 29: The Art of Discerning a Man’s selfe*. 30: Religion from Reason: in 3 tomes. 31: The Life of Cum-fu-zu, soe farr wrote by J.B. 32: The Life of Mahomet, wrote by Sir Walters Raleigh’s papers, with some small addition for methodizing the same.⁶⁹

From this list, Boevey’s ‘Active Philosophy’ would appear to be distinctly Aristotelian, in so far as it ‘has the practical task of directing man’s activities precisely as human; its parts are ethics, which directs one’s personal life, ‘oeconomics’, which governs home and family, and politics, which orders the city and the republic’.⁷⁰ Moreover, there is none of the Neoplatonic astrological understanding of the cosmos supporting his understanding of physiognomy. Thus, another aspect of its originality lies in the insight its study could give us into how a less Paracelsian-influenced physiognomy was incorporated into an ethics of everyday life at a time when Paracelsianism was of particular interest. Indeed Boevey, who also owned many books on magic and witchcraft—a list of which, written out in Elias Ashmole’s hand has survived—provides an opportunity for examining the coexistence of the rational and the hermetic, not only because of the widespread interest in Paracelsianism at that time but also owing to the fact that one of his next-door neighbours in the part of Chelsea in which he resided as a young man was the famous Paracelsian and royal physician Sir Theodore Mayerne. This argument about the respective contributions of the Aristotelian and the Neoplatonic towards the metamorphosis of physiognomy could be traced ⁶⁹ Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. O. Lawson Dick (1992), [32]. I have since discovered those manuscripts marked with an asterisk. ⁷⁰ W. A. Wallace, ‘Traditional Natural Philosophy’, in C. B. Schmitt and Q. Skinner (eds.), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, 1988), 201–35, 210.

166 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 through to the end of the eighteenth century. One major theme in that history is the rise of a more mechanical approach to the subject. James Parson’s Royal Society lecture could be taken as emblematic of this, in particular with regard to the way in which it contributed towards the Baconian suggestion of examining physiognomy through the mechanics of ‘impression’ and not ‘discovery’. It is in the context of the gradual establishment of this sense of physiognomy that the increase in the number of ‘books on physiognomy’ published as some form of inexplicable ‘curiosity’ has to be understood. The late seventeenth century saw something of an explosion in the vogue for cabinets of curiosity. Collections of remarkable natural phenomena were springing up in private museums all over Europe. They were one consequence of the ongoing taxonomic reordering of man’s understanding of nature and its ‘great chain of being’, both the consequence and the ongoing cause of a greater distinction being made between things that were the product of the imagination and things that were the product of scientific reason. Those ‘curiosities’ were primarily the subjects or the phenomena which could not be fitted into the dominant natural philosophical framework, but neither could they be entirely dismissed and ignored. Physiognomy became one of them. Whilst there does not appear to have been a cabinet of curiosity in the form of a private museum devoted to physiognomical curiosities, a similar idea was expressed in certain books such as Nicolo Spandoni’s Studio di curiosità nel quale si tratta di Fisionomia, Chiromantia, Metoposcopia (Venezia, 1662), which he dedicated to the Venetian noble, and lover of curiosities, Iseppo Cassetti. In France and England it was exemplified by the publication of The Court of Curiositie (1669).⁷¹ This book claimed to be the work of Marc de Vulson, Sieur de La Colombière (d. 1658), but was essentially a reissue of the unknown Edmé Gallimard’s Traicté physiognomique, par lequel un chacun peut apprendre a se bien cognoistre, et aussi la nature, les moeurs, et inclinations des autres. This understanding of physiognomy was still to be found in the middle of the Enlightenment in, for example, Johann Georg Job’s Anleitung zu denen curiösen Wissenschafften, Nemlich der Physiognomia, Chiromantia, Astrologia, Geomantia, Oniromantia, Onomantia, Teratoscopia, Sympathia und Antipathia (Frankfurt, Leipzig, [Berlin], 1747). Yet, despite the spread of the new natural philosophy and the tendency of the mechanical philosophy to push physiognomy into the realm of curiosity, its presence constantly exposed the epistemological limitations of the new philosophies, particularly through its long-standing conviction that the physi⁷¹ Marc Vulson, The Court of Curiositie (1669).


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cal and the moral or the metaphysical were somehow joined. This ineluctable sense of some sort of innate relationship between the moral and the material even occurred in the work of such Enlightenment figures as La Mettrie, physician and philosopher and author of the famous book L’Homme machine. In La Mettrie’s case, he articulated this relationship between the moral and the physical through a passing reference in his famous work to the subject of physiognomy in Jacques Pernetti’s Lettres sur les phisiognomies, first published in Paris in 1746.⁷² One of the most notable contributions to this distinctly physiognomical debate was made by the Benedictine and Masonic librarian of Frederick the Great, Antoine Pernetty, in his Discours sur [la physionomie et les avantages des] les connoissances physiognomiques (Berlin, 1749). Indeed, with Pernetty we catch a glimpse of the more occult, theosophic, ideas bequeathed to posterity originally by the Florentine Renaissance hermeticists, which signposted another more occult side to the alleged rationality of the Enlightenment out of which Romanticism was born. For Pernetty went on to found an Illuminist sect in 1765. In the eighteenth century, there were, besides such works of moral philosophy, numerous works which continued the medical contribution to the ongoing developing understandings of what physiognomy was, particularly those which arose in the context of the discussion during the latter half of the eighteenth century between the mechanists and the vitalists. One way of approaching this context is through the unusual figure of Anton Wilhelm Amo (c.1703–56). Amo, like Bartholomaeus Cocles in the Renaissance, is a remarkable but as yet neglected figure with whom to finish this general survey of some of the more important turning-points in the tradition of writing ‘books on physiognomy’ that were published in the early modern period, all the more so for being a figure who does not appear to have ever written a ‘treatise on physiognomy’. Born on the Gold Coast, Amo was the first European-trained African philosopher and became a professor at Halle, Wittenberg, and Jena Universities. He lectured on such intellectually heavyweight issues as Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason, and his work on jurisprudence is said to have made a contribution to the abolition of slavery. More directly related to physiognomy was his work on medicine and rationalist psychology that, by that time, found itself at the heart of the struggle in medicine between the aforementioned mechanists and the vitalists. It was around this issue that the question of physiognomy resurfaced. More to the point, Amo was an Enlightened philosopher who seems to have addressed the ‘occult’ side of this question ⁷² Julien Jan Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine (1750), 14–15.

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between the mechanical and the vital, at least privately. As a private tutor he conducted classes in the ars hermetica, including physiognomy and chiromancy. His native Africa may have had its own oral physiognomical tradition about which nothing is yet known, or else he may have developed his interest in physiognomy and chiromancy through the Western hermetic tradition. He was in contact with Johann Georg Job, author of the aforementioned compilation of curious occult sciences published in 1747, Anleitung zu denen curiösen Wissenschafften. No evidence has yet been found that Amo published anything on the subject. However, he appears to have taken his interest in the hermetic back home. By 1753 he was back on the Gold Coast. In the last years of his life, according to Winckelmann, he was found living the life of a hermit and, like most physiognomists through the ages, he had developed a reputation among the locals as a ‘soothsayer’.⁷³ Like the mid-eighteenth-century manuscript on physiognomy written in Icelandic which was mentioned in Chapter 2, Amo’s commitment is another indication of the temporal and geographical ubiquity of this interest in the ‘occult’ and a more hermetic form of physiognomy. Amo’s connection with the art of physiognomy is just one of many which would benefit from some rigorous scholarly analysis, particularly in terms of how such an Enlightenment figure may have been central to the understanding of the self and the world that one finds in, for example, German Romanticism. After all, Schelling’s idea of organic expression, of the world as God’s body, as the incarnation of divine life, was distinctly ‘physiognomical’, and is often traced back through such naturalist mystics as Jacob Boehme to Paracelsus and popular German tracts on alchemy, natural magic, and this divine language of ‘physiognomy’.⁷⁴

Physiognomy, Self-knowledge, and Self-transformation Both the Christian Aristotelian and the Neoplatonic hermetic traditions in early modern natural philosophy, alongside the more general social phenomenon of physiognomical ‘superstition’ represented by people like the ‘gypsies’, were mutually influential stimuli in the metamorphosis of physiognomy. Yet that still leaves one question unanswered. Why did people even bother with such a seemingly obscure subject? At that point we could turn to a claim made by one contemporary historian of Renaissance philosophy: ‘much of the most innovative debate of the period on questions of attainment of knowledge con⁷³ M. Firla, ‘Anton Wilhelm Amo, Kammermohr—Privatdozent für Philosophie—Wahrsager’, Tribus, 51 (Stuttgart, 2002), 56–89. ⁷⁴ A. Koyré, De la mystique à la science, ed. P. Redondi (Paris, 1986), 20.


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cerns disciplines whose credentials as scientiae were perceived as questionable: the ‘unorthodox’ sciences, astrology, alchemy, natural magic and so on.’⁷⁵ Physiognomy was certainly an unorthodox scientia. What was so important about physiognomy that made it worth fighting over? The answer to this question, I would argue, is because it was a subject that dealt with the central question of man’s self-knowledge. In other words, the conflict over ‘knowledge by the visage’ was part of a conflict over the nature of the human being that one came to know by that ‘visage’, whether one was looking at one’s self in a mirror or at other people. Paracelsus observed that ‘the . . . physiognomantier bases his judgements on the nature of the human self ’.⁷⁶ One twentieth-century commentator on gypsy ‘magic’ provides an insight into that concern when he writes of how, in an encounter with a first-class gypsy ‘seer’, ‘you may well be astounded by the unveiling of the past, by an uncanny glimpse into the future and by a devastating penetration into your character that would put many a psycho-analyst to shame’.⁷⁷ Many of the early modern authors made the claim that physiognomy helped to establish self-knowledge. As one French author of a ‘book on physiognomy’ put it in 1669: the subject of this Treatise I am upon comprehends the principal object which the ancient Philosophers ever aim’d at, and wherein they placed the greatest part of their felicity; that was, Nosce Teipsum, Know thy self: which knowledge consists in the exact experience that every man hath of himself in particular, and an universal knowledge of men in general.⁷⁸

Francis Bacon explicitly agreed. For Bacon, the art of physiognomy was the scientia which dealt with what he termed the ‘league’, or ‘common Bond between the soul and body’, that is to say ‘the adjuncts of [Man’s] common and undivided nature; but chiefly in regard of the knowledge concerning the sympathies and concordances between the mind and body, which, being mixed, cannot be properly assigned to the sciences of either’. It was a genuine ‘portion of natural philosophy in the continent of nature’, ‘sister’ of the art of the interpretation of dreams, and was capable of contributing towards ‘the knowledge of ourselves’, in other words help man’s fulfilment of the ancient oracle: ‘Nosce teipsum— know thy self ’.⁷⁹ ⁷⁵ N. Jardine, ‘Epistemology of the Sciences’, in Schmitt and Skinner (eds.), Renaissance Philosophy, 685–711, 685. ⁷⁶ Paraclesus, Samlicht, 1, 193–4. ⁷⁷ B. I. Ráko¯czi, ‘Gypsy Magic’, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, 3rd ser. 35 (1956), 39–46, 39 ⁷⁸ Vulson, Curiositie, 113. ⁷⁹ Francis Bacon, Collected Works, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, 7 vols. (1857–9), III.i, 366–7; IV, 375.

170 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 The fundamental disagreements were not over whether physiognomy could do this, but over how one went about doing this, what sort of ‘physiognomy’ one used to do it, what sort of self did it help one come to know, and to what extent that self-knowledge included the past and the future—in other words, where one was from and where one was going. Nor was it simply a conflict over the question of self-knowledge. As a result of the influence of the Neoplatonic hermetic movement, physiognomy became embroiled in the battle over the question of whether it was possible to change one’s self. It was a common question. One medicalized academic version of the question appeared on many a university examination paper, such as the one in Oxford on 12 July 1613: ‘whether the innate complexion is capable of being transformed?’⁸⁰ For the university-educated it was a question which fed into such issues as the extent to which the Galenic ‘self ’ was rooted in the materiality of the combination of humours that constituted the innate ‘complexio’, and hence the existence of an immaterial soul. In terms of the history of the religious mysticism of which it was so much a part, physiognomy provided the background of concerns about metempsychosis—that is to say whether or not the soul of a dead human being returns to this life in the form of an animal. In the eighteenth century physiognomy found itself at the heart of the debate about the physical, the moral, and self-knowledge in such publications as the German pastor Johann Georg Leutmann’s Nosce te ipsum et alios, Oder die Wissenschafft Sich Selbst und anderer Menschen Gemüther zu erkennen, Aus Moral—und Physicalischen Grund—Sätzen hergeleitet (Wittenberg, 1719), or Johann Andreas Fabricius’s (1696–1769), Vernünftige Gedanken von der Moralischen Erkenntnis der Menschen Gemüther (Jena, 1735), and Johann Wilhelm Appelius’s Historisch—moralischer Entwurf der Temperamenten, und der hieraus entstehenden Neigungen des Gemüths, der Sitten und des Naturels des Menschen (Hamburg, 1737). Indeed, it is this notion of the continuous metamorphosis of physiognomy which helps to explain why the one physiognomical treatise in the distinctly modern library of Le Comte de Sainte Mure (sold in 1764), La Chambre’s L’Art de connaitre les hommes, was accompanied by more Enlightened articulations of the same concern, be it in the form of the Dictionnaire philosophique, ou introduction à la connoissance de l’homme (1741), or a work entitled Introduction à la connoissance de l’Ésprit humain. The bibliophile Antoine Marie Henri Boulard (1754–1825), mayor of the tenth arrondissement of Paris, had an entire section in his library labelled ‘physiognomy’. But by that stage he also had a number of more modern texts which put themselves forward ⁸⁰ Register of the University of Oxford, ed. A. Clark, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1887–9), II.i, 193.


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as the route to self-knowledge, such as in his collection of what might be termed more modern physiognomical treatises like Pernetty’s three-volumed La connaissance de l’homme moral par celle de l’homme physique (1776), or Borelly’s La connaissance de l’homme et au perfectione de l’homme physique et moral (1797); Bonnet’s La palingénésie philosophique sur l’état passé et future des êtres vivans (1771); Desbus’s, L’art de connatire les homes (1762), or the Abbé Joannet’s, De la connaissance de l’homme (1775). ⁸¹

Conclusion The early modern period produced many different physiognomies, be it the Christian Aristotelian physiognomy of Augusto Nifo or Camillo Baldi; the Neoplatonic ‘Egyptian’ physiognomy of Pompeo Gaurico and Robert Fludd; the Calvinist physiognomy of Clemens Timpler; the catholic physiognomy of Athanasius Kircher; the Kabbalistic physiognomy of Jean Belot; the anglican mechanical physiognomy of James Parsons, the Pietist physiognomy of Lavater; or the unbookish physiognomy that happened in the encounter with a ‘gypsy’. None of them, including those Neoplatonic versions which can be said to have been based on an episteme of ‘resemblance’, simply relinquished ‘its relation with knowledge’ and disappeared ‘from the sphere of cognition’ as Foucault put it.⁸² All of them contributed in one way or another to the metamorphosis of physiognomy throughout the period. Whilst the Aristotelian investigations of physiognomy were more continuous with the medieval tradition, the Neoplatonic investigation of its ‘natural magic’ also had a significant impact. The emergence of interest in things ‘Egyptian’ was not simply begun by Cosimo de Medici and Ficino in Florence in the 1460s. In many ways, they, like the later writers on the subject, were reacting in part to the social phenomenon of the ‘gypsies’. For all that ‘books on physiognomy’ remained a relatively marginal affair, none the less what was at issue in the development of physiognomical theory was not only the question of self-knowledge but also the much more controversial question of self-transformation. ⁸¹ Catalogue des livres du cabinet de feu monsieur le comte de Sainte-Mure (Paris, 1764); Catalogue des livres de . . . A. M. H. Boulard (Paris, 1828). ⁸² M. Foucault, The Order of Things (1974), 17.

4 The Physiognomy Captured and Lost in a Book The aim of this is chapter is to carry out a basic philological examination of the words that make up the physiognomical aphorisms found in these ‘books on physiognomy’. In so doing I shall stress that it is in terms of the epistemological debate about the nature of the so-called ‘natural language’ of physiognomy which they represented that any philological approach has to be carried out. The many evident disagreements among the aphorisms make it impossible to establish with any scientific accuracy what any particular feature always meant. Moreover, the changes they underwent over time are best explained by reference to the internal hazards involved in textual transmission. Some of the more intriguing aphorisms refer to a particular historical personage. However, rather than pointing us in the direction of any certain human origin of a particular physiognomic, they should be seen more as a reflection of a distinctly visual, physiognomical conception of history. When the actual words of these printed physiognomics are examined as a Geertzian web of meaning spun by humans for themselves, I shall show how they can be revealing about early modern notions of virtue, beauty, sex and gender, and helped to prepare the way for the emergence of the eighteenth-century notion of the aesthetic in which beauty stood as a meaning (often a gendered meaning) in and of itself. It will become apparent that few physiognomical aphorisms were constantly identified with one sex or another, but most physiognomical aphorisms appear to be constructed upon an understanding of the ineluctable difference of ‘sex’ upon which the physiognomatable self was based. However, I shall argue that such differences are probably more a consequence of religious cosmogonies than early modern medical theories. But, above all, in this chapter I want to suggest that the ‘physiognomics’ in ‘books on physiognomy’ are themselves evidence of what may have been the very different, but now irretrievable, language of an oral physiognomical tradition—a claim which points us, once again, beyond the pages of these books in the direction of the ‘gypsies’ and the illiterate ‘fisnomiers’ discussed in the previous chapter.

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A Natural Language We have seen how physiognomy was defined to schoolchildren, most simply, as ‘knowledge by the visage’.¹ When put like that, with or without a conscious understanding of the theorized physics of it that we saw in Alsted’s writings (see the Introduction of this book), physiognomical wisdom seems to have been broadcast to people’s fisnomy from, and sensed by people’s fisnomy in, every nook and cranny of early modern society. The often overwhelming number of painted and carved ‘faces’ which appear to have been crammed into almost every available space on and in some Renaissance and early modern church decoration can be taken as a microcosm of this phenomenon. Everything had a ‘face’. Even the abyss in Genesis had a ‘face’, as did the ‘typeface’ through which the literate élite of early modern Europe so often encountered it. That ‘knowledge by the visage’, which was such a ubiquitous phenomenon of early modern life, was hinted at in the early modern proverbial wisdom encapsulated in the form, to see something ‘on the face of it’. At one point in his researches into the past, Erasmus decided to search for the classical origins of this particular adage. That search led him back to the Latin of that newly rediscovered antiquity so beloved of high Renaissance humanists like himself: ‘Ex fronte perspicere—To see on the face of it ’. The classical genealogy with which he then provided this adage was both Greek and distinctly physiognomical— the ‘expert’ physiognomists of ancient Greece: ‘we are said to see something on the face of it when we perceive it immediately and, as it were, at the very first moment of contact. It is taken from the experts in physiognomy, who maintain that they can discern a man’s character from his facial peculiarities and other bodily features’.² In his desire to establish a Greek genealogy for this adage, Erasmus appears to have overlooked the very strong possibility that Zopyrus, the physiognomist who famously read the face of Socrates, was actually Syrian not Greek. Similarly, Erasmus said nothing about how to see something ‘on the face of it’, or to get ‘knowledge by the visage’, did not require having the ability to read books. It was something even the so-called ‘illiterati’ could do. Indeed, for all the early modern period was ‘the age of print’, there were more people who could read ‘faces’ than could read humanist cursive manuscript or black gothic typefaces, and thus just as much, if not more, knowledge gained ‘by the visage’ than ‘by the book’. Given that this more innate, visual faculty of ‘literacy’ in faces was shared by the literati and the illiterati, the world of phy¹ Edmund Coote, The English schoole-maister (1596). ² Desiderius Erasmus, Collected Works, Vol. 33, Adages II. i 1 to II. vi 100, trans. R. A. B. Mynors (Toronto, 1991), 191.

174 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 siognomony encountered in these texts, has, as we shall see, much to tell us of the world of physiognomy to which they were themselves a closed book. For example, to understand how the apparently banal aphorisms of physiognomony could be taken very seriously by those who could read, and thus the sincerity and passion with which the illiterati could take their own physiognomical knowledge and traditions, it must be pointed out that the physiognomony in these books was sometimes presented as if it had the same irrefutable religious authority and the same mnemonic imperative as God’s twelve commandments. For example, in the Kalendar of Shepherds, readers and listeners, ‘clerkes and ley people’, were bound ‘to lerne & knowe on peyne of everlastynge dethe | as ye lawes of god done shewe how we maye knowe to kepe his commaundements | and to knowe the remedyes to withstande deedly synne’. They were to learn these contents: as parfytely as theyr Pater noster. . . . Therfore ye that do not knowe them | do youre dylygence to lerne them | for ye be bounde to lerne them | as well as for to lerne youre Pater noster. For how can you kepe the commaundementes of oure sauyoure Jhesu cryst | and yet ye knowe them not. Also ye be bounde to breke not one of them on payne of dampnacyon | for and thou breke one thou brekes all.³

Early modern literati would have been much more sensitive to the seemingly unimpeachable and immortal authorities of Aristotle and Plato who were often put forward by writers to defend physiognomy. Even the names of authors associated with physiognomony, such as Pietro d’Abano and Roger Bacon, still meant something important among sixteenth-century literate circles. Having said that, the early modern authors of these texts on physiognomony often uttered something that both the literati and the illiterati could agree upon when they claimed that these physiognomics were the ‘secrets of old Philosophers’, ‘Ancient Prophecies’, or the ‘Oracle of Apollo’. What scholars now call ‘the ancient Babylonian omen tradition’ was very much alive for everyone in early modern Europe. But what is essential for readers unfamiliar with this period to understand is that all of these claims had all the more power because of the very different way in which physiognomy was understood or even experienced as a ‘natural language’. When the twentieth-century French historian and philosopher Michel Foucault wrote of physiognomics, he did so in the context of the Renaissance understanding of the ‘doctrine of natural signatures’, in which the language of physiognomy was understood to be ‘coeval with the institution of God’. A Dutch historian from the early twentieth century, Johannes Huizinga, wrote of ³ Oxford: Bodleian Library, Douce K. 97, sig. Aiir–v.


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the ‘living function’ of aphoristic, proverbial ‘crystallised form[s] of thought’ (to which physiognomics had such a close resemblance) that in the Middle Ages were ‘substantial and unchallengeable’.⁴ In making these observations, they were referring, in effect, to the ‘natural language’ of which the likes of the English astrological physician Richard Saunders or the seventeenth-century English radical, and army chaplain, John Webster, understood the printed words of physiognomony to be such an important part. In their understanding of what constituted that ‘natural language’, there was thought to be a natural link, a ‘resemblance’, between what scholars today call the ‘signifiers’ and the ‘signified’. Thus, the so-called ‘natural signatures’ of physiognomony were thought to contain a magic and potentially efficacious power in the form of the ‘similitude’ between the word itself and the thing to which it referred. This power was such that it provided the reader with the potential to manipulate the properties signified by those words. In turn, their understanding of this ‘natural language’ was embedded in what one historian has suggested was the most dominant episteme of the sixteenth century, that of ‘a perfect, divinely inspired language in which Adam named each created thing and captured its essence, and which scholars, despite the Flood and Babel, might still recover’. Whilst, as we shall see, it was not a universal opinion, John Webster was certainly one who thought that ‘perfection would be achieved when all spoke a language which was universal, original, pre-Hebraic, natural, and transcendent, in that it would be above fallen human languages’.⁵

Physiognomics: Meaning, Origins, Continuity and Discontinuity The most popular and burning questions about physiognomy as a subject seem to be: what did the various physical features actually mean in the early modern period? How did they come to mean what they meant? Did the meaning of any particular physiognomic alter during the early modern period? What were the reasons for those changes? Was there any continuity of physiognomical meaning across time? The questioners are often unhappy with a response which seems to avoid the question by claiming that the search for continuity and change in meaning and language can be a paradoxical and elusive quest, ⁴ M. Foucault, The Order of Things (1974), 34; J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924), 209 ff. ⁵ S. Clark, Thinking with Demons (Oxford, 1997), 286; N. Smith, Perfection Proclaimed (Oxford, 1989), 288.

176 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 and that it is particularly pronounced in physiognomics, be it in the light of heavyweight intellectual arguments about the shift in the nature of the episteme that underpinned the Renaissance understanding of the physiognomic, or of the changes in the logic which upheld it and through which it was joined to other signs. In that sense, the answer is simply that the question of physiognomical meaning per se itself changes—epistemologically speaking. The only way to provide any sort of concise, simple, and direct answer is to present a very brief, analytical résumé of the agreement between and continuity among the aphorisms. This section does this by examining the physiognomics relating to the eyes and the voice found in the English ‘books on physiognomy’. Such an analysis can do no more than make general claims about degrees of continuity at this very specific level of the much broader historical phenomenon that was ‘physiognomy’ in the early modern period. Its claims could be supported by the claim that, just as in poetry certain metres have come to be associated with certain kinds of statement and feelings and hence a given metre tends to maintain a portion of its meaning, so it would appear that, in the early modern period, certain features can be said to have embodied specific meanings through constant repetition, often in a versified form. In what follows there is a case to be made for seeing these physiognomics as having been the most commonly known in the English language. A closer comparative philological examination of those in other languages would be more revealing. Either way, as will become blatantly clear (and not only through the absence of footnotes), the results of such an analysis are about as ‘scientific’ or as ‘subjective’ and seemingly arbitrary as an early modern exposition of physiognomical doctrine. Which, in itself, is more evidence of the need to understand the importance of the early modern epistemological debate about the nature of language embedded in the apparent banality of these printed physiognomical aphorisms. As fisnomy is being conceived of in this study as a sonic and visual phenomenon, the examples that follow have been based on the physiognomics relating to the eyes and the voice.

The eyes The physiognomics based around the eyes provide a stark contrast with those of the voice. On account of their being the most important of physiognomics in the hierarchy of physical features around which the grammar of the physiognomical eye was structured, it is the eyes which, more than any other physical feature, refuse the sort of simple synthesis offered by, for example, the analysis of the physiognomics on the hair. With the eyes it is difficult to be sure


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one is comparing the same physiognomics. Take, for example, small eyes. In one treatise they are described, in separate physiognomics, as a sign of dissimulation, of a liar, of envy, of a traitor. Another will describe them as the sign of a fool, of being bad mannered, like an ape, of fearfulness, in addition to their being an indication of deceit. Small and hollow eyes were sometimes said to be a sign of covetousness, of a crafty and flattering person, as well as a wrathful and angry person, but if small and inflated, it could be the sign of a murderer and a poisoner. Thus, on the whole, one can say that small eyes were a bad sign, and usually an indication of deceit. This is probably on account of the fact that, as with hollow eyes, one could not see them clearly. For the best eyes were more easily discernible. Yet eyes that were too big, though more visible, were still not such a good sign. There were many different types of large eyes, some looking up, some looking down, some inclined to look to the left (apathy), some to the right (adultery). Some moved, some were more fixed, some opened one way, some opened another, and their meaning changed accordingly. The most common meaning was sluggishness, or sloth, or dullness, and it was often seen as ox-like. Yet some large eyes were a sign of cruel rapaciousness, such as one sees in wolves. Some big-eyed physiognomics blended sloth and unshamefastness with envy, others with a rustic and unsavoury mind, some with gluttony. Yet if they had a luminous and humid look, then, as one author put it, it revealed an elevated soul capable of great things, if somewhat inclined to choler, drunkenness, and an excessive desire for glory. Interestingly, cross-eyedness was often given as a sign of ‘venery’. As such it makes Descartes’s confession that he was attracted to cross-eyed women somewhat intriguing.⁶ Twinkling eyes were for some a sign of honesty; for others a sign of anything from theft and betrayal to unfaithfulness and presumptuousness. Similarly smiling eyes could be seen as a sign of dissimulation, yet in some physiognomics smiling and twinkling are a sign of a just and merry person. A humid look was, on the whole, better than a dry look. Similarly, the terms used to describe the colours of the eyes are difficult to understand. The word red is used to describe what may have been what we now see as a number of colours, and it is given meanings as different as drunkenness, courage, cunning, gluttony, libertinism, and a gambler. Nor is it very easy to know what was meant by the term black. Spots were always seen as bad, be they a sign of lechery or more generally speaking sin. The ideal colour was often described as between black and yellow, which some authors appear to have ⁶ Rene Descartes, Les passions de l ’âme, ed. G. Rodis-Lewis (Paris, 1991), 133, fn. 1.

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called brown. And the best eyes, average in size, clear, and moist, were usually seen as a sign of intelligence and honesty.

The voice A brief analysis of the physiognomics on the voice is a more manageable task, if only due to the fact that there were fewer of them, and that, unlike the eyes, they did not always appear in the treatises, thus leaving less room for disagreement. Unsurprisingly, the ‘medium’ voice was more or less always given as a sign of such virtues as reason, wisdom, prudence, and justice. Similarly the ‘good sounding’ voice was usually seen as reflecting the qualities of peacefulness and wisdom. The deep cavernous voice was usually understood to be a sign of magnanimity, boldness, courage, even truth, and often compared to the lion. It is frequently difficult to distinguish this type of voice from the voice described as sonorous, which was most often given as a sign of boldness and eloquence. At the same time there was another form of ‘deep’ voice which was understood to be a sign of gluttony or greed, in other words, of a person addicted to the pleasures of the stomach—presumably a voice that sounded as though it resonated through the stomach. A ‘great’ voice was often seen as a sign of stupidity (as was the ‘thick’ voice), irascibility, and a generally bad nature. It was often equated with the ass, and in a woman was seen as an ‘evil’ sign. A voice which started low and ended high was also often given as a sign of irascibility and violence. Similarly the strong, quaking voice was a sign of violence; a ‘rough’ voice was a sign of stupidity and rancour. There appears to have been much agreement over the nasal voice, which was frequently given as signifying envy and mendacity, and the impudence, ignorance, and mendacity of a hasty speaker. Similarly, the person who moved when speaking was also understood to be a liar, whilst the person who was still when speaking was good, clever, and wise. The ‘sweet’ or ‘fawning’ voice was a sign of envy, a liar, and a person full of suspicion; the fair or beautiful voice for the most part was seen as a sign of stupidity. Although it is often difficult to distinguish between the variety of soft and high voices given in these treatises, the soft voice appears to have been understood to be a sign of gentleness, often compared with the sheep, the high voice a sign of timorousness, and both often understood to be women’s voices. The shrill high voice was seen as a sign of lewdness and anger, often compared with goats. A more scholarly and scientific approach to the question of the changes which the physiognomics in these texts underwent during the early modern


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period would necessitate taking all of the aphorisms that appear in all of the texts from this invented archive (putting those in the most ancient texts to one side) and assembling them into a series of chronological lists arranged, say, by physical feature. That is, to a great extent, what Giovanni Della Porta did in his famous treatise. But it is a task more difficult than it sounds for the contemporary historian with a very different sense of the ‘scientific’ than Della Porta’s. A spectrum of the entire corpus of the physiognomical signs found in these texts could be arranged along a number of intersecting continua, each of whose teleology is signposted by increasing degrees of complexity in the element each continuum represents. Amongst the many problems which arise is the fact that, in many cases, it is virtually impossible for us now to visualize what is being suggested by a physiognomic. Thus one cannot always be sure one is comparing aphorisms referring to the same specific physical feature. Even when one appears to be able to compare the same physiognomic (in the sense of the same physical feature) as found in different texts, what is the cause of such differences and changes? For example, the difference in the meaning of flat faces one finds in texts based on the physiognomony from the Secretum or texts based on Michael Scot’s Liber phisionomia seem unlikely to be the consequence of a tangible, bloody revolution led by the flat-faced avant-garde that changed the meaning of a flat face.⁷ Nor is it immediately obvious that such changes are the manifestation of some wider, more profound, cultural seachange. Indeed, as original or as revolutionary as Scot may have been at the time, and as much as his physiognomic on the flat face may have been formed as a consequence of a particularly memorable example of a person with a flat face whom Scot encountered, even a medievalist is not sure to have enough evidence to perform this very detailed task. To understand the causes of some changes in the history of physiognomy and the intellectual apparatus that sustained the configuration of various physiognomical eyes requires looking in much more depth outside the restricted body of evidence that this corpus of early modern ‘books on physiognomy’ represents. However, to find the causes of most of the changes in the actual metaphysical meaning given to any physiognomic (as opposed to the implicit conception of what the physiognomic was in its intellectual status as ‘a sign’ or ‘signature’), one has to look no further than the relatively closed world of the texts themselves. Many disagreements and variations on the visible surface of the physiognomics are caused by the inevitable leakage and persistent metamorphosis that, as with the passing on of oral traditions, comes with ⁷ Secretum secretorum, ed. M. A. Manzalaoui, Early English Text Society (Oxford, 1977), 381; Thomas Hill, A brief and most pleasaunt epitomye of the whole art of phisiognomie (1556), sig. Diiii.

180 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 the innately hazardous process of written and printed transmission. As with poetry, an even more profound transformation is introduced in the very act of transmission by their respective translations from Hebrew into Greek into Arabic and into Latin, followed by their translation into respective vernaculars from the late fifteenth century onwards, all the more so for those in whose eyes the ancient theological language of physiognomy was, like the language of the Kabbalah, only possible in its original language—to translate it was to lose or destroy it. In passing, those changes that are the accidental result of scribal errors transmitted to the printed versions via the manuscripts may actually be a consequence of a more profound modification in the evolution of the medieval and early modern communications system. For example, some changes were caused by a thing as deeply important but now as intangible as the medieval scribe’s substitution of the auditory memory (which some historians argue was stronger than the scribe’s visual memory) of his or her own dialect in the places where the dialect of the text seemed impenetrable.⁸ In that sense the work done by anthropologists on the oral transmission of knowledge provides a model for understanding the changes inherent in the textual transmission of this corpus of physiognomical knowledge. Indeed, this oral/textual interface appears in the fact that some of the treatises give one the impression of having been dictated by the author to a scribe, and the scribe’s distinctly literal written dictation then being used for the printed version. At the very end of the section on the eyes Indagine adds ‘also, diuers mennes eyes do runne and droppe, the whiche do not [show] his nature, but onlye the moistnesse of the braine, with aboundance of fleume. This is sufficient.’⁹ This could be explained by the fact that Indagine was dictating the work from memory to a scribe. At this point he appears to have checked himself just as he began to veer off into physiological explanation rather than physiognomical signification and the scribe or student simply wrote down what he said as he did so. When Lucas Gaurico edited his brother Pompeo’s writings on physiognomy, he interwove a small physiognomical table, seemingly of his own making, into the text written by his brother. If these signs originate with Lucas, their inclusion might be an indication of his own empirical physiognomical observations.¹⁰ Other changes occurred more haphazardly in the printing process itself. The crudely printed table in the Arcandam treatise exemplifies this perfectly. Here it is difficult to tell which meaning is meant to go with which physical feature, and a reader could resolve the tension in numerous ways. In ⁸ H. J. Chaytor, From Script to Print (Cambridge, 1945), 19. ⁹ Indagine, Introductions (1558), sig. Hii. ¹⁰ Pompeo Gaurico, De sculptura, ed. A. Chastel and R. Klein (Paris, 1969), 140, fn. 47.


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22. The instability of printed knowledge. This tabulated presentation changes the meaning of a physical feature. Arcandam, The most excellent, profitable and pleasant book to find the fatal desteny, constellation, complexion and natural inclination of every man and child by his birth. With an addition of physiognomy very pleasant to read (1592), sig. L7v–L8 Oxford: Bodleian Library, Ashm 556. (Photo: Oxford: Bodleian Library.)

that sense, contrary to what some historians have argued, the printing process has introduced or retained an element of instability into the textual world of physiognomy, and thus provided what might be referred to today by some as free-floating signifiers and signifieds, or what others might prefer to see as the gypsy-like quality of an elusive mobility.¹¹ All that can be said on this issue is that there are some changes which occurred simply as a consequence of the process of translation which sometimes raise questions about the ‘culture’ in which the translation was made and which could be worth further investigation. It is often quite evident that a writer has attempted to find more appropriate contemporary language for the various aspects of the physiognomic, especially for its meaning. For example, in the mid-sixteenth-century printed edition of Abano’s late thirteenth-century treatise one finds the following aphorism: ‘qui vocem habet crassam altam & sonoram, est audax eloquens & bellicosus’. By the eighteenth ¹¹ For a more detailed philological investigation, see M. H. Porter, ‘English “treatises on physiognomy” c.1500–c.1780’, D. Phil. thesis (Oxford, 1998), ch. 4.

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century, the author of Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece had obviously felt it more appropriate to translate it as: ‘A great and full voice in either sex shews them to be of a great spirit, confident, proud, and wilful’. Some such changes suggest the pressure of the reality of the time in which the aphorism was uttered and provide an insight into the genealogy of the morals which constituted the late eighteenth-century self—in other words the translation of audax, eloquens, and bellicosus as ‘great spirit’, ‘confident’, ‘proud’, and ‘wilful’, as well as the explicit reference to the fact that it refers to ‘either sex’.¹² Similarly, take the following chronologically arranged series of English aphorisms which is based on a sign first coined by Michael Scot in the early thirteenth century: [1250] Cuius nasus fuerit in medio valde elevatum significat hominem sempe mendacem, vanum, instabilem, luxuriosum, cito credentem importunum ingenii boni grossi nutrimenti et plus simplicem quam sapientem & malitiosum. [1511] Large nose in myddes/whiche dothe up ryse, | Of a lyer | and greet spekyng is signe. [1556] The nose very highe eleuated in the middle which we name a copped nose: declareth that man to bee an often lyar, vayne, unstable, leacherouse, sone or lightly credytyng, importunate, hauyng a good wytte, grosse in feadyng, and more simple then wyse, and malycyouse. [1676] A Nose more than ordinary elevated in the middle like a ridge, intimates the person to be much given to Lying, Idle, Unconstant, Luxurious, easie of beleif [sic], importunate, of a ready flashy wit, of gross nourishment, more simple than wise, and malicious. [1764] A nose broad in the middle, and less towards the end, denotes a vain and talkative person, a liar, and one of hard fortune.

All of these seem to agree, particularly over the fact that this sort of nose (which has a large rising in the middle) was a sign of a talkative liar. Yet in one late seventeenth-century treatise it is given as [1669] When the Nose is large in the middle upwards, it is a signe the person is addicted to superfluous Romantick stories.¹³

For all the success of the Roman de la Rose, being addicted to ‘superfluous Romantick stories’ was more a seventeenth-century than a thirteenth-century phenomenon. Therefore this change might be seen as a less direct, more ¹² Pietro d’Abano, Decisiones physionomiæ, ed. Michelangelo Biondo (Venice, 1548), sig. Ci; Aristotle, Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece (1764), 108. ¹³ Scot, Phisionomia [not before 1485], [65]; Lydgate, Secrees, 83, ll. 2627–9; Hill, Phisiognomie, sig. Bvii; Richard Saunders, Palmistry (1676), 192; Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece (1764), 105; Marc Vulson, The Court of Curiositie (1669), 175.


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metaphorical, late seventeenth-century way of saying that someone is a liar. It is this sort of change which one might characterize as representing the pressure of late seventeenth-century reality. In this sense, physiognomony is similar to common law. Thus one can see how, in certain cases, the metaphysical meanings in the physiognomics, for so long dominated by the allegedly natural phenomena of Aristotelian ethics, zoological analogies, and Christian vices and virtues, have been replaced by a phenomenon from the realm of late seventeenth-century culture. Given the fact that the physiognomic is an expression of the self, then this cultivated self is one that came to be physiognomically expressed as a new nature. One would then have to carry out an extensive study in order to ascertain just how popular Romantic stories were in England at that time. Another example of a change in a physiognomic through which one can perceive the pressure of the reality of different epochs is found in a late eighteenthcentury edition of A New Academy of Compliments (1772). Under the section headed: Signs to chose Husbands and good Wives, readers would have come across the following nugget of physiognomical wisdom: ‘an extraordinary long Chin, with the Under Lip larger than the Upper, signifies a cross-grain’d Person, fit for little Business, yet given to Folly’. Given that the textual origins of this ‘popular’ ‘chapbook’ physiognomic appear to lie, once again, in Michael Scot’s treatise, this physiognomic could be read as a hybrid of the medieval and the modern. Intellectually speaking, it carries traces of Michael Scot’s combination of the art of physiognomy with issues of selective breeding (‘signs to choose’ partners); a tinge of the seventeenth-century applied mechanics of causality (cross-grain’d) and utility (‘fit for’), as well as the medicalization and propathologization of a Renaissance humanist metaphysical building-block of the human self (the ‘folly’ Erasmus praised). One could also see it as containing building-blocks of a self-understanding whose parameters are constituted by the material reality of two very different social organizations—an agricultural society (‘cross-grain’d’ and not cross-seeded), perched on the cusp of an intensified capitalism (‘little Business’). Be that as it may, for a contemporary historian trying to find some sort of explanation for change across time, all of these changes or inconsistencies bring us back to an issue which was often more implicit than explicit in these printed physiognomics. That is to say the aforementioned, unavoidable, issue of an early modern reader’s conception of the episteme which underpinned this language of physiognomy. With regard to the question ‘whence do the meanings of the physiognomics originate?’, it has to be said that most of the meanings given to any specific physical feature arise from previous texts. The further back one traces this tex-

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tual influence, the more difficult it is to find certain evidence of why the earliest textual form of such and such a physiognomic took the form it did, particularly evidence which is external to the texts themselves. Many physiognomics appear to have their origin in a purely intellectual process. Some of the physiognomics in the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica, for example, appear to have been the product of an experimental combination of logical inference and humoral theory, with or without a zoological analogy, whilst in other texts one finds physiognomics which seem to have been formed as deliberate logical opposites or inversions of others.

Beauty and virtue Notwithstanding all of those aforementioned iconic issues, when reading the words of early modern expositions of physiognomical doctrine today, one often comes face-to-face with what appears to be the implicit issue of an assumed relationship between beauty and virtue that underlies many physiognomics. For example, many physiognomical tracts contained the following observation: ‘we must abstain from the co[m]pany of such as be markt & lame in any me[m]ber, I speake of such as are naturally defectiue and lame and not by chaunce or witchcraftes’. This explicit equation of deformity with vice implicitly equated beauty with virtue. It raises wider theological, social, and cultural questions about how its relationship was considered in the early modern period to such passages of Holy Scripture as Leviticus 21: 17–24, ‘for whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach’ (v. 18.)? We have seen in Chapter 1 how there are passages in Canon Law which reveal that it was upon this basis that, by the fourth century, the physically deformed were officially excluded from Christian ordination.¹⁴ It certainly makes one wonder upon what basis did Moses ‘chose able men out of all Israel’—if indeed they were chosen, or whether they simply became known? These texts show that early modern virtue had a number of distinct, common physiognomical ideals. The point can most clearly and simply be illustrated by a series of aphorisms taken from the earliest and the latest texts in the English series, all of which relate to what was considered in these texts to be the most virtuous type of face: [1503] The wysage that ys not short no long and that as not gret fatnes and as good couleur betoknys oon parson werytabyl lowabyl sage and af good wyt fer wysabyl debonayr and weelordonnyt to alys thyngys. ¹⁴ Indagine, Introductions (1558), sig. Hvv. See above, Chapter 1, III.i.


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[1508] A visage neither too short nor too long and that is not over fat with good colour betokeneth a man veritable, amiable, wise, witty, serviceable, debonair, and well ordered in all his works. [1511] Signes be | for ful conclusyoun, | As in wrytng | philisoffres seyn, | Whan face kepith | dew proporcioun, | These dymenciouns | he kepith in certeyn, | Not engrosyd | nouthir ovir pleyn, | Jawys and templys | in mene vp-rysyng, | Whiche signe is | of witt | and greet undirstandyng. [1528] But he that hath a meane vysage of fourme of chekes and eyes | neyther to fat nor to leane | he is trusty | louynge | and of grete vnderstandynge | wyse and full of seruyce and wytte. [1556] The face meane to the disposicion of the others afore but more fatte, then leane: declareth that man to bee true in talke, willyng to be bounde to serue, commonly ingeniouse, wary and perfitie of memorye. [1556] The face commune betwene long and rounde, leane and grosse: declareth that man to be congruente to all thynges, but soner to good then euill. [1558] A mene face not ouer lene, nor very fat, signifieth a man apt to all things. [1558] A meane slender face is token of an ingenious, studious & wise man. [1564] The face of them that be very cleane, is meane in the cheekes, and temples, & somwhat fat. And that face is a true face, louing and not disdaineful. The merry face commeth of a mery heart, and so the contrary. [1564] The face well proportioned of colour, and other thinges appertaining, declare a commendable life, and abundance of vertues. [1571] The faces of such wel borne and complexioned, are on such wise: that is, meane of composition in the cheekes, and temples, declining unto a fatnesse. Such a creature (after Phisiognomie) is iudged iust, louing, faythful, and of a good understanding. [1619] Quadrata, sapientem, & constantem, ac boni consilii. [1676] a mediocrity appearing in the Face neither to short nor long, too Fat, nor Lean, Aptum significat ad omnia, signifies the person ingenious, and apt to all things that are laudable and commendable. [1676] A mean and competent leaneness in the Face, a mediocritie between fat and lean, indicate a studious, ingenious, prudent person, the puffing, and as it were the swelling of the Jaw-bones without flesh, presageth the Kings Evil or the like. [1694] A well proportion’d Face, shew a Person to have virtuous qualities, and to live a commendable Life, whether they be rich or poor.¹⁵ ¹⁵ The Kalender of Shepherdes, ed. H. O. Sommer (1892), sig. K viii; The Kalendar & Compost of Shepherds (1508), ed. G. C. Heseltine (1930), 153; Lydgate, Secrees, 83, ll. 2640–6; Manzalaoui, Secretum, 381; Hill, Phisiognomie, sig. Diiii; Indagine, Introductions (1558), sig. Iiv; Arcandam, The most excellent, profitable and pleasant book (1592), sigs. O2v and O3v; Hill, Contemplation (1571), fol. 84v; Fludd, Utriusque cosmi . . . historia, II. i. 2, 125; Saunders, Palmistry (1676), 202, 2[0]3; Erra Pater, The book of knowledge (1758), 65.

