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LOUIS DE CASENEUVE’S ΔΩΔΕΚΆΚΡΟΥΝΟΣ HIEROGLYPHICORUM ET MEDICORUM EMBLEMATUM: EMBLEMS AS A LANGUAGE OF THE 17TH CENTURY MEDICINE // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2021. Issue 4 (30). P. 186-212

The article deals with one of the most magnificent samples of the early 17th century emblematic literature – Δωδεκάκρουνος Hieroglyphicorum et Medicorum Emblematum (1626) by the French physician Louis de Caseneuve (Lat. Ludovicus Casanova). This text may be considered as the only extant full-scale emblematic treatise in the field of medicine; therefore, its study enables its reader to take a closer look at the early modern medical imaginotheca. The composition of this text aims at encompassing all the traditional branches of medical knowledge: the first emblem symbolically represents the Δωδεκάκρουνος itself; in the following four, the author represents the temperaments, combining their traditional iconographic attributes very freely; other three are dedicated to different pathologies (humoral pathology caused by the excess of black bile, melancholicus aeger; then follows a kind of a “pathological encyclopedia”, a list of the diseases of all the organs of the body; the third one deals with the mental illnesses and evil passions); the penultimate one to the therapy, and the last one to the glorification of physicians and medical science. Δωδεκάκρουνος may be viewed as belonging to the discursive formation of medical humanism – one of the extinct dialects of the early modern learned culture that emerged in the first half of the 16th century in the texts of such authors as Niccolo Leoniceno, Fortunato Liceti, Jean Frenel, and Jakob Schegk. About a century after de Caseneuve’s treatise was published, medical humanism definitely came to an end together with emblematic, humanist dialectics, sacred physics, Ciceronianism, iatrochemistry, Jesuit “middle knowledge”, moral logic, et al. A special focus has been made on the mixture of genres of the learned culture carried out in the treatise: Δωδεκάκρουνος is simultaneously an emblematic treatise, an ekphrasis, a medical manual, and, last but not least, a specific learned “Menippean satire”. The polyvalence of the text, visible in this fusion of genres, is corroborated by a broad use of illusionistic verbal and visual effect – anamorhosis. The anamorphic effect, a conscious ambivalence of signification, may be found not only in the emblems and epigrams, but in the “serious” scientific parts of the text as well. This ambivalence manifests itself in a certain epistemological tension which may be detected throughout the text: the “episteme of similarity”, heavily present all over the treatise, especially in its “humoral” section, coexists with the resolute Aristotelian philosophical credo and the gesture of recognition towards the Hermetic medicine.

Keywords: emblems, hieroglyphs, Louis de Caseneuve, Menippean satire, medical humanism, anamorphosis, ekphrasis, epigram, gardens of knowledge