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| Constructions both Sacred and Profane: Serpents, Angels and Pointing Fingers in Renaissance Books with Moving Parts PART 4 Though the publishers of these editions offered more interaction, Publicius himself recommended a ritual purification before attempting the memory exercises in his treatise: You will keep the head and feet very clean with a decoction of water in which honey, bay leaves, and stems of fennel and chamomile have been boiled. You will abstain from immoderate coitus, in accordance with the opinion of the Pythagoreans. You will avoid noxious odors which harm the brain... Moderate pleasure and moderate delight brings much help to memory... Moderate pleasure and delight may have been the reason the second legitimate edition of Publicius's Artes orandi included more illustrations, which are possibly his own drawings. Even though the text did not insist on the use of sacred images, the new edition implicitly endorsed religious meditation. Although Mary Carruthers correctly interprets the additions as a ploy to "make the book more appealing," she does not analyze the theme evoked—the Garden of Eden. Such an association would have been commonly understood, as the medieval garden in general and biblical places as specific as Noah's Ark frequently became loci for remembering. And so, flipping backward through the second edition of Artes orandi, one sees the animal plate, a double-page spread of a tree of oratory, the diagram with its serpentine volvelle, and, a few pages earlier, a nearly naked couple (fig. 9). Carruthers accounts for the snake pointer as "possibly inspired by the vermis structure in the brain," but when one considers that the naked male figure wears a scalloped loincloth much resembling a fig leaf, there can be no doubt that the last chapter refers to the Fall of Man. Like Llull's Arbor Scientiae, this Tree of Knowledge stems from classical rhetoric-mapping techniques, and was still considered important enough to include in two variants in the Publicius (fig.10). The tree's mortal keepers also became the loci for memory. Moveable prints with diagrams of the human body with flaps were later used for study of anatomy, and the German prints in particular showed recognizably male and female figures, which contraband editions soon reinterpreted as Adam and Eve with fig leaves. Publicius's postlapsarian couple proffered their outstretched bodies as a location for logic as well as for religious contemplation. One of Publicius's contemporaries also used the nude body to reinforce grammatical constructions. In that case however, the figures cannot be Adam and Eve, for the woman was shown both naked and clothed, representing the singular and plural: "And for the singular nombre I set a fayre mayden naked, and for the plurell the same mayde, well arrayed and rychely or her that I would be remembred of." Publicius's alphabet roundels also read the body, as evidenced by the unflatteringly U-shaped peasant with his bare legs stretched behind his head (fig. 11). While Romberch and della Porta reused Publicius without attracting criticism, elements of the Publicius alphabet also reappeared in the most famously offensive memory system with moving parts. This one worked too efficiently. The German professor of law Thomas Murner's Logical Card Game from 1509 included Publicius's crab, bell, fish, crown and snake. Rather than spelling out concepts, Murner incorporated them into sixteen logical suits. The book's fifty-one full-page woodcut illustrations demonstrated the abstract logical figures from each chapter surrounded by their attributes (fig. 12). Instead of creating a new logic system, Murner edited and reused Peter of Spain's standard textbook. Cutting out the images to use as cards destroyed the text, but helped students remember the concepts behind it. This unorthodox approach to teaching fostered great success—and the suspicion of his contemporaries. Later, Murner's fanatical Catholicism made him the brunt of much Protestant propaganda, as did his unorthodox approach. The preface to another card game of his attests this judgment: "people say a demon has inspired me to do all these completely new things and assisted me continuously during the writing of it." Johann Fischart's 1575 adaptation of Rabelais, which mentions two of Murner's games, is difficult to read as either irony or criticism, but when coupled with his later acerbic commentary on Pambst in his Daemonomania translation proves he was keenly aware of books with moving parts produced throughout the century. |
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 Figure 9  Figure 10  Figure 12  Figure 13 |
