The Land of Remorse: A Study of Southern Italian Tarantism, and: Storia biomedica del tarantismo nel XVIII secolo (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Land of Remorse: A Study of Southern Italian Tarantism, and: Storia biomedica del tarantismo nel XVIII secolo David Gentilcore Ernesto de Martino . The Land of Remorse: A Study of Southern Italian Tarantism. Originally published as La terra del rimorso (Milan: Il Saggiatore), 1961. Translated and annotated by Dorothy Louise Zinn. London: Free Association Books, 2005. xxiii + 332 pp. Ill. $34.50 (paperbound, 1-85343-784-0). [End Page 447] Gino L. Di Mitri . Storia biomedica del tarantismo nel XVIII secolo. Nuova serie della Biblioteca di "Lares." Florence: Olschki, 2006. xxiii + 322 pp. €34.00 (88-222 5508-9). During the early modern period, a whole range of scholars, medical doctors, and travelers entered into the debate concerning the phenomenon of tarantism. They argued whether sufferers of this ailment were the victims of actual tarantula bites and to what extent the only apparently effective treatment, to undergo a series of dances, was determined by the nature of the bite. Why was the phenomenon known only in southern Apulia, they asked, when poisonous spiders could be found throughout Italy and Europe? In the course of this Europe-wide debate a Celestine monk and scholar, Ludovico Valletta, stood up for local knowledge. In his De phalangio apulo (1706), Valletta asserted that no one could pronounce on the subject who had not lived in Apulia and experienced it firsthand in order to learn about the venomous insects of the area, the sufferers of the disease, its symptoms, and the nature of the treatment. Too many outsiders had offered judgments on the basis of secondhand knowledge and hearsay. Valletta, a native of Lucera, practiced what he preached, through direct observation of the phenomenon, investigating local insect life in order to determine which spider, if any, was responsible. The importance of local knowledge is what sent the first serious modern scholar of tarantism, the ethnologist Ernesto De Martino, into the field fifty years ago. He took with him an interdisciplinary team of scholars, whose interpretations formed an appendix to the resulting book, La terra del rimorso (1961). Why this pioneering and interdisciplinary masterpiece was not translated into English soon after it first appeared is something of a mystery. After all, what was called the "southern question," attempting to understand the backwardness (the word then used) of southern Italy, was then widely reported. These were the years of Edward Banfield's controversial notion of "amoral familism," based on his study of poverty in a town in nearby Basilicata, and Nobel prize–winning Danilo Dolci's investigations into Sicilian peasant conditions. Tarantism itself also attracted some interest from historians of medicine like Henry Sigerist and, writing in this journal in 1963, George Mora. De Martino himself died in 1965. Whatever the reason, De Martino's study remained largely unknown to Anglo-phone scholars, although a handful did come to it through a French translation of 1966. An English translation is certainly long overdue. We have the commitment of Dorothy Louise Zinn to thank for its final appearance. Zinn is an American anthropologist living in Matera (Basilicata), and the translation benefits from her local knowledge, complete with introduction and her own annotations to the original text. The careful translation has obviously been a labor of love and is faithfully rendered while also reading well in English. It is only unfortunate that, in this age of digital technology, the music that accompanied the very first edition of La terra del rimorso in the form of a record (remember them?) is not made available to readers of the translation. Local knowledge is the leitmotiv of Gino Di Mitri's detailed survey of what were crucial years in the debate over tarantism during the eighteenth century. This is [End Page 448] when scholars finally put to rest any notion that a real spider might lie behind tarantism, thus refashioning it as a "mere" cultural manifestation. If De Martino reduced this debate into one of Enlightenment physicians belittling and marginalizing popular culture, Di Mitri takes a fresh look at the role of local physicians. One doctor in particular, derided by De Martino, is rehabilitated by Di Mitri. He is Niccolò Caputi, a physician in Lecce. Not only was his own...