Porter, Windows of The Soul Physiognomy in European Culture 1470-1780 by Martin

OXFORD HISTORICAL MONOGRAPHS
editors
j. maddicott r. j. w. evans
j. harris b. ward-perkins
j. robertson r. service
p. a. slack
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Windows of
the Soul
Physiognomy in European
Culture 1470–1780
martin porter
CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD

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For my Mother, Barbara,
my Brother, Ian,
and in memory of my Father, Stephen Henry.
Nor is it not sayde without cause of antyke sage men, that the eye is the
seate and place of the soule.
Erasmus, De civilitate morum puerillium, trans. Robert Whytinton
(1540), sigs. A3–A4.
A particularly apt way of putting it is to say the eyes are the windows of the
soul.
David Laigneau, Traicté pour la conservation de la santé
(Paris, 1650), 812.
Physiognomy . . . nothing of the truth of which is openly professed by

our Academians.
Paracelsus, Opera omnia, 3 vols. (Geneva, 1662), i. 674.
PREFACE
I
This book is about something that is very difficult to capture in book form. It
is about ‘physiognomy’ in early modern European culture. ‘Fisnomy’, another
term with which the very fluid early modern notion of ‘physiognomy’ was
often confused but integrally related, was understood at the time as the art of
discovering the nature of a person by sight. During the early modern period,
many attempts were made by people to capture the innate visuality of the phe-
nomenon of ‘physiognomy’ in different media. Artists tried to express it in
paintings, sculptures, engravings, and woodcuts; architects tried to etch it
in stone; actors tried to bring it out in themselves; writers tried to capture it in
words.
In order to lay some sort of introductory foundation for future investiga-
tions of this ubiquitous subject, the following history is the by-product of an
‘archive’ it has created of the often heavily illustrated books on the theory of
‘physiognomy’ (physiognomony) which were in circulation, in manuscript
and in print, throughout early modern Europe. That archive begins with the
first appearance of physiognomony in printed form at the height of the Renais-
sance in northern and southern Europe in the 1470s. It ends, some three hun-
dred years later, at the dawn of Romanticism, with the publication of a ‘book
on physiognomy’, written by a Swiss Pietist minister named Johannes Caspar
Lavater, that saw an extraordinary European-wide success.
Those books were published incessantly throughout the period in most lan-
guages, be it Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, and Latin, or the many European vernac-
ulars, from Russian to Spanish, and from Icelandic to Welsh. They were
published in all formats, from cheap, ephemeral single-sheet pamphlets to the
most lavishly illustrated, hand-painted vellum or leather bound folios, and dis-
tributed across Europe and later to America, far beyond the main printing cen-
tres of Europe’s urban growths, to a reading and listening audience made up of
a wide range of ages, sexes, occupations, and incomes. Yet, for all their geo-
graphical and social ubiquity, the number of ‘books on physiognomy’ was a
very small percentage of the literature published during the ‘age of print’.
What was the basic appeal of these apparently marginal books to early mod-
ern readers? In a time when the modern scientific universe of ‘how?’ and the
viii Preface
religious universe of ‘why?’ had still to be separated out from one another, men,
women, and children of the early modern period used their own eyes and ears
to try to ‘make sense’ of, and interpret and express, what they saw and heard, in
themselves and in the world every day. Some tried to do this through what they
read in, or heard read out from, books. Essentially, what manuscript and print-
ed ‘books on physiognomy’ offered to early modern Europe’s relatively small
group of textually literate readers was a ‘natural magic’. In the ‘natural magic’
of the language of physiognomy, the eyes, the face, indeed the entire human
appearance, including the sound of a voice, and the character of a walk or a
laugh, so often concealed beneath the artifice and culture of make-up, haircuts,
wigs, dress, and elocution, were all natural ‘windows of the soul’. Many of the
authors of ‘books on physiognomy’ tried to seduce their textually literate audi-
ence by putting forward the ‘natural magic’ of physiognomy as a natural exten-
sion of the common wisdom alluded to in a widely known proverb of the day:
‘the eyes are the windows of the soul’. As such, the ‘natural magic’ of physi-
ognomony explicitly appealed to, and often struck a chord with, an innate
hermeneutic faculty of visual and sonic literacy in their minds—their ‘fis-
nomy’. Like the force that drives the moth to the light, that ‘fisnomy’ was an
intuitive and equally magical, inexplicable part of their own characters. In fact,
together, fisnomy and physiognomony were thought mysteriously to open
windows onto the ‘occult’, that is to say ‘hidden’ realm of the virtues and mean-
ings thought to be discoverable in every natural body (not just the human one)
in the microcosm and the macrocosm. Through its windows people thought
they could come to discover, understand, even control themselves, their rela-
tions with others, the nature around them, and, in some cases, their gods. This
book represents the first attempt to present a comprehensive study of the
production, distribution, and consumption of the audio-visual scientia of
‘physiognomy’ contained in those early modern texts. Its aim is to provide a
map of the wide-ranging workings and history of the so-called ‘natural magic’
of early modern ‘physiognomy’ and to offer an initial synthetic framework in
terms of which readers might make their way through it.
When perusing the pages of this book readers are required to put aside all
commonly received, but fundamentally misconceived, ideas of ‘physiognomy’
as a so-called ‘pseudo’ or ‘occult science’ in which physiognomy is too readily
dismissed as a form of ‘vulgar’, ‘esoteric’, backward-looking ‘magic’ or ‘super-
stition’ in comparison to an assumedly progressive, rational, science. As
will become evident, writers from both within and outside the socially elite,
textually literate, predominantly male world of early modern European acad-
eme produced many different types of ‘physiognomony’. Whilst many were
Preface ix
penned by Neoplatonic ‘hermeticists’, still others by Jewish Kabbalists and
Islamic mystics (all of whom are often disregarded by the condescension of
posterity as esoteric ‘magicians’), some were penned by the most mainstream,
pioneering, Aristotelian natural philosophers, protestant and catholic alike,
seventeenth-century mechanical philosophers, as well as many ‘Grub Street’
hacks. A marginal body of writings in relation to the monumental ‘age of print’
this archive of ‘books on physiognomy’ may have been, but as this study will try
to show, those books shed much light on the way in which the so-called ‘magi-
cal’ and the rational actively coexisted and interacted in the same literate and
‘illiterate’ minds and the ways in which they developed in tandem throughout
the art and culture of the period so often identified as having laid the founda-
tions of modern scientific rationality.
II
If physiognomy is an ‘unbookish’ subject, the official word for the subject of
this book is a particularly ‘unwordy’ word. Yet the tongue-twisting term, physi-
ognomy, was much more familiar to the generations that made up Renaissance
and early modern Europe than it is today. A Latin word of Greek origins,
‘physiognomia’, or the even more troublesome ‘physiognomonia’, crystallized in
the Latin language sometime in the eleventh century, and gradually migrated
into all early modern European vernacular tongues, be it the Romance lan-
guages of French, Italian, Spanish, and English, or the Germanic languages of
Hungarian, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Dutch. In this book, present
readers will encounter four closely related English words on which they are
asked to focus, and between which they are asked to distinguish. The first of
those four words was invented in 1556 when a short-bearded, Italian-looking
writer from London named Thomas Hill began his prolific career as a popular
author by publishing the first ever book printed in English devoted solely to the
‘art of Phisiognomie’. In that book he coined a neologism based on the word
‘physiognomy’ that does not appear to have travelled much further than his
own lips; at least it is a word that has yet to find its way into the Oxford English
Dictionary—the verb to physiognomate. As clumsy and inelegant as it sounds,
this word will be recoined throughout this book to refer to some form of sys-
tematized ‘physiognomy’ (physiognomony) ‘in action’.
Hill’s little verbal invention was part of a broader popularist aim to provide
Renaissance readers with a term less tongue-twisting than one based on
the classical term physiognomony. This is the second of the four words.
x Preface
Etymologically speaking, physiognomony derives from the Greek physis, mean-
ing nature, and gnomon, meaning indication, knowledge, judgement, or
essence. (In the early modern period, some authors claimed it meant ‘law’ or
‘rule’.) On the occasions it is used in this book, it refers to the theory of phys-
iognomy as it was presented to early modern readers of books on the subject,
what are being called in this work ‘treatises on’ or ‘books on physiognomy’.
If Hill’s new verb was a gesture against the snobbery of the university-
educated ‘literati’, at the same time it was an attempt to distinguish his own lit-
erate subject from the early modern colloquial, but now equally obscure, term,
fisnomy (sometimes spelt physnomy or physnamy). This is the third but in some
ways the key word. It was an early modern ‘vulgarization’ of physiognom(on)y.
It is a word that appears to have entered Middle English from Old French,
and which Shakespeare used only once. In All’s Well That Ends Well, iv. v., the
Clown, speaking to the temperamentally named ‘La Feu’, retorts playfully:
‘Faith, sir, a’ has an English name; but his fisnomy is more hotter in France than
there.’ (In some editions of the play it was spelt fisnamy, but sounded who
knows how.) Whilst this word was sometimes used to refer to the face, as well
as the theory of physiognomy (the physiognomony contained in the texts under
consideration), more often, and more significantly, it referred to a person’s nat-
ural physiognomical intelligence. In other words, it signified that general, intu-
itive, even unconscious ability that human beings (including those who
are blind or deaf ) somehow have, which enables them to discover something
about a person simply by looking at, and listening to, them. Whether it was
understood as common sense or as a mystical skill given by God, fisnomy was
an innate, universal visual and sonic literacy, a part of man’s instinctive
physiognomical consciousness. In other words, fisnomy was an ontological
fact. It was that natural, inexplicably intuitive physiognomical faculty in the
mind that was cultivated (one might even say ‘hypnotized’), as much if not
more, by the everyday experience of being alive and face-to-face with people
and nature or representations of that nature, as by the reading of physiogno-
mony in books. That is the predominant sense it is given throughout this work.
The fourth word, physiognomy, like fisnomy, was often used in the early mod-
ern period to refer to the face or the physical appearance as a whole in a purely
anatomical sense. This is a change known in linguistic jargon as semantic
change through contiguity of object. At other times it was used in the more
physiognomical sense of ‘countenance’, that is to say a physical feature express-
ing something. That is the most predominant sense it still carries today. It will
be used in both of these ways at different times in this book. It will also be used
as a convenient, slightly more pronouncable, synonym for the official theory,
Preface xi
physiognomony, as well as providing the default term for the multi-faceted sub-
ject as a whole. Throughout all of these uses, the underlying sense is that phys-
iognomy is a phenomenon that happens not only between people, but also
between people and nature, and between people and representations of that
nature, be it painted portraits, mirrors, or books. It is hoped that the context
will make the intended meaning clear to the reader.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank Keith Thomas who supervised my doctoral thesis. Many
thanks to Margaret Pelling whose close reading of a number of drafts saved it
from many errors. Similarly, thanks to Peter Burke, Patrice Higonnet, and
Charles Tilly all of whom read various early drafts of the manuscript. If their
comments have not made it a better book, the fault is entirely mine.
I would like to show my gratitude to The Wellcome Trust/The Wellcome
Centre for the History of Medicine, which at one point kindly lent me a com-
puter and some office space; to the European University Institute, Florence, for
making me a Jean Monnet Fellow, then a Visiting Fellow, and the former Dan-
marks Humanistiskes Forskningcenter, Copenhagen, for making me a Senior
Research Fellow. Sincere thanks to the helpful staffs of the many astonishing
libraries, archives and galleries visited along the way, from the Bodleian to the
Folger, from the Medici to the Warburg, and from the Huntington to the
Clarke Memorial. I would also like to thank Ian Archer, David d’Avray,
Laurence Brockliss, Jacques Le Goff, Martin Kemp, Yves Hersant, Lene Koch,
the late Roy Porter, Jean-Claude Schmitt, Michael A. Screech, and Johannes
Thomann.
I am very saddened that I no longer have the chance to thank Conrad
Russell who died as this book was being produced.
The people who have helped me, from the Lane to Fiesole, from the North
Park to Echo Park, from The Strand to The Sound and beyond, are too numer-
ous to mention individually. However, I would like in particular to thank
Elizabeth Boggs, Jennifer Boggs, Emily Green, Rosie Mestel, Eirinn Larsen,
Jennifer Greensleeves, Mike Keating and Morten Djørup, as well as Lynn,
Athena, Paul, Andy, Nathalie, Ute, Christoph, Cecile, Rebecca, Fiona, Yann,
Poppie, Brooks, Tony, Colette, Alex, Marie, Peter, Sophie and Emmanuelle.
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations xiv

List of Figures xix
List of Abbreviations xx
Introduction 1
1. A Persistent Fisnomical Consciousness c.400 bce–c.1470 ce 46
2. The Bookish Face of Physiognomy in Early Modern Europe 79
3. The Troubling Emergence of the ‘Egyptian’ in Early Modern
Europe 120
4. The Physiognomy Captured and Lost in a Book 172
5. Physiognomating by the Book 207
6. Living Graffiti 255
Conclusion 301
Bibliography 326
Index 347
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
1. From Giovanni Battista Della Porta, De humana physiognomonia

(Vici Æquensis: Iosephum Cacchium, 1586), 59. Private collection. 4
2. Engraving from Richard Saunders, Physiognomie, Chiromanice,
Metoposcopie (1671), 311. (Photo: Warburg Institute.) 7
3. Engraving from Richard Saunders, Physiognomie, Chiromanice,
Metoposcopie (1671), 289. (Photo: Warburg Institute.) 8
4. Guillaume de La Perrière, Le théâtre des bons engins, auquel sont
contenuz cent emblems (Lyon, 1536), No. 53. (Cliché Bibliothèque
Nationale de France.) 9
5. Hagecius ab Hajek, Aphorismorum metoposcopicorum libellus unus
(Prague, 1564), 57. (Cliché Bibliothèque Nationale de France.) 14
6. Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica,
physica atque technica historia, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), ii. De
Macrocosmi Historia (frontispiece), 1. (Bibliothèque Municipale de
Lyon, Rés 107538 (1–3). Credit photographique Bibliothèque
Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.) 22
7. Sutton Nichols, ‘The Compleat Auctioner’, c.1700. Copper engraving,
from S. Taubert, Bibliopola. Bilder und Texte aus der Welt des
Buchhandels, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1966), ii., 77. (Bibliothèque
Municipale de Lyon, FA hist 03 D t. 01-02. Credit photographique
Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.) 106
8. Hans Baldung Grien, Woodcut of author, frontispiece from Johannes
de Indagine, Introductiones apotelesmaticae elegantes in chiromantiam,
physionomiam, astrologiam naturalem, complexiones hominum,
naturas planetarum (Strasburg, 1522). (Bibliothèque Municipale de
Lyon, Rés 126655. Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de
Lyon, Didier Nicole.) 127
9. Sébastian Le Clerc (1637–1714), La Bohémienne, 1664. Engraving.
(Cliché Bibliothèque Nationale de France.) 142
10. Jacques Callot (1592–1635), ‘At a Resting Place’, No. 3 from the series
of four entitled The Feast of the Bohemians, after 1621. Etching and
engraving. (Photo: Nancy, Musée des Beaux-arts, Cliché Claude
Philippot.) 143
11. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573–1610), The Gypsy
Fortune-Teller, 1596–7. Oil on canvas, 99 cm ¥ 131 cm. Pinoteca
Capitolina, Rome. (Photo: Studio Fotografico Antonio Idini.) 144
List of Illustrations xv
12. David Teniers (Antwerp, 1610–90), A Gypsy Fortune-Teller and Other
Figures in a Craggy Landscape. Oil on canvas, 108 ¥ 135 cm. (Photo:
Collection Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentarie (RKD),
The Hague. Copyright: The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg.) 145
13. David Teniers (Antwerp 1610–90), The Interior of a Grotto with Gypsies.
Oil on canvas, 108 ¥ 135 cm. (Photo: Collection Rijksbureau voor
Kunsthistorische Documentarie (RKD), The Hague. Copyright:
Trafalgar Galleries, London.) 146
14. David Teniers (Antwerp, 1610–90), Landscape with Gypsies telling
Fortunes. Oil on panel, 36 ¥ 63 cm. Private collection, Switzerland
(Photo: Zurich: David H. Koetser Gallery, Zurich.) 146
15. Hans Burgkmair the Elder, Gipsy Woman Telling Fortunes to a Market
Woman. Pen and black ink 21.5 ¥ 31.8 cm. National Museum of
Stockholm, inv.nr. NM H 132/1918. [Lower Rhine, Netherlands,
c.1530s]. (Photo: Warburg Institute.) 147
16. ‘La vente des enfants’, early 16th-century tapestry from the ‘Series of
Carrabarra’, woven in Tournai by Arnould Poissonier, designed by
Antoine Ferret, Castle of Gaasbeek, Belgium. (Photo: Private
collection.) 147
17. Jacob Duck [Dutch, c.1600–67], Interior with Gypsies. Private
collection, The Netherlands. (Photo: Collection Rijksbureau voor
Kunsthistorische Documentarie (RKD), The Hague.) 148
18. J. Cossiers [Dutch, 1600–71], Gypsywoman Fortune-Telling, Another
Woman Pickpocketing. Photo: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen.) 149
19. Christian Wilhelm Dietrich [German, 1717–74], Wirtsstube mit
Zigeunern. (Photo: Neumeister Muenchener Kunstauktionhaus.) 149
20. Gypsy Boy Selling Manuscripts and Print [?], from S. Taubert,
Bibliopola. Bilder und Texte aus der Welt des Buchhandels, 2 vols.
(Hamburg, 1966), ii. 41. (Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, FA hist
03 D t.01-02. Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de
21. Marin Cureau de La Chambre, The Art How to Know Men (1665),
frontispiece. (Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Rés 801896. Credit
photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.) 159
22. Arcandam, The most excellent, profitable and pleasant book to find the
fatal desteny, constellation, complexion and natural inclination of every
man and child by his birth. With an addition of physiognomy very
pleasant to read (1592), sig. L7v–L8 Oxford: Bodleian Library, Ashm
556. (Photo: Oxford: Bodleian Library.) 181
23. Michael Scot, La physionomia natural di Michel Scotto (Vinegia, 1546),
Rome: Biblioteca Vaticana, [Racc. Gen. Class. Ital. V 414], sig. Gvir.
(Photo: Rome: Biblioteca Vaticana.) 201
xvi List of Illustrations
24. Diagram of the physiognomical syllogism, Giambattista Della Porta,
De humana physiognomonia (Vici Æquensis, 1586), 27. Private
collection. 209
25. Woodcut of Cardinal Luigi d’Este, Giambattista Della Porta, De
humana physiognomonia (Vici Æquensis: Apud Iosephum Cacchium,
1586), 4. Private collection. 212
26. Urs Graf, ‘Monks Reading’, from Guigo de Castro, Statuta ordinis
cartusiensis (Johann Amorbach, Basle, 1510). Wooduct. (Photo:
Warburg Institute.) 225
27. Cesare Revardino/Georges Reverdy [French, fl. 1529–57], Prudentia
[B. XV. 481.28]. (Photo: Warburg Institute.) 227
28. J. Kips, 17th-century English engraving of Prudence. (Photo: Warburg
Institute.) 227
29. Diptych. Right panel: Bust of Christ blessing. Left panel: Lentulus’
letter, Netherlands, 1490–9. Oil on wood, 38.5 cm ¥ 27.3 cm.
Museum Cartharijneconvent, Utrecht (Photo: Ruben de Heer.) 230
physica atque technica historia, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), i. De
Macrocosmi Historia, 26, Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon,
Rés 107538 (1–3). (Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale
de Lyon, Didier Nicole.) 233
physica atque technica historia, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), i. De
Macrocosmi Historia, 29. Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon,
Rès 107538 (1–3). (Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale
physica atque technica historia, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), ii. De
Supernaturali, Naturali, Praeternaturali et Contranaturali Microcosmi
historia, in Tractatus tres distributa, 117. (Photo: Warburg Institute.) 234
physica atque technica historia, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), ii.
Tractatus Primi Sectio Secunda (title page) ‘De technica Microcosmi
historia’, 1, Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Rés 107538 (1–3).
(Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier
Nicole.) 236
Tractatus Primi Sectio Secunda, Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon,
List of Illustrations xvii
Tractus Primi Sectio Secunda, Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon,
36. The Kalender of Sheephards (c.1585). A Facsimile Reproduction, ed.
S. K. Heninger, Jr (Delmar, New York, 1979), 73, and 75, 80, 86,
prepared from the copy in the Bodleian Library, Malone 17. sig. E5.
(Photo: Oxford: Bodleian Library.) 259
37. Giovanni Baptista Della Porta, Coelestis physiognomoniae libri sex
(Naples, 1603), Rome: Biblioteca Vallicaliana, S.Borr.H.III.98, p. 78,
K3v. (Photo: Mario Setter Biblioteca Vallicaliana.) 260
38. Ciro Spontoni, La Metoposcopia Ouero Commensuratione Delle Linee
Della Fronte (Venice, 1629), Florence: Firenze: Bibliotheca Nazionale,
1272.6, fol. 123 (Photo: Bibliotheca Nazionale Firenze.) 269
39. Johannes ab Indagine, Introductiones Apotelesmaticae elegantes in
Chiromantiam, Physionomiam, Astrologiam naturalem, Complexiones
hominum, Naturas Planetarum (Strasburg/Frankfurt, 1522) (Photo:
Basle: Bibliothek der Universität.) 280
hominum, Naturas Planetarum (Strasburg/Frankfurt, 1522). (Photo:
Basle: Bibliothek der Universität.) 281
hominum, Naturas Planetarum (Strasburg/Frankfurt, 1522). fol. 29.
Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Rés 126655. (Credit
photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.) 282
42. The Kalender of Shepherdes, ed. H. O. Sommer (1892), sig. K iiii.
(Photo: Warburg Institute.) 284
43. Eglon Hendrik van der Neer (1634–1703), Portrait of a Young Lady
Seated at a Table Holding an Open Book, 1665. Private collection.
(Photograph courtesy of Richard Green Gallery, London.) 285
44. Jan Luiken, Het leerzaam huisraad (Amsterdam, 1711), 54. (Photo:
Warburg Institute.) 286
45. Martin Engelbrecht, A Seller of Images, 1730. After S. Taubert,
Bibliopola. Bilden und Texte aus der Welt des Buchhandels, 2 vols.
(Hamburg, 1959), ii. 103, Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, FA hist 03
D t. 01-02. (Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de
xviii List of Illustrations
46. Theodore de Bry, Emblemata saeculario (Frankfurt, 1596), pl. 40.
(Photo: Warburg Institute.) 290
47. Master of the Die (BXV.226.75). (Photo: Warburg Institute.) 291
48. Philipp Mey, Chiromantia et Phisiognomia Medica, wie auch
Chiromantia Curiosa (1702). (Photo: Basle, Bibliothek der
Universität.) 292
49. Abstract human shape drawn at bottom of the page, Oxford:
Bodleian Library, Douce Fragm. d. 6, Kalendar of Shepherds, [1550?],
sig. Bvii. (Photo: Oxford: Bodleian Library.) 294
50. Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Douce 45, fol. 50r. (Photo: Oxford:
Bodleian Library.) 296
51. Bodleian Library, MS Digby 119, ‘Recepta varia alchemica’ (14th
century), ff. 24r. (Photo: Oxford: Bodleian Library.) 297
52. Manuscript profile drawn by John Dee, Oxford: Bodleian Library,
MS Ashmole 1451 (15th–16th century), 53v. (Photo: Oxford: Bodleian
Library.) 298
53. The Blake–Varley Sketchbook of 1819: In the Collection of M. D. E.
Clayton-Stamm, ed. M. Butlin (1969). (Photo: Fitzwilliam Museum,
Cambridge.) 299
54. Abbé Desmonceaux (1734–1806) Traité des maladies des yeux et des
oreilles (Paris, 1786), frontispiece. (Cliché Bibliothèque Nationale de
France.) 311
55. Sigismund Elsholtz, Anthropometria (Padua, 1654), 28. (Cliché
Bibliothèque Nationale de France.) 314
58. ‘Mirth for Citizens; or, A Comedy for the Country’, 17th century
English broadsheet ballads. (Photo: by permission of the Houghton
Library, Harvard University.) 324
LIST OF FIGURES
1a. ‘Books on physiognomy’ printed in Europe, c.1470–c.1639 91

1b. ‘Books on physiognomy’ printed in Europe, c.1640–c.1780 92
2. ‘Books on physiognomy’ printed in England, c.1470–c.1780 93
3. Annual book production in England, 1480–1700 (5-year totals).
Derived from M. Bell and J. Barnard, ‘Provisional Count of STC Titles
1475–1700’, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume IV
1557–1695, ed. J. Barnard, D. F. McKenzie, and M. Bell (Cambridge,
2002), Appendix 1. 102
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
All books are published in London unless otherwise stated. Dates have been put into
arabic numerals.
bce Before the Common Era

ce Common Era
MS Manuscript
RSTC A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland, & Ireland
and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640, first compiled by A. W.
Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, 2nd edn., rev. and enl., begun by W. A.
Jackson and F. S. Ferguson; completed by Katharine F. Pantzer, 3 vols.
(London: Bibliographical Society, 1976–1991)
Introduction
Physiognomy and Ancient Theology

On 12 July, 1694, Samuel Jeake Esq. began to write a diary. Jeake, a merchant
from the English town of Rye, in East Sussex, had long been used to the magic
of quills and ink and words on paper. From his childhood days in the 1650s, his
literate father had accustomed him to scribble things about himself and his life
into notebooks. Now, having reached his forties, something spurred this astro-
logically obsessed Sussex merchant to sit down with those historical records he
had been saving up and organize them into some meaningful form.
Choosing 12 July, rather than the occasion of his forty-second birthday
which fell a few days earlier, to commence his astrological diary was for him a
highly symbolic act. To an English protestant dissenter of Dutch descent like
Jeake, 12 July was the anniversary of the ‘Glorious Revolution’, the day when
the English replaced a home-grown catholic English king with an imported
Dutch protestant one. In fact, its symbolism was doubly suitable for a mer-
chant. For the very same day that Jeake began raising a retrospective flag on his
own existence, a royal proclamation was issued establishing the official flag of
the new English Customs. It was a signal to the rest of Europe’s powers that the
fresh-blooded economic policies of a new, increasingly rationalized, protestant
regime were about to be unleashed. It was a fitting day for an English merchant
to begin to take some sort of astrological stock-check, as it were, of his life.
In his diary, Jeake included a number of curious passages which reveal some-
thing about what he actually looked like, something about his ‘physiognomy’.
A series of entries show us that he had had his height measured on various
birthdays throughout his youth, very probably by his mathematically inclined
father—for they were always precisely calculated to the nearest eighth of an
inch. Taken together they record how tall he was at different ages and allow us
to see him growing up, from a 3-year-old boy to an 18-year-old young man. The
first was taken on the day of his third birthday 4 July 1655: ‘Being 3 years old,
my stature was 2 Feet 10 3/8 Inches’. Years later, having chosen to include this
mathematical fact in his diary, our diarist evidently felt no urge to comment
2 ‘Windows of the Soul’: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780
further on it. In keeping with the new, revolutionary Galilean mathematics of
the day, he attached no retrospective symbols to its bare arithmetical bones. He
did not add that he was as tall as a particular plant in the garden. He offered no
conjecture about the sonic pitch that a piece of string the same length as his
height would have produced upon the plucking. The merchant in him drew no
strange medical or poetic analogy between those fragile three-eighths of an
inch and the virtues in the size of the ‘3 Barlie cornes faire and round lying in
length without the tailes’ which made up an inch in Scotland.¹ In fact, being
the only entry for the next 365 days, the exact, purely arithmetical, nature of his
stature seems to have been for Jeake the only thing of any significance about the
entire third year of his being.
Eleven years appear to have passed before his father took the rod to his son
once more, in July 1666. By then, young Jeake had grown by 2 feet: ‘Being 14
years old my stature was 4 Feet 10 5/8 Inches’. His fifteenth birthday marked a
much more symbolic moment. For the sole remains of the dynasty that Jeake
senior had succeeded in generating was then embarking upon the third of the
twelve ‘hebdomars’ that mapped out what was universally known as ‘the ages of
man’. 1667 also marked a significant arithmetical event. Young Samuel Jeake
had passed the 5-feet mark—if only just: ‘Being now, 15 years old my stature
was 5 feet 1/8 inch’.
Over the next four years, the outing of that measuring rod on Samuel’s birth-
day became an annual family ritual. In the course of that fifteenth year Samuel’s
height shot up by a not insubstantial 2 inches: ‘Being 16 year old, my Stature
was 5 feet 2 7/8 inches. About this time my beard began to appear.’ Though 1669
saw only half an inch increase: ‘Being 17 year old, my stature was 5 feet 3 –12
inches’, the pace picked up again in 1670, his eighteenth year, when he length-
ened by over another inch: ‘Being 18 year old my stature was 5 feet 4 5/8
inches’. Years later, when the adult Samuel Jeake Esq. came to include this
indisputable mathematical fact in the retrospective construction of his diary,
something prompted him to use his author’s hitherto suspended privilege of
hindsight. He added: ‘After which I never grew in heighth’.
On his nineteenth birthday, in 1671, after a long period of illness during
which he feared he might either die or at the very least lose his sight, the emerg-
ing young adult penned a more full-blooded description of his ‘physiognomy’
in words. He began it with a qualitative (that is, a less mathematical) expression
of his height—one that somehow had a ring of finality (and disappointment?)
about it:
¹ Alexander Huntar, A treatise of weights, mets, and measures of Scotland (Edinburgh, 1624), 5.
Introduction 3
My stature was short, viz.; the same that was noted July 4 1670. My Complexion
Melancholy, My Face pale & lean, Forehead high; Eyes grey, Nose large, Teeth bad &
distorted, No. 28. Hair of a sad brown, & curling: about this age and till after 20 had a
great quantity of it; but from thence it decayed & grew thin. My voice grew hoarse after
I had the small pocks. My Body was always lean, my hands & feet small, I was partly
left handed & partly Ambodexter.
It was not the most detailed of self-descriptions, and distinctly less literary and
self-conscious than the ‘character’ sketches with which the guests of Mademoi-
selle de Montpensier’s salon were amusing themselves around the same time in
Paris.² In fact, it reads more like the physiognomical descriptions which the
German authorities took whilst the accused was making his statement,
the experimental consideration of which, under the Emperor Charles V, was
made an official part of German criminal law in 1532, under article 71, ‘mala
physiognomia’.³ It was also similar to the physiognomical descriptions of clients
and wanted criminals which early modern astrologers noted in their
manuscripts.
There are no extant portraits of Samuel Jeake against which to compare his
self-description. Despite a decent education in the liberal arts, Jeake never
really mastered the art of drawing, so has left us no sketch of himself in the mar-
gins of the pages of his diary, such as those one finds in some manuscript ‘trea-
tises on physiognomy’. Therefore, the closest we can now come to picturing
Jeake’s adult physiognomy are by the images of his appearance that arise in the
reader’s mind through these written words. Any physiognomical likeness he
may have borne to his wife and daughter, whose portraits have survived, seems
somehow beyond us. Similarly, with regard to a phenomenon of pressing con-
cern to some of Jeake’s contemporaries, we do not know whether he bore a
‘resemblance’ to a particular animal, such as Della Porta’s widely known late
sixteenth-century image of the owl-man, shown in Illustration 1.
In fact, when one considers the rest of Samuel Jeake’s self-description, it
seems curious that he appears to have gone to more trouble to describe accu-
rately some of the hidden aspects of his physiognomy than he did to describe
his head and his face—such as the moles on his body and the lines on the palms
of his hands:
In my right hand was found the perfect Triangle composed of the Vital, Cephalick, &
Hepatick Lines, all entire; but the Cephalica broken in my left hand. The Moles or
Naevi five: Viz. 1. one under the right arm almost as high as the armhole. 2. one in the
² See Chapter 5.
³ See M. Schneider and R. Campe, Geschichten der Physiognomik (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1996).
1. As Jeake was reading his copy of Saunders’ book, Giovanni Battista Della Porta’s
famous ‘owl man’ was the subject of Charles Le Brun’s Conferences in Pairs, 1670–1.
Giovanni Battista Della Porta, De humana physiognomonia (Vici Æquensis: Iosephum
Cacchium, 1586), 59. Private collection.
left hand upon the Mount of Jupiter. 3. one upon the right side, under the short Ribs.
4. one (the largest) on the Abdomen. 5. one, at the left side of the right heel.⁴
And yet all of this continues to beg one very important question: so what? An
observation recently offered by two contemporary historians put the same
question in the following way: ‘Give rich and detailed accounts of physiogno-
my, passions, habits, and regimens, and you will invite from academic readers
(at least) puzzled inquiries about what all this can possibly have to do with
“knowledge itself?” ’⁵ Is there really any real historical significance to be seen in
the short, lean, grey-eyed, and pale-faced physiognomy of an obscure
seventeenth-century English merchant?
As curious, or even irrelevant, as it may seem to many readers today, many of
Jeake’s early modern contemporaries would have understood why he so care-
fully located the moles on his physiognomy. For in many of their eyes those
moles still carried some deep significance. That meaning was often astrological,
⁴ An Astrological Diary of the Seventeenth-Century, ed. M. Hunter and A. Gregory (Oxford, 1988), 86, 89,
92, 95, 103, 105, and 117–18. ⁵ S. Shapin and C. Lawrence (eds.), Science Incarnate (Chicago, 1998), 2.
Introduction 5
sometimes medical, sometimes divine.⁶ Evidence of the early modern concern
with this sort of meaning can be seen in the many books in circulation through-
out Europe which dealt with the meaning of moles, wherever they were
situated on one’s anatomy. The authors of those books on moles came from
much further afield than mid-seventeenth century England. In the classically
educated Renaissance mind, one of the main figures associated with moles was
the renowned classical Greek figure of Melampus. Melampus was one of the
most famous ‘seers’ in Greek mythology. He was credited with the ability to
talk to the animals. His association with moles was the result of the fact that he
was often confused in Renaissance minds with another ‘seer’ named Melam-
podis. Melampodis wrote on another distinctly physiognomical subject, the
divination from tremors in the body. Their hybrid was the alleged author of De
naevis, a treatise on divination by moles widely read throughout Renaissance
and early modern Europe.⁷
Similarly, Renaissance and early modern readers could turn to the writings
of the medieval Arab physician Haly Abenragel, one of the most influential
astrologers in the medieval Christian West. And even closer to Jeake’s own day,
there was the early modern Italian physician and moral philosopher Lodovico
Settala (1522–1631). Settala’s act of publishing a tract on moles in 1605 might
place him among the ranks of the hermeticists or even the superstitious
‘quacks’.⁸ Yet he was, in reality, a distinctly practical person. His influential
political treatise, Reason of State, dealt with some of the problems of imperial
Spanish government in the midst of the Counter-Reformation, and he com-
bined his medical and political interests as public health officer for Milan. As
cheap and crude as some of these texts on physiognomy, chiromancy, meto-
poscopy, and moles were, and they certainly became increasingly so as the
period moved on, there were also many which were expensive and seriously
illustrated.
On 29 September 1670, just a few months before the date of the original
form of this self-description, Samuel Jeake had taken a book from his father’s
library. It was entitled Physiognomie, Chiromancie, Metoposcopie. It also
included a section on moles. It was written, in 1653, by Richard Saunders, an
astrological physician based in London. Although his place in the history of
English astrology and medicine has been overshadowed by the much more
famous figures of Simon Forman, Richard Napier, and William Lilly, Saunders
was quite well known in his day. Among his influential friends he counted the
⁶ Philippo Picinello, Mundus symbolicus (Cologne, 1715), Index, q.v. Naevi.
⁷ Melampodis . . . Divinatio ex nævis corporis, in Girolamo Cardano, Metoposcopia (Paris, 1658).
⁸ Lodovico Settala, Labyrinthi medici extricati (Geneva, 1687).
prominent Oxford dignitary Elias Ashmole, godfather to one of his children
and the purchaser of Saunders’s library when the astrologer died in the 1670s.
Long since forgotten, Saunders’s name lived on in English reading circles for
quite some time after his death. Isaac Newton had copies of his work in his pri-
vate library, and Benjamin Franklin was among the regular readers of an almanac
that was still being published under Saunders’s name in the eighteenth century.⁹
In the copy of this book that Samuel Jeake was reading that day was a section
devoted to moles in which young Jeake could have empirically examined those
on his own body by comparing them with the diagram in Illustration 2.
Indeed, as Jeake read, an English publisher was preparing a second, enlarged
edition, no doubt encouraged by the news of the rekindled interest in the
subject sparked by the Conférence on physiognomie and painting held in Paris
that year by Louis XIV’s court painter, Charles Le Brun.¹⁰ The publisher was
aiming upmarket by including a tasteful engraving of the moles of the face
(Illustration 3).
In fact, as we try to imagine and picture Samuel Jeake sitting in his library at
home in East Sussex, surrounded by his books, his diary open on the desk
before him, peering into his looking-glass, it is worth remembering that the
image we conjure up formed part of the emblematic culture of early modern
Europe, such as the German version of it which was published in 1536
(Illustration 4).
The verse below it reads:
A small stain or mole on the face is sooner seen than a large one on the body: The face
is open in all places, the body hidden and only seen from the outside. By this emblem
we can remember, that we make more of the smallest of vices noted in a Prince, than a
large one in the thin man. The vices of those of base stature remain unknown. But if the
Kings and Lords, in all Kingdoms and Provinces, are mean, it is soon known.
Thus, in that sense, at the very moment that Jeake turned to his looking-glass
to contemplate the moles on his face, he became the living embodiment of a
widely known hieroglyphic enigma found illustrated in many of the ‘emblem
books’ that were such a feature of early modern European reading and visual
culture. The seventeenth-century English playwright James Shirley seems to
have experienced one of the social implications of having a mole. According to
the seventeenth-century historian Anthony Wood, William Laud, while still
President of St John’s and before becoming the Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘had
a very great affection’ for Shirley, ‘but then [Shirley] having a broad or large
mole upon his left cheek which some esteemed a deformity, that worthy doc-
⁹ Jeake, Diary, 108. ¹⁰ J. Montagu, The Expression of the Passions (New Haven, 1994).
Introduction 7
2. Engraving of the moles on the entire male body, from Richard Saunders, Physiog-
nomie, Chiromanice, Metoposcopie (1671), 311. (Photo: Warburg Institute.)
tor would often tell him that he was an unfit person to take the sacred function
upon him, and should never have his consent to do so’. Here Laud was simply
invoking what had long been a part of Canon Law (based on Leviticus 21:
16–24), by which any person with any sort of physical deformity was not
allowed to be ordained.¹¹ The late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century
medical debates on the significance of moles are perhaps the most obvious evi-
dence of the seriousness with which they were examined by early modern
¹¹ See Chapter 1.
3. Engraving of the moles on a woman’s face, from Richard Saunders, Physiognomie,

Chiromanice, Metoposcopie (1671), 289. (Photo: Warburg Institute.)
physicians and the hitherto unexamined role that they played, both positively
and negatively, in the construction of modern medicine.
By the standards of the new, late seventeenth-century natural philosophy,
Richard Saunders’s book could be said to have been something of an anomaly.
Contrary to the apparently more progressive claims being put forward at the
time by philosophers such as Hobbes about the arbitrary and purely conven-
tional relationship in language between words and the things they represented,
Saunders was claiming that physiognomy was a ‘natural language’ descended
from Adam through the written language of Hebrew. What he meant by
‘natural language’ was one in which there was a mysterious, natural link, a
Introduction 9
4. An emblem, known throughout Europe, and formed around the contemplation in

the mirror of the moles on one’s face, from Guillaume de La Perrière, Le théâtre des bons
engins, auquel sont contenuz cent emblems (Lyon, 1536), No. 53. (Cliché Bibliothèque
Nationale de France.)
‘resemblance’, between the signifiers and the things signified. Those with eyes
to see and read these ‘natural signatures’ properly could unleash the magic and
efficacious power of these words and so manipulate the properties they signi-
fied—in some cases with the help of the good angels. Just as against the grain
of things ‘modern’ as that strange conception of the power of language, was the
fact that the physics of the universe laid out in its pages contained no traces of
the revolutionary heliocentric conception of the universe that Copernicus had
announced to the world over a century earlier, in 1543. Equally retrograde were
the mathematical calculations which it contained. For they were far from the
new geometry that Galileo had claimed was the language in which the ‘book of
nature’ was written, and so at odds with the very thing that young Jeake set
himself to learn the following month, in October 1670.
On the contrary, the content of Saunders’s book was shot through with ideas
and material about the ‘natural magic’ of the ‘book of nature’ as understood in
the Neoplatonic hermetic views of the English magus Robert Fludd and the
Paracelsian-influenced protestant natural philosopher Johannes Alsted. In this
‘natural magic’ every human, indeed every natural body, was irradiated with
the potentially malleable celestial influence of the seven planets and the twelve
signs of the zodiac—their early modern version of the claim made by contem-
porary astronomers and astrophysicists that we are made of the ‘stuff ’ of stars.
The mathematics of that natural magic was embedded in strange notions of
Pythagorean number mysticism and ideas of the efficacious, numerical signi-
ficance of Kabbalistic combinations of letters.¹²
Moreover, besides this very different sort of physics and mathematics, the
religious character of the material seemed equally at odds with the protes-
tantism which underpinned the natural philosophy of the likes of Alsted or the
dissenting protestantism of a merchant like Samuel Jeake. For the majority of
Saunders’s text had been lifted verbatim from a French book published origi-
nally in 1620 by a French curé named Jean Belot. Belot was an expert in the
body of Jewish mystical texts known as the Kabbalah. Belot’s interest in phys-
iognomy and the Kabbalah was in part the result of the influence of two late
fifteenth-century Italian humanists, Marsilio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola.
Between them, they had tried to forge a religious synthesis between a variety of
different religious mysticisms. Besides advocating the texts that made up the
Kabbalah, they also used the writings of the allegedly Egyptian sage Hermes
Trismegistus. The resulting cocktail came to form a part of what was known in
early modern Europe as the ‘hermetic philosophy’. This movement pre-dated
Copernicus’s famous claim that it was the sun and not the earth at the centre of
the universe. None the less, when the famous historian of science Alexander
Koyré wrote of the ‘the desire to re-conquer for man that central place in the
universe which mystical theology assigned him’, his observation could be used
as an accurate description of many adherents of hermeticism. At the very
least, that hermetic philosophy, the influence of which was clearly evident in
¹² Luca Gaurico, Operum omnium (Basle, 1576), 2. The number of manuscript ‘treatises on physiogno-
my’ bound with works on the sphere of Sacrobosco is striking. For example, Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS
Bodley 26.
Introduction 11
the book that Samuel Jeake read that day, can be seen, metaphorically speaking,
as part of man’s attempt to place the sun at the centre of himself.¹³
That heavily illustrated tome of hermeticism by Richard Saunders was not
the only book on the curious subject of physiognomy that the Jeakes had in
their library. There were three more. Moreover, the tiny corner of the library
that the four of them constituted was less provincial than it seemed.¹⁴
Although all of Jeake’s editions were in English, each one was a translation of
an earlier text written in, and widely read throughout, mainland Europe. The
first of the other three, a 1638 edition of a work entitled The Compost of
Ptholomeus, had been around in cheap print in England since the Reformation
Parliament of 1530. Essentially it was an anglicanized version of a much more
widely known French catholic devotional handbook infused with Arabic
and hermetic mysticism originally entitled the Compost des bergiers. People
in France and Switzerland as well as in the German-speaking territories who
could read books had been reading it in printed form from the late fifteenth
century onwards.¹⁵
The third of Jeake’s four ‘books on physiognomy’ was entered in the library’s
register as ‘Three books viz: of Palmestry, Physiognomy, Nat[ural] Astrology’. This
was a 1598 English edition of a book written by an early sixteenth-century
German priest-astrologer from Hain bei Darmstadt named Johannes Rosen-
bach (1467–1537). In the midst of the German Lutheran Reformation, with its
promotion of a new anti-idolatrous theology of images, Rosenbach had not
only absorbed some of Ficino’s ideas on language and magic, he had even
changed his name to the much more hieroglyphical ‘Johannes de Indagine’
(Latin for ‘sign’). Indagine’s book, which fused physiognomy with ‘natural
astrology’ (as opposed to the much more controversial, future-telling ‘judicial
astrology’), had first appeared in 1522 in the form of a heavily illustrated Latin
folio edition. It was immediately translated into the German vernacular, and
by the late seventeenth century Indagine’s ‘book on physiognomy’ had been
widely diffused in numerous languages and cheaper formats throughout early
modern Europe, particularly among the Northern protestant countries,
despite the fact that it was put on the Index by Pope Paul IV.¹⁶
¹³ A. Koyré, De la mystique à la science, ed. P. Redondi (Paris, 1986), 21.