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In the physiognomy captured in early modern printed books, it was virtue not beauty which was defined as a ‘mean’. Indeed, one might even go further and say that it was the issue of virtue with which this textual physiognomical eye was originally and primarily concerned. It is commonplace among scholars of the aesthetic that the modern sense of beauty was developed by the German aesthete Baumgarten as a discourse on the human body, and came to maturity at the end of the eighteenth century. Given this, it is not surprising to find an absence of concern with beauty or aesthetics in these texts that date from a much earlier period. In his 1671 treatise the London astrological physician Richard Saunders wrote: ‘a Nose that is round and long of a pleasant feature, besides that it is one of the perfections of Beauty, denotes the Woman or Maid, wise, prudent and chaste, and especially when she hath a blue eye’. But this was unusual. It was not a sign that this sense of physiognomical beauty was on the rise, at least not within the pages of ‘books on physiognomy’. Fourteen years later the same sign appeared in another treatise. All reference to beauty had, significantly enough, been dropped: ‘a Nose round and long, of a pleasant feature, denotes in the Female Sex, especially if they have blew Eyes, prudence, chastity, and good conduct in affairs’.¹⁶ In the early modern period, when the notion of beauty was articulated in a ‘book on physiognomy’, it was often, but not always, accompanied by references to mental properties that go with it. In that sense it was interpreted in terms either of virtues or of vices. In fact, this argument, that the purpose of the hermeneutics of the physiognomical eye captured in these books was less the discovery and contemplation of ‘beauty’ in and of itself, and more the pursuit of virtue or ethics, could be taken further. The physiognomical eye, it could be argued, was intended to help the viewer to guard herself or himself against what some saw as the sinful seductions of ‘beauty’ in and of itself. In 1556 Thomas Hill stated that ‘the pleasantnes or bewtyfulnes of the voice, declareth folishnes, cockebraynes, and stoutnes’.¹⁷ This helps to explain the detrimental meanings which physiognomical treatises from the earlier part of the period often attempted to etch into physical features described as ‘beautiful’. None the less, there is evidence to suggest that the early modern Neoplatonic hermetic physiognomical tradition of equating beauty and virtue may have some bearing on the later developments in, or even the construction of, that new realm of ‘aesthetics’. Once again this brings us back to the aforementioned question of the relationship of physiognomy to early modern painting ¹⁶ Saunders, Physiognomie (1653), 175; J. S., The true fortune-teller (1686), 69. ¹⁷ Hill, Phisiognomie, sig. Cv.


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and sculpting. For example, the Neoplatonic hermeticist Robert Fludd wrote, ‘Facies non multùm pulchra rarò importat bonos mores’.¹⁸ Whilst the meaning of the term ‘pulchra’ is open to debate, and despite the qualification of the claim introduced by the term raro, Fludd’s words nevertheless seem to suggest some form of Platonic equation of beauty and virtue. Indeed, it may have been in the most sophisticated Neoplatonic physiognomical eye that one finds the origins of a notion of beauty which was left to stand as a meaning in itself—an indication that, in the hermetic realm of the physiognomic at least, the potentially paganesque poetic had yet to be detached from theological accretions. To substantiate this claim requires returning to the treatise on sculpture written by Pompeo Gaurico in Florence in 1504. There appears to be a lack of evidence for why Gaurico chose to link the physiognomy he found in the treatise by the fourth-century figure of Adamantius with his writing on sculpture. I would suggest here that this is yet another example of the impact of the Corpus hermeticum at this time, and that the explanation is found in Gaurico’s Neoplatonic hermeticism. This is not the place to discuss the classic art historical issues of how Gaurico concerned himself more with graphics and animation than questions of technique; or how this aspect of his Neoplatonism developed from an earlier Epicurean naturalism and was ‘open to expressive suggestions of the inner vitality deep within the mass of the figure’—issues which in themselves could be traced through the expressive capabilities of art up to the Romantic period.¹⁹ The point here is that this text represented Gaurico’s attempt to articulate what was for Christians a very contentious passage in Asclepius. That passage described the magical rites by which Egyptians drew down the powers of the cosmos onto the statues of their gods which, when infused with the celestial influence, then came alive: ‘since they could not actually create souls, after having evoked the souls of demons or angels, they introduced these into their idols by holy and divine rites, so that the idols had the power of doing good and evil’. A sense of the literal efficacy of the words of the physiognomical aphorisms which Gaurico found in Adamantius’s Greek work appears to have made them into, in Gaurico’s eyes at least, a talismanic technology by which the material reality of the ‘occult’ celestial virtues could be guided into the statues. This achieved what Ficino described as ‘capturing the life of the stars, drawing down the life of heaven’, what Pico della Mirandola described as the marriage of heaven and earth, and is how Giordano Bruno understood the efficacious power of images. It was a way of furnishing the sculptures with the ‘occult virtue of divine efficacy’ which would then be ¹⁸ Fludd, Utriusque cosmi, II.i.2, 125.

¹⁹ C. Seymour, Sculpture in Italy: 1400–1500 (1966), 201 ff.

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transmitted to the viewers of these statues by the vehicle of what Ficino referred to as ‘spiritus’. Hermes Trismegistus described the man-made statues of the gods in the temples as ‘animated statues full of sensus and spiritus who can accomplish many things, foretelling the future, giving ills to men and curing them’.²⁰ It is in terms of these words of Hermes that Gaurico’s writing on sculpture can be said to have brought the scientia of physiognomy alongside proportion and symmetry into the construction of art. And not only that. It also brought the contemplation of art into the hermetic conception and practice of healing. It made the interface between creation and contemplation of those works of art an experience that was at one and the same time distinctly religious, medical, moral, ethical, magical, and occult—in a word, ‘physiognomical’. Paolo Pino was just one theorist who took Gaurico at his word. He thought that ‘physiognomy was a useful and honourable part’ of the techniques required by any painter of natural or artificial things, for it required the ability ‘to see and understand all the qualities and nature of a thing’.²¹ Notwithstanding, that sense of physiognomical beauty had implications beyond the rise of art theory and the development of an art market. It was also underpinned by an issue of what is referred to today in English as ‘gender’. At the end of the period under consideration, Mary Wollstonecraft’s understanding of what might broadly be called the physiognomical gaze revealed the heart of this tension between beauty and virtue that one finds in physiognomy. Her writing gives the sense that this physiognomical way of looking was one which aimed at moralizing what she saw as an inferior and purely physical understanding of beauty that had obviously established itself. She advised children that the soul of beauty . . . consists in the body gracefully exhibiting the emotions and variations of the informing mind. If truth, humanity and knowledge inhabit the breast, the eyes will beam with a mild lustre, modesty will suffuse the cheeks, and smiles of innocent joy play over all the features. At first sight, regularity and colour will attract, and have the advantage, because the hidden springs are not directly set in motion; but when internal goodness is reflected, every other kind of beauty, the shadow of it, withers away before it, as the sun obscures a lamp.²²

At the same time she provides us with an insight into the way in which the issue of gender underpinned the changing relationship between beauty and virtue in the physiognomical gaze. This is because she was also concerned to relieve the ²⁰ Giordano Bruno, De la magie, trans. D. Sonnier and B. Donné (Paris, 2000); Yates, Bruno, 37, 41, 56. ²¹ Paolo Pino, Dialogo di pittura (Venice, 1548), fol. 31v. ²² Mary Wollstonecraft, Works, ed. J. Todd and M. Butler, 7 vols. (1989), iv. 390–2.


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oppressive consequences which the more purely physical and geometric view of beauty constructed by educated, middle-class Enlightened men had for woman when judged only by these standards. She wanted to do this by exposing the sexual prejudice upon which the physiognomical gaze of her patriarchal society was founded. Wollstonecraft termed it ‘the male prejudice, which deems beauty the perfection of woman—mere beauty of features and complexion, the vulgar acceptation of the word, whilst male beauty is allowed to have some connection with the mind’. From this it was widely accepted, she claimed, that women arrived at ‘maturity’ (defined in terms of physical beauty alone) by the age of 20, whereas in men (in whom it was considered as a more physiognomical phenomenon) it was not reached until 30. Hence, the physiognomy of women was understood in a general way according to different criteria from that of men: ‘strength of body, and that character of countenance, which the French term a physionomie, women do not acquire before thirty, any more than men’.²³ If the purpose of physiognomy was to contemplate a person’s physical features with the aim of avoiding the numerous vices embodied in that person, including the seductions of that person’s beauty, or at least the seduction of a beauty understood in a predominantly physical way; if the aim of the art of physiognomating can thus be said to be the pursuit of virtue, then it would appear that the early modern art of physiognomy was more concerned with distinguishing good from bad, as the classic definition of prudence would have us believe. In that sense the early modern physiognomical eye had yet to go into the realms described by Neitzsche as ‘beyond good and evil’. The vision of what Pico della Mirandola termed the ‘dignity’ of man that one finds in most ‘books on physiognomy’ is distinctly bleak. One way in which this almost misanthropic view of mankind insidiously suggests itself is in the fact that the majority of the physiognomics in these treatises do not offer a flattering view of human nature. To take just one example: of the eighty-seven or so physiognomical aphorisms in the 1508 Kalendar, only about fifteen can be said to be signs of virtue, whilst about sixty-four appear to be signs of vice. There are about eight physiognomics which cannot be fitted into either category of good or evil. As such, the latter reveal the limitations of thinking about these physiognomical aphorisms in strict black-and-white terms of good or bad, virtue or vice. The following is an example which one would have to include under both, ‘great erys betokeneth foly in a man but he is in gode mynde’.²⁴ In this aphorism folly is not compounded by another very bad ²³ Wollstonecraft, Works, v. 138.

²⁴ Sommer, Shepherds, 147.

190 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 quality like deceitfulness or ignorance. The person is foolish but none the less good, that is to say ‘in gode mynde’, or we would say ‘means well’. Indeed, the difficulties involved in classifying physiognomics as either good or evil reveal the highly pragmatic and ‘utilitarian’ aspect of much of the physiognomical thinking presented in these books. In this ‘applied physiognomics’, any dominant polarity between virtue and vice is displaced by more practical concerns. Take the following very common sign, ‘a sharpe nose sheweth an angry person’.²⁵ Irascibility, and thus, from a physiognomical point of view, a sharp nose, might be a vice in an ambassador or a prospective novice, but it could be a virtue in a soldier. It is from this perspective that one is able to discern the very strong element of utility in many of the early modern expositions of physiognomical doctrine. This practical perspective helps one to understand how, beyond the more ethical question of beauty and virtue, the physiognomical eye was incorporated into a wide variety of hitherto unexamined early modern social practices, be it the choice of marriage partners, friends, counsellors, soldiers, or, as mentioned above, the priesthood. In so doing, it shows how the hermeneutic process of physiognomating in the early modern period incorporated both ethics and politics.

Sex and Gender As implied in Mary Wollstonecraft’s aforementioned observations, the issue of beauty and virtue also shaded into the issue of what today would be referred to as ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. To what extent was the ‘sex’ or the ‘gender’ of either the physiognomator or physiognomatee made explicit in these treatises?²⁶ Was the physiognomatic eye restricted to men?²⁷ Were there some physiognomatable features or physiognomatical traits that were seen as exclusively belonging to the female sex or the male sex, or as being exclusively the property of the ‘masculine’ or the ‘feminine’? This is another very large and as yet unexplored area of early modern physiognomy, of which the following can only be the briefest and most general résumé. It is certainly true that most of these ‘books on physiognomy’ appear to have been written by, and usually dedicated to, men. Whilst some of the aforementioned fisnomiers were undoubtedly women, with regard to the sex of the physiognomical beholder implicit in those treatises, the suggested physiogno²⁵ Indagine, Introductions (1575) sig. Hiiv. ²⁶ R. Stoller, Sex and Gender (1968); J. Butler, Gender Trouble (1990). ²⁷ L. Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (1989).


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mator in many of those without an identifiable author is often represented by such male figures as the shepherd (in the Kalendar), the astrologer (in the Compost) and the king (in the Secretum). Yet for all the innate ‘patriarchy’ this conceals and perpetuates, none of these texts explicitly claimed that the active, physiognomating eye was the preserve of either the male or the masculine eye.²⁸ It is only by the later seventeenth century that one begins to find physiognomical treatises specifically addressed to women as potential physiognomators, at around the same time that the subject itself starts being described in these texts as a ‘curiosity’.²⁹ If there were, over time, both male physiognomators and female physiognomators, what about the ‘sex’ of those on the other end of the physiognomating, in other words the physiognomatees? The late fifteenth- and early sixteenthcentury editions of the Shepherd’s Kalendar suggested that both men and women could be physiognomatees. It contained ‘a science that have shepherds for to know the natural inclination of man and woman good or evil by divers signs on them in beholding them only’.³⁰ As early as 1528 the Secretum refers to the physiognomatee by using the more neutral and pluralistic term ‘people’,³¹ and from the late seventeenth century onwards, the move towards using this gender-neutral term alongside ‘person’ to designate the physiognomatees is quite striking. Guy Miège, for example, in his The Great French Dictionary (London, 1688), chose the much more neutral term ‘one’, defining physiognomy as ‘a guess at one’s nature or inward disposition by the features of the outward lineaments’. To what extent were the physiognomics themselves either ‘sex’ or ‘gender’ specific? In other words, were there any physiognomics which were thought to be the particular property of either men or women, or the masculine or the feminine? There is no disputing the fact that most physiognomics include terms such as ‘he’ or ‘man’. The innate patriarchy in the use of these terms was not exclusive to the art of physiognomy. It was part of the more general early modern tendency to assume a masculine abstract third person. In that sense this practice may be assumed to be a consequence of what one historian has argued was a one-sex model understanding of the physiology of the sexes in which the physical differences and similarities were underpinned by a hierarchy of metaphysical perfection, the female body being seen as commensurable with, but an inferior version of, the male body.³² ²⁸ M. Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today, 2nd edn. (1988). ²⁹ Vulson, Curiositie, sig. A3. ³⁰ Heseltine, Shepherds, 150. ³² See T. Laqueur, Making Sex (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).

³¹ Manzalaoui, Secretum, 377.

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However, I would argue that a richer understanding of the issue of gender in terms of its relationship to physiognomy would be achieved if these ideas about the distinctions of sex were seen as a consequence, not of a ‘one-sex’ or ‘two-sex’ model, but of the conviction about some sort of innate, ineluctable ‘distinction’ ‘between’ the ‘sexes’ which gave rise to the symbolism of various religious cosmogonies rather than the theories of any ‘medical’ tradition. The Zohar provides just one example. In the Book of Jethro, a passage on the ‘lineaments of the countenance’ speaks of how the features of the face are ‘formed by internal forces’ which then moulds, or ‘impresses’ itself upon the outwardly appearing features. It is this notion of ‘impression’ that is the key to understanding the more ‘mechanical’ and the more ‘mystical’ aspects of Francis Bacon’s understanding of physiognomy. Moreover, it is this notion of the ‘impression’ and ‘projection’ of the spirit into ‘form’ that Hegel refused. For Hegel, physiognomical signs were ‘just the reflection of Spirit out of its sensuous existence back into itself, and a particular [physical] existence is for Spirit something indifferent and contingent’, the ‘kind of knowing’ to which it gave rise nothing more than ‘idle chatter, or merely the voicing of one’s own opinion’.³³ The passage from the Zohar, which is worth citing at length in order to avoid any further misinterpretation, continues: Man has a spirit on which the letters of the alphabet are in a way designed. All these letters are enclosed in that spirit, and for a time the designs of those letters enter into the face; and as they enter, the face appears with the design of these letters upon it. But this semblance lasts for a short time only, save upon the faces of adepts in wisdom, on whom it is always visible. There is a place which is called ‘the world to come’, from whence issues the mystery of the Torah with its alphabet of twenty-two letters, which is the essence of all things. Now that ‘river which goes out of Eden’ carries all this along with it, so that when the spirits and souls emerge therefrom they are all stamped with the imprint of those letters; the which, when the spirit of a man be thus stamped by it, makes also a certain impression on the face. Said R. Simeon to them: ‘If so, the likeness of the Mother is not impressed upon the form of that spirit’. They replied: ‘This, Master, is the teaching we have heard from thine own lips: The design of the letters proceeds from the side which is above, and the image of the Mother is impressed upon the spirit. The design of the Mother which is outwardly discernible follows the four prototypes—Man, Lion, Bull, and Eagle, in the Supernal Chariot, and the spirit projects the image of them all for a time, because whatsoever belongs to the domain of the spirit thrusts itself forward and is both visible and invisible. All these forms are designed in the shape of the letters, and although they are ³³ G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford, 1979), 193.


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hidden they are discerned for a short space by those who have eyes to see, by the wise who can comprehend the mystery of wisdom, to contemplate therein’.³⁴

Of those ‘books on physiognomy’ that do explicitly discuss the differences in nature between men and women, most depict man as ‘perfiter than the woman’. But details of this understanding of the physical differences between the sexes are rarely given and never questioned in the more popular treatises themselves. As for the physiognomical traits associated with masculinity or femininity that followed from this distinction, this is not an issue upon which one finds a great deal of consistency. One late sixteenth-century English physiognomist, for example, presented a number of philosophers’ very different ideal pictures of the general character of ‘man’ and ‘woman’. He claimed that in the eyes of Abano, the thirteenth-century Italian philosopher and physician, men were: of a liuely minde and courage, and unto brunte or an attempt prest and vehement: yet slowly moued to yre, slowly pleased, aduised in businesse, in due and fytte tymes studious, abroade lyberall, stowte, iuste, trustie, unconstant or wandring from place to place, and true of his worde.³⁵

On the other hand, he wrote of how the Arabic physician, Avicenna, saw women as more pittiful and gentle than men: more conuertible, lighter perswaded, sooner seduced, enuiouser, fearefuller, unshamefaster, more foolishe, lyars, more fraudulent, more receiue frawde, more esteeming trifles, slower, tenderer, weaker, and more prone, or sooner drawing into familiaritie, and into companie with another.

But this refers to the general ideal of the man or woman. Moreover, as far as these treatises go, they were never entirely consistent on this matter. The aforementioned late eighteenth-century English text, Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece, when claiming what the art of physiognomy could do, was less convinced that virtue or vice was the monopoly of any one ‘sex’, claiming that ‘the disposition, vice, virtues, and fatality, either of a man or a woman, are plainly foretold’. In fact this same eighteenth-century text reveals a certain discomfort with the problem of the physiognomical distinction between the sexes: In the judgement that is to be made from physiognomy, there is a great difference betwixt a man and a woman, the reason is, because in respect of the whole composition, men do more fully comprehend it than women do, as may evidently appear by the ³⁴ Spelling et al., The Zohar, Jethro 73a–74a, 224–5.

³⁵ Hill, Contemplation, sigs. Biiiir–v.

194 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 manner and method we shall give in the following section. Wherefore the judgments, which we shall pass in every chapter, do properly concern a man, as comprehending the whole species, and but improperly the woman, as being but a part thereof, and derived from the man . . . But does physiognomy give the same judgement on her, as it does of a man that is like unto her? By no means, but far otherwise, in regard that the conception of the woman is much different from that of a man, even in those respects which are said to be common. Now in those common respects, two parts are attributed to a man, and a third part to a woman.³⁶

As it is an eighteenth-century text, it is suggestive of a change in the understanding of the physiognomy of the sexes. Indeed, paradoxical as it might sound, one might argue that it is in the ambiguity of such passages that, physiognomically speaking, women became the privileged site of the limits of Enlightened rationality. In other words, they represented the aspect of the human self which remained defiantly ungraspable and uncontainable by a potentially all-embracing, infallible, rational, physiognomical science. As the following chapter will make clearer, this sense of women being seen as the physiognomical locus of a self-transforming, physiognomical liberty may have been an inheritance of the metaphysical framework of the hermetic understanding of the art of physiognomy which, in aiming at self-transformation, offered all of its exponents, male and female, one way out of any oppressive physiological (and astrological), and thus theological or sociological, determinism. As for the issue of sex and gender as articulated in specific physiognomics, some treatises, particularly from the latter part of the early modern period, suggested that there was no sexual distinction to be made in the physiognomics. For example, one late eighteenth-century English treatise contains the following note at the end of the section on the hair, ‘Note, that whatsoever signification the hair has in men, it has the same in women also’.³⁷ In the New School of Love (1786), the very short physiognomical exposition, which uses the masculine pronoun throughout, is followed by a similar note: ‘Note. That most of the above observations will hold in either sex’ .³⁸ For all the imprecision in the word ‘most’, it would appear that with regard to the modern feminist issue of ‘gender’ as it is articulated in the English treatises from the later part of the period, the equivalent issue has for the most part been avoided altogether, possibly out of a desire not to restrict the market to men or women. With regard to specific physiognomics being gendered in one way or another, it must be said that some physiognomics meant one thing for a man and another thing for a woman, particularly in popular English treatises pub³⁶ Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece (1764), 99. ³⁸ New School of Love (Glasgow, 1786), 2.

³⁷ Ibid., 101.


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lished in the later part of the period. In Aristotle’s Legacy, one finds: ‘A round Nose at the extremity [and?] small Nostrils, denotes, in a Man Pride and incredulity; in a Woman, mu[ch?] given to Love and lust’. Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece offers another: A nose very sharp on the tip of it, and neither too long nor too short, too thick, nor too thin, denotes the person, if a man, to be of a fretful disposition, always pining and peevish; and if a woman, a scold, contentious, wedded to her own humours; of a morose and dogged carriage, and if married, a plague to her husband.³⁹

But there are few about which one can be certain. For example, one writer gives ‘a Forehead without lines, shews a man to be Effeminate’. Yet one can also find what appears to be the same sign which makes no mention of effeminacy, ‘who hath the Forehead plain and smooth without lines or wrinkles; is signified to be litigious, contending for trifles, vain, fallacious, more simple then wise’. Other explicitly gendered signs appear to be unique, such as ‘a low forhead is no signe of a manly man’.⁴⁰ There are very few physical features which are always given as belonging to a woman, or, if in a man, are seen as a sign of effeminacy. Yet the treatises do provide a sense of an urge for a clear distinction between the male/masculine and the female/feminine through the fact that signs of the ‘manly woman’ and the ‘effeminate man’ are never complimentary. For example, the male with the effeminate voice: ‘Shrill, soft, broken tones mark the speech of the effeminate; for such a voice is found in women and is congruous’;⁴¹ and ‘he that hath a femynyne voyce is soone angry | and of yl nature’.⁴² Similarly, a great (masculine?) voice in a woman, as far as the Kalendar of Shepherds was concerned, was not a good sign (‘a great voice in a woman is an evil sign’).⁴³ Moreover, one can sometimes establish a series of relatively unchanging, and distinctly ‘gendered’, signs. One such is the small round chin. In the midsixteenth century it appeared in some texts in the following form: ‘If the ende of the chin bee rounde, it is a signe of feminine manners, and also it is a signe of a Woman. But the chinne of a man must bee alwaies square.’ And one could still find this physiognomic at the turn of the eighteenth century: ‘round Chin, denotes a Man effeminate, yet haughty and proud’.⁴⁴ Indeed, there is an even more impressive continuity in the gendered meaning given to the white face: ³⁹ Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece (1764), 105. ⁴⁰ Saunders, Palmistry (1676), 174, 172; Arcandam, Most excellent (1592), sig. N3. ⁴¹ Cf. Physiognomonics in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes (Princeton, 1984), i. 1237–50: 813b 1. ⁴² Manzalaoui, Secretum, 381. ⁴³ Heseltine, Shepherds, 153. ⁴⁴ Arcandam, Most excellent (1592), sig. O8v; Aristotle’s Last Legacy [1690?], 26.

196 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 [1558] a white feminine coloure, soft & cold, declareth a cold, soft and te[n]der person. [1619] Alba foemineum, mollem, frigidum. [1653] He that hath it white, womanish, soft, and cold, is tender and effeminate; this colour suits well with women; for such are good natured, but fit for men. [1676] a white Flegmatick Face, intimates a Feminine, soft condition. [1685] A high white complection, bespeaks a man to be good natured, seldome angry, soon pacefied, and ever faithful to his friend, but fearful and effeminate; and therefore is best suited with women, to render them more admirable in the Eyes of their Admirers.

Notwithstanding, a constant feature of the early modern ‘treatises on physiognomy’ is inconsistency. Thus it comes as no surprise to find at least one contradiction even if one restricts the analysis to the English series. In a 1564 edition of the Arcandam treatise one finds: ‘Very White, Strong, Meanness’.⁴⁵ All in all, it is fair to say that the early modern physiognomical eye did not consciously see itself as an emanation of the male gaze. Nor was it. In fact, there is some evidence to suggest that, during the eighteenth century, as the art of physiognomy lost its intellectual status and became more incomprehensible within the framework of the new scientific paradigm, it came increasingly to be seen as a curiosity with which women preoccupied themselves. It was a skill for which women became renowned for being particularly adept. In the mideighteenth century Jacques Pernetti claimed: Very far be it from me, to intend to exclude Women from the Knowledge of Physiognomy; nay, I am apt to think, that their Minds unembarassed with the Spinosities of scholastic Sciences, are more clear and vivid, more subtle and delicate, and consequently better adapted for physiognomical Researches.⁴⁶

Citing Rousseau, Wollstonecraft also gives the impression that it was thought particularly necessary for a woman to have some form of physiognomical expertise given her position in society in the late eighteenth century, writing that women ought to study the mind of man thoroughly, not the mind of man in general, abstractedly, but the dispositions of those men to whom she is subject either by the laws of her country or by the force of opinion. She should learn to penetrate into their real sentiments from their conversation, their actions, their looks, and gestures. She should also have the art, by her own conversation, actions, looks, and gestures, to communicate those sentiments which are agreeable to them, without seeming to intend it. Men will ⁴⁵ Indagine, Introductions (1558), sig. I; Fludd, Utriusque cosmi, II.i.2, 125; Saunders, Physiognomie (1653), 177; Saunders, Palmistry (1676), 202; True Fortune-Teller, 62; Arcandam, Most excellent (1652), sig. Hviiiv–I [missing]. ⁴⁶ Pernetti, Letters, 53.


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argue more philosophically about the human heart; but women will read the heart of men better than they. It belongs to women—if I may be allowed the expression—to form an experimental morality, and to reduce the study of man to a system. Women have most wit, men have most genius; women observe, men reason. From the concurrence of both we derive the clearest light and the most perfect knowledge which the human mind is of itself capable of attaining. In one word, from hence we acquire the most intimate acquaintance, both with ourselves and others, of which our nature is capable; and it is thus that art has a constant tendency to perfect those endowments which nature has bestowed. The world is the book of women.⁴⁷

Wollstonecraft not only suggests that women were more adept at this form of visual literacy; in claiming that ‘women from necessity, because their minds are not cultivated, have recourse very often to what I familiarly term bodily wit’, she came close to a phrase the English author Thomas Hill used in 1556 to describe physiognomy, ‘body skyl’. It was evidently thought to be one way in which women might attain the ‘worldly prudence’ which the expectation of their chastity and modesty usually forbade them.⁴⁸ From this perspective, one might immediately assume that physiognomy was taken to have been a form of female ‘sensibility’. However, it would be misleading to suggest that, by the end of the period under consideration, physiognomy, as a consequence of its declining intellectual status, had become the sole preserve of female ‘sensibility’. In 1771, Henry MacKenzie published his influential novel, Man of Feeling. At one point, the hero Harley encounters a gentleman conversing with a beggar: there was something in [the beggar’s] physiognomy which caught Harley’s notice: indeed physiognomy was one of Harley’s foibles, for which he had been often rebuked by his aunt in the country; who used to tell him, that when he was come to her years and experience, he would know that all’s not gold that glisters.

Despite being rebuked and criticized for his physiognomical beliefs by a woman, his aunt, he persists in them. When conversing with the said gentleman on the subject of how ‘charity to our common beggars is often displaced’, ‘Harley looked again in his face, and blessed himself for his skill in physiognomy’.⁴⁹ Yet although this suggests it was an element in male sensibility, MacKenzie’s Man of Feeling was, in some eyes, a rather effeminate man. This implicit gendering of physiognomical sensibility can be taken as an indication that the early modern physiognomical eye, indeed the early modern physiog⁴⁷ Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1985), 44. ⁴⁸ Hill, Phisiognomie, Preface [unpaginated, 2]; Wollstonecraft, Rights, 142. ⁴⁹ Henry MacKenzie, The Man of Feeling, ed. B. Vickers (1987), 33–4.

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nomatable self never escaped what it saw and experienced as the deep, seemingly innate, and natural metaphysical distinction underpinning the physiognomy of ‘the sexes’. It is also a sign perhaps of the social and cultural prejudices that the physiognomically sensitive Romantics were up against.

An Oral Physiognomical Tradition In this final section I want to return to the issue of the physiognomical capabilities of the ‘illiterati’ by asking was there an oral tradition of physiognomony, and, if so, how extensive was it? What relationship did that oral physiognomical tradition bear to that which is represented in the ‘books on physiognomy’? Fragments of that oral physiognomical tradition have been handed down to posterity in the form of numerous early modern physiognomical proverbs. These are found, paradoxically, in numerous written and printed collections of adages and proverbial sentences, such as, ‘vultus amici index’. As this particular proverb shows, and as stated earlier, many of them encapsulated the essence of the art of physiognomy rather than being actual physiognomical aphorisms. Moreover, many variations on this proverb have survived, such as ‘the eyes are the windows of the soul’, ‘the eyes are the mirror of the heart’, ‘the face is the mirror[/index] of the soul/mind’. There were others which encapsulated one or other of both sides of the debate about the veracity of physiognomy, such as fronte nulla fides and fronte multa fides, and similarly ‘fair face fair heart’, ‘fair face foul heart’, ‘ane thrawart will, ane thrawin Phisnomy’, or its Latin version: Distortum vultum sequitur distortio morum, or the same version for the hands: ‘he that hath good handes, must nedes have good customes’. Some were essentially physiognomical aphorisms, such as: curled hair, curled sense, ‘red hair, beware’, ‘the Red is Witty, the Brown Trusty, the Pale Peevish, the Black Lusty’, ‘rarely is a small man humble, a red man faithful, a white man brave, and a tall man wise’.⁵⁰ Although they were known throughout Europe, little is known about the actual scale of this sort of knowledge or the overall narrative of these physiognomical proverbs, or indeed proverbs as a whole. In general, proverbs have been called the ‘small change of [Renaissance and early modern] conversation’. Erasmus thought they should be included in school notebooks. The English ⁵⁰ See B. J. Whiting and H. W. Whiting, Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases (Cambridge, Mass., 1968); Daniel Arnoldi, Sententiae proverbiales (Cologne, 1675), 6, 25.


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gentleman scholar John Evelyn certainly respected their wisdom and authority. Proverbs were often presented pictorially. Indeed, it has been suggested that at the time that the Dutch painter Pieter Breughel was painting proverbs, literary proverbs had reached ‘unprecedented heights of popularity’. Another historian has suggested that, whilst proverbs were very fashionable with late sixteenth-century English writers, by the eighteenth century there appears to have been a reaction in which they ‘were first frowned upon and then banished from polite literature, and, finally, from polite conversation’.⁵¹ What, then, was their relationship to the wisdom of the textual physiognomics in these ‘books on physiognomy’? There certainly appears to have been something of a symbiotic relationship between the oral and the textual physiognomical traditions. Many of the ‘books on physiognomy’ contained physiognomical proverbs. One Galenism that had attained proverbial status was often turned to by writers as an authority for the justification of this textual physiognomony: ‘This confirms the old Proverb, Animi mores corporis temperamentum sequuntur; The disposition of the soul follows the temperament of the body’. Johannes de Indagine’s famous treatise is notable for this tendency to rest the authority of a physiognomical aphorism upon a proverb, such as in the following case: ‘the face of them that be very cleane, is meane in the cheekes, and temples, & somwhat fat. And that face is a true face, louing and not disdaineful. The mery face commeth of a mery heart, and so the contrary.’ A further sign of this symbiotic relationship is the fact that, in addition to incorporating actual proverbs, many of the physiognomical aphorisms in these treatises partake in the rhetorical nature of the proverb, and not only in the more popular treatises. Physiognomics with the simplicity of the proverb ‘Unknown unkissed’ can be found in even the most erudite works. The following aphorism on the nose is just one of many found in Robert Fludd’s enigmatic encyclopedia, ‘blunt weak’ [obtusus mollitiem]. Some more expansive physiognomics were characterized by a distinctly proverbial rhythmic and alliterative quality, ‘A round face signifieth folly: and a great face signifieth sloth’, whilst others were actually versified, ‘Of a red Beard and black Hair, | If th’art wise, thou’lt have a care’, and some physiognomics, such as the one about the bearded woman, blended into another ancient genre known as ‘curse tablets’ (tabellae defixionium), ‘Of such a woman you have this Proverb, Foeminam ⁵¹ M. P. Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England (Ann Arbor, 1950), pp. v and vii; N. Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England (1989), chs. 5 and 74; Desiderius Erasmus, The Education of Children, trans. Richard Sherry, in Richard Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), facs. (Gainesville, 1961), 204; Evelyn, Numismata, 299–301; B. Claressens and J. Rousseau, Netherlandish Proverbs (1969), 199; Tilley, Proverbs, p. viii.

200 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 barbatam lapidibus eminus salutandam esse. A bearded woman should saluted be | With Stones at distance at her head to flee.⁵² Erasmus’s Adages, alongside the famous book of the Bible, are just two monuments to the esteem in which the proverbial oral tradition was held in a society evidently soaked in such wisdom. But it was more than just a scholarly bookish respect, it was a living respect. Jean Belot, the early seventeenthcentury French Kabbalist and author of a ‘book on physiognomy’, invented his own aphorism for the big nose, ‘whereupon to recreate my self I made this distick or Epigram, on the praise of one of these Noses, in imitation of Martial: Cui longu est & pendulus nasus viri | Pendentem habet longuamque valde mentulam’, whilst a litigious lawyer friend of John Aubrey’s, the Anglo-Dutch merchant James Boevey, coined one in honour of his dislike of people with red hair, ‘In a red pelt there is no soul without poison’ [In rusa pelle non est animus sine felle].⁵³ And the underlining in one Italian edition of Michael Scot’s physiognomical treatise now in the Vatican library suggests that the proverbs in ‘books on physiognomy’ did not go unconsidered (Illustration 23). Being part of a wider body of relatively common and frequently repeated knowledge which had the authority of both a rational and a mystical antiquity, much of this proverbial physiognomical wisdom could easily stand as a form of what Aquinas called self-evident truth, or even as an aspect of the original, unwritten Adamic language.⁵⁴ But, whilst this might be seen as evidence of the vivacity of the oral physiognomical tradition, the question remains, to what extent should these physiognomical proverbs be seen as evidence of both a wider and very different oral physiognomical tradition, or ‘pre-textual Logos’, which has now been lost and which Renaissance hermeticists were trying to use poetry and art to recover? This is a difficult, if not impossible, question to answer. As we have just seen, there was something of a symbiotic relationship between the printed and the oral physiognomical tradition. Folk-tales provide further evidence of this and of popular physiognomical assumptions. For example, there is a legend of a red-haired family upon whom the beggars were frightened to set their eyes.⁵⁵ The latter is an example of an agreement between the oral and the written tradition. Yet it still raises the chicken or egg question of which one was following ⁵² Vulson, Curiositie, 115; Arcandam, Most excellent (1592), sig. O2v; Tilley, Proverbs, p. vi; Fludd, Utriusque cosmi, II.i.2, 126, taken from Pompeo Gaurico, De sculptura (Florence, 1504), sig. Cviv; Arcandam, Most excellent (1592), sig. O2v–O3; Saunders, Physiognomie (1671), 186, 191; T. S. Barton, Power and Knowledge (Ann Arbor, 1994), 97; Saunders, Physiognomie (1653), 171. ⁵³ Tilley, Proverbs, pp. vi–viii; Saunders, Physiognomie (1653), 174. See Jean Belot, Les œuvres de m. Iean Belot (Rouen, 1640), 302–3; Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1898), i. 113. ⁵⁴ J. Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford, 1980), 32. ⁵⁵ K. M. Briggs, A Dictionary of English Folk-Tales in the English Language, 2 vols. (1971), ii. 2, 16.


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23. The memorization of these physiognomical proverbs was obviously important enough to inspire this graffiti from one reader which emphasises the proverb ‘you rarely see a small man patient, a red man faithful, a tall man wise’. Michael Scot, La physionomia natural di Michel Scotto (Vinegia, 1546), Rome: Biblioteca Vaticana, [Racc. Gen. Class. Ital. V 414], sig. Gvir. (Photo: Rome: Biblioteca Vaticana.)

the other. Moreover, it also raises the issue of the aspects of that oral tradition which were not captured textually. In his 1653 ‘book on physiognomy’ the distinctly literate English astrologer Richard Saunders claimed that proverbs derived from the written physiognomical tradition: ‘He that hath the nose hairy at the point, or above, is a person altogether simple hearted, whence came the Proverb, He is an honest man, he hath a hairy Nose’. However, he offered no proof of this claim. On the other hand, in the passage on physiognomy that Pompeo Gaurico added to his writing on sculpture, his very definition of physiognomy, as was his aforementioned notion of the images of the illustrious that arise in the mind from a sense of their moral character, was interwoven with, indeed seems to take some authority from, proverbial wisdom: Physiognomony is a manner of observing by which we deduce the qualities of the soul from the traits that appertain to the body. In effect, one recognises, according to the proverb, the artisan through his tools and the nature of the master by his house. Now,

202 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 as this rule is reversible and perhaps taken in both senses, it is completely indispensable to the sculptor; because we would have produced either an image after living models, as you made me see for Calpurnius, or to imagine the appearance of the dead after their well known moral characters.⁵⁶

There is other textual evidence that is at least suggestive of aspects of a strong oral physiognomical tradition that was not captured in texts. Particularly helpful for this are the writings of Paracelsus, notwithstanding the scholarly problems of working out which work is a genuinely Paracelsian one. Even the most cursory glance at his writings reveals that none of the Paracelsian physiognomics appears to be based on any of the signs one finds in ‘books on physiognomy’. In fact, Paracelsus does not appear to provide very many specific physiognomical signs in his writings. He comes close to this in a chapter he explicitly devoted to physiognomy. There he wrote that a person with black hair will have the nature of a person with black hair: The person who wants to get to understand the mature beings of nature must know about things that he cannot see. Because what he sees and how much he sees will be given a name. The name for what he sees is nothing for he sees nothing when his eyes only distinguish the outside/externality. However, there is nothing external which is not a sign of the internal. If black hair grows, this indicates a person with such a nature. If there is red hair then it indicates that. Everything must evolve from that which belongs to it, like a peach indicates its tree. Now there is nothing among the hidden things in nature, in the Arcanis, and in all properties which does not have its own body. The man who likes to steal has his own body which is different from the body of the person who does not like to steal, like white is from black.

Just exactly what the nature of a person with black hair was considered to be is not stated explicitly. It is simply assumed. Even those physiognomics in a printed treatise which bears the name of Paracelsus as author and which dealt with what were referred to as the physiognomical signs of death, were really only a version of the Hippocratic ‘facies’.⁵⁷ There are other ways in which the physiognomy of Paracelsus is clearly distinguishable from the textual physiognomical tradition. As was shown in Chapter 1, the physiognomical eye of the written, pseudo-Aristotelian tradition contained what was described as a ‘characterological prism’. This came into operation during the more deductive process of physiognomating when the eye searched for marks of specific metaphysical traits, and those traits were ⁵⁶ Saunders, Physiognomie (1671), 195; Gaurico, De sculptura (1969), 128. ⁵⁷ Paracelsus, Opera (Strasburg: Lazari Zekners, 1603), i. 763.


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conceived of as full-blown characters such as ‘the gambler’, ‘the angry man’, and ‘the shy man’. Paracelsus’s physiognomical eye, as his description of black hair and his notion of lumen naturae suggests, was supported by a very specific metaphysics. However, it does not appear to contain any of these deductive structures. Paracelsus’s own writings contain fragments of what might be termed nationalistic physiognomy. For example, he was not particularly enamoured of the French: ‘And so by Chiromancy and Physiognomy one can tell what the difference is between us and the French people’.⁵⁸ But this is all. The writings of Paracelsus do not contain detailed discussions of the theory of what Johannes Alsted called physiognomia orta. Similarly, as astrological as Paracelsus’s conception of physiognomy was, the traditional physiognomies of the planets and the signs of the zodiac are not prominent in his ideas on physiognomy, thus distinguishing his sense of the physiognomical eye even further from the textual tradition. For all that Paracelsus committed his thoughts to paper, he was notoriously anti-bookish, and this comes out in his writings. Mention has been made of how the authors of books on physiognomy often refer to the name of an earlier authority, be it Albertus Magnus or Polemon. Paracelsus often seems to want to highlight this distance between his physiognomy and the physiognomy of the textual physiognomical tradition by frequent reference to an often implicit, proverbial, and as such an oral physiognomical authority, rather than any of the named textual authorities. Take the following passage in which Paracelsus discusses the flexibility in the meaning of the physiognomical sign: For there is not only one sign for one quality, . . . it has lots of meaning in it . . . It’s the same with physiognomy. There are the eyes, nose, mouth, jaws etc., which belong to the physiognomy. Now, one is looking into the face. One is good, the other evil, one is in the middle, one has a penchant to this, one to something different, and so there are many things like this. But the face is a mixed forecast of all the qualities that can be found in the human being. The same thing with a rock. It might give silver, even despite bad forecasting. And it might give nothing even if it has good indications. In the same way the face is a mixed forecasting . . . So that if you want to tell about a person after their physiognomy, you have to take everything together, then you can find what there is. For example, in desperate situations you can see what there is because in desperate needs things are coming to the surface, and then physiognomy will show what character is, for before it could have been that he was hiding his infidelity . . . When he comes under fire, his pearl will come out, his silver will be put on the balance.

The phrases ‘the same thing with a rock’ and ‘under fire, his pearl will come out’, covering a spectrum of non-textual wisdom, show how, in Paracelsus’s ⁵⁸ Paracelsus, Sämtliche Werke, ed. K. Sudhoff and W. Matthiessen, 15 vols. (Munich, 1922–33), xii. 443.

204 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 eyes, the spectrum of physiognomical hermeneutics ranged from the doctrine of signatures (the rock) to the sphere of local proverbial wisdom of ‘everything will out in the end’. Indeed, nuggets of this sort of proverbial sagesse appear again and again in various guises throughout the passages in which Paracelsus discusses physiognomy. For example, ‘physiognomy is the recognition of the inner hidden things of man . . . You can tell what is in the heart of somebody because he who has a full heart has a mouth that will flow-over.’ A German proverb to the effect of ‘if you have something to tell other people which is very important to you, your mouth will give way to a wave of words’ is behind this: the same proverb that one finds on the work of Jacob Cats, ‘whatever your vice is, however you hide it, the mouth will reveal it’ [‘Quisque suo vitium, quot tegit, ore gerit’]. It also appears behind the following physiognomical observation, which, in turn, takes Paracelsus back to the doctrine of signatures: although the eyes of human beings show perfectly well the physiognomy of their hearts’ desires, the ears of their mood’s luxury, the tongue will show what they are filled with inwards. Such signs can be found in flowers e.g. in those parts of the flowers that play the role of the tongue.

In the following passage, both the doctrine of signatures as well as some obvious biblical and genealogical overtones are clearly discernible in his proverbial claim that ‘one can tell the tree by the fruit’: what his heart desires, his ears will hear, his eyes will see what he is searching for. That’s why the same person can be judged by physiognomia coelestis and will give knowledge by his behaviour. You can tell by the fruit which is the tree.

Indeed, this proverbial logic appears to be based on the empirical and thus authoritative experience of everyday face-to-face encounters. Paracelsus describes one such encounter in the following way: you come to him, begging him to lend you a sum of money, by fidelity. And if you see that this is his fire, you bring into daylight what is in him apart from being faithful. If you think that he is faithful make him join you in your desperate need, look how the fire will behave. It is like the smoke in a smith’s pit, it flees. Thus will the fidelity flee. That’s why you should know that in all things you should judge by reason of the things that are shown in nature. It is the same thing in the face. One face has many faithful signs and a few unfaithful signs. One person has many signs of one thing and few of another thing, but one should always pay attention to the signs that have been made by nature to mark somebody.