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Paul Pambst's Equal-Opportunity Looßbuch The seeming anomaly among these erudite tomes is the humorous and distinctly nonacademic Looßbuch (1546). It is a lottery game in German doggerel with the devotional trappings of the Angel and Christ Child volvelle—and meant to be used by women. Although the device allows the user to ask a series of twenty-one questions, including a simple "yes or no," it could not offer the freedom and religious symbolism of the Llullian Art. That Art required rhetorical skill to extrapolate convincing answers from the letter-combinations of divine truths. Pambst substitutes dice for rhetoric, but nonetheless allows women to ask the questions. The lack of more scholarly volumes for women reflects the contemporaneous fear of educated females. Jean Bodin's Daemonomania of 1581 is even more preoccupied with witches than it is with the "conjurer" della Porta, and has not advanced much from the notoriously misogynistic fifteenth-century Malleus Malificarum, which served as the Inquisitors's witch-hunt manual. Therefore, it is unusual to see a book explicitly dedicated to a woman—in the rightful place of an Emperor, or even God himself. Pambst's full title read: Looßbuch, zu ehren der Römischen, Ungerischen unnd Bohemischen Künigen, or, Lottery book in honor of the Roman, Hungarian and Bohemian Queen. Anna of Bohemia, wife of Ferdinand I, the younger brother of Charles V and future Holy Roman Emperor, could have been the recipient and sponsor, as the massive coat of arms on the title page and the attached permission suggest. Her patronage—if actual—was short-lived, since she died in January of 1547 in Prague, a distance from Straßburg. Furthermore, her approval of such a work is questionable, because of her husband's strong Catholicism. Her brother-in-law Charles V would win his most important victory over the Protestants at the Battle of Muhlberg that same year. Johann Fischart, translator and annotator of Jean Bodin's Daemonomania, believed the dedication was a ruse, and that the royal permission was counterfeit. His irritated tone suggested he was hardly amused by Pambst's effort to make the book appear to be condoned by the queen. Inserting the work into Bodin's chapter on "Of unseemly and improper means of helping yourself arrive at a particular goal," Fischart eclipsed any hope of the text having moral or educational value. Nor could he be dissuaded by the book's tasteful division into ersatz Old and New Testaments. In pursuit of the answer to their question, the reader passed through the histories of four distinct Old Testament figures. Each of these Patriarchs, Heroes, and Kings and Prophets told the reader their story, and more importantly, the page number they had to visit next to get closer to the answer. While the woodcuts accompanying the first two guides displayed the appropriate biblical narrative, those of the second two were also functional. In addition to pointing the way, the Heroes administered the rolling of three dice. A woodcut image of every possible distinct roll then correlated these scores with the name of a mystical river. Lastly, the Prophet fulfilled his prophecy by linking the name of the river to the number of the actual fortune. His woodcut story appeared in the center of two concentric rings, which held the names of the rivers in alphabetical order and their numbers. From these, the reader might finally access their fortunes, which ranged from two lines to a paragraph long, and appeared in the New Testament-like second half of the book under the aegis of Christian Saints. Despite these elaborate maneuvers, to Fischart the Looßbuch was a thinly veiled variant of the Italian Lorenzo Spirito's pagan-inspired, dice-driven lottery from 1482. ". . . so too has a German (so that the Italian should not be alone in his foolishness) who calls himself Paul Pambst Praemonstratens profess . . ." had this work printed. By saying he "calls himself" a member of the Catholic Premonstratensian brotherhood, Fischart called attention to the author's ambiguous title in the colophon. "Praemonstratens profess" could also winkingly commemorate the author's divining abilities by splicing the Latin participle praemonstrans, or prophesying, and proffesio, by profession, into the German. It is certainly easier to accept Pambst as a Protestant due to the several anti-monastic entries among the fortunes. In 1796, the historian of science Abraham Kästner marveled at the discrepancy between Pambst's advice and supposed vocation: "Nowhere is there a recommendation of the cloistered life, but instead there are many for marriage, which must have made the book freely beloved of women and young folk." Even the negative responses to the question "Should I marry?" produce risqué advice such as: "Avoid Chastity until you repent at seventy!" (No. 250) It is possible that the proof of Pambst's clerical affiliation may be glimpsed in the illustrations. The man presenting the book to the Queen in the first woodcut probably represents the writer—and he does not wear ecclesiastical garb (fig.13). |
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