¹⁴ A Radical’s Books, ed. M. Hunter, G. Mandelbrote, R. Ovenden, and N. Smith (1999), 134, 206, 216,
and 266.
¹⁵ Here begynneth the compost of Ptholomeus ([1530?]); Le compost et kalendrier des bergiers (Geneva, 1497);
Der Schapherders Kalender (Rostock, 1523).
¹⁶ Johannes de Indagine, Introductiones apotelesmaticae (Strasburg/Frankfurt, 1522), 15; Die kunst der
chiromantzey (Strasburg, 1523).
The last of the four, entered in the register as ‘Natures chief Rarities’, was an
unrecorded 1660 English publication of a medieval Latin tract written at the
thirteenth-century court of the German King and Holy Roman Emperor,
Frederick II (1194–1250), by a Scottish natural philosopher named Michael
Scot. Of the four ‘books on physiognomy’ in the Jeake library, Scot’s work was
the most widely known. Written originally as part of an enormously influen-
tial, often copiously illustrated, encyclopaedic work on the nature of the entire
cosmos by Scot entitled Liber introductorius, it had been in circulation
throughout medieval Europe in illuminated manuscript form. The physiog-
nomical section had made the transition to print as early as the 1470s.¹⁷ By the
turn of the sixteenth century, it had seen a multitude of Latin and vernacular
forms, and was still falling from European printing presses during Jeake’s life-
time. Between the 1640s and the 1660s numerous Dutch publishers, encour-
aged by a European-wide re-emergence of interest in Paracelsianism and things
‘occult’, were publishing it in very small pocket-size (octavo and duodecimo)
formats bound with a work on generation and menstruation entitled On the
Secrets of Women (De secretis mulierum) by the thirteenth century dominican
theologian Albertus Magnus—teacher of Thomas Aquinas and himself an
author of a ‘treatise on physiognomy’.
When taken together, the strands of this small textual cobweb in the Jeake
library which I have just outlined conveniently symbolize the fact that
throughout Europe there was something of a now forgotten, but at the time still
active, shared ‘canon’ of literature on the subject of ‘physiognomy’ in circulation
from the beginning to the end of the early modern period. Those ‘books on
physiognomy’ contained, among many other things, claims about the ‘occult’
properties of all natural bodies, not just the eyes or the moles of a human being,
be it the ‘occult virtues’ of a particular plant, the physical and mental attributes
of a certain planet or sign of the zodiac, the occult phenomena of the ‘antipathy’
and ‘sympathy’ that regulated the relationships between those natural bodies,
and, more specific to the physiognomy of the human body, the actual meaning
(as opposed to, but not always exclusive of an explanation of the physiological
or humoral mechanics) of a human being’s physical features. The latter took
the form of claims or ‘conclusions’ that red hair was a sign of anger; that large
foreheads were a sign of intelligence; that eyebrows joined in the middle indi-
cated a dangerous person; that deep-set hollow eyes were a sign of a liar, long
fingers a sign of an artistic nature, large noses or large feet a sign of large geni-
talia—or not, as the case may be. As curious, ‘supernatural’, even ‘superstitious’
¹⁷ Michael Scot, Physionomia (Venice, [c.1477]).

Introduction 13
as such claims may seem, one gets a sense of how widely and deeply these
physiognomical ideas and the philosophical framework of the natural magic
which supported them penetrated early modern European culture by consider-
ing the words of another contemporary historian:
If a sense of supernatural power, a curiosity to test the secrets of the occult tradition, a
willingness to consider the occult as intelligible, and a confidence in finding explana-
tions for insensible agents were ways that Renaissance magic prepared the ground for
seventeenth-century science, these were more a central feature of natural magic inde-
pendent of hermeticism, Neoplatonicism, and Kabbalah than of the more religiously
motivated ideas of magic.¹⁸
In his book entitled De homine (Milan, 1490), the fifteenth-century Italian

humanist Galeotto Marzio (1427/8–90), whose interest in the religiously haz-
ardous mixture of Neoplatonicism of Ficino and Mirandola was encouraged
and protected by King Mattheus of Hungary and Lorenzo il Magnifico, wrote:
The eyes are the windows of the soul: almost everyone knows what their colour, what
their restlessness, what their sharpness indicates. Something worth mentioning,
though, is that people with long eyes are malicious and immoral. And if the white of
the eye is widely extended and visible all round, this shows shamelessness; if it is
concealed, not visible at all, this shows unreliability.¹⁹
Marzio is, in fact, just one example of how, by the beginning of the early mod-
ern period, the natural magic of the written ‘physiognomony’ that had been
inherited from the Middle Ages in a variety of linguistic forms, had come to be
thought to contain the Egyptian, hieroglyphic vestiges of the original, perfect,
divine language by which Adam had named all of nature. That ‘language’ had
been lost in the Fall as a consequence of original sin but could, somehow, be
recovered and used to improve the world and the people in it. Another exam-
ple was Hagecius ab Hajek, an astrologer and natural philosopher employed in
Rudolf II’s late sixteenth-century court. Hajek wrote a book on the physiog-
nomical subject of metoposcopy (a topic which was also discussed in the book
that Samuel Jeake read in 1670). In that work Hajek not only described the
lines on the forehead that were the language of metoposcopy as ‘signatures of
the highest architect’, ‘vestiges of the impression of God’, such was the innate
iconicity of its language, he illustrated them (Illustration 5).
In fact, for Hajek, physiognomony was a part of what one scholar has
described as an ‘ancient theology’—so much so that he supported the divinity
¹⁸ N. H. Clulee, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy (1988), 240–1.

¹⁹ M. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford, 1988), 58.
5. The innately visual language of physiognomy, including the lines on the forehead,
often necessitated a pictorial representation in one form or another, from Hagecius ab
Hajek, Aphorismorum metoposcopicorum libellus unus (Prague, 1564), 57. (Cliché
Bibliothèque Nationale de France.)
of this physiognomical knowledge through quotations of passages of Scripture,

such as the passage from Ecclesiastes 8: 1, ‘a man’s wisdom makes his face to
shine’, which he placed on the title page of the book.²⁰
This view of the language of physiognomy was not the monopoly of authors
of books on the subject. In the middle of the seventeenth century, Sir Thomas
Browne spoke of the ‘characters’ found in the human face, the hands, and the
forehead, indeed, all natural bodies, in exactly this way:
for there are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry in them the motto of
our Soules, wherein he that cannot read A.B.C. may read our natures. I hold moreover
that there is a Phytognomy, or Physiognomy, not onely of men, but of Plants, and
Vegetables; and in every one of them, some outward figures which hang as signes or
²⁰ Hagecius ab Hajek, Aphorismorum metoposcopicorum (Prague, 1564), 4–5; D. P. Walker, The Ancient
Theology (1972).
Introduction 15
bushes of their inward formes. The finger of God hath left an Inscription upon all his
workes, not graphicall or composed of Letters, but of their severall formes, constitu-
tions, parts, and operations, which aptly joyned together doe make one word that doth
expresse their natures. By these Letters God cals the Starres by their names, and by this
Alphabet Adam assigned to every creature a name peculiar to its Nature. Now there are
besides these Characters in our faces, certaine mysticall figures in our hands, which I
dare not call meere dashes, strokes, a la volee, or at randome, because delineated by
a pencill, that never workes in vaine; and hereof I take more particular notice,
because I carry that in mine owne hand, which I could never read of, nor discover in
another.²¹
In seeing and describing the hieroglyphic nature of the outer world and the
characters who populated it in this way, Sir Thomas Browne was simply the lat-
est advocate of an understanding of the mystical language of physiognomy that
was part of an ancient Hebraic exegetical tradition captured in one translation
of Genesis 2: 19–20 as ‘and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that
was the name thereof ’.²²
In the book that young Samuel Jeake was reading that September day in
1670, Richard Saunders claimed that ‘you see the holy Scriptures full of
Physiognomical expressions’, and discussed many of them in his preface. In so
doing, Saunders claimed to have noticed something of a conspiracy: the fact
that, with every successive translation of the Bible, the physiognomy that was
such an important part of the original Hebrew version had been distilled out of
it. For Saunders, St Jerome’s early translation was more physiognomical than
any subsequent translations, but he suggested that the Hebrew original was the
most physiognomical of all. He pointed out how, for example, in the Hebrew
version, ‘God himself in Exodus for his Wisdom among the eleven Properties
hath called himself, Great Nose . . . Longus Narium: as if he should say, Wise,
Mercifull, and Long-suffering’.²³
There were many other physiognomical moments in the Bible which pro-
vided early modern writers with an authority with which to underpin this mys-
terious language and scientia of physiognomony. Two of the most popular were
Isiah 3: 9, ‘the look on their faces testifies against them; they parade their sin like
Sodom; they do not hide it’, or such as the passage from Job 37: 7 which the
Elizabethan magus John Dee wrote out in Greek on the title-page of one of the
²¹ Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, ed. J.-J. Denonain (Cambridge, 1953), 90–1.
²² John Evelyn, Numismata (1697), 293.
²³ Richard Saunders, Physiognomie, Chiromancie, Metoposcopie (1653), Preface, sig. a1v and 139. The
Hebrew cited by Saunders, ‘erekh apayim’, is normally translated as ‘slow to anger’. A literal translation would
be long nose or long nostrils. See A Hebrew Lexicon of the Old Testament, ed. F. Brown, S. R. Driver, and C.
A. Briggs (Oxford, 1955).
numerous ‘books on physiognomy’ and ‘chiromancy’ which he owned: ‘He
sealeth up the hand of every man that he may know his fate’.²⁴ Since at least the
Middle Ages, physiognomony had formed part of sermons based on specific
passages of Scripture, and on the early modern Continent, books were pub-
lished dedicated entirely to the discussion of the meaning of such physiog-
nomical passages in Holy Scripture.²⁵ Not all such passages were seen as so
favourable to physiognomy. There were some passages of Scripture which
could be interpreted as anti-physiognomical. In Wycliff ’s famous vernacular
version of the Bible, he gave his translation of John 7: 24 a distinctly aphoristic
twist, ‘Nile ye deme aftir the face, but deme ye a rightful doom’. But the fact
that he felt his translation needed to be so evidently anti-physiognomical is
significant enough.²⁶ Indeed, evidence that the physiognomy implicit in this
passage was still an issue in the late seventeenth century can be seen in a 1677
sermon by Joseph Caryl, preacher to Lincoln’s Inn, rejecting what he claimed
was a strict, chiromantical reading of the Hebrew for this passage:
The Hebrew is, In the hand he will seal, or, sealeth every man. From which strict reading,
some have made a very impious interpretation of this Text, thereupon grounding that
(as most use it) most unwarrantable Art of Chiromancy, as if God did put certain Lines,
Prints, or Seals upon the hand of every man, from whence it may be collected and con-
cluded, what (as some call it) his Fortune or Destiny will be in the world. Which, as it
is an opinion wicked in it self, so altogether heterogeneal to this place, the tendency
whereof is not to shew how things shall work with men hereafter, but how they are
often hindered or stopt in, or from their present work.²⁷
It is a passage made all the more revealing when one considers the holy phys-
iognomical concerns expressed in the seventeenth-century English puritan lit-
erature on the family and civility, itself a part of the debate about the visibility
of the invisible church in Samuel Jeake’s day: ‘The inward service of the heart
therefore is not sufficient, unlesse it be expressed in the outward service of the
body’:
The visage is for the most part a Prognostication of Vertue or Vice . . . They that write
of Physiognomie, discover certain conclusions demonstrable in the lines, and Symmetry
of the face. And in Scripture we finde mention of the Proud, Angry, Wanton lookes;
²⁴ John Dee’s Library Catalogue, ed. R. J. Roberts and A. G. Watson (Cambridge, 1994), 109.
²⁵ J. Ziegler, ‘Text and Context: On the Rise of Physiognomic Thought in the Later Middle Ages’, in De
Sion Exibit Lex et Verbum Domini de Hierusalem, ed. Y. Hen (Turnhout, 2001), 164 ff.; Franciscus Vallesius,
De iis quae scripta sunt physicae in libris sacris (Lyons, 1592), 183–90.
²⁶ The Authorised version runs: ‘Judge not according to the appearance, but judge righteous judgement’.
²⁷ Joseph Caryl, An exposition with practicall observations continued upon the thirty-fifth, thirty-sixth, and
thirty-seventh chapters of the Book of Job (1664), 478.
Introduction 17
because (by a Metonymie of the effect) thereby we bewray our Pride, Anger,
Wantonnesse, &c.²⁸
The variety of different religious and philosophical (or epistemological)

understandings of the language of physiognomony in Marzio, Hajek, Browne,
and Saunders were in part a consequence of a controversial attempt to recon-
cile and synthesize a dominant Christianity with Egyptian and pagan Neopla-
tonic philosophy. It was a movement begun by the Italian humanists Marsilio
Ficino and Pico della Mirandola, and funded by Cosimo de Medici from the
powerful banking family of Florence in the last quarter of the fifteenth centu-
ry. A central part of their enterprise involved the translation and dissemination
of a body of what they thought at the time to be an ancient Egyptian wisdom,
slightly younger than the wisdom of the Hebrew patriarchs and prophets, but
much older than Plato and the other philosophers of Greek antiquity, who had
all—so the Renaissance magus firmly believed—‘drunk from its sacred foun-
tain’.²⁹ As soon as the manuscripts containing it were discovered and brought
to Cosimo de Medici’s attention, he felt them so important that he asked
Marsilio Ficino to interrupt his epoch-making translation of the Greek manu-
scripts of Plato, which Cosimo had also recently obtained, in order to translate
them immediately. Allegedly written by the ancient theologians Hermes Tris-
megistus, Orpheus, and Pythagoras, these texts, generally known as the Corpus
hermeticum, were thought by Christian apologists to contain vestiges of the
true Christian religion (prisca theologia). Some even claimed that they derived
from no less a figure than Moses himself.³⁰ It is the influence of this hermetic
movement upon the development of early modern European understanding
and exploration of the audio-visual scientia of ‘physiognomy’ that will be the
main subject of this work. Moreover, as this study will show, there was more to
the spread of this ancient ‘Egyptian’ theology and the way in which it came to
envelop physiognomony than literate humanists and manuscripts. At least
forty years (and probably more) before these manuscripts arrived, a group of
people appeared in early modern Europe practising a form of physiognomy—
the ‘Egyptians’, or, as some called them, the ‘gypsies’.
More to the point here is that the obscure English merchant Samuel Jeake
provides us with clear evidence of the active exploration of ‘natural magic’ that
was a pervasive part of the natural philosopher’s and the artist’s métier both
during and long after ‘the great instauration’ of the allegedly more mathemati-
²⁸ John Downame, A guide to godlinesse (1622), 410; Matthew Griffith, Bethel (1633), 257.
²⁹ F. A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), 2.
³⁰ Walker, Ancient Theology, 1.
cal, rational form of natural philosophy discovered in the course of the ‘scien-
tific revolution’. Within that broader theme of the coexistence of, and the
interaction between, the ‘magical’ and the ‘rational’ considerations and under-
standings of the ‘occult’ phenomena of the world, this book is a study of how
the art of physiognomy became enmeshed in the spreading influence of that
‘Egyptian’ prisca theologia and Corpus hermeticum in early modern European
culture. As medical as the subject of physiognomy is so often assumed to be,
and indeed was, it will be argued that this should be understood from within
the inter-disciplinary perspective of the history of Renaissance rhetoric, art,
and poetry, or at least rhetoric used as a form of ‘medicine’. In other words, it
will be argued that the art of physiognomy was part of the way in which Renais-
sance Neoplatonism ‘sought the Logos of a pre-text world using rhetorical and
poetical tools’.³¹ In so doing it shows how, to put it simply and briefly, by the
early seventeenth century, the language and rhetoric of the art of physiognomy
became a form of mystical, self-transforming prayer, and by the beginning of
the eighteenth century, simply a laughable, if amusing, game.
From the Fisnomy of the Microcosm to the

Physiognomony of the Macrocosm
From the very beginning of this work, readers need to understand one striking
feature about the ancient physiognomical wisdom which these ‘books on phys-
iognomy’ contained in the written and printed characters on their pages. In so
doing I want to return to the phrase I used earlier when I spoke of the ‘audio-
visual scientia of physiognomy’. For the moment, let us put aside their claims
to be transmitting a part of the divine ‘Egyptian’ ‘language’ of an ancient the-
ology that showed one the various ‘windows’ and ‘doorways’ into the soul of the
individual as well as the soul of God’s created world. What I want to stress here
is that each one of those works was, essentially, an attempt to capture, collect
and organise in written and printed form, the conclusions and the grammar of
a way of looking which, for the sake of brevity, might usefully be referred to at
times as ‘the physiognomical eye’. In other words, what those books held frozen
in textual form was a systematized audio-visual scientia—the divine or magical
scientia of ‘physiognomy’, or, to use the more correct word to refer to it in its
theorized form, ‘physiognomony’.
³¹ E. S. Watson, Achille Bocchi and the Emblem Book as Symbolic Form (Cambridge, 1993), 37.
Introduction 19
Furthermore, it was a scientia that appealed to the innate physiognomical
consciousness of the human mind—a natural faculty of visual literacy referred
to in the first edition of Cole’s English dictionary (1696) as ‘physnomy’: ‘Phys-
iognomy: a discovering of men’s natures by their looks, also contracted to Phys-
nomy’. A minor character in Andromana; or, The Merchant’s Wife (1660), an
obscure Restoration play by an unknown author chosen at random, provides
an indication of this visual faculty of ‘physnomy’ ‘in action’. At one point,
when brought face-to-face with a rival, one character exclaims, ‘An honest fel-
low call you him? If he have not rogue writ in great letters in’s face, I have no
physnomy.’ An indication of how ‘books on physiognomy’ tried to identify,
indeed fuse, themselves with this innate faculty in the mind can be seen in one
late fifteenth-century ‘book on physiognomy’ which claimed to contain the
mystical wisdom of an illiterate shepherd: ‘Phyzonomy . . . ys oon scyens that
shyppars kennys for to wnderstod the inclynacyon naturel good ore wyl of men
& wemen & by sum syngys oonly in them oon for to be hold’. In both these
aforementioned cases, the term ‘physnomy’ or ‘phyzonomy’ should be read as
referring, not to the external signs, but to the internal, physiognomical instinct
(‘fisnomy’). In the case of the late fifteenth-century shepherd at least, this skill
was seen as a sign from God that he was blessed with this insight. It bore the
influence of the Arabic notion of ‘firāsa’, described by one thirteenth-century
Arabic physiognomist, Ibn Arabi (d. 1240), in the following way: ‘physiog-
nomical intuition is the light transmitted by the word of the Prophet, the
Leader, the Chosen Envoy’.³² For the hermeticist, one needed this inner light
in order to see physiognomically. Through this light, the characters that con-
stituted the words of the physiognomony printed on these pages had to be read,
not simply with the physical eye but with the eye of the imagination and, as we
shall see, the eye of memory.
In stressing the natural magic of its language, many of the authors of these
texts presented this printed physiognomical knowledge as an elaboration of
exactly this natural, potentially divine, fisnomic faculty in the reader’s mind. In
particular they saw this language, if not that innate faculty itself, as a living exe-
gesis of the distinctly visceral, visual wisdom and common sense inherent in
the aforementioned proverb known in various forms throughout early modern
Europe and used as the title of this book, ‘the eyes are the windows of the
soul’.³³ The passage from Marzio cited above is just one example. The proverb
³² The Kalender of Shepherdes, ed. H. O. Sommer (1892), sig. Kviv; M. J. Viguera, Dos cartillas de
fisiognómica (Madrid, 1977), 31.
³³ The Church Father Lactantius was often associated with this proverb, De opificio dei, in Patrologiae
Latina, ed. P. Migne, 217 vols. (Paris, 1844–55), VII, col. 38; Yates, Bruno, 7.
itself took many different forms. In French it was often said that ‘the eyes are
the mirror of the soul’. In 1504 the Italian professor of natural philosophy at
Padua, Achillini, cited the Epistola ad Theodosium for the seemingly common-
sense, but carefully worded, claim that that ‘the most intimate effect of the
mind is betrayed by the face, it is announced in the front as in a mirror and is
the image of the soul in the face’. In 1550, the Florentine humanist physician
Simone Porzio coined his own version of it: ‘the eyes are the lanterns of the
soul’. It was a common observation about the human eyes and face which was
found in a wide variety of respected literature, be it poetry or Scripture. In 1601,
in his book on the passions of the mind, the English Jesuit Thomas Wright
quoted Ovid’s poetry to the same effect: ‘wherefore a Poet said wisely how hard
it is, a fault with face not to bewray’. Wright complemented this by citing the
Proverbs of Solomon ‘Cor hominis immutat faciem, siue bona siue mala: The
heart of man changes his countenance, whether it be in good or euil’. He then
interwove this with more general proverbial wisdom:
according to the old proverb, Cor gaudens exhilerat faciem, a reioycing heart maketh
merry the face. And questionlesse wise men often, thorow the windowes of the face,
beholde the secrets of the heart, according to that saying of Salomon, Quomodo in aquis
resplendent vultus prospicientium, sic corda hominum manifesta sunt prudentibus: as the
faces of those which looke into waters shine vnto them, so the harts of men are mani-
fest vnto the wise: not that they can exactly understand the hearts which be inscrutable,
and onely open vnto God, but that by coniectures they may ayme well at them.³⁴
Whatever form it took, it was an observation based on the mysterious,

ineluctable fact that, somehow, the characters of the human eyes and face made
the realm of the ‘occult’ ‘manifest’. Such manifestations of the secrets of man’s
heart in his physiognomy were part of the numerous empirically evident, but
now uncapturable, ‘mira’ (as opposed to the miracles) of nature that one could
catch glimpses of everyday and everywhere. To physiognomists such as Della
Porta or Cardano, this was evidence of the ‘strange works of Nature’, a part of
the traditional area of natural philosophy which dealt with the issue of ‘natur-
al’, ‘preternatural’, or ‘magical’ (supernatural) causation. It was these phy-
siognomical signs transmitted so evidently to the senses that the natural
philosophers of this epoch-making period of ‘conceptual chaos’ and ‘categori-
cal revolution’ set themselves the task to explain. Was the anger or intelligence
emanating from a person’s eyes a prophetic sign of divine attributes, or merely
the mechanical product of the mixture of the ‘sublunary elements’ which con-
³⁴ Bartholomaeus Cocles, Chyromantie ac physionomie anastasis . . . (Bologna, 1504), sig. Aaiii; Simone
Porzio, De coloribus oculorum (Florence, 1550), 43; Thomas Wright, The passions of the minde in generall
(1601), 49–50.
Introduction 21
stituted man’s physiology? Were they simply a consequence of the perceptual
inaccuracy of the internal fisnomic sense itself through which they were expe-
rienced and perceived by the beholder?³⁵
To the visual literacy of those few early modern minds which had been
transformed by the learning of a textual literacy and were open to persuasion,
these ‘books on physiognomy’ offered to add a collection of authoritative,
normative physiognomonical theory which complemented, or competed
with, the physiognomical wisdom and knowledge embedded in the traditions
of Holy Scripture and oral folk-lore. It was in the midst of all of this that the
‘magical’ power of the intuitive, physiognomical intelligence that formed the
crossroads of their senses—their innate everyday-life ‘fisnomy’—was suspend-
ed as they made their way, literate and illiterate alike, through a predominant-
ly face-to-face society. One way in which the early modern hermetic mind
tried to systematize and make sense of this was through the metaphor of the
totality of inter-connected correspondences that existed between the ‘macro-
cosm’ (the entire universe) and the ‘microcosm’ (man). It was this hermetic sys-
tem that the English Neoplatonist Robert Fludd tried to visualize in the
frontispiece to his encyclopaedia (Illustration 6). Yet whether or not these
books contained traces of the ancient characters of the lost, universal, Adamic
physiognomony that could be recovered and efficaciously tapped through
the intricate pathways of the ‘occult’ hermetic labyrinth pictured by Fludd,
they certainly contained the macrocosmic physiognomony of a universal,
microcosmic fisnomy.
The aforementioned description of the art of physiognomy as a way of look-
ing needs to be emphasized from the outset in order to distinguish this study of
‘physiognomy’ from the recent trend for histories of ‘the body’. Physiognomi-
cal tracts certainly contain a great deal of information about how people under-
stood their own and other people’s bodies. As such, many assume that the
subject falls firmly within the post-modern realms of the history of corpo-
reality. However, this present work is not a ‘history of the body’. Nor is it
strictly speaking a close study of the changing understandings of the relation-
ship between the body and the soul. Medieval and early modern discussions of
the extent to which human beings and their alleged ‘free will’ were prisoners of
a divinely pre-programmed, physiologically determined ‘complexion’, or an
astrologically driven ‘inclination’, or debates about whether a person has some
sort of ‘biologically’ innate as opposed to a learned talent for a particular voca-
tion, are as important to understanding the intellectual, religious, social, and
³⁵ S. Clark, Thinking With Demons (Oxford, 1997), 251, 257, 263, 265.
6. The hermetic route from the fisnomy of the microcosm to the physiognomony of
the macrocosm, Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica,
physica atque technica historia, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), ii. De Macrocosmi Histo-
ria (frontispiece), 1. (Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Rés 107538 (1–3). Credit
photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.)
cultural history of the art of physiognomy as they are for understanding