One could even go so far as to argue that this passage reveals how it was an everyday proverbial physiognomical experience which was intellectualized and


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which entered the written form of the doctrine of signatures in the natural magic concept of ‘sympathy’. It is the everyday phenomenology of these faceto-face encounters, often embodied in proverbial wisdom, that appears to be at the basis of Paracelsus’s art of physiognomy, which he then conceptualizes and stretches across the terrain he calls his ‘astronomy’ through the notion of signatum, analogy, and into the doctrine of signatures. Given the wider relevance of physiognomy to the medicine of Paracelsus, evident in such passages as: ‘Each illness and its remedy are of equal physiognomy, chiromancy and anatomy. And without this no doctor may be who has understood the reason’; and given the extent to which the foundations of Paracelsus’s physiognomy appears to be in proverbial wisdom, then this oral proverbial wisdom can be said to have been a fundamental aspect of the intellectual foundations of Paracelsian medical logic, which claimed everyday common experience as the highest source of wisdom.⁵⁹ The conceptual untidiness of Paracelsus’s physiognomy in its textual form (sometimes seven, sometimes nine ‘religions’ or ‘faculties’ in his ‘astronomy’; sometimes ‘habitus’, sometimes ‘proportion’ was said to be one of the three things that made up his ‘signatum’) suggests that there was more to it in its oral form than recorded in his writings—as far as one can retrieve it. This is not surprising. Indeed, it seems perfectly in keeping with Paracelsus’s frequent claim that true medicine came not from reading books but from looking and listening; from observing the book of nature with a magical eye. It was the illiterate peasants, not the university-educated physicians, who were the masters of this sort of medicine—illiterate peasants and old women. Indeed, at this point Paracelsus brings us back to the argument put forward in the previous chapter about the social impetus in terms of which the spread of the ‘Egyptian’ wisdom of the Corpus hermeticum and the particular sort of physiognomy that resulted from it have to be understood and explained. Paracelsus added another type of person to this list of the uneducated, un-academic learned, the ‘Egyptians’: ‘Learn of old Women, Egyptians, and such-like persons; for they have greater experiences in such things than all the Academicians’.⁶⁰

Conclusion A certain degree of continuity can be established among the physiognomies in these texts, but not in a very scientific way. The changes and disagreements are ⁵⁹ Ibid., xiv. 182; xii. 343; x. 300; xii. 343; xiv. 183–4; x. 261. ⁶⁰ Cited in A. G. Debus, The French Paracelsians (Cambridge, 1991), 9.

206 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 for the most part explicable in terms of the nature of textual transmission. However, these textual physiognomics need for the most part to be understood in terms of the different early modern epistemological understandings of the natural or purely arbitrary link between the signifier and the thing signified. The origins of any particular physiognomic, when not obviously the product of a particular form of logic or dialectic, or a previous, earlier text, often appears to reside in the physical appearance of a famous historical or mythical personage. It is more fruitful to approach this issue as representing a physiognomical conception of history and follow the implications which the innate iconicity of the language of physiognomony has for the relationship of physiognomy, not only to the history of hieroglyphics and emblems but also to the history of art and the creation and perception of images more generally. Notwithstanding these issues, the physiognomics in these early modern treatises suggest that physiognomy was more concerned with virtue than with beauty. Having said that, the Neoplatonic link between beauty and virtue comes through in some of these treatises, suggesting that physiognomy may have contributed to the birth of the aesthetic. If physiognomony was more concerned to warn people away from the seductions of beauty, it also had a more pragmatic, less ethical, more political element. Applied physiognomics was more concerned in choosing the right person for the job rather than judging them on the purely ethical grounds of good and bad. Finally, I also argued that there was an oral physiognomical tradition. Oral traditions represented the sort of knowledge to which everyone had access, including those who could not read books. If the meanings in these texts are some of the meanings through which people throughout Europe used to understand each other’s eyes, and their own physiognomies, other people, and the rest of nature’s natural bodies, then, like the many different local languages and dialects of early modern Europe, an oral physiognomical tradition may have provided those who could not read (and even those who could) with a very different range of physiognomical meanings beyond those found in the textual physiogomical tradition.⁶¹ Like the physiognomical métier of the gypsies, there appears to have been some sort of oral physiognomical tradition which, for all that some of it may have been captured in proverbs or in the writings of the Zohar, is now lost. ⁶¹ F. Loux and P. Richard, Sagesse du corps (Paris, 1978), 11 ff.

5 Physiognomating by the Book In these two final chapters I want to provide present readers with an idea of how the reading of the physiognomony in these books worked its natural magic in such a way as to bring the reader to some form of self-knowledge. I will also try to offer a way of understanding how, in the early modern period, the hermetic sense of reading the art of physiognomy gave rise to an ‘internal cinema’ that was thought to be capable of bringing about a self-transformation, or what was referred to in the Corpus hermeticum as a ‘regeneration’. With the gestation of time, and with all the intellectual, religious, social, political, and cultural changes that took place between the late fifteenth century and the late eighteenth century, this intensely religious process of ‘regeneration’ was lost sight of, and reading a ‘book on physiognomy’ was transformed into a much more light-hearted form of recreation. Those changes are encapsulated in the overarching metaphor used in the Introduction of this book, where the reading of a ‘book on physiognomy’ was described as having undergone a ‘shift’ from praying to playing.

The Rhetoric of Physiognomy Historians wishing to reconstruct former ways of reading have developed a methodology in which they talk of the ‘encounter’ between the ‘world of the text’ and the ‘world of the reader’. It is this ‘encounter’ that produces the meaning of the text. In that ‘encounter’ the reader is said to ‘appropriate’ the text. In that encounter the reader can create the meaning of the text, but that act of creation is limited by the form and content of the text being read. In other words, like Marx’s view of man’s relationship to history, as much as readers try to make a text their own, the text also makes them. A more early modern way of putting it would be to talk of the ‘natural magic’ that happens between a person and a book during the act of reading.

208 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 The now standard textbook on the history of reading has raised the following fundamental question, ‘can we . . . document more directly the ways humble folk appropriated the texts that they bought, borrowed or listened to?’¹ The following analysis is an attempt, in part, to reconstruct the way in which ‘books on physiognomy’ were read by more ‘humble folk’, or rather, given the limitations of the extant evidence, the more ‘humble ways’ in which they were read. That is to say it deals with readings which were not driven by the demands of any particular professional discipline but by engaging with the subject on its own terms as an alleged provider of a way of coming to some sort of self-knowledge. Some ‘books on physiognomy’ were undoubtedly read and ‘studied for action’ by the wide variety of the disciplined professionals who owned copies of them.² The reading of many a ‘book on physiognomy’, for example, would have given the Renaissance humanist in any scholar plenty of material upon which to practise his philological investigations, encouraging a search through a labyrinth of newly acquired, but preciously ancient, manuscripts in Latin, Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew, in an attempt to discover the ancient roots of the subject. Wearing his more abstract hat as an Aristotelian natural philosopher, any decent Renaissance scholar would have transformed or appropriated a banal textual exposition of physiognomical doctrine into a sophisticated-sounding semiotic system. Distinctions would have been made in his mind between this ‘celestial’ physiognomic and that ‘sub-celestial’ physiognomic; between those ‘sub-celestial’ physiognomics that were ‘elementary’ and those that were ‘mixed’; between ‘signs’ which were ‘necessary’ or ‘contingent’, ‘proper’ or ‘common’, ‘permanent’ or ‘transient’; and between signs classifiable according to size, colour, movement, even light.³ The pure logician in any Renaissance scholar had much to learn from the art of physiognomy about the logic of what was known as ‘the syllogism’. In fact, the art of physiognomy provided European logic with a syllogism all of its own.⁴ Known everywhere as the ‘physiognomical syllogism’, it was often presented in diagrammatic form (Illustration 24). The early modern lawyer concealed inside this logician would have been more concerned with assessing the utility of the physiognomical syllogism for his more practical métier. James Boevey, the mid-seventeenth-century Anglo-Dutch merchant-turned-lawyer ¹ G. Cavallo and R. Chartier (eds.), The History of Reading in the West (Cambridge, 1999), 281. ² A. Grafton and L. Jardine, ‘ “Studied for action”: How Gabriel Harvey read his Livy’, Past and Present, 129 (1990), 3–51. ³ See Johannes Alsted, Encyclopaedia septem tomis distincta, 4 vols. (Herborn, 1630), ii. 767 ff. ⁴ See, for example, Augustus Niphus, Parua naturalia (Venice, 1550 [–1551]), fol. 6v.

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24. Diagram of the physiognomical syllogism, Giambattista Della Porta, De humana physiognomonia (Vici Æquensis, 1586), 27. Private collection

mentioned in Chapter 3 as the author of his own manuscript on physiognomy, was one who did exactly this. His manuscript treatise on ‘the art of going to law’ reveals that the lawyer in him soon discovered the ultimately rhetorical nature of the physiognomic. He gave the following example: ‘He hath a soft skynn; ergo, he is witty. He is an hairy man; ergo, he is lecherous’, and argued that it showed that the connection between the ‘signe’ and the ‘signified’ was contingent rather than necessary. For all that this reveals Boevey’s ‘modern’ position on the issue of the epistemology of the language of physiognomy (that it was an arbitrary, conventional, language, rather than a language which somehow contained a natural link between the words and what those words meant), it does not mean that he therefore simply dismissed it. Indeed, in Boevey’s opinion, this made physiognomical syllogisms more useful to an ‘Orator’ then to a legal ‘Disputant’.⁵ At which point our Renaissance lawyer could have reverted to the ⁵ James Boevey ‘The Art of Going to Law’, Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, B673M3A72 [1665–6], 109; I. Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 2002), esp. 4.3.3.

210 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 Renaissance humanist deep in himself. A glance at the latest Renaissance scholarly edition of the Opera omnia of the celebrated ancient Roman writer Cicero would have provided him with an intriguing classical precedent for exactly this use of physiognomical rhetoric in a court of law in Cicero’s Pro Quinto Roscio.⁶ It was by donning his Renaissance medical cap, on the other hand, that our Renaissance scholar would have provided himself with the largest number of competing theoretical perspectives in terms of which to appropriate this art of physiognomy. As we have seen, although physiognomy was never originally a part of Galenic or Hippocratic medicine, it had been absorbed into both, particularly since the thirteenth century. One pseudo-Galenic text carried the following, much-quoted statement: ‘In those who practise medicine without a knowledge of the subject of physiognomy, the judgement goes to seed, wallowing in darkness’. Less blatant was the Therapeutics for Glaucon, in which Galen advised the study of the eyes of the healthy for the character of the soul as well as of the sick for prognosis.⁷ Mention was made in Chapter 3 how Alexander Achillini, the late fifteenth-century professor of natural philosophy at Bologna and Padua, attempted to read physiognomy in Aristotelian terms in order then to reconcile it with his Averroist perspective.⁸ Most would have examined its conclusions in the light of the famous Galenic aphorism often cited in the treatises themselves: ‘the mores of the soul follow the temperament of the body’. In 1611, Jacques Fontaine, a Galenic physician from Aix-enProvence (d. 1621), who was mentioned in the Introduction to this book, took this so far that he published a book entitled Phisiognomia Aristotelis, in which he gave a Galenic physiological explanation of each of the physiognomical conclusions found in Aristotle. At this point we can return to the aforementioned issue of physiognomy and the history of law. For the lawyer in the humanist in this particular physician found a distinctly legal practical outlet for this apparently less rhetorical, more ‘scientific’ form of physiognomical knowledge—the persecution of witches.⁹ Yet in some ways the art of physiognomy was more simple than that. Given that the physiognomony in these books was the more or less systematized product of a seemingly common-sense way of seeing and listening, is there a way in which the physiognomy found in these books was read that distances it from the clearly defined academic philosophical frameworks through which it was ⁶ E. C. Evans, ‘Physiognomy in the Ancient World’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s. 59, 5 (Philadelphia, 1969), 43. ⁷ T. S. Barton, Power and Knowledge (Ann Arbor, 1994), 206, fn. 18. ⁸ B. P. Copenhaver, ‘Astrology and Magic’, in C. B. Schmitt and Q. Skinner (eds.), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, 1988), 264–300: 271–2. ⁹ Jacques Fontaine, Des marques des sorciers (Lyon, 1611), 4 ff.


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analysed and appropriated, and brings it closer to its instinctive, even pre-textual, audio-visual roots? With regard to such less scholarly, less ‘bookish’ readings of a ‘book on physiognomy’, one question recently posed in relation to ‘the physiology of reading’ is of relevance here: ‘what is it that passes from page to mind when someone reads, and how does it have an effect?’¹⁰ What occurs in the following analysis might be helpfully thought of as an attempt to establish and investigate the ‘physiognomy of reading’. One enters the realms of the ‘physiognomy of reading’ by focusing initially upon the early modern art of rhetoric—in the case of these texts, the rhetoric that underpinned an early modern exposition of physiognomical doctrine in textual form. The early modern interest in emblems and hieroglyphs as well as in physiognomy was part of the rediscovery of the troubling Egyptian aspect of the antiquity and classicism that constituted such a fundamental part of the period known as the Renaissance. Another part of that reawakening classicism was the rediscovery not only of classical rhetoric but also of the visual power of the rhetoric of the art of physiognomy. The second-century Roman political orator Polemon represented the best classical example of how to use physiognomical rhetoric as a ‘new magic’ in the ‘winning of [his audience’s] souls’.¹¹ The most famous seventeenth-century physiognomist, the Italian natural philosopher and playwright Giovanni Battista Della Porta, was also very aware of this. This is most clearly and simply demonstrated by turning to his famous text, the opening pages of which included a woodcut of Cardinal Luigi d’Este—the man to whom he had originally dedicated his De Physiognomia Humana (1586) (Illustration 25). The verse underneath the Cardinal’s face invited readers to inspect this image of the great hero of Este, ‘whose soul is even more dignified than his dignified face’. This was then followed by an extended physiognomical interpretation of Este’s face that clearly shows the rhetorical power of the art of physiognomy. It was, as Della Porta described it, ‘an example of the way in which to put into practice the rule of physiognomy’ using the ‘effigy’ of the most illustrious and reverend cardinal.¹² Whilst this is yet another suggestion of the need for historians to explore the development of the early modern portrait in terms of the spread of this interest in physiognomical rhetoric, in what follows we shall focus on the impact of the rhetorical aspect of the physiognomony present in the (often illustrated) books on the subject. As stated above, the physiognomy that happens between two people is different from the physiognomy that happens between a person and a book. None the less, examining the rhetorical structure of an exposition of ¹⁰ A. Johns, The Nature of the Book (Chicago, 1998), 386. ¹¹ Barton, Power, 97. ¹² Giambattista Della Porta, Della fisonomia dell’huomo (Naples, 1610), sig. Aov.

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25. ‘Physiognomical rhetoric’ of one sort or another often accompanied early modern portraits. Woodcut of Cardinal Luigi d’Este, Giambattista Della Porta, De humana physiognomonia (Vici Æquensis: Apud Iosephum Cacchium, 1586), 4. Private collection.

physiognomical doctrine is the first step towards reconstructing how readers read early modern ‘books on physiognomy’, and, as a result, might provide some indirect evidence of the process of physiognomation as it occurred between a fisnomier and a client. Despite one or two exceptions, the basic structure underlying any textual exposition of physiognomical doctrine, be it the physiognomy in ancient papyri, medieval manuscripts, or Renaissance and early modern printed texts and pamphlets, is more or less exactly the same—a list. Numerous early modern authors even went so far as to present this essential structure in some sort of


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tabulated form (see Illustration 22). In the enormously condescending eyes of posterity, these lists of physiognomics (like the individual physiognomics themselves) appear too crude, illogical, or simply inane to be taken seriously. Even if one dares to speak of the ‘narrative structure’ in a list of physiognomics, it consisted of nothing more than a simple, straight line running, usually, from the head to the feet. It lacked all those more interesting features so characteristic of Renaissance dialogues, sixteenth-century plays, or the seventeenthcentury romances that in the eighteenth century gave way to the rise of the novel: the cut and thrust of witty dialogue, the dramatic twists of plot, and the temporal development of characters. However, it is this apparent banality that turns out to have been a fundamental aspect of what made these texts interesting. Two very specific rhetorical effects ensued as a consequence of the aforementioned literary banality of these lists of physiognomics. Both were characterized by a form of engagement with the text on what might be described as the text’s own terms. One was a consideration of what the physiognomics implied about the ‘physiognomy’ of another person. The second was a reflection upon what the physiognomics implied about the reader’s own ‘physiognomy’. As will become evident, both routes could lead to the consideration of the nature of the divine and the contemplation of the physiognomy of the Godhead. Either way, the rhetorical result was universally the same. It was the readers who metaphorically supplied those narrative and dramatic deficiencies by placing themselves ‘inside’ the text, or by placing the text ‘inside’ themselves. Those readers then became the central ‘characters’ around whom the potentially efficacious physiognomical narrative was spun. In brief, a dialogue commenced. Readers began to physiognomate themselves, or each other. The plot thickened. Let us put aside the issue of the different epistemological understandings of the printed physiognomics in one of these texts which any reader may have had, and simply assume that an exposition of physiognomical doctrine was being read alone, in private, for example, by a nun at the turn of the sixteenth century. Her solitary, self-reflective process of self-physiognomation could have been triggered off by a single aphorism. Taking an arbitrary entry point, she would have read that ‘thin lips signifieth lecherousness and lyings’.¹³ There were numerous pathways in her mind along which this physiognomical oracle would have travelled towards her understanding of what had long been understood in the Christian West as her ‘inner self ’.¹⁴ If she had thin lips, and knew ¹³ The Kalendar & Compost of Shepherds [1508], ed. G. C. Heseltine (1932), 153. ¹⁴ Taylor, Sources of the Self, 129 ff.

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she was slightly lecherous and susceptible to lying, the impact of the alleged truth of the aphorism could have been quite powerful, even uncanny. For until that moment she may never have considered herself a person normally disposed to such vices, but now felt that this aphorism spoke as an authoritative and timely omen. This rhetorical effect was all the more likely if she had already been strongly struck by, and convinced about, the truth of one of the physiognomics she had read earlier in the text. From then on, she may have felt that she had to guard herself against the vices of lechery and lying. Indeed, she may have come to credit the physiognomic with the powerful and memorable revelation of an aspect of her personality of which she had hitherto been unaware, or had been trying to deny or to suppress in herself. It was, after all, a widely accepted notion that it was not good to lie. In addition, there was an abundance of widely known physiological explanations for a variety of physiognomical aphorisms which she could have drawn upon to underpin the veracity of the aphorism, available in such popular works as Manfredi’s Liber de homine.¹⁵ If she had thin lips but was a model nun, utterly convinced that she did not have an inclination to lechery or to lying, she could have resisted the ancient wisdom of the aphorism and concluded that the sign was either wrong or not applicable to her. She may then have moved on to the next aphorism, or have decided to call into question the overall validity of physiognomy as a scientia and drop the manuscript on the spot. Or she might have concluded, Socratically, that despite the natural meaning of her physical appearance, she had succeeded in overcoming the vices to which the unquestionable natural truth of this physiognomic and her own physiognomy so naturally disposed her. This is how Socrates is said to have responded to what he admitted was the true, albeit unfavourable, assessment of his snub-nosed physiognomy by the famous Syrian physiognomist Zopyrus. Even if she was, in reality, distinctly blubber-lipped, the aphorism about thin lips might still have troubled her with its suggestion that she was susceptible to lechery and lying. She could have rejected the verity of either the aphorism or the entire discourse of physiognomony as an acceptable scientia, yet still contemplated the plausibility of the suggestion that she was inclined to lechery and lying. Similarly, she could have rejected this particular sign but located these vices in another of her physical features. Such may have been our hypothetical reader’s reaction were she a blubber-lipped, ‘hawked-nosed’ nun, who then encountered the following aphorism later in the same text: ‘A hawked ¹⁵ Girolamo Manfredi, Liber de homine (Bologna, 1474), Lib II, cap. V.


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nose that boweth to the upper lips signifieth malice, deceit, untruth, and lechery’. Of course, our blubber-lipped nun may also have been distinctly snubnosed, and yet still felt the inner twang of the recognition of a tendency to lechery and lying in herself. In this case, she may have then returned to her lips and, in this re-examination, begun to think of, or even actually see, them as thin. After all, how thin are thin lips? Whilst there is an obvious and real distinction between blubber lips and thin lips, long faces and round faces, big chins and small chins, certainty in such self-description is neither as easy nor as visually self-evident as one might imagine. This is perhaps especially the case when someone is beholding themselves. In the middle of the seventeenth century, even a person as ‘rational’ and ‘enlightened’ as the duc de Rochefoucauld had exactly this problem. One of the parlour games in the salon of Mademoiselle de Montpensier, the ‘Grande Mademoiselle’, consisted of inviting the guests to compose written ‘portraits’ of themselves. From Rochefoucauld’s self-portrait, which she included in the collection she published in 1659, we learn that he had always been told that he had ‘too much chin’. Indeed, even the empirical reflexion provided by a mirror did not help him reach a decision on the matter: ‘In the old days I used to be told that I had too much chin: I have just felt it, and also looked in the glass to see if this is so, and I really cannot say whether it is true or not.’¹⁶ To some modern minds, part of the lack of what we see to day as ‘scientific’ certainty in these physiognomical signs lies not only in the absence of any verifiable, causal explanation for each one, or the absence of a causal explanation of their interrelationship, but also in the fact that many of the physiognomical aphorisms in any list appear to contain contradictory meanings. Here we need to return to something that was pointed out in Chapter 1. For the original grammar of the process of physiognomating allows us to understand how it provided Renaissance readers with the means to circumvent such apparent logical obstacles to its sense. Take for example ‘Long ears signifieth folly, but it is a sign of good memory’.¹⁷ One might think ‘folly’ and ‘a good memory’ a contradiction in terms. After all, memory has often been associated with intelligence and wisdom. Yet has there ever been a person who, for all the perfection of their memory, could not be accused of ‘folly’? At moments of intimate confession, even the most arrogant and stubborn of such people might be prepared to admit a streak of folly. Similarly, a large enough dose of folly might easily succeed in persuading an amnesiac of his or her excellent memory. Being able to ¹⁶ The Maxims of the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, trans. C. Fitzgibbon (1957), 19, 24. ¹⁷ Heseltine, Kalendar, 153.

216 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 see that folly symbolically embodied in a physical feature could have provided them with a concrete and daily reminder of an abstract vice that they ought to avoid in themselves, and that they should remember to try to avoid or overcome in society at large. As we saw in Chapter 4, the more complex physiognomic consisted of many apparently different meanings attached to or discoverable within one physical feature: The nose retorte and crokyng upwarde, and long, hauyng the ende congruently grosse: declareth that man to be bolde, proude, a niggarde, enuyouse, couetouse, Ireful, leacherouse, a lyar, a deceauer, vayne gloryouse, unfaythful, a stryuer, and a brawler.¹⁸

However, from a rhetorical point of view, when given time to breathe, when whatever music the words may have had was given time to resonate ‘inside’ the reader, the different meanings in this sign were not seen as contradictions. They became small genealogies of related metaphysical traits—the interlaced strands of morality from the metaphysical web of the self. To that extent, it is worth repeating that these physiognomics could be seen in terms of the semiotic concept of culture espoused by Weber and Geertz, ‘that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun’.¹⁹ In the search for metaphysical meaning rather than physiological explanation, such physiognomics required a more drawn-out meditative form of contemplation. Their range of meanings was weighed and considered at greater length in terms of their relationship to each other, with new meanings teased out of their seeming incompatibilities and even their interstices. In this particular case, the reading nun might have reflected upon the relationship between being proud and being envious. Or she may have considered whether there was a contradiction between being bold and being unfaithful. She could have resorted to the hierarchy built into the classical grammar of this art which was perpetuated in many early modern ‘treatises on physiognomy’ such as the one suggested by the Italian professor Camillo Baldi. One could also alter the meaning given to a particular physical feature in relation to a different, perhaps even contradictory, meaning given to the same feature. In this way one began to meditate upon the genealogy of the ‘mores’ attached to the feature in order to reach some form of conclusion. As was shown in Chapter 1, in one fourthcentury anonymous Latin ‘treatise on physiognomy’, the eye-lashes of loquacity, the forehead of a thinker, and the eyes of raging madness might eventually ¹⁸ Thomas Hill, A brief and most pleasaunt epitomye of the whole art of phisiognomie (1556), sig. Bviv. ¹⁹ C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 4–5.


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be resolved into a loquacity which is less rude and a character which is impetuous rather than mad.²⁰ Whilst the physical feature (the ‘signifier’) which constituted part of the physiognomical ‘sign’ formed such a fundamental part of every physiognomical aphorism in these books, a reader’s engagement with any physiognomical aphorism was not always driven by the physical feature. That engagement was sometimes driven by the words of the meaning attached to it, in other words by the metaphysical aspect of the physiognomic (the ‘signified’). As such, this form of engagement would have wound the reader through any one of a number of the deductive ‘prisms’ through which her physiognomical selfmeditation could have been refracted at any point. As was also pointed out in the first chapter of this book, at the centre of this (in)finite flux of metaphysical states was a ‘characterological prism’. It was, in effect, a pantheon of fully fledged characters (or ‘types’) in the theophrastian sense. This sort of physiognomy, in its theorized form, was what Johannes Alsted called Physiognomia orta. It was also the part of his understanding of physiognomy that had an ‘Aristotelian’ precedent.²¹ Indeed, for all the importance of the philological continuities and changes discernible in the wording of printed physiognomics as they were transmitted across the early modern period, it is perhaps the changes that took place in this characterological prism, be it the prism offered by any ‘book on physiognomy’, the now untraceable characterological prism that was carried around by any particular reader in his or her mind, or the more tangible one that could be said to have dominated the local, public, or national sphere of any region or period, which played the most significant role in this physiognomical process of self-understanding, and would benefit from further investigation. The aforementioned contemplation of the marks of ‘folly’ provide a good example. A more educated, bookish sort of person might follow the hidden textual labyrinth in this single physiognomic and immediately start to think about the universality of this aspect of the human condition and come upon the memory of a passage in Erasmus’s influential book ‘In Praise of Folly’, in which the author, intriguingly, introduced the ‘character’ of Folly in the following, distinctly physiognomical way: To what purpose, think ye, should I describe my self, when I am here present before ye, and ye behold me speaking? For I am, as ye see, that true and onely giver of wealth, ²⁰ Camillo Baldi, In Physiognomica Aristotelis commentarii (Bologna, 1621), 41; Traité de physiognomonie: anonyme latin, ed. J. André (Paris, 1981), 57–60. ²¹ See Physiognomonics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes (Princeton, 1984), i. 1237–50: 807a35–808b10; Alsted, Encyclopaedia, ii. 767–80.

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whom the Greeks call Moria, the Latines Stultitia, (and our plain English, Folly:) Or what need was there to have said so much, as if my very looks were not sufficient to inform ye who I am? Or as if any man, mistaking me for Wisedome, could not at first sight convince himself by my face, the true index of my mind? I am no Counterfeit, nor do I carry one thing in my looks and another in my breast: No, I am in every respect so like my self, that neither can they dissemble me, who arrogate to themselves, the appearance and title of Wisemen, and walk (in purpura simiae) like Asses in Scarlet-hoods; though after all their hypocrisie, Midas’s ears will discover their Master.²²

Either way, the point I wish to make here is that the reader could think about the physical appearance of folly, or the universal ‘character’ of folly in and of itself. Similarly there were other micro-prisms inside this intellectual prism through which this self-meditation could have been refracted, be it the microprisms of an astrological, an ethnological, a mineralogical, or a zoological form of physiognomical contemplation. For example, when engaging with the aforementioned aphorism: ‘A hawked nose that boweth to the upper lips signifieth malice, deceit, untruth, and lechery’, our imaginary reader may have felt the sting of the implicit analogy between her nose and the nose of the hawk as it flew across what Paracelsus would have called her ‘inner firmament’, whereupon the hawk may have begun to take on a new significance for her in her own private emblematic world, and perhaps then even her domestic world. Other possible analogies with minerals and plants may have taken on a purely medical resonance, and contributed to her understanding of her microcosmic relation to the macrocosm. In turn, that understanding of what the theorists called the macrocosm/microcosm analogy may have been refracted through an unconscious and now irretrievable understanding of ‘the physics’ or the astrological workings of the universe—an issue to which we shall return below when considering the workings of the hermetic physiognomical eye. The ‘mood’ of her self-contemplation may also have taken her into the different layers of time which were embedded in the various micro-prisms inside this process of physiognomical self-contemplation. In the pupil of the physiognomical eye, the face being examined became a temporal prism through which the lights of the past, the present, and the future were refracted—a feature which brought the physiognomical eye close to the medical gaze. As the Hippocratic oath stated: ‘Declare the past, diagnose the present, foretell the future’.²³ As much as this would have been seen as a form of temporal divination, it was not necessarily an ‘out-of-the-ordinary’ experience. It was, and still ²² Desiderius Erasmus, Moriae Encomium, trans. John Wilson (1688), 5. ²³ V. Nutton and R. Porter (eds.), The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine (Cambridge, 1996), 58.


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is, not at all unusual for older, ‘more experienced’ people to suggest that the life a person has led in the past is expressed through and can be read in their face, even if it does take the form of banal generalizations. Yet, in the early modern period, discerning one’s more constant and fundamental, or even natural, disposition was often understood in terms of what was called ‘natural magic’. As such, it provided knowledge of what so many early modern people, natural philosophers or not, were searching for—the hidden ‘secrets of nature’. It was this more ‘natural magic’ form of engagement, which, I would argue, was the most universal and common form of reading ‘physiognomy’ in books throughout Europe from the beginning to the end of the early modern period, whether it was ultimately ‘Aristotelian’ or ‘Neoplatonic’, or a mixture of both, or neither. When examined from this more rhetorical point of view, one sees that it was not so much an academic exploration of the ‘truth’ of physiognomy in the sense of Girolamo Cardano’s claim that ‘physiognomics without doubt contains great truth’, constantly examining the logic of its own observations.²⁴ Rather, it was a form of reading driven by the widely accepted proverbial notion that gestured towards the tenaciously occult aspect of nature and that Paracelsus picked from the oral culture of his day—that somehow, inexplicably, ‘truth will out’. In the case of a private physiognomical self-examination, the reader had the physiognomical text as the disembodied, potentially mystical, interlocutor. In the case of Indagine’s very widely known tract, there was also a portrait of the physiognomist to compensate for his absence, which in some cases, the reader made more real by hand painting.

Appropriations The illiterate shepherd’s physiognomical prayer If this basic sense of ‘engagement’ (for all it was demonized, satirized, and eventually medicalized as ‘hypnosis’) with the ‘natural magic’ of a ‘book on physiognomy’ reveals the universality and continuity in the non-disciplined, more ‘humble’ reading practices surrounding these ‘books on physiognomy’, what were the specific changes which this form of engaging with physiognomy in book form underwent across the period? In what follows I want to argue that by examining the overarching conceptual apparatus of ‘books on physiognomy’, one sees how, through the evolution of the influence of the hermetic ²⁴ Cited in Maclean, Logic, 319.

220 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 tradition in early modern Europe, it was a reading practice that underwent a fundamental transformation described above as ‘a shift from praying to playing’. The reading that was a form of praying is particularly evident in the late fifteenth-century French vernacular work entitled the Compost et kalendrier des bergiers. As the progeny of a medieval manuscript tradition (for all its claims to contain the oral wisdom of an illiterate shepherd), the material in this book arose out of a conceptual universe, very different from the present one, in which religion and medicine were still inextricably bound together.²⁵ Generically speaking, the shepherd’s curious text was a hybrid of two mutually complementary genres. One was medical, the other devotional: the regimen sanitatis; and the book of hours. Christendom’s readers had long been familiar with both. The former gave one advice on how to look after one’s body; the latter on how to look after one’s soul. The one offered physical medicine for the ‘temperament’, to ensure one did not die before one’s soul was properly prepared and worthy to enter the garden of virtues after death. The other provided the spiritual medicament for that metaphysical grooming. Each was deeply infused with the star-taste of an astrological influence. From the very opening page of this book, the illiterate shepherd dramatically addressed the audience’s most intimate, burning, and sacred concerns— being and time. First, he pinned the audience to a two-faced temporal axis—the finite time of this life, and the infinite time of the immortal after-life. Having done this, the shepherd then revealed how, as this finite time passed, the members of his audience underwent an unavoidable metamorphosis through the ‘twelve ages of man’: ‘And now to show how man changeth twelve times even as the twelve months do’. This metamorphosis was bound (by a spatio-temporal axis) to the flow of the environment’s changing seasons and a universe which was unfolding through them. Meanwhile, he constantly sang out a refrain about the three things it was most urgent for all those who wished for rebirth in immortality to remember: salvation, prudence, and self-knowledge (nosce te ipsum). First, the shepherd boldly declared the overriding importance of ‘salvation’: ‘the thing that we desire most in this world is to live long, and the thing that we most fear is to die soon . . . he should live long that the end of this present life should be in the life eternal, that is to say, the life everlasting in heaven’. Of the seven things that the shepherd thought it was essential for anyone to know, by far the most important was whether one was ‘in the grace of our Lord or not . . . for who that ²⁵ For one possible textual precursor, see Zurich: Zentralbibliotheck, MS C.101, fol. 58r ‘visonomia’.


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receiveth in this grace receiveth salvation and who that receiveth otherwise receiveth damnation’. Knowledge of this ‘grace’ and the attainment of salvation required ‘prudence’. ‘Prudence’ required the reader to pursue a ‘diligent keeping of himself with discreet providence to know and discern which is good and which is bad’. Salvation and prudence were, in turn, linked to the third and most fundamental theme: ‘know thyself ’. It was only through this prudent, religio-medical knowledge of one’s self, other people, and thus God that one could receive the grace and wisdom that would ensure one’s salvation: ‘who that knoweth himself knoweth God and shall not be damned and who that knoweth him not knoweth not God, and shall not be saved’. All of this cosmological contemplation was summed up by the shepherd in two very simple, memorable commands. One of them was implicit, the other was explicit: study thy temperament; and ‘study on youre synne’.²⁶ The former meant knowing the illnesses to which you were prone; the latter meant meditating upon the virtues and vices to which you were inclined. In societies still racked by famine and plague, the former came with very practical, fundamentally urgent, suggestions about the food appropriate to particular physical conditions. In a society in which disease and disaster were heavily moralized, the latter offered the more metaphysical fruits and diseases of the self that were to be found hanging from the branches of the ‘trees of knowledge’ in an illustrated presentation of the ‘deadly sins’. In either case, be it temperament or character, real food or spiritual food, all was irradiated astrologically, that is to say religiously, with the influence of the stars. The illiterate shepherd’s intention was to make his readers and listeners participate in a form of self-‘reading’. As strange as it may sound, there was a religious precedent for it. In the study of one’s sin, the listing of the virtues and vices was part of a long-standing tradition in the history of confessional practices. Monks and nuns in monasteries and convents throughout medieval Europe had often listened to lists of sins being read out in the refectory. Alternatively, they had read them out to themselves while alone in their own cells. Either way, their inner eye registered the seemingly instinctual motions of their soul. Its movements revealed to them a clean or guilty ‘conscience’. Thus, taking the shepherd at his word, the late fifteenth-century audience for this text asked themselves whether they were susceptible to a particular vice, whether they bore the stain of a particular sin. But now there was a difference. Now the shepherd was offering his audience a physiognomical way of contemplating ²⁶ Heseltine, Kalendar, 4, 2, 80, 52, 79, and 60; Oxford: Bodleian Library, Douce K. 97 sig. Aiiv.

222 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 their souls. The exposition of physiognomical doctrine that formed a part of the shepherd’s text was also essentially a list of virtues and vices. In the shepherd’s mystical eyes, the purpose of engaging with the art of physiognomy was appropriated into a religious practice. It was to act as the reader’s entry-point into a process of confessional self-meditation. It is in this way that reading the physiognomy in this book became a form of confessional prayer. As strange as it may now seem, there was a medieval precedent for this physiognomical aspect of the confessional tradition. The confessional manuals of Alain of Lille advised the priest ‘to note the sinner’s appearance and complexion in order to assay his disposition: “One man is more impelled to a certain sin than another; a choleric person is more driven to wrath, a melancholy one to hatred, a sanguine or phlegmatic one to lust” ’.²⁷ But it was a physiognomical prayer that now bore two very significant differences. The first was that, unlike the traditional vices and virtues, those aspects of the inner self were not just the metaphorical fruits hanging from the branches of some abstract tree of knowledge. They were symbolically and mnemonically embodied in the specific physical features of the reader. This meant that physiognomical confession was now something sinners could try to do for themselves—to themselves and to others. It circumvented the need for a pastoral ‘middle man’, more commonly known as the priest. As such, the shepherd’s late fifteenth-century physiognomical prayer provided readers with a ‘do-it-yourself ’ confessional practice which resonated with some of the more radical claims being made by the early reformers in their rejection of the special vocation of monasticism, and which contributed to the onset of the Reformation. Another difference between this and mainstream church confession lay in the fact that the moral meanings attached to the physical features in the shepherd’s section on physiognomy did not perfectly match the lists of virtues and vices presented earlier in the Kalendar. Take, for example, the following two signs with which one early English edition of the Kalendar’s physiognomical section opens: They that have red hair be commonly ireful, and lack wit, and be of little truth. A man that hath black hair and a red beard signifieth to be lecherous, disloyal, and a vaunter, and one ought not to trust in him.²⁸

²⁷ T. C. Price Zimmermann ‘Confession and Autobiography in the Early Renaissance’, in A. Molho and J. Tedeschi (eds.), Renaissance: Studies in Honor of Hans Baron (Florence, 1971), 125–6. ²⁸ Heseltine, Kalendar, 152.


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The shepherd makes no specific mention of ‘untrustworthiness’, a ‘lack of wit’ or ‘disloyalty’ in his trees of vices. There is no exact correlation. Yet, as a consequence of this, a correlation can be looked for. Thus the physiognomical sign of ‘lacking wit’ can be interpreted as a form of ‘sloth’. The shepherd says that the ninth branch of sloth is ‘ignorance’. This ‘ignorance’ is itself broken down into three elements: (1) ‘indiscretion’; (2) ‘that they ought not to understand’; and (3) ‘not willing to know’. Similarly, the ‘vaunter’ might be incorporated within the vice of ‘pride’, disloyalty could conceivably be linked to ‘covetousness’ (through adultery), and a physiognomical sign ‘of little truth’ could conceivably be incorporated either into ‘pride’ (under ‘false goodness’) or ‘covetise’ (under false witness). A further reason why this physiognomical prayer was frowned upon by the church authorities was because it was bound up with things hermetic, Egyptian, Jewish, and Arabic. In so being, it actually added further cognitive dimensions to the experience of the trees of vices and virtues that represented the metaphysical building-blocks of the contemplated Christian self. Hermetic physiognomy, with its links through an astrologized physiognomy to a potentially very different, non-Christian set of metaphysics and mythologies, opened up further labyrinths of meaning in the natural galaxy of the audience’s inner selves. In other words, this divine language of physiognomy provided windows into a universe of the self riddled with a hierarchy of metaphysics emanating from the One, or with polytheism, or even with the seraphim of the Kabbalah. In addition, it was a process that was potentially as applicable to every single person and as unique in each case as the tangled branches of any single tree. In retrospect, this appropriation of physiognomical engagement may appear to be a tributary of the tradition of self-reflection most often identified with Montaigne.²⁹ At the time, given the hermetic influence pervading this text and that was being disseminated throughout Western Europe, it was also a sign that the church was in danger of losing its grip on the deepest parts of the soul—to the extent that it can be said ever to have really had such a deep grip in the first place. For past historians of the Reformation have underestimated the extent to which the deepest and most all-pervasive religion in the so-called Christian West was an astrological one.

The hermetic physiognomical eye To say that the Renaissance art of physiognomy was bound up with what are generally referred to as ‘the sciences of the occult’ not only means that it was ²⁹ Taylor, Sources of the Self, 178–84.

224 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 seen as a body of knowledge that dealt with things (beyond ‘effects’, this also meant ‘significations’) for which the cause was hidden, if not inexplicable. It also means that it was enmeshed with ancient Jewish, Orphic, Pythagorean, Islamic, Egyptian, Indian, and Christian mysticism. In light of the tendency in Western European historiography to assume that the rediscovery of antiquity that was such a feature of the Renaissance was synonymous with Rome and Greece, even putting the alleged ‘Egyptian’ nature of hermetic wisdom to one side, it is worth noting in passing that the aforementioned analogy of the late fifteenth-century physiognomatable self and the tree of knowledge also carried echoes of an Oriental mysticism.³⁰ If the physiognomical contemplation found in the Shepherd’s Kalendar carries traces of the hermetic philosophy being disseminated by the late fifteenthcentury circles of Florentine Neoplatonists, then, as it became more enmeshed with hermeticism, reading physiognomy in a book appears to have been absorbed into a hermetic process of gnosis, an active, ‘gradual’ process of purification that involved actively wiping ‘the dust’ from ‘the mirror’, a ‘re-birth’, or literally a ‘renaissance’. The influence of the Kabbalistic tradition was very important in this development. As Scholem pointed out, the Kabbalah was a magic used on one’s self as an aid to contemplation: Though Cabala is primarily a mysticism, a way of trying to know God, there is also a magic which goes with it, which can be used mystically or subjectively on oneself, a kind of self-hypnosis, as an aid to contemplation . . . Or it can be developed into an operative magic, using the power of the Hebrew language, or the powers of the angels invoked by it, to perform magical works.

Thus, as it became mixed with the Neoplatonic hermeticism of the Corpus hermeticum and the Kabbalah, the art of physiognomy became an aid to self-transformation, or what Ficino and Pico della Mirandola were referring to as ‘regeneration’.³¹ I want to approach the reconstruction of this self-transforming hermetic physiognomical eye by bringing the reader’s attention to the innate iconicity of the hieroglyphic language of physiognomony and what might be termed the ‘multi-media’ aspect of reading physiognomy in a book. So far we have assumed that the reader’s interaction with this text was a solitary private affair. However, it could also have been more public. Any reader perusing a physiognomical treatise in the vicinity of, say, her fellow nuns, would also have used the ³⁰ For earlier Indian buddhist and pre-Buddhist Taoist influences, see P. Demiéville, ‘Le miroir spirituel’, Choix d’études bouddhiques: (1929–1970) (Leiden, 1973), 131–56; M. W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins (Michigan, 1952), 2, n. 3. ³¹ F. A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), 93.


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26. This representation of early 16th-century communal reading practices provides an insight into how the group may have interacted when reading a ‘treatise on physiognomy’, Urs Graf, ‘Monks Reading’, from Guigo de Castro, Statuta ordinis cartusiensis ( Johann Amorbach, Basle, 1510). Woodcut. (Photo: Warburg Institute.)

hard physical reality of their bodies or the sound of their voices to illustrate some of the text’s physiognomics. The woodcut in Illustration 26 helps us to visualize this more communal form of reading a ‘treatise on physiognomy’. This woodcut is not taken from a ‘treatise on physiognomy’. Nor is there any evidence to suggest that it was intended to represent a group of Carthusian monks reading one. None the less, despite what appears to be its specific satirical content, it is an image that provides us with a visual basis upon which to build a more anthropological insight into how a communal form of

226 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 engagement with physiognomy in book form would have been enacted. By referring to this image, one can imagine how, when a ‘treatise on physiognomy’ was read in a monastery, each brother could have been examined in a collective fashion in terms of whether he was an illustration or embodiment of any particular physiognomical aphorism in the text. More self-reflexive concerns, even within such a group reading of a ‘treatise on physiognomy’, may have led a reader to compare the physiognomies of the members of the group to his or her own physiognomy. Or, like the duc de Rochefoucauld, it may have led her to ask her colleagues their opinion on whether or not her own lips were thin, her nose hawked, her eyes sunken. Either way, the ‘natural magic’ aspect of this ‘engagement’ with those other people encapsulated the proverbial notion of coming to know one’s self through others, or how the eyes of an old friend are the best form of mirror.³² Moreover, as the nun engaged her sisters in this confessional prayer, her sense of ‘beholding’ absorbed other visual and sonic media—the more ‘realistic’ or ‘naturalistic’ forms of their ‘physiognomies’ and voices. And, as the reading or invocation of this confessional prayer wound her through this audio-visual dialogue with the others around her, it took on a distinctly theatrical character. When read alone and in private, if a reader wanted to know if she had this or that particular physical feature as described in the text, she would have looked at her own body. In other words, she would have used her own physiognomy to visualize a physiognomic. In so doing, her contemplative eye moved her from the linear realm of textual literacy to the non-linear realm of visual literacy. This was more difficult for the shape or colour of her eyes, or for even the most hawked of hawked noses. Such visions required the use of a looking-glass. The resort to a looking-glass introduced yet another object of visual contemplation into this reading practice beside her own physiognomy and the treatise on physiognomy—a visual reflection of her physiognomy. At this point, itself a reminder of the emblematic image of Samuel Jeake with quill in hand, poised between his mirror and his book with which the Introduction to this book opened, we must bear in mind that one moral virtue long associated with looking in mirrors was Prudence. This was the very same virtue that the illiterate shepherd of the above-mentioned Shepherd’s Kalendar said was one the seven things which one needed for salvation. Actual prudential mirror-gazing was such an innately visual part of Renaissance literacy that it had created its own iconographic tradition (Illustrations 27 and 28). Using a ³² For variations on this, see M. P. Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs (Ann Arbor, 1950), 243.


