Sergius Kodera, Disreputable Bodies: Magic, Medicine, and Gender in Renaissance Natural Philosophy

Abstract

In many ways this is an excellent book with much to offer scholars interested in Renaissance Neo-Platonism, and in particular those interested in the work of Marsilio Ficino and Leone Ebreo. However, for those (like this reviewer) schooled in philosophy as it has developed in the British (or Anglo-American) empiricist tradition, and with expectations of historical scholarship that go hand in hand with that tradition, reading it will require some mental adjustment. Indeed, when I first started to read this book I became convinced that there was a major disciplinary rift between me and this author—I thought it must have been written by someone trained as a literary scholar, but evidently the author has been raised in the traditions of Continental philosophy. One manifestation of this was the author's tendency to mix indiscriminately his own interpretations with those interpretations which can be seen to derive from historical evidence. ‘I tend to view abstract concepts such as “potency” and “act”’, he tells us at one point (p. 58), ‘as manifestations of originally gendered concepts.’ This tells us something about the author, but does nothing to help our understanding of historical categories.