contemporary debates about the nature and the working of human genes.
However, in this work, detailed investigations of those philosophical issues
are on the whole avoided, except for the light they bring to bear on a central
theme of this work—the way in which a hermetic understanding of physiog-
nomy, and the entire physics of the world that underpinned it, developed into
a ‘technique’ of self-transformation that was, in itself, an empirical experiment
in ‘applied physics’. By contrast, this study, like that hermetic technique, is
Introduction 23
an attempt to reverse the perspective on the history of physiognomy and,
approaching it through the history of reading, to posit that physiognomy as a
part of the history of sound and vision, or even a history of the efficacy of art
and poetry and music.³⁶
This ocular perspective is in part informed by what some historians call the
‘visual turn’ in contemporary historiography. Be that as it may, it is equally
based on the fact that early modern writers on the subject were themselves
familiar with the inherently visual nature of physiognomy. That innate visual-
ity of the subject might explain why, in 1444, one early Renaissance scribe tran-
scribed the word physiognomia as ‘visonomia’, just as it might clarify the form
of some of the many English variants of the word found in the Oxford English
Dictionary such as ‘vysonamy’, ‘visenomy’, ‘visiognomy’, and ‘visionogmi’. The
writer of one late fifteenth-century English manuscript introduced his tract on
physiognomy with the following words: ‘Here oues ceyteneu rewles of phisno-
my to knowe by onely thoght when men lokes on any man of what condicions
he es’. In 1550, the French author Antoine du Moulin made the connection
much more explicit, defining physiognomy as ‘the knowledge that one has of
the nature of each person by sight’.³⁷
Yet whilst this claim about the inherent visual nature of this ‘fisnomy’ needs
to be understood from the start, it also needs to be qualified. This is due to the
fact that an important element in the theory and practice of this art of phys-
iognomating was the character of the sound of the voice. Many authors of ‘trea-
tises on physiognomy’ followed the oldest Greek manuscript on the subject,
the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica, and included a section devoted to
the physiognomy of the voice. One seventeenth-century French author of an
unpublished ‘manuscript on physiognomy’ was sensitive enough to the sonic
qualities of physiognomy to have devoted an entire chapter to the physiogno-
my of silence. Furthermore, much evidence of the sonic aspect of physiogno-
my can be found beyond the pages of the ‘books on physiognomy’. Athanasius
Kircher, the seventeenth-century Jesuit priest-philosopher, professor of math-
ematics and physics at the Collegio Romano, and famous for his work on
hieroglyphics, provides one example. Kircher based a divinatory science on the
physiognomy of sound, or ‘phonocritics’, that he called ‘Phonocriticam, seu
Phonognomia’. A more practical example is that even complete blindness does
not appear to have prevented the tutor of the son of the seventeenth-century
English gentleman scholar Sir Kenelm Digby from physiognomating the
³⁶ B. Soldati, La poesia astrologica nel Quattrocento (Florence 1906, rep. 1986).
³⁷ London: British Library, MS Sloane 213, fol. 118v–119v; Antoine du Moulin, Physionomie naturelle
(Lyons, 1550), 13.
pupils under his supervision by the sound of their voices: ‘when he taught his
scholars to declaim, to represent a tragedy, or the like, he knew, by their voice,
whether they stood up or sat down, and all the different gestures and situations
of their bodies; so that they behaved themselves before him with the same
decency as if he had seen them perfectly’.³⁸
Even the most superficial glance at the canon of early modern European
‘books on physiognomy’ shows that, by the late seventeenth century, the sonic
aspect of physiognomy had begun to disappear from the printed treatises on
the subject. However, this was not a sign of its overall demise in the culture and
society beyond the pages of those books. Sound did not just suddenly and sim-
ply stop meaning something and transforming people, however mysteriously it
managed to do so in the first place. The eighteenth-century French materialist
philosopher and physician La Mettrie, author of L’homme machine, provides a
telling example of why not. As a prominent advocate of the modern, rational,
mechanical philosophy that came to characterize Enlightenment science, La
Mettrie is perhaps the last person historians might associate with the meta-
physics of the misleadingly labelled ‘occult sciences’ like physiognomy. Yet in
1749 this arch automaton himself claimed that ‘alongside the physiognomy, the
voice can help a Physician discover the character of his patients’. The fact that
La Mettrie’s diagnostic medical gaze was concerned with the ‘character’ of the
patient is significant enough for a physician at a time when learned medicine
had become more concerned with what the English physician Thomas Syden-
ham called the ‘face of the disease’ than with the physiognomy of the patient.
Even more striking is that La Mettrie, in his typically playful way, then
explicitly cited a passage from the aforementioned writings of Athanasius
Kircher:
but the surest way would be to make them sing; the various nuances of the voice do not
show themselves enough in talking; . . . But, you will say, what madness it is to make
the sick sing! . . . One can judge characters by their voice, which is, according to
Kircher, the first symbol of any character. Those people who have a high and strong
voice and who always want to make themselves heard above all others, ordinarily reveal
that they are endowed with the nature of the ass; they are indiscrete and petulant,
just as we know that asses are indiscrete and petulant. Bass voices, very low voices,
falsetto voices, or squeaky little voices appertain in the same way to different characters.
The brutal man never has a sweet voice, and it is rare that a piercing voice is not
caustic.³⁹
³⁸ Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, MS Fr. 19953, fol. 53v; Athanasius Kircher, Ars magna lucis et umbrae, 2
vols. (Rome, 1646), i. 14; G. Douglas, Authentic Anecdotes (1829), 53.
³⁹ Thomas Sydenham, Opera omnia medica (Geneva, 1696); Julien Jan Offray de la Mettrie, Caractères des
médecins (Paris, 1760), 97; Kircher, Ars magna, i. 144–6.
Introduction 25
As Sir Thomas Browne showed earlier, the sounds and visions of this early
modern physiognomical way of looking and listening were not only experi-
enced by people in the contemplation of the characters or ‘signatures’ of their
fellow human beings. Physiognomy also burst into life through a person’s con-
templation of the whole of nature’s natural bodies. In other words, physiogno-
my happened not only between people but also between people and nature,
and between people and visual and sonic representations of nature—even rep-
resentations of those natural philosophers who were issuing in a new concep-
tion of nature so different from the one that underpinned the ‘natural magic’ of
physiognomy. In a letter to Thomas Hobbes from his French secretary dated 11
July 1645, Samuel Sorbière told Hobbes that he had asked de Martel to send
him portraits of Hobbes, Gassendi, and Mersenne, ‘for I am moved and
impelled to be virtuous not only by writings but also by the faces of great men;
I feel, as it were, an emanation, a natural force which radiates from them to me’.
The Italian hermeticist Giordano Bruno, executed by the church for his
allegedly heretical Egyptian philosophy in 1600, would have claimed this as a
part of ‘magic’, an example of ‘the virtues which transmitted themselves from
subject to subject’. Some of them were manifest, such as heat and cold, whilst
others were ‘occult’ or hidden, ‘such as joy or sadness, desire or disgust, fear or
audacity . . . or those impressions produced by images thanks to the “intellec-
tual” faculty with which man is endowed.’ For Bruno, it was this magic that
was discernible in the way that ‘nature had imprinted in all things a sort of inte-
rior spirit (or, if one prefers, an internal sense) by which all species recognise
their most redoubtable enemy thanks to a sort of signature’.⁴⁰
These words of Giordano Bruno are evidence of the fact that, as instinctive
and as unscientifically subjective as such fisnomical experiences of nature may
have been to some natural philosophers, and still appear to art historians, in
other early modern eyes and ears it was a way of looking and listening that was
theoretically underpinned by an entire physics. Indeed, despite its much mis-
understood reputation both then and now as a ‘pseudo-science’ or a ‘natural
magic’, physiognomy, be it in its Neoplatonic or its Christian Aristotelian
form, was in fact one of the most sophisticated of sign theories of the early
modern period.⁴¹ The medical theories of the German physician Paracelsus,
what he called ‘Astronomia’ provide one early sixteenth-century example of the
theories built around this instinct.
⁴⁰ The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, ed. N. Malcolm, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1994), i. 123; Giordano Bruno,
De la magie, ed. D. Sonnier and B. Donné (Paris, 2000), 19–20.
⁴¹ I. Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 2002), ch. 8.
The Astronomia of Paracelsus was very different from the new astronomy for
which the Danish natural philosopher Tycho Brahe came to be most widely
known, notwithstanding Brahe’s interest in and sympathy with Paracelsian-
ism. In Paracelsus’s eyes, astronomy was a philosophy based on the knowledge
of the invisible or the ‘occult’ aspect of nature, the central concept of which was
‘gestin’, or ‘star’. This notion of ‘gestin’ referred to the fundamental sidereal
influence that, in Paracelsus’s understanding, pervaded and animated all mate-
rial things. ‘Gestin’ somehow animated the actual stars, the earth, the elements
and all its various bodies. At the same time, it was also the source of the ‘gestin’
or ‘star’ of man’s ‘inner light’, what Paracelsus also called a lumen naturae. It was
through this ‘inner light’ that man experienced and perceived the signs of all of
nature’s natural bodies—what Paracelsus called ‘signatum’. In Paracelsus’s the-
oretical system, signatum was one of the seven (sometimes Paracelsus said there
were nine) ‘religions’ (or ‘faculties’) that constituted his astronomia. The ‘reli-
gion’ of ‘signatum’ was constituted by three things: habitus (synonymous in
Paracelsus’s theories with what he sometimes called ‘proportion’); chiromancy;
and physiognomy.⁴² Paracelsus’s ‘gestin’ had striking parallels with Marsilio
Ficino’s notion of ‘spiritus’, just as his ‘signatum’ had with Ficino’s ‘religion of
the world’. It was in many ways the antithesis of the seventeenth-century mate-
rialism and ‘mechanical’ philosophy that came to dominate natural philosophy
in the wake of Descartes and a reinvigorated Lucretius, just as much as it
was the source of inspiration for the Romantic visions of a ‘re-enchanted’
world.
This ‘physics’ was the antithesis of that which Descartes was to use to under-
pin his understanding of the relationship between mind and body. For
Descartes followed in the wake of the tradition of people like the Montpellier
physician Jacques Fontaine. Following upon the anatomical work of Vesalius,
Fontaine, like many other physicians, tried to approach the epistemological
difficulties created by the occult qualities which the art of physiognomy some-
how made manifest by focusing his investigation on what he called the ‘subal-
ternate physics’ of physiognomy in terms of the ‘sublunary things’. That is to
say he took what were understood to be the four ‘principal qualities’ (hot, cold,
dry, and moist) and their secondary compounds, detached them from all astro-
logical influence, and used the ordinary qualities involved with the Galenic
doctrine of the temperament (based on the workings of the four humours) and
Vesalian anatomical structures to explain the nature of the soul. William
Harvey’s famous discovery of the circulation of the blood was a radical break
⁴² Paracelse. De la magie, ed. L. Braun (Strasburg, 1998), 18; Paracelsus, Opera (Strasburg, 1603), ii. 365.
Introduction 27
with this sort of explanation, but primarily in terms of the actual working of
the body’s mechanics, not the basic, sublunary framework itself.⁴³
In his Encyclopaedia (1630), Johannes Alsted proposed a very different theo-
rized physiognomy, which aimed at systematizing and understanding the same
phenomenon of magic described by Giordano Bruno. In Alsted’s system of nat-
ural philosophy, physiognomy was the seventh part of physics, defined univer-
sally as ‘that which explains the nature of natural bodies from certain signs’.
Physiognomy was that part of physics which provided ‘a way of knowing the
internal affections of natural bodies through signs’.⁴⁴ As for the Italian philoso-
pher Giordano Bruno, those physiognomical signs were to be found through-
out the natural world, not just on the human body—from the size, shape, and
colour of an apparently lifeless stone or a person’s motionless foot, to the light,
the colour, and the motion of the natural bodies in the sky or the way a person
walked. In Alsted’s universe, there was not only a human physiognomy (what
Alsted called physiognomia anthropologia), there was a celestial physiognomy, a
meteorological physiognomy, a mineralogical physiognomy, a botanical phys-
iognomy, and a theriological (animal/zoological) physiognomy. Indeed, the
implications this had for the literature and the ‘psychology’ of the period can be
seen in the fact that there was even a physiognomy of the metaphysical arche-
types of man which Alsted called physiognomia orta. The visual field of this part
of the physiognomical eye involved the contemplation of the range of human
‘characters’, from the poet to the coward and from the hero to the gambler. It
was these ‘characters’ that constituted the innate types or forms of the human
condition so fundamental, not only to the workings of the physiognomical eye
but also to the history of poetry from Chaucer to Blake, as well as the history of
theatre, be it the stock characters of the Italian commedia dell’arte or the epoch-
making acting technique of the eighteenth-century English actor David
Garrick. In the eyes of many, these characters were understood within the
natural magic of the mechanics of the celestial influence of the planets and
the stars.
‘Books on physiognomy’ were marginal in early modern libraries and in
early modern culture more generally. Physiognomical perception might seem
primitive to art critics, and the subject of physiognomy may seem recherché to
contemporary historians and readers. However, in early modern eyes, whether
they could read books or not, ‘physiognomy’ was a central, if not an all-
pervasive phenomenon of their encounter with the universe. One late
sixteenth-century English schoolbook defined physiognomy very simply as
⁴³ Jacques Fontaine, Phisiognomia Aristotelis (Paris, 1611), 7, 71.
⁴⁴ Johannes Alsted, Encyclopaedia septem tomis distincta, 4 vols. (Herborn, 1630), ii. 767–80.
‘knowledge by the visage’.⁴⁵ For all that the ‘characters’ to which it gave rise
may have been ungraspable, ephemeral phenomena intuited in the blink of
an eye, just how ubiquitous was this ‘knowledge by the visage’ can be seen in
the fact that everyone and everything under the early modern sun had a ‘phys-
iognomy’ by which it could be known—including the sun itself. In Alsted’s sys-
tem, this was more than what we today understand by a metaphor. For Alsted,
the contemplation of the signatures of these potentially efficacious physiog-
nomies of the macrocosm and the microcosm together constituted what he
understood to be the seventh part of theoretical physics, something he called
‘collative physics, or, physiognomy’.
Notwithstanding the specificity of the intellectual parallels of Alsted’s
physics with the Paracelsian ‘doctrine of signatures’, or Ficino’s spiritus, or
Bruno’s ‘soul of the universe’, or the even older notion of the ‘book of nature’,
what is important to note here is that it was this physiognomony, this ‘collative
physics’, that the 18-year-old Samuel Jeake was reading in Saunders’s ‘book on
physiognomy’ in September 1670. For at the very same time, it was this ‘colla-
tive physics’, and as such an entire way of looking at and listening to, indeed
being with, the world that was being eroded or at least transfigured under the
growing influence and establishment of another, allegedly more rational, type
of physics perpetuated by the seventeenth-century’s new natural philosophers.
The advocates of that new natural philosophy were themselves by no means
blind to the sounds and visions of this physiognomical universe. As Sorbière
and La Mettrie showed, they too had fisnomy. However, the knowledge with
which that innate physiognomical intelligence (their fisnomy) provided them
was an aspect of their encounter with nature that they could not fit into their
rational, scientific, framework. In other words, unlike Paracelsus and Alsted,
they could not get from fisnomy to physiognomony. One such was Robert
Boyle.
In 1684, while contemplating water, Boyle had something of a physiognom-
ical epiphany:
And I have sometimes fancy’d, that there may be a kind of Physiognomy of many, if not
most, other natural Bodies as well as of humane faces, whereby an attentive and expe-
rienc’d considerer may himself discern in them many instructive things, that he cannot
so declare to another man, as to make him discern them too.⁴⁶
Boyle evidently felt the visual impulse of his physiognomical intuition. Yet,
despite its evident empirical outer garments, the knowledge or truth offered by
⁴⁵ Edmund Coote, The English schoole-maister (1596).
⁴⁶ Robert Boyle, Short memoirs for the natural experimental history of mineral waters (Oxford, 1684), 46–7.
Introduction 29
this physiognomical discovery seemed the very antithesis of the objective of the
new ‘science’. These physiognomical sensations, which Boyle experienced in
his encounter with the faces and the world of nature around him, provided him
with ‘many instructive things’. However, they could not be made into scienti-
fic knowledge because he could not demonstrate or make manifest to another
person the knowledge and insight those ‘instructive things’ provided so as to
make that other person see them in the same way that Boyle thought he could
incontrovertibly demonstrate a vacuum to an audience of invited eyewit-
nesses.⁴⁷ And yet, ironically, it was the physiognomical experience and inter-
pretation of the honourable and trustworthy presence of the physiognomy of
Boyle’s persona that contributed to the trust and belief he inspired in the eye-
witnesses to his distinctly theatrical experiments. The words of one of his con-
temporaries, Izaak Walton, echoing the aforementioned Samuel Sorbière, are
again evidence of how this also extended to the contemplation of their
portraits: ‘the beholder . . . shall here see the Authors Picture in a natural
dress, which ought to beget faith in what is spoken: for, he that wants skill
to deceive, may safely be trusted’. As one contemporary historian of the
period has written, ‘the presentation of self as modest, sober, restrained, toler-
ant, and unconcerned for fame was considered effectively to enhance the cred-
ibility of what one claimed’.⁴⁸ Or, as one of the two old proverbs in terms of
which the entire history of physiognomy could be conceived said, fronti multa
fides—‘much faith in the face’; the other being fronti nulla fides—‘no faith in
the face’.
One result of this reconsideration of man’s physiognomical sensibility was a
change in the intellectual status of physiognomy among the opinions of the
seventeenth century’s most established natural philosophers. Yet that does not
mean that the history of physiognomy can be understood by talking of it in
terms of the decline of an antiquarian ‘superstition’ and the rise of a progressive
science.⁴⁹ The intellectual light and ‘empirical’ experiences of the natural
magic of the ‘occult’ physiognomical universe were not simply and universally
obscured and numbed by the luminosity and mechanistic logic of the new ris-
ing sun of rationality. Natural philosophers like Boyle only distanced their sci-
entific selves from a certain type of physiognomy, as the more hermetic Bruno
and Kircher did so themselves. Locke could still see and sense the fear in a
pupil’s eyes. In his writings on education Locke suggested that sheer wilfulness
and obstinacy in a child was to be met with whipping and admonition, ‘till the
⁴⁷ S. Schaffer and S. Shapin, Leviathan and the Air-Pump (Princeton, NJ, 1985).
⁴⁸ S. Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago, 1994), 221–2.
⁴⁹ C. Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton (Cambridge, 1982), 1.
Impression of it on the Mind were found legible in the Face, Voice and
Submission of the Child’.⁵⁰
Indeed, those new natural philosophers who did reject ‘physiognomy’ out of
hand as superstitious rubbish were contradicting part of the revolutionary
intellectual vision of one of their mentors, Francis Bacon. In his scheme of
things, as it would later be for Kant, physiognomy, for all it was an aspect of
‘natural magic’, was a genuine portion of the ‘continent of natural philosophy’,
a genuine knowledge or ‘erkennen’ as Kant called it. It may not have been a sci-
ence according to the new notion of what a science should or could be, but it
was not to be amputated and discarded. How could anyone ever amputate or
discard anything as simple and basic as wondering about the weather? In
Bacon’s eyes, physiognomy, like its sister art the interpretation of dreams, ‘have
of later time been used to be coupled with superstitious and fantastical arts, yet
being purged and restored to their true state, they have both of them a solid
ground in nature’.⁵¹ In Bacon’s opinion, one feature of that restoration
required an investigation of the relationship between body and mind which
physiognomy self-evidently articulated, less in terms of ‘discovery’ and more in
terms of the new sense of a non-astrological, environmental, and cultural
causality of ‘impression’—as evident in the passage from Locke just cited.
Not that the explanations offered by such investigations can unproble-
matically be called correct. Whilst Bacon would not have seen Samuel Jeake’s
shortness as a sign of anger or impatience, his own more environmental,
physiological explanation would have raised as many questions as it answered.
Notwithstanding, this environmental approach gradually gave rise to a new
form of ‘natural history’. Robert Boyle’s model for writing a natural history
of a county or region suggested first taking into account the climate, followed
by the Hippocratic triptych of airs, waters, and places. Then
the inhabitants themselves are to be consider’d, both Natives and Strangers, that have
been long settled there; particularly their Stature, Shape, Features, Strength, Ingenuity,
Dyet, Inclination, that seem not due to Education. As to their Women, their Fruitful-
ness or Barreneness, their easie or hard Labour, with their Exercises and Dyet; the
Diseases both Men and Women are subject to, peculiar to themselves, compared with
their Dyet, Air, &c. that do influence them.⁵²
Yet just how one was to differentiate between those aspects of their personae
‘that seem not due to Education’ Boyle did not state. Physiognomically speak-
⁵⁰ W. A. L. Vincent, The Grammar Schools (1969), 64.

⁵¹ Francis Bacon, Collected Works, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, 7 vols. (1857–9), III.i, 368.
⁵² Robert Boyle, General heads for the natural history of a country (1692), 9.
Introduction 31
ing, whilst these histories do not appear to have ever confined one particular
form of the eyebrow with one particular moral characteristic and one particu-
lar region, none the less, these allegedly scientific investigations were repeating
at the level of natural history the sort of ‘loose’, physiognomical connection
found in astrology or humoral theory and their respective connections between
a handful of physical features and a handful of vaguely related metaphysical
features. Moreover, those investigations were the early modern predecessors of
Darwinian evolutionism.
If the latter is an intimation of the contribution of the role of thinking about
physiognomy in the birth of ‘modern science’, a more ‘esoteric’ form of phys-
iognomy can also be said to have contributed to the ongoing definition of the
parameters of that developing scientific knowledge of nature. For side by side
with the developments in the new natural philosophy, there was a continuous
and developing conception of the more Neoplatonic hermetic physiognomical
way of beholding the world and its ‘occult’ properties. These very different
forms of physiognomy can be traced across the entire early modern European
period: be it through seventeenth-century Cambridge Platonists like Henry
More; or the religious mystics of the post-Reformation period, such as the
German mystic Jacob Boehme, the Swedish mystic Emmanuel Swedenborg,
and on the eve of the French Revolution and end of the early modern period,
the Swiss Pietist minister and physiognomist Johannes Caspar Lavater.⁵³
These apparent mysticisms should not be thought of as purely ‘theological’
and examined as if they were detached from more rational scientific inquiry. In
fact, even the so-called ‘scientific’ endeavours in this period were themselves
still founded upon primarily religious notions. Indeed, with the dawn of
Romanticism, both the sensitivity to, and the intellectual category of, the
‘physiognomy’ of a natural body found themselves once more on the horizon
of religious, aesthetic, and scientific sensitivities and investigations. Lavater
himself asked rhetorically ‘is not all nature physiognomy?’ The influential
investigations into natural history by the famous German natural philosopher
Alexander von Humboldt furnish just one notable example of a post-Baconian
natural history in which a concept of physiognomy had gradually been culti-
vated. In his famous book Lavater had expressed a hope that enlightened sci-
entific progress would one day establish a scientific physiognomy which would
be able ‘to calculate and determine the forms of heads according to the princi-
ple of Physics and Mathematics’. Physiognomy, as we have seen, had long been
linked to mathematics via Pythagorean number mysticism and Kabbalistic
⁵³ A. Koyré, La philosophie de Jacob Boehme (Paris, 1929); Jan Hall, ‘In Swedenborg’s Labyrinth,’ unpub-
lished Ph.D. thesis (University of Uppsala, Sweden, 1995), pt. III.
numerology very different from the concept of mathematics developed in the
early modern Europe of Galileo. Yet even this new mathematics did not mean
the end of a mathematical physiognomy. In fact, in the work of the Dutch
anatomist Petrus Camper (1722–89), Lavater’s dream of the mathematicization
of physiognomy had already begun.⁵⁴
What all of this shows is that conflicts over the allegedly mystical language
of ‘physiognomy’, as well as the claims made for it being the original language
of man before the Fall, were part of the history of the religious turmoil of early
modern Europe. Debates over the nature of physiognomical knowledge were
part of the history of the conflicting natural philosophies of the period. Differ-
ent understandings of the ‘physiognomy of man’, the ‘physiognomy of nature’,
and the ‘physiognomy of representations of nature’ constitute a hitherto unex-
amined element of early modern moral philosophy, natural history, and art
history. Historiographically speaking, all of these form part of a number of
modern grand narratives, be it the Weberian notion of the ‘disenchantment of
the world’; Thomas Kuhn’s notion of a ‘paradigm shift’ in science from a qual-
itative to a mathematized and probabilistic approach to nature; Foucault’s
argument about an epistemic shift from a grid of correspondences to a theory
of representation; Arthur Lovejoy’s famous study of the ‘great chain of being’;
Daston and Park’s notion of the cyclical life of ideas; or Warburg’s ‘historical
psychology of human expression’. What is being emphasized in this study is
that physiognomy is a subject that has to be understood in terms of the coexis-
tence and the reciprocal relationship of the rational and the magical, and in
terms of the innovative role that investigations into the so-called ‘magical’ and
‘occult’ played in the birth of modern art and science.⁵⁵
For all the seeming marginality and recherché nature of the subject of phys-
iognomy, its history provides a micro-arena in which were played out some of
the most fundamental religious, philosophical, artistic, and cultural changes
that occurred between the autumn of the Middle Ages and the dawn of
Romanticism. Indeed, as this study will try to indicate, not the least of those
transformations was the role of physiognomy in the debate about the changing
and changeable nature of the human self. As one author of a book on physiog-
nomy put it: ‘my end aimed at herein is . . . to inform the Reader of that
⁵⁴ J. C. Lavater, Essays on Physiognomy, 3 vols. (1789), i. 28, ii. 133; Petrus Camper, Dissertation physique
(Utrecht, 1791).
⁵⁵ M. Weber, ‘Science as Vocation’, in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth
and C. Wright Mills (New York, 1946), 155; T. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn.
(Chicago, 1970); M. Foucault, The Order of Things (1974); A. O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being (Cam-
bridge, Mass., 1936); L. Daston and K. Park, Wonder and the Order of Nature, 1150–1750 (New York, 1998).
Introduction 33
ancient adage Nosce teipsum, of which Plato affirms, Difficillima res est, seipsum
cognoscere [it is the most difficult thing, to know oneself ]. For most men are a
terra incognita [unknown earth] to themselves’.⁵⁶ That this continued to be so
throughout and beyond the period dealt with in this study can be seen in the
work of the early nineteenth-century scientists Gall and Spurzheim. For their
early nineteenth-century phrenology or ‘physiognomical system’ was nothing
other than an attempt by modern science to redefine the human self:
This system is commonly considered as one according to which it is possible to discov-
er the particular actions of individuals: it is treated as an art of prognostication. Such,
however, is not the aim of our enquiries: we never treat of determinate actions: we con-
sider only the faculties man is endowed with, the organic parts, by means of which
these faculties are manifested, and the general indications which they present. The
object of this new psychological system, therefore, is to examine the structures, the
functions and the external indications of the nervous system in general, and of
the brain in particular. Thus does this science especially contribute to the knowledge
of human nature.⁵⁷
However, it was not simply the materiality of the self that was being redefined,
it was also the metaphysical side of the self. As we saw earlier, the physiog-
nomical self in the work of Alsted was structured by the ‘characters’ that
constituted what he called physiognomia orta. In the work of the early
nineteenth-century scientist Alexander Walker, Physiognomy Founded on
Physiology (1834), those ‘characters’ had been replaced by what he called ‘the 5
Principal Varieties of the Human Species’.
Yet, despite the continuous tradition of this physiognomical view of the
‘occult’ properties of man and nature in the early modern period, and notwith-
standing its coexistence and constant interplay with the ever-evolving rational
and scientific conception of the same man in the same universe, Boyle’s afore-
mentioned reaction to his own physiognomical sensibility is none the less an
indication of a turning-point. That turning-point could be helpfully, if too
neatly, characterized as the moment when physiognomy was shifted out of the
realm of reason and into, temporarily at least, the realm of ‘curiosity’. The sub-
ject of physiognomy had traditionally formed part of the long-standing inter-
est in ‘secrets’ and problemata out of which this later interest in ‘curiosities’
developed. Early modern authors of ‘books on physiognomy’ often introduced
their subject in terms of the tradition of its being some sort of marvel or curios-
ity. The standard way of doing this was to speak of the wonderment of the vari-
ety and infinite particularity of faces in the world, of the fact that there were no
⁵⁶ Saunders, Physiognomie (1653), sig. b2v.
⁵⁷ The Physiognomical System of Drs. Gall and Spurzheim, 2nd edn. (1815), 1.
two faces in the world which were exactly alike. Indeed, for Athanasius Kircher,
as for Giordano Bruno, this issue of the infinite variety of different faces, and
the particularity of each person this fact expressed, underpinned the falsity of
certain forms of the scientia of physiognomy.⁵⁸
None the less, in Robert Boyle’s eyes, for all there was something in phys-
iognomy, it seemed to be an inexplicable aspect of nature. To that extent it at
least deserved the then still respectable intellectual status of ‘curiosity’—at least
until things were settled by those who had taken it upon themselves to do so.
Boyle’s observation about the physiognomy of water was a sign that the ratio-
nality underpinning the new scientific investigations was refocusing the natur-
al philosophical gaze. As the tangible realms of the seemingly more everyday
experiences of the physiognomical consciousness discernible with the naked
eye receded from its sight, so an entire, hitherto invisible, world was made
increasingly more visible with the aid of the microscope, and its ‘magical’
workings were made increasingly more intelligible by the new mechanical
philosophy.
In fact, we can go further than this and say that, as Boyle’s use of the term
‘fancy’ intimates, the shifting of physiognomical knowledge—along with the
hermetic view of nature with which it had come to be associated—from
the realms of ‘reason’ to the realms of ‘curiosity’ was only a temporary stop on
the way to their being permanently shifted into what was for many the more
disreputable realm of the ‘imagination’—that is until the Romantic poets and
painters made the imagination respectable once again, and Romantic scientists
tried to conquer the hitherto unmanageable realms of physiognomy, despite
Kant’s warnings. In his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, Kant’s
explanation of why physiognomy, whilst it was a part of erkennen, could never
become a science is something that Boyle himself may have been able to accept:
If we are supposed to put our trust in someone, no matter how highly he comes rec-
ommended to us, we first look him in the face, especially in the eyes, so as to search out
what we can expect from him. This is a natural impulse, and his repugnant or attractive
air decides on our choice or makes us suspicious even before we have inquired about his
morals. So it is incontestable that there is a characterisation by physiognomy. But it can
never become a science, because the peculiarity of a human form, which points to
certain inclinations or powers of the person under observation, cannot be grasped
through conceptual description but only by intuitive illustration and presentation, or
⁵⁸ Pompeo Gaurico, De sculptura liber (Antwerp, 1609), 65; Hajek, Aphorismorum metoposciporum, sig
Aii; Giordano Bruno, Opere Italiane ed. E. Canone, 4 vols. (Florence, 1999), 1231–4; Oeuvres Complètes, VI
Cabale du Chevale pegaséen, trans. T. Dagron (Paris, 1994), 160; Kircher, Ars Magna, II.i, 96; Clark, Demons,
267 ff.
Introduction 35
by an imitation of it. This is how the human form in all its varieties, each of which
is supposed to point to a particular inner quality within the man, is displayed to
judgement.⁵⁹
This epistemological realignment of an ontological, physiognomical, experi-

ence—of the self and the physiognomical universe of which it was the
centre—is what underlies the more wide-ranging ‘shift’ that will be alluded
to throughout this book as the change from praying to playing.
Physiognomy in Libraries
As ‘unbookish’ as the subject ultimately is, much of this present monograph
will focus on a very specific form of physiognomy—physiognomy in books
(physiognomony). However, rather than being an intellectual history of the
different forms of physiognomy presented by the authors of those books, this
study will be based on the following, more anthropologically oriented, ques-
tion: what exactly was the place of the aforementioned common canon of
‘books on physiognomy’ in the reading (and visual) culture of early modern
Europe? As will become evident, answering that question provides an insight
into how this physiognomical way of ‘reading’ the universe functioned in
society and culture at large beyond, but not always entirely independent of
the books on the subject.
Indeed, even before we open a single ‘book on physiognomy’, the libraries in
which those books were placed can tell us much about the history of physiog-
nomy in early modern reading culture. The French historian Daniel Roche
once asked a distinctly physiognomical question about a library. It is a question
in which literary historians will hear an echo of the contemporary debate about
‘intentionality’ and the ‘death of the author’: ‘is a library the state of a soul?’⁶⁰
Of course, not everything under the early modern sun was to be found in a
book or a library, as the innately visual and sonic aspects of ‘physiognomy’
indicate. None the less, the contents of a library, just as much as its form, can
reveal much about the mental universe of its owners, as well as the universe in
which they thought they lived.
Samuel Jeake’s father, being a methodical man, made a ‘register’ of all the
books in his library—organized, as his modern mathematical inclination
would have it, according to the new-fangled, mathematical, notion of ‘size’.
⁵⁹ Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. M. J. Gregor (The Hague, 1974),
161.
⁶⁰ D. Roche, ‘Un Savant et Sa Bibliothèque au XVIIIe siècle’, Dix-Huitième Siècle, 1 (1969), 44–88.
That register may provide little idea of how the Jeake library looked or what
specific books from his collection Jeake senior actually opened and when.
However, its recent editors have described it as ‘one of the most remarkable
library catalogues to survive from the early modern period . . . remarkable for
the view of Jeake’s mental world revealed by its content’.⁶¹ As the following
brief analysis of five different early modern libraries will reveal, Samuel Jeake
was not unusual in having some ‘books on physiognomy’ in his library. In fact,
these five libraries can be used as a microcosm of the changing place of ‘books
on physiognomy’ in some quite specific areas of early modern reading culture.
Taken together, the changes which they reveal add further support to the argu-
ment put forward in this study that the place of physiognomy in the human
mind was shifted from reason to imagination, and that the nature of reading it
in books shifted from praying to playing.
Take, for example, the Italian Renaissance scribe Laurentius Benincontri,
who finished transcribing a manuscript on the art of physiognomy for the
Medici library on 10 May 1477. It was bound with other works on astrology and
divination written by Alcabitius, the tenth-century Arab astrologer (d. 967),
one of the most famous of astrologers in medieval Europe, whose works had
long been used to teach astronomy at medieval universities.⁶² Today, from the
‘tavoletta’ (tablet of contents) attached to the side of the ‘pluteus’ (reading
bench) designed for the library by Michelangelo in 1571, one can still see that
this manuscript was chained to the bench marked ‘Philosophi Latini’. More
significant is the fact that it was chained alongside two other works which con-
tained physiognomy. The first of those was a fifteenth-century manuscript of
Albertus Magnus’s Opera omnia. The other was a fifteenth-century manuscript
version of a work of Arabic mysticism thought at the time to be by Aristotle, the
Liber de secretis secretorum. Even more to the point for this study of the
influence of Neoplatonism on the art of physiognomy is that all of these works
were chained next to Marsilio Ficino’s epoch-making Neoplatonic hermetic
writings.⁶³
In 1580, over a century after Benincontri had transcribed that manuscript,
and around the same time as it was being rebound by the Medicis and placed
in their newly designed Laurenziana, Gabriel Harvey (1550?–1630), the English
writer and friend of Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser (1552/3–99), described
the libraries and reading habits of ‘owr vulgar Astrologers’, especially those he
termed ‘Cunning men or Artsmen’:
⁶¹ Jeake, A Radical’s Books, p. xiv.
⁶² See Statuti delle Università e dei Collegi dello Studio Bolognese, ed. C. Malagola (Bologna, 1888), 276.
⁶³ Florence: Bibliotheca Medicea Laurenziana Ms Plut. XXIX.3, fols. 59r–61v.
Introduction 37
I have heard sum of them name Jon de indagine. Theise be theire great masters: & this
in a manner theire whole librarie . . . Erra Pater, their Hornebooke. The Shepherds
Kalendar, their primer. The Compost of Ptolomeus, their Bible. Arcandum, their newe
Testament. The rest, with Albertus secrets, & Aristotles problems Inglished, their great
Doctours, & wonderfull Secreta secretorum.
All but one of the texts mentioned by Harvey contained physiognomy, two of
them were in the Laurenziana in Florence in 1571, and three of them were on
the late seventeenth-century shelves of Samuel Jeake’s library. Hence, a cen-
tury after Ficino’s Neoplatonic hermeticism began to infuse understanding of
‘physiognomy’, sixteenth-century ‘books on physiognomy’ had become the
Bible and New Testament for English ‘artsmen’ and ‘cunning men’. Two cen-
turies afterwards they were still being read by English protestant merchants.
As scathing as Harvey’s remarks might at first appear, it was the quality of the
astrology that those works contained of which he was critical rather than the
fact that they contained astrology and physiognomy per se. Like many other
Christians, Harvey was a deeply religious advocate of the much more sophisti-
cated physiognomical astrology found in the writings of the eminent Italian
Renaissance astrologer to the pope, Lucas Gaurico (1476–1558). Lucas
Gaurico’s own brother, the poet Pompeo Gaurico, had originally synthesized
this hermetically influenced language of physiognomy with his ideas on sculp-
ture first published in Florence in 1504.⁶⁴ Lucas Gaurico in turn incorporated
physiognomy into his astrology, and later edited a collection of expositions of
physiognomical doctrine that included his brother’s writings. Indeed, Harvey
admitted that ‘my [method of ] physical prediction carefully corrected consists
as much in stoicheology [the physics of the elements] and especially in phys-
iognomy as in planetology or horoscopy’. In that sense, Harvey was similar to
the Danish theologian Niels Hemmingsen, who included physiognomy in
his understanding of what were ‘natural predictions’, as did Cardano, who
described physiognomy as one the most pre-eminent of the three forms of
natural prediction, indeed of all divination, in as far as it was approached with
prudence.⁶⁵
If these libraries and book owners provide an indication of just how seri-
ously the natural magic of physiognomy was taken by the most learned, rea-
soning, and religious of Renaissance minds during the course of the sixteenth
century, the library of Sir Isaac Newton provides us with an exemplary
⁶⁴ Luca Gaurico (ed.), Aristotelis physiognomia adamantio interprete (Bologna, 1551); Pompeo Gaurico, De
sculptura (Florence, 1504).
⁶⁵ V. F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey (Oxford, 1979), 168–9, fn. 58; Clark, Demons, 171; Girolamo Cardano,
Opera omnia, 5 vols. (Lyon, 1663), i. 144.
indication of how the place of this canon of physiognomical treatises in early
modern reading practices had changed by the late seventeenth/early eighteenth
century. On 31 August 1726, shortly before his death, Sir Isaac Newton was
interviewed by his nephew John Conduitt (1688–1737). During that conversa-
tion Newton told his interlocutor about a book on astrology he had purchased
from the midsummer fair at Stourbridge in the summer of 1663 when still a
young student at Cambridge. Newton allegedly said that it was the incompre-
hensibility of that book which convinced him of ‘ “the vanity & emptiness of
the pretended science of Judicial astrology” ’ and impelled him to study the
books on geometry and calculus by Euclid and Descartes. It is not known for
certain to which book Newton was referring. One of the books on astrology in
Newton’s private library was an octavo entitled Palmistry dated the very same
year as Newton’s purchase at Stourbridge fair, 1663.⁶⁶ That Palmistry was actu-
ally a distilled version of the same ‘treatise on physiognomy’ by the same
Richard Saunders that young Samuel Jeake had taken from his father’s library
in September 1670. Newton may not have owned the larger, more sophisticat-
ed work by Saunders. However, curiously enough, he did have a 1662 edition
of the book from which Saunders had originally plagiarized most of his mater-
ial, Jean Belot’s Oeuvres.
An indication of just how deeply embedded Newton’s mind was in the con-
templation of nature’s more ‘occult’ properties can be gained by looking at the
rest of the books in his library. There were many other works that were, intel-
lectually speaking, closely related to Belot’s Kabbalistic physiognomy. For
example, Newton also owned a copy of the Harmonie mystique (1636), written
by the French physician David Laigneau, who was himself the author of a tract
on physiognomy.⁶⁷ Newton owned a 1651 edition of a work entitled Natural
Magic, an English translation of a text written by the famous Italian physiogn-
omist Giovanni Battista Della Porta. Moreover, besides the large quantity of
the writings of Paracelsus, and an evident interest in the wisdom of the ‘occult’
properties of natural phenomena which permeated Thomas Vaughan’s
Anthroposophia theomagica (1650), Newton also owned a copy of John Evelyn’s
Numismata (1697), which, intriguingly for a Master of the Mint, also included
a curious ‘digression on physiognomy’.⁶⁸
Notwithstanding the relatively poor quality of astrological theory in
Saunders’s Palmistry, Newton’s attitude should not be seen as a sign of the gen-
⁶⁶ Richard Saunders, Palmistry, the secrets thereof disclosed (1663); R. S. Westfall, Never at Rest (Cambridge,
1980), 88 and 98; J. R. Harrison, The Library of Isaac Newton (Cambridge, 1978), 232.
⁶⁷ David Laigneau, Traicté de la saignée contre le vieil erreur d’Erasistrate (Paris, 1635).
⁶⁸ Newton’s Library, 72, 98, 174, 176, 209–10, and 220.
Introduction 39
eral ‘decline’ or the imminent demise of both astrology and physiognomy by
the late seventeenth century, even in the minds of the new natural philosophers
who were constructing the new scientific universe. Newton’s ‘books on phys-
iognomy’ are better understood as an aspect of his interest in alchemy, and as
an example of the ongoing reconfiguration of physiognomy and the physiog-
nomic in the aforementioned passage of physiognomy from the realm of
Renaissance reason and genuine natural philosophical investigation into the
more enlightened realm of an inexplicable ‘curiosity’ of nature.
The library of another of the Enlightenment’s most famous scientists,
Albrecht von Haller, the eighteenth-century Swiss physiologist, provides a con-
venient late eighteenth-century example to contrast with Ficino, Harvey,
Jeake, and Newton—this time taken from the very eve of the publication of
what became one of the most widely known books on physiognomy and the
work with which this present study terminates, Lavater’s four-volumed and
lavishly illustrated Physiognomische Fragmente, zur Beförderung der Mensch-
enkenntniss und Menschenliebe (Physiognomical Fragments for the Promo-
tion of the Love and Understanding of Mankind) (Leipzig and Winterthur,
1775–78). Indeed, in Haller’s library one can discern several aspects of the
multi-faceted history of physiognomy in the early modern period, be it the
shift from the realm of ‘curiosity’ to the realm of the imagination; from ‘science’
to poetry; from theology to entertainment; or, in other words, the shift from
praying to playing.
Like all of the aforementioned collections, Haller’s huge personal library
contained the same physiognomical writings of the same Johannes de Indagine
that Samuel Jeake—and Gabriel Harvey’s cunning men—had been reading
during the course of the previous two centuries. Haller did not possess the
Kabbalistic Belot or the Paracelsian Saunders, but his copy of Indagine took the
form of an early eighteenth-century edition of a multi-authored work on phys-
iognomy originally compiled by Guilelmus Gratarolus, a sixteenth-century
Paracelsian-influenced Swiss professor, natural philosopher, and physician. In
addition to this, Haller also had a copy of Helvetius’s Paracelsian-influenced
Amphiteatrum physiognomiae medicum, as well as an edition of Della Porta’s De
humana physiognomia. Haller may not have owned the Kalendar of Shepherds or
the Secreta secretorum that were the Bible of sixteenth-century ‘cunning men’,
yet he was obviously familiar with them. In the bibliography of over 50,000
anatomical and physiological works that the famous anatomist compiled,
Haller thought and understood enough of the Arabic-influenced mystical wis-
dom of the shepherds to list the Compost des bergiers under the heading of works
he labelled ‘Arabiste’.
Of course, it could be argued that these latter works were, in Haller’s mind,
simply the bibliographical equivalent of flies in amber. To the famous physiol-
ogist they may have been nothing more than an antiquated aspect of the histo-
ry of the subject in which he was evidently so interested. His interest may have
gone no further than the then fashionable Lamarckian desire to ‘classify’ them
correctly. Yet, that very classification was a sign in itself of a change in the ongo-
ing reinterpretation and understanding of physiognomy and the place of
‘books on physiognomy’ in one distinctly academic part of the ever-evolving
reading culture of the early modern period. Indeed, Haller’s other ‘books on
physiognomy’ are evidence of just such an enlightened, rationalized, and
medicalized reworking of the subject. This is evident in such works as
Giovanni Battista Fantoni’s Observationes anatomico-medicae (1713), Johann
Hieronymus Kniphof ’s 1737 discussion of the place of physiognomy in med-
ical semiotics, or Johann Oosterdijk Schacht’s 1752 inaugural lecture on med-
ical physiognomy. These works are once again timely reminders of Charles
Webster’s observation that the history of physiognomy is not one of decline of
an ancient superstition and the rise of an allegedly progressive science, but an
ongoing metamorphosis and continual re-conception of what physiognomy
was understood to be.⁶⁹
Haller may have been happy enough to possess a copy of Von der Physiog-
nomik (1772) by the famous Swiss ‘physiognomist’ Lavater. However, his read-
ing of that book was undoubtedly influenced by the fact that he both knew and
corresponded with its author. In fact, Haller’s correspondence with his friend
Charles Bonnet is interspersed with comments that provide a very different
picture of what Haller actually thought of the sort of physiognomy advocated
by Lavater which he had on the shelves of his library. For Haller, Lavater was
‘riding his horse Pegasus and over-feeding it with oats’. Lavater was an ‘enthu-
siast . . . [whose] piety is so hot, he is nearly seraphic . . . I think that if you
undertook to sound the foundations of [Lavater’s] doctrine on physiognomies,
you would find them so ruinous that they would fall apart at the very instant
. . . I agree with you that there is only a thin line between Enthusiasm and
Incredulity: Nevertheless, I will not presume that our virtuous Diacre will cross
it . . . He would need to study logic for a long time . . . I place no confidence
in a man entirely governed by imagination . . . the poor Lavater has a hot imag-
ination. He is a poet.’
⁶⁹ Catalogo del Fondo Haller della Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense di Milano, ed. M. T. Monti, 13 vols.
(Milan, 1983–94), Cat. nos. 985, 3620, 4499, 14173, 18231, 21031; Albrecht von Haller, Bibliotheca anatomica,
2 vols. (Zurich, 1774–7), i. 216, 150; C. Webster, From Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern
Science (Cambridge, 1982), 1.
Introduction 41
By the end of the early modern period, for a scientist and a devout protestant
like Haller, physiognomy as Lavater represented it was neither science nor
divine scientia. Indeed, for Haller, as polite as he tried to remain in his letters,
Lavater’s dream of a scientific physiognomy was nothing more than a form of
praying which ultimately seduced only the third-rate logic and the overheated
imaginations of enthusiastic theologians and poets. Were it not for the serious
dangers of enthusiasm, to a protestant scientist like Haller, physiognomy was
at best too ridiculous to be anything other than the source of a little imagina-
tive entertainment and ironical fun. Just how much so can be seen in the fact
that the subject brought out a sense of self-ironic playfulness even in one as
internationally straight-faced and pious as the renowned physiologist. Haller
gives a fleeting glimpse of this in a letter he wrote to tell Bonnet that he had
refused Lavater’s request to have Haller’s portrait in his Fragments. His justifi-
cation for denying Lavater’s request had an air of pious humility: ‘I did not
believe that my physiognomy merited a place’. However, Haller could not
resist adding playfully, ‘I know how many good things he drew from your nose:
He will not be able to draw as much from mine’.⁷⁰
Résumé of the Argument