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27 and 28. Prudence was often portrayed looking at herself in the mirror, Cesare Revardino/Georges Reverdy [French, fl. 1529–57], Prudentia [B. XV. 481.28]. (Photo: Warburg Institute.); J. Kips, 17th-century English engraving of Prudence. (Photo: Warburg Institute.)

looking-glass, literally, to help one come to know one’s self and to pierce one’s self-illusions did not always get one anywhere, and it also carried risks. As Marsilio Ficino wrote: I have often looked for myself . . . I have gazed at this face in the mirror . . . but I could never say I have . . . seen myself. For when I seek myself, it is exactly the same Marsilio that is both seeker and sought . . . it is spirit alone I seek, since I seek myself, who am indeed pure spirit.³³

Moreover, there were, for example, the potential dangers of vanity, pride, and folly. But, if used properly, it could help in the quest for nosce teipsum. Many knew of the claim that Socrates used mirrors for moral instruction, urging his pupils ‘to look at themselves frequently in the glass, that he might beg any of them who should be gratified at his own beauty not to spoil the dignity of the ³³ P. Tudor-Craig, ‘Ficino and Portraiture’, in M. Shepherd (ed.), Friend to Mankind. Marsilio Ficino 1433–1499 (1999), 101–5.

228 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 body by a dishonourable state of mind’. The same legend was celebrated enough to be known in visual form.³⁴ If a mirror was used while reading physiognomy in a book, this does not mean it was Socratic and thus Greek in origin. Like the aforementioned tree of knowledge, this form of mirror-gazing had also been a long-standing element in the Buddhist and Taoist traditions. In the ritual of one tantric school, for example, during the ceremony of abhisheka, the initiated was presented with a mirror. He was to contemplate his image in it in order to penetrate the illusory character of his person and all things.³⁵ Given this, the Renaissance practice of reading physiognomy in a book with the aid of a looking-glass may have carried much more than just the classical echoes of ancient Greece. Yet the looking-glass was not the only visual technology implicit in this reading practice of self-examination. It was a reading practice that also included the hand-painted illustrations, woodcuts, and engravings that lined the pages of many ‘books on physiognomy’. Likewise, this reading practice could also have incorporated images outside of the text, with the reader turning to a painted portrait or sculpture of himself or of someone else. Other equally visual, but more ‘occult’, aspects involved in the ‘natural magic’ of reading the shepherd’s ‘treatise on physiognomy’ were the visual representations produced in the mind’s eye. For when reading a ‘treatise on physiognomy’, there were two other of the reader’s mental faculties that came into play with the reason that was directing the reading, both of which had a distinctly visual and active nature: imagination and memory.³⁶ This is not the place to discuss the scholars’ conceptions of the imagination or the memory and their place in the human ontology. All I want to emphasize here is the fact that when one engaged one’s imagination with this ‘natural magic’, the innate, iconic nature of the language of physiognomony shone through the printed words on the page, irrespective of how this ‘kinematic’ aspect of the phenomenon was then understood in further, more abstract, intellectual terms. As the Italian hermeticist Giordano Bruno put it: ‘to think is to speculate with images’.³⁷ For example, the physiognomic ‘an aquiline nose is a sign of magnanimity’ contained within it the latent image of an aquiline nose. When read or heard, an image of an aquiline nose formed in the eye of the reader’s imagination. In ³⁴ ‘Speculum Commune’, from P. Joannes David, Duodecim specula: Devm aliqvando videre desideranti concinnata (Antwerp, 1610). ³⁵ R. Tajima, Étude sur le Maha¯vairocana-su¯tra (Dainichikyo¯ ) (Paris, 1936), 14, 114. Cf. M. Shinkô, Bukkyô-daijiten, 10 vols. (Tokyo, 1931), i. 184 and 601 for a person between two mirrors faced with the infinite. ³⁶ C. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 136. ³⁷ F. A. Yates, The Art of Memory (1966), 298.


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this way it was possible to make contact with the hidden visual episteme of this language by visualizing abstract categories such as ‘magnanimity’, and some Aristotelians could even have conceived of them in terms of the Aristotelian notion of ‘substantial form’. Given the frequency with which the aquiline nose was described as a sign of magnanimity in the early modern period, magnanimity itself would often have been automatically visually represented before the early modern mind’s eye in the form of an image of an aquiline nose. To modern minds, this iconic aspect of its language carries overtones of Wittgenstein’s observation: ‘(Meaning is a physiognomy)’.³⁸ To early modern European philosophers of language, as rational and empirical as many of them were trying to be, this aspect of the character of the language of physiognomy was what made them feel that it could contribute to the dream of a universal language of ‘real characters’.³⁹ To the hermeticist it was part of the astrological divinity of this original, pre-textual, hieroglyphic, Adamic language.⁴⁰ Once the virtual physiognomics of this Adamic language formed in the eyes and ears of our reader’s imagination, by the ‘natural magic’ workings of the mind, they were then captured in, or sent to, her distinctly visual memory. These ‘virtual’, visual, dream-like memories, like those of their ‘real’ audiovisual counterparts, had the potential of mediating her vision of any real flesh and blood nose or any real, oil-painted represented nose, or the hearing of any actual or imagined voice.⁴¹ And vice versa. Thus an aphorism about a thick neck, or wide nostrils, or a hoarse voice not only conjured up images of a thick neck or wide nostrils and the sound of a hoarse voice: they also stimulated the visual and aural memories of particular thick necks, wide nostrils, and hoarse voices. And those visual and sonic memories had their origins either in the experience of earlier, everyday realities or the previous experience of the beholding of various representations: for example, in the hoarse sound of a neighbour’s grating voice, embedded in its immediate analogue—the sound of an ass ee-aawing; in the very real, thick neck of a very real, thick-necked solider, or the image of the thick-necked figure of Stupiditas in Giotto’s famous fresco in the Scrovegni Chapel.⁴² At this point it is worth mentioning that the fisnomical use of external images as well as internal images created in the eyes of the imagination and ³⁸ L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1958), 151e, 568. ³⁹ Francis Bacon, Collected Works, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, 7 vols. (1857–74), III.i, 399–400. ⁴⁰ U. Eco, La recherche de la langue parfaite (Paris, 1994). ⁴¹ J. Aitchison, Words in the Mind (Oxford, 1994), 41–3, and 68–72; Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 139, 54e. ⁴² For a learned and rich misunderstanding of this application of physiognomy to images, see H. Steinke, ‘Giotto und die Physiognomik’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 59 (Berlin, 1996), 523–47.


29. This late 15th-century mirror-like diptych brought together the contemplation of the physiognomy of Christ through word (Lentulus’ famous forged description of Christ) and image (painted profile of Christ). Diptych. Right panel: Bust of Christ blessing. Left panel: Lentulus’ letter, Netherlands, 1490–9. Oil on wood, 38.5 cm ¥ 27.3 cm. Museum Cartharijneconvent, Utrecht (Photo: Ruben de Heer.)

memory through the words of physiognomony explains the function of certain portraits of Jesus Christ. Christ was often seen as the ideal embodiment whom one was to imitate. Moreover, the famous ‘description’ of Jesus Christ written by Lentulus was often found in physiognomical treatises, as well as painted beside portraits of Christ. Was it through the use of this verbal and iconic description of Christ that this hermetic form of physiognomical prayer involved readers and viewers in a controversial, physiognomical form of the contemplation of the face of God? If so, it was an aspect of the Renaissance hermetic construction and contemplation of images that was the culmination of a long-standing medieval meditative practice in which intense visualization was seen as the climax of mystical introspection.⁴³ Given the ‘occult’ power of ⁴³ For contrary views on this, see Dom. C. Butler, Western Mysticism (2000), l ff., 55 ff., 87 ff., 117 ff.; and C. Frugoni, ‘Female Mystics, Visions and Iconography’, in D. Bornstein and R. Rusconi (eds.), Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, trans. M. J. Schneider (Chicago, 1996), 130–64.


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images, or the natural magic of the process of ‘imitation’ (part of the process of ‘impression’), these icons of Jesus Christ may at times have been used in this physiognomical prayer. In all such cases, those works of art, like the reflection from the looking-glass, became exemplary participants in the illuminating, and potentially efficacious, physiognomical contemplation of the moral topography of one’s self, and thus, given the way in which the early modern self was understood, ultimately of God. What all of this adds up to is the fact that the more intense, hermetic reading of the shepherd’s physiognomical prayer was actually a textual exegesis in which imagined visions and sounds arose through the typeface of the words, passed before the inner eyes and ears of the reader’s mind, and, in so doing, blended with the contemplation of the actual flesh and blood, the actual sounds and the real images that passed before the physical eyes and ears of the confessors who were in the group reading it, or in the reader’s vicinity whilst she was reading it. This constant, random switching between text, flesh, voice, image, and sound; between reality and representation; between reason, imagination, and memory; between one’s self and other people, was not only distinctly ‘unbookish’, and not only required more visual (and sonic) literacy than textual literacy, it is also what gave the performance of this naturally magical prayer a theatrical, indeed a proto-operatic, character. In the encounter of the hermetic reader with a physiognomical treatise, in private or public, the text acted like a projector generated by the light of the reader’s physical and inner eyes. As a result, the text’s physiognomics were projected onto the internal screens of the reader’s own imagination and memory. But this internal screen did not exist in a vacuum. Nor was this internal screen a tabula rasa, to use Locke’s later conception. For that screen was infused with the very particular visual culture of the said reader. Thus, on the internal screens in Renaissance hermetic minds, these physiognomics became the catalyst for the visual articulation of a series of other emblems and images from that visual and sonic culture which had hitherto been buried or frozen in the reader’s memory. Together the articulation of this series of inner audio-visual associations triggered by the encounter with a ‘book on physiognomy’ constituted what might most helpfully be referred to as an internal emblematic slideshow or ‘cinema’. The mythologies and meanings encased in its ‘emblems’ and symbols constituted the more cognitive, meaningful, or psychological part of this distinctly visual internal moral ‘cinema’. The ‘cinematic’ nature of this experience is further suggested by the fact that, in the hermetic tradition, the sense of a chord being struck in our reader was not a blind, unconceptualized intuition. In many cases the ‘inner’ intuition of

232 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 the truth of either a part or the whole of a single physiognomical aphorism may have been compounded in some cases by a conscious awareness of what the Aristotelian scholastics had tried to articulate with their notion of ‘synderesis’. As late as 1664 one finds this notion within the writing on physiognomy. The French physiognomist La Chambre made this connection explicit in his treatise: ‘Prudence and Synderesis, or Remorse of Conscience, are two habits of the Understanding, whereby Moral Actions are regulated. But they are different in this particular, that the Synderesis prescribes to all the vertues the end which they ought to have; and Prudence treats only of the means whereof they ought to make use, in order to their arrival thereto.’⁴⁴ This was not the case for St Augustine. In his enormously influential discussion of inner ‘self-presence’, he had famously spoken of that ‘incorporeal light . . . by which our minds are somehow irradiated, so that we may judge rightly of all these things’.⁴⁵ Yet Paracelsus is one example of someone within the ‘hermetic’ tradition who took this further. In Paracelsus’s eyes, it was not only a distinctly corporeal light, it was an inner physiognomical light—what he called lumen naturae. The writings of the Renaissance Neoplatonic occultists such as Marsilio Ficino or Giordano Bruno contain much about this inner light and vision. Even before the anxiety produced by Copernicus’s heliocentric vision of the universe, Ficino had offered Western Europe a ‘religion of the world’ which placed the sun at the centre of the human self.⁴⁶ The dangers were evident in the fact that the Apostate Emperor Julian (331/72–363) had tried to drive out the newly established Christianity and return to a philosophical ‘religion of the world’ in which the sun was worshipped as the supreme god.⁴⁷ This notion was encapsulated most visually in the series of plates engraved by Theodor de Bry for Robert Fludd’s Utriusque cosmic . . . historia (1617). It is often said that Fludd’s illustrations were an integral part of the exposition of his philosophy. They were, in fact, part of the visual episteme of his philosophy. This is particularly evident in the series of eye-like images representing Fludd’s conception of the act of creation ex nihili (Illustrations 30 and 31). However, the relationship of Fludd’s visual episteme to his writing on physiognomy can be most clearly seen in the engraving which serves as the frontispiece for his tract on the scientia of physiognomy (Illustration 32). This engraving can be said to represent the hermetic physiognomical eye. It shows a man and a woman not just looking at each other, but physiognomating each other. Some mystical Jewish influences are discernible in the visual suggestion that ⁴⁴ Marin Cureau de la Chambre, The Art How to Know Men (1665), 167. ⁴⁵ Taylor, Sources of the Self, 134. ⁴⁶ See Marsilio Ficino, Quid sit lumen, ed. B. Schefer (Paris, 1998). ⁴⁷ Yates, Bruno, 58.


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30 and 31. These two images show the first two stages of God’s creation of the world ‘ex nihili’. The eye-like form of the second stage (as well as the subsequent stages) is striking and self-evident. Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), i. De Macrocosmi Historia, 26, 29. Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Rés 107538 (1–3). (Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.)

they are gazing at each other’s foreheads—a visual allusion to the tradition of this ‘knowledge by the visage’ in Jewish mysticism in which truth was said to shine from the forehead of Adam. But there is something else which is just as important as the two people in the process of physiognomating each other. That is the fact that both are physiognomating at the same time as they are being physiognomated, not only by each other, but also by God. In this portrayal of this reciprocal act of physiognomating, both physiognomators are located in the middle of the pupil of the providential eye of an omniscient, omnipresent, all-seeing physiognomating God—the three parts of the eye being equated elsewhere in Fludd’s text with the Trinity. Once again this representation of the physiognomical eye might be seen to carry non-Christian influences, or at least have parallels with concepts outside Christianity. For, like the Islamic notion of fira¯sa, of the Kabbalistic theosophic notion of hakkarath panim, the optic nerves of Fludd’s physiognomical eye had their roots in, and were an illuminating participation in, the divine, providential gaze of


32. The Neoplatonic, hermetic, physiognomical eye, Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), ii. De Supernaturali, Naturali, Praeternaturali et Contranaturali Microcosmi historia, in Tractatus tres distributa, 117. (Photo: Warburg Institute.)

God.⁴⁸ The nature of the ‘light’ that drove these inner visual projectors was often conceived of as so intensely divine that the projecting eye of this internal ‘cinematic’ exegesis was fused with the celestial rays of the stars and the sun, whilst in turn being irradiated by a divine illumination. Thus, in this intensely meditative sense, the reading of physiognomy in a book was driven by the theosophic light of the infinite eye of the Godhead, the first cause. Through the play ⁴⁸ Yates, Bruno, 404; Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi . . . historia, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), I.i, 11–12.


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of the images in the projection of that theosophic light, the hermetic physiognomical eye became the soul of its own internal cinema. To understand the images that constituted the ‘cinema’ of this form of physiognomical reading and contemplation, we need to turn to consider Robert Fludd’s brief etymological definition of the term Physiognomia: ‘Indeed Physiognomy is called a sign of nature’.⁴⁹ Those signs of nature, those ‘signatures’, those physiognomics, like the emblem books and the interest in Egyptian hieroglyphics that were so characteristic of the Renaissance and to which the physiognomics in these books bore a strong family resemblance, carried within themselves a labyrinth of natural mythology, part of what Marsilio Ficino’s eyes recognized as the ‘religion of the world’, and a natural mythology which was itself an astrological interface with an ancient theology.⁵⁰ Fludd was simply saying that this knowledge of nature, this gnomos of physis, this ‘knowledge by the visage’, even in textual form, was a manifest knowledge. It was manifest in the audio-visual signs of nature in and beyond the printed words on the pages of his ‘treatise on physiognomy’. As such, Fludd was placing the reading of physiognomy in books firmly within the long-standing hermeneutic tradition of the ‘book of nature’ that the Renaissance had inherited from the Middle Ages.⁵¹ It was a tradition in which the nature of the book as well as the book of nature was seen as a system of natural signs created by God. Those signs were not only being broadcast from the printed pages of the ‘book on physiognomy’ itself, but also from the people and the nature ‘outside’ the printed page—from the sky itself, as well as the face of the person who was beholding it.⁵² Those signs were the windows and doorways into the pre-textual ‘logos’ of an astrologically irradiated, potentially self-purifying mythology that, ultimately, revealed the nature of the creator, if only one knew how to behold and control them. In the thirteenth century, Michael Scot’s Liber introductorius had placed physiognomy on the cusp of all of this. It was the troubling emergence of the ‘Egyptian’ in Western European culture that brought it, as some thought, ‘back to life’. It was Robert Fludd who took it as far as it could go in purely book form.

‘Inner writing’ This hermetic appropriation of the natural magic involved in the encounter between a reader and a ‘book on physiognomy’ can be characterized in even ⁴⁹ Fludd, Utriusque cosmi, II.i.2, 118. ⁵⁰ D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology (1972). ⁵¹ Cited in G. Josipovici, The World and the Book (1971), 29. ⁵² E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York, 1953), 319–26.


33. Physiognomy was just one tool that constituted the ‘techniques of the microcosm’, Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), ii. Tractatus Primi Sectio Secunda (title page) ‘De technica Microcosmi historia’, 1, Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Rés 107538 (1–3). (Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.)

more intense detail by considering it in the context of Robert Fludd’s encyclopaedic Utriusque cosmic . . . historia as a whole. In so doing, I want to show how Fludd’s work has to be understood in terms of ‘the pagan theory of the ascent of the soul through the spheres’ in order to achieve its ‘final regeneration’.⁵³ Doing so helps to prepare the way for understanding the general change that the reading of a ‘book on physiognomy’ underwent during the ⁵³ Yates, Bruno, 108.


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early modern period, from praying to playing, or what some might prefer to call ‘from totalization to vulgarization’. As the title-page of Robert Fludd’s tractatus intimates (Illustration 33), the art of physiognomy was just one technique in a small toolbox of ‘techniques of the microcosm’ (De technica microcosmi). However, nowhere in his writings does Fludd explicitly explain how these ‘techniques’ were supposed to be used. This is very likely a consequence of how this hermetic knowledge was guarded as a ‘secret’ knowledge. As Frances Yates wrote of the connection between incantations and the Art of Memory: ‘I am not sure if this is the right explanation of the unexplained connection . . . but it is a possible one’.⁵⁴ With that reservation I should like to argue that, like the string and wind instruments played together to produce a concerto, these ‘techniques of the microcosm’ were there to be used in conjunction with one another. When the hermetic art of physiognomy is considered as a part of this combinatorial toolbox of ‘techniques’, the natural magic that occurred when reading a ‘book on physiognomy’ appears to dissolve into a larger, experimental ‘reading’ practice. It was a process of natural magic which, in its most ‘occult’ form, was an exercise in applied physics, which had the medico-moral objective of controlling the spiritus of the celestial influence that infused everything in order to bring about some form of self-transfiguration, or ‘regeneration’ in the divine. As with Pomponazzi’s notion of the efficacy of talismans, incantation, and prayer, when looked at in this more rhetorical way, reading a physiognomony appears to have become a form of prayer which used the aforementioned ‘internal cinema’ in some form of what today might be called a medicalized art therapy. Another way to describe this use of the technique of physiognomy would be to call it a catalyst in a practice very much related to Ficino’s ‘Orphic singing’, in other words a micro-opera of God’s revealed self.⁵⁵ The present state of scholarship does not allow us to date precisely the moment when ‘treatises on the art of physiognomy’ entered into this hermetic attempt to bring about some form of self-metamorphosis. For the moment all that can be said is that its absorption was part of what scholars often refer to as the syncretic element in Renaissance Neoplatonism. The Corpus hermeticum did not contain any exposition of physiognomical doctrine. However, there are a number of crucial ‘moments’ in the numerous narratives which it contains that were distinctly ‘physiognomical’. It is perhaps those moments which provided the windows through which the art of physiognomy was dissolved in this ⁵⁴ Yates, Bruno, 198, 201; Yates, Memory, 241. ⁵⁵ For the musical side of this, see the works of G. Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic (Chicago, 1993).

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hermetic process of ‘regeneration’, or, to use Giordano Bruno’s words, this ‘inner writing’.⁵⁶ Bruno’s phrase ‘inner writing’ can be used to describe both the means and the end of this physiognomical self-contemplation as laid out in Fludd’s works. In other words, it was basically a form of self-literacy. To understand this selfliteracy, one needs to understand the hermetic conceptions of the mechanisms of natural magic. Some of this understanding can be seen in Bruno’s understanding of the process of ‘fascination’, ‘which acts by virtue of a luminous and subtle spirit . . . emitted, a little like a ray, by open eyes. In the effort one uses to fix the image of the other in beholding them, these rays wound him, touch him in his heart, effect his body and his spirit, and make him express love, hate, envy, melancholy.’⁵⁷ Moreover, the mechanism that contributed to this process of ‘inner writing’ was understood in astrological terms. As one historian of Renaissance occult philosophy has written, ‘in the Picatrix, the whole art of magic . . . consists in capturing and guiding the influx of spiritus into materia’. To control one’s self-literacy, one had to understand and work with the Neoplatonic conception of the astrological mechanics that bound the macrocosm and the microcosm. Like Giordano Bruno, the obscure seventeenth-century English hermeticist Hardick Warren thought that the spirits which wander all over the body, these containing the Idea or form of the particular parts to be formed, being ayr and moist, are ready to receive any impression, which is conveyed in at the eye, and doth frame the thing answerable in some sort to the thing received: As I have read of a Negor [sic] woman, that conceived a beautiful white child by the help of her Imagination, it being fixed upon a beautiful picture in the Act of Generation, which is wrought by nothing else but that reciprocal quality, and tender property of those ayral and moist spirits which are in every seed in conception.⁵⁸

John Dee was another, more famous, Renaissance magus whose writings help us to understand this. In his famous Mathematickall Praeface, Dee wrote: The Whole Frame of Gods Creatures, (which is the whole world,) is to vs, a bright glasse: from which, by reflexion, reboundeth to our knowledge and perceiuerance, Beames, and Radiations: representing the Image of his Infinite goodness, Omnipotency, and wisdome.⁵⁹ ⁵⁶ A. J. Fegustière, Hermétisme et mystique paienne (Paris, 1967), 220, 225, fn. 1, 229, 231, 235, 240, 249; Yates, Memory, 326–7; Giordano Bruno, Œuvres complètes, 7 vols. (Paris, 1994–9), iii. De La Cause, Du Principe et de l’Un, ed. G. Aquilecchia (Paris, 1996), xvii. For Giordano Bruno’s reference to his own physiognomical skill, see Jordani Bruni Nolani opere latine conscripta, facs., 3 vols. (Stuttgart, 1962), II.ii, 76. ⁵⁷ Cited in Giordano Bruno, De la magie, trans. D. Sonnier and B. Donné (Paris, 2000), 95, fn. 7. ⁵⁸ Yates, Bruno, 52. Hardick Warren, Magick and astrology vindicated (1651), 16–17, 24, 14. ⁵⁹ N. H. Clulee, ‘At the Crossroads of Magic and Science: John Dee’s Archemasterie’, in B. Vickers (ed.), Occult and Scientific Mentalities (Cambridge, 1988), 64.


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In John Dee’s eyes, physiognomating one’s self with the aid of a physiognomical text (and the mirror?) sent one on a form of ‘internal’ contemplative travel, in search of one’s fundamental inclination. This inclination was not only under the influence of the stars and, as such, an astrological phenomenon, it was an ontological fact, as profound and deeply rooted in the human psyche and physiology and nature as Freud’s unconscious. This inclination, the fundamental virtues and vices which constituted it, as well as the nose that Dee saw when he peered into the South American obsidian looking-glass which he owned, were more than just the reflections of celestial influences. They were actual celestial radiations in and of themselves.⁶⁰ Thus, this form of physiognomical contemplation, through the text or through images, driven by the lights of reason and natural law, was itself ultimately part of the divine celestial radiation. For Dee, this internal journey across the dark recesses of one’s ‘inner’ self was guided, as was shown earlier, by the light of his mind’s internal theosophic eye and the external light that irradiated the physical eye one used to gaze into the looking-glass. It was a journey that took one across the terrain of one’s own internal galaxy, a galaxy constellated by virtues and vices, what Paracelsus called man’s ‘inner firmament’. The art was a technique that allowed one to try and gain some sort of control over this astrological mechanism, cultivate the virtues, and conquer or purge the vices in one’s self.⁶¹ This aim fitted the Christian scheme of things which accepted that the stars inclined but did not determine. It thus left open the possibility of free will, the possibility of being able to control and manipulate one’s natural inclination, or, in the case of the wise Socrates, actually to change one’s natural inclination.⁶² As Giordano Bruno said in his book The Cause, the Principle and the One, stars, gems, and plants contained virtues which, through a material cause and a vital, animistic, and symbolic principle, could alter the spirit and engender new affections or passions in the soul, as well as in the body. It was the manipulation of this material cause and this ‘symbolic principle’ that made one an internal artist, what Mirandola and Gaurico might have agreed to call a sculptor of one’s inner self, and which helped to make the hermetic reading of a tract on physiognomy a part of what Bruno saw as an ‘inner writing’.⁶³ Indeed, this process might even usefully be referred to as a sort of ‘alchemy of the self ’, in which one’s natural inclination to the good (and, as Bruno saw it, the common will to love) was the psychological equivalent of the ⁶⁰ Yates, Bruno, 22. ⁶¹ See Taylor, Sources of the Self, 186–92. ⁶² Yates, Bruno, 52. ⁶³ Giordano Bruno, Œuvres complètes, 7 vols. (Paris, 1994–2000), iii. De La Cause, Du Principe et de l’Un, ed. G. Aquilecchia (Paris, 1996), 134.

240 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 philosopher’s stone and the immortality that it ensured.⁶⁴ This concept of an alchemy of the self is certainly a helpful metaphor for explaining how reading a ‘book on physiognomy’ involved the use of a temporal grammar to discern the layers or signs of the past, the present, and the future character in the self. In other words, seeing the reading of a ‘treatise on physiognomy’ as part of a more general attempt to explore the alchemy of the self highlights the fact that this self-transformation was also thought to involve a certain sense of the manipulation of time. This astrological manipulation of time is certainly discernible in John Dee’s understanding of a true, empirical, experimental science; for him, it was one which enabled a person ‘to investigate the secrets of nature; namely, the ability to acquire knowledge of the future, the past, and the present through wonderful works, by which it forms judgements better than ordinary judicial astrology’.⁶⁵ Other scholars might be able to explore this apparent connection between physiognomy, astrology, and alchemy in more detail. As the link between the art of physiognomy and the art of chiromancy was examined to some extent in Chapter 3, I want here to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that the art of physiognomy was also linked with another ‘technique of the microcosm’—the art of memory. If ‘physiognomy’ was both a technique and expression of selftransformation, the art of memory was a technique aimed at making that self-transformation permanent. How so? As we saw in Chapter 4, whether understood as occult wisdom or common sense, these seemingly banal sentences formed part of a common stock of memorized knowledge. Indeed, some of the authors of their written and printed forms appear to have dictated them from memory.⁶⁶ A link between the art of physiognomy and the art of memory was long-standing. It had long been known by the authors of physiognomical treatises, and dates from at least the fourth century ce. As the fourth-century Anonymous Latin treatise put it, ‘whosoever wishes to practise physiognomy must first commit the meaning of the signs to memory’.⁶⁷ This connection was continued in numerous Renaissance and early modern ‘treatises on physiognomy’, such as those by Gratarolus, Della Porta, Jean Belot, and Richard Saunders.⁶⁸ ⁶⁴ The number of manuscript treatises on physiognomy bound with alchemical works is considerable. For example, Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Lyell 36 (15th century). ⁶⁵ Clulee, ‘Crossroads’, 59. ⁶⁶ Indagine, Briefe introductions (1558), sig. Hii; Richard Saunders, Palmistry, the secrets thereof disclosed (1676) 2[0]3. ⁶⁷ André, Traité de physiognomonie, 58. ⁶⁸ See, for example, Fludd, Utriusque cosmi, II. i.2, 47 ff.; Richard Saunders, Physiognomie, Chiromancie, Metoposcopie (1653), sig. Eee–Eee4.


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34. One of the other techniques of the microcosm with which physiognomical contemplation was combined was the art of memory, Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), ii., Tractatus Primi Sectio Secunda, Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Rés 107538 (1–3). (Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.)

Another connection with the art of memory lies in the fact that physiognomics such as ‘a litle nose a disceitful person’, or the various attempts to versify them, were phrased in such a way as to help them pass more easily into the reader’s memory.⁶⁹ As many present-day advertisers and headline writers know, and as the early modern authors of these works also knew, this ⁶⁹ Indagine, Introductions (1558), sig. Iviv.

242 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 simplicity and brevity rendered things all the more memorable: ‘the Brevity of these [physiognomical] Rules will render them infinitely useful to the memory’.⁷⁰ This connection between the art of physiognomy and the art of memory was also in part visual. For the art of memory was itself fundamentally based upon the stimulation of the visual memory. It was a commonplace for even the least hermetic of Renaissance intellectuals that the surest way to remember something was to translate it into an image. Francis Bacon certainly accepted this rule of the art of memory: We find in the art of memory, that images visible work better than other conceits; as if you would remember the word philosophy, you shall more surely do it by imagining that such a man (for men are best places) is reading upon Aristotle’s Physics; than if you should imagine him to say, I’ll go study philosophy.

It is well known that the art of memory involved placing those images or emblems in a specific architectural setting. The most famous example was Guilio Camillo’s ‘memory theatre’. That ‘memory theatre’ was what Camillo called ‘an artificial spirit or mind endowed with windows’. Erasmus knew of it. It was described to him in a letter dated 8 June 1532: The author has different names for his theatre: artificial spirit or mind endowed with windows. He says, in fact, that all the things that the human mind conceives and that cannot be seen with the eyes of the body, can be, however, with careful consideration, expressed with some bodily signs, so that everyone can see directly with his own eyes all that which otherwise is submersed in the profundities of the human mind. And he has used these names for his theatre because it can be seen with the eyes of the body.⁷¹

This is not the place to go into the details of the various techniques of the art of memory, one aspect of which involved creating ‘active images’ (imagines agentes) for the aforementioned internal cinema.⁷² What needs to be emphasized here is that both the art of memory and the art of physiognomy were forms of visual (and sonic) literacy. Both were innately emblematic, both visual and both architectural. The Neoplatonic, hermetic art of memory was thus an edifice of a ‘mind endowed with windows’ (Illustration 34). The art of physiognomy was an edifice endowed with windows into the soul. In the hermetic tradition, together they provided what the Neoplatonic Moses called ‘windows into heaven’, that is to say celestial windows onto the unmediated revelation of the divine. ⁷⁰ Saunders, Palmistry (1676), 204. ⁷¹ Desiderius Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. P. S. Allen, 12 vols. (Oxford, 1941), x. 29–30. I owe this translation to Lina Bolzoni. ⁷² See Yates, Memory, 9–11


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The question remains: how were these techniques of the microcosm to be used in this more metaphysical ‘alchemy of the self ’? I would argue that we can come close to explaining Fludd’s inclusion of the art of physiognomy among these ‘techniques of the microcosm’ if we understand it in terms of what Frances Yates has taught us about Giordano Bruno’s ‘memory wheel’. In Fludd’s hermeticism, as influenced as it was by Bruno, the art of memory was used to collect together, in one memorable system, the things which would help to sustain one’s self, to fill one’s inner abyss, and to push one further along the path to salvation and immortality—an attempt to control what Ficino understood as the flow of spiritus into materia. In other words, the physiognomics were used as mnenomic windows into passages, characters, and events from the immortal universe that were described in works of the great poets and the images of the master painters. One such example were the quite large, shining, humid eyes of Homer’s Pallas, or the very small, dry, sombre eyes of duplicity and treachery which Achilles attacks in the Iliad, and with which Pompeo Gaurico was suggesting some statues should be endowed.⁷³ Another example, taken from a mid-seventeenth-century English translation of a Kabbalahinspired French ‘treatise on physiognomy’, also shows this same idea still at work: We may from the Eyes discover the good or ill disposition of persons; therefore Homer calls Minerva a blue-eyed Lass, and Venus black-eyed . . . to represent the prudence of the one, and luxury of the other: And that is the reason the left eye is attributed to Venus; for if in a woman that eye be shining, and move, the eye-lids fat, it signifies much inclination to Venery, especially if that Woman be olive-coloured or yellowish with her black eyes, as Venus is described by Hesiod . . . never look for any shamefastness in such a woman.⁷⁴

In his book on De sculptura (Florence, 1504), Pompeo Gaurico was attempting to reify a passage from the Picatrix. The inclusion of a section on physiognomy was part of an aim to bring sculptures alive by having them radiate the efficacious virtues of its language. Yet, as Pompeo Gaurico said, physiognomy was not useful simply for actual sculpting but for the entire human species (omni generi humano).⁷⁵ In Fludd’s work, the divine language of the art of physiognomy became a technique for the self-sculpting to which Pico referred in his famous oration. One used its efficacious physiognomics to remember the various metaphysical qualities which sustained one’s desired self. Being able to control and bring together the virtues required for the ‘marriage of heaven and ⁷³ Pompeo Gaurico, De sculptura (1504), ed. A. Chastel and R. Klein (Paris, 1969), 146, 140. ⁷⁴ Saunders, Physiognomie (1653), 173. ⁷⁵ Gaurico, De sculptura (1969), 129.

244 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 earth’ and the attainment of immortality necessitated having them embodied symbolically in the various members of the human body. To each of the physical features and metaphysical qualities that made up a physiognomic were attached visual and sonic myths. In the eye of the hermetic’s imagination, the physiognomic was a window into those myths. Those myths could lead one in various directions, through the mythologies of astrological lore, the mythologies wrapped around and infused in the labyrinthine vines of hieroglyphic emblems, mythologies which consisted of the words of the great, if pagan, poets, and the images of the great painters and sculptors, or the writers of ancient theology. Sustaining the rebirth or regeneration in this way using the art of astrology and the art of memory kept the light of that spiritual regeneration shining through one’s eyes. It was in that way that the people with eyes to see would know that one was regenerated. This hypothesis certainly seems to fit very closely with John Dee’s understanding of the purpose of natural magic: ‘[to collect] together the virtues [which are in the substance of the terrestrial world] and join them to that virtue by which strange and [or miraculous] actions are produced’.⁷⁶ Indeed, one can take this further. For Fludd’s understanding of the self-transforming power of the hermetic art of physiognomy, as evident in his engravings, involved the intermediary help of the angels. His Kabbalistic recourse to the angels (or ‘Sefiroth’) in his attempt to take some sort of control over this mechanism distinguished him from the less esoteric Ficino. But it was itself an echo of John Dee’s famous conversations with the angels in which the angel Gabriel told him Hebrew was the language of Adam, the primal language, and then dictated various revelations and prophecies in the language of Enoch.⁷⁷ The aforementioned ‘inner chord’ struck in Fludd’s ‘physiognomical consciousness’ by these physiognomics became the universal vibration of the ‘inner lyre’ of Ficino’s very musical ‘religion of the world’, which, as another of Fludd’s illustrations makes clear, involved the rebirth of the soul (Illustration 35). Generated in the divine light of the theosophic eye, projected onto the mind’s internal screen by the inner eye of imagination, the immortal ‘cinema’ of these windows of the soul—whose mythologies in some cases took one through the ‘windows of heaven’ far into the realms of the astrological and the mythical self embedded in an ancient theology—was sustained and perpetuated by the omnipresent eye of the art of memory. ⁷⁶ Clulee, ‘Crossroads’, 61, fn. 27. The phrases in brackets are my suggested alterations to Clulee’s translation. ⁷⁷ John Dee, A true and faithful relation of what passed for many yeers between Dr. John Dee . . . and some spirits (1659), 92.


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35. Hermetic ‘regeneration’ was understood in musical terms, Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), ii. Tractus Primi Sectio Secunda, Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Rés 107538 (1–3). (Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.)

From regeneration to recreation In what way do other treatises from the early modern period reveal how the overarching conceptual framework, into which the art of physiognomy was placed and by which the aforementioned, more universal, form of physiognomical engagement was appropriated, actually changed across time? The number of ‘treatises on physiognomy’ in manuscript and print throughout

246 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 early modern Europe is too large for the overarching conceptual apparatus of each one to be examined here in detail. Such a study would provide an illuminating comparative, chronological picture of the conceptual changes which physiognomony underwent in each country in Europe. The following is based primarily on the treatises which make up the English series. In themselves they suggest a number of fundamental changes that happened more generally across Europe in the early modern period. The first of those changes occurred primarily between the late fifteenth and the early seventeenth centuries. It seems to have been characterized by what might usefully be described as a change in the depth of field of this physiognomical eye, a change that can be most conveniently symbolized by the alteration that the Elizabethan author Thomas Hill made to the title of the second, expanded 1571 edition of his ‘treatise on physiognomy’. Entitled in print A contemplation of mankinde, the sole surviving fragment of manuscript of this work in Hill’s hand reveals that it originally bore the more self-reflexive title ‘The Mirror of Knowledge’. In other words, these ‘books on physiognomy’ give the impression that there was a general turning of the physiognomical eye away from the occult physiognomical self-meditation and ‘regeneration’ towards a more exclusive, and seemingly objective, focus on the contemplation of other people. For Hill, developing one’s physiognomical eye provided one with a baseline of natural knowledge for assessing what he called the natural ‘state and condicions’ of the people with whom one came into contact and with whom one had to negotiate along life’s path. In other words, reading a physiognomical treatise provided one with a tool for constructing the most basic structure, not of one’s self, but of one’s social relationships across the social spectrum, from friends to enemies: [It] teacheth the thyrde part of wysdom, and first part of prudence, that is: how to discerne the disposicions of al men by their fourme and shape, whereby we maye knowe whom to make oure frendes and familiers, whom to preserve from beyng our foes, & whom to auoyde as daungerous to haue to doe with all.⁷⁸

This was not a new phenomenon as far as the theory of the physiognomical eye was concerned. As was shown in Chapter 1, this more socially oriented physiognomical eye can be found in Pietro d’Abano’s thirteenth-century treatise. The Speculum physiognomiae which Michael Savonarola wrote for Leonello d’Este in the mid-fifteenth century also had this very practical objective. But by the sixteenth century it was starting to be driven by a very different under⁷⁸ Thomas Hill, A contemplation of mankinde (1571), Preface.


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standing of, and a new Renaissance perspective on, the empirical, observable, rational relationship between the viewer and the object. As with any historical change, changes in these reading practices were never complete and clear cut. Even in the later eighteenth century there were ‘treatises on physiognomy’ published, such as Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece, which still contained vestiges of the originally more self-reflexive, devotional, form of ‘engagement’ ‘Now since philosophy informs us, that nosce te ipsum is one of the first lessons a man ought to learn, it cannot surely be accounted a useless piece of knowledge for a man to be acquainted with the cause of his own being’—as well as echoes of the use of the ‘mirror’.⁷⁹ Yet despite such nuggets of self-reflection in the conception of the physiognomical eye as presented in this later text, all sense of how the grammar of the art of physiognomy could be used to know one’s self had been lost. A sign itself of the way in which the new, more empirical, natural philosophy managed to infuse the culture of everyday life. As this more outward focus of the textual physiognomical eye came to the fore, reading a physiognomical treatise appears to have been conceived of as providing readers with a tool to aid them in some quite specific areas of the general process of social filtering, rather than the more mystical process of regeneration. Thus, just as the more self-reflexive side of physiognomical contemplation had found itself absorbed in the more religious walks of early modern life, so the more socially oriented physiognomical gaze offered in these printed texts was increasingly appropriated into a number of different but interrelated fields of social encounter. For example, in the Secretum secretorum, this physiognomical form of looking and listening was enveloped within a conceptual framework suited to a more political ‘walk of life’. The cognitive framework driving the Secretum’s physiognomical eye, whilst still embedded within the classical concept of a mystical prudence, was now being refracted through what the authors Lydgate and Burgh called ‘polityk prudence’. In their physiognomical treatise, Lydgate and Burgh offered advice on how the king ‘must prudently Afore conceyve in his providence’; how the king must be ‘prudent and wys | and of discrecyoun’; And how, ‘amonge all other thynges of this worlde I wyll that thou knowe a noble and meruaylous science that is called physonomy by the which thou shalt knowe the nature and condycyon of people’.⁸⁰ ⁷⁹ Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece (1764), 9, 27. ⁸⁰ Lydgate and Burgh’s Secrees of old Philisoffres, ed. R. Steele, Early English Text Society (1894), 1, l. 3, and 12, l. 373, 32, l. 1029a, 3, l. 60; Secretum Secretorum, ed. M. A. Manzalaoui, Early English Text Society (Oxford, 1977), 377.

248 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 It was this physiognomical prudence that was to help the king discover how to treat his subjects wisely, and how to choose the right counsellors and ministers to help him govern. There was still an element of self-reflection that it required of the king—he must avoid all impolitic excesses such as largesse and avarice. But it was a self-reflection that was oriented outwards, for it concerned itself only with the regulation and orchestration of the king’s appearance and manner in the physiognomical eyes of his subjects. In that sense its physiognomical eye was the eye of political science. Rather than the successful entry of a Christian into the garden of virtues, it was more intent on gaining and regulating the physical and metaphysical virtues necessary for ensuring the successful rule of a king in this life: God Almyghty save | and conferme our kyng In al vertu | to his encrees of glorye.⁸¹

Thus, in sharp contrast to the illiterate Shepherd’s mystical physiognomical prayer, the spatial and temporal optical nerves as well as the objectives of the physiognomical eye of the Secretum were very much rooted in the realms of this world. It was a way of looking driven by a physiognomical prudence aimed at political success in the here and now, with the eye of its political science set more firmly on other people than on one’s self. This shift in the orientation of the physiogomical eye was not simply a consequence of the evaporation of the ‘occult’ or the hermetic framework. Fludd’s hermetic physiognomical eye, as self-meditative as it could be, offers us quite a detailed insight into some more quite specific social practices into which the reading of a more occult ‘treatise on physiognomy’ appears to have been appropriated: And truly, if this art is considered by a person of discretion and wisdom it will bring him great fruit and utility; certainly it will teach him with whom to deposit things, whom to trust, to enter marriage, to teach young boys, to mingle with honest men, to avoid filthy and obscene men, not to rashly form alliances and acquaintances, to avoid the improbity of wicked people without harm and danger; and thereafter, this Science makes those people who are skilled in it and cultivate it, prudent and fortunate. For, as we first observe the man, through this we can judge the disposition of his soul to good or evil.⁸²

None the less, as the new natural philosophy refused all sense of the divinely inspired, fisnomic inner light of the viewer which was capable of unleashing the power of the similitude in the natural language of physiognomy, that outward ⁸¹ Lydgate, Secrees, 1, ll. 1–2; Manzalaoui, Secretum, 253.

⁸² Fludd, Utriusque cosmi, II.i.2, 118.


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gaze of the physiognomical eye underwent a radical change in what might be called the depth of its focal field. Of all such social encounters, the most prominent, and the one that became all the more dominant from the mid- to late seventeenth century onwards, was the search for a partner, or what might usefully be termed ‘generation’. Indeed, it became so dominant that the second fundamental aspect of the change which the reading practices that sprung up around the art of physiognomy underwent during the early modern period might be described as a shift from concerns about ‘re-generation’ to concerns about ‘generation’. This relationship between physiognomy and generation was not new. As was shown in Chapter 1, since at least the thirteenth-century treatise written by Michael Scot, physiognomony had been linked with the Aristotelian issue of generation. In fact, as will become clear in the final chapter, if the readers’ graffiti in extant copies of physiognomical treatises are any indication, Michael Scot’s treatise was one of the most widely read in early modern Europe and was read with exactly this concern in mind. None the less, there is much more evidence in other treatises to suggest that there appears to have been an increasing tendency to use physiognomony not so much in search of a business partner but in search of a marriage partner, or breeding partner, and in some cases one might even say the business of breeding. Given the contributions of natural philosophers to the developing notion of the self, this was enough to make this relationship different from its medieval form. Indeed, the evidence in these treatises for this wider socio-cultural shift from regeneration to generation also articulates another aspect of the transformation that occurred in the overarching nature of the physiognomical eye as presented in these English treatises. The same evidence also shows that the practice of reading a ‘treatise on physiognomy’ in the early modern period underwent a fundamental change from praying to playing. It was stated in the Introduction that before this devotional physiognomical prayer of occult self-meditation became an amusing, bawdy parlour game, it first became something of a ‘curiosity’ – a sign in itself that it still had some intellectual or other value in the late seventeenth century. One finds intimations of its relegation to the status of ‘curiosity’ in numerous later seventeenth-century treatises: ‘this treatise of physiognomy and palmistry . . . for the benefit and advantage of those who are curious enquirers into the secrets of nature’.⁸³ It has been argued in this book that this was a consequence of the spread of a new rationality. In the wake of the new natural philosophy, as the new ⁸³ Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece (1764), 96.

250 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 mechanical philosophies took root and a new form of rationality began to penetrate everyday life, the development of a sense of the play of nature, the obliteration of physiognomy’s classical grammar, the survival of only fragmented nuggets of its hermetic grammar, and the consequent lack of new ‘scientific’ validity of both according to the established scientific methods, all served to contribute to the development of its reputation as at best a pseudo-scientific ‘curiosity’. As was mentioned in Chapter 3, one text which exemplified that stage of the transition of physiognomy was aptly named the Court of Curiositie. Whilst the physiognomy is presented in all seriousness, gone is all sense of private devotion. Instead it is surrounded by a playfulness which will eventually absorb it. The reader is informed that the section on dreams was invented not ‘to unhinge the Brain, or torture the Phancie; but rather to Divert, and Exercise in your Ladyships that pleasant Ague of the Diaphragm, Laughter’. Vulson sandwiched his entertaining account of physiognomy between the interpretation of dreams and a game of chance based around a table of questions typical of those asked of astrologers, all of which he then contrasted with the more serious tone of the physiognomy. Yet, despite this, the overall presentation of the contents of this ‘cabinet’ is as a form of theatrical entertainment, one which might be attractive to ‘noble’ women in particular: But lest I be accus’d of too much Rudeness for detaining you so long in the Porch of this Palace, I will now open the Portal, and give you free admittance into this Court of Curiosity; where, that the Entertainment may in some measure Answer your Expectation, it is the earnest desire of your Ladyships most obedient Servant . . .

