Monsters and Modal Logic among French Naturalists of the Renaissance

Abstract

Ernst Cassirer, who argued so forcefully that it was in the Renaissance that Europeans began to view nature objectively, devoted an important place in his Individual and Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy to applauding Pico della Mirandola for replacing astrology with what Cassirer generously calls mathematico-physical causality. Cassirer does acknowledge, however, with surprise and, one feels, some disappointment, that Pico also cultivated an interest in magic and the occult.' Years after Cassirer but with a kindred eagerness to confirm how modem the Renaissance mind could be, a historian of law publicly congratulated the sixteenth-century juridical theoretician, Jean Bodin, for having recognized insanity as an acceptable legal defense. A medical historian in the audience, however, objected: had not Bodin's German rival, Jean Wier, subsequently challenged him for promoting witch-hunts? Asked by Wier to please explain the difference between a witch and a mad-woman, Bodin was to have serenely answered, witches are women capable of traversing great distances upon a broomstick.2