When Haller told Bonnet that Lavater ‘reads in the Bible the same way he reads
in faces’, he made an observation that could be used as emblematic of these
wider developments in the history of religion, science, philosophy, poetry, art,
literacy, even satire, in terms of which the history of physiognomy could be
explored by historians. A small, neglected corpus of texts in the ‘age of print’,
early modern ‘books on physiognomy’ may be, but, as I hope I have shown in
this wide-ranging introduction, they are capable of shedding light on many
fundamental issues in the culture and history of the early modern period
beyond the history of the book and the history of reading practices. Much of
the rest of this study will concentrate on the extant copies of these books in
order to examine the changes in the ways in which early modern readers read
physiognomy in books, with particular emphasis on the influence of the Neo-
platonic hermetic variety of physiognomy so often identified as being set in
train in late fifteenth-century Florence by the Medici-backed Marsilio Ficino.
Despite the apparent newness of these sorts of physiognomy, the early mod-
ern period saw neither any sudden awakening of interest in physiognomy nor
⁷⁰ The Correspondence between Albrecht von Haller and Charles Bonnet (Berne, 1983), 876, 830–1, 1230,
1236, 833, 1233.
its disappearance from the realm of thought or practice. The history of phys-
iognomy between c.1470 and c.1780 is one of an unstoppable epistemological
metamorphosis of the scientia and culture of ‘physiognomy’ around the
immoveable, ontological faculty of man’s ‘fisnomy’. In other words, in these
attempts by early modern literate men to capture and articulate the part of nat-
ural philosophy that was ‘physiognomy’ in book form, we can see how the lit-
erate human self, male and female, came to understand and articulate ‘itself ’
and its relation to the world through a variety of different theological and
philosophical prisms that arose from, and were built upon, an ineluctable, tex-
tually illiterate, naturally ungendered part of the human self.
As a result of Ficino and Mirandola’s attempt to reconcile their Neoplatonic
hermeticism with Christianity, their hermetic ‘Egyptian’ influence spread
across the many different religious cultures long since embedded in an early
modern Europe dominated, but not controlled, by a powerful, institutional-
ized Christianity already in the tumultuous process of adapting itself to, and
being simultaneously transformed by, the coming of the printed word. A help-
ful twentieth-century analogy might be the spread (or decay) of Marxism
through the world’s industrializing nations. Although the ‘natural magic’ of the
art of physiognomy continued to be considered and examined and developed
for a long time afterwards within the more traditional Aristotelian framework
that the Renaissance had inherited from the Middle Ages, like that Aristotelian
framework itself physiognomy soon became enmeshed in the spread of this
hermeticism. Given all its implicit dangers of pagan polytheism and Islamic
and Jewish mysticism, both church and state became concerned. However,
their concern was neither simply caused nor driven solely by the manuscripts
and books containing the physiognomy of this ancient theology. That anxiety
was also caused by the ways in which this hermetic physiognomy was absorbed
into what the church attacked as the ‘superstitious’ practices of the ordinary
people that made up its often illiterate, and distinctly unmanageable, flock.
Indeed, even before this Neoplatonic ‘Egyptian’ philosophy began to break
across the relatively small number of minds in Europe who had acquired (and
whose minds were being restructured by) the textual literacy necessary to read
it, there was another sort of ‘Egyptian’ physiognomy that was equally, indeed
in some ways even more, disturbing to the authorities of an established church
occupied with trying to establish an order among its heterogeneous, ‘supersti-
tious’ flock. This phenomenon took the form of a group of illiterate ‘seers’
found wandering among Europe’s large mobile population of dispossessed
nomads and vagabonds, some of whom were known as the ‘Egyptians’, or the
‘gypsies’. They too were practitioners of a form of this ‘natural magic’, or, what
Introduction 43
to them was part of a religious medicine, even a religious poetry. That physiog-
nomy was a part of their long-standing oral, ‘story-telling’, poetic métier, and
tradition, with which they seduced, even hypnotized their audience. The
anxious, established authorities reacted accordingly and tried, with one hand,
to drive it out and, with the other, to appropriate and tame it.
The exact nature of that gypsy physiognomy, being unwritten, is now lost
and unknown. However, traces of it can be glimpsed, not only through the
many, as yet unexamined, extant Sanskrit manuscript ‘treatises on physiogno-
my’ in circulation throughout the medieval and early modern Indian continent
but also through the physiognomical aphorisms whose characters lined the
written and printed pages of ‘books on physiognomy’ in the early modern
West. For those texts were, to some extent, an attempt on the part of the
guardians of the textual tradition to appropriate both that theology and that
métier and replace them with a Christianized physiognomy of their own,
despite the paradox of losing, if not destroying, the very thing they were trying
to capture by writing it down in words. Those printed ‘physiognomics’ have to
be seen and understood in the same light as the linguistic interest in the char-
acters of hieroglyphics and emblems that developed from the early sixteenth
century as a part of the troubling emergence of the ‘Egyptian’ in early modern
Western Europe. As banal as they appear on the page, printed ‘physiognomies’
in themselves not only shed light on the developing understandings of lan-
guage, or of sex, gender, and beauty in this early modern natural magic, they
also offer an important insight into the main metaphysical, and in some cases
distinctly gendered, building blocks of the early modern self.
There was one thing common to all of the different forms of physiognomy
in circulation in early modern Europe, whether it be the learned and not so
learned physiognomy of the established Aristotelian or Neoplatonic authors or
the story-telling ‘fisnomy’ of the wandering illiterate ‘fisnomiers’: the ‘natural
magic’ of physiognomy was put forward as a way of achieving the ultimate
rational Socratic dictum, and the famous magical Delphic oracle: ‘know your
self ’. Thus, as marginal as the subject may now seem, conflicts over physiog-
nomy in Western Christendom were not just intellectual battles over the exact
nature of the knowledge provided by the scientia of physiognomy, over the
rationality or the good and bad ‘magic’ in its model of ‘causation’, or the his-
torical and astrological mythologies of its theology. They were a micro-arena of
the battle over the essence and malleability of the metaphysics, indeed, the
poetic, of the human self.
The major events that are so often taken to characterize the early modern
period, be it the print revolution, the Reformation, the ‘scientific revolution’,
or ‘the Enlightenment’, all had an impact on the evolution of this physiog-
nomical form of ‘natural magic’ and helped to bring about many changes in the
religious and scientific understanding as well as the many social and cultural
practices of physiognomy. In articulating some of those changes, this study
concentrates primarily on the ‘fisnomy’ or ‘physiognomy’ that happened
between the reader and the page. In other words it examines how the practice
of reading the ‘natural magic’ of physiognomy in books in a non-academic,
non-intellectual way underwent some fundamental transformations. Hand-
in-hand with an examination of the graffiti found on those early modern phys-
iognomical texts that have survived, it argues that, as a result of the spread of
the Neoplatonic hermetic synthesis, the art of physiognomy was eventually
developed into what Robert Fludd called a ‘technique of the microcosm’.
Although Fludd never made explicit what he meant by this, he appears to have
understood it as something that, when combined with the art of astrology and
the art of memory, became a prayer-like form of self-meditation that was
considered capable of bringing about a form of mystical re-birth, literally, a
‘re-naissance’. In other words, in the hands of these Neoplatonic magi,
physiognomy was more than just a vehicle of self-knowledge. Its art was a
potential means not only of marrying heaven and earth but of self-transforma-
tion, or what Giordano Bruno called ‘inner writing’. Fludd’s combinatorial
approach to the art of physiognomy was, in the naturally magic eye of his imag-
ination at least, a scientific experiment in applied physics which aimed at pro-
ducing a real effect through a preternatural manipulation of the efficacy of
‘occult’ qualities. In Fludd’s case (and in this he was less modest and more eso-
teric in his approach to natural magic than Ficino), its aim was to tap the invis-
ible spiritual and angelic powers above the natural celestial ones in order to
bring about the influx of spiritus into materia . The manifest ‘effect’ it aimed at
achieving and making intelligible and visible was what the Corpus hermeticum
referred to as a ‘regeneration’—a notion which had as many medical, ethical,
political, and religious implications for the individual as it had for the individ-
ual’s relationship to the population and society at large, as well as his or her rela-
tionship to nature and to God.⁷¹
Yet by the late seventeenth century, when what came to be seen as a passion
for talking in enigmatic riddles seemed less mystical as well as ‘scientifically’
unacceptable, reading physiognomy in a book had been relegated to the same
status as the perusal of a cabinet of ‘curiosity’ at best. By the early eighteenth
⁷¹ Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, 2
vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), ii. Tractatus Primi Sectio Secunda (title page) ‘De technica Microcosmi histo-
ria’, 1; F. A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), 108.
Introduction 45
century, reading ‘books on physiognomy’ had become for many nothing more
than a bawdy parlour game. In other words, during what might be termed the
long autumn of the Middle Ages, the art of physiognomy became a form of
self-transformative praying. In the auroras of the Enlightenment, it had been
transformed into a form of playing. With the dawn of Romanticism, some
began to see once again, whether as a science, a religion, or even a poetry, that
‘physiognomy’ was no game.
1
A Persistent Fisnomical Consciousness
c.400 bce–c.1470 ce
The theory of this way of looking and listening, frozen in the four English
‘books on physiognomy’ in Jeake’s library, was not unique to early modern
England. The aim of this chapter is very briefly to give readers a sense of the
antiquity of ‘physiognomy’ in its written form (physiognomony). Whilst the
word ‘physiognomia’ is a medieval Latin term, the written traditions which it
was coined to embrace are indications of the persistence of man’s fisnomical
consciousness from antiquity onwards. They contain indications of the basic
elements which constituted the theorized structure and process of a particular
way of looking and listening that arose through that physiognomical con-
sciousness. Beside showing some important continuities with the written
physiognomical traditions of antiquity, extant medieval copies of the classical,
Arabic, and medieval texts also reveal some important changes which the the-
ory of physiognomony, in what was philosophically speaking a predominantly
Aristotelian form, had undergone long before becoming enmeshed, in the late
fifteenth century, with the Neoplatonic hermetic influence of Marsilio Ficino
and Pico della Mirandola.
Introduction
In the late sixteenth century, when the Belgian physician and botanist Rembert
Dodoens (1516?–85) was evaluating the notion of the physiognomy of plants
that still formed a part of his discipline, he pointed out that it was without any
classical foundations:
That the faculties of plants can be known from the characters or signs which are in
them or are sometimes to be observed in their parts, is a doctrine not found in the most
trustworthy authors among the ancients; this has been discovered, or rather made up
by several authors of later date and some of our own time . . . physiognomy is attested
A Persistent Fisnomical Consciousness 47
by Aristotle and other ancient philosophers; whereas the doctrine of the signature of
plants has been attested by no one ancient writer who is held in any esteem.¹
He was correct to claim that the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise contained none of

the physiognomy of plants or minerals that one finds, for example, in the
Paracelsian notion of the ‘doctrine of signatures’. Dodoen’s observation allows
us to grasp just how far from the parameters of the classical physiognomical eye
were those of the physiognomical eye that one finds in the autumn of the
Middle Ages. That reconfiguration of the physiognomical eye during the inter-
vening period amounted to nothing less than a process of ‘totalization’. So
much so that Dodoens was just one of many Renaissance natural philosophers,
in a variety of different, but interrelated disciplines, who took it upon them-
selves to re-evaluate the place of physiognomy in their world.
The early modern European printed tradition of physiognomy had been
inherited from the Middle Ages and antiquity via the media of writing and
orality. In medieval texts, famous figures from Greek and Roman antiquity
such as Socrates, Plato, Hippocrates, and Galen were most frequently put
forward as the ‘father’ of physiognomy. The Italian scribe of one late fifteenth-
century manuscript on physiognomy who claimed he was transcribing a text
written by Hippocrates (‘Ippocras’) is just one example of how such claims
continued to appear in early modern texts. One late fifteenth-century English
manuscript said it was founded by the philosopher ‘Phisonomias’. However,
those medieval claims are best seen as revealing more of the character of early
modern Western Christianity’s very particular vision and understanding of
history than of the truth of the origins of this physiognomy.²
Despite the blinkered concerns of Renaissance humanists with the ancient
Roman and Greek foundations of everything, theories of physiognomony, as
well as a rich array of religious, social, and cultural practices associated with it,
had roots in numerous civilizations beyond those represented by these classical
Greco-Roman figures. The earliest extant complete Sanskrit text on the subject
of body divination presented as independent technique, the Sāmudrikatilaka,
may date from only c.1160. None the less, discussions of the physiognomical
characteristics of prepubescent girls are found in the Gargasamhita, which
dates from the first century bce to the first century ce.³ The principal Chinese
¹ Cited in I. Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 2002), 324–5.
² T. S. Barton, Power and Knowledge (Ann Arbor, 1994), 98–100, fn. 40, 101, fn. 45 and fn. 48; Florence:
Bibliotheca Medicea Laurenziana, Ms Plut. XXIX.3, fol. 59v; Secretum Secretorum, ed. M. A. Manzalaoui,
Early English Text Society (Oxford, 1977), 376.
³ D. Pingree, Jyotihśāstra. Astral & Mathematical Literature (Wiesbaden, 1981), 67–9, and 76–7; A.
Caquot and M. Leibovici, La divination, 2 vols. (Paris, 1968), i, 118 and 127; K. G. Zysk, Conjugal Love in
India (Leiden, 2002), 10 ff.
‘treatises on physiognomy’ (hsiang shu) may date from only the fourteenth cen-
tury, but this large work was a revision of an earlier work entitled ‘Complete
Work on Physiognomy’ (Shen Hsiang Ch’iian Pien) compiled during the Sing
dynasty in the tenth century. Moreover, numerous scholars have dated the
antiquity of the Chinese physiognomical tradition as early as the ninth
century bce, and have suggested a possible Indian influence.⁴ The first
Japanese attempt at systematizing physiognomy appears to have occurred
between the mid-fourteenth and mid-sixteenth centuries. Yet in Japan one also
finds a more ancient tradition.⁵ Whilst a textual tradition of physiognomony
appears absent from the various civilizations of the Mayas, the Aztecs, and the
Incas, physiognomy in book form did have an important place in ancient
Semitic mysticism. The Zohar, a body of Jewish mystical literature containing
an exposition of some physiognomical theory, dates from only thirteenth-cen-
tury Castile in written form, but it claimed to represent an earlier oral tradi-
tion. Moreover, the connection between physiognomy and the Jewish mystical
texts which make up what is known as the Kabbalah is certainly earlier, dating
from at least the third century ce. The so-called ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’, themselves
currently the subject of an important re-dating to before the ‘common era’
(1 bce), contain a form of astrological physiognomony.⁶
In fact, the earliest known traces of textual physiognomony are the physiog-
nomical omens which formed part of what was known to the Babylonians and
Assyrians as šumma alandimmû. They are to be found in a series of eleven
Mesopotamian tablets found in an area which is today known as Iraq. Dating
from the first half of the second millennium bce, each tablet consists of about
150 oracles concerning the physical appearance of human beings. The follow-
ing are just two examples:
If a man with a contorted face has a prominent[?] right eye, far from his home dogs will
eat him.
If a man has curly hair on his shoulders, women will fall in love with him.⁷
The first of these may seem to many readers to be, like ancient Mesopotamia
itself, beyond what they consider to be their more rational comprehension. By
stark contrast, the second brings the Mesopotamian physiognomical con-
⁴ J. Needham, Science and Civilisation in China, 7 vols. (Cambridge, 1956–98), ii, 346, 363 ff.; G. Sarton,
Introduction to the History of Science, 3 vols. (Baltimore, 1927–48), III.ii, 1232; W. A. Lessa, Chinese Body
Divination (Los Angeles, 1968), 1, 10.
⁵ Kodansha Encyclopaedia of Japan, 9 vols. (Tokyo, 1983), vi, q.v. ‘Physiognomy’ (ninsō).
⁶ J. M. Allegro, The Dead Sea Scrolls (1964), 127; G. G. Scholem, Kabbalah (Jerusalem, 1974), 14, 215, and
317 ff.
⁷ J. Bottéro, ‘Symptomes, Signes, Ecritures’, in J. P. Vernant (ed.), Divination et rationalité (Paris, 1974),
82 and 109; J. Bottéro, Mesopotamia, trans. Z. Bahrani and M. van de Mieroop (Chicago, 1992), 127.
sciousness and thus its civilization so close as to seem universally self-evident,
even to those who know nothing of the existence of medieval verbal descrip-
tions of Christ as having hair which curled on his shoulders. As they now exist,
these cuneiform physiognomical oracles provide us with no explicit sense of
the thinking behind their construction, nor of the ‘grammar’ of their interrela-
tionship. They are presented in the most basic and simple shopping-list form.
If physiognomy is defined as the art of discovering a person’s character by
that person’s physical appearance, then the concern of these two oracles with
the future rather than with the character of a person might prevent them from
being classed as part of the textual tradition of physiognomony. However, the
dividing line between character and future, like the temporal line between past,
present, and future, is thin, even permeable. Divining a person’s character is
one very small step away from divining that same person’s future, if only in the
sense of predicting how he or she is going to behave or the problems that that
person will meet in life, or the career that person should follow, given the sort
of character he or she has. In literature, this is often explored through the
notion of ‘character as destiny’, and in modern genetics through ‘biology as
destiny’. Moreover, given that the ancient, medieval, and early modern arts of
physiognomy were often understood to be a form of ‘natural magic’, or even
mantic disciplines, these tablets can be said to represent the earliest textual
form of the more prophetic element in the art of ‘physiognomating’.⁸
Let us put aside the Chinese, Indian, and Mesopotamian traditions of
physiognomy in written form, as well as the question of the exact nature of
their relationship to what has come to be considered as the ‘Western tradition’.
As scholarship now stands, the most authoritative textual foundation of the
theoretical part of early modern ‘Western’ physiognomical intelligence rests
primarily on four ‘pagan’ texts, all dating from the eight-hundred-year period
between the fourth century bce and the fourth century ce. Most prominent
of them all is the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica. Its influence in the
West is a consequence of the fact that for a long time it was thought to be by
Aristotle. Another is a treatise written by a Roman sophist named Antonius
Polemon (88–145 ce) of Smyrna. Polemon was a wealthy and powerful politi-
cal rhetorician in the Roman Empire successful enough to have been honoured
by the Emperor Hadrian. Polemon’s treatise dates from the second century ce,
but was for a long time known only in its Arabic form. The other two treatises
date from the fourth century ce. One of them is an epitome of Polemon’s tract
by an unknown but possibly ‘Jewish’ writer named Adamantius; whilst the
⁸ E. O. Wilson, On Human Nature (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), 77, 207; Evans, ‘Physiognomics in the
Ancient World’, 13.
fourth is a compilation of the previous three with some new material added by
an obscure physician named Loxus, and is known to scholars as the Anonymous
Latin treatise.⁹
What changes do all of these earlier ancient and medieval ‘treatises on
physiognomy’ suggest that this theorized form of physiognomical perception
had already undergone by the end of the fifteenth century? Much detailed
philological and philosophical investigation needs to be carried out in order to
compare the cognitive content of the theory of the physiognomical scientia
found in these textual traditions of the ‘Christian West’ in order to discover
the extent of any mutual influence with those of the aforementioned ‘non-
Western’ tradition. The wide-ranging nature of the way of looking and listen-
ing that they contain, as well as the social and cultural practices that constituted
it, ideally requires the universal approach to visual history along the lines devel-
oped by the late nineteenth-century German cultural historian Aby Warburg.
It also requires one to look beyond the issue of the West’s classical inheritance
from ancient Greece and Rome as well as beyond the texts themselves.
However, even when considered in isolation from all of this, the four classi-
cal Greek and Roman texts on physiognomony can be used to provide a fun-
damental insight into an issue that has hypnotized both the Warburgian
tradition and the Western art historical tradition—the classical inheritance of
the pre-modern West. Those four texts can be used to reconstruct the intellec-
tual ‘prism’ through which the theorized pagan physiognomical consciousness
refracted its sense impressions when in the process of physiognomating. More-
over, the developments in the scientia of physiognomony which one finds in
the treatises composed by the Arabic and medieval Latin authors provide us
with some basic, but much needed, insight into the continuities and disconti-
nuities involved in the metamorphosis of that theorized physiognomical intel-
ligence over a period of eight hundred years.
What will be suggested in the rest of this chapter is that that metamorphosis
was characterized by six main developments. The first was the early medical-
ization of physiognomony. The second was one which turned out to be of
central importance to the Renaissance hermetic understanding of the art of
physiognomy—its development as a branch of the art of rhetoric. The third
was the introduction of a divine element into, or the ‘theologization’ of the
grammar of the ‘physiognomical eye’. The fourth was the deeper absorption of
⁹ Aristotle, Physiognomonics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1984), i,
1237–50; for Polemon and Adamantius, see Scriptores Physiognomonici Graeci et Latini, ed. R. Förster, 2 vols.
(Leipzig, 1894), i, 95–294 and 297–426; Traité de physiognomonie: anonyme latin, ed. J. André (Paris, 1981),
49–140.
that medicalized physiognomy into astrological and mathematical theory. The
fifth was its further medicalization through its absorption into theories of
anatomy, embryology, generation, and the four humours. The sixth was the
development of a theorized physiognomical scientia which went beyond man’s
appearance as the primary reference point. In so doing it took in the contem-
plation of the entire ‘book of nature’ or what the fourteenth-century master
from the faculty of medicine in Paris, Evrart de Conty (c.1330–1405), called ‘the
face of nature’, and which later came to be identified with the Paracelsan
theory of the ‘doctrine of signatures’—a process which, overall, might con-
veniently be referred to as a ‘totalization’.¹⁰
The Intellectual Prism of Classical

Physiognomonical Scientia
As innately visual as early modern physiognomy was considered to be, these
classical texts reveal that the sense of vision was not the only sense used in the
classical process of physiognomating. The pseudo-Aristotelian treatise pro-
vides the most complete list of the sources from which the rational, classical
‘physiognomical eye’ drew its sense impressions or ‘signs’:
movements, gestures of the body, colour, characteristic facial expression, the growth of
the hair, the smoothness of the skin, the voice, condition of the flesh, the parts of the
body, and the build of the body as a whole.¹¹
Immediately we see that, besides the use of the sense of sight, the hearing was
used to physiognomate the sound of the voice, and the sense of touch was used
to physiognomate the condition and smoothness of the flesh—the latter being
a possible consequence of the practice of buying slaves.¹² It also shows us that
the basic information which constituted pagan physiognomical scientia was
broadcast from all parts of the human body, and not just the face alone. The
fact that the information processed by the classical physiognomical conscious-
ness consisted primarily in visual and sonic sensations distinguishes it signifi-
cantly from the medieval physiognomical consciousness in which, as will be
seen below, the sense of smell was used. This list also shows that the primarily
¹⁰ E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953), 319–26; J. Ziegler, ‘Text and Con-
text: On the Rise of Physiognomic Thought in the Later Middle Ages’, in De Sion Exibit Lex et Verbum
Domini de Hierusalem, ed. Y. Hen (Turnhout, 2001), 159–82, 181; Charles Tilley’s comments on an early draft
of this manuscript suggested the utility of this term ‘totalization’.
¹¹ Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 806a 25.
¹² Y. Mourad, La physiognomonie arabe (Paris, 1939), 55–7.
audio-visual field of this theorized physiognomical intelligence was distinctly
‘anthropocentric’, although, as we shall also see, whilst that focus was pri-
marily on the human being, it drew visual and mental analogies with animals.
This is another way in which it differs significantly from the many other
non-human natural bodies that later came to be used as potential objects of
physiognomical perception that one finds much later, for example, in the writ-
ings of Paracelsus.
However, despite these notable changes, these classical texts also reveal some
important continuities between them and their medieval successors. One such
was the articulation of the most important philosophical assumption that
underpinned the theoretical process of physiognomation from ancient to early
modern times: ‘Mental character is not independent of and unaffected by
bodily process, but is conditioned by the state of the body . . . And contrari-
wise the body is evidently influenced by the affections of the soul.’ In other
words, ‘soul and body . . . are affected sympathetically by one another’. This
claim carried the authority of Aristotle, who, in his Prior Analytics, wrote ‘it is
possible to infer character from physical features, if it is granted that the body
and the soul are changed together by the natural affections’.¹³
No further philosophical claim is made in the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiog-
nomonica about the location of the soul, the nature of the soul, whether or not
it is immortal, a substantial form, what are its faculties, and so on. That only
appeared in a ‘treatise on physiognomy’ when the fourth-century physician
Loxus claimed that the seat of the soul was in the blood. This claim was in itself
an indication of the first of the aforementioned developments—the way in
which the scientia of physiognomy was gradually absorbed into medicine.¹⁴
Notwithstanding Loxus, the general absence of such claims within expositions
of physiognomical doctrine tended to give the subject a philosophical simplic-
ity. This simplicity had the paradoxical effect of underpinning the continuity
of the essential structure and character of the intellectual prism of physiogno-
mating, whilst simultaneously providing it with a chameleon-like quality
which enabled it to adapt itself to a wide variety of otherwise conflicting philo-
sophical perspectives.
One outcome of this was the formation across the Middle Ages and the early
modern period of an increasing number of different philosophical under-
standings of the same art of physiognomy. The sixteenth-century Italian
¹³ Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 805a 1, and i, 808b 10. Cf. Aristotle, Prior Analytics, in Complete Works, i,
70b 5.
¹⁴ E. C. Evans, ‘Physiognomics in the Ancient World’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society,
n.s. 59: 5 (1969), 11; G. Misener, ‘Loxus, Physician and Physiognomist’, Classical Philology, 18 (1923), 4–9.
physiognomist Michelangelo Biondo could think that the soul was located in
the brain.¹⁵ Alessandro Achillini (1463–1512), professor of natural philosophy
and medicine at Padua and Bologna, incorporated physiognomy into an
Averroist framework, in which the individual conscious was part of a universal
consciousness. However, these differences did not undermine physiognomy as
a scientia. Similarly, the essentials of the art of physiognomy were just as easily
accommodated within the Aristotelian claim that there was only one principal
organ, the heart (associated with the spirit), the Galenic claim that there were
three principal organs (heart, lungs, and liver), or the Neoplatonic notion of
the tripartite soul that one finds in the work of Robert Fludd. Moreover, for all
that the Galenic aphorism ‘the maners of the minde do followe the temperature
of the bodie’ was the antithesis of the Aristotelian philosophical assumption in
so far as it verged upon an out-and-out material determinism that implicitly
called into question the existence of the soul, Galen’s aphorism was none the
less often cited by numerous authors of ‘treatises on physiognomy’, and, more
broadly, was often discussed within the framework of the issue of whether it
was possible for the nature of man to be transformed.¹⁶
Pagan theorized physiognomical intelligence also contained a number of
cells of logic which helped to determine its character and provided a sense
of continuity in its transmission from the ancient to the early modern period.
The pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica assumed a constant correspondence
between a particular physical attribute and a particular mental or moral
property:
There never was an animal with the form of one kind and the mental character of
another.
Permanent bodily signs will indicate permanent mental qualities.
Soft hair indicates cowardice, and coarse hair courage.
This passage also reveals what classical logicians referred to as the ‘syllogistic
logic’ which sustained some aspects of physiognomation. The rhetorical figure
that was particularly important in physiognomy was known as the enthymeme:
X resembles a sea-monster.
Sea-monsters are gluttonous, voracious and impious.
X is gluttonous, voracious and impious.¹⁷
¹⁵ Michelangelo Biondo, De cognitione hominis per aspectum (Rome, 1544), fol. 32v.
¹⁶ The most excellent, profitable and pleasant book of the famous Doctor and expert Astrologian Arcandam
(1592), sig. L 4.
¹⁷ Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 805a 10; 806a 5–10; 806b 5. Cf. Aristotle, Prior Analytics, in Complete
Works, i, 70b5–20.
As crude as the physiognomical syllogism may seem, even the most intel-
ligent of people succumb to its logic. Indeed, the second-century political
orator Polemon made an entire career out of the rhetorical applications of
this particular form of logic. To that extent, his treatise provides evidence of
the second of the six main developments in theorized physiognomy during
this period—its absorption in the theory and practice of rhetoric. It later
became a form of logic central to the development of early modern medical
semiotics.¹⁸
Another aspect of the physiognomony which one finds in the pseudo-
Aristotelian Physiognomonica that distinguished it from many subsequent
treatises on the subject was its discussion of the formal logic behind the apho-
risms. Unlike the scholarly Renaissance commentaries, many early modern
authors omitted this. One rhetorical consequence of this omission was that the
physiognomical aphorisms often just lay there on the page, before the reader’s
eye, like a shopping-list of self-evident, quasi-oracular truths. This lack of
causal reflection contributed towards the development of what many saw as
the (rhetorical?) magical or mantic character of physiognomy.¹⁹
One fundamental feature of the ‘grammar’ of the theorized classical
physiognomical perception emphasized by most medieval and early modern
treatises on the subject is that it necessitated any physiognomator to consider
more than one sign in order to avoid a rushed judgement.²⁰ In practice, of
course, this did not always happen. In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare
uses Leonato to provide one early modern example of such physiognomical
haste. Having been informed of the death of his daughter but suspecting mur-
der, Leonato rushes in and exclaims:
Which is the villain? Let me see his eyes
That when I note another man like him
I may avoid him. Which of these is he?²¹
In this passage Shakespeare quietly ironized an (empirical?) illogicality in

Leonato’s statement by having him ask ‘Which of these is he?’ (If it was so
physiognomically obvious then Leonato should not have to ask which one it
was.) However, Leonato’s reaction does reveal the ease with which some minds
could not only develop a private physiognomical dictionary independent of
the printed tradition but also come to a physiognomical conclusion, with a
¹⁸ Barton, Power and Knowledge, 103–31; Maclean, Logic, esp. 4.3.3.

¹⁹ See Förster, Scriptores, i, 210, ll. 18–23, for one of the very rare nuggets of physiological explanation.
²⁰ Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 807a 1 and 807a 25–30.
²¹ William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing (Cambridge, 1988) v. i. 226–8.
potentially profound consequence, based on a single sign. It is also an indica-
tion of the need for studies of physiognomy ‘in action’.
In turn, the classical pagan physiognomical eye had often to deal with con-
tradictory physiognomical signs. The official ‘grammar’ suggested that any
physiognomator must respect the inherent hierarchy in the physiognomical
clarity of the signs. By far the most important of all the signs were those of the
eyes:
It will be found, moreover, in every selection of signs that some signs are better
adapted than others to indicate the mental character behind them. The clearest indica-
tions are given by signs in certain particularly suitable parts of the body. The most suit-
able part of all is the region of the eyes and forehead, head and face; next to it comes the
region of the chest and shoulders, and next again, that of the legs and feet; whilst the
belly and neighbouring parts are of least service. In a word, the clearest signs are derived
from those parts in which intelligence is most manifest.²²
One important innovation in the developing ‘grammar’ of the physiognomical

eye, as far as these early texts indicate, occurred during the second century
when Polemon introduced the very important concept of epiprepeia or ‘overall
impression’ into this official grammar:
The most powerful determining factor is the overall impression of the whole man that
makes itself visible on all parts of the body. One must look upon this in all cases as if it
were the seal of the whole. It has no rational principle, in and of itself, but the details,
the signs of the eyes and all the rest, synthesise the complete appearance of the man.²³
With no ‘rational principle, in and of itself ’, Polemon’s epiprepeia opened

physiognomical perception to the realms beyond the formal logic of the
pseudo-Aristotelian treatise in the sense that this ‘overall impression’ hovered
precariously between instinct and reflection. Polemon’s epiprepeia is not only
evidence of a further development in the theorized understanding of physiog-
nomony, but also of its practical applications—in Polemon’s case, as a form of
politic rhetoric. With hindsight, it can also be seen to have prepared the con-
ceptual ground for a further fundamental metamorphosis in the physiognomi-
cal eye in the late fourth century when this notion of the ‘overall impression’
was infused in Adamantius’s treatise with a divine element: ‘it speaks as if with
signs, Nature announces the ways of each person, from some god-sent, unerr-
ing divination, the physiognomist knows the habits and inclinations of all
men, so to speak’.²⁴ Adamantius’s understanding of epiprepeia thus linked it to
²² Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 814b1–5.

²³ Cited in M. W. Gleason, Making Men (Princeton, 1995), 34–5. ²⁴ Cited in Barton, Power, 107.
a similar concept which one finds in the Arabic tradition discussed below, the
notion of firāsa.
The fourth-century Anonymous Latin treatise revealed another important
grammatical development that had taken place in the eight hundred years since
the fourth century bce which had an effect on the polyvalence of the physiog-
nomical sign. When comparing contradictory signs with each other, the author
of this fourth-century ce treatise said that the physiognomator was to ‘reduce
the dominant signs in proportion to the contrary signs’. This was a vital devel-
opment in as much as it introduced an elasticity into the relationship between
the physical feature and the meaning that constituted any physiognomical
sign. This was not provided for by the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise. In that
sense, as we shall see, it brought the physiognomical sign closer to the early
modern Paracelsian conception of the physiognomical sign, albeit one still
without botanical or mineralogical analogies. In this way, the reason in the
physiognomical consciousness began to meditate upon the genealogy of the
often contradictory meanings attached to a single feature in order to reach a
conclusion or synthesis. Similarly the same ‘synthesis’ could be rationally
achieved by altering the individual meanings of different physical features in
terms of each other and their place in the hierarchy. As a result, the eye-lashes
of loquacity, the forehead of a thinker, and the eyes of raging madness might
eventually be resolved into a loquacity which is less rude and a character which
is impetuous rather than mad.²⁵
But perhaps most crucial of all for the theory of the pagan physiognomical
consciousness was the temporal aspect of its ‘grammar’. The present-oriented
aspect of physiognomating outlined in the classical pseudo-Aristotelian trea-
tise involved a more facially oriented method which, it briefly says, ‘took as its
basis the characteristic facial expressions which are observed to accompany dif-
ferent conditions of mind, such as anger, fear, erotic excitement, and all other
passions’.²⁶ This is the equivalent of what today is referred to as pathognomy—
the study of the facial configuration of transient emotions, now often identi-
fied historically with the famous Cartesian-inspired treatise on painting
written by Louis XIV’s court painter, Charles Le Brun.²⁷ However, the absence
of a clear distinction between this pathognomy and physiognomy is suggestive
of an important temporal ambiguity. In the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise, the
teleological point of that act of physiognomation was the elucidation of a
²⁵ André, Anonyme, 57–60. ²⁶ Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 805a 20–5.

²⁷ J. Montagu, The Expression of the Passions (New Haven, 1994).
person’s ‘mental character’ rather than their future or past.²⁸ It could be argued
that that ‘mental character’ appears to have been understood primarily in terms
of the present. But the border between past, present, and future was, physiog-
nomically speaking, permeable and fluid. By the fourth century ce one finds a
physiognomical tract in which these temporal parameters have shifted and the
prophetic aspect of the pagan physiognomical consciousness has been made
much more prominent. In other words, the physiognomic, as a sign, developed
a temporal as well as a semantic polyvalence.
How empirical was the process of physiognomating? As described so far,
these pagan physiognomical investigations were empirically driven in so far as
they often began inductively, by receiving impressions from a person’s body.
Yet, having said that, there were three other very important meta-elements in
the ‘grammar’ which, taken together, constituted the more deductive aspect
of this physiognomical way of looking and listening. Indeed, these deductive
elements provide a sense of continuity in the development of the theorized
physiognomical eye from the classical period to the end of the Middle Ages and
on through the early modern period. The first two were based on what the
Physiognomonica referred to as ‘the distinction between the sexes’, and the
‘various characters’:
It is advisable, in elucidating all the signs I have mentioned, to take into consideration
both their congruity with various characters and the distinction of the sexes; for this is
the most complete distinction, and, as was shown, the male is more upright and coura-
geous and, in short, altogether better than the female.²⁹
These two distinctions represented, in effect, a priori grids or micro-prisms

through which one was to refract, or ‘elucidate’ the multiple signs presented to
the senses. The pseudo-Aristotelian treatise makes explicit reference to the ‘dis-
tinction between the sexes’ but offers no detailed discussion of it or of how it
was arrived at in the first place. Only in the fourth-century ce Anonymous Latin
treatise does one find an extant physiognomical treatise containing a more
detailed elaboration of this distinction.³⁰ Either way, it was a sexual distinction
that was simply assumed to be a part of nature (physis), and hence the different
sexes were presented as a priori categories.
The aforementioned ‘various characters’ are part of a process of physiogno-
mating that begins with the metaphysical or mental trait and works its way
down to its physical embodiment. Thus, for example, signs of courage were
given as ‘an upright carriage of the body; size and strength of bones, sides and
²⁸ André, Anonyme, 140 and sections 29, 31, 41, 53, and 82. ²⁹ Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 814a 5.
³⁰ André, Anonyme, 51 ff.
extremities; the belly broad and flat; shoulder blades broad and set well apart,
neither too closely nor too loosely knit’. ³¹ In this case the Physiognomonica pre-
sented a list of different mental/moral properties followed by the physical sign
or signs of each of those properties. Taken together those signs had a tendency
towards becoming fully fledged characters in the Theophrastian sense, such as
‘the sly man’ or ‘the gambler’. This constituted what might be termed the ‘char-
acterological prism’ of the physiognomical consciousness, through which all
physiognomators were to refract the empirical signs presented to their minds
by their senses. In the long-term evolution of the process of physiognomating,
it is the changes that took place in this a priori pantheon of characters that are
among the most fundamental to the history of this physiognomical way of
looking and listening, be it in the history of science or literature. It is of partic-
ular importance for the way in which it feeds into the birth of the discipline of
psychology and later of clinical psychiatry. Furthermore, it is this that makes
the ‘character’ literature of the early modern period so important to under-
standing the cultural history of physiognomical perception. But, above all, it is
important for understanding the nature and function of what might be
described as the categories which structured the unconscious physiognomical
prejudices of everyday life of any person, society, or culture.³²
The third a priori prism was based on the significance of those physiog-
nomics attributable to the changes incurred by the ageing process. Though
never described in any great detail, this question of age seems to have opened
the way for the introduction into the physiognomical consciousness of yet
another a priori prism of ‘characters’—those which make up what became
known in the West as the ‘ages of man’. Having said that, these early textual tra-
ditions of physiognomy contain no indication that the belief in or adherence
to the truth of physiognomy was connected to the age of the person doing the
physiognomating, other than its often being stated in treatises that it was an art
necessitating long experience.
In the pseudo-Aristotelian tradition, the ultimate purpose of each of these
three a priori prisms was to help the physiognomating consciousness in its
negotiation of the classical philosophical problem of relating the universal and
the particular. By cross-checking observations drawn from the inductive
³¹ As an offshoot of this, at one point the Physiognomonics offers a ‘new’ method by which the reasoned
physiognomical consciousness might be able to deduce the presence of a particular trait which has no physi-
cal mark from the other signs that are present. This comes close to a genealogy of moral qualities, Aristotle,
Physiognomonics, i, 807a 1–5.
³² Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 807a 35; Evans, Ancient World, 16; W. Ginsberg, The Cast of Character
(Toronto, 1983).
aspect, the ultimate aim of this physiognomical eye was to establish the particu-
larities of the individual as opposed to the confirmation of any of these
general ‘characters’, ‘for in physiognomy we try to infer from bodily signs the
character of this or that particular person, and not the characters of the whole
human race’.
Another, more causally conceived, ‘prism’ was made up of distinctions
between ‘various races of men (e.g. Egyptian, Thracian, Scythian) by differ-
ences of appearance and of character, and drew their signs from these races’.³³
This is not the place to go into what these authors meant by the term ‘race’.
Biologically speaking, there is, of course, no such thing as ‘race’.³⁴ More to the
point is the fact that this particular ethnological prism pointed towards the
necessity of considering causal factors external to the person and hence the rela-
tionship of physiognomy to natural history. It was an aspect of introducing a
method into the physiognomical consciousness which gradually found itself
shored up by numerous popular sayings, as well as by the refinements of the
theory of the klimata by which people were understood as being in a deter-
minist relationship with their specific environmental, often regional, condi-
tions, such as is to be found in the Airs, Waters and Places of Hippocrates. By
these means, geography was linked to astrology. Particularly important for this
link were Ptolemaic notions of regions and persons being under the determin-
ing influence of the planets and the signs of the zodiac. However, as will
become clearer below, the deeper penetration of astrological theory into the
Western art of physiognomy, as with its link with the doctrine of signatures,
appears to have been a medieval phenomenon.³⁵
As was mentioned earlier, the focus of the ancient physiognomical eye may
have been primarily upon the human face and body, however careful one has to
be about describing the act of physiognomating as ‘anthropocentric’. Another
fundamental aspect of classical physiognomical thinking was its consideration
of the symbolization of the mental characters of animals through their bodily
form. The anthropocentric form of this physiognomical symbolization then
involved the inference that a man resembling an animal in body will also
resemble it in soul. As the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise states, this element in
the process of physiognomical contemplation
took as the basis for physiognomic inferences the various genera of animals, positing
for each genus a peculiar animal form, and a peculiar mental character appropriate to
³³ Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 807a 30, and i, 805a 25–30.