This sense of the physiognomical eye as a curious form of entertainment and game was developed further in such texts as Wits Cabinet; or, A Companion for Young Men and Ladies. In this work the physiognomony itself was absorbed into these more playful elements. In other words, alongside its longstanding partners—palmistry, moles, and interpretation of dreams—the exposition of physiognomical doctrine was conceived of as a form of entertainment side-byside with ‘the Art of Drinking’ and ‘Pleasant Riddles for Merry Company’ as well as, significantly, advice on courtship, ‘the Whole Art of Wooing and making Love, with the best Complemental Letters, Elegant Epistles, Amorous Addresses, and Answers in a most Pleasant and Ingenious Strain, with the Newest Songs, sung at Court and both Theatres’.⁸⁴ Thus, despite the return of the more hermetic forms of physiognomy in the 1650s and 1660s, by the late seventeenth century the physiognomical eye was no longer the preserve of the would-be magi. It was being appropriated into ⁸⁴ Marc Vulson, The Court of Curiositie (1669), sig. A3v; Wit’s Cabinet (1686), title-page.


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notions of the social graces, the lighter, more communally entertaining side of ‘Education and Accomplishment’, or what was to be called by some ‘sensibility’. Yet it was still a social grace in which lurked the notion of generation in the most common and fundamental aim of the physiognomical search for a partner. By the early eighteenth century, the penny chapbooks were suggesting this latter more ludic form of appropriation even more clearly. They often declared that the utility of the physiognomical eye lay in the finding and choosing of partners: ‘How every one may know their Partner’s Disposition and Temper, by the hair, eyes, and nose, &c.’⁸⁵ Indeed, in these texts that very process of the physiognomical search for a partner had itself become something of a game, a game sometimes enveloped in bawdy humour. Aristotle’s Complete Masterpiece could be taken as providing the best symbol of all of this. This eighteenth-century text still contained some of Michael Scot’s original physiognomical aphorisms, but they were interspersed with short, light-hearted verses such as: Thus those who chiefly mind the brutal part, May learn to chuse a husband by this art. And he that will of a good wife make choice, May chuse her by observing of her voice.

This ludic aspect of partner-seeking or generation had been apparent as early as 1690. In Aristotle’s Legacy, for example, the reader was presented with a Wheel of Fortune just prior to the exposition of physiognomical doctrine. The aim was to have the reader throw a dice, and the numbers on the dice corresponded to a particular set of verses entitled ‘How to know Good or Bad Fortune to Men, in Love Matters and Business, by Changes on the Dice, in the Wheel of Fortune’. Many of the answers were distinctly physiognomical, with a hint of smutty humour: She will be brown, and of a middle Age; A brisk and lively Wench, I will engage: But in her love, with others you shall share, yet of the main Chance, she will have a care. O Me, a Red-Hair’d Man will be your lot; But he to please You, has a good thing got; You Children will have many, and much pleasure, Then be content without a World of treasure.

The bawdy humour had become even more evident by the middle of the eighteenth century. The New School of Love, for example, cloaks its advice on how ⁸⁵ New School of Love (1786), 2.

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to woo and the physiognomical search for a partner with plenty of risqué verse: ‘Let not the Bridegroom be afraid | Though he encounter with a Maid | She’ll squeak, she’ll cry | She’ll faint she’ll die’. And if the ribald humour at the heart of this admittedly random game of love-searching can be said to have come and gone, the appropriation of physiognomy into the notion of the game was a more permanent feature of these more popular texts. A late eighteenthcentury text, A New Academy of Compliments, consisted of the now traditional future-telling and partner-seeking art of physiognomating: ‘The most Exact and Approved Fortune-Teller: As to what relates to Good or Bad Fortune in either Sex, especially to maids, Widows, Widowers, and Batchelors’ . . . ‘Signs to chuse Husbands and good Wives’, as well as the same types of partnerseeking games, some of which seemed to equate love and business: ‘Several Queries resolved in Matters of Love and Business, by throwing a Die, or pricking at a Figure’. The number thrown or letter pricked corresponded to a particular question and a particular answer to questions such as: ‘As to what Kind of a Husband a Widow or maid shall have’, and once again there were numerous physiognomical answers.⁸⁶ Thus, if this shift from re-generation to generation was at the same time one that involved a shift from praying to playing, one final question can be asked. What was the role of the occult understanding of physiognomy in this transformation of the ways in which reading a ‘treatise on physiognomy’ was appropriated? Once again it must be said that the shift from regeneration to generation was not a consequence of the demise of the hermetic form of physiognomy. Indeed, as much as the hermetic art of physiognomy was bound up with the notion of ‘re-generation’, the hermetic philosophers also had a particular physiognomical understanding of generation. The frontispiece of Robert Fludd’s ‘treatise on physiognomy’ articulated just this relationship between physiognomical ‘re-generation’ and ‘generation’. It represented the human level of the notion of divine fecundity which underpinned Fludd’s earlier vision and visualization of the Creation. It was a conception of human fecundity enmeshed in Neoplatonic notions of love, of the ‘eros’ of ‘spiritus’, and hermetic conceptions of re-generation/reproduction.⁸⁷ Thus, whether one was reading a hermetically influenced ‘book on physiognomy’ or not, that reading ⁸⁶ Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece (1764), 106, 108, and 109; Aristotle’s Legacy [1690?], London: British Library, Cup.403h.37, 3, 4, and 5; New School of Love (Glasgow, 1786), 11; New Academy of Compliments (1772), 56–7, 61–2. ⁸⁷ Bruno, Œuvres Complètes, vii. Des Fureurs Hèroiques, ed. M. A. Granada (Paris, 1999), 330 and 578 (n. 75), 360.


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practice was one that often came to be appropriated in the practice of searching for a mate. Indeed, as far as the more occult-influenced physiognomical eye was concerned, it was a reading practice which in some cases appropriated the hermetic desire for self-perfection and immortality via self-transformation into the generation of offspring. The following definition of physiognomy would have been acceptable at any point in the period: ‘Physiognomy is an ingenious Science, or Knowledge of Nature, by which the Inclinations and Dispositions of every Creature are understood’. The words may have been the same. But what had changed was man’s understanding of nature, man’s relationship to nature, and the conception of what constituted ‘knowledge’. Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece contained vestiges of the originally more self-reflexive, devotional form of ‘engagement’: Now since philosophy informs us, that nosce te ipsum is one of the first lessons a man ought to learn, it cannot surely be accounted a useless piece of knowledge for a man to be acquainted with the cause of his own being.⁸⁸

Yet all sense of how physiognomy could be used to know one’s self had gone. This was not only because the understanding of the grammar of physiognomy had been lost. It was also due to the fact that, by that stage, the conception of the self had changed profoundly, with the result that the realm of physiognomy, to the extent that it was still recognizable as physiognomy, had been transformed into a concern with the mechanics of the cause and external ‘impression’ of the self rather than the less mechanical meaning and the more occult internal ‘impression’ of one’s self. Indeed, it can be argued that what had begun a significant part of its early modern life as part of the oral, then the printed, hermetic wisdom of Egyptian, Islamic, and Jewish mysticism was by the end of the early modern period being published in a variety of cheap collections of extremely popular, even bawdy, material, some of which carried intimations of racial overtones. The title of one 1729 anonymous Italian publication states this evolution from ‘praying’ to ‘playing’ very clearly—The Golden Key; or, The art of winning the lottery, followed by a treatise on physiognomy and chiromancy from the work of a modern Cabbalist.⁸⁹ ⁸⁸ Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece (1710), 104; Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece (1764), 9. ⁸⁹ La chiave d’oro, ovvero l’ arte di vincere alla lotteria, seguito da un trattato di fisognomia e di chiromanzia ad opera di un cabalista moderno (n. pl., 1729).


Conclusion Historiographically speaking, this chapter has attempted to complement the work of scholars such as F. A. Yates and D. P. Walker on the history of the hermetic philosophy in early modern Europe, whilst the following chapter, which tests the hypotheses offered in this chapter by examining the graffiti found on extant copies of early modern ‘books on physiognomy’, is a contribution to what might be termed the history of the margins. Together they argue that, as a result of Neoplatonic hermetic syncretism, the physiognomics in this series of texts came to provide some readers with a labyrinthine, audio-visual world of symbolic entry-points into the mythological meaning which was, at one time, thought to be dissolved in, if not actually indistinguishable from, the nature (physis) of the human body and the human self. Those symbols and meanings were, in fact, the remnants of an ancient religion (prisca theologia) of a now forgotten mythical self-knowledge. When combined with the art of memory, the art of physiognomy became what Robert Fludd called a ‘technique of the microcosm’, aimed at guiding and controlling the celestial influence that regulated the microcosm and the macrocosm in order to bring about and sustain a regeneration of the self, what Bruno referred to as an ‘inner writing’. As a result of the rediscovery of hermeticism in the autumn of the Middle Ages, reading a ‘book on physiognomy’ became an intense exercise in a mystical form of selfmeditation. However, with the gradual penetration into everyday life of the seventeenth century’s more empirical culture, the refusal of an increasingly dominant natural philosophy to accept the divine fisnomic capacities of the scientific viewer, and the less reverential attitudes taken towards the ancient language of physiognomony as presented on the pages of these increasingly vulgarized texts, reading physiognomony became, for a while, nothing more than a respectable ‘curiosity’. By the early eighteenth century it was a reading practice that had been transformed into nothing more than a bawdy, communal parlour game.

6 Living Graffiti In one extant copy of the Kalendar of Shepherds, the passage referring to the special way in which shepherds and simple people know God has been underlined.¹ In the ensuing analysis it will be argued that the graffiti in these ‘treatises on physiognomy’ reveal a number of different reading practices of ‘humble folk’ or even the ‘poorest members of society’, including those who could not quite read books. Indeed, many of them can be taken as an indication of the way in which the innate iconicity of the language of physiognomony inspired some form of visual representation. The first is a scholary examination referencing of the sources of the physiognomy in the text. The second is the more ‘humble’ reading practice of children in the process of learning the language of physiognomy as part of a shared process of developing both a textual and a visual literacy. The severe limitations of using graffiti as empirical evidence certainly become apparent when one tries to use them to establish with indisputable clarity whether specific readers at specific times prayed or played in the ways suggested in the previous chapter. Notwithstanding those limitations, it is further argued that the perusal of these texts not only involved the use of a mirror, but, when seen in the light of the internal moral projection which it was claimed these books stimulated, some of these seemingly meaningless graffitoed traces at times become what, for brevity’s sake, can be described as the hermetic graffiti of a Renaissance soul.

Backward Projection ‘Direct’, detailed evidence of an early modern reader having read a ‘book on physiognomy’ is rarely come by. The working hypothesis of the previous chapter has been based on a process of anthropological back-projection—by observing the way in which these texts are read today and deliberately project¹ Oxford: Bodleian Library, Vet. A3c. 238, sig. I2.

256 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 ing that back onto the past. As Marc Bloch wrote, ‘it is always by borrowing from our daily experiences and by shading them, where necessary, with new tints, that we derive the elements which help us to restore the past’. In order to admit the limitations of such an exercise, it should also be seen as an exercise in what Foucault called a ‘history of the present’, or what E. H. Carr described as ‘an unending dialogue between the present and the past’.² Another way of describing this would be to see this process as articulating the enigma of the continuity and discontinuity between the present and the past, between our present sense of ‘ourselves’ and an early modern sense of ‘ourselves’. For, on the one hand, it is historically naïve to assume that ‘they’ (the readers of the early modern period) were exactly like ‘us’ (contemporary readers). Indeed, that very act of projecting ourselves backwards into the position and mindset of an early modern reader brings us face-to-face with all of the religious, scientific, political, social, economic, and cultural changes that have taken place between then and now, and which have contributed to our present understanding of ‘the self ’ that we use to carry out that backward projection. It is undeniable that all of those developments have contributed to a process of metamorphosis by which our present sense of ‘self ’ is in some ways profoundly different from the early modern sense of ‘self ’. So much so that some now claim that our present, allegedly post-genome, ‘post-human’ condition represents some radical and fundamental discontinuity with our past ‘human condition’. However, that very same act of anthropological back-projection which helps us to reconstruct how they read these ‘books on physiognomy’ also allows us to experience an understanding of a historical and ontological continuity between our past and present sense of ‘self ’ in the form of the basic, almost visceral ‘intersubjectivity’ we feel we share with the nature of the people of the early modern past. There are no early modern newsreels or films of these reading practices. In addition, the internal ‘cinema’ generated as part of the most intense, prayer-like hermetic form of textual self-physiognomation, or the laughter and wit which arose spontaneously among a party of readers as they playfully perused these pages, also appears to have vanished without trace. Visual representations of reading practices, such as the woodcut of the Carthusian monks (Illustration 26), bring us closer to ‘live footage’. But even they are, strictly speaking, indirect evidence. Until a first-hand detailed early modern diary account of the reading of a ‘treatise on physiognomy’ is discovered, the only surviving direct ² M. Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. P. Putnam (Manchester, 1954), 44, 47; M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan (1979), 31; E. H. Carr, What is History?, ed. R. W. Davies, 2nd edn. (Basingstoke, 2000), 24.

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evidence of such actual readings are the traces of graffiti left by former readers on the extant texts themselves. Is it possible to use such graffiti to ‘document more directly the ways humble folk appropriated’ these texts? One expert in the field is understandably sceptical: This is a difficult task because, unlike the reading styles of the learned and the lettered, ‘popular’ reading has left no traces on the print objects themselves. Careful scrutiny of the marginal notes that Gabriel Harvey, a professional reader in the service of various aristocratic patrons, made in his copy of Livy has made it possible to reconstruct how he read, and similar annotations in Jean Bodin’s Universae naturae theatrum made by the university professors give a notion of the uses and interpretations of that work, but this seems totally unavailable to historians of the poorest members of society. Similarly, historians lack anything like the first-person accounts of reading left by some popular readers of the eighteenth century who wrote the stories of their lives.³

Marginal Graffiti When examining the graffiti in these books, one has to be aware that graffiti constitute a form of writing with a long history. The Lascaux caves or the walls of Pompeii are just two of the most well-known forms of what might be considered historical graffiti. Less well-known and studied but equally important are the graffiti found on the walls of monasteries, including, very often, representations of human faces.⁴ The balustrades of the upper gallery of the seventeenth-century chapel built by Christian IV at Fredriksborg slot, in Hillerød, outside Copenhagen, to take just one example, contain an astonishing amount of seventeenth-century graffiti scratched into the stone by former church-goers. Indeed, just as graffiti are an art form now being taken seriously as a valid form of expression by the aficionados of the ‘art world’; just as this sort of physical interaction with the text becomes increasingly impossible in the world of hypertext; so graffiti are a writing practice that is increasingly coming under the lens of serious historical scholarship. Within the discipline of history itself, the consideration of graffiti as potentially significant evidence is bound up with the historiographical tradition of the history of the margins. As Carlo Ginzburg has shown, the late nineteenthcentury art historian Giovanni Morelli thought that it was through the marginal details that the individuality of the artist avoided subordination to ³ G. Cavallo and R. Chartier (eds.), The History of Reading in the West (Cambridge, 1999), 281–2. ⁴ R. Kostova, ‘The Silent Communication: Graffiti from the Monastery of Ravna, Bulgaria’, Mitteilungen der ANISA 17, Heft. 1 (1996), 57–77.

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cultural traditions, those details being repeated ‘by force of habit, almost unconsciously’. Sigmund Freud also found them very revealing in works of art as well as psychoanalysis, which, he wrote, ‘is accustomed to divine secret and concealed things from unconsidered or unnoticed details, from the rubbishheap, as it were, of our observations’. An analysis of the graffiti in this obscure corpus of early modern ‘books on physiognomy’ certainly calls for what Ginzburg described as ‘an interpretative method based on taking marginal and irrelevant details as revealing clues’.⁵ The study of graffiti in the margins of books on such an obscure subject like physiognomy makes it even more marginal. Yet, however marginal it might be, one question has yet to be addressed: why are these markings being referred to as ‘graffiti’, and not ‘marginal annotations’ or more generally ‘marginalia’? The term ‘graffiti’ is being used because both ‘marginal annotations’ and ‘marginalia’, whilst claiming a bibliographic objectivity, imply some sort of deliberate scholarly commentary. Some of the markings in ‘books on physiognomy’ are of a very scholarly nature, made by the quill of a model Renaissance humanist, and hence accurately described as ‘marginal annotations’ or ‘marginalia’. Some might even be said to have added up to an entire commentary, such as Camillo Baldi’s on the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica. However, most of them are not. And quantity aside, what is more to the point is that this particular analysis is more concerned with the markings made by (humble?) people who appear to have been engaging with the text on its own terms, in a non-scholarly, non-professional, or a less consciously intellectual or learned way. The traces of such interactions, like the now irretrievable faces of the people who made them, were and are their own very particular type of commentary. Indeed, if one has to be pedantic, neither are such traces of readers’ interactions always to be found in the margins. They were often made in the middle of a paragraph, or on the back or front cover of the volume. In fact, some of them are found in the middle of a woodcut or an engraving. Consider, for example, the smoking pipe placed in the mouth of a woodcut of the Virgin Mary in a sixteenth-century printed version of the Kalendar of Shepherds (Illustration 36); or the human genitalia added to engravings of the gladiator in a 1603 edition of Giovanni Battista Della Porta’s De coelestis physiognomoniae (Illustration 37), and those erased from a late fifteenth-century edition of the Compost et kalendrier des bergiers.⁶ It seems difficult to describe these ⁵ C. Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. J. Tedeschi and A. Tedeschi (Baltimore, Md., 1989), 96–125. ⁶ Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, MV33, sig. Hiiiv.

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36. An early modern, graffitoed pipe placed in the mouth of the mother of God. The Kalender of Sheephards (c.1585). A Facsimile Reproduction, ed. S. K. Heninger, Jr (Delmar, New York, 1979), 73 and 75, 80, 86, prepared from the copy in the Bodleian Library, Malone 17. sig. E5. (Photo: Oxford: Bodleian Library.)

things with any degree of accuracy as ‘marginal annotations’ or ‘manuscript notes’.⁷ Even if this is enough to allow for the use of the term ‘graffiti’, it still begs the question of the purposefulness of examining graffiti per se. If ‘rich and detailed accounts of physiognomy, passions, habits, and regimens’ still seem to have little to do with ‘ “knowledge itself ” ’, then some might feel that the act of ⁷ See M. Camille, Image on the Edge (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 11.


37. Graffitoed genitalia and skirts on the illustrations found in Della Porta’s famous physiognomical treatise, Giovanni Baptista Della Porta, Coelestis physiognomoniae libri sex (Naples, 1603), Rome: Biblioteca Vallicaliana, S.Borr.H.III.98, p. 78, K3v. (Photo: Mario Setter Biblioteca Vallicaliana.)

contemplating graffiti when one could be reading Shakespeare is a sign that the métier of the Western historian of Western Europe took a wrong turning and has arrived at a (turning) point where it really must have nothing better to do.⁸ Opinions are certainly divided over the possible significance of the knowledge one can gain by considering graffiti. One recent attempt to categorize all marginalia provides a historical spectrum of opinion on the matter. That spectrum is framed, at this contemporary end, by a contemporary bibliographer for whom hand-written marginalia ‘spring up spontaneously around a text ⁸ S. Shapin and C. Lawrence (eds.), Science Incarnate (Chicago, 1998), 2.

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unaware of their presence’ and are ‘wayward in their very nature’. At its other, early nineteenth-century end, sits Mary Shelley, for whom marginalia were, in a phrase reminiscent of the title of this book, ‘a reliable mirror of the soul’.⁹ Using the graffiti found in a historical document as evidence for how that text was read is certainly often hazardously speculative. It raises numerous, usually unanswerable, questions. For example, assuming it can be clearly established which different hands are responsible for which marks, and assuming that the marks of these hands can be accurately dated (a huge, and often insurmountable problem), one is still left with the problem of the actual (and usually untraceable) narrative of any interaction between pen and page. Was the underlining of a series of particular phrases in the text made in one sitting, or were they made over a period of time through consecutive readings? Were they made in the order in which they appear? In cases where the age, sex, or even the identity of the reader who made these marks is not known, or known by name alone, to what extent can one discern the identity of that person by these marks themselves? Why has a reader underlined certain passages and not others? Is there any meaningful pattern to the arrangement of these graffiti? Whatever question one is asking, as far as the use of graffiti in the reconstruction of early modern readings of physiognomy in books is concerned, the extant treatises which make up this canon of physiognomical texts are too scattered for a single person to be able to examine them in their entirety. Moreover, even if these treatises were collectable in their entirety and all of the graffiti in those that bore them examined in detail, generalizations based on comparative quantitative figures might still be distorted by the incompleteness of the evidence. Given the degree of distortion introduced by the hazardous survival of the evidence, such a quantitative comparative analysis might provide more scholarly false trails than genuine historical leads, and, even worse, cover them with the dubious patina of statistical science. Yet, with perseverance and distinct reservations, some suggestive patterns and meanings emerge, highlighting phenomena which certainly deserve further investigation.

The Graffiti of the Learned If graffiti are a form of defacement, many of the graffiti on these texts have themselves been defaced through natural fading, or concerted attempts to erase ⁹ R. C. Alston, Books with Manuscript (1994), p. xiii; W. E. Slights, ‘The Edifying Margins of Renaissance English Books’, Renaissance Quarterly, 42: 4 (1989), 682–716; L. Lipking, ‘The Marginal Gloss’, Critical Inquiry, 3 (1977), 609–55, 612.

262 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 them, such as the clipping of the margins of the book that was such a common practice in the history of the book. An octavo edition of Johannes de Indagine’s physiognomical treatise which was published in Lyon in 1582 is just one example of the graffiti that have faded over time and deliberately been erased.¹⁰ Either way, vital evidence with which the trained eye of the historian in the guise of detective can work has been destroyed by the passing of time. The manuscripts which the Middle Ages handed down to the Renaissance contained huge swathes of textual commentary created in their copious margins by readers and scribes. Those commentaries were part of the medieval labyrinths of meaning from which Renaissance humanists were attempting to escape, interpretations from which they were trying to purify both themselves and their culture. The humanist desire to capture and consider only the original text itself helped to create a new conceptual universe since known as the Renaissance. One consequence of this was that these marginal comments were not included in the printed Renaissance version of the text. Indeed, from around 1500, when printers across Europe began to include printed marginalia as part of their presentation of the content of the actual main text itself, margins became smaller, and the medieval practice of glossing waned somewhat further. Yet, as some of these physiognomical treatises show, there was still a demand for such marginal résumés of the main text. In those treatises which were printed without marginal indexes, readers often provided them in their own hands. Thus, many of the hand-written markings in the extant copies of physiognomical treatises represent an attempt by a former reader to construct an index in the margin of the page, which was then to be used by the reader as either an easy reference guide, or as an aid to memorization.¹¹ The scholarship or pragmatism of some readers even went so far as to compile an entire index in manuscript at the back of the book.¹² At times these marginal ‘glosses’ take the more obviously Renaissance scholarly form of an attempt to provide the exact textual authorities for a particular passage in the main body of the text. Thus, in the margins of a late sixteenthcentury quarto edition of Della Porta’s De humana physiognomia (Hanover, 1593), for example, one (Swiss?) reader provided very scholarly references to precise passages in the Latin translation of specific texts of Aristotle, Galen, and Cicero.¹³ This sort of marginalia was yet another of the early modern ¹⁰ Geneva: Bibliothèque Publique Universitaire, Se 6344 Res, 108–16. ¹¹ For example, London: British Library, C.27.k.6, sig. Jviii. ¹² Florence: Biblotheca Nazionale, I.7.357: Giovanni Battista Della Porta, Coelestis physiognomoniae (Naples, 1603). ¹³ Basle: Bibliothek der Universität: HI VIII 24: 1, sigs. 4v and 5v.

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European-wide legacies of Renaissance humanism. One can perhaps detect the autumn of this sort of Renaissance humanism and the rise of the more pragmatic approach to learning advocated by some mid-seventeenth-century writers on education in the markings which the English royalist and antiquary Richard Symonds made in his 1644 Venetian edition of Della Porta’s Fisonomia. At one point he has underlined the passage in which Cicero is quoted as saying: The face is the looking-glass of the mind [Il volto e specchio della mente],

but without going as far as to give the exact reference from Cicero.¹⁴ Much of the graffiti which can be found in the extant copies of early modern ‘books on physiognomy’ represent traces of another equally significant form of learning—the learning of the language of physiognomony by children. Take one densely graffitoed sixteenth-century English copy of the Kalendar of Shepherds. The person responsible for the majority of the graffiti appears to be a child named ‘Thomas Betteley’, who, on ‘august ye 27, 1696’ performed these calligraphic acts on a text that was by that stage between 120 and 190 years old.¹⁵ The lack of any secure antiquarian sensitivity on the part of the parents preventing his getting hold of it might be of interest or surprise to some contemporary readers. Despite the rise of antiquarianism at the end of the seventeenth century, it might even suggest that ‘books on physiognomy’ had not yet taken on a lifeless antiquity in all eyes. More tangible is the fact that the graffiti made by this child on the pages of this text were done in imitation of the graffiti made by an earlier reader. Moreover, after young Betteley, the book seems then to have passed into the hands of one ‘Joseph Cartwright’, who, in 1700, proceeded to imitate the graffiti of both Betteley and even the previous readers of that book.¹⁶ These are thus signs that this sort of interaction was a trans-historical, universal, and continuous practice. More pertinent is the fact that the graffiti in these ‘books on physiognomy’ bear witness to an inter-generational practice of learning to read, write, count, and draw. For the children’s graffiti on the aforementioned copy of the Kalendar of Shepherds consist not only of a repeated name but also of a series of repeated letters from the alphabet, repeated numbers, or attempts to imitate or copy out a phrase from the main body of the text as a calligraphic exercise, written the right way up or upside down, vertically, horizontally, even diagonally, across the page. It is at this point that the ritual of possession inherent in the ¹⁴ London: British Library, 718.h.38: 97. ¹⁵ Oxford: Bodleian Library Auct. QQ. Supra II 30, sig. Aviiv–Aviiir. ¹⁶ Oxford: Bodleian Library, Auct. QQ. Supra II 30, sigs. Bi, Bviv, Bvii, Cii, Cviii, Evv, and Eviii.

264 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 writing of the name dissolves into a ritual of learning. Indeed, given the number of times children repeatedly scrawled their names throughout the text, one might interpret such actions as the first intimations of both the discovery and the creation of a textual self. Moreover, the graffiti in some of these texts provide clear evidence of the spread of this learning virus in so far as they show that these ‘treatises on physiognomy’ were passed from child to child, both within and outside the family. The unique extant copy of Robert Copland’s English translation of the Secret of Secrets (1528) is a particularly good English example. In 1630, a century after it was first published, it was owned by ‘Robert Doe of Enfield in the County of P p p p P’. Beneath Robert Doe’s inscription, there is written a list of other names: ‘Anthony Doe’, ‘Joyne Doe’, ‘Edward Doe’, and ‘William Doe 1636’. Another inscription found later in the text runs: ‘Robert Doe was the right onor to this book but now I give it to my well beloued [. . .?].’¹⁷ This fraternal ritual of hand-me-down also happened between friends. One early sixteenthcentury copy of the Compost of Ptholomeus was owned by a sixteenth-century child named ‘Joannes Hodgson’. The writing on the back page suggests that he then gave this book to a friend: To his beste friend Thomas H[??????] H H Hodyggon.¹⁸

Nor was this a phenomenon of the economy of the book that existed only between literate boys. One extant 1700 edition of Aristotle’s Masterpiece carries the names of ‘Ruth Tomlinson’, ‘Sarah Webster’, ‘Hanah Marpets’, and most prominently ‘Ruth Swindell 1745’. Although a lively second-hand bookmarket could explain the names of these different ‘owners’, it is just as likely evidence of the same ritual of book-giving between girl friends. The absence of evidence for this ritual having occurred between friends of different sex is probably a distortion introduced by the fragmented nature of the evidence that has survived. It certainly occurred between brothers and sisters. The ‘Jon’ and ‘James’ who have signed this particular copy of Aristotle’s Masterpiece as well are very likely Ruth Swindell’s brothers. Hence, these reading and learning rituals were part of a common textual culture. Given that the exposition of physiognomical doctrine in these books was the textual form of a visual language, then this exchange of texts can also be said to be an exchange of a common visual culture, a common way of seeing things, a ¹⁷ Cambridge: University Library, Sel. 5.60, sigs. Ciiiv, Givv, Aii, Bii, Biv, Ciiv, Iiv, and Diiv. ¹⁸ Harvard: Houghton Library, STC 29481.2, sig. Cviiiv.

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shared physiognomical eye. In one case, it was an exchange of a common way of seeing in which the innate distinction between the male and female sexes that underlay the grammar of the art of physiognomy itself was sometimes asserted. When Ruth Swindell’s brother, James, entered his name in the book, he placed it under the chapter devoted to ‘The Anatomy of the Organ of Generation in Man’, thus emphasizing the most fundamental aspect of his physiognomy that distinguished him from his sister.¹⁹ This sort of graffiti is, of course, not specific to ‘treatises on physiognomy’. None the less, it does confirm that systematized physiognomony in written and printed form was something in which children were educated, and which some children learned as part of the process of learning to read. However, it should not be taken as evidence that, from around the midseventeenth century onwards, systematized ‘knowledge by the visage’ underwent a relegation in its intellectual status to that of a ‘childish’ thing. Apart from the fact that adults continued to read physiognomy, from at least the fourth century physiognomy had been thought of as a language, an ‘alphabet’ of the body, that children should learn in their earliest years. As one of the most authoritative and widely distributed of the ancient physiognomical treatises put it: For just as in the study of letters, which, according to the Greeks, consists of 24 elements by which the voice and conversation of all things is comprehended, so in physiognomony, the broader observation is disclosed from the elements of that which is proposed. If we learn all the syllables during the earliest years of childhood, then once we have understood their value, we will very quickly see the series of letters from which any word which presents itself is composed.²⁰

It has yet to be established to what extent the art and science of physiognomy was an official part of the early modern European school syllabus. However, it was none the less evidently a part of early modern children’s shared textual and visual culture. But all of this still begs the question of how the learning of physiognomy was related to what may have been more official school learning. I would suggest that this learning of the language of physiognomy points once again towards the historiographical debate about the coexistence, even the complementarity, of the rational and the occult, in this case in the form of two very different concepts of language. This becomes evident by considering one basic aspect of the various ways in which children learned foreign languages in the early modern period. Early modern dictionaries which aimed at teaching children foreign ¹⁹ London: British Library, 1506/676: sig. Ai, 125, 129, 165, and 172. ²⁰ Traité de physiognomonie, ed. J. André (Paris, 1981), 52.

266 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 languages show how fundamental was the human body to the process of learning to read and write in any language. For the words for the human body were often the first words or names for things to be learned by heart. In Shakespeare’s Henry V, the French princess’s attempt to learn the English language is just one less bookish example of the same process. The first question she asks is ‘Comment appelez-vous la main en anglais?’ She then continues with the word for the fingers, nails, arm, elbow, neck, and chin, and makes a hash of it.²¹ When early modern foreign language learning and early modern physiognomical language learning are considered in the light of one another, it appears that, in some eyes at least, learning a ‘foreign’ language not only involved learning the words for the particular members of the human body, it also meant learning the meanings of those corporeal members. In other words, it involved understanding how the members which made up the human anatomy were a language in themselves, incarnated elements of a Holy Scripture, part of the emblematic character of God’s natural language. Moreover, the meanings of that language took one into what Robert Fludd called the ‘indexes of nature’, what was for Ficino and hermeticists ‘religion of the world’, and the divine realms of an ancient theology.²²

The Graffiti of the Soul Generation If it can be said that the graffiti in ‘treatises on physiognomy’ provide evidence of this ‘religion of the world’ being learned and committed to memory by young and old alike, to what extent do they provide evidence that some of these treatises were engaged with, and appropriated, in the ways suggested in the previous chapter? In some cases the graffiti in the extant copies of the texts in this corpus of physiognomical literature show how a reader has brought out an implicit theme with a remarkable degree of consistency and conscious reflection. This seems particularly evident for the concern of the physiognomical eye with the issue of ‘generation’. Take, for example, the underlining in one extant copy of a 1571 edition of Thomas Hill’s physiognomical treatise. They appear to have been made by at least two different hands. The first hand (in black ink) shows that the reader has underlined a variety of aphorisms which, in nearly every case, refer to the dif²¹ William Shakespeare, Henry V, III. v. 1–55. ²² F. A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), 41.

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ferent aspects of the sexual act, such as, for instance, the phrases ‘the earnest desire to the veneriall acte’, and ‘a fornicator’. Every mention of the genitalia themselves has been underlined. On folio 179v, where the meaning of the short backbone is given as ‘hastie in the venereall action’, the meaning has been underlined. The same reader has also underlined the sign ‘when the pappes begin to arise’—whose meaning is given as ‘that (such shortly after) to be prouoked unto the veneriall acte’ (fol. 184v). This same text gives large bellies as a sign of abnormal sexual appetite. This too has been underlined. Further evidence of this concern can be found in the chapter devoted to the physiognomy of the ‘yard and the testicles’. Each time either one of these words or their cognates has been used in the main body of the text, they have been printed in the form of a code. The code is relatively simple to work out. The letters that make up the word have been printed backwards (though not in the sense that one would need a mirror to decode it). In addition, each vowel of the word is represented by a number 1–5, a corresponding to 1, e to 2, i to 3, o to 4, and u to 5. Thus ‘yard’ is printed as ‘dr1y’, ‘penis’ as ‘s3n2p’. Notwithstanding, the same reader not only went to the trouble of cracking each of these coded words, he or she also wrote the solution in the margin of the text. Just how ‘educated’ (or shame-ridden) this reader may have been is demonstrated by the fact that the word ‘testicles’ has not only been decoded, but the reader has tried to preserve some Renaissance-educated sense of decorum by writing the solution in the margin in Greek. On folio 192r, the meaning of a ‘hairy belly’ has been underlined. That the meaning is given as ‘very leacherous’ is further evidence of this reader’s concern with the sexual act. So consistent does this concern with sexual practice seem to be in graffiti that one is then led to assume that the reason why the signs for small feet and long feet have been underlined is because they are given as a sign of those who are ‘small, comely, fayre . . . prone unto the veneriall act’, ‘small, fayre & tender . . . a fornicator’, ‘long feet . . . aptest, and doe lightly conceyue with childe’. Moreover, the same pattern of underlining is also found in the epitome with which the author has followed the main text. Similarly in the section on moles, two passages about moles on the genitalia have been underlined, one of which is a presage of child-bearing capacities: ‘A Mole on the 23v3rp r2bm2m itselfe, doth portend that he shall beget men children: and she contrariwise, beare women children’. And whilst there are two passages underlined that seem to have nothing to do with the theme of sexuality, one of these is the underlining of a sign which was given earlier in the main text as meaning ‘bigge genitale’.²³ ²³ Oxford: Bodleian Library, Antiq. F. E 1571/, fols. 184v, 191r–v, 193v, 192r, 201r and 203r. 127v and 129r; fols. 179v, 184v, 191, 203; [2]13v), [2]14r) [foliation is erratic.]

268 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 The text just discussed, a 1571 edition of Thomas Hill’s Contemplation of mankinde, was heavily derivative of the Liber physiognomiae of Michael Scot, whose contribution to the development of the theory driving the medieval physiognomical eye was to link it more closely with the notion of generation and embryology. As was pointed out in Chapter 3, Scot’s work, in one guise or another, may have been the printed physiognomical treatise most widely read between the late fifteenth and the late seventeenth centuries. Many editions of this work survived. Indeed, it seems to have been a work which was more heavily graffitoed than any other text in the physiognomical canon. Moreover, that graffiti most often suggests that it was with exactly these concerns about generation that they were read. In one late fifteenth-century printed edition of Scot’s Liber physiognomiae now in the Vatican library, where the text runs ‘coitu sit mutua relatio’, a reader has written in the right-hand margin ‘Coitus est mutua relatio’.²⁴ Similarly, one Baesl University library copy of Michael Scot’s Liber physiognomiae is an example of a text where the underlined passages have also been complemented by the writing out of the themes to which those passages refer in the margin of the page. In this case those themes again relate to notions of generation such as ‘Vir agens’, ‘Mulier patiens’, ‘Luxuriae radix’, and ‘tempus concubitus’, ‘Testiculi utriusque’, ‘Spermatis fontes’.²⁵ A copy of Scot’s text found in the Bibliothèque Publique Universitaire of Geneva is also typical.²⁶ In the margin beside the section dealing with birth prior to seven months (sig. c) a sixteenthcentury reader has written ‘Nasc, ante mesam septimum’. There are more manuscript notes next to the sections dealing with the fluxation of the blood according to the moon (sig. ci); how the baby in the uterus is fed by the mother’s menstrual blood through the umbilical cord (sig. civ); how the infant exits via the uterus (sig. cii), as well as other underlining of passages in the section on lactation. Indeed, in the passages devoted to milk and the disposition of the child’s parents, the appropriate nutrition and the inappropriate nutrition, this reader’s manuscript notes also include references to Plutarch, Erasmus, and Galen. The part of the text which deals with how the woman’s foot reveals the form of her vagina, and how the lips of her mouth reveal the state of her skin (sig. Div) has been marked with an asterisk. Though nothing in the actual section on physiognomony in this text has been underlined except the aphorism relating to the bearded woman (sig. Gvi), the passage in which Scot defines physiognomy has been marked, as are the references to the claim that ²⁴ Rome: Vatican Library, Incun. IV. 232, fol. 7. ²⁵ Basle: Bibliothek der Universität, K.L.X.1, sigs. A4r–v. ²⁶ Geneva: Bibliothèque Publique Universitaire, Cb 577(2) Res.

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38. One reader’s careful drawing of the physiognomical signs of infertility in a woman are very suggestive of what was in his mind, Ciro Spontoni, La Metoposcopia Ouero Commensuratione Delle Linee Della Fronte (Venice, 1629), Florence: Firenze: Bibliotheca Nazionale, 1272.6, fol. 123 (Photo: Bibliotheca Nazionale Firenze.)

Hippocrates, Galen, and ‘Almansori’ have written authoritatively on the matter. Taken as a whole, this seems proof enough of this late sixteenthcentury/early seventeenth-century reader’s overwhelming physiognomonical concern with the sexual act, and related notions of fertility and generation. Nor does it appear to have been particular to this reader. The number of extant early modern copies of Scot’s work with this sort of graffiti is striking. Nor is this concern visible only in the graffiti of Scot’s texts. Illustration 38 is taken from one Italian edition of Spontoni’s Metoposcopia in which the seventeenthcentury owner has hand drawn a number of female heads whose lines indicate a woman having a malady of the womb.²⁷ ²⁷ For a hand pointing to a passage dealing with the rarity with which Jewish sperm generates a face, see Girolamo Manfredi, Liber de homine (Bologna, 1474), Oxford: Bodleian Library, Inc.d.I.ii 1474/2, fol. 24.


From praying to playing Do the graffiti on these texts allow us to see any readers praying or playing physiognomically? In order to appreciate the moments of clarity and order in the graffiti in these texts, let us first begin with an example of graffiti at its most chaotic and impenetrable. The following chunk was found in the middle of an early sixteenth-century exposition of physiognomical doctrine: A persone that hath a very longe thycke necke sygnyfyeth glotonye force & great lechery. A manly woman that is great and rudely membred is by nature melancolyous varyaunte & lecherous. A persone that hath a great longe bely sygnyfyeth small wyt pryde and lechery. A lytell bely & large fete sygnyfyeth good understandynge good counceyle and true.²⁸

Whilst the markings appear to have been made by the same ink, the same pen, and the same sixteenth-century(?) hand, there is no other sense of pattern. Sometimes the words representing the physical feature are underlined. Sometimes it is the words representing the metaphysical meaning discoverable in that physical feature that have been underlined. And sometimes, as in this passage, it is somewhere in between the two. In this case, the metaphysical meaning of one aphorism has been underlined: ‘melancholyous varyaunte [&] lecherous’. The underlining then continues across into the next aphorism, but only as far as its first three words—‘A persone that’. This is followed by a small gap, then the underlining of the three words that make up the physical feature: ‘a great longe bely’. The next part of the underlining continues only as far as the adjective contained in its metaphysical meaning: ‘sygnyfyeth small’. Written in the margin besides this underlined passage, in what appears to be the same ink, the same pen, and again the same hand is: ‘manly woman’. Taken in conjunction with the underlining of the same phrase in the main text, this suggests a particular concern on the part of the reader with the phenomenon of the ‘manly woman’. Yet beyond that, marginalia such as these appear so random and any interpretation so speculative as to be inexplicable other than in terms of the process of underlining having taken on a mindless life of its own. It is at exactly this point that one might feel it necessary to come back to the issue of marginality, and the claim made by Freud, that such seemingly chaotic, unimportant details, what Freud called the ‘rubbish-heap’, are an entrypoint into the unconscious. In this case it would appear that what remains of the route to that reader’s unconscious takes the form of the ‘manly woman’. But ²⁸ London: British Library, 717.a.5, sig. r iiv.

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just how far one can go with this sort of analysis is another question. This issue of ‘manly woman’ may have been of profound importance to the reader. But in the absence of any other known evidence about that reader, a positivist historical analysis comes up against a historical brick wall. There are other passages in the section on physiognomony in this same copy of the Compost of Ptholomeus which appear to have been underlined by the same (sixteenth-century?) hand and which, through careful questioning, appear less chaotic and therefore more interpretable. Take, for example, the marginalia in the section on hair. Unlike the passage just discussed, this contains distinct traces of order and consistency. With one exception, only the meanings in the aphorisms have been underlined, not the physical features. Even in the one exception, only part of the physical feature has been underlined, suggesting a greater concern with the meaning: hangynge heer sygnyfyeth wyt with malice.²⁹

A similar pattern is found in the section of aphorisms dealing with the eyes where, once again, no physical features have been underlined. And yet still they leave one unable to draw any firm conclusion beyond claiming that the ambiguities of the evidence are too great. Should all this underlining be interpreted as evidence of a reader attempting simply to memorize these particular passages? Or was the reader underlining aphorisms which he or she recognized in himself or herself or in other people? The weakness in the memorization thesis lies in the fact that only the meanings of hard hair, black hair, and red beard, and black crispy and yellow crispy hair have been underlined. Similarly, in the section on eyes, the aphorisms for ‘great wide iyes’, ‘ardaunt & sperkelynge’ eyes, and ‘whytyshe and flesshely’ eyes have not been underlined at all.³⁰ If the reader was attempting to learn this part of the text, then why only underline some of the aphorisms and not these? One could argue that the reason the latter have not been underlined is because the reader was already familiar with them. However, that argument is weakened by the fact that the aphorism for ‘black hair and red beard’ has been underlined. This aphorism had attained proverbial status and as such was probably much more widely known than the sign for ‘great and wide eyes’ which was not underlined. Furthermore, the weakness of the self-physiognomation thesis lies in the fact that more than one type of hair and shape of eyes has been underlined. No-one can naturally have black hair, red hair, yellow hair, crisp hair, and ²⁹ London: British Library, 717.a.5, sig. qivv.

³⁰ London: British Library, 717.a.5, sigs. qivv and ri.

272 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 hanging hair. So the reader could not have been thinking only of himself or herself while doing the underlining. This, then, brings us to the suggestion that the passages underlined must be those which represented physiognomical features (either physical, psychological, or both) which the reader recognized about himself or her self and/or other people known to the reader. Even if this admittedly speculative possibility is accepted, one is then faced with some of the unanswerable questions rehearsed earlier. Was the reader interacting with this text in private (in one or more sessions), or with another person or a group of other people who were sitting around the reader at the same time? The ambiguities of this evidence mean that the possibilities are still numerous. The reader may have been alone, and, on coming across a particular aphorism, was reminded of either himself or her self, a friend, or a person the reader had once seen. In fact, it is not beyond the realms of possibility, for example, that these markings were made by a local cunning man or wizard in the course of a number of physiognomical consultations with respective clients. Having said that, it is through exactly this more anthropological sort of consideration of the graffiti that one discovers that some of them do, in fact, represent traces of the actual performance of the universal form of engagement with a physiognomical treatise. Or at least it is this form of engagement which more than any other interpretation helps to give sense to much of the graffiti in these books. Other extant physiognomical treatises offer much stronger evidence for claiming that the graffiti represent the traces of a single reader who had read the text in search of signs that represented attributes of his or her own real or ideal self. In the margins of the physiognomical section in one copy of the 1618 edition of the Kalendar, the same hand in the same ink has drawn the same pointing finger four times next to four different aphorisms: the ‘little short visage and a small necke, a litle slender nose’, ‘long ears’, ‘great long bellie’, and ‘clear and shining nailes of good colour’.³¹ Unlike the previous example, all of these could conceivably be found in a single person. The fact that three of these aphorisms carry the complimentary meanings of ‘good memory’, ‘good understanding’, ‘wit’, and ‘increase of honour’, and that the criticism (‘follie’) implied in the fourth is not devastating, suggests that these marginalia show signs of wishful thinking on the part of the reader.³² The strength of this hypothesis about the search for attributes of one’s self is that it allows one to make sense of some otherwise impenetrable marginalia. For example, it suggests that one late seventeenth/early eighteenth-century ³¹ One finds the same pattern of graffiti in manuscripts, Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Digby 11, fol. 93r–v. ³² Oxford: Bodleian Library, Douce C. subt. 214, sigs. Pii–Piiv.

