A doctor, an astrologer, a heretic, an alchemist and a sorcerer, and a tame demon who taught him everything: traces of the mythologization and rehabilitation of the figure of a doctor in Collin de Plancy’s <i>Infernal Dictionary</i>

Abstract

This article is devoted to biographies of doctors contained in the Infernal Dictionary of Collin de Plancy, and narrative topoi formed around the figure of a doctor in the historical past. One of the stable attributes that place biographies of doctors in the context of the history of the Church is the statement of tense and conflict-rich interaction, which, however, cannot be assessed unambiguously as a confrontation. Another dimension of the texts under consideration is their transformation under the influence of the compiler’s conversion and the “сhristianization” of the Infernal Dictionary in the 1840s. The peculiarity of the approach of this study is the view of the figure of a doctor as a narrative construct, considered from the point of view of its internal logic, and not in relation to historical authenticity or unreliability. The aim of the study is to localize further stable combinations of narrative elements and attributes correlated with the figure of a doctor, and to formulate possible topics and disciplinary frameworks for further research of the problem, which is currently not described in Russian-language science. The material on which this article is written is also presented to the Russian-speaking scientific community for the first time, there are also practically no publications devoted to it in the Western tradition. The method used in the study is a qualitative analysis of the text following the example of field ethnographic studies with elements of quantitative methods.