³⁴ R. Jenkins, Rethinking Ethnicity (1997), 48 ff.
³⁵ G. Dagron, ‘Image de bête ou image de dieu. La physiognomonie animale dans la tradition grecque et
ses avatars byzantins’, in Poikilia: Études offertes à Jean-Pierre Vernant (Paris, 1987), 70.
such a body, and then assuming that if a man resembles such and such a genus in body
he will resemble it also in soul.
This analogical use of zoology played a fundamental role in the history of early
modern physiognomy, and had particularly important consequences for the
metamorphosis of conceptions of the human ‘self ’ and its relationship to the
‘animal’.³⁶
One final, but fundamental, transformation which these ‘treatises on
physiognomy’ suggest that the physiognomical eye underwent between the
fourth century bce and the fourth century ce was a form of medicalization.
The pseudo-Aristotelian textual understanding of physiognomony is a
relatively non-medical one. There is a hint of the influence of humoral
theory, and in places some blatant physiological determinism: ‘Men of
abnormally small stature are hasty, for the flow of their blood having but a
small area to cover, its movements are too rapidly propagated to the organ
of intelligence.’ There is even a hint of the signs of illness found in medical
physiognomy, ‘A flaming skin, however, indicates mania, for it results from
an overheated body, and extreme bodily heat is likely to mean mania’.³⁷ But
this appears to be a consequence of the fact that the treatise itself originates
from the separate pens of two authors who between them are simply trying
to consider, in something of an interdisciplinary manner, the various
potential rational foundations for a ‘scientific’ physiognomy. Physiognomy
did not form part of the original Hippocratic or Galenic corpus. One scholar
has suggested that the weight of physiognomical literature is not Hippocratic.
The word physiognomy does not appear in the Hippocratic corpus except
as a part of the titles in the book on Epidemics, and those titles were given by
the librarians at Alexandria rather than Hippocrates himself.³⁸ The same
scholar further suggests that Galen did not even know of the pseudo-
Aristotelian treatise and though he was aware of some physiognomical texts he
was critical of them. A medical conception of physiognomy is more discernible
in the fourth-century Anonymous Latin treatise, as a consequence of the
fact that parts of it were written by Loxus the physician.³⁹ All of this suggests
that physiognomy was not originally a medical subject, but a subject which
became medicalized. Indeed, there is evidence to suggest that there may
³⁶ Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 805a 20. Cf. Aristotle Prior Analytics, in Complete Works, ii, 70b 10–15; I,
Bk. I, Sec. 8, 491b 10.
³⁷ Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 807b 5–10, 807b 30–5, 808a 1, 808a 15–20, 808b 1–5 and 812a 10–15; 813b
5–35; 812a 20–5.
³⁸ A divisive issue here is the extent to which it is thought that the concept can exist without the word.
³⁹ Misener, ‘Loxus’, 5.
even have been an antagonism between physiognomy and medicine in
antiquity.⁴⁰
The Arabic Textual Traditions

By the tenth century the texts containing this theorized Greek ‘physiognomi-
cal eye’ were circulating in Muslim lands, where they were translated into
Arabic, and mixed with an already long-standing Arabic physiognomical
tradition. The Arabic and Islamic physiognomical tradition is a vast and com-
plex subject which awaits its scholar.⁴¹ Central to the understanding of the
grammar of the Arabic physiognomical eye is the term firāsa. One authoritative
lexicographer defined firāsa as
Insight; or intuitive perception; or the perception, or discernment, of the internal,
inward, or intrinsic, state, condition, character, or circumstances, by the eye [or by the
examination of outward indications etc.,] . . . a faculty which God puts into the minds
of his favourites, in consequence whereof they know the states, conditions, or circum-
stances, of certain men, by a kind of what are termed [thaumaturgic operations], and
by the right direction of opinion and conjecture: and also a kind of art [such as
physiognomy] . . . learned by indications, or evidences, and by experiments, and by
the make and dispositions, whereby one knows the state, conditions, or circumstances,
of men.⁴²
The Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg has noted that the Arabic notion of firāsa,
which constituted such an essential element in the Islamic physiognomical tra-
dition, was ‘none other than the organ of conjectural knowledge’, referring to
it as a form of ‘low intuition . . . [which] . . . binds the human animal closely
to other animal species’.⁴³ It must be repeated here that this notion of firāsa
bears a strong ‘family resemblance’ to the concept of epipepreia (‘overall impres-
sion’) as put forward in the fourth century by Adamantius, as well as to the
faculty of perception that is being described in this book as ‘fisnomy’. More-
over, it had a scriptural authority in passages of the Qur’an such as XLVII, 30,
‘And if We wish it, We shall make thee see them [the false Muslims]; thou shalt
recognise them by their physiognomy [sima-hum]; thou shalt recognise them
⁴⁰ Private conversation with J. Thomann.

⁴¹ D. Jacquart and F. Micheau, La médecine arabe et l’occident mediéval (Paris, 1990), 15; Mourad, La
physiognomonie arabe, 25 ff.
⁴² E. W. Lane, An Arabic–English Lexicon (1874), s.v. Firāsa.
⁴³ C. Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. J. Tedeschi and A. Tedeschi (Baltimore,
1989), 125.
by their lapsus linguae (lahn al-kawl)’; or XV, 75: ‘Behold in this are signs for
those who by tokens do understand’.⁴⁴ As Ibn Arabi (d.1240), a thirteenth-
century Arabic author of a ‘treatise on physiognomy’ put it:
Physiognomical intuition is the light transmitted by the word of the Prophet, the
Guide, the Chosen Envoy. Whoever possesses this intuition receives it from the eyes
and ears of God himself, who is the One, the Originator and the Initiator. The result is
that it allows one to contrast the things that are known, in the invisible and in the
visible.⁴⁵
Although this study focuses on the theory of physiognomony, there were many
practical applications of this physiognomical theory hitherto unexamined by
historians. Just as the Greek ‘treatises on physiognomy’ provide intimations of
specific practices with which physiognomy came to be associated, from slave
trading and horse breeding, to political oratory, astrological prophesying,
medical diagnosis and prognosis, the choice of marriage partners, rulers, or
novices, there were numerous ‘sciences’ and mantic disciplines subsumed
under this Arabic notion of firāsa. Despite the vague generality of the phrase
‘outward indications’ in Lane’s definition, many were mantic and anthro-
pocentric. The oldest of those disciplines was the practice of kiyafa—the recog-
nition of signs of paternity.⁴⁶ To take just one example, the significance of this
latter aspect of the physiognomator’s repertoire of arts at a time when blood
tests to establish parental lineage were unavailable helps to explain the follow-
ing ancient oracle: ‘the wife of that man, pregnant by another man, will not
cease to implore the goddess Ištar, and say to her while looking at her husband:
“May my child look like my husband!” ’⁴⁷
It was not until the famous, epoch-making wave of twelfth- and thirteenth-
century translations from Arabic into Latin that the Greek/Arabic treatises
appear to have arrived in the ‘West’.⁴⁸ Among them were two works of
Arabic origin by Arabic authors containing an exposition of physiognomical
doctrine. These works can be said to have been primarily responsible for
the dissemination of the Arabic physiognomical tradition in the West. Both
of these Arabic texts were translated into Latin in the twelfth century. The
first of the two to arrive was Rhazes’s Liber ad regem Almansorem (or
Liber almansoris) translated by Gerard of Cremona (d. 1187) in the twelfth
⁴⁴ The Holy Qur’an, trans. Abdulla Yusuf Ali (Maryland, 1983).

⁴⁵ M. J. Viguera, Dos cartillas de fisiognómica (Madrid, 1977), 31.
⁴⁶ Mourad, La physiognomonie arabe, 1; P. Nwyia, Exégèse coranique et langage mystique (Beirut, 1970),
296–7. ⁴⁷ Bottero, Mesopotamia, 132.
⁴⁸ See Mourad, La physiognomonie arabe; A. Ghersetti, ‘Una tabella di fisiognomica nel Qabs al-anwār wa
Bahğat al-Asrār attribuito a Ibn “Arabı̄” ’, Quaderni di Studi Arabi, 12 (Rome, 1994), 15–49.
century.⁴⁹ Relatively little is known about the author Rhazes, other than that
he was a physician, born in Rayy, a Persian town a few kilometres south of
Teheran, who in the last years of the ninth century arrived at the court at Bagh-
dad, and took up the practice of medicine.⁵⁰
Rhazes’s exposition of physiognomy, as presented in Book II of his text, was
heavily influenced by the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica, even to the
point of containing descriptions of the ‘various characters’, or the very same
physiognomical aphorisms, such as, for example, that the small, narrow fore-
head was a sign of stupidity.⁵¹ However, like the second-century bce treatise
of the Roman orator Polemon, and unlike the pseudo-Aristotelian Physi-
ognomonica, Rhazes presented his physiognomy in the much more simplistic
form of a list of physiognomical aphorisms or ‘signs’ without any discussion
of their philosophical or logical assumptions. The absence of the analogies
between man and animals that one finds in the Greek texts suggests a greater
anthropocentric emphasis in the focus of Rhazes’s physiognomical eye, an
anthropocentrism made all the more striking by a more detailed discussion
of the ‘distinction between the sexes’, particularly Rhazes’s examination of the
eunuch. In addition to this, the fact that all of the material which surrounds the
chapter on physiognomy is explicitly and unambiguously medical suggests
that Rhazes’s tract contributed to furthering the process of the medicalization
of physiognomy that began in ancient Greece, including the physiognomy
of the members of the human body that one finds in the thirteenth-century
physiognomical theory of Albertus Magnus discussed below. Indeed, given the
importance of firāsa to the Arabic physiognomical tradition, Rhazes may have
been attempting to render the formerly instinctual Islamic physiognomical
inspection more ‘rational’ and empirical as well as more medical, and in that
sense can be seen as a precursor to a movement so often identified with Renais-
sance theorists in part because of the latter’s anti-Arabic and anti-Islamic
religious persuasions.⁵²
The actual impact of Rhazes’s physiognomy on Western medicine and
religion in the Middle Ages remains unclear. Whilst the influence of Rhazes’s
medical writings began to be felt after 1270, particularly in Paris, Montpellier,
and Bologna, it was always less discernible than that of another Arabic writer,
Avicenna, whose Canon ‘shaped and formed anew the medical thought of the
⁴⁹ Förster, Scriptores, i, pp. clxxvii–clxxviii, and ii, 161–79.

⁵⁰ L. I. Conrad, ‘The Arabic–Islamic Medical Tradition’, in L. I. Conrad, M. Neve, V. Nutton, R. Porter,
and A. Wear (eds.), The Western Medical Tradition 800 B.C. to A.D. 1800 (Cambridge, 1995), 112–13.
⁵¹ Cf. Rhazes, in Förster, Scriptores, ii, 168, ll. 15–16 and 167–8, ll. 21 ff, with Aristotle, Physiognomonics,
806b 25–30 and i, 811b 25. ⁵² Cf. Jacquart and Michean, La médicine arabe, 60 and 255.
early thirteenth century’ even more than Galen.⁵³ The role of physiognomy in
Avicenna’s medical theories remains unexamined by medievalists. Notwith-
standing, the impact of Rhazes’s medicalized Arabic physiognomy must have
been limited by the fact that the Liber almansoris appears to have been most
widely known through Book IX, which does not contain any physiognomy.
The other Arabic text responsible for the dissemination of some of the
Arabic tradition of physiognomy was the Secretum secretorum. This text was
long thought to be an Aristotelian work, despite the absence of any extant
Greek original.⁵⁴ It is, in fact, a translation of a ninth- or tenth-century work of
Arabic origins known as the Kitab sirr al-asrar, whose more proper title should
be translated as The Book of the Science of Government; or, The Good Ordering
of Statecraft. By at least the middle of the tenth century, it included a section
devoted to physiognomy. The work as a whole is presented as the mystical
advice which Aristotle sent to Alexander the Great during his conquest of
Persia, a presentation possibly intended to symbolize the moment of a synthe-
sis of Greek and Arabic instrumental rationality and mysticism. The first three
discourses derive from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Elsewhere, it shows the
influence of Hippocrates in its material on humoral theory and the seasons.
The physiognomy in this work can be said to contain nothing new. Like
the Liber almansoris, the distinctly anthropocentric aphorisms are presented
in a simple list form. As with Rhazes’s physiognomy, the most fundamental
differences lie not so much in the exposition of physiognomical doctrine
itself, but in the context of the rest of the material with which that theoretical
physiognomy is presented.
With the addition of layers of scientific and occult material, the Secretum
secretorum grew, by a ‘process of accretion’, from ‘a Mirror for Princes’ into ‘an
encyclopaedic manual’. One of these ‘additions’ along the way was an exposi-
tion of physiognomical doctrine.⁵⁵ Like Rhazes’s Liber almansoris, the Secre-
tum is explicitly written for a king, but with a different purpose. Despite the
medical material which surrounds it, the physiognomy is presented as a mysti-
cal scientia which the prince should know in order to rule his subjects success-
fully and to choose his ministers correctly. In that way, the emphasis which the
Secretum places on the scientia of physiognomy presents it less as a self-reflexive
medical scientia, and more as a form of political science with an obvious
⁵³ Jacquart and Michean, La médecine arabe, 175; M. R. McVaugh, ‘Medical Knowledge at the Time of
Frederick II’, Micrologus, ii (Turnhout, 1994), 7.
⁵⁴ Secretum Secretorum, ed. M. A. Manzalaoui, Early English Text Society (Oxford, 1977); S. J. Williams,
‘The Scholarly Career of the Pseudo-Aristotelian “Secretum Secretorum” in the 13th and 14th Century’,
unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (Northwestern University, 1991).
⁵⁵ Manzalaoui, Secretum, pp. ix–xi.
practical application—the choosing of ministers by physiognomy as opposed
to their automatic assumption of their duties due to the privilege of birth.
Another fundamental difference between the Secretum and Rhazes’s Liber
almansoris is that during the Middle Ages, unlike Book II of Rhazes’s Liber
almansoris, the Secretum experienced what Alexander Murray has described as
an ‘extraordinary European diffusion’. More recent scholars, describing it as a
text which weds ‘ethics and alchemy’, suggest that it ‘probably ranks amongst
the most widely read and most often copied or translated works in the Latin
West in the Middle Ages’.⁵⁶ It was translated into Hebrew in early thirteenth-
century Spain, if not before, possibly by the poet Judah al-Harizi.⁵⁷ The extant
versions of it in Castilian, Catalonian, French, English, Welsh, German, Ital-
ian, Portuguese, Hebrew, Icelandic, Russian, Croatian, and Czech, many of
which take a poetic form, are a further suggestion of the extent to which phys-
iognomy entered medical, religious, and political cultures across a vast geo-
graphical area.
The Medieval Latin Textual Traditions

The art of physiognomy in the Dark Ages
Medieval Christian ‘physiognomy’ is often assumed to have begun with the
wave of Latin translations of Arabic works which took place in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries. This wave certainly brought the Physiognomonica, the
Anonymous Latin, as well as the aforementioned Arabic Liber almansoris and
Secretum, to the Latin West. As no manuscripts have been found dating from
earlier than this, it is often assumed that this theoretical physiognomical eye
dates from the same time. Moreover, it is around this time that the term
physiognomia entered the written Latin language.
However, before we move on to examine those works, it must be said that
even the most superficial glance suggests that there is some evidence, albeit at
present inconclusive and in some cases distinctly tangential, alluding to some
form of physiognomical practice, if not theory, during the Dark Ages, which
should not be so readily dismissed. For example, in 1546 John Bale (1494–1563),
bishop of Ossory, celebrated bibliophile and radical religious polemicist,
⁵⁶ A. Murray, Reason and Society in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1985), 83; S. Gentile and C. Gilly (eds.),
Marsilio Ficino e il ritorno di Ermete Trismegisto (Rome, 2000), 197–8.
⁵⁷ A. I. Spitzer, ‘The Hebrew Translations of the Sod ha-sodot and its Place in the Transmission of the Sirr
al-Asrar’, in W. F. Ryan and C. B. Schmitt (eds.), Pseudo-Aristotle, the Secret of Secrets (1982), 34–54.
attacked Theodore (602–90), the late seventh-century archbishop of Canter-
bury who was responsible for adopting the Roman centralized model for the
English church. In addition to criticizing him for this, Bale also blamed
Theodore for introducing into England many ‘vayne & craftye scyences’
including ‘Phisnomy, Palmestrye, Alcumye, Necroma[n]cye, Chyroma[n]cye,
Geomancye, & wytherye’ through the famous school of St Augustine’s he set
up with Adrian the abbot of the monastery of Saints Peter and Paul—a school
which produced, among others, the venerable Bede (673–735). An early mod-
ern protestant religious polemic it may have been, but it was an educated
polemic by someone who knew about the history of written and printed texts.
For astrology was certainly taught at the school set up by Theodore, as it was in
the medieval universities, and wherever one finds astrology one often finds
some form of physiognomy.⁵⁸ Indeed, given Archbishop Theodore’s Byzantine
education, one contemporary scholar can think of no reason why he would not
have been familiar with Aristotle, and perhaps even the Physiognomonica or the
Secretum.⁵⁹
The absence of the actual word ‘physiognomy’ and its many derivatives from
those Anglo-Saxon and Old English Latin glossaries that have been edited by
recent scholars confirms the lateness of the arrival of this neologism. Yet it is
hard to accept that ‘physiognomy’, or ‘fisnomy’, only exists where one finds
these words for it. From this perspective, those glossaries do include some
interesting, potentially physiognomical, material mixed with proverbial wis-
dom. For example: ‘A hairy forehead. For as long as you shall have a hairy fore-
head. That is the day you have divinity. That is as long as you shall have
friends.’⁶⁰ This may be described as nothing but physiognomical folklore due
to the fact that no direct link with any literary source can be established. Yet
that is no reason to dismiss its importance. Moreover, the Church Fathers were
certainly aware of physiognomy even earlier than this. Origen speaks, albeit
disparagingly, of the physiognomical ability of Zopyrus, the physiognomist
who famously examined Socrates. Cassian also uses the term in talking of
Socrates.⁶¹ Moreover, whilst the Coptic texts carry no specific mention of
physiognomy, they do provide evidence for something that sounds very much
⁵⁸ John Bale, The actes of Englysh votaryes (1548), i. 37v–38v. Cf. Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of the English
People, ed. B. Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1969), 331 ff.
⁵⁹ Private conversation with Professor J. Kraye, the Warburg Institute, October 1994.
⁶⁰ J. H. Hessels, ed. An Eighth-century Latin-Anglo-Saxon Glossary (Cambridge, 1890); J. H. Hessels, ed.
A Late Eighth-century Latin-Anglo-Saxon Glossary (Cambridge, 1906); T. Wright and R. P. Wülker eds.
Anglo-Saxon and Old-English Vocabularies (1884 , repr. 1968); R. T. Oliphant, ed. The Harley Latin–Old
English glossary (The Hague, 1966), 199.
⁶¹ J. Cassian, Collationes, in Patrologia Latina, ed. P. Migne, 217 vols. (Paris, 1844–53), v. 49, col. 905a.
like a form of firāsa, or what in Jewish mysticism was referred to as hakkarath
panim—perception by the face. In one text, Paul says
‘I looked at each one of those that entered [the church] to see in what state were the
souls that went in. All those who entered had joyful faces and their looks were glad, so
that the angel of each one rejoiced with him’. For he had this gift from God, to see how
each one was, in the way that we see the faces of one another.⁶²
Just as the Qu’ran acted as a textual authority for firāsa, so the Holy Bible
provided numerous scriptural authorities for Christian ‘physiognomy’. Men-
tion was made in the Introduction of Ecclesiastes 8 : 1, ‘a man’s wisdom maketh
his face to shine, and the boldness of his face shall be changed’. Similarly there
was Isaiah 3 : 9, ‘the shew of their countenance doth witness against them; and
they declare their sin as Sodom, they hide it not’, and even Leviticus 21: 17–24,
‘for whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach’ (v. 18.).
Indeed, this last passage from Leviticus raises the issue of a hitherto unexam-
ined and distinctly physiognomical practice in the history of Christian ordina-
tion. That is the one which, by the fourth century, saw the exclusion of the
physically deformed from ordination officially enshrined in canon law, with all
of the hitherto unexamined physiognomical implications that this apparent
notion of the purity of the priesthood had for social make-up of the leaders of
the church and state.⁶³
Of those texts certainly known in the Anglo-Saxon period, Isidore’s Ety-
mologies contained much of the humoral material on which certain concep-
tions of physiognomy were based. Given how medicalized physiognomy had
become by the fourth century, this demands much further investigation. In
addition, Oribasius at least mentions Adamantius, and both Cicero’s Tusculan
Disputations as well as his De fato would have made Anglo-Saxons familiar with
Socrates’ famous encounter with the physiognomist Zopyrus.⁶⁴
Given the innate nature of some forms of physiognomical perception, and
given that physiognomia was a Latin term coined to refer to the textualized, sys-
tematized, form of an audio-visual phenomenon, it would be either naïve or
pedantic to assume that ‘physiognomy’ only began in the medieval West with
the arrival of these manuscripts. Furthermore, it has yet to be established that
there was no oral body of physiognomical theory which pre-dated this Greco-
Arabic textual tradition, an oral physiognomical culture into which the
⁶² G. G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York, 1961), 48–9. V. MacDermot, The Cult of
the Seer in the Ancient Middle East (1971), 417, 420.
⁶³ Gratian, Decretum, Dist. XXXV, I, 1, Dist. L, 59, Dist. LV, 1, and Gregory IX, Decretales I. XX, 3. 6, in
Corpus juris canonici, ed. E. Friedberg and A. L. Richter, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1879).
⁶⁴ J. D. A. Ogilvy, Books Known To The English 597–1066 (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 113, 166, 208.
textual tradition was inserted or converted. Let us take just two examples. First,
Daniel of Beccles (fl. c.1180) used the phrase ‘frons faceto’ to describe the coun-
tenance as expressive of feeling. Second, the proverbs ascribed to Alfred the
Great include the famous physiognomical aphorism about red hair: ‘The rede
man he is a quet [wicked man]; for he wole the thin uvil red [will give thee evil
counsel’].⁶⁵ But here, once again, we come upon a historical brick wall, as it is
an aspect of the history of this subject that no historian has yet considered
closely, and a problem for which the available sources might not in any case suf-
fice. All that can be said is that until further scholarship is carried out in this
area, Dark Age physiognomy remains something of an unexplored abyss. Nev-
ertheless, in the light of a 1596 English schoolbook definition of physiognomy
as ‘knowledge by the visage’, a single entry in an Anglo-Saxon glossary is
suggestive of what a rewarding area of investigation it might be: ‘Vultus:
Contemplatio’.⁶⁶
The art of physiognomy in the Middle Ages

The art of physiognomy in the Middle Ages is yet another aspect of the his-
tory of physiognomy which, as I write, still awaits its scholar.⁶⁷ It should prove
a fruitful area of research. It was during this period, perhaps more than any
other, that physiognomy can be seen to have undergone a rich intellectual
transformation. The proliferation of physiognomical treatises in manuscript
from the thirteenth century onwards was part of a complex process that, from
both an intellectual and a practical point of view, had particularly profound
consequences for the medieval Christian understanding of, among other
things, religion, natural philosophy, medicine, and art. This involved the
assimilation of the Greco-Arabic medical tradition, as well as the arrival of the
newly translated corpus of Aristotelian writings, particularly the corpus
vetustius (which sometimes included the Physiognomonica). Such an approach
emphasizes only the ‘Christian’ tradition. Equally important for the dissemi-
nation of physiognomical theory in the Middle Ages, as well as for the history
of religious conflict in the period, was the diffusion of the extremely influential
late thirteenth-century Hebraic encyclopaedia, the Book of Splendour (Sefer ha-
zohar), otherwise known as the Zohar, written in Castile and containing the
physiognomy of the Secretum. As Scholem has written, ‘alone among the whole
⁶⁵ Manzalaoui, Secretum, 276; The Proverbs of Alfred, ed. E. Borgström (Lund, 1908), 25, ll. 661–2. See also
24, ll. 639–40.
⁶⁶ Edmund Coote, The English schoole-maister (1596); Hessels, Latin–Anglo-Saxon Glossary, 122.
⁶⁷ J. Agrimi, Ingeniosa scientia nature (Florence, 2002).
of post-Talmudic rabbinical literature it became a canonical text, which for a
period of several centuries actually ranked with the Bible and the Talmud’. Two
centuries after its first appearance, the Zohar had been raised from obscurity ‘to
the foremost eminence in Kabbalistic literature’.⁶⁸ In addition to this more
intellectual approach, there is much to be learned about the role of the art of
physiognomy in the wider sphere of medieval culture and society, from prac-
tising physiognomists, university education, religious rituals, or even medieval
art and poetry.
For the moment it has to be said that there appear to have been four treatis-
es that dominated the medieval Christian tradition. Three of them were writ-
ten in the thirteenth century, within the sixty-five-year period c.1230–c.1295.
Moreover, with one exception, they are all treatises that later made the transi-
tion from manuscript into early modern print. There are no doubt other trea-
tises which made more significant contributions to the development of the
medieval theory of physiognomy but which only ever circulated in manuscript.
One such is the extensive treatise purportedly written by ‘Roland Scriptoris’.
But a full understanding of the exact contribution of all such manuscripts to
the intellectual development of medieval physiognomy will have to await their
scholarly editors. Notwithstanding, the following will simply try to highlight
the most basic innovative feature of each of the medieval treatises. In so doing,
it will be argued that these developments, cumulatively speaking, contributed
to what I want to argue was a broadening of the focus of the physiognomical
eye in a process that, by the end of the Middle Ages, might be described as the
realization of its totalizing potential.
The first, and possibly the most influential, of those medieval physiognom-
ical treatises was written by Michael Scot, as already mentioned most widely
known as the court astrologer of Frederick II from about 1228 to c.1235, in
whose court he wrote this most original of his works. Scot’s Liber phisionomie
was the third book in a work entitled the Liber introductorius. Like the earlier
Arabic Secretum, Scot’s work is a veritable encyclopaedia of the more Arabic-
influenced ‘medical’ aspects of natural philosophy.⁶⁹
Until this text is studied in greater detail by a medievalist, all that can be said
here is that the originality of Scot’s contribution to the written tradition of
physiognomy can be said to have had three aspects. The first is that he coined
many of his own physiognomical aphorisms. It is not yet known if they were
⁶⁸ G. G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York, 1974), 156–60.

⁶⁹ P. Morpurgo, ‘Michele Scoto tra scienza dell’anima e astrologia’, Clio. Rivista trimestrale di studi
storici, 19 (Rome, 1983), 441–50; ‘Il capitolo “de informacione medicorum” nel “Liber introductorius” di
Michele Scoto’, Clio. Rivista trimestrale di studi storici (Rome, 1984), 651–61.
formed through some sort of ‘empirical’ observation of the people around him.
Yet, irrespective of how they were formed, their effect was to introduce some
fundamental changes into the structure and nature of the physiognomical
aphorism. In Scot’s treatise, the genealogy of the metaphysical meanings
attached to the physical feature in all of the physiognomical aphorisms is much
more complex. As a result the sign became much more polyvalent. As contra-
dictory as many of them seem, what Scot in fact did was to introduce new fam-
ilies of related moral/psychological meanings. Given the extent to which
physiognomy was an art that authors often claimed led one to self-knowledge,
an issue that will be explored in greater detail in Chapters 3, 4, and 5, this
re-combination of the metaphysics of the self as symbolized in the physical
features had important implications for the self that was to be known by this
art.
Scot’s second innovation appears to have been to forge a much stronger
conceptual link between physiognomy, issues of hereditary, embryology, and
generation, which he articulated through astrological ideas of conception.⁷⁰
Moreover, it was an intellectual innovation with a very practical basis, as the
many later editions of his treatise on physiognomy which begin with a chapter
entitled ‘The Utility of Physiognomy’ indicate.⁷¹ In Scot’s case, one very prac-
tical impetus behind his conceptual link between physiognomy, embryology,
and generation was the fact that Scot may have been trying to help Frederick
II choose his second wife.⁷² As such, it was a medieval Christian version of
a practice also found in medieval India in which the physiognomist was
accompanied by two brahmins in the examination of the potential wife.⁷³
The third aspect of the originality of Scot’s treatise lay in the fact that he
seems to have been the first to include the sense of smell in the phenomenon of
physiognomical perception. In Michael Scot’s treatise one finds the following
passage: ‘the fetid breath of a man signifies an illness of the liver, often lying,
vain, lascivious, fallacious, of a tenacious capacity, of a gross intellect, a
seducer, envious, desirous of the goods of others’.⁷⁴ This connection with gen-
eration and reproduction as well as the extension of physiognomical percep-
tion to the realm of smell might be taken as another intimation of what appears
to have been the most overarching change that occurred in the structure of the
⁷⁰ S. J. Williams, ‘The Early Circulation of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Secret of Secrets in the West: The
Papal and Imperial Courts’, Micrologus, 2 (Turnhout, 1994), 127–44.
⁷¹ See, for example, Michael Scot, Rerum naturalium perscrutatoris, de secretis naturae (Frankfurt, 1565).
⁷² D. Jacquart, ‘La physiognomonie à l’époque de Frédéric II: Le traité de Michel Scot’, Micrologus, ii
(Turnhout, 1994), 34. ⁷³ Professor K. G. Zysk, private conversation, August 2003.
⁷⁴ Michael Scot, Liber phisionomie magistri Michaelis Scoti (Basle, after 1485), [65].
physiognomical eye as it developed in the period between classical Athens
and late fifteenth-century Europe—its totalization.⁷⁵
Thirty years later, in the 1260s, came the next major scholastic exposition of
physiognomical doctrine. This was written by a theologian at the very heart of
the established church, the famous thirteenth-century Dominican philoso-
pher and bishop of Regensburg, Albertus Magnus (d. 1280). As obscure as he
appears these days, the intellectual reputation of Albertus Magnus throughout
medieval Europe was staggering. As master of theology at the University of
Paris, he taught Thomas Aquinas. Like Scot, Albertus Magnus’s reputation was
ruined by accusations of his being a ‘magician’. However, unlike Scot, Albertus
Magnus was finally canonized in 1931.
The work which contained his exposition of physiognomy was his De ani-
malibus. Like Scot’s work, this also bears the strong influence of Arabic authors.
Book XII, for example, is based largely on Galen’s De complexionibus but via the
Canon and De animalibus of the Arabic physician and philosopher Avicenna.
However, unlike Scot, Albertus Magnus took his physiognomical aphorisms
verbatim from a version of Loxus’s fourth-century treatise, interspersed with
citations taken verbatim from the physiognomy found in the Arabic Secretum.
Thus, once again, we find an author whose contribution to the development of
the physiognomical eye was not to change its inner grammar or language, but
to embed it in a new conceptual context. In the case of Albertus Magnus, he
interwove these physiognomical aphorisms with material on the anatomy of
animals and humans, in a similar vein to the zoological writings of Aristotle,
but much more systematically. In that sense he widened the hitherto more
anthropocentric parameters of the physiognomical eye.
The exact nature of that intellectual connection between anatomy and phys-
iognomy in Albertus, however original, remains as yet unexplained, as does its
relationship to his theology. It is possible he was attempting to find a way of cir-
cumventing the problems of syllogistic thinking inherent in physiognomy.
Similarly, he may have been implying the need for a physiological causal expla-
nation, as opposed to an astrological one, which would link anatomy and phys-
iognomy.⁷⁶ It is also conceivable that he saw physiognomy as a way of linking
the high-ranking Aristotelian natural philosophy and the often scorned lower
ranking mechanical art of medicine, with the aim of incorporating both into
devotional practice. Interweaving the anatomy and physiognomy of man so
⁷⁵ See M. R. McVaugh, Smells and the Medieval Surgeon (forthcoming).

⁷⁶ E. Synan, ‘Albertus Magnus and the Sciences’, in J. A. Weisheipl (ed.), Albertus Magnus and the Sciences
(Toronto, 1980), 6–8. However, see N. Siraisi, ‘The Medical Learning of Albertus Magnus’, in Weisheipl,
Albertus Magnus, 382–3.
blatantly with that of the animals, it could be argued, brought physiognomy
closer to the doctrine of signatures—the next conceptual step after this therio-
logical physiognomy being the development of an analogical botanical
physiognomy. It is in that sense that the work of Albertus on physiognomy
can perhaps be considered, retrospectively, as a stepping-stone in the gradual
totalization of the physiognomical eye.
The third significant medieval contribution to the canon of physiognomical
writings came from the quill of the famous Italian natural philosopher and
physician Pietro d’Abano (1257–1315?). Professor of philosophy, medicine, and
astronomy at Paris and Padua, Abano’s most famous and influential text was
known as the Conciliator differentiarum philosophorum et praecipue medicorum.
It was an ambitious attempt to reconcile a variety of opposed philosophical
views, in particular Arab medicine and Greek natural philosophy. It was a work
which commanded respect and authority well into the sixteenth century, and
helped to further Padua’s reputation as a centre of medical study.⁷⁷ Yet Abano
remains something of a controversial figure. He was tried twice by the Inquisi-
tion on charges of heresy, and accused of questioning the holy miracles and
practising magic. His interest in astrology and alchemy, and his claims as to
their usefulness in medicine, alongside his interest in things Arabic, only added
to the determination of the Christian Inquisition to get a conviction. He was
acquitted at the first trial, but found guilty at the second trial, which took place
after his death. His reputation has never really recovered since.
Abano’s ‘treatise on physiognomy’, entitled Compilatio Physionomiae, was
written in Paris c.1295. Like so many of the treatises in this canon of physiog-
nomical writing, much of the grammar and conclusions of his physiognomical
doctrine are not so original in themselves. It is, in fact, a compendium of all ear-
lier works. It is a less anthropocentric physiognomy than that found in Rhazes
and the Secretum. Abano sees physiognomy as an art which compares the
human aspect with that of the animals, as well as helping with understanding
the difference between men and women. Like Scot, Abano emphasizes the
utility of physiognomy. In Abano’s eyes that utility goes beyond the buying of
horses and slaves, the preservation of health, the political rhetoric of Polemon,
the political scientia of the Secretum, and its choosing of élite ministers or the
choosing of a mate put forward by Scot. Abano explicitly states that physiog-
nomy can help one to discern friends from enemies. In that sense, from the
point of view of physiognomy as a political science, Abano extended its utility
⁷⁷ N. Siraisi, ‘Pietro d’Abano and Taddeo Alderotti: Two Models of Medical Culture’, in Medioevo, 11
(Padua, 1985), 162.
across the entire polis, to cover what might today be termed the ‘public sphere’
between the home/family and the guardians of the state.
Yet besides broadening its practical applications, Abano’s contribution to
the evolution of the physiognomical eye lies in the intellectual connection he
makes between physiognomy, astrology, mathematics, and the idea of the ‘nec-
essary proportionality of cause and effect’.⁷⁸ This is an extremely complex idea
that cannot be discussed in any detail here, but which goes back to the Aris-
totelian notion of ‘proportion’ in the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise. Suffice it to
say that whilst Abano was not the first to link physiognomy with astrology, he
did explore this link in more detail than any previous writer in the physiog-
nomical canon.⁷⁹ In Ptolemaic astrology, there were specific, if loose, physiog-
nomical indications attributed to the planets. Abano joins this physiognomy to
the physiognomical descriptions of zodiacal types, and includes notes about
their state of health as well as their preferences, their colours, and their fortu-
nate days. He placed all of this within a framework governed by the notion of
‘proportionality’—a mathematical law that was thought to determine the rec-
iprocal harmony of the universe, including the relationship between body and
soul, and the foreseeing of the primary and secondary causes. In this way, not
only did Abano further contribute to the medicalization of physiognomy
(in which physiognomical diagnosis allowed one to determine the state of
health, the predisposition to illness, longevity, or imminent death), he also
contributed to reinforcing its place in the realm of the mantic disciplines.⁸⁰
The final work which will be considered in this section is one of the manu-
scripts of the Western medieval physiognomical tradition which was never
printed. It was a text written sometime before 1450 and entitled Speculum Phi-
sionomia. Its author was Michael Savonarola (1384–1464), a professor at the
University of Padua until his fifty-fifth year, who spent the last twenty-five
years of his life as court physician to the Estes. Savonarola dedicated his text to
Leonello d’Este, an ancestor of Cardinal Luigi d’Este, to whom the sixteenth-
century physiognomist Giovanni Battista Della Porta would dedicate his De
humana physiognomia over a century later, in 1586.
Savonarola’s Speculum Phisionomia continues the process of the medicaliza-
tion of physiognomy. Like Albertus Magnus, Savonarola took most of the
physiognomical aphorisms from Loxus’s fourth-century treatise. With regard
to his specific intellectual contribution to the development of physiognomical
⁷⁸ E. Paschetto, ‘La Fisiognomica nell’enciclopedia delle scienze di Pietro d’Abano’, Medioevo, 11 (Padua,
1985), 97, 98, 105.
⁷⁹ R. Pack, ‘Auctores incerti de physionomia libellus’, Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen
Age, 42 (Paris, 1975), 113–38. ⁸⁰ Paschetto, ‘La Fisiognomica’, 109 and 111.
theory, Thomann has shown the rich intellectual range of Savonarola’s treat-
ment of the subject. In particular, the treatise contributed, among other things,
to the development of the mathematical notion of the mean, and explored this
through art.⁸¹ But Savonarola’s originality also lies in the degree of specificity
with which he seeks to correlate the doctrine of the temperaments and the
law of the four elements with physiognomy. He attempts to determine the
corresponding temperament of each physiognomical sign as well as offer a
physiological explanation of the particular physical feature before giving its
psychological meaning. For Savonarola, the physiognomists said what it is, but
did not explain how or why it is—he thought that was something only
medicine could explain. Yet for all its intellectual subtlety, like Abano,
Savonarola also stressed the practical aim of physiognomy. He thought it
would teach Leonello to know the character and secret inclinations of the
hearts of men, as well as the temperaments and the diseases to which they were
predisposed, the marvellous secrets of nature, the proportions of the human
body, some principles of the physiognomy of animals, particularly horses, and,
in the tradition of the Secretum Secretorum and Abano, he thought it could act
as a guide to help Este’s sons in choosing their entourages.
The Textual Presence of Physiognomy before Print