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reader of Saunders’s Physiognomie (1671) does not appear to have liked what he or she found under the ‘signs of a bold impudent person’ and those of a ‘wrathful and cruel person’. Both have been scratched through with a huge ‘X’ in a (bold, wrathful, and impudent?) gesture of disagreement, even obliteration.³³ But perhaps the most suggestive example of this universal form of engagement with an exposition of physiognomical doctrine are the graffiti made by one of the two hands which marked the 1571 edition of Thomas Hill’s Contemplation of mankinde mentioned above. The hand concerned appears to be that of a late seventeenth/early eighteenth-century unknown woman, possibly named ‘Arabella Bray’. Reproduced below, the different passages that have been underlined will instinctively suggest to most readers that she has carefully underlined specific physiognomical aphorisms because they were suggestive of people she knew: The stature which bendeth naturally forward, and not of age caused: doth denote a warie person to himselfe, a niggarde, laborious, a grosse feeder, long angrie, not lightly creediting, secrete, and yet of a dull witte and severe or cruell.

D.C.

The head long in fashion to the Hammer, to be prudent and warie, And in the forepart of the heade, a hollownesse: R.W. to be wylie & yrefull. Such which have the heares of the eye broowes shed over the nose, and spred upwarde unto the temples: are denoted foolish persons: applyed for the forme to the Hogge.

J.S.

Such which be verie naked of heare on the breast, or at (the least) have verie little or fewe heares to be seene: are invirecundious [sic], persons H.M. applyed unto women.

Given that the initials are all different, they might be taken to refer to friends (or enemies) rather than family.³⁴ With one exception, these graffiti show a relatively consistent care taken to underline the whole of the physiognomic (the physical feature and its meaning). As such, the absence of underlining in certain places appears to be explicable in terms of the inefficiency of the pen or the nerves of the reader’s hand as ³³ Washington D.C.: Library of Congress; BF 911. 52: 248–249. ³⁴ Oxford: Bodleian Library, Antiq.f.E.1571/1, fols. [2]14, [2]18, 208r, 207v–208r.

274 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 it moved across the page. One might even be tempted to assume that those aphorisms which have been underlined but carry no corresponding initials in the margin actually refer to particular attributes of the underliner’s own self. In that case Arabella may have had a ‘nose round . . . blunt at the ende’, ‘nosethrils large’, a ‘face of a small cause sweating’, ‘armes very long’, ‘pale [in body colour]’, and ‘nayles narrow and long’ (and thus she may even have been ‘stowt: applyed to the Lyon’, ‘yrefull’, ‘craftie, leacherous, and a great feeder’, ‘strong, bolde, honest, and gentle’, ‘vicious, & wicked’, or ‘cruell, and fierce’).³⁵ There are, of course, other possible explanations. Yet notwithstanding the ambiguities, what these last two examples of sixteenth- and early eighteenthcentury graffiti reveal are the actualization of the two sides of the same coin of engagement with an exposition of physiognomical doctrine in book form. In the first of those, it is carried out in private, and one searches for attributes of one’s self or other people known to one’s self. The second of them is more public, in the sense that one is actually surrounded by people who may even be participating in this interaction with the text. Although the first of the above examples appears to date from the sixteenth century and the second from the early eighteenth century, no diachronic change is being implied. Moreover, the fact that one finds graffiti of this nature on extant copies of early modern physiognomical treatises from around Europe suggests that this form of engagement could arise whenever and wherever a list of physiognomical aphorisms was encountered. But if these graffiti provide a typical example of the universality of this form of engagement with a ‘book on physiognomy’, how do we use graffiti to crosscheck the argument about the ways in which this universal form of engagement was appropriated? How do we get from their universality to their particularity? How can we be sure that one set of such universal traces are those made by a person in the process of a private confessional act of self-physiognomation, whilst another set of the same traces are those of a communal bawdy parlour game? How does one distinguish between the graffiti of ‘re-generation’ and the graffiti of ‘recreation’? In other words, how is one to know whether these ink traces are to be interpreted as the graffiti of praying or playing? This question helpfully reveals some of the strengths and weaknesses of graffiti as historical evidence. For establishing such distinctions would require an examination of the rest of the graffiti one finds elsewhere in the text in which they are found. The analysis of the graffiti could be driven by the question of whether the traces of this ‘engagement’ that one finds in the exposition of ³⁵ Oxford: Bodleian Library, Antiq.f.E.1571/1, fol. [2]19r–[2]22v.

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physiognomical doctrine were made or experienced in terms of the particular conceptual apparatus that surrounds the physiognomy in any specific text. However, it must be pointed out that it is rare to find such a complete set of graffiti. Of those texts examined so far, it is usually either the exposition of physiognomical doctrine or the rest of the text which contains the richest graffiti, not both together in the same text. Let us begin with the hypothesis about physiognomical praying. If one interprets the aforementioned marks of engagement in terms of the conceptual structure of the Kalendar of Shepherds, then those readers who also engaged with the physiognomy can be said to have been participating in a form of private confession in the guise of a medico-moral self-examination. What evidence is there that this ever actually happened? The underlining made by former readers which can be found throughout many extant copies of the Kalendar of Shepherds certainly suggests that the text was read in terms of what was argued in the previous chapter were the most prominent ideas in its overarching conceptual framework: prudence, nosce teipsum, and salvation. One example of this is the graffiti found in a 1526 edition of the Kalendar. It appears to have been a late sixteenth-century hand which has written the numbers 1–6 in the left-hand margin beside the section dealing with ‘the coniectoures wherby we may knowe if we be in grace of god ben suche’.³⁶ This seems quite strong evidence of a concern on the part of the reader with being in the ‘grace of God’—a concern which, as the text explains elsewhere, is a concern with both the actual state of one’s self as well as one’s future salvation. In a 1518 edition of the Kalendar the section entitled ‘Six benefits given to us by god’ has been highlighted in the margin by a pointing hand drawn by a sixteenth-century reader in search of God’s grace. On the very next page one finds the same pointing hand, this time highlighting the section dealing with the six ways: ‘how [the Shepherd] knew himself ’.³⁷ Another extant copy of the Kalendar owned in the 1660s by a ‘Roger Miloud’ contains the following underlining: ‘The seventh, and the last thing that each man ought to know, is to know himself ’.³⁸ Another copy has the following underlined: ‘What nede it you to stodye on a thynge that is nought: stodye on your synne and what grace by god in you wrought is’.³⁹ In many other copies, the underlining in the section on the trees of virtues and vices suggests that other readers did ³⁶ ³⁷ ³⁸ ³⁹

London: British Library, C.71. fol. 2, sig. Giiv. Cambridge: University Library, SSS.35.13, sigs. Giii and Giv. Oxford: Bodleian Library, Vet. A3c. 238, sig. P4v and sig. I3. Oxford: Bodleian Library, Auct. QQ. Supra II 30, sig. Aii.

276 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 precisely this—studied their sin. In all of these cases, the traces of the reader’s interaction with the shepherd’s mystical text suggest that the reading of this particular text was indeed actually experienced as something of a devotional practice, with the emphasis placed on self-knowledge, the contemplation of one’s sins, and the search for grace. These all constituted the necessary prerequisites for salvation in the shepherd’s vision of things. They are all evidence of an active engagement with the main themes which characterized his physiognomical prayer. However, until all of the surviving copies of the texts in this corpus have been examined, it has to be said that there are simply not enough graffiti on the copies which have survived to enable one to provide an equivalent analysis. With regard to the initials of different people placed beside particular physiognomical aphorisms in a copy of the 1571 edition of Thomas Hill’s tract, assuming these markings are early eighteenth century, then in terms of what conceptual framework is one to read them? That of the text itself? Those of other texts in the series? Or those contemporaneous with the time in which the marks were made? And, if the latter, what does that mean? After all, it is possible that some of the humbler folk or even the mystically inclined philosophers of the early eighteenth-century could have read and experienced these signs in terms of a pre-eighteenth-century conception of ‘the sign’, or rather in terms of their understanding of that earlier conception of the physiognomic. At the same time one might, of course, argue that these markings were made some time in the eighteenth century by, for example, a late witch-hunter. The physiognomics underlined could denote the physiognomical features of those who were to be condemned. In such a scenario, the initials might indicate those villagers who bore the underlined features and who were to be executed. As speculative as such a suggestion is, the involvement in the persecution of witches of such physiognomists as the Aix-en-Provence physician Jacques Fontaine leaves such a hypothesis open, awaiting more concrete evidence of such a practice to come to light. One further hint provided by the books on physiognomy of such a form of legal physiognomical scrutiny, if not persecution, is one French author’s suggestion that ‘Magistrates’ may ‘by Physiognomy understand the disposition and inclination of the Inferiors and Subjects’.⁴⁰ On the other hand, given that by the late seventeenth century the notion of curiosity had entered some conceptions of the act of physiognomating, these markings might equally represent the reading of a late sixteenth-century treatise of natural/moral philosophy by an early eighteenth-century female reader ⁴⁰ Marc Vulson, The Court of Curiositie (1669), 113.

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out of a sense of light-hearted antiquarian curiosity. That antiquarian aspect appears more prominent given the fact that by 1784 this copy of Hill’s work had been bought as a form of antique by the famous antiquarian ‘Charles Chadwick of Healey Hall’.⁴¹ Similarly, one might understand the same graffiti in terms of the conceptual framework found in the small books of fortune-telling games and riddles which also contained physiognomy. In that case, these very same marks might just as easily represent the remnants of a group of people, children or adults, or both, who early in the eighteenth century gathered around a late sixteenth-century physiognomical treatise in order to play what was basically a form of fortune-telling bawdy parlour game. By the eighteenth century, physiognomical fortune-telling had long been considered less intellectually respectable than philosophising or praying, all the more so by the late eighteenth century. One often finds readers providing quite clear graffitoed intimations of this more satirical and playful attitude towards physiognomy in the form of a written comment. One extant copy of the 1623 Paduan edition of Della Porta’s Fisonomia naturale reveals that it was bought ‘From a stall in Chancery Lane near Holborn on August 22nd 1761’. By that time it would appear that one particular reader had established some sort of playful, ironic stance towards Porta’s skill, if the insertion of a verse from ‘Gay Fables’on the inside cover is anything to go by: Sagacious PORTA’S skill could trace Some Beast or bird in every face The Head, the eye, the nose’s shape Proved this a mole & that an ape.⁴²

Similarly, in 1659, the Swiss-German philosopher and physician ‘Joannes Chanlon Sleebi’ may have been content enough to sign his name on the 1658 edition of Cardano’s Metoposcopia he had proudly purchased. But a century later, in 1765, when it came into the possession of one ‘Joan Casp. Lippertus Furthensis Bojus’, he felt urged to pen the following remark: ‘That the celebrated author of this tract gave him self needless creases in the face with such a huge labour of ineptitude. All the worse to those who believe it.’⁴³ These satirical, playful remarks seem very far from the more prayer-like attitude displayed in the passage from Job 37: 7 written out by John Dee across the title page of one of his ‘books on physiognomy’, or the phrase written in the 1630s by one ⁴¹ Oxford: Bodleian Library, Antiq.f.E.1571/1, sig. [qq v]v. ⁴² London : British Library, 1600/27. ⁴³ Zurich: ETH, 1013 [AE 367], 28.

278 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 Robert Doe in his 1528 edition of the Secretum secretorum: ‘My soul prais thou the Lord alwais my God I will confess whilst breth and Life prolong my Days my loving no time shall ceas’.⁴⁴ Having said that, the concerns and anxieties reflected (if not necessarily expressed) in even the most playful and bawdy form of physiognomical fortune-telling could be just as serious and profound. Indeed, how the playful and the godly may have been mixed is made evident if these same aforementioned underlined passages and initials are interpreted not in terms of the magistrate’s pen but in terms of the sentiment and spirit of the following verses found in one of the eighteenth-century physiognomical chapbooks: Let no Distractions now abound, Nor Whig nor Tory longer grumble; But let the Glass go chearful round. Yet for their Sins let all be humble.

It suggests that the book and the looking-glass are still being used as part of this reading practice. But far from the hermetic medico-moral seriousness of the shepherd’s private physiognomical prayer of self-examination, it sounds very much like something written by John Gay of Beggar’s Opera fame. Yet whilst such graffiti provide intimations of a fundamental shift in attitudes, from praying to playing, or from totalization to vulgarization, it has to be said that the shift was neither sudden nor complete. There was still some continuity across the shift, still some people engaging with physiognomy very seriously, however their more serious understanding of it may have changed from that of those who took it seriously three centuries earlier. This is perhaps best symbolized by the passages underlined by two famous readers: one from the beginning of the period; and one from the end. In the long autumn of the Middle Ages, one distinctly philosophical early sixteenth-century reader who engaged with Rhazes’s exposition of physiognomical doctrine underlined a physiognomical aphorism which seemed applicable to himself—Rhazes’s physiognomical description of ‘the philosophical man’.⁴⁵ That reader was the famous Renaissance humanist Conrad Gesner. At the end of the eighteenth century another famous philosophical man did more or less the same thing. Before Lavater published his famous tome on physiognomy, he first published a work entitled Aphorisms on Man. The very last aphorism read: ‘If you mean to know yourself, interline such of these aphorisms as affect you agreeably in the reading, and set a mark to such as left a sense ⁴⁴ Cambridge: University Library, Sel. 5.60 sig. Hiiiv. ⁴⁵ Zurich: Zentralbibliothek, Inc.311, fol. 10[?].

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of uneasiness with you; and then show your copy to whom you please’. In one extant copy of this work of Lavater’s, the famous owner of it not only followed this suggestion, he also commented upon the suggestion itself: ‘This is true Christian philosophy far above all abstraction’. For all that the art of physiognomy had by then been reduced by science and social ridicule to nothing more than a laughable parlour game in many people’s eyes, this particular reader’s engagement with physiognomy flew in the face of such satire. In fact, this reader’s graffiti provided an intimation of the important role that a more serious and esoteric, Kabbalah-influenced conception of physiognomy would play in the dawning revolutionary Romantic vision of the world. For that reader was William Blake.⁴⁶

‘Cinematic’ Physiognomy Finally, is there any evidence to suggest the actuality of a more audio-visual engagement with these ‘treatises on physiognomy’? With regard to the use of actual visual representations, one sometimes finds phrases, even names and initials, graffitoed in the middle of the woodcuts that line many of the pages of various ‘books on physiognomy’, thus suggesting their use during the act of reading (Illustration 39). Similarly, from the markings in one copy of a 1522 edition of Indagine’s treatise that appear to have been made by a late sixteenthearly seventeenth-century young child, of particular relevance is the graffiti in one of the woodcuts of the hands from the section on Chiromantia (Illustration 40). In the original woodcut, the illustrated, life-sized hand was cut off at the wrist, surrounded by a blank margin, thus giving the impression of being a representation, suspended in the middle of a blank page (Illustration 41). It is in this gap which surrounds the representation, and which originally served to emphasize that it is a representation, that the graffiti were made. As a result, the way in which the graffitoed wrist then descends to the end of the page gives the impression of its having been inserted with the express intention of effacing the gap which emphasizes the distinction between the representation and the reality. The end result of this is such that the ink of the graffiti is not so immediately distinguishable from the ink of the original woodcut. This not only makes the entire image look more life-size and life-like; it also appears to be an attempt to blend together both the world of representation and the world of reality, to ⁴⁶ ‘Annotations to Lavater’s Aphorisms On Man’ [c.1788], in The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed. G. Keynes (1966), 65.


39. Johannes ab Indagine, Introductiones Apotelesmaticae elegantes in Chiromantiam, Physionomiam, Astrologiam naturalem, Complexiones hominum, Naturas Planetarum (Strasburg/Frankfurt, 1522), (Photo: Basle: Bibliothek der Universität.)

establish a natural link between the sign and the thing signified. It seems to dissolve the image into the natural three-dimensional reality of the reader’s own self and the reader’s own surroundings. With regard to the use of images and mirrors as part of this reading ritual, there are overtones of it buried in other evidence. For example, with regard to the suggestion that this physiognomical prayer or physiognomical game was performed with the aid of a looking-glass, many physiognomical treatises themselves contain subliminal suggestions about a relationship between a mirror and the text. A metaphorical relationship between the mirror and the

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40. Johannes ab Indagine, Introductiones Apotelesmaticae elegantes in Chiromantiam, Physionomiam, Astrologiam naturalem, Complexiones hominum, Naturas Planetarum (Strasburg/Frankfurt, 1522). (Photo: Basle: Bibliothek der Universität.)

physiognomical treatise is often found in numerous titles of ‘books on physiognomy’, such as Ancelme Petit Douxciel’s Speculum physionomicum (Langres, 1648), Harmannus Follinus’s Speculum naturae humanae (Cologne 1649), whilst De La Bellière’s La Fisionomia con ragionamenti (Paris, 1644) had a subtitle: o lo specchio per vedere le passioni di Coascheduno. It was a tradition which went back at least as far as Michael Savonarola’s Speculum physiognomicae. Similarly, one author described his ‘treatise on physiognomy’ as a ‘myrour of helth’, and explicitly advised the reader: ‘Of this said booke make oft a lok-


41. Johannes ab Indagine, Introductiones Apotelesmaticae elegantes in Chiromantiam, Physionomiam, Astrologiam naturalem, Complexiones hominum, Naturas Planetarum (Strasburg/Frankfurt, 1522), fol. 29. Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Rés 126655. (Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.)

ing glas’.⁴⁷ This was a common restatement of the famous Augustinian rule: ‘That you may see yourself in this little book as in a mirror and may not neglect anything through forgetfulness, let it be read to you once a week’.⁴⁸ For one author of a ‘book on physiognomy’, the mirror in which one looked was distinctly social. Self-knowledge necessitated reflecting upon ‘what company you ⁴⁷ Manzalaoui, Secretum, 275. ⁴⁸ Sister R. M. Bradley, ‘Backgrounds of the Title Speculum in Medieval Literature’, Speculum, 29 (Cambridge, Mass., 1954), 100–5, 104.

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most phancy, they are the mirrour wherein you may take a survey of your own self; for every individual person affects him that most resembles himself ’.⁴⁹ La Chambre was another author of a physiognomical treatise who was aware of the necessity of having to look in the mirror, ‘for it is most certain, that we cannot by our selves come to a perfect knowledge of our selves: and our Souls may, in that respect, be compar’d to our Faces, inasmuch as the former, as well as the latter, can only view themselves in Mirrours’.⁵⁰ Other texts from this physiognomical canon contained subliminal visual suggestions about the use of the mirror. The Kalendar of Shepherds, for example, contains a woodcut in the section dealing with astrological physiognomy in which the figure of Venus is looking at herself in the mirror and the image is surrounded by physiognomical description (Illustration 42). Some editions of Pernetti’s mid-eighteenth century Lettres philosophiques sur les physionomies, such as that published by Jean Neaulme, in The Hague in 1748, have a frontispiece which consists of two putti, one of which is being unmasked, while the other is looking into a mirror.⁵¹ In terms of actuality rather than subliminal suggestion, the search for a late fifteenth-century monk or a nun simply looking into a mirror, let alone physiognomating themselves in one, proved vain. However, the convalescents at Westminster Abbey in the early fourteenth century used to walk in the garden on the south side of the infirmary and sometimes watched the fish in the infirmary’s fish pond. Their pond-gazing may have focused from time to time on the reflections of their own healing physiognomies floating on the water’s surface. Indeed, by the mid-fourteenth century, monks had begun to keep their own razors. Whilst this ‘flight . . . into private shaving’ appears to have for a long time been carried out by the sense of touch alone, some of them may have also possessed mirrors, despite the mysterious absence of such objects from the records.⁵² There is no iconic tradition which specifically connects the reading of a physiognomical treatise and gazing into a mirror. However, I would argue that this is due to the fact that physiognomical mirror-gazing is buried in other, more general, iconographic themes. One such iconographic theme in the early modern period was devoted to the reading of books and looking in mirrors (Illustrations 43 and 44). Of course, one might argue that these images advo⁴⁹ Vulson, Curiositie, 114. ⁵⁰ Marin Cureau de la Chambre, The Art How to Know Men (1665), sig. B2v. ⁵¹ Geneva: Bibliothèque Publique Universitaire, Md 410**. ⁵² B. Harvey, Living and Dying in England, 1100–1540 (Oxford, 1993), 90, fn. 85, 132–3; J. Bond, ‘The Fishponds of Eynsham Abbey’, The Eynsham Record, 9 (1992), 3–17.


42. Venus looks at herself in a mirror. This woodcut is surrounded by physiognomical description, The Kalender of Shepherdes, ed. H. O. Sommer (1892), sig. K iiii. (Photo: Warburg Institute.)

cate the very opposite of this physiognomical prayer. In other words they could be read as suggesting that time spent reading books is a good thing, whilst time spent preening oneself in the mirror is attacked. As such they could be seen as a part of the attempt to visualize what was often perceived in the wake of the Reformation to be a fundamental antagonism between two forms of literacy, one textual, the other visual. Indeed, it could even be argued that, as a consequence of early modern religious reform, these images were one way in which visual literacy was used to etch textual literacy deeper into the predominantly visual literacy of the human mind. In addition to this iconographic tradition, there were many textual traditions which tried to regulate mirror-gazing to the same textual end. In the influential medieval text Roman de la Rose, for example, mirror-gazing could just as easily bring you to ruin as to self-knowledge.⁵³ As one late sixteenthcentury text put it: there is nothyng more meete, especially for yong Maidens then a Mirrhor, there in to see and beholde how to order their dooyng, I meane not a Christall Mirrhor, made by handie Arte, by whiche Maidens now adaies, dooe onely take delight daiely to tricke and trim their tresses . . . the Mirrhor I meane is made of another maner of matter, and ⁵³ P. Ariès and G. Duby (ed.), A History of Private Life, 4 vols. (Paris, 1989), ii. 392.

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43. Eglon Hendrik van der Neer (1634–1703), Portrait of a Young Lady Seated at a Table Holding an Open Book, 1665. Private collection. (Photograph courtesy of Richard Green Gallery, London.) is of muche more worthe then any Christall Mirrhor; for as the one teacheth how to attire the outwarde bodie, so the other guideth to garnishe the inwarde mynde, and maketh it meete for vertue.⁵⁴

This same antagonistic dualism between the text and the image is explicit in the quotation from 2 Corinthians 7: 1 which accompanies the engraving shown in Illustration 44, ‘having therefore these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear of God’. ⁵⁴ Thomas Salter, A mirrhor mete for all mothers (1579), sig. Avi.


44. Jan Luiken, Het leerzaam huisraad (Amsterdam, 1711), 54. (Photo: Warburg Institute.)

Much more work would need to be done before one could determine whether a more physiognomical form of mirror-gazing was gradually undermined by this sort of moral and religious condemnation, alongside its reconfiguration by the new mechanical philosophy. Yet for all that this sort of dualism seems fundamentally antithetical to this physiognomical prayer, there was another textual tradition which very much supported the aim of this more physiognomical form of mirror-gazing. Similarly, many Renaissance readers and mirror-gazers would have been familiar, for example, with the claim that Socrates ‘made use of a mirror for moral instruction. For he urged his pupils, we are told, to look at themselves frequently in the glass, that he might beg any

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of them who should be gratified at his own beauty not to spoil the dignity of the body by dishonourable state of mind’.⁵⁵ Moreover, as we saw in the previous chapter, it was a tradition that was also represented iconographically in the early modern period. Therefore, despite the number of people like Edward Bourne who supported the former textual perspective on life by citing James I: 23–4, ‘a natural man, who, having neglected God’s word, beholds his face in a glass, and straitway forgets what manner of man he is’,⁵⁶ there are numerous authorities which could have been marshalled in support of the more physiognomical form of mirror-gazing. Seneca is just one: ‘the mirror was invented that man might recognise himself ’. Indeed, Seneca even went so far as to suggest that every one should always carry a mirror with them.⁵⁷ And many visions of this sort of self-reflection were driven by a distinctly physiognomical conception of the experience: ‘A lady must look in a mirror for two reasons: to see her face and to see her conscience’.⁵⁸ Of all the iconographical traditions in which the looking-glass aspect of this inter-medial reading of a physiognomical text lay buried, perhaps the most important was Prudence—one of the concepts which underpinned many forms of ‘the physiognomical eye’. The briefest glance at the iconography of Prudence reveals one consistent attribute—Prudence was often represented holding a book while she contemplated herself in a looking-glass. In Giotto’s vision of Prudence, the book lay open on a lectern while the gaze of Prudence was focused on the mirror. The material proximity between the physiognomical treatise and the looking-glass is shown by the fact that the hawkers who sold cheap ‘treatises on physiognomy’ across the Continent of Europe also sold looking-glasses.⁵⁹ Of course, one could argue that such mirrors may have been used by hawkers to reflect the sunshine in order to gain the attention of potential customers from afar; or to allow his customers to see what they looked like as they tried on the jewellery he had for sale. However, one could equally argue for a more physiognomical use. In the case of an eighteenth-century chapman, it may also have been used to allow the customers to see whether or not they bore any resemblance to the images of the various people on the posters he had come to sell them (Illustration 45). ⁵⁵ M. A. Wallace-Dunlop, Glass in the Old World (1882), 216. ⁵⁶ Edward Bourne, A looking-glass discovering to all people what image they bear (1671), 11. ⁵⁷ Wallace-Dunlop, Glass, 216–17. ⁵⁸ Ariès and Duby, Private Life, ii. 391. ⁵⁹ M. Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (Cambridge, 1984), 117, 121–2. T. Norris’s London Bridge bookshop, ‘The Looking-glass’, sold physiognomical treatises to chapmen until 1735. See Pasadena: Huntington Library, *AG104 E72 (1).


45. Martin Engelbrecht, A Seller of Images, 1730. After S. Taubert, Bibliopola. Bilden und Texte aus der Welt des Buchhandels, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1959), ii. 103, Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, FA hist 03 D t. 01–02. (Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.)

Yet, as we have seen in this study, what people saw in a looking-glass in the early modern period depended in part upon what was in their mind when they looked into it. And what was in their mind in turn depended upon who they were, when they were, and, to some extent, what sort of mirror literacy they had. This is not the place to examine in detail the effect on mirror literacy of the significant developments that took place in the technology of the mirror during the early modern period. Suffice it to say that for the classically educated among the population of early modern Europe, looking in a mirror

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was just as frequently associated in their minds with the notion of vanitas and folly as it was with the wisdom of self-knowledge. When Hans Holbein the Younger read his 1515 edition of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, one of the illustrations he penned in its margins was the act of looking in a mirror.⁶⁰ Other images, such as the portrait by the German painter Hans Burgkmair (1473–1551) of himself and his wife blurred those genres. Those same genres existed not only in reality but also in dreams. Dreaming about looking into a mirror, as opposed to actually looking into one, was, according to one authority on the matter, a sign of what today would be called vanity, and what they called ‘self-love’: To Dream within a Glass thou dost behold Thy Face shews great Love of thy self, tis told; And if thy self thou Trim and do pin there, It shews thou thinkst that few with thee compare.⁶¹

When believers in early modern ‘magic’ looked in a mirror, rather than simply the anatomy of a face, some saw the soul of the infernal regions, where the dead seemed alive.⁶² This was known to the learned minds of the sixteenth century as captopotromancy. But that sort of divination from mirrors was a far cry, intellectually speaking, from the contemplation of the pure mathematics of the looking-glass reflection calculated so precisely by the French mathematician Pierre de Fermat in about 1660. In laying down the basis for what became known as the laws of reflection and refraction, Fermat’s mirror-gazing led him to concentrate on the invisible process taking place ‘underneath’ the actual visual image as it were. As such, he went on to claim that the path taken by a ray of light between two fixed points in an arrangement of mirrors, lenses, and so forth is that which takes the least time, assuming that in a medium of refractive index m light travels more slowly than in free space by a factor m. This was a mode of reflection which characterized the vision of the enlightened author of the entry for ‘miroir’ in that monument to the end of the early modern period, the famous Encyclopédie of 1750. Divination may have been a far cry from this intellectually, but not temporally. Even in Samuel Jeake’s day, temporally mid-way between the former mid-sixteenth-century magical and the latter mid-eighteenth-century mathematical reflections, the French philosophizing priest Mersenne was still embroiled in dismissing occult arguments about the appearance of angels in mirrors. Indeed, it is exactly this latter sort of mirror literacy that helps to explain the drama and shock evident in Theodor de Bry’s ⁶⁰ Desiderius Erasmus, Eloge de la folie (Paris, 1959), 32. ⁶¹ Oniropolus; or, Dreams Interpreter (1680), 20. ⁶² L. Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New York, 1923–58), v. 132.


46. Theodore de Bry, Emblemata saeculario (Frankfurt, 1596), pl. 40. (Photo: Warburg Institute.)

late sixteenth-century representation of one of those rarer moments of technologically aided self-reflection, perhaps even physiognomical divination, the inscription of which reads ‘So as you will be able to be known by yourself, inspect this foreseeing mirror’.⁶³ But of all the evidence for this practice of physiognomating by the mirror, it is, suitably enough, the iconography of the ‘gypsies’ which provides the most telling material. Take, for example, the obscure engraving by the Master of the Die shown in Illustration 47. Virtually nothing is known about it. Notwith⁶³ Thanks to Michael Screech for this translation.

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47. Master of the Die (BXV.226.75). (Photo: Warburg Institute.)

standing its irreducibly visual qualities, how are we to read it as a historical document? I would argue that this engraving is evidence of an early modern physiognomical examination being carried out with the aid of a mirror. The image quite clearly shows a relatively well-to-do young woman looking into a small hand-held mirror, while a distinctly swarthy, gypsy-like figure watches over her shoulder as though supervising the process. There is no printed treatise in the image. But that might just be the point. For, as was argued in Chapter 3, the gypsies may have been masters of a visual (and oral) rather than a textual physiognomical literacy. Being a well-to-do individual, it is possible that the mirror which the woman in this image is using is her own, and that she is using it to check and in that sense ‘appropriate’ the gypsy’s reading of her face. Indeed, the


48. A rich, provocative representation of a physiognomical consultation. Philipp Mey, Chiromantia et Phisiognomia Medica, wie auch Chiromantia Curiosa (1702). (Photo: Basle, Bibliothek der Universität.)

most basic physiognomical appreciation of the content of the image (the one with which art historians feel so uncomfortable yet use so often) itself provides further grounds for this interpretation—in the form of the detection of an expression of anxiety or concern on the gypsy’s face. The speculation in such a reading of the image is rendered more convincing by the frontispiece from Phillip Mey’s Chiromancy (Illustration 48). This image indisputably portrays an early eighteenth-century consultation between a physiognomist and a client. In terms of what was argued in Chapter 3 about the appropriation and domestication of the gypsy métier by the end of the seven-

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teenth century, I would argue that the wig and coat on the wall suggest that the Turkish/gypsy-like appearance of the physiognomist is simply the uniform he has put on because it is the image that goes with the image of the physiognomist. The relatively well-to-do social status of the client can perhaps be taken as evidence of the extent to which the gypsy-physiognomating referred to in Chapter 3, which so troubled the Reformation authorities, had by the early eighteenth century been co-opted or tamed by the establishment, rather like what happened with Paracelsianism. That is to say, the gypsies they went to see were gypsies made in their own image of what a gypsy should look like. But more to the point here is that the open book upon the table in the physiognomist’s consulting room is a book on physiognomy. The signs of the zodiac indicate that, like Robert Fludd’s hermetic variety, it is a distinctly astrological form of physiognomy. The fact that it lies open before a mirror surrounded by astrological signs suggests that reading ‘books on physiognomy’ was a process that literally involved both a textual and a visual literacy, due to the fact that such books were actually sometimes read with the aid of a mirror. If this is evidence of the external audio-visual dimension of reading ‘books on physiognomy’, is there any evidence for the alleged internal moral cinematic aspect of the experience amongst the graffiti? This internal moral ‘cinema’, by its very nature, was not written down. It was performed in the mind of the reader. Notwithstanding, some of the graffiti found in these texts are certainly more a form of drawing than a form of writing. Moreover, the spectrum of that type of graffiti ranges from seemingly chaotic squiggles and doodles, through human faces, to more recognizable abstract geometrical figures (Illustration 49).⁶⁴ Can any of these graffiti be interpreted as traces of an actual reader’s actual experience of the internal moral ‘cinema’ that was allegedly produced in the encounter between the reader and these texts? This concept of an ‘internal cinema’ certainly gives meaning to some of the graffiti which might otherwise be too easily disregarded, in particular that which is of a more deliberately figurative nature, especially those attempts which various readers made to draw a human figure. Some examples of this, such as the faces drawn on the cover of one French edition of the Compost des bergiers are more immediately suggestive merely of childish playfulness of a youngster named ‘Guyon de sardiere’. Indeed, the seemingly sixteenthcentury character of these squiggles is a timely reminder that playfulness with physiognomy was not simply a product of eighteenth-century rationality and satire. Indeed, as playful as the graffiti of these children may seem to be, and ⁶⁴ Oxford: Bodleian Library, Douce Fragm. d. 6, Kalendar of Shepherds [1550?], sigs. Bv and Bvii.


49. Abstract human shape drawn at bottom of the page, Oxford: Bodleian Library, Douce Fragm. d. 6, Kalendar of Shepherds [1550?], sig. Bvii. (Photo: Oxford: Bodleian Library.)

may even have been, it is a playfulness that should not necessarily be assumed to be exclusive to early modern children and, as a result, taken any less seriously. Traces of a similar sort of playfulness can be found, for example, in the face drawn at the end of the above-mentioned thirteenth-century manuscript exposition of physiognomical doctrine now in the Vatican. Given that its provenance and readership were ecclesiastical, does it bear a suggestion of the carnival at the heart of scholasticism, or even traces of what Johannes Huizinga referred to as Homo Ludens?⁶⁵ Or, at the very least, in terms of the argument ⁶⁵ J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens (1949).

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being put forward in this book about a shift from praying to playing, should it be taken as an indication that the medieval scholastics, for all their arid intellectualism, also had a sense of humour in their appreciation of scientia, rather than the equivalent of the more satirical humour with which physiognomy was attacked as a pseudo-science at the end of the period? If the apparently playful element in some types of the more visual graffiti prevents us from taking them seriously as traces of this internal moral ‘cinema’, there are other traces which appear to be less playful. In Bodleian MS Douce 45, one folio consists of a short list of specific physiognomical aphorisms (Illustration 50). Beside it, in the margins, a former reader has drawn a number of profiles of faces. It is difficult for the contemporary eye to see how the aphorisms written on the page are linked with the graffitoed visual representations of faces in the margins. But it is precisely that hidden link which could be the indication that these are traces of that internal cinema. Before dismissing this possibility as too speculative, let us turn to one Renaissance reader and writer who developed something of a habit of drawing faces in his manuscripts of alchemical or natural philosophical works, the English magus John Dee. Dee’s habit of decorating his texts in this way should not be assumed to be meaningless or impenetrable ornament (Illustrations 51 and 52). In some cases, it is interesting to see that these human and animal faces are the culminating point of a process of predominantly abstract ornamentation initiated by a capital letter.⁶⁶ In John Dee’s case, it might be worth investigating further whether this practice may have been understood as a form of decorative exegesis of the opening line of the gospel of St John ‘and the word was made flesh’. For it begins in ‘the word’ (the capital letter) and finishes in an image of ‘the flesh’ (the face).⁶⁷ Similarly, such graffiti might be considered in the same light as the selfportrait which Mantegna placed in the ornamental decorations in the Camera dei Sposi in Mantua.⁶⁸ Even more to the point, given Dee’s interest in the Kabbalah, one might even begin to see such graffiti as a conscious or unconscious echo, if not a direct invocation, of the internal visions of the ‘physiognomies’ or faces of the ‘Sefiroth’ or angels, the contemplation of which provided one with a pathway through one’s meditative ascent to the face of God. No other material relating to this has been found on the books themselves. However, I would like to argue that it is in the context of this hermetic internal ⁶⁶ W. H. Sherman, John Dee. The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst, Mass., 1995), who points out that these faces ‘only appear in alchemical or natural philosophical texts’ (88); Oxford: Corpus Christi College, MS 144, f. 33r and 34r; Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1451, pt. II, fols. 11v, 17v, 35r, 51v, 53v, 55r; Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Digby 119, fols. 24r, 114r, 115r, 117r, 118r. ⁶⁷ See, for example, Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Canon misc. 555, fols. 83v and 80r. ⁶⁸ I owe my knowledge of this ornamental self-portrait to Dr F. Quiviger.

50. Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Douce 45, fol. 50r. (Photo: Oxford: Bodleian Library.)

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51. Bodleian Library, MS Digby 119, ‘Recepta varia alchemica’ (14th century), ff. 24r. (Photo: Oxford: Bodleian Library.)

moral ‘cinema’ that some of the visions experienced by the English Romantic poet and political radical William Blake should be understood. One account of Blake’s imagined physiognomies also brings us back to the physiognomical sense of history mentioned in Chapter 4, which I argued developed out of Neoplatonic hermeticism. John Varley, an acquaintance of Blake’s and the author of a book entitled A Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy (1828), has left a description of how Blake used to have intense visions when he was reading history books. At one point when reading a history of the Scottish chiefs, both William Wallace and Robert the Bruce appeared before him. Blake asked them to


52. Manuscript profile drawn by John Dee, Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1451 (15th–16th century), 53v. (Photo: Oxford: Bodleian Library.)

remain before his eyes whilst he made a sketch of them. One account describes how Blake was sitting, meditating, as he had often done, on the heroic actions and hard fate of the Scottish hero, when, like a flash of lightning, a noble form stood before him; which he instantly knew, by a something within himself, to be Sir William Wallace. He felt that it was a spiritual appearance . . . The warrior Scot, in this vision, seemed as true to his historical mental picture, as his noble shade was to the manly bearing of his recorded person . . . The face was, nearly a front view, remarkably handsome—open in its expression, and full of an ardent, generous courage: the blue eye being bright and

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53. This representation of Caractacus, the leader of the British resistance to the Romans, was another of Blake’s historical physiognomical visions, from The Blake–Varley Sketchbook of 1819: In the Collection of M. D. E. Clayton-Stamm, ed. M. Butlin (1969). (Photo: Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.)

expanded, and the lips of a noble contour, seemed cheering his devoted followers to deeds of glory. All was gallant sunshine over that fine countenance, which, while you looked on it, might almost induce you to believe the reality of the vision . . . I confess, I looked upon them with no small pleasure; for each bore a strong resemblance to the pictures my mind had before inbibed of both heroes, from all the historical descriptions I had ever heard, or read.⁶⁹ ⁶⁹ Jane Porter, ‘The Scottish Chiefs’ (1841), in A Bibliography of William Blake, ed., G. Keynes (New York, 1921), 473–4; The Blake–Varley Sketchbook of 1819: in the Collection of M. D. E. Clayton-Stamm, ed. M. Butlin (1969).


Conclusion In this chapter I have tried to contribute to the methodology and historiography of the history of reading by examining the ‘graffiti’ that is often found in extant copies of early modern ‘books on physiognomy’. I examined the extent to which the patterns in this graffiti can be said to provide evidential support for the hypothesis offered in the previous chapter about the fundamental shift in the experience of reading a treatise on physiognomy, from praying to playing. The graffiti examined provides indications of a number of different reading practices, be it the scholarly examination of the sources of physiognomony, or the learning of the language of physiognomony by children. It further suggests that the committing to memory of passages of physiognomonical doctrine was often carried out within the framework of concerns about the notion of ‘generation’ and ‘reproduction’. Moreover, I have also argued that some of it can be taken as evidence of the engagement of early modern reader with the language of physiognomy in their attempts to discover something about themselves or people known to them. Besides providing evidence that the reading of physiognomy was often carried out with the aid of visual images, including the use of a mirror, I have also examined the extent to which the extant graffiti on these texts might be fruitfully thought of as providing evidence of the hermetic ‘internal cinema’ that was part of the natural magic of engaging with the language of physiognomy in textual form.

Conclusion

Fisnomy-to-Fisnomy The Introduction to this book opened with a written self-description of the physiognomy of a late seventeenth-century English protestant merchant named Samuel Jeake, owner of, among other things, four ‘books on physiognomy’. I have tried to show how the indistinct emblematic image of Jeake’s physiognomy, which arises through the present-day reader’s mind via the written words Jeake used to describe himself, can be grasped through the play of the shadows and the light of the ongoing reconfiguration of the relationship between what was understood to be ‘science’, ‘art’, ‘natural magic’, and ‘occult’ in early modern European culture. I have tried to show in this study the how the physiognomony which Samuel Jeake was reading that day in 1670 was one written form of the audio-visual scientia of a way of looking and listening that Renaissance Europe had inherited from the Middle Ages and antiquity. I have argued that, during its transmission across early modern Europe, the language of physiognomy had become enmeshed, textually and culturally, in what was referred to as the troubling emergence of the ‘Egyptian’. That ‘Egyptian’ phenomenon was largely a consequence of the spreading influence of the hermetic Neoplatonic philosophy coming out of Florence in the late fifteenth century—a movement which attempted to mix and synthesize Jewish mysticism, Islamic mysticism, and ‘Egyptian’ mysticism with Christianity. As a result, the art of physiognomy came to be seen as a part of the newly re-discovered natural language of an ancient theology, whose mysterious hieroglyphic characters astrologically infused every leaf of the book of nature with symbolic meaning and hidden mythologies. The famous Hebrew scholar Gershom Scholem once described how Jewish mysticism introduces ‘a sphere, or a whole realm of divinity, which underlies the world of our sense-data and which is present and active in all that exists’. Scholem’s observation could be used as an accurate description of the hermetic notion of ‘spiritus’, or the ‘gestin’ in Paracelsus’s theories, or, in turn,

302 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 the ‘Egyptian’ hermetic understanding of the Kabbalistic language of physiognomony as seen in the work of Robert Fludd.¹ By using the methodology developed by historians of reading, I have further argued that Fludd’s attempt to systematize, experimentally, the language of physiognomony took the form of a Kabbalah-influenced combination of what he called the ‘techniques of the microcosm’. The ‘internal cinema’ produced in the imagination by the rhetorical nature of the hermetic art of physiognomy as developed by Robert Fludd was nothing less than a scientific ‘experiment’ in what Fludd understood to be an applied physics. In that physics, Fludd’s ‘physiognomical consciousness’ became the universal vibration of the ‘inner lyre’ of Ficino’s distinctly musical ‘religion of the world’. By reading it with the eye of his imagination, and combining it with the art of astrology, the art of chiromancy, and the art of memory, it was thought capable of using, among other things, the efficacy of the language of poetry and art to engage with and manipulate the mechanisms of the divine, celestial rays. By bringing about such a marriage of heaven and earth in man in this way, the art of physiognomy made the invisible manifest and intelligible through the illumination and the sustainment, not only of profound self-knowledge but also self‘re-generation’. In other words, I suggested that Fludd’s experiment had close affinities with what Giordano Bruno called an ‘inner writing’, and might fruitfully be thought of as an attempt to construct an alchemy of the self. For early modern sculptors, painters, engravers, musicians, poets, and actors influenced by that hermetic movement, the influence of this hermetic form of physiognomy was made manifest in their work. For regenerated hermeticists and magi it was made manifest in themselves and their faces, and was either present or absent in the faces of everyone they met. The particularities of Fludd’s art of physiognomony should not be underestimated. It is certainly difficult to gauge just how widely spread such textually literate, hermetic notions of the art of physiognomy were in early modern Europe. ‘Books on physiognomy’ evidently reached readers from across the entire social spectrum of those few people in early modern Europe who had endowed themselves with the still relatively uncommon skill of textual literacy required to read them. However, from a quantitative perspective, those ‘treatises on physiognomy’ were small, not all of them had absorbed this heterogeneous hermetic influence, and even in those that had, these intellectually complicated and mysterious theories were presented in a watered-down, and often undigested, form. I have further argued that, for all the emphasis placed in this ¹ G. G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York, 1974), 11.