Catalogues of medieval libraries show that manuscript versions of all of these
‘treatises on physiognomy’ were familiar material in libraries throughout
Europe from the twelfth century onwards.⁸² The earliest surviving catalogue of
an Austin library, a list of fifty-seven volumes of part of the conventical library
at Ratisbon in 1347, is just one of many examples of such libraries. The only
‘Aristotelian’ work it contains is a ‘Liber secretorum’. Yet it was not only the
Latin-reading élite who had access to such treatises. Of those few manuscripts
which have survived, many are written in a European vernacular, and their
original provenance ranges across the continent. Some can be traced to spe-
cific religious orders, if not specific monasteries. There is, for example, a
thirteenth-century Latin manuscript of the Anonymous Latin treatise which
may have been written at Evesham. There are others in English and Latin
⁸¹ J. Thomann, Studien zum “Speculum physionomie” des Michele Savonarola, Ph.D. thesis (University of
Zurich, 1997).
⁸² Williams, ‘Scholarly Career’, 89, 92 ff., and 124; K. W. Humphreys, The Book Provisions of the Medieval
Friars 1215–1400 (Amsterdam, 1964), 119 and 125; J. N. Hillgarth, Readers & Books in Majorca, 1229–1550, 2
vols. (Paris, 1991), ii. 95.
whose provenance was originally English Benedictine and Augustinian. The
Franciscans at Oxford owned at least one such manuscript, which Roger Bacon
and John of Wales both used. Hiltgart von Hürnheim, a young Cistercian nun
of the convent of Zimmern in south Germany, set a precedent for all Cistercian
communities with her translation of the long Secretum into German in 1282
(which entitled the section on physiognomy ‘on the knowledge of the qualities
of man by spiritual signs which is called the phisonomia of Aristotle’), as
Albertus Magnus had done for the Dominicans.
There are fragments of evidence which suggest that these manuscripts were
not simply left chained and unread in the monastic library. One monk who had
a physiognomical manuscript in his private possession was Simon of Bozoun,
prior of Norwich (1344–52), who had his own copy of the Secretum. Nuns also
had their own private copies. A good example is the manuscript of Lydgate’s
versified Secretum, in a version compiled by John Newton on 25 October 1459,
at Rhodes, Lancashire. It was held in Syon, Middlesex, in the Abbey of St
Saviour and St Bridget. The Brigittine nuns were particularly important in the
transmission of ‘mystical’ texts. This particular mystical text appears to have
been passed down through the private hands of the sisters. Until 1531, one of its
owners was a sister called Anne Colville. After her death in 1531 it became the
property of Clemencia Thraseborough until her death in 1536. These manu-
scripts could also be found in lay hands. One was included in the seven vol-
umes donated to the Benedictine cathedral priory of St Cuthbert in Durham
by one ‘Master Herbert the Doctor’. Moreover, those who did not possess their
own copy or never visited the library may have heard one read out in the Refec-
tory. Such may have been the case with Hiltgart von Hürnheim’s translation of
the Secretum, in which she addresses both ‘readers’ and ‘listeners’. In other
words, the text was written to be read out aloud to a group of people.⁸³
By the late Middle Ages, the art of physiognomy was being taught at numer-
ous universities throughout Europe. Indeed, it was taken so seriously at the
University of Freiburg that in its mid-fifteenth century statutes physiognomy
was actually prescribed to be read. The seriousness with which physiognomy
was considered in the syllabus of the scholastics is what the mid-seventeenth
century English radical John Webster was trying to remind the educated world
of when he pointed out that the loss of physiognomy from the syllabus of the
⁸³ Aberystwyth: National Library of Wales, MS Peniarth 339A, fol. 105r–117v; Thomann, Thesis, Appen-
dix; Hiltgart von Hürnheim, Mittelhochdeutsche Prosaübersetzung des “Secretum Secretorum”, ed. R. Möller
(Berlin, 1963), 4, 34; English Benedictine Libraries, ed. R. Sharpe et al., Corpus of British Medieval Library
Catalogues (1996), ii, 303; Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 416, fol. 253; David N. Bell, What
Nuns Read (Michigan, 1995), 195 (Syon A. 35e); Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 18,
6. 11, fol. 82r–84v; D. H. Green, Medieval Listening and Reading (Cambridge, 1994), 80, 96, and 152.
scholastics was a major wrong turning-point in the development of élite
education:
There remaineth diverse excellent discoveries of many mysterious things in nature that
do properly belong to Physicks, which yet the Schools take small or no notice of, and
as little pains in, either to know, teach, or improve them; and so are a witness against
them of their sluggishness, and deficiency of their too-much magnified Peripatetick
Philosophy. As first, they pass over with a dry foot that laudable, excellent, and prof-
itable science of Physiognomy, which hath been admired, and studyed of the gravest
and wisest Sages that have been in many generations: which is that Science which from
and by certain external signs, signatures, and lineaments, doth explicate the internal
nature and quality of natural bodies either generally or specifically.⁸⁴
Intellectually or taxonomically speaking, throughout medieval Europe,

physiognomy was a seemingly unstable, unclassifiable, subject. On the whole
it hovered between being conceived of as a rational Aristotelian scientia, and
a more mystical, so-called ‘occult’ scientia, and, in either case, was always a
somewhat medicalized and astrologized scientia. This intellectual ambiguity is
embodied in the extant manuscripts themselves. For example, one finds expo-
sitions of physiognomical doctrine at one and the same time in Aristotelian flo-
rilegia, collections of occult sciences, or bound with manuscripts devoted to
astrological/medical material, often beside expositions of chiromancy. If the
binding of one manuscript of the Secretum secretorum with another manuscript
on the coronation of kings is more than a random accident, it is perhaps under-
standable in terms of the tradition of Mirrors for Princes. However the binding
of another manuscript on physiognomy with a manuscript on some sort of
either literal or metaphorical ‘travel’ or ‘journey’ (itinerarium), if not com-
pletely fortuitous, seems much more curious.⁸⁵
If the status of medicine as a scientia was still very much disputed during the
Middle Ages, the status of physiognomy as a scientia was even more ambiguous
for Aristotelians. Charles Schmitt has argued that by the fifteenth century, with
the rise of more rigorous critical methods, the lack of a Greek original meant
that a hitherto supposedly Aristotelian work, such as the Secretum, would be
deemed to be spurious. Indeed, Williams has clearly shown that whilst some
scholars took the Secretum very seriously, as early as the fourteenth century
most school-men had questioned its paternity, and by the late fifteenth
⁸⁴ Agrimi, Ingeniosa, ch. 3; Maclean, Logic, 319; John Webster, Academiarum examen (1653), 76.
⁸⁵ Williams, ‘Scholarly Career’, 92 ff. and 124; London: British Library, MS Sloane 213; Oxford: Bodleian
Library, MS Digby 95; Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Douce 95; Sharpe, English Benedictine Libraries, B58
#26 (303).
century, this doubt was quite widespread. In the case of the Secretum, this
then followed through in its printing history. It never appeared in any Latin
edition of the Aristotelian Opera. Indeed, like the Chiromantia, the Secretum
was ‘the only work of any size attributed to Aristotle . . . which never went into
a printed edition of the Opera’, and by the sixteenth century ‘it was no longer
worth discussing whether or not it was by Aristotle’.⁸⁶
Yet for all that scholars might argue about the authenticity of the Aris-
totelianism of the Secretum, this does not mean that the Secretum was not able
to stand on its own authority, even if that authority was an Arabic one and suf-
fered all the more for being so. More to the point, this does not mean that the
credibility of physiognomy itself was dismissed. Physiognomy retained the
significant theological, medical, and philosophical authorities of Albertus,
Rhazes, Scot, and Abano. And if these were considered by some as dubious,
marginal, figures in themselves, the art of physiognomy could still claim an
Aristotelian authority. Not only were there numerous genuine works of the
Stagyrite which contained some physiognomical doctrine, be it the Historia
animalium, the Prior analytica, as well as the Problemata, there was an original
Greek manuscript of the Physiognomonica. Moreover, unlike the Secretum, the
Physiognomonica appeared in numerous printed Greek editions of the Aris-
totelian Opera as well as numerous Latin editions. Having said that, despite this
Aristotelian authority that physiognomy retained, the criticisms of it by Jean
Buridan, one of the leading fourteenth-century commentators on Aristotle, are
perhaps a good example among many of the ambiguity one can find in the
as-yet-unexamined medieval attitudes towards physiognomy.⁸⁷
Conclusion
The Renaissance and early modern period did not see a sudden ‘awakening’
of interest in physiognomy per se. The coming of print saw the distribution of
earlier physiognomical doctrine in a new medium to a wider audience.
Notwithstanding the earlier ‘non-Western’ influences, the continuity of the
medieval tradition with the classical tradition is evident in some of the basic
philosophical and logical assumptions, as well as the various a priori ‘prisms’
which underpinned the basic structure of the more deductive aspect of the
⁸⁶ Williams, ‘Scholarly Career’, 90; C. B. Schmitt, ‘Francesco Storella and the Last Printed Edition of the
Latin Secretum Secretorum (1555)’, in Ryan and Schmitt, Sources and Influences, 125.
⁸⁷ L. Thorndike, ‘Buridan’s Questions on the Physiognomy ascribed to Aristotle’, Speculum, 18 (1943),
99–103.
physiognomical eye. However, the theory of this physiognomical eye
underwent various adaptations and transformations between the fourth centu-
ry bce and the fourth century ce which brought about the fusion of a divine,
temporally all-encompassing, medicalized, zoologized, astrologized physiog-
nomical eye and ear with the hermeneutic tradition expressed in the idea of the
‘book of nature’. As a result of that totalization, everything in nature came to
be seen as having some sort of systematized physiognomical significance. It
is this process which is echoed in the distinctly Boethian sub-title of one
late fifteenth-century Venetian edition of Michael Scot’s physiognomical
treatise, Tractatus de scientia phisonomie, siue de consolatione naturae ( [Venice,
1490 ?] ).⁸⁸ In the early modern period, this more total form of physiognomy
came to have its own, carefully elaborated, Neoplatonic physics which the
seventeenth-century natural philosopher Johannes Alsted referred to as
‘physica collativa, or physiognomy’.⁸⁹
⁸⁸ London: British Library, IA.25095.
⁸⁹ Johannes Alsted, Encyclopaedia septem tomis distincta, 4 vols. (Herborn, 1630), ii, 767–80.
2
The Bookish Face of Physiognomy in Early
Modern Europe
In this chapter I want to expose the assumptions upon which the archive of
early modern ‘books on physiognomy’ used as the foundation of this study was
created. I shall then use it, initially, to produce a tangible, material sense of the
presence of this corpus of physiognomical writings in early modern Europe. I
shall try to show how much of this textual physiognomy was in circulation in
early modern Europe, how much it cost, and who was reading it. In arguing for
the social and geographical ubiquity of this small corpus of text, I shall also
offer some suggestions about the evident dynamics of its production and
consumption.
Textual Presence
Inventing an archive
An archive is not only discovered, it is also ‘invented’. In the historian’s hands,
the four ‘books on physiognomy’ from Samuel Jeake’s library become a hand-
ful of documents in an ‘invented’ archive. That ‘invented archive’is part of a
longue durée global process of exchange of textual knowledge that was intensi-
fied by the work of medieval scribes in the twelfth century, and which explod-
ed with the invention of the printing press at the end of the fifteenth century.
Jeake’s ‘books on physiognomy’ thus were riddled with utterances and obser-
vations accumulated across centuries. But in each text, those utterances were
‘translated’ into the mentality and the culture of medieval and then early mod-
ern contemporaneity in the form of this ‘canon’ of ‘books on physiognomy’. As
was shown in the Introduction, this ‘canon’ was known and read throughout
the European mainland in Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and various early
modern vernaculars. Thus, taken as a whole, the texts under consideration here
were not the product of any one, specific organization, or any one person’s
writings or lifetime. The ‘archive’ they form in this work was not found chained
to the walls of a secret corridor under the Vatican library with an inscription
above the doorway reading ‘what we saw when we looked into their eyes’. They
do not form a self-evident series of documents and cannot now be said to exist
in the form of an archive with an in-built beginning, middle, and end, or an
obvious, innate unifying feature. Yet an authentic historical archive with no
obvious coherent form in and of itself can be constituted as such. However, it
can only be ‘invented’ on a reasoned basis, with the limitations of the assump-
tions underpinning it fully exposed to rational criticism.
Geographical framework
A rough impression of the textual presence of ‘treatises on physiognomy’ can be
established through a laborious process that was inconceivable to Renaissance
minds—by making a graph of the chronology and volume of ‘books on physi-
ognomy’ published throughout the period. This way one can at least provide
some tangible sense of the actual physical presence of physiognomy in its tex-
tual form in early modern Europe. It is this aspect of the project that requires
the ‘invention’ of an archive. It immediately raises two questions of its own and
begs a third. Where, both temporally and spatially speaking, does one begin
and end this bibliographical mapping? Why does one begin and end there?
And what does the graph depict?
With regard to the first question, when George Sarton, the historian of sci-
ence, was mining the archives for works of Arabic medicine and science, he
wrote of how he kept stumbling across Arabic ‘treatises on physiognomy’ even
when he was not looking for them.¹ A similar thing happens when one looks in
the library collections of America and Europe. With regard to the geographical
delineation of the inquiry, this particular study restricted its search to those
‘books on physiognomy’ published in England, France, Germany, Italy, the
Low Countries, Switzerland, and Spain. However, there were others published
in countries further north and east. In 1594, Lorentz Benedicht in Copenhagen
published an octavo in Danish entitled Astronomical Description, containing
information about the nature and inclination of man.² Further east in Cracow,
Hieronymus Viebores published Joannes Glogoviens’s Phisionomia hinc inde
ex illustribus scriptoribus . . . recollecta, in a short quarto format in 1518. An octa-
vo of Szymon z Lowicza’s Enchiridion chiromantie compendiosum published by
¹ G. Sarton, Introduction to the History of Science, 3 vols. (Baltimore, 1927–48), III.i., 258.
² Astronomische bescriffuelse: huor vdi tilkiende giffuis menniskens natur oc tilbøielighed (Copenhagen,
1594).
Bookish Face of Physiognomy in Early Modern Europe 81
Florianum Vnglerium in Cracow in 1532 suggests that Glogoviens’s book was
by no means the only physiognomical treatise published in Central and East-
ern Europe.
In carrying out this bibliographical mapping of early modern printed ‘trea-
tises on physiognomy’ in Europe, it was decided to arrange them according to
the country of publication. However, those very ‘national’ distinctions upon
which the lists are calculated are, of course, rather arbitrary. The political
reconfigurations of the German-speaking territories and the Italian kingdoms
and republics during the early modern period are obvious examples of the
problem of using the term ‘nation’ at this time as though it were a stable,
unproblematic, analytical category. As for the more banal concerns of book
publishing, even at the most simple, geopolitical level, the constant redrawing
of territorial boundaries raises the question of whether, for example, one
should include books published in Strasburg in the ‘French’ or the ‘German’
bibliography. From a linguistic perspective, the problems are even greater.
With regard to England, strictly speaking, the first printed exposition of phys-
iognomical doctrine in English (1503) was not only written in ‘Scottish’, it was
published in France from where it was then imported into England. Should
this text be included in both the English and the French lists, or a separate
Scottish list? In the sixteenth century, even a work written in French would not
have been seen as foreign to an English person. William Warde, the Cambridge
professor of anatomy and original translator of the first English version of a
physiognomical treatise widely known at the time as Arcandam (c.1564),
described the work as ‘now newly turned out of our French into our Vulgar
Tongue’.³ Paulo Pinzio’s Italian translation of the French Neoplatonist Antoine
Du Moulin’s 1549 Latin physiognomical treatise, Fisionomia con grandissima
brevità raccolta da i libri di antichi filosofi, was actually published in Lyon, by
Jean de Tournes in 1550. Does this mean it should be included in the French list
or the Italian list? These problems of classification do not only arise with works
in the vernacular. The same can be said of works written in Latin. Robert
Fludd’s large encyclopaedia Utriusque cosmi . . . historia (1617–21) may be con-
sidered as the writings of an English occult philosopher. But not only was it
written in Latin, it was published in Oppenheim. Should it therefore be
included in the English list or the German list, or both, or a separate early mod-
ern Latin reading/speaking ‘nation’ of its own?
Moreover, by concentrating on the place or the language of the publication
of physiognomical treatises in any one country, one is in danger of overlooking
³ Arcandam, The most excellent, profitable and pleasant book, of the famous Doctor and expert Astrologian
Arcandam, trans. William Warde [c.1564], title-page. My emphasis.
the more important and difficult issue of gauging the actual presence of ‘books
on physiognomy’ in any one geographical space. Works published in one coun-
try circulated widely in another, because book-buyers often preferred the
physiognomy in books produced outside their own country. A 1503 French edi-
tion of the Calendrier des bergiers in the Radcliffe Science Library in Oxford has
manuscript zodiacal and calendrical comments in an early sixteenth-century
English hand.⁴ The seventeenth-century gentleman scholar John Aubrey
swore by the Bolognese professor Camillo Baldi’s huge Latin commentary on
the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica, which was printed in Bologna. In
addition, the historical records are littered with off-the-cuff remarks suggesting
just this sort of interchange of physiognomical texts, such as Samuel Hartlib’s
note to the effect that ‘Mr. Smith of Christ’s College’ commended ‘Finella’s
Physiognomia Planetaria’ while Rozencreutzen commended another entitled
‘Anatomia et Physiognom[i]a simplicium’. In Richard Symonds’s notebooks
we can actually see some of these books in transit on board a boat heading for
England from Italy. Symonds informs us that he bought his Latin versions of
the treatises on physiognomy by Della Porta and Ingegneri while he was in
Rome and had them sent back home in a special trunk.⁵
Notwithstanding the translation of many early modern European ‘books on
physiognomy’ into the various European vernaculars, this apparent instability
in any strict understanding of the ‘national’ categories on which the invention
of this bibliographical archive is based is aggravated by the fact that the actual
content of much of the physiognomy in these books has an important and
hitherto unexamined relationship with the wide diversity of ancient written
traditions of physiognomy dating back to ancient China and ancient
Mesopotamia, as highlighted in Chapter 1. This suggests that not only is a
wider spatial conception of ‘Europe’ necessary, but also a non-Eurocentric
understanding of the term ‘book on physiognomy’. Indeed, as part of the
ongoing, international exchange of textual knowledge intensified by the dis-
covery of the printing press, there is a case to be made for seeing this invented
archive of early modern ‘books on physiognomy’ as part of the early modern
period’s contribution to what is often today termed as ‘the growing globalisa-
tion of media, communication and culture’. Given the innately visual, even
‘non-literate’ nature of the faculty of fisnomy, ‘books on physiognomy’ are
perhaps particularly appropriate to be thought of along the lines suggested by
⁴ C. Brotherton-Ratcliffe, ‘Illustrations of the Four Last Things in English Pre-Reformation Books of

Devotion’, Ph.D. thesis (University of London, 1994), 256 ff.
⁵ Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Aubrey 10, fol. 47v; The Hartlib Papers (Ann Arbor, 1995), 28/1/80a and
31/22/29a; London: British Library, MS Harley 943, fol. 110v–111v and 260v–261r.
Walter Ong with regard to the restructuring of thought effected by those tech-
nologies.⁶
Temporal framework
With regard to the temporal framework of this archive of physiognomical
texts, we saw in Chapter 1 that ‘books on physiognomy’ were not new to early
modern Europe. In fact, the many attempts made to record some form of
physiognomy in writing or in print represent an enormous textual cobweb
stretching from the Neo-Babylonian era to the present day. The invention of
print has simply been chosen because it provides the most convenient starting-
point for this graphic calculation. Put like that it can be said that the first print-
ed physiognomical treatise was a late fifteenth-century edition of a medieval
text written originally in 1295 by the Paduan philosopher and physician Pietro
d’Abano, and published in Padua in around 1471 under the title Decisiones phys-
iognomiae. An equally convenient cut-off point for this present study is around
1780. The mid-1770s onwards witnessed the phenomenal European-wide suc-
cess and translation of the physiognomical writings of an obscure Swiss Pietist
minister named Johannes Caspar Lavater. Published originally in German in
1775, his text was soon translated into other European vernaculars.⁷ Indeed its
impact brought about a publication by a German scholar that could provide an
even neater terminal point for the temporal framework of this study: Johann
Georg Friedrich Franz’s Scriptores physiognomoniae veteres (Altenburg, 1780).
Franz’s study was the first major scholarly retrospective on the art and sci-
ence of physiognomy that had been carried out in the two hundred years since
the Italian natural philosopher and playwright Giovanni Battista Della Porta
had published his famous Renaissance treatise De physiognomia humana in
Naples in 1586.⁸ But it was not the last. A hundred years later, near the end of
the nineteenth century, in the midst of what was then the increasing institu-
tionalization of the new ‘physiognomical’ science of physical anthropology and
the growing ‘physiognomical’ concern with the biological question of ‘degen-
eration’, another German scholar, Richard Förster, undertook a formidable
philological and palaeological investigation into the ancient and classical foun-
dations of physiognomy. In both cases, it was something that needed to be
done. For, as implied in the title of a satirical attack upon Lavaterian physiog-
nomy, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s (1742–99) Über physiognomik, after the
⁶ W. J. Ong, Orality and Literacy (1982).
⁷ J. C. Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente, 4 vols. (Leipzig and Winterthur, 1775–8).
⁸ Giambattista Della Porta, De humana physiognomonia (Vici Æquensis, 1586).
appearance of the famous Swiss physiognomist, physiognomy was never quite
the same.⁹
Defining a ‘treatise on physiognomy’

If this is the geographical and temporal framework for both the archive and the
actual calculation of the presence of ‘books on physiognomy’ in early modern
Europe, one fundamental question still needs to be answered: what is a ‘book
on physiognomy’? In 1617, in response to the question ‘what is physiognomy?’,
the controversial German Calvinist professor Clemens Timpler (1567–1624)
wrote: ‘in defining human physiognomy, the philosophers do not agree
amongst themselves’.¹⁰ It would be equally difficult to get them or historians of
the book to agree on what is meant by a ‘book on physiognomy’.
One of the defining features of the most authoritative classical and medieval
‘treatises on physiognomy’ was that, for all the diversity of material they con-
tained, they all included a simple list of physiognomical aphorisms (physiog-
nomics), running, usually, from the head to the feet. As this represented the
most basic element and the most consistent feature of expositions of physiog-
nomical doctrine, it was decided that any early modern text that incorporated
a textual exposition of physiognomical doctrine in the form of a list of physi-
ognomical aphorisms would be included in the calculation. This covered a
diverse range of texts, from the printed versions of the pseudo-Aristotelian
Physiognomonica to those late eighteenth-century English chapbooks like The
New School of Love (Glasgow, c.1786) in which one finds lists of physiognomi-
cal aphorisms presented in an extremely contracted form.¹¹
This decision introduces as many problems as it solves. For what of those
innumerable works, by the likes of the well-known Henricus Cornelius Agrip-
pa, or the less well-known Antonius Zara, the bishop of Pedena, which show a
very learned familiarity with the art of physiognomy, its history, and its textual
authorities, but whose relatively brief discussion of the subject does not include
a systematic presentation of the lists of physiognomical aphorisms that consti-
tute what might be called a classical exposition of physiognomical doctrine?¹²
⁹ Scriptores physiognomonici Graeci et Latini, ed. R. Förster, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1893); D. Pick, Faces of
Degeneration (Cambridge, 1989); Georg Christopher Lichtenberg, Über Physiognomik (Göttingen, 1778).
¹⁰ Opticæ systema methodicum (Hanover, 1617), 134.
¹¹ Aristotle, Physiognomonics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1984), i,
1237–50; The New School of Love (Glasgow, 1786).
¹² Henricus Cornelius Agrippa, De incertitudine et vanitate omnium scientarium & artium liber (1530),
edition consulted (Geneva, 1630), 142–4; Antonius Zara, Anatomia ingeniorum et scientiarum (Venice, 1615),
184–6, 99–100. See 46, for the essence of what, two hundred years later, became phrenology.
Should this calculation also include the work on the colour of eyes written in
1550 by the Florentine Galenic humanist Simone Porzio? Although Porzio’s text
is dominated by anatomical issues, he does include some very revealing pas-
sages on physiognomy. If Porzio’s work is to be included, what about the more
provincial ‘Dr. Gwither’s Discourse on Physiognomy’, which was communi-
cated in 1693 to the Philosophical Society in Dublin by the secretary, Mr Owen
Lloyd? If these works are to be included, what about the discussion of physiog-
nomy by the Roman physician Giovanni Maria Lancisi (1654–1720), pontifical
doctor to Innocent XI, which was later added to the anatomical writings of an
advocate of physiognomy in medicine, the professor of anatomy at the Uni-
versity of Turin, Giovanni Fantoni? And what of the numerous discussions of
the art and science of physiognomy that were published throughout early
modern Europe, such as the late eighteenth-century thesis of one Swiss
doctoral candidate entitled Whether the physiognomy of man is exhibited through
the consideration of the four temperaments?¹³
One might reconcile oneself to the exclusion of some of the aforementioned
works on the grounds that they are more academic discussions of the subject
rather than straightforward expositions of physiognomical doctrine. Yet that
still leaves the problem of those works which do not contain an exposition of
physiognomical doctrine but which it would be ludicrous to omit from any
attempt to calculate the presence of, or constitute an archive of, ‘books on
physiognomy’—if only for the light they shed on the distinct limitations of the
present approach to the subject and the necessity of exploring it via the broad
issue of the ‘physiognomatical’ rather than the more restricted realms of ‘physi-
ognomony’. One such text, known throughout Europe in Latin and numerous
vernacular translations, is a distinctly physiognomical text in which the term
physiognomy, let alone any list of physiognomical aphorisms, was not
employed but which is central to the history of physiognomy. It was written in
1575 by the Spanish physician Juan de Dios Huarte Navarro (1529–92), and
entitled Examen de ingenios para las sciencias, donde se muestra la differencia de
habilidades que hay en los hombres, y el género de letras que a cada uno responde en
particular (Baeza, 1575). The search for a person’s vocation was often under-
stood in physiognomical terms. After all, in terms of physique and tempera-
ment, there were only so many things any one person could do or become in
life. Any early modern private library that contained a ‘book on physiognomy’
¹³ Simone Porzio, De coloribus oculorum (Florence, 1550); The Royal Society of London. Philosophical
Transactions, 17 (1693–4), 118–20; Joannes Baptista Fantonus, Observationes anatomicae–medicae [. . .] acce-
dunt ejusdem D. Lancisii dissertationes II, quarum prior est de physiognomia, posteriore de sede cogitantis animae
(Venice, 1713); F. Rosé, Physiognomia hominis ex consideratione quatuor temperamentorum exhibita (Fribourg,
1768).
also usually had a copy of this work. Similarly, there is much to be said for the
view that Jacques Pernetti’s Philosophical Letters upon Physiognomies, which was
translated into English in 1751, five years after its first appearance in French in
1746, and into Italian slightly later than that, might actually reveal much more
about the nature and understanding of the art of physiognomy in mid-
eighteenth-century Europe than many of those much less sophisticated con-
siderations of the subject contained in an exposition of physiognomical
doctrine as defined here.
Another such work is Charles Le Brun’s internationally famous Conférence
sur l’expression des passions held at the Académie Royale in the 1670s, or indeed
any one of the many tracts on art and the drawing of heads which it inspired,
such as the progessively expressionistic examples presented in Benjamin
Ralph’s The School of Raphael; or, The Student’ s Guide to Expression in Histori-
cal Painting (1759). And if one includes these more obviously aesthetic works,
one could make a case for including the entire corpus of painted and engraved
portraits from Van Eyck to Hogarth, particularly if one takes notice of Vasari’s
claim that painters must have ‘besides long practice in the art, a complete
understanding of physiognomy’.¹⁴ In addition to which one should also
include all of the editions of Theophrastus’s Characters, alongside the large
body of ‘character’ literature that it spawned. This is a corpus of writing that
provides fundamental evidence for the early modern development of what was
referred to in Chapter 1 as the ‘characterological prism’ of the early modern
physiognomical eye, particularly in the context of the early modern changes in
physiognomy which led to the development of the discipline of psychology
and underpinned the evolution of literature.
And what of those texts in which one finds nuggets of physiognomical
thinking, some of which are recognizable fragments from an exposition of
physiognomical doctrine proper? Such works represent quite a large variety of
interrelated texts just beyond the fringes of this definition of a ‘treatise on
physiognomy’.¹⁵ One often finds such nuggets of physiognomical thinking in
sixteenth-century anatomical treatises. Conceiving of a ‘book on physiogno-
my’ in the way it is being treated here means excluding popular late seven-
teenth-century works which can tell one much about the history of the art of
physiognomy. In England, for example, A New Academy of Compliments (1772)
contained a nugget of physiognomical wisdom under the section headed ‘Signs
to chose Husbands and good Wives’: ‘an extraordinary long Chin, with the
Under-Lip larger than the Upper, signifies a cross-grain’d Person, fit for little
¹⁴ Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, trans. L. S. Maclehose,
2 vols. (1907), i, p. xxx. ¹⁵ See V. E. Neuberg, Chapbooks (1964).
Business, yet given to Folly’. Another section consists of a small fortune-telling
game entitled ‘As to what Kind of a Husband a Widow or Maid Shall have’. Some
of its conclusions are clearly physiognomical:
A handsome Youth be sure you’ll have,
Brown hair’d, high Nose, he’ll keep thee brave,
Fair, ruddy, bushy-hair’d is thy Love,
He’ll keep thee well, and call thee still his Dove.¹⁶
Mother Bunch’s Closet advised young men not to choose a wife with ‘a long nose,
a scoldy brow, and thin lips: for in such there is great danger’. It might further
be argued that such was the general ‘culture’ of physiognomy in many of these
English chapbooks that fragments of physiognomical aphorisms even entered
the material on dreams. To dream, for example, ‘that you have long hair, in
seemly order, is good for a woman; but if in disorder, it shows trouble and
heaviness. . . . [to dream] that you have a fair great nose, is good to all, except
sick persons, it being a sure token of death’. Indeed, this last implicit reference
to the Persian notion of the great nose of kings and the Hippocratic ‘facies’ is a
reminder of the fact that the New Academy of Compliments, which sold itself as
‘suitable to all Constitutions and Complexions’, had a distinctly physiognomi-
cal conception of the audience at which it was aimed. It also recalls to mind the
fact that Francis Bacon thought that the art of physiognomy the sister art of the
interpretation of dreams. Given this, and given the existence of some early
modern books entitled ‘The Phisiognimye of dreames &c’ (John Wolfe, 30
April 1591), and ‘The phisiog[o]mony of Dreames’ (George Purslo[w]e, 2nd
November 1613’, one could make a case for including them and all dream books
in the calculation.¹⁷
If one can happily exclude the latter as being just beyond the fringes of the
conceptualization that supports the analytical framework of this bibliographi-
cal map (if not of the wider framework of this ‘invented archive’), that still
leaves one important problem. What is to be done with the many books in cir-
culation throughout Europe that dealt with the meaning of the lines in the
palm of the hand (chiromancy) as well as the lines on the forehead (metopos-
copy)?¹⁸ They all dealt in one way or another with the same physiognomical
¹⁶ Oxford: Bodleian Library, Harding E 329 (1772), 57, 61–3.

¹⁷ Mother Bunch’s Closet Newly Broke Open [c.1790], Oxford: Bodleian Library, Douce PP 176 (10), 16;
Dreams and Moles, with their Interpretation and Signification [Manchester, n.d.] Oxford: Bodleian Library,
Douce PP 162 (17), 3–4; Oxford: Bodleian Library, Harding E 328 sig. A3v; A Transcript of the Register of the
Company of Stationers of London 1554–1640, ed. E. Arber, 4 vols. (1875–94), ii, 273, and iii, 245.
¹⁸ Some even dealt with the lines on the feet (pedomancy). See ‘Explication du Pied’, Paris: Bibliothèque
St Genéviève, MS 2327, fol. 22r.
phenomenon. That is to say, they were all expositions of the doctrine dealing
with the meaning discoverable (physiognomatically) in the eyes and all the
physical features of a human being, from the head to the feet, moles and all. As
the professor of elementary mathematics at the University of Wittenberg,
Nicolas Pompeius, noted in a series of lectures he gave on the subject of chiro-
mancy around 1653, ‘Chiromancy is a part of Anthropological Physiognomy,
by which, from the inspection of the hand, one makes useful conjectures not at
all unworthy of notice about various things in human life’.
Pompeius was not alone in this view, nor was it a view that was only
expressed in printed form. The author of one seventeenth-century manuscript
now in the Royal Library at Copenhagen entitled ‘Compendium Chiromanti-
ae’ wrote out these very same words by hand.¹⁹ Moreover, in addition to Pom-
peius’s coupling of chiromancy and physiognomy, there were others, such as
Johannes Praetorius, who also saw metoposcopy as a species of physiognomy:
That part of natural science, which considers the members of the human body, the
face, the eyes, the nose, the lips, the ears, the back, the hand and the feet, is called Physi-
ognomy. Of which there are two main species, Metoposcopy, which mainly conjec-
tures from the face of man; and Chiromancy, which observes the constitution of the
hand.²⁰
Nor was this conceptual distinction, so troublesome to the calculation, new to

the seventeenth century. In fact, Pompeius, in riding the wave of new-found
interest in the theories of Paracelsus just at the moment when the new
mechanical science was intensifying its grip, was attempting to salvage an
understanding of physiognomy that had been lost during the course of the sev-
enteenth century. The earliest known edition of Andree Henrici’s very brief
work Chyromancia doctoris (1514) contains chapters devoted to ‘The Physiog-
nomy of the lines on the head’ and ‘The Physiognomy of the hand’. This not
only provides an intimation of how the term physiognomy was often used and
understood to refer to a theory of natural signs: it also suggests that this con-
ceptual distinction was a long-standing notion.²¹
Notwithstanding the medieval manuscripts highlighted in Chapter 1, there
was a considerable number of such works which had already begun to appear
as early as the end of the fifteenth century, and not only in Latin but also in the
vernacular. One of the first seems to have been Johannes Hartlieb’s Das nach
¹⁹ Copenhagen: Royal Library, MS Thott 835 [unpaginated, fol. 3r].

²⁰ Johannes Praetorius, Lvdicrvm chiromanticum Praetorii (Leipzig, 1661), 216.
²¹ ‘De Phisonomia linee capitis’, ‘De phisonomia manuum’, Andree Henrici, Chyromancia doctoris (n. pl.,
1514), sigs. Avir and Ciiv.
geschriben büch von der hannd [1475].²² Similarly, as was pointed out in the
Introduction, treatises on moles are essentially physiognomical in conception,
and from 1540 onwards, tracts on palmistry and moles often appeared printed
alongside expositions of physiognomical doctrine in the same work. Indeed,
from the late seventeenth century onwards, the texts containing expositions
of palmistry, moles, dreams, and fortune-telling but not physiognomy are
much more numerous than those which include physiognomy. Yet, generi-
cally speaking, they all dealt in one way or another with ‘windows of the
soul’.
All in all, whilst as many as possible of the works on chiromancy and meto-
poscopy have been included, many of the earlier-mentioned works (in which
the physiognomy appears in fragments) have been omitted from the calcula-
tion, if not permanently excluded from the archive. However, if all of them
were to be referred to generically as ‘books on the art of physiognomy’, then the
overall total figures reached of works published in each country would be sig-
nificantly affected. None the less, for all its conceptual untidiness, the ‘books
on physiognomy’ concentrated upon in this calculation—those with an expo-
sition of physiognomical doctrine in the form of a list of physiognomical apho-
risms—are arguably the most physiognomically dense of those works which
could be included. Yet it must be borne in mind that even they cannot entirely
indicate the nature of physiognomy in books in the early modern period as a
whole.
Indeed, from a conceptual or taxonomical point of view, it must also be
borne in mind that many so-called ‘books’ or ‘treatises on physiognomy’ would
be more accurately described as astrological treatises, treatises on moral
philosophy, treatises on aesthetics, medical works, or chapbooks. As Chapter 1
has shown, as Chapters 3 and 5 will show, and as will be discussed further below,
the analytical virtues of a much more rigid definition prevent one from under-
standing the inherent fluidity in the medieval and the early modern conception
of physiognomony, as well as, more broadly speaking, the innately multi-
faceted, interdisciplinary subject of physiognomy. But notwithstanding the
problems inherent in choosing to concentrate this calculation on works con-
taining an exposition of physiognomical doctrine in the form of a list of physi-
ognomical aphorisms, the choice seems to have at least one virtue. It provides
some sense of consistency and unity to the calculation, as well as to the analy-
sis of how they were read, allowing one to constitute a series of documents
and etch a straight, if limited, pathway through an otherwise unruly forest of
²² London: British Library, I.B.8; C. Burnett, ‘The Earliest Chiromancy in the West’, Journal of the War-
burg and Courtauld Institutes, 50 (1987), 189–95.
material. In so doing, it allows for some sort of foundation to be laid which
might help, and be corrected by, any interested scholars in the future.
Problems of calculation
We can now ask how many such ‘books on physiognomy’ were in circulation
in each of the respective countries between c.1470 and c.1780. Were there any
periods that saw a greater volume produced than others? How can the dynam-
ics of this chronology be explained?
Calculating the overall volume of physiognomical treatises published in the
early modern period may be, in the last resort, a question of one’s empirical
temperament. Beyond the aforementioned conceptual problems of defining a
‘treatise on physiognomy’, there are also numerous difficulties involved in the
process of quantification. The English bibliography of ‘books on physiogno-
my’ is probably the most exhaustive of all those compiled here for the various
countries examined. The following calculation is therefore based on a chrono-
logically arranged list of English ‘books on physiognomy’ which is being taken
as typical and representative of the others.
When trying to use tables 1a and 1b to calculate a total figure one encoun-
ters numerous problems, whether it be problems of dating undated books or
what to make of the gaps as well as the consecutive years which did or did not
see the publication of a ‘book on physiognomy’. It also requires an under-
standing of the rules of the early modern publishing game and the ways in
which those rules were circumvented.²³ Suffice it to say here that when calcu-
lating volume, bibliographers today normally opt for a figure of between 1,000
and 1,500 for an average print run. Taking the list of English physiognomical
treatises at face-value, and assuming a print run of 1,000 for each, produces a
total of about 185,000. This is not a very large figure. However, there are a num-
ber of other factors which necessitate increasing this figure.²⁴ To begin with,
given that it was not possible to examine every single extant copy of every Eng-
lish work, then there may be some that do not contain any physiognomy. How-
ever, since a number of the texts in the ‘invented archive’ were stumbled upon
haphazardly, it is very likely that there are others extant which have not been
included. With regard to the continental publications, the problem is even
more considerable. It has not been possible to examine all existing copies of
²³ For more detail on this, see M. H. Porter, ‘English “treatises on physiognomy” c.1500–c.1780’, D.Phil.
thesis (Oxford, 1998), ch. 2.
²⁴ For under-estimations in such calculations, A Ledger of Charles Ackers, ed. D. F. McKenzie and J. C.
Ross ( [Oxford], 1968), 18.
30
Italy Germany France England Low Countries Switzerland Spain
25
20
Number of extant editions
15
10
0
1470– 1480– 1490– 1500– 1510– 1520– 1530– 1540– 1550– 1560– 1570– 1580– 1590– 1600– 1610– 1620– 1630–
1479 1489 1499 1509 1519 1529 1539 1549 1559 1569 1579 1589 1599 1609 1619 1629 1639
Decade of publication
1a. ‘Books on physiognomy’ printed in Europe, c.1470–c.1639

30
Italy Germany France England Low Countries Switzerland Spain
25
20
15
10
0
1640– 1650– 1660– 1670– 1680– 1690– 1700– 1710– 1720– 1730– 1740– 1750– 1760– 1770– 1780–
1649 1659 1669 1679 1689 1699 1709 1719 1729 1739 1749 1759 1769 1779 1789
1b. ‘Books on physiognomy’ printed in Europe, c.1640–c.1780

14
70
0
2
4
6
8
10
12
14
16
14 –14
80 79
–
14 14
90 89
15 –14
00 99
–
15 15
10 09
–
15 15
20 19
15 –15
30 29
–
15 153
40 9
15 –15
50 49
15 –15
60 59
–
15 15
70 69
15 –15
80 79
15 –15
90 89
–
2. ‘Books on physiognomy’ printed in England, c.1470–c.1780

16 15
00 99
16 –16
10 09
16 –16
20 19
–
16 16
30 29
16 –16
40 39
16 –16
50 49
–
16 16
60 59
16 –16
70 69
16 –16
80 79
16 –16
90 89
–
17 16
00 99
17 –17
10 09
17 –17
20 19
–
17 17
30 29
17 –17
40 39
–
17 17
50 49
17 –17
60 59
–
17 17
70 69
17 –17
80 79
–1
78
9
these texts even in the small handful of libraries around the world that were
actually visited for this study. Some have no doubt been included in these lists
erroneously. For example, extracts of Michael Scot’s Liber physiognomiae
appeared in some early printed versions of the medieval collection of medical
works known as Ketham’s Fasciculus medicinae but not others. Only an exami-
nation of all extant copies would reduce such error. On the other hand, numer-
ous works, or even particular editions and issues of known works, have no
doubt been completely overlooked. The colophon of one 1599 edition of Livio
Agrippa’s Discorso sopra alla natura, & complessione humano, et alcuni preserva-
tivi dal mal contagioso di peste (Brescia: Vincenzo Sabbio, [1599] ) suggests that
it was also published in Venice, Milan, Verona, Carmagnola, Turin, and Pavia,
though no copies of these issues have yet been found.
Secondly, these bibliographies/graphs represent only those treatises for
which a copy has survived or for which some record of a published edition has
survived. Indeed, since most of the English ‘books on physiognomy’ are exam-
ples of ‘cheap print’, then the numbers which have not survived and for which
there is no extant trace might be even more considerable than with hardier
products.²⁵ The English graph, for example, does not include all those entered
in the Stationers’ Register. On 31 May 1594, the Register records an entry to
James Roberts for the printing of Thomas Hill’s ‘palmestry and physiognomye’.
However, no copy of this edition has survived—assuming it was ever printed in
the first place. Registering and not publishing was also an everyday part of the
cut-throat strategies of the early modern publishing world.²⁶ Thirdly, the
English bibliography itself (like Samuel Jeake’s library) provides evidence of
no longer extant editions, and many of the late eighteenth-century penny
chapbooks may have been printed in runs larger than 1,000.
This last point, in turn, raises the question of the extent to which expositions
of physiognomical doctrine circulated in the form of very cheap printed pam-
phlets. If so, where and when? There is some very suggestive evidence that they
did. The pamphlet by Johannes Roehnus, Moderatore summo fortunate, phys-
iognomiam anthropologicam (Wittenburg, 1670), was only eight pages long.
However, it was not an exposition of physiognomical doctrine in the sense used
here to define a ‘book on physiognomy’. The Physiognomonica Aristotelis latina
facta a Iodoco Willichio . . . addita est euisdem interpretis oratio in laudem physio-
gnomoniae, published in 1536 and 1538, was not a pamphlet. However, it was
printed as a small octavo by Nicolaus Schirlentz of Wittenberg, one of the
major printers of the 1530s German pamphlets in the Freytag collection. If this
²⁵ Spufford, Small Books, 48. ²⁶ Arber, Register, ii, 308. See also ii, 273, and iii, 245.
remains circumstantial, there is other evidence that cheap pamphlets devoted
to the art of physiognomy in the German vernacular were available from the
early sixteenth century onwards. Mention has already been made above of
Henrici’s very short Chyromancia doctoris of 1514. Less disputable is the ‘com-
plexionbuch’ In disem biechlin wirt erfunden von complexion der menschen zu
erlernen leibliche unnd menschliche nature, ir siten geberden und nayglichayt zu
erkennen und urtaylen, published by Mathis Hüpfuff in Strasbourg in 1511, and
by Hans Schönsperger in Augsburg four years later, in 1515. They were only
three small, poor-quality sheets long.²⁷ Just how many more such pamphlets
were published for which no evidence has survived, it is impossible to know.
However many there were, they were very probably printed in numbers larger
than 1,000.²⁸
Similarly one has to take into account the unquantifiable fact that many of
the medieval manuscripts on physiognomy were still being read, whilst others
were still being produced. In 1525 one ‘T. Wall alias Wyndesor’ purchased a
manuscript copy of the Secretum from ‘Henry at the taverne within buschops
gate at London’. In 1556, the English Renaissance magus John Dee borrowed
a manuscript claiming to be Avicenna’s ‘physiognomia’ from the library of
Peterhouse, Cambridge, and never returned it. Thomas Hill advertised his
‘Two pleasaunt Bookes of Paulmestrie’ as being available in manuscript. Whilst
his translation of Thaddeus Hagecius’s Metoposcopie was ‘in a readinesse to the
printing’, it too was available in manuscript: ‘if any be desirous to enioy a pri-
vate Copy of this, let them resort unto maister Barkers shop, and there they
shall common with the Translatour, and knowe his minde for the writing of the
Pamphlet’. It was nothing new. A fifteenth-century manuscript of Lydgate and
Burgh’s Secretum carried the following inscription on the inside back cover:
‘John Bevyn of Stroud Inne for my Master Poulet or ellis enquere for Thomas
Warreyn of Tantoun’. Indeed, Hill’s Metoposcopie, a work which does not
appear to have been printed, may only have circulated in manuscript. The sin-
gle surviving manuscript fragment of Hill’s writings is a slightly modified title-
page to his 1571 physiognomical treatise. However, it looks more like a
fragment of an ‘authorial holograph’ than ‘a copy made by a specialist scribe’ or
‘the copy made by an individual who wished to possess the text’.²⁹ But this
²⁷ See also Trattato di humanita fisonomia (Viterbo, 1617) Paris: Biblothèque Nationale, VP 18618.
²⁸ Harvard: Houghton Library, Phil. 6012.9 is a German physiognomical pamphlet, possibly printed in
Strasbourg around 1576.
²⁹ Die Handschriften zu Lydgate’s Book of the Gouernaunce of Kynges and of Prynces, ed. T. Prosiegel
(Munich, 1903), 4–16; Roberts and Watson, Dee’s Library, M24; Thomas Hill, A contemplation of mankinde
(1571), fols. 234v–235r; Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Laud Misc. 673; Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS
Ashmole 417, fol. 74r–v. These categories are from H. Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth Century
England (Oxford, 1993), 46.
practice of transcribing printed works continued well beyond the sixteenth
century. Around 1700 a certain ‘A. Howe’ not only began to read the second
edition (1671) of the 1653 ‘treatise on physiognomy’ by Richard Saunders that
young Samuel Jeake had begun to read thirty years earlier in 1670, but actually
transcribed large sections of it. Transcribing manuscripts from printed editions
reduced prices and circumvented the limitations of print-runs and official pro-
scriptions. Besides this sort of pirating, official orders for transcriptions could
range from 250 to 500 copies. In addition, there are many unpublished manu-
scripts on physiognomy in libraries around the world, some of which appear to
have been the writer’s own invention. Such is the case with a manuscript
penned in 1665/6 by one James Boevey entitled ‘Of the art of discerning of
men’. Just how representative these examples are is neither easy to say nor pos-
sible to quantify for the present calculation. If Sir Hans Sloane’s collection of
manuscript ‘books of secrets’, a genre with which the art of physiognomy was
so closely linked, was ‘the tip of a huge iceberg’, the same might be said of man-
uscript ‘treatises on physiognomy’.³⁰
Notwithstanding all of these problems, and however preliminary such fig-
ures must be, can any total figures be offered? Let us take the English case as
representative. By way of taking into account all of these factors, an addition of
30 per cent (roughly 60 editions) to the total number of unregistered editions,
plus the eight editions suggested by the bibliography, raises the total output to
about 250,000. By way of making up for the fact that some of them saw print
runs greater than 1,500, one might calculate the overall total using an average
print run of 1,500. This would bring the total to around 400,000. To err on the
conservative side, an estimated total figure would be 300,000 English ‘books
on physiognomy’.³¹
The other bibliographies are much less complete. However, using the
English total as a guide, then one might suggest the following figures for
Europe. By the same rough calculation, there appear to have been only about
30,000 published in Switzerland. But this is not a fair comparison because this
Swiss figure is based on those published before the end of the sixteenth centu-
ry, not over three hundred years. Moreover, when one considers that by the end
of the sixteenth century there had been about 50,000 printed in England, then
the output of the Swiss presses seems relatively large for such a small country, a
sign of the important role of Swiss publishers in the spread of the high Renais-
³⁰ London: Wellcome Library, MS 4370; D’Amico, ‘Manuscripts’, 21; Love, Scribal Publication, 37;
London: Wellcome Library, MS 699; Cambridge: University Library, MS Dd 15. 28; W. Eamon, Science and
the Secrets of Nature (Princeton, 1994), 4.
³¹ For more detail, see Porter, ‘English “treatises on physiognomy” ’ (Oxford, 1998).
sance and the Reformation. The number of Spanish publications so far
unearthed is also very small overall. Yet for all its incompleteness, the fact that
there were about 43,000 of the treatises published between 1570 and 1650 alone
suggests an output equivalent to that in England. Similarly, the present overall
figure for the early modern period in the Low Countries is about 100,000, less
than a third of the English total. However, about 30 per cent of them date from
before 1520 and 50 per cent from between 1630 and 1700, both of which figures
are actually greater than the equivalent output by English presses, reminding us
once again of the importance of the Dutch publishing industry in the period of
Dutch economic supremacy and in making the early modern period the ‘age of
print’.
The numbers of ‘treatises on physiognomy’ printed in Italy and France were
certainly larger than the present findings suggest, and thus larger than the
number published in England and, indeed, anywhere else. By the end of the
seventeenth century alone there had been about 480,000 copies published in
Italy, and about 200,000 in France. Moreover, given the relative continuity in
the publication of such works in eighteenth-century England and Germany,
there are probably many more to be discovered as having been published in
eighteenth-century France and Italy. The figures for Germany are in a healthi-
er state and suggest that, as with the Low Countries, the overall volume of such
publications was significantly larger than in England and France, if not Italy.
The numbers unearthed so far suggest a figure of about half a million, and this
too is certainly an under-estimation.
Yet, however inaccurate these conservative figures are, it is hard to avoid the
conclusion that physiognomical treatises were, numerically speaking, relative-
ly insignificant, even taking into account the small percentage of the popula-
tion endowed with the textual literacy to read them. This is made clearer when
one considers these figures in relation to the overall textual output of nearly
three hundred years of the age of print’s printing-press activity. All of these total
figures for ‘books on physiognomy’ pale in comparison, for example, with the
number of Bibles, ABCs and catechisms, or almanacs, that were printed dur-
ing this period. Books of secrets were one very popular genre under whose
attractive rubric some physiognomical treatises were sold, such as Les secrets
d’Albert le Grand. But most books of secrets, like most astrological works, did
not contain an explicit and distinct exposition of physiognomical doctrine.³²
Next to the Bible, almanacs were one of the most common forms of printed
word in the early modern period, often exempt from the usual limited
³² Eamon, Secrets, appendix.

print-run. But few of the texts in this ‘archive’, besides the Compost of
Ptholomeus, can be considered almanacs.
Nor does this impression of a marginal presence of physiognomy in textual
form change much when one compares the respective outputs with the overall
volume of output of other publications to which they might be seen as related.
The English bibliography illustrates this quite clearly. One study of the popu-
lar medical literature that was printed and published in England between 1480
and 1603 provides helpful light for this perspective. It has suggested a total fig-
ure of 400,000 actual books published. For the same period there are only 34
extant English physiognomical treatises. If one adds the customary 30 per cent
to this figure as well as the assumed print run of 1,000, it leaves one with an
overall volume of around 45,000 for roughly the same period of time. Thus, if
a ‘book on physiognomy’ is considered as a ‘medical’ work, then the medical
works which contained some form of exposition of physiognomical doctrine
were outnumbered by non-physiognomical medical works by about 9 to 1. By
sheer coincidence, this is roughly the same ratio one could apply to Rhazes’s
Liber almansoris, the medical work of a medieval Arabic physician made up of
nine books, the other eight of which were more widely known than the one
book it included on the subject of physiognomy. An even more sobering per-
spective is provided by the fact that medical works in themselves only consti-
tute about 3 per cent of the total printed output of the sixteenth century in
England.³³
A single European comparison reveals the same sort of proportions. At the
1569 Frankfurt Book Fair, Michael Herder sold 108 Planetenbüchlein, among
which were a number that could be called ‘treatises on physiognomy’, such as
Das Gross Planeten Buch. Darin das erst Theil sagt von Natur, Zeichen des Himels.
. . . Das dritt Theil melt die Physiognomi, und Chiromanci (Frankfurt, 1556),
of which he sold 19; and Das Kleyn Planeten Büchlin (Strasburg, n.d.), of
which he sold 7. Yet the total number of physiognomical works sold was
half the number that he sold of a general medical work entitled Das Hand-
buechlin Apollinaris (which, at 227, was his second bestseller behind Die siben
weisen Meister (233) ). Moreover, even this was only a small percentage of the
5,918 books he sold overall during the Lenten Fair. By far the most popular of
all were romances of chivalry, and especially didactic narratives and funny
stories.³⁴
³³ P. Slack, ‘Mirrors of Health and Treasures of Poor Men: The Uses of Vernacular Medical Literature of
Tudor England’, in C. Webster (ed.), Health, Medicine and Mortality in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge,
1979), 237–74: 239–40.
³⁴ Henri Estienne, The Frankfurt Book Fair, ed. J. Westfall Thompson (Chicago, 1911), 34, 181, and 187.
But neither the obscurity of the subject, then as now, nor the smallness of
numbers automatically reflects historical insignificance. The historiographical
traditions of the ‘history of the margins’ and ‘history from below’ have made
that clear to most of the profession of history. Indeed, the resonance of these
physiognomical treatises in early modern culture may have been out of all pro-
portion to their number. One example of how this may have been so is provid-
ed by considering the very close and often very confused relationship between
physiognomy and two of the most widely disseminated bodies of knowledge
(textual and non-textual) in the early modern period—astrology and the doc-
trine of the four humours. Just as the presence of a ‘physiognomical treatise’
should not be automatically taken as a reflection of the presence of physiogno-
my, so physiognomy was present in places where there were no manuscript or
printed physiognomical treatises.³⁵
Indeed, one very different indication of the danger of underestimating their
historical significance as presented by this mathematical calculation of their
stature can be seen in the annotations which Archbishop Cranmer made to
Henry VIII’s Institutions of a Christian Man. Written around 1538, in the midst
of the epoch-making religious and political storm of the Reformation, the king
at one point attacked numerous superstitions of the ‘superstitious folk’, who
‘infame the creatures of God’, including those people
which by lots, astrology, divination, chattering of birds, physiognomy, and looking of
men’s hands, or other unlawful and superstitious crafts, take upon them certainly to
tell, determine and judge beforehand of men’s acts and fortunes, which be to come
afterward.
Although the king then erased some of this statement, something made the
ever vigilant Archbishop Cranmer later annotate this passage with the follow-
ing words of caution:
Whereas the same is stricken out, it seemeth more necessary to remain, forsomuch as
the common people do in nothing more superstitiously. Likewise of astrology, and spe-
cially physiognomy.³⁶
That ‘something’ will be discussed in more detail later. Suffice it to say here that
it was evidence in itself of how the authorities of the day understood that there
was more to physiognomy than simply books on the subject. Cranmer’s con-
cerns indicate an anxiety not to underestimate the religious, political, and
social implications of that very fact. Leaving that aside for now, let it simply be
³⁵ See Ch. 4, final section.
³⁶ Thomas Cranmer, Miscellaneous Writings and Letters of Thomas Cranmer, ed. Revd J. E. Cox, Parker
Society (Cambridge, 1846), 100. My emphasis.
said that the relative scarcity of mystical texts about the physiognomical link
between astrological and humoral knowledge appears to have been sufficient to
keep an interest in this sort of scientia before the reading public, but distant
enough to safeguard its awe of secrecy and mystery—as long as its status as a
respectable mysticism and body of ‘secret’ knowledge remained reputable
enough.
Chronological dynamic
What can the abstract features of the graphs in Figure 1a and 1b of the overall
textual presence of physiognomical treatises in early modern Europe tell us
about the chronological dynamic of this corpus of textual knowledge? How are
the features of that dynamic to be explained?
Generally speaking, the large number of medieval manuscripts and incun-
ables (pre-1500 printed editions) again suggests that there was no sudden ‘anas-
tasis’ or ‘awakening’ in the printing of ‘books on physiognomy’ in the
beginning of the sixteenth century. Similarly, the relatively continuous pub-
lication of ‘books on physiognomy’ in eighteenth-century England and
Germany might be used as more general evidence to suggest that Lavater’s
epoch-making work did not fall from the European presses into a phy-
siognomonical vacuum.
As with the ‘Renaissance’, the primary motor behind the distinctly less
epoch-making phenomenon that was the publication of physiognomical trea-
tises was Italy, particularly up until about the 1620s, with Germany never very
far behind. During the late fifteenth century this seemingly polygenetic phe-
nomenon of the printing of ‘books on physiognomy’ spread at one and the
same time from Italy and Germany first to France, then on to the Low Coun-
tries, Switzerland, and Spain. Geography and transport costs might be the pri-
mary factors which explain why England was the last of the main European
printing centres to begin publishing them, beginning only in the early six-
teenth century, over thirty years after the Italian, German, and French presses.
Given the incompleteness of the bibliographical data, it is dangerous to rest
too much weight on the narrative implicit in the output of physiognomy in any
particular country. For example, the high volume of output of such works in
late fifteenth-century Spain makes it difficult to believe that there were no
Spanish publications between 1520 and 1560. Similarly, it is equally hazardous
to assume that there was none published in either the Low Countries or
Germany in the 1570s. The largest peaks, which occurred in Switzerland in
the 1480s, in Spain in the 1600s, in Italy in the 1620s, in France and the Low
Countries in the 1660s, and in Germany in the 1690s, are probably a distortion
stemming from the random survival of the evidence and the problems of con-
ceptualization underlying the bibliographies, rather than the reflection or con-
sequence of any wider historical phenomenon. In addition to the smallness of
their numbers and their incompleteness, the obscurity of both the subject and
the texts themselves only adds to the difficulties of offering solid causal expla-
nations for the apparent peaks and troughs.
Sometimes there are obvious reasons internal to book history for such appar-
ent variations. For example, the recorded fall in England between 1700 and
1710 is likely to have been the result of the changes in the licensing laws. But this
affected printing in general and cannot be said to have been specific to physi-
ognomical treatises. More intriguing is the apparent exceptional bursts of
interest in England in the 1510s and between 1555 and 1575, both of which
appear to have been slightly behind the Continental peaks which, prior to the
eighteenth century, came roughly speaking during the periods 1480–1500,
1540–60, 1610–20, 1660–80. Given that most of the English physiognomical
treatises were translations of Continental works, then one might be tempted to
conclude that England was always behind and following the rest of the Conti-
nent. If so, then the fact that the late seventeenth-century peak in England
coincided with a peak on the European Continent suggests that, by that stage,
Albion had caught up with Europa.
A comparison of the output of physiognomical treatises in England (Figure
2) with the output of printed material as a whole in England c.1500–c.1700
(Figure 3) is illuminating, for one sees that the peaks in the output of English
physiognomical treatises of the late 1550s and 1660s, as well as that of the last
decades of the seventeenth century, occur at times which saw a relative decline
in the overall numbers of books published. Why? Given the marginality of
‘books on physiognomy’, to talk of movements in demand for physiognomical
treatises would be something of a misnomer. None the less, I would argue that
some of the dynamics of this chronology can be explained, from a purely intel-
lectual point of view, via the rise and fall of interest in Neoplatonic hermeti-
cism, the science of the ‘occult’, and in Paracelsianism more generally.
The influence of the hermetic and the Paracelsian will be discussed in more
detail in the following chapter. When considering the apparent dynamics of
the output of ‘treatises on physiognomy’ from a more material perspective, it
seems more profitable not to concern oneself too much with trying to explain
the short-term rises and falls in the demand or the output, but rather to con-
centrate upon explaining the sustained existence of this physiognomical lan-
guage in terms of the material structures of early modern everyday life. As
Total number of books
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intangible as such explanations often are, the sustained interest in celestial
physiognomy, botanical physiognomy (the ‘doctrine of signatures’), or therio-
logical physiognomy (the zoological aspect of this codified language of physi-
ognomy) might be in part explained by the closer, more conscious, proximity
of the sky, natural light, plants, and animals to man’s life as lived in a still pre-
dominantly agricultural, indeed ‘pastoral’, society.³⁷
Indeed, one might even take this further and look to the weather for the
causes of certain intellectual forms of the art of physiognomy. Such a causal
connection seems less ludicrous when one considers the intellectual proximity
of physiognomy and weather prediction in sixteenth-century sign theory as
exemplified by Gulielmus Gratarolus, the sixteenth-century Swiss natural
philosopher. Gratarolus not only wrote a learned ‘treatise on physiognomy’, he
published it with a tract he also wrote on predicting the weather from natural
signs. The Danish theologian Niels Hemmingsen ranked physiognomy along-
side the forecast of rain as a form of natural prediction.³⁸ Similarly, the crystal-
lization of an occult, visual art of physiognomy, driven by the light of a
theosophic eye and embedded in a religion of the sun in Florence at the end of
the fifteenth century, may have an intangible (but visually very obvious) causal-
ity in the luminosity of the sun in that region of the world.³⁹
Notwithstanding these relatively longue durée reasons for the persistence of
a particular form of the language of physiognomy, are there any material causal
explanations for any of the sudden shifts in output indicated by the graphs?
One such explanation suggests itself when one considers that two of the most
significant English peaks occurred during periods in English history which saw
two of the great plagues of London (1563 and 1665).⁴⁰ A causal relationship
between the two seems more conceivable when one takes into account how
interrelated this archive of books shows physiognomy and the plague to have
been in the early modern period. Many authors of ‘books on physiognomy’
also wrote books on the plague, such as the aforementioned Swiss professor
Gratarolus, or the French popularizer Antoine Mizauld. In fact, there were a
number of texts throughout the period in which the art of physiognomy and
advice on how to avoid the plague were actually part of the same text. One finds
this in some of the early editions of Michael Scot. One also finds it in various
editions of Ketham’s Fasciculus medicinae. The latter was a collection of texts
made by Hans von Kircheim of Swabia (fl. 1455–70), professor of medicine in
³⁷ K. V. Thomas, Man and the Natural World (1983).

³⁸ S. Clark, Thinking with Demons (Oxford, 1997), 171.
³⁹ Marsilio Ficino, De sole opusculum (Strasburg, 1508).
⁴⁰ P. Slack, The Impact of Plague in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1990), 54.
Vienna, and first printed in Venice in 1491. The main theme of Kircheim’s text
was that most fundamental of all inseparably physical and metaphysical con-
cerns, health and salvation. In the seventeenth century Livio Agrippa da
Monteferrato’s tract explicitly declared this family resemblance between
good health, plague, and physiognomy in the title of his physiognomical
treatise: Discorso sopra la natura, & complessione humano, et alcuni preservativi
dal mal contagioso di peste (Brescia, Vincenzo Sabbio, [1599] ). And even as late
as the mid-eighteenth century, editions of Albertus Magnus’s writing about
the process of female conception and the virtues of stones were interwoven
with Scot’s physiognomy and advice on ways of preserving oneself against con-
tracting the plague and other malignant fevers.⁴¹
These books signal the fact that the early modern understanding of the
plague was distinctly physiognomical in conception, in so far as particular tem-
peraments (the most fundamental state of the health of one’s body and mind)
and particular families (even particular regions) were thought to be more sus-
ceptible to developing the plague. Within this causal framework, the intellec-
tual interdependence of physiognomy with concerns about the generation of
children, as well as the virtues in stones evident in such works as the aforemen-
tioned Secrets of Albert, can also be seen in various aspects of early modern cul-
tural practice. For example, young men often offered a solitaire to their fiancées
which they were to place on the third (ring) finger of their left hand—to pro-
tect them against the plague. Another possible reason why more people turned
to physiognomy at a time of plague lay in the fact that it was long thought that
the plague could be caught via the look, or what some referred to as the spiri-
tus, which was thought to come from the eyes of the sick and transmit itself to
the eyes of those surrounding them. This was why, for example, Charles
Delorme, the physician of Louis XIII, wore crystal spectacles when he visited
those who were infected by the plague.⁴²
I would argue that it is within this wider cultural context of plague and the
tendency to moralize illness that the following physiognomical imperative
which many ‘books on physiognomy’ contained should be understood:
First we advertise that one ought to beware of all persons that hath default of members
naturally, as of forehead, eye, or other member, though he be but a cripple, and spe-
cially of a man that hath no beard, for such be inclined to divers vices and evils, and one
ought to eschew his company as his mortal enemy.⁴³
⁴¹ G. Gratarolus, Pestis descriptio (Paris, 1561); Antoine Mizauld, Singuliers secrets et secours contre la peste
(Paris, 1562); Johannes von Ketham, Fasciculus medicine (Venice, 1500); Albertus Magnus, Les admirables
secrets d’Albert le Grand . . . (Lyons, 1752).
⁴² J.-N. Biraben, Les hommes et la peste en France, 2 vols. (Paris, 1975–6), ii, 185 and 23.
⁴³ The Kalendar & Compost of Shepherds [1508], ed. G. C. Heseltine (1932), 152.
This imperative was distinctly reminiscent of Leviticus 21: 16–24: ‘For whatso-
ever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach: a blind man, or a
lame, or he that hath a flat nose, or anything superfluous’ (v. 18), which, as was
shown in the Introduction and Chapter 1, had long been at the basis of Canon
Law preventing anyone with a physical deformity from being ordained.
All in all, given the nature and role of plague in early modern society; given
the way in which disease and physical deformity were heavily moralized; given
the urgency of the notion of salut (health/salvation) in societies dominated
by the religious preoccupation with death, not to mention the high mortality
rates among children; and given the extent to which the physiognomical apho-
risms in these texts rarely have anything good to say about anyone, it is easy to
understand how readily people could come to see other people as some sort of
physiognomical danger or even disease in which they lived. In this anxiety lay
the utility of physiognomical ‘prudence’ by which these texts offered to provide
readers with a way of looking, a visual tool with which they could forewarn
themselves in the battle to distinguish good (healthy) from evil (sick), all the
more so during periods of particularly intense danger. It was this religio-
medical utility that can be heard in the overtone of the extended title of one
French edition of Michael Scot’s ‘physiognomy’, Phisionomia magistri
Michaelis Scoti. Si Prudentiam. Si Sanitatem. Si Cautelam. Si Fiduciam.⁴⁴
Price and Distribution

The closest we can now come to visual footage of the distribution of a ‘treatise
on physiognomy’ being sold in a book fair takes the form of a late seventeenth-
/early eighteenth-century engraving of a second-hand book sale by the English
engraver more renowned for his maps, Sutton Nichols.
As satirical as it may be in intent, the sixth book from the left on the front
row bears the title of one of the most popular eighteenth-century books with
physiognomy in it: ‘Aristotle’s Masterpiece’. How much did ‘treatises on physi-
ognomy’ cost in the early modern period? Who would have been able to afford
them? How widely available were they beyond the main printing centres of
Europe? The sparse evidence for the prices of ‘treatises on physiognomy’ sug-
gests that, by the late seventeenth century, and probably long before, they were
available along the full range of the price spectrum and therefore available to
people from across the social/income spectrum. In the case of a popular text
from the earlier part of the period, such as the Kalendar of Shepherds, no price
⁴⁴ Michael Scot, Phisionomia magistri Michaelis Scoti ( [Paris], [1509?] ).

7. The sixth book from the left is marked ‘Aristotle’s Masterpiece’, a text which nor-
mally contained an exposition of physiognomical doctrine, Sutton Nichols, ‘The
Compleat Auctioner’, c.1700. Copper engraving, from S. Taubert, Bibliopola. Bilder
und Texte aus der Welt des Buchhandels, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1966), ii., 77. (Bibliothèque
Municipale de Lyon, FA hist 03 D t. 01–02. Credit photographique Bibliothèque
Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.)
details have survived. However, it is possible to estimate its market value. It has
been suggested that between 1560 and 1635 the price of normal, new, unbound
books printed in pica or larger type was usually a halfpenny a sheet. Whilst it is
likely that the Kalendar cost over 1 shilling prior to 1540, there are numerous
early seventeenth-century Kalendars whose paper, type-face, and woodcuts
have all the attributes of a cheap edition published a century earlier by the Eng-
lish printer Robert Wyer. At around 18–20 sheets in length on average, this may
have priced some pre-1540 versions of the Kalendar at around 9 d. This estimate
does not take into consideration the numerous woodcuts in any edition of the
Kalendar. However, the 1522 inventory of a Parisian bookseller, Jean Janot,
which valued 150 undated quarto copies of the Kalendar at ‘69 s’, might be seen
as supporting this calculation.⁴⁵
On 14 March 1547, an inventory was made of the library of M. Jean Le
Fenon, a lawyer of the Parlement de Paris, at his home in the cloister Sainte-
Opportune. It listed a ‘Phisionomia Aristotellis, cum commanto Micaelis Scoti’.
This refers to a leather-bound folio edition which contained the physiog-
nomies of Aristotle, Scot, and Cocles, which had been published in Pavia some
thirty years earlier, in 1515. In the inventory it was given an estimated value of
‘12 s’. At this price it was much more expensive than the Kalendar, and provides
an insight into how expensive the Renaissance was in comparison to the Refor-
mation. In fact, notwithstanding inflation, it was roughly the ‘same’ price as
the physiognomical treatise which young Samuel Jeake picked up to read in
1670; in 1671, the bookseller Nathaniel Hawthorne was advertising the second
edition of Richard Saunders’s Physiognomie and Chiromancie at ‘12 s’, if bought
bound, and ‘10 s’ unbound.
In the case of the latter, the size and quality of the paper (it was a large folio)
plus the large number of woodcuts and the couple of engravings drove up the
price of its production. But in both these cases, be it in 1515 or in 1671, some of
the very same physiognomy of Scot and Saunders was available, word for word,
in much cheaper, smaller formats for those who could not afford such large,
expensive folios. Another of Saunders’s books available in the mid-to-late sev-
enteenth century, such as the Palmistry that Newton bought, cost ‘1 s 6 d ’. This
put it in the middle of the price-range of the fad for leather-bound octavos that
were being sold in England for ‘1 s’ from the 1660s onwards. The top end of that
particular market was another physiognomical tract, Vulson’s Court of Curiosi-
ties, which cost ‘2 s’ in 1672 and ‘18 d ’ in 1681. Physiognomical texts like octavos
of The True Fortune Teller, Indagine, and Wits Cabinet all sold in this format for
‘1 s’, whilst in 1699 Aristotle’s Legacy; or, His Golden Cabinet of Secrets (‘illustrat-
ed with above 60 cuts’) was being sold, bound, for 6 d.⁴⁶
Inventories of booksellers provide a further insight into how books were
priced. In some cases, they suggest that some of these physiognomical treatises
were available at even lower prices. When the appraisers visited the English
⁴⁵ F. R. Johnson, ‘Notes on English Retail Book Prices, 1550–1640’, The Library, 5th ser., 5 (1950), 83–112;
84; Oxford: Bodleian Library, Vet A2 c.52; R. Doucet, Les bibliothèques parisiennes au XVIe siècle (Paris, 1956),
102 (item no. 139), and 144 (item no. 438).
⁴⁶ The Term Catalogues, 1668–1709 A.D, ed. E. Arber, 3 vols. (1903–6), i, 15, 62, and 454; ii, 148; iii, 130.
book-trader Charles Tias’s warehouse in 1665 after his death, they noted in their
inventory 600 copies of ‘Books of Palmistrie’ (presumably the treatise by
Johannes de Indagine) which they valued at ‘2 –12 d each’. Whether this is based
on estimated wholesale prices or prices at which they were actually sold is diffi-
cult to say. The fact that the English diarist Samuel Pepys had ‘a pair of duodec-
imo Art of Palmistry books from Tias’s cheapest titles amongst his collection’
suggests the latter.⁴⁷ Indeed, in the eighteenth century, the English chapbooks
which incorporated small expositions of physiognomical doctrine, such as the
School of Love, or the Groatsworth of Wit for a Penny, were sold in very large
quantities at prices even cheaper than 2 d. Much the same can be said for works
published earlier. Robert Fludd’s 1617–21 multi-volumed encyclopaedia prob-
ably cost far beyond the 12 s of Saunders’s single folio. Yet, as far as physiogno-
my in printed form was concerned, from the mid-1550s onwards, some of
Thomas Hill’s works were priced as low as 2 d and 3 d, and 6 d.⁴⁸
The same spread of prices can be found on the Continent. Antoine Gerard’s
1493 edition of Le compost et kalendrier des bergiers, which was printed on vel-
lum, illustrated with sixty-six hand-painted miniatures and presented to
Charles VIII, no doubt cost well above ‘12 s’ to produce. Cornelio Ghiradelli’s
Cefalogia fisionomica, published in Bologna in 1630, though a smaller size than
Saunders’s work, was longer and contained even more engravings and so prob-
ably cost an equivalent amount. Yet the most common format of those exam-
ples that have survived is the much cheaper, pocket-size octavo illustrated with
cheap woodcuts—the most widely read being the Physiognomiae & chiroman-
tiae compendium of Bartholomaeus Cocles. Of those examples I have consult-
ed, interestingly enough, none contains any details about price—a suggestion
of how flexible pricing was in the early modern market. But, on the whole, they
must have been relatively cheap, and no more than the ‘1 s’ octavos so popular
in England in the mid-seventeenth century. In fact, given the quality of the
paper on which they were printed, as well as the basic nature of the woodcuts,
they were probably in the same price range as some of Thomas Hill’s popular
texts, i.e. 2 d–5 d.
Who would have been able to afford them? There were obviously great vari-
ations in the state of early modern economies, and discrepancies in the dispos-
able incomes of the different people who made up those economies. Generally
speaking, some historians have argued that books became more and more
affordable as the early modern period progressed. According to one calcula-
tion, prices in England remained steady between 1560 and 1635, when the
⁴⁷ Spufford, Small Books, 93. ⁴⁸ Johnson, ‘Book prices’, 104.

prices of other commodities nearly doubled and wages rose between one half
and two thirds, and that after 1635 prices suddenly rose by about 40 per cent,
‘without any corresponding increase in the general level of prices in the same
period’). ‘Books on physiognomy’, generally speaking, were coming down in
price.⁴⁹
In 1560 a builder could earn 8 d–10 d per day. Therefore, one of these books
would have cost him a day’s wages. By 1600 he was earning 1 s, and by 1640 this
had risen to 16 d. One historian’s suggestion of a basic subsistence level of
£10–14 for a relatively poor family in a normal year, with the wages of a labour-
ing man totalling around £9–10, leaves little if anything to spare for books.
However, an early seventeenth-century husbandman holding 30 acres of arable
land might have around £3–4 surplus, which is an average of 14 d–18 d per week.
Thus in one study of English print it has been suggested that ‘a lesser yeoman
with £40–50 income a year would hardly have to think twice about buying
pamphlets or ballads, and probably represented a more regular market’.⁵⁰
If this provides a picture of the distribution of these texts along the full range
of the income spectrum, what was the extent of their geographical distribu-
tion? The small library in the church of St-Bonnet-le-Chateau, a little village
deep in the Loire region of France, is one example that might be taken as typi-
cal of the intriguing network down which this information was passed. The
collegial which is attached to the church has a small library. That library con-
tains a 1654 copy of Jean Belot’s Oeuvres—a French version of the text which
Samuel Jeake had in his own library in an English version plagiarized by
Richard Saunders, and the very same text which Sir Isaac Newton had in his
library. The book itself is marked ‘Ex dono D. de Maysonneuve’. Gabriel de
Maisonneuve was a priest of St-Bonnet who gave several works to the library in
1717 once they started to renovate it. Of course, consideration of the proximity
of St Bonnet-le-Chateau to Lyon, a major printing centre, might make this a
less-telling example. In that case, more suggestive of the ubiquity of physiog-
nomical knowledge in textual form is a manuscript in the Royal Library in
Copenhagen. It contains a manuscript ‘treatise on physiognomy’, written in
1751, in Iceland, in Icelandic, by a cleric named ‘H. Blom Proust’.⁵¹
Thus the simple answer is that this invented archive of ‘books on physiog-
nomy’ may have been a marginal corpus of texts in the age of print, but it was
⁴⁹ Johnson, ‘Book prices’, 93; E. H. Phelps-Brown and S. V. Hopkins, ‘Seven Centuries of the Prices
of Consumables compared with Builder’s Wage-Rates’, in E. M. Carus-Wilson (ed.), Essays in Economic
History (1962), ii, 179–96.
⁵⁰ K. Wrightson, English Society, 1580–1680 (1982), 32–4; Watt, Cheap Print, 262.
⁵¹ Jean Belot, Les œuvres de m. Jean Belot (Lyon, 1654); Copenhagen: Royal Library, Ms Thott 289.
a distinctly ubiquitous one. They appear to have been distributed to, and later
printed in, some of the furthest corners of early modern society. There were a
number of routes down which they appear to have been disseminated besides
the bookshops in the major European cities. The most famous mechanism, of
course, was the Frankfurt Book Fair. In addition to this there was a relatively
large second-hand book market all over Europe. Booksellers who did not have
direct trade connections with the provincial sellers could rely upon pedlars and
hawkers.⁵² From at least as early as the 1570s onwards, and probably long
before, these hawkers were growing in numbers, ensuring a distribution of
cheap printed texts from big city publishers to the furthest reaches of any coun-
try. They were a truly remarkable phenomenon. Indeed, for the highly scepti-
cal among the readers of this book, evidence that the hawkers sold treatises on
physiognomy can be found in one early eighteenth-century edition of an Eng-
lish ‘treatise on physiognomy’ in which the bookseller included a catalogue of
the works he had on sale including ‘all sorts of Chapmen’s Books whatsoever’.
By the later eighteenth century their métier was being eroded somewhat by the
rise of regional presses, which, among other things, also began to print physi-
ognomical chapbooks: printers such as J. Turner in Coventry, England, who
produced an ‘11th edition’ of a text containing physiognomy entitled A
Groatsworth of Wit for a Penny published alongside another entitled Nine Pen-
nyworth of Wit for a Penny.⁵³ Indeed, by this time such works were also being
published in Scotland, Ireland, and America.⁵⁴
The Audience
Who was in the audience for the sounds and visions of the self, the world, and
the virtues and vices of its soul as it was articulated in, and seen through, the
windows of these early modern ‘books on physiognomy’? The authors them-
selves had a broad vision of the public at whom they aimed their writings. In
1528, Robert Copland suggested his book of secrets was ‘also veray good to
teche chyldren to lerne to rede Englysshe’.⁵⁵ One hundred and thirty years
later, a prefatory verse in Saunders’s 1653 text was addressed ‘To the deserving
⁵² L. Fontaine, Histoire du colportage en Europe (XVe–XIXe siècles) (Paris, 1993).