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study upon the Neoplatonic hermetic tradition and its influence on the art of physiognomy, natural philosophers firmly within the Aristotelian tradition also made a contribution to the ongoing metamorphosis of physiognomy. Indeed, there is a strong case to be made that the ground for much of this hermetic mysticism had long been prepared by that Aristotelian tradition in natural philosophy. One can see this in particular in the influence of the encyclopaedic work of the thirteenth-century natural philosopher Michael Scot and the physiognomy which he included in his influential Liber introductorius. Furthermore, as the early sixteenth-century Paduan commentaries show, the Renaissance Aristotelian tradition, which themselves absorbed some hermetic influences, made their own contribution to the development of a modern, more scientific, understanding of ‘physiognomy’. If this was evident in the early sixteenth-century writings of Nifo, the work of Clemens Timpler and Camillo Baldi showed that this continued into the seventeenth century. Whilst this is a position that is now finally becoming part of the historiographical orthodox, I argued that the general impact of things ‘Egyptian’ in Renaissance and early modern Europe, including the ‘Egyptian’ art of physiognomy in particular, needs to be approached and understood in terms wider than the more restrictive realm of the history of ideas that characterizes that historiographical debate. I did this by suggesting that the spread of the troubling emergence of the ‘Egyptian’ in early modern Europe was more than just an intellectual phenomenon of the socially élite, textually literate, predominantly male world of the early modern universities or academies. The circulation of precious, expensive manuscripts and printed hermetic books and the development of a theorized hermetic physiognomical eye that arose as a consequence of that literate movement were, in part, I claimed, a reaction to an earlier social, religious, possibly even illiterate phenomenon described in this book as the coming of the ‘gypsies’. I further argued that the ‘characters’ of the physiognomony captured in the ‘books on physiognomy’ that circulated in Europe need to be read with more than just a philological eye. Whilst many of the inconsistencies so evident in the physiognomical aphorisms which one finds in different texts can be explained by their hazardous transmission through the world of medieval scribal and early modern printed publication, they can still provide us with evidence of assumptions about early modern understandings of literacy, sex and gender, and virtue and beauty. I stressed how, epistemologically, the hermetic language of physiognomy was not only another facet of the ‘natural magic’ of the language of dreams, but had its own innate iconic nature, which, in early

304 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 modern Neoplatonic eyes, came to be understood as part of the pre-textual, hieroglyphic, language of the ancient Egyptians. I also suggest that in those ‘books on physiognomy’ one can detect traces of both a physiognomical conception of history, as well as what appears to have been a very different oral physiognomical tradition. It is in the light of that oral tradition that the métier of the story-telling ‘gypsy’ fisnomier has to be understood, and it is a tradition which the textual tradition can be seen as an attempt both to repress and appropriate. Overall, the marginality of these texts makes it difficult at this stage in the research to link the dissemination and understanding of ‘books on physiognomy’ in early modern Europe to specific political and economic causes. The coming of the plague and other early modern environmental conditions seem to have had some role to play in the rise and fall of demand for them. For now, the most prominent factor in explaining the dissemination of ‘books on physiognomy’ appears to have been religion. The fractured state of the late medieval church explains much of both the attraction and detestation of the mysticism and ancient theology which enveloped the ‘natural magic’ of physiognomy under the spreading influence of the Corpus hermeticum, and in the wake of the theological story-telling medicine of the early modern ‘gypsies’. Gershom Scholem once claimed that ‘Mysticism is a definite stage in the historical development of religion and makes its appearance under certain well-defined conditions’. It is a description that fits well with developments in the early modern period. In Scholem’s terms, both the Indian or ‘gypsy’ fisnomiers and the Neoplatonic hermetic art of physiognomy could all be seen as part of the mysticism which promised to fill the ‘abyss’ between man and God created by institutionalized religion and reintroduce a sense of unity—in other words as the moment when ‘the world of mythology and that of revelation meet in the soul of man’.² This would then explain why, generally speaking, the more hermetic way of beholding the world physiognomically was both condemned and appropriated by both church and state which persecuted their Jewish and Islamic mystics, and the ‘magicians’, astrologers, ‘gypsies’, and ‘enthusiasts’ who experienced the world through its lens. If religion was the driving factor in all of this, what were the main factors which contributed to what has been described as the continuous metamorphosis of the art of physiognomy? The first of those factors were the changes that occurred in the understanding of the epistemological status of the language of physiognomony. To grasp this involves returning to the very words ² G. G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York, 1974), 7–8.

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that Samuel Jeake read in Richard Saunders’s ‘book on physiognomy’ in 1670, and with which he described his own phyz in his diary. I said above that those words have to be understood in the context of the early modern debates about the nature or epistemology of language. One part of the historical context for understanding the importance of this debate was the early modern Christian notion of original sin. The ensuing ‘Fall of man’ had deprived him of his divine ability to see and comprehend all of nature. The famous story of the construction of the Tower of Babel was a legend that symbolized one of the consequences of that Fall—the confusion of languages which ensued. For those readers unfamiliar with this issue, it is worth repeating that that debate was succinctly captured in the exchange between two of Jeake’s English contemporaries, John Webster and Seth Ward. For John Webster, as for many authors of books on the subject, physiognomony was a special type of language that had been handed down to them from Adam through successive translations into the written languages of Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldean, Arabic, Greek, and Latin.³ It was a ‘natural language’ in which there was embedded a mysterious ‘resemblance’ between the words and the things they signified. When read within the framework of the hermetic philosophy, the efficacious power of those natural signatures could be tapped and the properties they signified manipulated and made manifest—in Robert Fludd’s case, with the help of the angels. Webster was just one of many possessed of a deeply held conviction about the existence of some sort of recoverable ‘natural language’ or living hieroglyph underneath the Latin or the European, regional, and local vernaculars and cants that people spoke and read, which had been fed and influenced by the spread of the élite form of hermeticism that Marsilio Ficino had begun in late fifteenth-century Florence. The recovery of that natural language could, by unleashing its innate ‘similitude’, restore man’s divine powers through a rebirth of the ‘resemblance’ to God in which man was originally made. It was for this reason that Webster, like Paracelsus, criticized the universities which understood and taught ‘nothing of Caelestial signatures, which are in some measure made known by the quantity, light, colour, motion, and other affections of those bodies: . . . nothing of Subcaelestial Physiognomy, whether Elementary, Meteorological, or Mineralogical, but are utterly ignorant in all these, as also in Botanical, and Anthropological Physiognomy . . . and so never seek to penetrate into the more interiour nature of things.’⁴ On the other hand, ³ David Laigneau, Traicté de la saignée contre le vieil erreur d’Erasistrate (Paris, 1635), 369. ⁴ John Webster, Academiarum examen (1653), 76.

306 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 and at the same time, there were many at the cutting-edge of investigations into the nature and epistemology of language who refused all such claims, and for whom language was a purely conventional thing. In other words, they thought that the link between the word and the thing it signified was an arbitrary affair agreed upon for a time by a community, but liable to change. One such was Webster’s English contemporary Seth Ward. Ward accepted that a language in which every word ‘were a definition and contain’d the nature of the thing’, could be called ‘a naturall Language, and would afford that which the Cabalists and Rosycrucians have vainley sought for in the Hebrew, And in the names of things assigned by Adam’. However, he denied ‘that ever there was any such Language of Nature’. In Ward’s eyes, the writings of natural philosophers like Agrippa and Porta, so appreciated by Webster, were a ‘cheat and imposture which they put upon us, eluding credulous men with the pretence of specificall vertues, and occult celestiall Signatures and taking them off from observation & experiment (the only way to the knowledge of nature)’. To put it simply and briefly, Ward’s opinion can be said to have won the day. Yet the gradual reconfiguration of people’s understanding of the language of physiognomy brought about by this movement was, in turn, driven by other factors, some of which can also be seen in what is now left of Samuel Jeake’s physiognomy. The series of diary entries which charted young Samuel Jeake’s growing height were an indication of the development of the new form of physics that was being ushered in by early modern Europe’s natural philosophers that was very different from the Paracelsian- and Alstedian-influenced ‘collative physics’ with which young Jeake was faced as he read Saunders’s ‘book on physiognomy’ in 1670. During the very same time that Jeake was growing up, and as a result of the impact and spread of a new understanding of mathematics, the ‘value’ which appeared to be objectively out there in nature was increasingly being re-written and coming to be understood in terms of pure, indisputable, mathematical fact. In that mathematics, size, in the newer sense of demonstrable measurement, became an increasingly important category. By the time young Samuel Jeake was 19, Galileo had already made his famous statement about how the language of the book of nature ‘is written in the language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it’. In that new ‘language of geometry’, as Galileo put it, ‘to know means to measure according to a known measure, and the knowable is that which is either immediately measurable or whose measurement can be deduced’.⁵ This was far from the mystical Pythagorean and Kabbalistic combi⁵ B. Vickers (ed.), Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1988), 152.

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natorial mathematics with which the art of physiognomy had for so long been enveloped. Indeed, such was the religious fervour and conviction of this new, non-symbolic form of mathematical calculation that Leibniz, inventor of the calculus, thought even religious differences could be resolved by saying ‘let us calculate’. The series of measurements which Samuel Jeake senior took of his only surviving son’s growing physiognomy were exactly the sort of new, mathematical observation of nature that Francis Bacon had requested in the list of 130 subjects in his Catalogue of Particular Histories, which he felt it was the mission of that new science of man to investigate. This project included ‘the History of the Figure and External Limbs of Man, his Stature, Frame, Countenance and Features; of the variety of the same according to the [Peoples] and Climates or other smaller differences’ and the ‘History of the Growth and Increase of the Body, in the whole and in its parts’.⁶ It was a change in mathematical understanding which seems unremarkable to early twenty-first century minds. But to those unfamiliar with it at the time, that new seventeenth-century mathematics did to early modern reasoning and experience what contemporary neoliberalism has done to a planned economy, or what Derridean ‘deconstruction’ has done to contemporary ‘logocentric’ rationality. Throughout this book I have argued that a main theme in the history of physiognomy was the way in which it was so often understood to be a part of self-knowledge, or, in the case of hermeticism, self-transformation. Another facet of the impact of the new seventeenth-century natural philosophy on the metamorphosis of early modern European physiognomical self-understanding can also be seen in the physiognomy which Samuel Jeake left on the pages of his diary in the form of his self-description. Jeake’s diary was the scientific byproduct of someone who was using himself and his life as a sort of ‘experiment’ to test the validity of astrology, objectively, empirically, and rationally, according to the new scientific standards. This is why, when Jeake turned to his mirror to help him with his description of his short, mole-ridden physiognomy, his immediate motivation may have been the fear of blindness and death, but his weakened sense of vision produced neither skulls nor angels, nor visions of the future nor the past in the glass. The Baconian empiricist that intellectually regulated Jeake’s eyesight meant that he just looked in his looking-glass in order to describe, in as ‘plain’ a language as he could, exactly what he saw. From his grey eyes and his large nose to the lines in his palms and the moles on his body, our diarist, for all he was an advocate of the science of astrology, did not explore the astrological meanings that hermeticists thought mysteriously infused in the ⁶ Francis Bacon, Collected Works, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, 7 vols. (1857–9), I.i, 407–8, iv. 267–8; J. M. Tanner, A History of the Study of Human Growth (Cambridge, 1981), 25–6.

308 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 members of one’s physiognomy and the language of physiognomony. As such, Jeake’s more purely classificatory physiognomical language, which simply noted only the size and shape of different parts of his anatomy, can be seen as an early indication of the new observational and descriptive approach to natural bodies that was to come to fruition and be most often identified with the work of the Swedish natural philosopher and natural historian Carl Linnaeus (1707–78). With regard to the general process of the ongoing reconfiguration of early modern European physiognomony in so far as it was located in the realms of self-knowledge, Jeake’s written physiognomy was an indication of another aspect of the new philosophical order of things that was then taking root in everyday life—the spreading and deepening influence of an everyday understanding of the human self that, for simplicity’s sake, can be said to have been driven by the philosophical perspective of the French philosopher René Descartes. This becomes evident when we consider the absence of any vision of Jeake’s ‘inner self ’ through his own written physiognomy. Jeake’s brief description of the materiality of what French astrologers and later police authorities called the main signalements of his own individual physiognomy may have flowed from his quill with relative ease. However, a résumé of the more metaphysical aspects etched into that short physiognomy seemed to have been for Jeake something of a taller order. Jeake said nothing explicitly about the soul or the ‘inner self ’ onto which those particular external aspects of his physiognomy provided a window. He did not lose himself in the potentially transforming ancient theological labyrinth of their meanings and symbolism—at least not in the pages of his diary. Indeed, for the adult author, a retrospective description of the mind of that physiognomy, unlike that of his body, was the equivalent of sailing between the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ of a present and a former self: ‘The Description of my Mind must be totally omitted as inconvenient for me to relate, and liable to certaine exposure: it being not possible for me in this particular to saile between Scylla & Charybdis’. It was a conceptual difficulty compounded by a psychological (even a religious) reluctance on Jeake’s part to confess his ‘inner’ side, a desire to keep what was ‘liable to certaine exposure’ private: I kept formerly a Catalogue of sins committed by me, in order to a deeper humiliation. But now considering, that God hath blotted out as a thick Cloud my Transgressions, & as a Cloud my Sins: why should I give occasion to Man to revive the memory of that which God will remember no more.⁷ ⁷ An Astrological Diary of the Seventeenth-Century, ed. M. Hunter and A. Gregory (Oxford, 1988), 118 and 98.

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In Descartes’s eyes, the mind (what he called the cogito) was something that was to be understood as a private mental entity, distinct from the body. Contrary to how it appeared through the hermetic lens, the ‘physis’ of the Cartesian body or the Cartesian mind was not infused with the ‘gnomos’ of symbolic meaning. In Descartes’s vision of the self, as Descartes himself wrote, ‘the first and chief prerequisite for the knowledge of the immortality of the soul is our being able to form the clearest possible conception of the soul itself, and such as shall be absolutely distinct from all our notions of body’. For all Descartes tried to distinguish the body from the mind, he could not deny that they were linked in some way. In his system, the link between mind and body was the physiological mechanics of what he called the pineal gland—ironically, a ‘fictional’ piece of the anatomy he had never actually seen with his own eyes. Notwithstanding that, Descartes’s self, his thinking ‘I’, as he constantly repeated, was a thing in and of itself, independent of the body: I clearly apprehended nothing, so far as I was conscious, as belonging to my essence, except that I was a thinking thing, or a thing possessing in itself the faculty of thinking. But I will show hereafter how, from the consciousness that nothing besides thinking belongs to the essence of the mind, it follows that nothing else does in truth belong to it.⁸

Thus Jeake’s articulation of his physiognomy in his diary side-stepped what many others saw as the ‘natural magic’ of physiognomy that happened even when one beheld one’s own (or anyone else’s) body. In other words Jeake can be said to have suppressed the more hermetic physiognomical way of beholding the self and the natural world which surrounded it. He may not yet have seen the allegedly ‘natural language’ of physiognomy that he read in Saunders’s text a few weeks before first penning his self-description as a ‘game’, but he certainly does not appear to have treated it as an ancient theology. In that sense, the moment when we find Samuel Jeake poised between various technologies of his quill, his book, and his mirror is now an emblematic indication of how the art of physiognomy, on its translation from mystical prayer to inconsequential entertainment, had become, in his, and in many other eyes, something of a ‘curiosity’. The Cartesian body was itself a philosophical construction that arose out of the developments of post-Vesalian anatomy and, in turn, prepared the ground for Hallerian physiology. That ‘body’ was understood as nothing more than some form of ‘purely’ physical, mechanistic extension from which the hermetic understanding of its physiognomy that one finds in the anatomical theories ⁸ René Descartes, Method, Meditations, trans. J. Veitch (1901), 88, 92.

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of Paracelsus or Fludd had been amputated. Indeed, when taken together, the developments in early modern medicine and early modern natural philosophy were such a major factor in the history of the reconfiguration of ‘physiognomy’ that they can be said to have contributed to a process that might be described as the splitting of the physiognomic. With regard to the more material side of the physiognomic, the early modern developments in anatomy, physiology, and medical semiotics contributed to changing the medical conception of ‘the physiognomic’ out of all recognition, by approaching and trying to explain the ‘occult’ effects of the ‘league’ of mind and body from within a self-referential system of the human body, detached from the mechanics of celestial influence. If this can be seen most clearly in the work of such anatomists and physiologists as Vesalius, William Harvey, and later Albrecht von Haller, the writings of the French physician Jean Riolan (the younger) (1580–1657) provide one example of the role in the gradual transformation of the language of physiognomy brought about by the development of the semiotic systems which regulated the early modern medical gaze. In that gaze, to use Thomas Sydenham’s phrase, physicians started to focus on the ‘face of the disease’ rather than the face as a mirror of the soul. As Riolan wrote, the face was a small table which contained the whole of man. From the face one could apprehend man’s genius, take the measurements (mensura) of the entire body, demonstrate age and beauty, separate the sexes, and show the dignity of man. One could even ‘derive the signs of physiognomy’. Riolan could accept that the face was ‘the most certain exemplar of our soul’, in which ‘the hidden theatre of the soul’ was made manifest. Yet he had a very different understanding of the ‘analogy ‘or ‘similitude’ that those physiognomical signs represented from that of a hermeticist. One late seventeenthcentury English translation of his writings provides a clear idea of what the physiognomic had become in medical eyes, ‘the Skin of the Face, is the Looking-Glass wherein are seen the Diseases of the Body, especially of the Liver, Spleen and Lungs, for look what Humour bears sway in the bowels, the same shews it self forth in the Face’.⁹ The same development that contributed to the splitting-off of the medical physiognomic from the hermetic divine vision of it as implied in the notion that ‘the eyes are the windows of the soul’ can be traced through the emergence of the discipline and practice of ophthalmology. In 1650, the French physician David Laigneau was convinced that a ‘white weak circle’ in the eye was the ⁹ Jean Riolan the Younger, Anthropographia (Paris, 1618), 430; Anthropographia et osteologia (Paris, 1626), 86, 667; A sure guide; or, The best and nearest way to physick and chyrurgery (1671), 191 (and 196–9).

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54. The divine ecstasy of scientific discovery, Abbé Desmonceaux (1734–1806) Traité des maladies des yeux et des oreilles (Paris, 1786), frontispiece. (Cliché Bibliothèque Nationale de France.)

mark of timidity and weakness, and ‘divers colours’ the marks of ‘trompery’.¹⁰ By the end of the period, in works such as the Abbé Desmonceaux (1734–1806) Traité des maladies des yeux et des oreilles (Paris, 1786), every sense of such metaphysical meanings that physiognomists attached to the points and circles and even the colours of the eyes had been eradicated. The frontispiece to Desmonceaux’s text shows Desmonceaux in the midst of a divine ecstasy as he contemplates the human eye he holds in his hand. Thus, just as the hermeticist saw physiognomy as part of an ancient theology, so this is evidence in itself of the ¹⁰ David Laigneau, Traicté pour la conservation de la santé (Paris, 1650), 756 ff.

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extent to which the discoveries of that new material natural philosophy were themselves made theological. It was such exclusively (and religiously) material concerns which, at the end of this period, brought Coleridge to describe doctors as ‘shallow animals. . . . having always employed their minds about Body and Gutt, they imagine that in the whole system of things there is nothing but Gutt and Body’.¹¹ The other side of this splitting of the physiognomic, the more metaphysical side of the physiognomic that underpinned what Bacon called the ‘sister’ art of physiognomy, the interpretation of dreams, and what Riolan referred to as the ‘hidden theatre of the soul’, found itself at the foundations of a discipline which was born out of the consideration of the passions and the emotions, ‘psychologia’.¹² The writings of the seventeenth-century Jesuit English physician Thomas Wright provide just one example. Wright felt that ‘it can not be doubted of, but that the passions of our mindes woorke diuers effects in our faces’. However, in Wright’s opinion, the contemplation of the face alone had its limits. For ‘he, that by externall phisiognomie and operations, will diuine what lieth hidden in the heart, may rather conceiue an image of that affection that doth raigne in the minde, than a perfite and resolute knowledge’. For all the utility of these ‘smal shadow[s]’ offered by ‘externall physiognomie’, as far as Wright was concerned, the face was not the ‘roote and kore where the Passions reside’, it was not the natural ‘similitude’ it was in hermetic eyes, ‘but onelie the rhinde and leaues, which shew the nature and goodnesse of both the roote and the kore’. For Wright, there were some other passions the knowledge of which required one to ‘dwell in an other soile than the face’ and to ‘wade deeper into the soule’.¹³ I have tried to emphasize throughout this study that such changes are not to be understood as the decline of physiognomy. The physiognomic may have been split, but its splinters shot off in numerous directions, be it through the arts or the sciences. Even at the end of the period, traces of the hermetic conception of the language of physiognomy were to be found in the understanding of art and poetry of many prominent Romantic figures. For Coleridge, physiognomy was part of the ‘forming form shining through the formed form’, and as such part of the definition and perfection of ideal art. It demonstrated the Platonic notion of ‘the power which discloses itself from within as a principle of unity in the many’. Indeed, so all encompassing was this that for ¹¹ Cited in V. Nutton and R. Porter (eds.), The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine (Cambridge, 1996), 100. ¹² Oratio Hennert, De physiognomia publice habita (Traiecti ad Rhenum, 1782), 45. ¹³ Thomas Wright, The passions of the minde in generall (1601), 49–56.

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Coleridge there was even ‘a physiognomy in words, which, without reference to their fitness or necessity, makes unfavourable as well as favourable impressions’.¹⁴ Coleridge’s physiognomical visions were a long-term consequence of the way in which the hermetic understanding of physiognomy became enmeshed in the development of the early modern aesthetic. To echo a question often raised in the historiographical debate about the relationship between the hermetic and the rational, to what extent can the hermetic understanding of physiognomy be said to have contributed to the developments that brought about the birth of modern science and the modern self? It is certainly true that, wherever one looks along the interface of this split in the physiognomic, one finds traces of that hermetic physiognomy. For example, in Elsholtz’s work, we encounter, once again, clear evidence of the aforementioned interweaving of both natural magic and the new mathematics. The very term ‘Anthropometria’ may have been coined by the aforementioned Elsholtz in distinction to the more hermetic science of ‘anthropographie’ outlined in John Dee’s famous Mathematicall Preface. Similarly, it appears to have been an attempt to distance his subject from the term ‘anthropomantry’, a form of ‘divination’ using dead bodies which, in the minds of the early modern learned, was associated with the Roman emperor famous for having introduced the religion of sun worship into Rome that played such an important role in (almost preventing) Constantine’s famous conversion to Christianity, Elagobalus (218–22). Yet for all his promotion of the new mathematical concern with pure measuring is evident in his ‘anthropometron,’ Elsholtz also included material on the seemingly retrograde subject of the significance of moles, the lines on the forehead, and even the lines on the feet (Illustrations 55, 56, and 57). One could argue that if this hermetic physiognomy had anything to contribute to the birth of modern science and the modern self, then that contribution should be seen as indirect or ‘negative’, in the sense that hermeticism provided a framework through, but ultimately against, which the new natural philosophy was constructed. The fact that Thomas Wright’s description of his goal as wading ‘deeper into the soule’ is so reminiscent of the goal of the ‘inner writing’ of the hermetic art of physiognomy is just one intimation of this. Kepler’s work is further evidence that the impact of Neoplatonic hermeticism, with all its troubling ‘Egyptianism’, seems to have been significant enough for the advocates of the new natural philosophy to have seen it as something against which they had to construct their own vision and understanding of the world. In his Harmonice mundi, Kepler explicitly distanced his mathematics ¹⁴ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Works, ed. K. Coburn, 16 vols. (1969), VII.ii, 215, II,i, 51.

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55. Sigismund Elsholtz, Anthropometria (Padua, 1654), 28. (Cliché Bibliothèque Nationale de France.)

and his astronomy from the more hermetic ‘Egyptian’ variety propounded by Robert Fludd: ‘I have stolen the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build with them a tabernacle for my God far from the confines of the land of Egypt’.¹⁵ William Harvey’s evident familiarity with the subject of physiognomy is another example. In his writings on the generation of animals, he included the following passage: For since a skilful artificer accomplishes his works by the ingenious use of one instrument to one end, the same to the same and the like to the like, so that from the ¹⁵ Vickers, Occult and Scientific, 292.

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substance and form of the instruments a man may easily judge of their use and action, no less certainly than Aristotle has taught us to know their natures from the bodies of animals and the shape of their parts; and as the art of physiognomy from the lineaments of the face and its parts (such as the eyes, nose, forehead), pronounces on men’s abilities and character, what shall prevent us from making our conjecture that from the same structure of the parts we should expect their office to be the same.¹⁶ ¹⁶ William Harvey, Disputations Touching the Generation of Animals, trans. G. Whitteridge (Oxford, 1981), 446. Harvey’s Latin original has: ‘ingeniis ac moribus hariolatur’ (296–7). ‘Hariolatur’ suggests prophesy and divination rather than simply looking and staring, whilst ‘ingeniis ac moribus’ would be better translated as intelligence and manners.

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Such a passage is suggestive of the way in which the art of physiognomy was used as some sort of basis upon which, and against which, to react. It was in this way that the new mechanical philosophy (picking up on the structural work of Vesalian anatomy) reconfigured the physiognomic, turning away from considerations of the meaning of the form and the form of the meaning towards a physiognomic understood in terms of the function which followed form. Indeed, one might push this argument even further by applying it to the physiognomical epiphany that, as we saw in the Introduction, Robert Boyle’s ‘fancy’ created for him whilst he was contemplating water in 1684. Boyle sensed the realm of the physiognomy of things but knew that, whatever it was, it was

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not ‘science’ in as far as he had set himself to understand it. In other words, it was in some ways a negative of what he was trying to create. Just how far this can be taken is hard to say. Can Boyle’s scientifically demonstrated vacuum be helpfully thought of as the Christian natural philosophical parallel (or antithesis) of those early modern Jewish and Christian mystics who described their God as a mystical ‘nothing’? Notwithstanding, as we saw in the work of the African philosopher Amo, even in the midst of the Enlightenment the realms of the ‘occult’, as well as the physiognomical eye required to see them, was a phenomenon that continued to highlight, prescribe, and both safeguard at the same time as they challenged the epistemological realms of the rational and the scientific. I have argued that the physics of Fludd and Bruno provided a countermodel against which the new seventeenth-century natural philosophers constructed their universe. At this point a word needs to be said about a now old-fashioned thesis put forward some years ago by Frances Yates. Is there any way in which the hermetic art of physiognomy could be said to have contributed, more ‘positively’, to ‘modernity’? The contribution of hermetic physiognomy to modern science might be seen in a slightly more ‘positive’ sense when one considers that the religious zeal with which many Enlightened scientists adopted that new science, and with which they believed they could order and explain everything, was a re-articulation of the same enthusiasm with which the hermeticists whom they attacked had held their ‘enigmatic’ beliefs. The famous ‘facial angle’ developed as part of the scientific system of physiognomy of the Dutch anatomist Petrus Camper (1722–89), as well as the numerous schemes of a scientific physiognomy that were developed in the course of the nineteenth century, are indications of the fact that the satire of Clubbe and Hogarth was well founded.¹⁷ It was evidence of the Enlightenment’s famous confidence and sense of progression in which it was thought that science could transcend its own epistemological limitations by conquering and scientifically explaining those physiognomical enigmas that they had once rejected as the mysticism and poetry of the hermeticist. In retrospect it can be seen as an early intimation of what the twentieth-century German philosopher Theodore Adorno came to see as the Enlightenment ‘radiating its own disaster’ ‘triumphantly’. In this book I have also attempted to use the history of physiognomy to point towards and partly reconstruct a change I have characterized using the overarching metaphor of a shift ‘from praying to playing’. It is a shift which ¹⁷ Petrus Camper, Dissertation physique, trans. D. B. Quatremère d’Isjonval (Utrecht, 1791); Revd. John Clubbe, Physiognomy (1763).

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covers the change from a Kabbalistic-influenced belief that the natural magic of physiognomy was, in fact, the original language of Adam, to the notion that physiognomy was nothing more than an unscientific human convention as random as the lottery and not to be taken so seriously. Part of that shift can be symbolized in the 1729 Italian publication entitled The golden key; or, The art of winning the lottery, followed by a treatise on physiognomy and chiromancy from the work of a modern cabbalist.¹⁸ Yet that same shift which can be discerned in the reading of ‘books on physiognomy’ can also be discerned in the intense religious fervour that circled ominously around what Boyle showed to be the natural vacuum at the heart of the aforementioned, new, non-symbolic form of mathematical calculation. For example, it transformed the French mathematician and theologian Pascal’s notion of faith into the probabilistic and mathematical concept at the heart of the market—the bet: ‘If God does not exist, one will lose nothing by believing in him, while if he does exist, one will lose everything by not believing. . . . we are compelled to gamble . . .’. It is a shift which also covers the general change from a belief in a divine providence regulating the laws of the universe, the astrological laws over which magi like Robert Fludd were trying to gain some control with their ‘techniques of the microcosm’, to a conviction about the random play of fortune symbolized by the arbitrariness of the pin with which the reader was called upon to use to interpret an illustrated profile by pricking one of the compartments of the wheel of fortune in a 1799 publication entitled The Ladies’ Physiognomonical Mirror. The dangers of positing some sort of uni-linear shift, and locating it in a particular time and place, are evident in the following remark of Kepler with regard to the hermetic understanding of the nature of language: I too play with symbols, and have planned a little work, Geometric Cabala, which is about the Ideas of natural things in geometry; but I play in such a way that I do not forget that I am playing. For nothing is proved by symbols, nothing hidden is discovered in natural philosophy through geometric symbols; things already known are merely fitted [to them]; unless by sure reasons it can be demonstrated that they are not merely symbolic but are descriptions of the ways in which the two things are connected and of the causes of this connexion.¹⁹

Indeed, in trying to reconstruct and understand diachronically this fundamental ‘shift’ from Renaissance private mystical meditation to Enlightened communal entertainment, Johannes Huizinga’s famous, but now largely forgotten, 1938 work Homo Ludens is a timely reminder that, whether one is think¹⁸ La chiave d’oro, ovvero l’ arte di vincere alla lotteria, seguito da un trattato di fisognomia e di chiromanzia ad opera di un cabalista moderno (n. pl.,1729). ¹⁹ Cited in Vickers, Occult and Scientific, 155.

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ing diachronically or synchronically, the distinction between the serious and the playful, the religious and the comic, the prayers and the players should not be overdrawn: ‘If ever an élite, fully conscious of its own merits, sought to segregate itself from the vulgar herd and live life as a game of artistic perfection, that élite was the circle of choice Renaissance spirits. We must emphasise yet again that play does not exclude seriousness. The spirit of the Renaissance was very far from being frivolous. The game of living in imitation of Antiquity was pursued in holy earnest . . . yet the whole mental attitude of the Renaissance was one of play.’ If, according to Plato, ‘God alone is worthy of supreme seriousness’, then the hermetic understanding of the language of physiognomony shows us the moral seriousness with which it was taken in their contemplation of the divine and the ultimate.²⁰ Similarly, it should be remembered that the awakening of a form of serious physiognomical sensibility in the dawn of Romanticism is further evidence that this shift in the experience of physiognomical ‘reading’ was neither ubiquitous nor permanent. Yet that is not to say that it came back full circle. The cyclical aspect in the history of Neoplatonic hermetic physiognomy is more spiral, or even helix-shaped, than circular. The proto-Romantic senses of physiognomical ‘re-awakening’ or ‘dawning’ were certainly a reaction to the overbearing rationality of the Enlightenment, and there were many people who once more began to take physiognomy seriously, be it as a poetic, a religious, or even a scientific phenomenon. Yet those understandings of physiognomy were fundamentally different from the ultimately irretrievable late fifteenth-century hermetic notion of physiognomical ‘anastasis’ or ‘re-generation’ from which they drew so much inspiration. Thus, as much like Giordano Bruno or Jacob Boehme as the German Romantic Herder seemed when he wrote of physiognomy as being ‘the exposition of the living nature of a man, the interpreter as it were of his genius rendered visible’, it is evidence at one and the same time of the fact that physiognomy did not decline, but that it did metamorphose.²¹ Indeed, the fundamental shift that the experience of reading physiognomy in books had undergone, from praying to playing, provides an intimation of the enlightened satire and sceptical derision faced by the new physiognomical sensibility that awakened in the auroras of Romanticism. Once again Coleridge provides clear evidence of what the Romantic sensibility was up against: To the philanthropic Physiognomist a face is beautiful because its Features are the symbols and visible signs of the inward Benevolence or Wisdom—to the pious man all ²⁰ J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens (1949), 205–6, 239–40. ²¹ J. G. Von Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, ed. F. E. Manuel (Chicago, 1968), 256.

320 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 Nature is thus beautiful because its every Feature is the Symbol and all its Parts the written Language of infinite Goodness and all powerful Intelligence. But to a Sensualist and to the Atheist, that alone can be beautiful which promises a gratification to the appetite—for of Wisdom and Benevolence the Atheist denies the very existence.²²

To close this study in the way it began, on a more general, wide-ranging note, the history of physiognomy provides an appropriate occasion to say something about one of the most common epithets used by historians to describe the early modern period—‘face-to-face society’. It is a description which arose in the wake of the development of the telegraph, telephone, radio, cinema, and later the television, and now takes on a new resonance in the socalled ‘face-time’ of the contemporary digital age, all of which are the modern and post-modern developments of the earlier, but equally ‘disembodied’, forms of communication of writing, print, painting, and engraving. During the communications revolution marked by the ‘coming of the book’ and the ‘age of print’, despite the periodic and violent ravages of plague and famine, the population in Europe increased from c.80 million to c.190 million between c.1500 and c.1800.²³ Throughout the period, relatively few members of that population had the textual literacy to enable them to read books. Yet, in contrast to that special ability, each had a face, and, for all the pictorial legends of the tribes of the eyeless disseminated by seventeenth-century writers such as John Bulwer, most had eyes and ears with which to physiognomate and be physiognomated.²⁴ Indeed, one intimation of how important the cultivation of this innate, proto-literate fisnomic faculty may have been considered in the early modern period can be found on the printed pages of Edmund Coote’s popular English schoolbook, The English schoole-maister, the first edition of which was dated 1596, and which was still being published in the eighteenth century. From the late sixteenth century to the mid-eighteenth century, Cootes defined physiognomy for untold numbers of schoolchildren and readers quite simply as ‘knowledge by the visage’. With that in mind, this study has tried to show some of what is still to be learned about early modern history by thinking of early modern culture and society as a fisnomy-to-fisnomy, or physiognomy-to-physiognomy, society. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Capulet’s matchmaking wife at one point tries to persuade Juliet of the virtues of Paris as a potential lover by suggesting that she rely on ‘knowledge by the visage’, in other words her ‘own’ fisnomic faculty: ²² Coleridge, Works, i. 158. ²³ C. Cipolla (ed.), The Fontana Economic History of Europe, 6 vols., Vol. 2, The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1974), 38. ²⁴ John Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis (1653), 101, 104, and 110.

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Read o’er the volume of young Paris’ face, And find delight writ there with beauty’s pen. Examine every married lineament, And see how one another lends content; And what obscured in this fair volume lies Find written in the margin of his eyes. [I.iii. 82 ff.]

Just as the history of the natural magic of physiognomy should not be seen as one of the rejection of an antique superstition, but of a continual metamorphosis across the entire period, this passage should also serve as a reminder that the quest for the perfect language did not only take place through the scholarly medium of words in books. The hitherto unexamined social and cultural implications of the history of physiognomony arise out of the fact that the recovery of this divine language was not only an attempt to recover a way of looking and listening. Its recovery was also looked and listened for, and thought to be expressed in, the hieroglyphic characters of people’s actual physiognomies—the way they looked, the way they talked, the gestures they made—as well as in the representations made of them by artists. In that sense, any future historians of the subject need to bear in mind that the hermetic sense of self-regeneration in which physiognomony came to be enveloped had numerous social counterparts, such as the necessity of carefully choosing the person with whom the act of generation was carried out, with all the dreams of utopian social engineering which that observation implies. Even at the end of the period, when Kant said that all physiognomy could amount to was the cultivation of ‘taste’, he, like Lavater, saw it as a scientia which had the social potential to improve human relationships: Physiognomy is the art of judging what lies within a man, whether in terms of his way of sensing or of his way of thinking, from his visible form and so from his exterior.—In doing this we judge him when he is in a state of health, not sickness, and when his mind is calm, not in commotion. . . . taste, which is a merely subjective ground for one man’s being pleased or displeased with other men. . . . cannot serve as a guiding principle to Wisdom, which has the existence of a man with certain natural qualities objectively as its end (which is, for us, quite incomprehensible). . . . physiognomy, as the art of detecting someone’s interior life by means of certain external signs involuntarily given up, is no longer a subject of inquiry. Nothing remains of it but the art of cultivating taste—not, indeed, taste in things but in morals, manners and customs—so that, by a critique that would promote human relations and knowledge of men generally, it could come to the aid of this knowledge.²⁵ ²⁵ Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view, trans. M. J. Gregor (The Hague, 1974), 120.

322 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Duncan’s famous words about the Thane of Cawdor, ‘there’s no art | To find the mind’s construction in the face: | He was a gentleman on whom I built | An absolute trust’ (I.iv. 12) show that, however innate and intuitive it appears, ‘fisnomy’ was, and is, not an infallible doorway to truth. None the less, as I have tried to stress throughout this book, ‘physiognomy’ was something that happened between people from all walks of early modern life, from monarchs to peasants, from nuns to children, from lawyers to merchants, from courtly poets to wandering beggars, from painters to gypsies. Just as it happened between people and animals and people and nature, so I have also tried to show how it often occurred between people and likenesses of people, be it the broadsheet woodcuts of early modern fugitives, the betrothal portraits of princes and princesses that formed such an important part of the political culture of the merging and generating of dynasties, or the painted Renaissance limewood sculptures of the holy that were an important part of early modern devotional practices. The potentially wide-ranging, inter-disciplinary, study of ‘fisnomy’ arises from the fact that that fisnomy was the most basic, primary mechanism through which the dynamic of most ‘face-to-face’ encounters in early modern Europe was mediated and regulated. It was an early modern hermeneutic faculty as ineluctable as a sense of the weather. Whether mysticism or common sense; as intuitive or as scientific, as serious or as laughable as its seemingly natural magic was taken at different times and in different ways to be; as different as the philosophical, aesthetic, and stylistic frameworks through which the attempts to capture it were articulated; everyone was sensitive to the sort of marginal, audio-visual ‘information’ with which their innate physiognomical consciousnesses provided them. That physiognomical consciousness was the pre-verbal ‘prism’ through which people came to interpret each other, be it in local, regional, national, or ‘New World’ terms. The remnants of those many different ‘physiognomical eyes’, expressions of the variegated forms of this physiognomical consciousness, examples of this visual and sonic fisnomic literacy ‘in action’ can be found in a wide range of textual and visual sources that now constitute the archives of early modern Europe—far beyond, but not always entirely independent of, the ‘books on physiognomy’ that have been the primary focus of this study. It is in those remnants that one finds traces of how those ‘face-to-face’ encounters were either constructed or articulated. There is much fruitful comparative research and analysis to be done to retrieve those respective and mutual early modern physiognomical perceptions in order to examine and compare them in more detail with each other in terms of the context of a particular ‘walk of life’, or ‘national culture’, or, as some

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might prefer, ‘field’ or ‘discourse’, including the ‘discourse’ of physiognomony itself. However, some of that ‘physiognomy’ is, and will always be, beyond the reaches of any early modern historical source. An example is the illiterate physiognomical skill that, as was mentioned in the Introduction, Sir Thomas Browne detected in the beggars and medicants of his day. It is worth repeating here: I have observed that those professed Eleemosynaries, though in a croud or multitude, do yet direct and place their petitions on a few and selected persons; there is surely a Physiognomy, which those experienced and Master Mendicants observe, whereby they instantly discover a merciful aspect, and will single out a face, wherein they spy the signatures and marks of mercy. For there are mystically in our faces certain Characters which carry in them the motto of our Soules, wherein he that cannot read A. B. C. may read our natures.²⁶

Whilst historians have no sources to enable them to capture this sort of ‘illiterate’ physiognomy in any detail, the ‘physiognomy’ discussed in this book might also provide a basis for better understanding of the significance of a popular ballad published in mid-seventeenth-century England in illustrated broadsheet form entitled ‘Mirth for Citizens; or, A Comedy for the Country’ (Illustration 58). Both sung to the tune of ‘Ragged, torn, and true’ (a traditional tune dating back to the sixteenth century and still alive in John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera), the refrain of the latter spoke of the dangers of cuckoldry in marriage. In so doing it alluded to how very common, if tragically unreliable, this sense of ‘knowledge by the visage’ was: Shewing A young Farmer his unfortunate marriage, His wife is so churlish & curlish in carriage. He married her for beauty, for’s own delight Now he repents it both day and night. By physiognomy Adviseth youngmen that at Wenches skip, To be sure to look before that they leap, To leap at a venture, & catch a fall, Raising the forehead breaks horns and all.

²⁶ Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, ed. Jean-Jacques Denonain (Cambridge, 1953), 90–1. My emphasis. With regard to the important uncorrected erratum in this passage in many editions of the text, see fn. to l. 2138.

58. ‘Mirth for Citizens; or, A Comedy for the Country’, 17th-century English broadsheet ballads. (Photo: Harvard Houghton Library.)

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To conclude on a methodological note, we can return to E. H. Carr’s description of history as ‘an unending dialogue between the present and the past’. This study has shown how history is an ‘audio-visual’ dialogue between the present and the past. For all the inherent methodological limitations in trying to write the history of such an ‘unbookish’ audio-visual subject, the study of early modern ‘physiognomy’, when looked upon from the radically different perspective of the early twenty-first century, raises fundamental questions about such crucial issues as, for example, the evolution of the so-called ‘European-ness’ of early modern European self-understanding, free of the limitations imposed by any Darwinian understanding of the term ‘evolution’; the development of religion, science, art, and entertainment in early modern European culture; or even the ‘historical psychology of human expression’ which the anthropologist and art historian Aby Warburg thought could only really be caught ‘in a cinematographic spotlight’.²⁷ The historical optic through which this work has been written might ultimately be characterized with the Dickenisan epithet of ‘the old curiosity shop’. However, perhaps this attempt to explore, historically, the metamorphosis of a way of looking and listening might have something to contribute to the development of a contemporary optic. At the very least, it is hoped that this study of the art of physiognomy opens up a hitherto neglected plane of audio-visual experience, the historical metamorphosis of which can be traced across the early modern period in European culture from the beginning to the end. ²⁷ E. Gombrich, ‘Aby Warburg: His Aims and Methods’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 62 (1979), 270.

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INDEX

Abbey of Saint Saviour and Saint Bridget 75 ABCs 97 abyss 173, 304 (between man and God) Académie 158 (des Sciences), 158 (Française) Accademia 125 (dei Gelati), 131 (dei Lincei), 163 (dei Verspitini) Achilles 243 Achillini, Alessandro 20, 53, 113, 117, 124, 125, 210 ‘active images’ 242 ‘active philosophy’ 165 actors 302 Adam 8, 13, 15, 21, 175, 232, 244, 306 Adamantius 49, 55, 61, 67, 113, 125, 156, 159, 187. Addison, Joseph 137 Adorno, Henrico 118 Adorno, Theodore 317 Aesop’s Fables 160 aesthetics 172, 186 ff, 313 ‘age of print’ 150, 173, 320 ‘ages of man’ 2, 58, 220 Agrippa, Henricus Cornelius 84, 301 Agrippa, Livio 94, 162 Aix-en-Provence 210, 276 Albertus Magnus 12, 36, 37, 63, 71, 97, 104, 114–15, 117, 175 Albrecht, Archbishop of Mainz 156 Alcabitius 36 Alchemy 39, 65, 72, 169, 240 Alexandria (the library at) 60 Alfred the Great 68 Alington, Sir Giles 153 almanac 97

alphabet 192, 265 (of the body) Alsted, Johann Heinrich 10, 27, 28, 33, 78, 114, 124, 173, 203, 217, 306 Alva, Duke of 164 America vii, 110 Amo, Anton Wilhelm 167 ff, 317 analogy 2, 60, 184 anastasis 319 anatomy 26, 39, 71, 162, 308, 310, 315 ‘ancient theology’ 1, 13, 21, 42, 116, 179, 235, 244, 266, 301, 304, 308, 309, 311 Angela of Foligno 133 angels 9, 224, 244, 289, 298, 305, 307 anglicanism 171 animals 3, 5, 52, 53, 59, 313 ‘animistic principle’ 239 Anne, Queen 140 Anonymous Latin 50, 56, 57, 60, 65, 74, 240 anthropocentrism 52, 59, 71 anthropography 162, 313 anthropological back-projection 255 anthropology 83 (physical), 114, 226, 272 anthropomantry 313 anthropometria 313 anthroposophia 162 antipathy 12 antiquity 17 (Greek), 46–7, 60, 118, 263, 277 Antwerp 123 appearance 3 Appelius, Johannes Wilhelm 170 Aquinas, Thomas 12, 71, 200 Arabic vii, 19, 36, 39, 179, 223, 305 Arcandam 37, 81, 129, 180, 196

348

Index

Arcona 162 Aristotelianism 18, 36, 37, 42, 46, 47, 49, 52, 53, 54, 60, 66, 68, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, 94, 107, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 130, 151, 159, 164, 165, 168, 171, 174, 183, 208, 219, 229, 262, 303, 314 Aristotle’s Complete Masterpiece 182, 193, 247 Aristotle’s Last Legacy 128 Aristotle’s Legacy 107, 195, 251 Aristotle’s Masterpiece 105, 264 arm 3, 124, 274 Arras, bishop of 138 art 18 Asclepius 187 Ashmole, Elias 6, 165 ass 24, 218 Assyrians 48 astrologers 3, 36, 131 astrology 5, 37, 39, 42, 73, 99, 134, 139, 157, 160, 218, 223, 239, 240, 283, 302, 307 astronomers 10 astronomia 25 astronomy 154 astro-physicists 10 Aubert, Guillaime 160 Aubrey, John 82, 200 audio-visual dialogue viii, 226, 325 audio-visual experience 325 audio-visual signs 235 Augsburg 95 Austin Friars 164 Averroism 53, 124, 125, 210 Avicenna 63–4, 71, 95, 193 Aztecs 48 Babel, Tower of 175, 305 Babylonia 48, 74, 83 back 88 Bacon, Francis 30, 117, 131, 169, 192, 307, 312 Bacon, Roger 75, 152 Baghdad 63

Baglivi, Georgius 112 Baldi, Camillo 81, 125, 161, 171, 216, 200 Bale, John 65 ballads (popular) 323 Barcelona 136 Barclay, Alexander 153 Baron, Theodore Hyacinthe 113 Basel 114, 122, 125 Baumgarten 186 beard 2, 199, 268, 271 ‘bearded woman’ 271 Beaumont, John 113 beauty 172, 184 ff., 206, 303 Bede, the venerable 66 beggars 135, 136, 140 Beggar’s Opera 278, 323 ‘beholding’ 226, 304, 309 belly 58, 267, 270, 272 Belot, Jean 10, 38, 39, 109, 171, 200, 240 Benedict, Lorenz 80 Benincontri, Laurentius 36, 116 Bentivoglio, Giovanni 155, 156 Bernard, Charles 112 Besançon 122 Bible 15, 37, 39, 41, 67, 97, 105, 134, 139, 200, 285, 287, 297 ‘biology as destiny’ 49 Biondo, Michelangelo 53, 126 black gothic 173 Blake, William 27, 279, 298–9 Bloch, Marc 256 blood 60 Blyth, Captin (of the Bounty) 114 Bodin, Jean 257 Bodleian library 117 body 3, 57, 307, 309 body and soul 21, 52, 29 body divination 47 body history 21 ‘body skyl’ 197 Boehme, Jacob 31, 168, 319 Boethius 78 Boevey, James 96, 164, 200, 208

Index Bologna 53, 63, 81, 108, 122, 125, 154, 159, 163, 210 bones 57 Bonnet, Charles 40, 171 book of hours 220 book of nature 10, 51, 78, 235, 301, 306 ‘books on physiognomy’ Ch. 2 passim, 302 Borde, Andrew 139 botany 114 Boulard, Antoine Marie Henrie 170 Bourne, Edward 287 Boyle, Robert 28, 29, 30, 33, 34, 316, 318 Brahe, Tycho 26 brain 33, 53 Brandis, Lucas 121 breeding 249 Brescia 94, 104 Breughel, Pieter 199 Browne, Sir Thomas 14, 17, 25, 323 Bruges 136 Bruno, Giordano 25, 27, 29, 34, 44, 128, 187, 227, 232, 238, 239, 243, 254, 302 Bry, Theodore de 232, 289 Buddhism 228 bull 192 Bulwer, John 320 Burckhardt, Jacob 120, 126 Burette, Pierre Jean 113 Burgh, Benedict 95 Burgkmair, Hans, the Elder 147, 289 business 251 Butler, Thomas 113 calculus 38, 307 Callot, Jacques 143 Calvinism 124, 171 Cambridge 38 Cambridge Platonists 31, 164 Camera dei Sposi 298 Camillo, Guilio 242 Campeggi, Lorenzo 162 Camper, Petrus 32, 317 Canon Law 7

349

Canterbury, Archbishop of 6 captopotromancy 26 Caravaggio, Michaelangelo Merisi da 143 Cardano, Girolamo 20, 37, 112, 154, 219, 277 Carlisle, Earl of 158 Carlos I, King of Spain 123 Carmagnola 94 Carr, E. H. 325 Carrabarra, Series of 147 Carthusian monks 225 Caryl, Joseph 16 Cassetti, Iseppo 166 Castile 48, 68 Catechism 98 Cats, Jacob 204 causal explanation 215 cause (material) 239 cause and effect 224 Cecil, Sir William 160 celestial influence 10, 254 celestial radiation 239 celestial rays (mechanisms of ) 302 celestial signatures 305 celestial windows 242 Chadwick, Charles 277 Chaldean 305 Chancery Lane 277 chapbooks 278 chapmen 110 character 3, 14, 15, 19, 25, 27, 28, 33, 46, 57–9, 63, 86, 163, 192, 216, 240, 303 ‘character as destiny’ 49 ‘characterological prism’ 202 Charles V 3, 123, 156 Charles VIII 108 Chaucer, Geoffrey 27 Cheam (Surrey) 164 ‘cheap print’ 128 cheek 6 Chelsea 165 chest 55, 124 children 264

350

Index

children readers 118 chin 86, 183, 195–6 China 81, 141 chiromancy 16, 26, 38, 66, 77, 88, 94, 95, 98, 108, 113, 116, 117, 131, 133, 134, 140, 141, 150, 154, 159, 160, 162, 163, 240, 249, 279, 302 Christ (appearance of ) 49 Christian Aristotelianism 25, 171 Christian IV 257 Church Fathers 66 church hostility 133 Cicero 67, 154, 210, 262, 263 cinematic physiognomy 279–99 cinematographic spotlight 325 Cingano 138 circulation of the blood 26 civility 125 Clare of Montefalco 133 classification 308 climate 30 Clubbe, Reverend John 317 Cocles, Bartholomaeus (Della Rocca) 107, 108, 113, 117, 123 Coleridge 312–13, 319 ‘collative physics’ (physica collativa) 78 College of Jesuits 113 Collegio Romano 23 Cologne 121 colour 27 Colville, Anne 75 ‘coming of the book’ 320 commedia dell’arte 27 common law 183 communication (embodied and disembodied) 320 complexion 3, 21, 139, 170 Complexionbüch 122, 128 Compost des Bergiers 11, 39, 82, 108, 115, 122, 152, 191, 220, 258, 293 Compost of Ptholomeus 11, 37, 98, 264, 271 conception 238

Conduit, John 38 confessional practices 221 ff., 274 confessional prayer 222 ff. confusion of languages 305 conscience 221 Constantine (Emperor) 313 contemplation of others 246 Conty, Evrart de 51 conventionality of language 306 conversation 165 Coote, Edmund 320 Copenhagen 80, 109, 119, 257 Copernicus 9, 10, 125, 232 Copland, Robert 110 corporeality 21 Corpus hermeticum 17, 18, 44, 126, 141, 154, 187, 205, 207, 224, 237, 304 Cortés, Jéronimo 123 cosmogonies 172 Cossiers, Jan 148 countenance x, 189, 192, 307 Coventry 110 Cracow 80, 81, 119 Cranmer, Thomas 99, 133, 136 criminal law 3 cripple 104 Cudworth, Ralph 164 cuneiform 49 cunning men and women 36, 131 ‘curiosity’ 33, 34, 39, 44, 118, 166, 191, 249, 250, 254, 277, 309 customs 1 Cybele 154 Daniel of Beccles 68 Dark Ages 65 Darwin, Charles 31, 325 Daston, Lorraine 32 Davies, John 158 De secretis mulierum 12, 114, 115, 117 dead bones 121 Dead Sea Scrolls 48 ‘death of the author’ 35 deconstruction 307

Index Dee, John 15, 95, 160–2, 238 ff., 244, 277, 296–8, 313 deformity 6, 7, 184 Della Porta, Giovanni Battista 3, 20, 38–9, 73, 81, 83, 113, 114, 115, 129, 132, 161, 179, 211, 240, 258, 262–3, 277, 306 Delorme, Charles 104 demonstrable measurement 306 Derrida, Jacques 307 Descartes, René 26, 38, 56, 158, 177, 308 ff. Desessarts, Abbé 116 Desmonceaux, Abbé 311 d’Este (family) 73, 138, 211, 246 destiny 16 Dethick, Henry 160 dialect 180 Dickens, Charles 325 diet 30 Dietrich, Christian Wilhelm 148 Digby, Sir Kenelm 23 discourse 323 discovery 30, 166 disease 310 d’Isnard, Antoine Danty 114 disposition 130 divine language (of physiognomy) 168 doctrine of signatures 28, 47, 51, 59, 72, 103, 174, 204–5 Dodoens, Rembert 46–7 Douxciel, Ancelme Petit 281 drawing 3 ‘dream memories’ 229 dreams (interpretation of ) 30, 87, 131, 139, 141, 160, 166, 169, 229, 250, 289, 303; (language of ) 303 dress viii du Bellay, Joachim 160 Dublin (Philosophical Society) 85 Duck, Jacob 145, 148 Dutch 1 dynasty 2

351

eagle 192 ears 88, 215, 218, 272 East Sussex 1 Ecclesiastes 14 education 3, 30, 165, 251 Egyptian 17, 25, 42, 120–171, 187, 205, 223, 235, 301, 303, 313 Elagobalus 313 eleemosynaries 323 elements 74 Elizabeth I 140 elocution viii Elsholtz, Sigismund 313 emblem books 6, 231 emblems 218, 231, 235, 244 ff., 309 embryology 70, 125 emotions 312 ff. empirical experience 29 empirical experiment 22 empiricism 28, 247 empirics 131 Encyclopédie 116, 289 engagement 219, 226, 247, 253, 272 England 100, 101 engravers 302 enigmas 317 enlightened rationality 194 Enlightenment 44, 45, 116, 158, 166, 167, 317, 319 entertainment 39, 250 enthusiasts 304 enthymeme 53 Epictetus 160 Epicurean naturalism 187 epiprepeia 55, 61 ‘epistemic shift’ 32 epistemology, see language Erasmus 130, 173, 198, 200, 217, 242, 268, 289 Erfurt 133 ‘erkennen’ 30 Eros 252 Erra Pater 37, 118 errant scholars 135

352

Index

esoteric viii, 31, 44 ethics 65 ethics 183, 190 Euclid 38 Evelyn, John 38, 199 ‘everyday life’ 254 evolution 31, 325 Exmoor 164 Exodus 15 experiment 307 experimental 3 expression 32 eye of God 233 eye of imagination 19, 44, 228 ff., 302 eye of memory 19 eye-brows 12, 31, 124 eye-lashes 56, 216 eyeless 320 eyes viii, 3, 4, 9, 12, 13, 20, 34, 48, 54, 55, 56, 85, 88, 104, 124, 162, 176 ff., 180, 186, 188, 189, 204, 216, 226, 242, 271, 307, 310 ff., 315 Fabricius, Johann Andreas 170 face viii, 3, 4, 6, 14, 15, 16, 20, 28, 29, 33, 34, 48, 51, 55, 88, 130, 132, 137, 139, 156, 157, 173, 179, 185, 187, 192, 198, 199, 203, 218 (temporal prism), 230, 274, 283, 287, 291, 294, 298, 302, 315 ‘face of God’ 230, 298 ‘face of nature’ 51 ‘face of the disease’ 24, 310 ‘face-time’ 320 ‘face-to-face’ x, 204, 313, 315, 320 ff. facial angle 317 facial expression 56 Faeschl, Remigius 114, 118 ‘Fall of Man’ 305 famine 221 fancy 34 ‘fantasticall ymagenacions’ 140 Fantoni, Giovanni Battista 40 Farnese, Alessandro 159 fascination 236

Faust 132, 141 Favier, Abbé 115, 117 features 30 feet 3, 12, 55, 84, 88, 124, 267, 313 Ferret, Antoine 147 fertility 269 Ficino, Marsilio 10, 11, 13, 17, 26, 28, 37, 38, 41, 42, 44, 46, 116, 117, 120, 126, 152, 155, 156, 160, 161, 171, 187, 188, 224, 227, 232, 237, 243, 266, 305 field 323 Fiesole 113 Finch, Henry 160 fingers 12, 14, 124 fira¯sa 19, 56, 61–6, 233 fire of London 164 first cause 234 fish pond 283 ‘fisnomical consciousness’ 46–78 fisnomiers 128, 131 ff., 150, 154, 172, 212, 304 fisnomy vii, 18, 19, 21, 23, 28, 30, 42, 44, 128, 248, 254 (divine capacity), 320 (proto-literate faculty) ‘fisnomy-to-fisnomy’ 301–25 Florence 17, 85, 103, 113, 126, 143, 156, 171, 301, 305 Fludd, Robert 10, 21, 44, 53, 81, 108, 114, 128, 162, 171, 187, 198, 232 ff., 236, 243, 244, 247, 254, 266 , 293, 302, 305, 310, 313, 318 folk-lore 139 Follinus, Harannus 281 folly 183, 189, 215, 216, 217, 227, 289 Fontaine, Jacques 26, 210, 276 forehead 3, 12, 13, 29, 55, 56, 63, 66, 68, 104, 124, 131, 194, 216, 232 form 192, 312, 316 (meaning of), 314–16 (form and function), 316 (form of meaning) Forman, Simon 5 Förster, Richard 83 fortune 16

Index fortune-telling 252, 278 Foucault, Michel 32, 171, 174, 256 four humours 99 four principal qualities 26 France 11, 47, 100, 137 Francis I 139 Franciscan minors 163 Frankfurt Book Fair 98, 110 Franklin, Benjamin 6 Franz, Johann Georg Friedrich 83 Frederick II 69 Frederick the Great 167 Fredriksborg slot 257 free will 21, 239 Freemasons 167 Freud, Sigmund 239, 258, 270 friendship 125 front 20, 198 future 49 Gabriel (angel) 244 Galen 26, 47, 60, 63, 71, 124, 199, 210, 262, 268–9 Galilei, Galileo 2, 32, 53, 306 Gall 33 Gallimard, Edmé 166 game 18, 250, 251, 252, 300, 309 garden 2 Gargasamhita 47 Garrick, David 27 Gassendi, Pierre 25 Gaurico, Luca 37, 158, 161, 180 Gaurico, Pompeo 37, 156, 171, 180, 187, 201, 239, 243 ‘Gay Fables’ 277 Geertz, Clifford 172, 216 gender 42, 57, 63, 172, 188, 190 ff., 303 genealogy of morals 182, 216 generation 70, 125, 238, 249, 251, 265–6, 268–9, 300, 313 genes 22 Genesis 15, 173 genetics 49

353

Geneva 268 genitalia 12, 267 Gent, William 117 geomancy 116 geometry 10, 38, 117, 306 George II 112, 140 Gerard of Cremona 62 Gerard, Antoine 108 Germany 3, 97, 100, 101, 126 Gesner, Conrad 112, 115, 278 ‘gestin’ 26, 301 gestures 196 Ghirardelli, Cornelia 108, 162 Ginzburg, Carlo 61, 257 Giotto 229, 287 Giovanni, Fantoni 85 Giovio, Paolo 156 Globalisation 82 Glogoviens, Joannes 80 ‘Glorious Revolution’ 1 gnomon x gnomos 235, 309 Godhead 213, 234 Goethe 130 Gold Coast 167 Gotha 133 grace 221 grafitti 44, 254, 255–300 grammar 56 Granada 152 Grand Tour 111, 135, 164 graphology 125 Gratarolus, Guilelmus 39, 103, 118, 129, 160–1, 240 Gray, John 278, 323 Greece vii, 50, 137, 179, 305 Gregory XV (Pope) 163 Groatsworth of Wit 108, 110 Grub Street ix, 128 gut 312 Gwithers, Dr 85 ‘gypsies’ 17, 42, 120–171, 126, 128, 136 ff., 168, 172, 290, 303, 304; see also Egyptians

354

Index

Haarlem 136 habitus 26, 205 Hadrian (Emperor) 49 Hague, The 283 Hain bei Darmstadt 11 hair 3, 12, 48, 49, 51 , 53, 87, 193, 199, 200, 202, 222, 251, 271, 272 haircuts viii Hajek, Hagecius ab 13, 17, 95 hakkarath panim 67, 233 Hall, John 132 Haller, Albrecht von 39, 40, 41, 117, 310 Haly Abenragel 5 hands 3, 14, 15, 88, 157 Harris, Robert 132 Hartlib, Johannes 88 Harvey, Gabriel 36, 37, 39, 134, 257 Harvey, William 26, 310, 314 hawkers 110, 135 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 107 head 3, 55, 84, 272 health 163 health and salvation 104–5 heart 53 ‘hebdomars’ 2 hebrew vii, 8, 15, 16, 17, 65, 179, 223, 305, 306 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 192 Heidelberg 124, 163 height 1, 2, 306 heliocentric 9 Helvetius, Johannes-Frederic 39, 163 Hemmingsen, Niels 37, 103 Henrici, André 88 Henry VIII 99, 133 Herder, Johann Gottfried 319 Herder, Michael 98 hereditary 70 hermeneutics 78, 163 Hermes Trismegistus 10, 17, 116, 120, 138, 153, 188 hermetic and rational 313 hermetic grafitti 255

hermetic philosophy viii, 10, 11, 13, 17, 19, 21, 22, 29, 37, 42, 117, 128, 152, 153, 160, 161, 163, 164, 168, 186, 187, 223, 229, 254, 293, 301, 302, 303, 305, 307, 312, 313 hermeticism and modernity 317 hermits 135 Hesiod 243 heteroglossia 129 hieroglyphics 6, 13, 23, 224, 229, 235, 244 ff, 301, 304, 305, 321 Hill, Thomas ix, 94–5, 108, 112, 125, 160, 186, 197, 246, 266, 267, 273, 276 Hillerød 257 Hinduisim 150 Hippocrates 30, 47, 59, 60, 156, 202, 210, 218, 269 historical optic 325 historical psychology of expression 325 ‘history from below’ 99 history of ideas 303 history of reading 22, 41, 208 ff., 299 history of sound and vision 22 history of the body 21 history of the book 41 history of the margins 99, 254, 257 Hobbes, Thomas 25, 81 Hoernen, Arnold Ther 121 Hogarth, William 86, 317 Holbein, Hans, the younger 289 holy women 133 Homer 243 homo ludens 294, 318 hsiang shu 48 Huartes, see Navarro Huizinga, Johannes 135, 174, 294, 318 human form 33 humanists 10, 13, 16, 17, 47, 160, 173, 208, 210, 262, 278 Humboldt, Alexander von 31 humoral theory 184 Hüpfuff 95 Hurnheim, Hilgart von 75 husbandman 109

Index hypertext 257 hypnosis x iatrophysiognomia 112 Ibn Arabi 19 Iceland 109 iconography 141, 283 ff. Iliad 243 illiteracy ix, 21, 42, 126, 132, 136, 153, 172, 173 ff., 198 ff., 219, 323 illiterate seers 130 ff. illness (morality of ) 104 Illuminists 167 image 3, 312 imagination 34, 36, 228 imagines agentes 242 imitation 230 immortality 155, 220 ff., 240, 243, 309 impression 30, 166, 192 incantations 237 incarnation 168 Incas 48 inclination 21 30, 239 Indagine, Johannes ab 11, 112, 114, 117, 126, 129, 156, 198, 219, 262 index 11, 262; of nature 266 India 139, 224 individual (discovery of ) 126, 129 individualism 126, 127 Indus valley 138 information (audio-visual) 322 Ingegneri, Giovanni (bishop of Capo d’Istria) 162 innate biology 21 innate complexion 170 innate faculty 19, 138 innate iconicity 224, 228 ff., 255, 303 innate types 27 inner chord 244 inner eye 231 inner firmament 239 inner intuition 232 inner light 26, 232, 248 inner lyre 244, 302

355

inner self 213, 223 ff., 308 ff. inner-writing 44, 235 ff., 254, 302, 313 Inquisition 163 institutionalized religion 304 intellectual faculty 25 intentionality 35, 115 interior nature of things 305 interior spirit 25 internal affections 27 internal artist 239 ‘internal cinema’ 207, 231 ff., 237, 244, 256, 293–300, 302 internal travel 239 ‘intersubjectivity’ 256 introspection 230 invisible (manifest) 302 Iraq 48 Ireland 110 Isaiah 15 Isidore of Seville 67 Islamicism ix, 61–5, 154, 223 Italy 97, 100, 143 Janot, Jean 107 Japan 48 Jardin des Plantes 114 Jeake, Samuel 1, 2, 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, 28, 30, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 44, 79, 94, 96, 107, 109, 157, 289, 301 ff., 305, 306, 307, 308, 309 Jena 129 Jerome, Saint 15 Jesus Christ 138, 250 (portraits) Joannet, Abbé 171 Job 15, 277 Job, Johann Georg 166, 168 John of Wales 75 journeymen 135 Judah al-Harizi 65 Judaism ix, 139, 154, 223 ff., 301 judicial astrology 11, 38, 115, 240 Julian (Apostate Emperor) 232 Julius II 123, 155

356

Index

Jupiter 3 jurisprudence 167 Kabbalah ix, 10, 13, 31, 38, 48, 69, 117, 128, 153, 171, 179, 200, 223, 224, 233, 243 ff., 279, 302, 306, 318 Kalendar of Shepherds 36, 39, 105, 106, 107, 118, 152, 153, 155, 174, 189, 191, 195, 222 ff., 226 ff., 255, 258, 263, 272, 275, 283 Kant, Emmanuel 30, 34, 321 Keable, George 160 Keckermann, Bartholomeus 124 Kent, Earl of 153 Kepler, Johannes 313, 318 Kessler, E. 155 Ketham, Johannes de 64, 103, 122 ‘kinematic’ (aspect of reading) 228 King’s College, Cambridge 129 Kircheim, Hans von 103, 104 Kircher, Athanasius 23, 29, 34, 113, 171 kiyafa 62 klimata 59 knee 124 Kniphof, Johann Hieronymus 40 ‘know thyself ’ 221 ‘knowledge by the visage’ 28, 169, 173, 232, 235, 265, 320, 323 Koyré, Alexandre 10 Kuhn, Thomas 32 La Chambre, Marin Cureau de 112, 116, 158, 170, 232, 283 La Mettrie, Julien Jan Offray de 24, 28, 167 Labé, Louis 160 lactation 268 Laguna, Andre de 123 Laigneau, David 38, 310 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 40 Lancisi, Giovanni Maria 85 language 8, 13, 18, 19, 42; adamic 200, 229, 244, 306; epistemology of 17, 26,

34, 42, 208, 213, 229, 304, 305, 306, 317; of nature 306; of physiognomy 306 ‘lanterns of the soul’ 20 Lascaux caves 257 Latin vii, 179, 305 Laud, William 6 laughter viii Laurenziana (Biblioteca) 36–7 Lavater, Johannes Caspar vii, 31, 32, 39, 40, 83, 100, 117, 129, 171, 278, 279, 321 lawyers 114 Le Brun, Charles 56, 86, 142 Le Clerc, Sebastian 142 Le Fenon, Jean 107 Lebon, Jean 125 legs 55 Leibniz 167, 307 Leipzig 129 Lentulus (description of Christ) 230 Leonato 54 letters 15 Leutmann, Johann Georg 170 Leviticus 7 L’homme machine 24 liberal arts 3 library catalogues 115 ff. library classification 115, 119 licensing laws 101 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 83 light 27, 234, 305 Lille, Alain of 222 Lilly, William 5 Lincoln’s Inn 16 Linnaeus, Carl 114, 308 lion 192 lips 86, 87, 88, 213, 214, 215, 226, 268 literacy ix, 126, 284 (textual and visual), 303 literati 173 liver 53 ‘living hieroglyph’ 305 Livy 257

Index Lloyd, Owen 83 Locke, John 29, 30, 231 logic and dialectic 116 logocentric rationality 307 Loire (France) 109 ‘longue durée’ 79, 103 looking glass, see mirror Lorry, Anne Charles 113 lottery 318 Louis XIII 104 Louis XIV 6, 56, 158 Lovejoy, Arthur 32 Low Countries 97, 100, 122, 163, 164 Lowicza, Szymonz 86 Loxus 50, 52, 60, 71, 73 Lucretius 26 Ludovisi, Cardinal Alessandro 163 lumen naturae 26, 203, 232 lungs 53 Luther, Martin 139 Lutheranism 11 Luttrell, Narcissus 117 Lydgate 75 lying 125 Lyon 81, 113, 160, 262 Machiavelli Niccolò dei 136 Mackenzie, Henry 197 macrocosm/microcosm 18, 21, 28, 162, 218, 238, 254 Madrid 123 magi 44, 126, 128, 160, 250, 300 magic viii, 1, 9, 13, 17, 25, 117, 133, 165 magicians ix, 304 magistrates 276 Maidstone 132 Maisonneuve, Gabriel de 109 make-up viii mala physiognomia 3 Manfredi, Girolamo 122, 214 manipulation of time 240 ‘manly woman’ 270–1 Mantegna 298

357

Mantua 298 manuscripts 3 Marchant, Giout 152 Marchant, Prosper 115 marginalia 258, 259, 262 marks of provenance 118 Marot, Clement 160 marriage of heaven and earth 243, 302 Martin, Gabriel 115 Marx, Karl 207 Marxism 42 Marzio, Galeotto 13, 17, 19 Master of the Die 290 materia 44 materialist philosophy 24 mathematics 2, 10, 31, 117, 306, 313 ff. Mattheus (King of Hungary) 13 May, Philipp 163 Mayas 48 Mayerne, Sir Theodore 165 Mazarin, Cardinal 158 mechanics ix, 12, 24, 26, 29, 34, 166, 168, 171, 249, 316 medical gaze 218 medical literature 98 medical semiotics 40, 310 Medici family 13, 36, 41, 171 medicine 5, 7, 8, 18, 24, 42, 71, 74, 117, 160, 163, 167, 176, 304 medieval church 304 Meek, William 118 Melampodi 5 Melampus 5 melancholy 3, 270 memory, art of 44, 180 (auditory, visual), 215, 228, 237, 240 ff., 242, 244, 302 memory wheel 243 mendicants 135, 323 Mercer’s Company 160 Merseberg 121 Mersenne 25, 289 Mesopotamia 48, 81

358

Index

metaphysical archetypes 27 metaphysics 42, 116 metonyme 16 metoposcopy 13, 88, 95, 112, 131, 162, 269, 277, 313 Michelangelo 36 microscope 34 Middle Ages 13, 32, 42, 44, 47, 254, 278 Middle English x, 16 Miège, Guy 191 Milan 94, 138 milk 268 mind and body 26, 30, 169, 309 ff. Minerva 243 mira 20 miracles 20 Mirandola, Pico della 10, 13, 17, 42, 46, 117, 152, 153, 155, 187, 189, 224, 239, 243 mirrors 20, 169, 198, 215, 224 (dust), 226 ff., 238–9, 246, 247, 280 ff., 288 (literacy), 289 (divination), 307, 309 mirror of the soul 20, 261, 310 Mirth for Citizens 323 Mizauld, Antoine 103 modern art 32 modern science (birth of ) 313 modern self 313 moles 3, 4, 6, 7, 12, 250, 267, 307, 313 Molière 150 monasteries 74 (Austin), 75 (Benedictine, Augustine, Franciscan), 75 (Cistercian), 154 (San Stefano) Montaigne, Michel de 223 Montalbani, Ovidio 163 Montanus 141 Monteferrato, Livio Agrippa da 104 Montpellier 60, 114 Montpensier, Mlle de 3, 215 Moors 139 moral and physical 167, 170 moral philosophy 167, 276 moral topography of self 231 morale 116

morals, manners and customs 321 More, Henry 31, 164 Morelli, Giovanni 257 Morgan, Thomas 112 Morton, Cardinal 153 Moses 17, 184, 242 motion 27, 305 Moulin, Antoine du 23, 160, 161 mouth 124, 268 Mundt, Conrad 133 Murray, Alexander 63 Museo Aldrovandi 125 musicians 302 Muslim 139, 152, 153, 154 mystical knowledge 128 mysticism ix, 10, 32 (number) 42, 48, 224 ff., 301, 304 mythologies 223, 301, 304 naevi, see moles nails 272 Napier, Richard 5 Naples 83, 112, 131 nation 81 natural astrology 11, 15 n, 23 natural force 25 natural history 30 natural language 8, 172, 173 ff., 248, 266, 301, 305, 309 natural magic viii, 10, 13, 17, 19, 25, 27, 30, 37, 38, 42, 44, 123, 169, 207, 219, 226, 228 ff., 244, 300, 301 ff., 303, 304, 309, 313, 321 natural mythology 235 natural philosophers 47 natural philosophy 17, 20, 28, 249, 276, 309, 312 natural predictions 37 natural signatures 8, 175, 305 nature of language 318 Naudé, Gabriel 115 Neaulme, Jean 283 neck 124, 229, 272 neo-liberalism 307

Index Neoplatonic ix, 10, 13, 17, 21, 25, 31, 37, 41, 42, 44, 46, 53, 126, 128, 130, 138, 152, 153, 156, 157, 164, 165, 168, 170, 186, 187, 206, 219, 224, 232, 237, 242, 252, 254, 298, 301, 303, 313, 319 nervous system 33 New World 111, 138, 322 Newton, Isaac 6, 37, 38, 39, 107, 109 Newton, John 75 Newton, Thomas 112 Nichols, Sutton 105 Nifo, Augustus 123, 155, 171, 303 Nine Pennyworth of Wit 110 Nodé, Pierre 131 nomads 132 Norfolk, Duke of 153, 161 Norwich 75 nosce teipsum 169 ff., 220, 221, 227, 247, 275, 290 nose 3, 12, 18, 87, 88, 124, 171, 182 ff., 186, 190, 199, 200, 201, 214, 215, 216, 218, 226, 227, 229, 240, 272, 274, 307, 315 nostrils 229 nothing (mystical) 317 Nuremberg 128 observation and experiment 306 occult viii, 12, 13, 17, 20, 24, 26, 29, 31, 33, 44, 101, 152, 160, 223, 249, 301, 317 Ogilby, John 141 ‘old curiosity shop’ 325 Old French x Ong, Walter 83 oniromancy 163 Onoforio, Girolamo 163 ontology x, 35, 42, 124 Opera 237 Oppenheim 81 opthalmology 310 ff. oracle 48, 49, 174 oral folk lore 21 oral tradition 48, 126, 153, 168, 172, 179, 198 ff., 206, 304 orality 47

359

organicism 168 Oribasius 67 Origen 66 original sin 305 Orleans 410 Orpheus 17 Orphic religion 224 Orphic singing 237 Ossory 65 Ovid 20 ‘owl-man’ 3 Padua 20, 83, 154, 210, 277, 302 painters 302 painting 186, 188, 320 Pallas 243 palmistry, see chiromancy palms 3, 307 pamphlets 93–4 papist 137 Paracelsus 10, 25, 28, 38, 39, 47, 51, 52, 56, 88, 101, 114, 125, 130, 131, 132, 135, 148, 156, 161, 163, 164, 165, 168, 169, 202, 205, 218, 219, 232, 239, 301, 305, 306, 309 Paris 3, 51, 72 Park, Katherine 32 Parlement de Paris 107 parlour game 45, 128, 215, 251, 254, 274, 277 Parson, James 166, 171, 196 Pascal, Blaise 318 passions 4, 20 (of the mind), 239 (of the soul) 259, 312 Pater Noster 174 pathognomy 56 patient 24 patriarchs 17 patriarchy 189 Paul III (Pope) 158 Paul V (Pope) 163 Paul VI (Pope) vi, 11 Pavia 94, 107 Pedena (Italy) 84

360

Index

pedlars 110, 135 pedomancy 313 Pegasus 40 Pellegrini, Antonio 162 penis 267 Pepys, Samuel 108 perception of images 206 Perman, John 117 Pernetti, Jacques 86, 115, 167, 283 Pernetty, Antoine 167, 170 Persia 87, 121 perspective 162 Peterhouse, Cambridge 95 phenomenon xi Philemo 156 Phillip II 123 philosopher’s stone 240 ‘phisionomiastres’ 131 phonocritics 23 phonognomia 23 physical anthropology 83 physical appearance 48, 49 physicians 5, 8, 20, 24, 26, 111, 112, 113, 114, 131 physics 9, 22 (applied), 31, 44 physiognomantier 130, 131 physiognomate ix physiognomating 49, 50, 57, 58, 59, 189, 202, 238–9 physiognomation 212 physiognomators 128, 130, 131 physiognomer 130 physiognomia coelestis, see celestial physiognomia orta, see characterological physiognomic (splitting of ) 310 ff. physiognomical: aphorism 172 ff.; appreciation of image 292; consciousness 46, 55, 57, 58, 302, 317, 322; contemplation 59; epiphany 313; eye 18, 47, 50, 51, 55, 59, 71, 72, 78, 86, 163, 179, 186, 197, 218, 233 ff., 235 (soul of its own cinema), 246 (depth of field), 249, 265, 322; gaze 188; history 172; intelligence 21, 28, 49; intuition

28; mirror 318; perception 58; prayer 276, 284; rhetoric 211 ff; sensation 29; sensibility 319 physiognomics 175 ff, 240, 244 physiognomist 293 physiognomy: in action 55; anthropological 27, 88, 94, 305; astrological 48, 283, 293; botanical/phytognomy 14, 27, 56, 103, 163, 305; celestial 27, 103, 204, 217; characterological 27, 33, 203; ethnological 218; of handwriting 125; meteorological 27, 305; mineralogical 27, 47, 56, 218, 305; of sound 23; subcaelestial 305; theriological/zoological 27, 103; of things 316; in words 313 physiology 12, 21, 39, 40, 180, 309, 310 physis x, 235, 254, 309 phyz 305 phyzonomy 19 Picatrix 238, 243 pick-pockets 143 ff. Pietism 171 Pietro d’Abano 72, 74, 77, 83, 121, 181, 193, 246 pilgrims 135 Pimander 152 pineal gland 309 Pino, Paolo 188 Pinzio, Paolo 81 plague 103 ff., 135, 164, 221, 304 Planetbüchlein 98 planets 10, 12, 27 planned economy 307 plants 2, 12, 14, 46, 47, 163 Plato 17, 47, 174, 312, 319 poetry 18, 39, 42, 117, 156, 200, 302 Polemon, Antonius 49, 54, 55, 126, 211 political science 248 politics 190 polytheism 42 Pompeius, Nicolas 88 Pomponazzi, Pietro 123, 155, 237

Index poor 135, 136 population 135 (mobile/immobile), 320 portraits xi, 3, 39, 126, 211, 219 Porzio, Simone 20, 84 positivism 271 posters 287 ‘praeternatural’ 20, 44 Praetorius, Johannes 88, 129 ‘praying to playing’ 35, 36, 39, 45, 207, 220, 237, 245, 249, 252, 253, 255, 270–9, 309, 317 ff. pre-textual language 304 pride 227 primal language 244 print 43 (revolution), 83 (invention of ) printing press 79 prisca theologia 17, 18, 254 prism 59 problemata 33 prognostication 16, 33 prophecies 174 Prophet, The (Allah) 19 prophets 17 proportion 26, 73, 183 protestant dissenter 1 Protestantism ix, 10 Prousteau, M. 115 proverbs 19, 136, 174, 198 ff. providence 318 Prudence 105, 189, 197, 221, 226 ff., 232, 243, 247, 275, 287 pseudo-Aristotle 47, 49, 52, 53, 56–60, 63, 65, 84, 121, 123–5, 155, 183, 210, 258 pseudo-science viii, 25 psyche 239 psychoanalysis 258 psychology 27, 86, 167, 310, 312 (psychologia) Pythagoras 10, 17, 31, 224, 306 quacks 5, 131 quill 309 Qur’an 61–2, 67, 125 race 59

361

radio 320 Ragged, torn and true 323 Ralph, Benjamin 86 rationality ix, 18, 32, 249 Ratisbon 74 Rayy 33 Razors 283 reading 23, 35, 207 ff. (methodology), 319 reading practices 224 ff., 237 ff., 247 ff., 256 ff., 293 (audio-visual dimension) ‘real characters’ 224 reason 33–4 reason of state 5 re-birth, see ‘regeneration’ reflection 142, 215, 238 Reformation parliament 11, 136, 140 ‘regeneration’ 44, 207, 224, 236–8, 244, 247, 249, 252, 302, 305, 319 (anastasis) regimen sanitatis 220 religion viii, 26 religion of the sun 103 religion of the world 26, 232, 244, 266, 302 religious medicine 136 Renaissance vii, 5, 17, 18, 36, 42, 44, 47, 120, 121, 128, 237, 301, 318 Renaissance humanists 47, 263 representation and reality 279 reproduction 252, 300 resemblance 3, 8, 171, 175, 305 Rhazes 62–5, 77, 98, 112, 268 (Almansori), 278 rhetoric 18, 207 ff. Rhodes (Lancashire) 75 Richelieu, Cardinal 158, 162 Riolan, Jean, the younger 310 ritual 2 Robert the Bruce 298 Roche, Daniel 35 Rochefoucauld, Duc de la 215, 226 rock 203 Roehnus, Johannes 94 Roelants, Jan 123

362

Index

Roman de la rose 182, 284 romances 98 Romanticism 26, 31, 32, 34, 45, 167, 168, 187, 198, 279, 312, 319 Rome 50, 81, 131 Rosenbach, see Indagine Rosicrucians 306 Roussat, Richard 129 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 196 ‘Royal College of Fisnomiers’ 132 Royal Society 165 Rubeis, Domenico de 162 Rudolf II 11, 13 Rye (east Sussex) 1 Sabbio, Vincenzo 94, 104 Saint Augustine 232 Saint John’s College, Oxford 162 Saint Peter and Saint Paul (abbey school of ) 114 Saint-Bonnet le Chateau 109 Sainte-Mure, Comte de 170 salvation 220, 221, 243, 275 Samudrikatilaka 47 Sanskrit 47, 150 Sansovini, Francesco 162 Sarton, George 80 Saunders, Richard 5, 8, 10, 11, 15, 17, 38, 39, 96, 107, 108, 109, 110, 157, 174, 186, 201, 240, 273, 305, 306 Savonarola, Michael 73–4, 246, 281 Scève, Maurice 160 Schact, Johann Oosterdijk 40 Schelling 168 Schirlentz, Nicolaus 94 Schmitt, Charles 76, 123, 125, 155 scholars 136 scholasticism 294 Scholem, Gershom 68, 224, 301, 304 Schönsperger, Hans 95 School of Love 108 science 317 scientia viii, 18, 19, 301 (audio-visual) scientific knowledge 29, 31

scientific revolution 18, 43 Scot, Michael 12, 69, 77, 78, 94, 103–7, 117, 122–5, 129, 179, 182, 183, 200, 235, 249, 267, 269, 303 Scotland 2, 81, 110 Scripture 14, 15, 20, 21 Scrovegni chapel 229 sculpture 156, 187, 188, 201, 239 Scylla and Charibdis 308 sea monster 53 Seamer, Sir Henry 160 Secrets 33, 36–7, 97, 174, 219, 240, 249 (of nature) Secretum secretorum 39, 64–6, 68–9, 71–2, 74–6, 95, 112, 114, 122, 129, 152, 155, 179, 191, 247 ff., 264, 278 seers 5, 42, 130 ff, 135, 169 sefiroth 298 self 32, 33, 35, 42, 60 (and animal), 120, 131, 169, 197–8 self (continuity and discontinuity) 256 self (metaphysics of ) 216 self-alchemy 239 ff., 243, 302 self-awareness 127 self-contemplation 218 self-description 3, 215, 307 self-hypnosis 224 self-knowledge 169–71, 207, 228, 282, 302, 307, 308; mystical 254 self-literacy 238 self-love 289 self-meditation 44, 222 ff., 248, 249, 254 self-metamorphosis 237 self-perfection 253 self-physiognomation 213, 274 self-portrait 298 self-reading 221 self-sculpting 239 self-transformation 18, 21, 44, 45, 120, 170, 171, 194, 207, 224, 240, 253, 307 Seneca 287 ‘sensibility’ 251

Index seraphim 223 Settala, Ludovico 5 Severinus, Marcus Aurelius 112 Severinus, Peter 135 sex 42, 57, 63, 172, 190 ff., 265, 267 ff. (sexual act), 303 Seymour, Edward (Duke of Somerset) 160 Seymour, Sir Henry 160 shadows 312 Shakespeare x, 54, 260, 266, 320, 322 shape 30 shaving 283 Shelley, Mary 261 Shen Hsiang Ch’iian Pien 48 shepherds 19, 153, 219, 221 ff. Shepherd’s Kalendar, see Kalendar of Shepherds shipmen 136 Shirley, James 6 shoulders 48, 55, 58, 124 Shrewsbury 114 sidereal influence 26 sight 2 sight and sound 51 sign theory 25 ‘signalements’ 308 signatum 26, 205 signatures 25, 28, 235, 306 signifiers and signifieds 306 signs 46, 276 silence 23 similitude 175, 248, 305 Simonetta, Bonifaccio 117, 154 sin 221 ff., 275, 308 size 35, 306 skin 51 slaves 51, 167 Sleebi, Johannes Christoph 112 Sloane, Sir Hans 96 small pox 3 smell 51, 170 Smyrna 49 social encounter 247, 249

363

social mobility 136 social practice 248 social relationships 321 social spectrum 302 ‘sociology of the text’ 112 Socrates 66, 67, 156, 214, 227, 239, 286 Solomon 20 sonic culture 231 sonic literacy 231, 242 sonic myths 244 soothsayer 168 Sorbière, Samuel 25, 28, 29 sorcery 131 soul 21, 283, 304 soul (image of ) 20, 53 sound and vision 23, 25, 28 Spain 97, 100, 123, 137, 139, 100 Spandoni, Nicolo 166 ‘species’ 33, 243 Spencer, Edmund 36 Sphere of Sacro Bosco 117 spiritus 26, 28, 44, 164, 188, 237, 238, 243, 252, 301 Spontoni, Ciro 112, 162, 269 Spurzheim 33 stars 26, 27 Stationer’s Register 94 statues 188 stature 2, 3, 30, 60, 307 Steinfurt 124 Stourbridge 38 Strasbourg 81, 95, 157 Stupiditas 229 sublunary elements 20, 26 substantial form 229 summa alandimmû 48 sun worship 232 supernal chariot 192 supernatural 12–13, 20 superstition viii, 13, 29, 30, 40, 42, 99, 117, 133, 134, 135, 168, 321 surgeons 117 Swabia 103 Swedenborg, Emmanuel 31

364

Index

Swift, Jonathan 112 Switzerland 11, 96, 100 Sydenham, Thomas 24, 310 syllogism 208, 209 symbolic meaning 301, 308, 309 symbolic principle 239 symbols 2, 318 symmetry 16, 188 Symonds, Richard 82, 263 sympathy 12, 205 syncretism 237, 254 synderesis 232 Syon (Middlesex) 75 Syriac 305 tabula rasa 231 Taisnier, Jean 129 talismans 237 Taoism 226 taste 321 techne 131 technique of the microcosm 21, 44, 237, 240, 243, 254, 302, 318 teeth 3, 124 telegraph 320 telephone 320 television 320 temperaments 74, 220, 221 Temple Inn 164 temporal grammar 240 Teniers, David, the younger 144 ff. textual literacy 302, 320 theatre 27 ‘theatre of the soul’ (hidden) 310 Theodore (Archbishop of Canterbury) 66 theology 17, 31, 39, 116, 117, 124 Theophrastus 58, 86 theosophic eye 103, 217 theosophy 162, 233 Thirty Years War 124 Thomann, Johannes 74 Thompson, E. P. 130 Thraseborough, Clemencia 75

Tias, Charles 108 Timpler, Clemens 84, 124, 171, 303 toes 124 ‘totalization to vulgarization’ 278 Tournai 147 Tournes, Jean de 81 travel 114 ‘tree of knowledge’ 221 Trinity (the Holy) 233 True Fortune Teller 107 truth 28 Turin 94 typeface 173 ‘unbookish nature’ (of physiognomy) 128 unconscious 239, 270 Unglerium, Florianum 81 universal language 229 Universities (medieval) 36 University: of Bologna 163; of Freiburg 75; of Halle 167; of Jena 167; of Leipzig 124; of Orleans 115; of Paris 71; of Turin 85; of Wittenberg 88, 167 Urbano VIII 163 urine (inspection) 131 vacuum 29, 317 vagabonds 132, 135–7, 140, 150, 157 vagina 268 vagrancy act 140, 154 Valencia 119 value 306 Van Eyck 86 vanity 227, 289 Varley, John 298 Vasari, Giorgio 86 Vatican 80, 294 Vaughan, Thomas 38 vegetables 14 Velasio, Sylvester 122 Venice 94, 104, 119, 166 Venus 243, 283

Index vernacular 122, 305 (regional, local) Verona 94 Vesalius 26, 125, 309, 315 vices and virtues 183, 186, 189–90, 193, 221 ff., 239 Vienna 104 virtual memories 229 virtue 172, 184 ff., 206, 303 visage 28, 130, 169, 184–5, 272 visenomy 23 visiognomy 23 visionogni 23 visionomia 23 visual: culture 35, 231, 264; episteme 229; language 264; literacy 21, 173, 197, 226, 242; memory 242; myths 244; representation 142; turn 23 vitalism 168 voice viii, 3, 23, 24, 30, 51, 178 ff., 181, 195, 225, 229 Vulson, Marc 107, 110, 117, 166 vultus 68, 198 vysenamy 141 vysonamy 23 walk viii Walker, Alexander 33 Walker, D. P. 254 Wallace, William 298 Walton, Izaak 29 wanderers 135, 137 Warburg, Aby 3, 250, 325 Ward, Seth 305 ff. Warde, William 81, 129 Warren, Hardick 238 water 34 way of looking and listening 21, 25, 28, 41, 57, 301, 321 way of seeing 264

365

weather 30, 66, 103 Weber, Max 32, 216 Webster, Charles 40, 161 Webster, John 75, 174, 305 ff. Wenssler, Michael 122 Westburg, Walter 114 Westminster Abbey 283 Wheel of Fortune 251 Widman, Georg Rudolph 141 wigs viii William, Prince of Orange 163 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 168 ‘windows’ (‘into heaven’) 242 ‘windows’ (‘mind endowed with’) 242 ‘windows of the soul’ viii, 18, 89, 310 Winter, Robert 125 witchcraft 165, 184, 210 witch-hunter 276 Wits Cabinet 107 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 94, 229 wizards 131 Wollstonecraft, Mary 188, 190, 196 womb (malady) 269 women 196–7 Wood, Anthony 6 Wright, Thomas 20, 312, 313 writing 47, 129, 320 Wyclif, John 16 Wyer, Robert 10 yard 267 Yates, Frances 237 ff., 243, 254, 317 Zara, Antonius 84 Zimmern (convent) 75 zodiac 27, 103, 183, 218 Zohar, The 48, 68–9, 152, 153, 192, 206 Zopyrus 66, 67, 130, 156, 173, 214

Windows of the Soul: Physiognomy in European Culture 1470-1780

Windows of the Soul

Windows Of The Soul