⁵³ Spufford, Small Books, 125; Taubert, Bibliopola, ii, 25, 33, and 35; Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark
Memorial Library, *AG104 E72 1739. London: British Library, 11621.b.26 (6); London: British Library,
1078.k.22 (3 and 4).
⁵⁴ The new book of knowledge . . . A brief collection of the members of man physiognomiz’d . . . (Boston,
Mass. [1767?] [Harvard: Lamont Library: Microfiche W 2571 (10699) ].
⁵⁵ Manzalaoui, Secretum, 388.
Ladies Satyrically’, in which reference was made to ‘the Strand | And Ladies of
the great Co-vent’. Similarly, in 1669 the translator of Vulson’s Court of Curiosi-
tie opened his text with an address ‘To the Ladies of our British Isle’. In 1653,
Saunders claimed that physiognomy was ‘a science very necessary for Ministers
and Physitians, in their visitation of the sick’. In 1665, the translator of La
Chambre’s treatise thought it a knowledge particularly suited to ‘persons
entrusted with the management of Embassies, and the most important Trans-
actions of Crowns and Scepters, and consequently, oblig’d to treat with People
of different Tempers and Climates’. To all of the above, another author ex-
panded the potential utility of physiognomy to include such people as
Doctors of Divinity . . . the Natural Philosopher . . . the Moral Philosopher . . . the
devout Preacher . . . Orators. . . . Ambassadors, Lawyers, Magistrates, and Captains,
and all others, that would perswade a multitude . . . Gentlemen and prudent
Politicians [who wished to be master of ] a most complaisant deportment and
presence.
Finally, in an age which had discovered both the ‘New World’ and the ‘Far
East’, in which the Grand Tour was an institutionalized duty of the privileged,
and in which the features of future imperialisms are clearly discernible, the
same author also recommended physiognomy to the traveller, who, ‘when he
travels into forrain parts, he may discover to what passion the people are most
inclinable’. In fact, to anyone engaged in the hazardous process of building up
a social network and trying to work out who they could trust ‘it is a matter of
great moment in society, to understand the inclination of the company you
associate with; and that conversation cannot but be agreeable, where the pas-
sions of the parties are moderated’. Moreover, if physiognomy helped one to
police one’s self and one’s associates, it was also useful for those who formed the
eyes of the policing and judicial arms of the growing state apparatus: ‘I will say
nothing of Magistrates, who may by Physiognomy understand the disposition
and inclination of their Inferiors and Subjects’.⁵⁶
As rhetorical as these claims were, to what extent did these ‘treatises on
physiognomy’ actually hit their mark? This question is answered by turning to
a number of other, very different, historical sources such as inventories of
books collected after a person’s death, or the catalogues of private libraries, as
well as the names of owners inscribed on the extant texts themselves (‘marks of
provenance’).
⁵⁶ Richard Saunders, Physiognomie, Chiromancie, Metoposcopie (1653), sig. B5, sig. a2 [pagination erratic];
Marc Vulson, The Court of Curiositie (1669), sig. A3, 110–13; Marin Cureau de la Chambre, The Art How to
Know Men (1665), sig. A4r–v.
It should be said from the outset that a superficial glance at a random sam-
ple of all of these sources suggests that these texts were indeed owned by people
from across the social and income spectrum, by clerics and by lay persons from
across the religious divide, by professionals and non-professionals, by adults
and children, male and female. The following is just a representative, analytical
sample to illustrate some of the early modern social pathways along which this
textual form of physiognomy migrated as it was transmitted from the late fif-
teenth century to the end of the eighteenth century. Many of the names found
written on these books are of people who can no longer be identified. How-
ever, those that can provide us with an idea of the sociology of ‘books on physi-
ognomy’, as well as of numerous, potentially rich areas of further investigation
into the place of physiognomy in their intellectual and cultural life. The list of
such names is extensive. The following are just a few representative examples
taken from across early modern Europe.
Given what was said in Chapter 1 about the medicalization of physiogno-
mony as it migrated through the Middle Ages, it is not surprising to find that
the names of medical students and physicians are particularly prominent
among the owners of these works. Three contemporary Parisian libraries pos-
sess numerous manuscript ‘treatises on physiognomy’ dating from the six-
teenth and seventeenth centuries, many of which appear to have been written,
copied, or owned by physicians.⁵⁷ Marcus Aurelius Severinus (1580–1656), pro-
fessor of medicine and surgery in Naples, wrote one entitled ‘Iatrophysiogno-
mia, Physiognomia medica cum symbolis alteris’. Conrad Gesner owned
a copy of Rhazes’s translation of the Secretum secretorum, whilst the mid-
seventeenth-century physician and philosopher Joannes Christophorus
Sleebus owned a 1658 folio Latin edition of Cardano’s Metoposcopia.⁵⁸ Thomas
Newton (1542–1607), English poet, physician, rector of Little Ilford in Essex,
and translator of The touchstone of complexions (1576), owned an edition of
Hill’s physi-ognomical work, A contemplation of mankinde (1571).⁵⁹ A 1629
Venetian edition of Ciro Spontoni’s La metoposcopia was in the library of the
Roman physician Georgius Baglivi (1668–1707). The frontispiece of one copy
of the 1522 Latin folio edition of Indagine’s famous text bears the names
of what appear to have been three very different élite owners, two of whom
were medical practitioners. They read ‘Thomas Morgan’ (1543–1606?), the
Welsh catholic conspirator, ‘Caroli Bernard’, most probably Charles Bernard
(1650–1711), the Tory and high churchman (and friend of Swift), and master of
⁵⁷ See Bibliography. Paris: Bibliothèque Saint Genéviève, MS 2241.
⁵⁸ Rome: Biblioteca Lancisiana, MS 2. LXXIV.3 (1612); Zurich: Zentralbibliothek, Inc.311; Zurich:
Zentralbibliothek, LL.12. ⁵⁹ Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 13487.
the Barber Surgeons Company, and ‘John Shipton’ (1680–1748), the steward of
anatomy at the Barber Surgeons Company in 1704, and the Brook Street prac-
titioner who was called in to treat Caroline (the wife of George II) when she was
mortally ill of a strangulated hernia.⁶⁰ The sale catalogues of the private
libraries of numerous late eighteenth-century French physicians, such as
Theodore Hyacinthe Baron (1707–87), Pierre Jean Burette, and Anne
Charles Lorry, also show that they too had their share of printed ‘books on
physiognomy’.⁶¹
As physiognomy was a subject which dealt with the union of body and soul,
it is hardly surprising to find ‘books on physiognomy’ in the possession of
numerous clerics throughout early modern Europe. One cleric named
‘bartholomai girai’ owned Achillini’s entire Opera (1508), including his writing
on physiognomy and chiromancy.⁶² A 1540 Greek edition of Adamantius was
owned by a mid-sixteenth-century doctor of divinity named ‘Domino Viro
Ardusero Antonius Stoppa’.⁶³ John Beaumont, the late sixteenth-century
canon of Westminster and master of Trinity, owned a 1546 edition of the Cocles
compendium.⁶⁴ A copy of Giovanni Battista Della Porta’s Coelestis physiogno-
moniae (Neapoli, 1603), found its way into the library of the Florentine
Franciscans in Fiesole.⁶⁵ Indeed, given the physiognomical gaze for which
the Inquisitors were known, there are no doubt many more examples of
Jesuits, besides Athanasius Kircher, who dabbled in the art of physiognomy.⁶⁶
One clear example of this is the fact that a significant number of ‘books on
physiognomy’ now in the Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon in France came
from the library of the local College of Jesuits. A brief survey of some late eigh-
teenth-century sale catalogues dating from between 1764 and 1779 of the
libraries of various French and Low Countries Jesuit colleges showed that this
was not unusual.⁶⁷
Evidence of textual intercourse between these aforementioned professions
can be seen in one very early folio edition of Indagine which was owned
by a (Swiss?) cleric who then gave it to a Swiss physician named ‘Jacobi
Bruli[s?]ouar’ in 1573.⁶⁸ Such exchanges also took place among the lower ranks
of the clergy and the schoolteaching profession. Thomas Butler, vicar of Holy
⁶⁰ London: British Library, 1606/313, title-page.

⁶¹ Catalogue de la bibliothèque de feu m. Baron (Paris, 1788); Catalogue de la bibliothèque de feu m. Burette
(Paris, 1748); Catalogue de la bibliothèque de feu mm. Lorry (Paris, 1791).
⁶² Florence: Biblotheca Nazionale, 9.4.2, fol. 118v.
⁶³ Basle: Bibliothek der Universität, D.C.VIII.8a. ⁶⁴ Leedham-Green, Cambridge Inventories,
⁶⁵ Florence: Biblotheca Nazionale, 30.6.4.28.
⁶⁶ P. Redondi, Galileo: Heretic, trans. R. Rosenthal (1987), 5.
⁶⁷ Oxford: Bodleian Library, Mus-Bibl. III 8o 551. ⁶⁸ Basle: Bibliothek der Universität, Da.III.21.
Trinity, Wenlock (1534–5), was given a copy of the Secretum by Walter
Westbury, formerly master of the abbey school of St Peter and St Paul in
Shrewsbury.⁶⁹
Europe’s other profession, the lawyers, are also to be found among the own-
ers of ‘treatises on physiognomy’. In 1652, the Basle lawyer Remigius Faesch
(1595–1667) bought a 1601 edition of Porta’s De humana physiognomia to add to
a collection that included numerous physiognomical treatises.⁷⁰ In fact,
Faesch’s 1534 folio edition of Indagine’s Chiromantia was bound with an anony-
mous work entitled Epitome Trium terrae partium, Asiae, Africae et Europae
compendium locorum descriptiones (Zurich, 1534), linking the language and art
of physiognomy with the issue of foreign travel, the physiognomy of the
‘other’, and, historically speaking, the birth of anthropology. Indeed, whilst on
the subject of professional travellers once again, one English version
of Indagine’s treatise claims to have been owned by ‘Captain Blyth of the
Bounty’.⁷¹
Historiographically speaking, all of this is further evidence of ‘natural
magic’s considerable significance in [and beyond] early modern intellectual
circles’. Given the presence of physiognomical treatises in a large number of
eighteenth-century private library catalogues, it also bleeds into the historio-
graphical debate about the slowness of the diffusion of the famous texts syn-
onymous with the ideas of the Enlightenment, and the continued importance
of third-rate writers as well as the more ‘hermetic’ and ‘occult’ concerns of
enlightened rationality.⁷² To take just one of many possible examples, Antoine
Danty D’Isnard (d. 1743), was a physician from Montpellier and botanist at the
Jardin des Plantes in Paris. As a correspondent of Linnaeus, D’Isnard was at the
coal-face of the intellectual developments that moved the natural philosopher’s
and the natural historian’s eye away from a concern with the physiognomy of
natural bodies as understood and theorized by the likes of Paracelsus, Robert
Fludd, and Johannes Alsted, to the new classification of natural bodies as
espoused by Linnaeus. D’Isnard’s awareness of the physiognomical view of
nature was evident in his library. He not only owned three copies of Della
Porta’s Phytognomonica, as well as a 1669 edition of De secretis mulierum by
Albertus Magnus (containing Scot’s physiognomy), he also had a large section
specifically devoted to physiognomy which contained many of the most
widely known ‘books on physiognomy’ from the ‘canon’.⁷³ Such catalogues
⁶⁹ E. Armstrong, ‘English Purchases of Printed Books from the Continent 1465–1526’, English Historical
Review, 94 (1979), 268–90, 274–5. See London: British Library, IA. 49240 (E 2a).
⁷⁰ Basle: Bibliothek der Universität, HI.VIII.33. ⁷¹ New York: New York Public Library, KB 1543.
⁷² Clark, Demons, 228; D. Mornet, Les origines intellectuelles de la révolution française (1715–1787) (Paris,
1933). ⁷³ Catalogue des livres de feu m. Danty d’Isnard (Paris, 1744).
certainly call for future studies to go beyond these relatively superficial facts of
mere ownership, into a detailed, qualitative assessment of the intellectual inter-
face which they suggest.
Intellectual and Environmental Dynamics of Production

Finally, a word should be said on how library catalogues and marks of prove-
nance suggest various intellectual and social dynamics driving the develop-
ment of that consumption of physiognomy across the entire period. One
intellectual dynamic is suggested by the different categories under which books
on physiognomy were catalogued. Library catalogues grew out of simple
inventories with a relatively simply administrative goal, often organized origi-
nally according to accession (by name of donor and not necessarily in chrono-
logical order of accession), or by author, or, increasingly, by location.⁷⁴ By the
early modern period, classification by subject-matter was more or less normal
procedure, even if in practice those categories varied enormously. Whilst
the library classification systems of Conrad Gesner, Gabriel Naudé, Gabriel
Martin, and Prosper Marchand were influential, it is not always certain who
was responsible for the system used in any particular catalogue, let alone how
closely it reflects the actual classificatory order of the books as they were stored
in the libraries themselves, or how the author of any work would have catego-
rized his own text. Thus, as textual documents, catalogues raise another aspect
of the problem of author ‘intentionality’.⁷⁵
As in many medieval monastic libraries, early modern ‘books on physiogno-
my’ were often classified under ‘astrology’ and ‘philosophy’. In 1766, Mallard,
an ‘advocat au Parlement’, had lots of books on physiognomy under ‘astrology’.
The rising influence of Gabriel Martin’s cataloguing categories reinforced this.
For example, in the Abbé Favier’s 1765 catalogue the Compost des bergiers was
placed under ‘Sciences and Arts (Astronomy and Cosmos)’, whilst Albertus
Magnus’s De secretis mulierum (1669) and Della Porta’s Physiognomia (1650)
were listed alongside Pernetti´s Lettres (1746) under ‘Physics and Natural His-
tory’. Indeed, even the most superficial glance at library catalogues shows that
early modern ‘books on physiognomy’, like their medieval manuscript prede-
cessors simply refused any consistent classification. For example, in the cata-
logue of the public library at Orleans, founded by M. Prousteau, the law
professor at the University of Orleans, books on physiognomy were shelved
⁷⁴ A. Derolez, Les catalogues de bibliothèques (Turnhout, 1979).
⁷⁵ C. Berkvens-Stevelinck, Prosper Marchand et l’histoire du livre (Bruges, 1978).
respectively under ‘Astrology’, ‘Medicine’, and ‘Morale’, whilst the aforemen-
tioned Mallard had his La Chambre (1660) under ‘Logic and Dialectic’, whilst
in 1775 the Abbé Desessarts, like Sandras, the avocat en Parlement, had them
under ‘Metaphysique’. By the end of the period one finds catalogues which
gave ‘books on physiognomy’ a section of their own. An anonymous catalogue
of 1805 has them all in order. Yet even this gives one an impression of the diver-
sity implicit in the subject. One section full of books on physiognomy was
labelled ‘Physiological, philosophical and moral treatises on physiognomies’,
and had a sub-section on ‘Chiromancy and Geomancy’, with others under
‘Moral treatises on the Virtues and Vices’, and still others under ‘Oracles,
dreams and hermetic philosophy and magic’.⁷⁶
Hand in hand with the dynamic evident in this explicit development of a
workable taxonomy, the practical problem of the nature of the book and its
storage (what name should a composite manuscript be placed under, or a text
of multiple authors) gave rise to a different, implicit classification system with
a dynamic of its own, the influence of which could be brought to bear on the
question of how a work was read. Indeed, it was this implicit dynamic that
Enlightenment schemes of classification were trying to curtail. Those schemes
were aiming at a system of classification that would not allow anything to be
left in the realms of the indeterminate and would spare readers the inconve-
nience of sometimes finding the same work in several different classes. In other
words, it would be the end of what the Encyclopédie described as ‘a labyrinth full
of confused routes’. Despite this utopian rationality, the catalogues of private
libraries in France from the last fifty years of the eighteenth century show that
the art of physiognomy continued to experience a classificatory ambiguity and
fluidity.
Having said that, one notable aspect of the history of the practice of the
library classification of ‘books on physiognomy’ is the persistence of its inclu-
sion under ‘theology’—evidence in itself of the way in which the early modern
interest in physiognomy was driven by its relationship to ‘the ancient theology’
so beloved of hermeticism. For example, the physiognomical manuscript tran-
scribed by Laurentius Benincontri on 10 May 1477 may have been bound with
other works on astrology and stored under Latin philosophy.⁷⁷ However, it was
catalogued in, and chained to, the same section of the library that contained
Marsilio Ficino’s Platonicae Theologiae de immortalitate animorum, his com-
⁷⁶ Catalogue des livres de la bibliothèque de feu monsieur l’abbé Favier (Lille, 1765); Catalogue des livres de
feu m. Mallard (Paris, 1766); Catalogue des livres de la bibliothèque de feu m. Sandras (Paris, 1771); Catalogue
des livres de la bibliothèque de feu monsieur l’abbé Desessarts (Paris, 1775); Catalogue des livres de la bibliothèque
publique fondée par m. Prousteau (Paris, 1777); Catalogue des livres . . . provenant de biblothèques de mm. D**
et de V*** (Paris, 1805). ⁷⁷ Florence: Bibliotheca Medica Laurenziana MS Plut. XXIX.3, fol. 59r–61v.
mentary Mercurii Trismegisti liber de potestate Dei, and Pico della Mirandola’s
Opus de amore divino. The inventory of the book collection of the sixteenth-
century English surgeon John Perman (d.1544) suggests that he may have
shelved his copy of Cocles’s ‘physiognomia and chiromantia’ next to ‘de Sphera
Johannise de Sacro Bosco’ and under ‘Theologi’.⁷⁸ The first catalogue of the
Bodleian library shows how this same classification arose implicitly from the
logistics of book storage. Some time between 1550 and 1600, a 1509 edition of
Simonetta’s Opuscula varia, which contained a tract on chiromancy and physi-
ognomy, was bound with a copy of the 1504/5 edition of the Achillini/Cocles
Anastasis (as well as a 1550 edition of Euclid’s geometry). It was presented to the
Bodleian library in 1600 by one William Gent. The first printed catalogue of
the Bodleian Library (1605) records it as having been shelved under theology.⁷⁹
The 1765 sale catalogue of the private library of the Abbé Favier, a priest from
Lille, contained about 2,500 books. One of them was Vulson’s Le palais des
curieux (1660). It was listed as the last book in the theology section under the
sub-section headed ‘The abuse of theology and religion, superstition, magic,
cabal and astrology’. Francis Bacon was correct to claim that physiognomy
‘hath been inquired and considered as a part and appendix of Medicine, but
much more as a part of Religion or Superstition’.⁸⁰ Indeed one anonymous cat-
alogue of 1805 included a book entitled Le parnasse divin . . . contenant le grand
microcosme, la phisionomie, la chiromancie, le rosaire mystique, le miroir ardent,
la paraphrase sur l’Évangile de S. Jean (Tolouse: A. Colomiez, 1653). It was writ-
ten by De Clermont, a priest from the convent of Nazareth, and was placed
under ‘Poètes français’—an echo of Albrecht von Haller, the famous
anatomist’s description of Lavater as a theologian and a poet, and a sign that, as
in Ficino’s vision of things, the scientia of physiognomy was more theological
and poetic than scientific.
The marks of provenance on these extant texts provide at least one pattern
which suggests something of a dynamic behind the ownership of ‘books on
physiognomy’—an increasing gap between the date of the signature and the
age of the text itself. Not surprisingly, the evidence of these signatures shows
that many owners were contemporary with the texts they owned. In 1665
‘Johannes Kappesig Montano-Hambergensis’ owned a 1662 Amsterdam
edition of Albertus Magnus’s De secretis mulierum, which also included
Scot’s physiognomy.⁸¹ At 10 years of age, Narcissus Luttrell (1657–1732), later
⁷⁸ Leedham-Green, Cambridge Inventories, 51.
⁷⁹ Oxford: Bodleian Library, Th. S. 7. 5; N. Ker, Fragments of Medieval Manuscripts (Oxford, 1954), 212,
fn. 4.
⁸⁰ Francis Bacon, Collected Works, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, 7 vols. (1857–9), III.i, 368.
⁸¹ Basle: Bibliothek der Universität, ls522.
annalist and bibliographer, was the owner of a 1665 edition of the Indagine
treatise.⁸²
Yet it appears that from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries
onwards, one often sees a significant time-lapse between the year of the publi-
cation of the text and the date of these signatures, suggesting a shift in the sta-
tus of these texts from curiosity to antiquity. One representative example of this
is the antiquarian William Meek, who, on 24 July, 1775, was the owner of a, by
then, century-old edition of the Indagine treatise. ⁸³ Such examples suggest the
development of a more antiquarian or bibliomaniac interest in, and interaction
with, an old printed book rather than any particular living interest in physiog-
nomy itself. Having said that, the British Library has a 1503 edition of the
Kalendar which bears the name of one ‘John Polotkley’ scribbled on the page
over two centuries later in 1711: not the usual attitude of an antiquarian.⁸⁴
Another discernible dynamic which suggests itself through these marks of
provenance is that one begins to see more evidence of female and child owners
from the early seventeenth century onwards. It would be rash to see this as a
consequence of the intellectual demise of physiognomy. Children had been
reading such works for a long time. Copland advertised his 1528 ‘book of
secrets’ as useful for teaching children to read. Furthermore, these texts could
also have been used by adults who were learning to read. Indeed, there is one
copy of the Erra Pater the frontispiece of which bears the inscription ‘Edward
Collins fifteen years of age, January the 23 in 1734’. The same owner has signed
his name thirty-two years later in 1766, thus suggesting that in later life he came
back to a book of his youth—unless of course the second signature was that of
his son.⁸⁵ This was not a peculiarly English affair. A copy of Gratarolus’s ‘book
on physiognomy’ which eventually made its way into the collection of the
seventeenth-century Swiss lawyer Faeschl carries the names of the scholar
Henrico Adorno and his son.⁸⁶
All in all, the degree of distortion in the surviving evidence and the relative-
ly random nature of its collection make it almost impossible to frame a defini-
tive statement about this. None the less, if one brings the two aforementioned
dynamics together it becomes interesting that as those ‘books on physiogno-
my’ increasingly take on the air of an antiquarian ‘curiosity’ from the later sev-
enteenth/early eighteenth century onwards, there appears to be a pattern of
more and more children and women who were reading them. When this pat-
⁸² Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, I 142.

⁸³ Los Angeles: William Andrews Clarke Memorial Library, *BF 910 I38 1697.
⁸⁴ London: British Library, C.70.g.2, sig.Iii. ⁸⁵ Cambridge: University Library, 5180.e.72.1.
⁸⁶ Basle: Bibliothek der Universität, LR.II.11.
tern is joined with the dynamics evident in the taxonomy, then one begins to
see how something that was once considered theology had taken on the air of a
thing less serious, a poetic entertainment for women and children.
Conclusion
This ‘invented archive’ has provided a general geographical and social survey
map of the material presence of textual physiognomy in early modern Europe.
‘Books on physiognomy’ were produced constantly throughout the early mod-
ern period, in all languages from Greek to German and from Hebrew to
Icelandic. They were published in all of early modern Europe’s main, as well as
some of the more obscure printing centres, from Cracow to Copenhagen and
from Venice to Valencia. Quantitatively speaking, this cobweb of ‘books on
physiognomy’ was relatively small. However, it is made up of books in all for-
mats and at all prices, aimed at and read by an audience spanning the entire age,
gender, social, income, and professional spectra. The geographical and social
ubiquity of ‘books on physiognomy’ is evidence of the widespread early mod-
ern interest in ‘natural magic’. This alone makes it deserving of a closer, more
inquisitive look. In the next chapter this closer look will take the form of an
analysis of this map of the ‘books on physiognomy’ in early modern Europe,
from the other end of the process of communication, that is to say from the
point of view of some of the factors driving their production.
3
The Troubling Emergence of the ‘Egyptian’ in
Early Modern Europe
This chapter will weave its argument around two classic Burckhardtian fea-
tures of the Renaissance, the ‘re-discovery of antiquity’ and the ‘discovery of the
individual’, that can be discerned in the dynamic contours of early modern
attempts to capture fisnomy in books. A third feature, overlooked by Burck-
hardt and usually associated with the ‘discoveries’ of Victorian excavators,
affects our understanding of the first two—that is, the troubling emergence of
the ‘Egyptian’ in Western Christendom. From a purely philosophical perspec-
tive, most ‘books on physiognomy’ continued to be characterized by the devel-
opment of the Aristotelian framework inherited from the Middle Ages.
However, some of the early modern ‘books on physiognomy’ absorbed the
influence of the ‘Egyptian’ hermetic wisdom which the writings of Marsilio
Ficino had helped to spread throughout Europe. I shall further argue that that
same rise of interest in all things ‘Egyptian’ during this period, from hiero-
glyphs and pyramids to the notions of physiognomical ‘regeneration’, was in
part a response to a forgotten, but in some ways remarkably illiterate, social
phenomenon, the coming of the ‘gypsies’. All in all it will be suggested that
these very different blends of physiognomy contributed to the gradual meta-
morphosis, rather than the decline, of ‘physiognomy’ across the early modern
period. Moreover, that metamorphosis was part of an ongoing religious and
‘scientific’ battle, not only over the instinct, characters, and the mythologies
that constituted the very essence and nature of man’s self-knowledge but also
over the transformability of the nature of the human self.
Features of a Renaissance
Inside the material reality and mundane factuality of the publication of a book,
there lies a narrative of ‘who?, what?, when?, where?’ struggling to get out. With
Emergence of the ‘Egyptian’ in Early Modern Europe 121
or without the ‘why?’ such narratives are often, ultimately, as unavoidably
mind-numbing as watching the final edition of a newspaper for a day on which
nothing happened roll endlessly off the wheels of a modern automated press.
But for a historian armed with an array of other historical information, the
dead bones of that catalogue of bibliographical events can be brought to life.
What follows is a résumé of the archive of texts upon which this study is based,
written this time from the point of view of some of the factors behind their pro-
duction. With hundreds of works, incorporating many different types of
physiognomy, and three hundred years of history to cover, it does not represent
the entire picture. It is based on a selection of those works that support its main
concerns. To reassure those alarmed that this might propel the elements for-
ward in something of a single direction, given the state of scholarship in this
field, it is hoped that its inevitable errors will generate multiplicity by encour-
aging others to pursue more detailed studies in this neglected area.
The ‘re-discovery of antiquity’

To begin with, traces of two classical, intellectual features of the movement or
period known as the ‘Renaissance’ can be discerned in the contours of this
‘invented archive’. The first is the interest in re-discovering the ancient Greek
and Roman origins of, in this case, the physiognomical texts that had long been
familiar reading material among Western Europe’s literate classes. Yet if
physiognomy can be said to have had such a ‘renaissance’, it was a distinctly
‘medieval’ affair, some of which gestured towards an antiquity in ancient
Persia. Hints of the re-discovery of the classical antiquity of physiognomy’s
‘renaissance’ in the north can be seen in the printing of the fourth century bce
pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica that was included by Arnold Ther Hoer-
nen in the collection of Aristotelian treatises he published in Cologne around
1472; and in another such collection published by Lucas Brandis in Merseberg
on 20 October 1473. Having said that, the ambiguity of the place of the art of
physiognomy in the official Aristotelian Renaissance scheme of things can also
be seen from the very beginning of its printed life. The presence of other
pseudo-Aristotelian works with which the Physiognomonica was printed in
these collections is suggestive of a deliberate effort on the part of some printers to
ignore humanist attempts to create an official Renaissance corpus of Aristotle.
Nevertheless, the overwhelming sense of the persistence of ‘medieval’ physi-
ognomy is seen clearly south of the Alps, where the visible transition in textual
physiognomy from scribal calligraphy to printed typeface began with an
edition of the medieval Italian philosopher and physician Pietro d’Abano’s De
physiognomia in Padua in 1471[?], followed by another in Mantua in 1472, and
again in Padua in 1474. Elsewhere, north and south, the ‘books on physiog-
nomy’ which appeared most often and earliest in print were the work of
another medieval writer, Michael Scot. Scot’s distinctly Aristotelian Liber
physiognomiae was one of the first texts printed by the newly established print-
ing press in Besançon in France in 1477. By 1480, the Swiss printer Michael
Wenssler had produced a quarto of Scot’s work in Basle. Though the first print-
ed physiognomy in the Low Countries was the pseudo-Aristotelian Secretum
secretorum published in 1480, four years later a printed version of Scot’s text had
been published in Louvain.
Indeed, one could go further than this and say that not only was the printed
Renaissance of physiognomy a ‘medieval’ affair, it was a distinctly early
vernacular phenomenon as well. For, whilst the bulk of the humanist
‘Renaissance’ of the classical texts tended to be kept locked up in the relative
obscurity of the Latin and Greek languages, the age of print soon brought
physiognomy in books to people who could read a vernacular language. By the
beginning of the sixteenth century, vernacular French editions of the Secretum
and the Calendrier were falling from Dutch presses, and by 1510 the German
language had an anonymous ‘Complexionbuch’, replete with physiognomy,
entitled In disem biechlein wirt erfunden von complexion der mensch zu erlernen
leibliche vnnd menschliche natur ir siten geberden vnd naygli chayt zu erkennen
vnd vrtaylen (Augsburg, H. Schoensperger, 1510). In Italy, a book by Girolamo
Manfredi explaining ‘the why of everything’, with its numerous passages
explaining the elemental physiological reasons of various physiognomical signs
(such as the small wisdom of the large fat nose, the luxuriousness and irascibil-
ity of the broad nose), was published in Italian in Bologna as early as 1474 under
the title Liber de homine.
Moreover, in the dawning of this medieval and vernacular Renaissance, the
light of Michael Scot’s medieval and distinctly Aristotelian physiognomy was
very prominent. The first Spanish vernacular treatise entirely devoted to physi-
ognomy may have been Sylvester Velasco’s Liber de fisiognomia (Hispali, 1517).
However, extracts of Scot’s physiognomy had already been translated into
Spanish and placed in Johannes de Ketham’s Compendio de la salud humana
published in Burgos in 1495. In fact, whether in Latin or the vernacular,
whether in compendia or under other authors’ names, it was Michael Scot’s
physiognomy, much more so than even the Secretum secretorum, which appears
to have been the most widely known in sixteenth-century Europe. (Having
said that, it must always be borne in mind that Scot’s physiognomy was influ-
enced by the Arabic Secretum.) It was translated into Italian by 1530 and into
French by 1540.¹ The first Dutch vernacular ‘book on physiognomy’ so far
unearthed was a cheap octavo published in Antwerp by Jan Roelants in 1554
entitled Nieu complexie boeck. But the physiognomy in this work was that of
Michael Scot. The same goes for physiognomy printed in Spanish. The work
that more or less dominated the Spanish physiognomy that was captured in
texts was Jéronimo Cortés’s Libro de phisonomia natvral (Madrid, 1589). This
was simply a Spanish translation of Scot. Indeed, one of the most widely
known texts throughout Europe, both in Latin and numerous vernaculars (in
German by 1547, in French by 1548, in English by 1556), was thought at the time
to have been written by Bartholomaeus Cocles, a late fifteenth-century physi-
ognomist from Bologna. Cocles’s name may well have graced the title-page,
but the contents of the physiognomy were actually Michael Scot’s published
under Cocles’s more famous name.
One historian of Renaissance philosophy, Charles Schmitt, has claimed that
‘Aristotle still provided the overarching principle for the textbooks from which
Christians from all parts of Europe and all shades of belief learned their philo-
sophy and science’. Recent historians, in reconsidering the role of so called
‘natural magic’ in the development of early modern natural philosophy, have
followed suit by emphasizing how frequently ‘natural magic’ was discussed by
those with a Christian Aristotelian epistemology—itself often taken to be the
area of the most innovative intellectual activity that brought about what used
to be called ‘the birth of modern science’. The same appears to be true for early
modern physiognomy. In this, scholars in the Italian- and German-speaking
territories were the pacemakers. In the latter, commentaries on the pseudo-
Aristotelian Physiognomonica were published as early as 1517 and again in 1538.²
By the late 1530s, Spain had also made a significant contribution. This was sym-
bolized when Andrés de Laguna (Segovia, 1499–1559), a converted Spanish Jew,
renowned physician to Emperor Carlos I of Spain and Charles V of Germany
as well as Phillip II and Pope Julius III, and a prominent, but unjustly neg-
lected, figure in the history of European Renaissance natural philosophy and
medicine, had his commentary on the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica
published in Paris in 1535.³ Notwithstanding the many other commentaries
that remain unpublished and unexamined in manuscript in Germany and
Spain and elsewhere, the primary generator of this discussion was the natural
philosophy faculty at Padua, whether the humanistic commentary on
¹ Michael Scot, La phisionomie de maistre Michel Lescot (Paris, 1540).

² Aristotle, Liber de physiognomia [Matthias Weißmann] (Leipzig, 1517); Aristotle, Physiognomonica Aris-
totelis Latina Facta (Wittenberg, 1538).
³ Aristotle, Physiognomonicis liber I. Andrea Lacuna interprete (Paris, 1535).
physiognomy of Pomponazzi, or in particular Augustus Nifo’s more extended
commentary on the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica. These writings
show how commentaries on physiognomy feed in to some of the central histo-
riographical debates over the role of Paduan Aristotelianism in laying the foun-
dations of some of the most fundamental aspects of the naturalistic scientific
mindset so often identified with the seventeenth century. Those aspects
include the Renaissance reconsideration of the Galenic corpus, the issue of
probability in the physiognomical eye, or the anti-Arabic prejudices driving
the rejection of the Averroistic understanding of Aristotelian physiognomy
advocated by one of the contemporaries of Nifo and Pomponazzi from the
University of Bologna, Alexander Achillini.
This Aristotelian interest in physiognomy continued long into the seven-
teenth century. It can be seen, for example, in the work of the natural philo-
sopher Clemens Timpler (1567–1624), author of Opticæ systema methodicum
(Hanover, 1617). Timpler was one of the most important and controversial
Calvinist metaphysicians, writing in a tradition which disappeared from the
German territories as a consequence of the Thirty Years War. Excluded from
the University of Leipzig because of his Calvinism, he went to Heidelberg
where he befriended another Calvinist metaphysician, Bartholomeus Kecker-
mann. He taught at the gymansium in Steinfurt from 1595 until his death. Tim-
pler’s definition of human ‘physiognomy’ shows that he saw it as an art which
dealt with the ‘occult’: ‘the art that deals with those external signs, from which
the internal and hidden (occultae) affections of man can be known’. Yet his text
bears a strong Aristotelian influence, discernible in, for example, the lists of
signs of particular characters from the ‘characterological prism’ referred to in
Chapter 1 of this study, and which Johannes Alsted called physiognomia orta.
The following are the signs of the audacious man:
a dark, cloudy forehead, long eyebrows, firm, blood-red, open, vibrant and shining
eyes, an austere, staring face, a long nose extended to the mouth, a large protruding
mouth, long, thin, sharp robust teeth, a short, cropped neck, a broad chest, large shoul-
ders, copious arms which can be extended to the knee, and thick short digits.⁴
This particular case of an Aristotelian interest in the ‘occult’ would benefit

from a much more detailed analysis relating it to Timpler’s Calvinism, and to
the way in which his creation of a rupture in philosophical thought between
theology and ontology contributed to the changing notion of man’s self and
man’s relationship to nature and God. Timpler would also provide an illumi-
⁴ Clemens Timpler, Opticæ systema (Hanover, 1617), 129, 230. Cf. Johannes Alsted, Encyclopaedia septem
tomis distincta, 4 vols. (Herborn, 1630), ii. 767–80.
nating comparative study with the catholic Aristotelian physiognomy that was
being considered by Camillo Baldi (1550–1637), professor of natural philo-
sophy at the University of Bologna in the 1620s and 1630s. Custodian of the
Museo Aldrovandi, Baldi was also a member of the Accademia dei Gelati.
Often credited with inventing graphology (a physiognomy of handwriting),
his other writings included such subjects as friendship, civility, and lying. They
too provide fascinating and hitherto unexplored aspects of his Aristotelian
interest in the art of physiognomy and its relation to his alleged Averroism.
The only reservation to be made with regard to Schmitt’s argument is that,
with regard to some of the more popular, vernacular texts, the presence of a
clear Aristotelian framework depends on how Aristotelian Scot’s physiognomy
is taken to be. This becomes all the more pertinent when one considers that in
many of the more popular versions of Scot, particularly those put out under
another name such as the small octavos published with Bartholomaeus Cocles’s
name on the title-page, the Aristotelianism was not so evident as it was in its
original form as part of his Liber introductorius or in the earlier editions of his
Liber physiognomia that were published under Scot’s own name and included
the surrounding material on generation and embryology. Indeed, as will
become apparent in the next section, some of those works, such as Thomas
Hill’s, tended to be tinged with a hermetic influence.
Indeed, by way of a transition to the consideration of those ‘books on
physiognomy’ influenced by the spread of hermeticism across early modern
Europe, it must be said that if the first forty years of the sixteenth century pro-
duced so many significant ‘commentaries’ on the ‘Aristotelian’ tradition, then
the 1540s—the decade so famous for the publication of the epoch-making
works which challenged the Aristotelian world-view, such as Vesalius’s De
fabrica, Copernicus’s De revolutionibus, and the first printed edition of the
Qu’ran—also appears to have witnessed humanist scholars’ questioning of the
purely ‘Aristotelian’ sense of antiquity and classicism in this sort of bookish
physiognomy. This is evidenced by the Latin version of Adamantius, thought
by some to be a sophist, by others to be a Jew, which was published in Paris in
1540, and which by 1556 was circulating in a French vernacular version with
commentary by Jean Lebon.⁵ If this can be called ‘non-Aristotelian’ physiog-
nomical classicism, it was soon taken up in protestant and catholic centres
elsewhere. In 1544, the Basle printer Robert Winter put out an octavo of
Adamantius’s treatise in Greek, and the following year another Basle printer
⁵ Adamantius, Adamantii Sophistae physiognomonica (Paris, 1540); La Phisionomie d’ Adamant Sophiste

(Paris, 1556).
published an edition of the Roman orator Polemon’s physiognomy. Michel-
angelo Biondo’s humanistic physiognomical retrospective De cognitione de
hominis per aspectum (1545) came out in the same year as a Greek edition of both
Adamantius and Polemon (1545) was published in Rome.⁶
It is perhaps not insignificant that the time which saw the re-discovery of this
‘non-Aristotelian’ classicism also witnessed the appearance of the corpus of
writings by Paracelsus. As will become more evident below, all of this, and per-
haps even some of the commentaries on the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiogno-
monica themselves, may have been given some of their innovative impetus by
the need to respond to two other forces: one intellectual and ‘literate’; the other
social and ‘illiterate’, but both fundamentally religious. The first was the
impact of the re-discovery of an aspect of antiquity that was thought at the time
to be the ancient ‘Egyptian’ wisdom of the Corpus hermeticum, translated and
interpreted by the Florentine Neoplatonist Marsilio Ficino. The second was a
social phenomenon far beyond all such ‘discourses’—the arrival of those
‘Egyptians’ otherwise known as the ‘gypsies’.
The ‘discovery of the individual’

Before turning to discuss those issues, a word first about another fundamental
characteristic of the Renaissance discernible in this map of ‘books on physiog-
nomy’—what the nineteenth-century Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt called
the ‘discovery of the individual’. This is most evident around the 1520s–1540s
in the appearance of tracts on the art of physiognomy penned by a range of
new, identifiable, named individual authors, lodged in, and broadcasting from,
a variety of very different but equally influential niches of the early modern
communications network. One distinctly visual, indeed innately physiog-
nomical, sign of how involved the art of physiognomy was in that multi-
faceted process of the ‘discovery of the individual’ is evident in the fact that,
from the early sixteenth century onwards, the physiognomies of individual
authors began to appear on frontispieces of their texts. In the case of ‘books on
physiognomy’, the most widely disseminated was that of a 1522 woodcut of the
German author Johannes de Indagine (Illustration 8).
The concept of ‘individualism’ and the question of its origins is a much-
debated issue in Western historiography. As will be argued in the final section
⁶ Adamantius, Physiognomonicum, id est de naturae indiciis cognoscendis libri duo (Basle, 1544); Michelan-
gelo Biondo, De cognitione hominis per aspectum (Rome, 1544); Adamantius, Physiognomonicum, idest, de
naturae indiciis cognoscendis (Rome, 1545); Claude de Préneste Ælien, Aeliani variae historiae libri XIIII.
(Rome, 1545).
8. Some readers hand coloured this woodcut portrait in order to make it more lifelike,
Hans Baldung Grien, Woodcut of author, frontispiece from Johannes de Indagine,
Introductiones apotelesmaticae elegantes in chiromantiam, physionomiam, astrologiam
naturalem, complexiones hominum, naturas planetarum (Strasburg, 1522). (Bibliothèque
Municipale de Lyon, Rés 126655. Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de
Lyon, Didier Nicole.)
of this chapter, physiognomy was a vehicle of some form of self-awareness and

thus ‘individualism’. However, all that is being emphasized here is that the very
attempts by some authors to identify themselves with a magical, even mystical,
scientia that was innately collective, and to put it forward as their own, are evi-
dence in themselves of some form of ‘individualism’. Indeed, it is significant
that this fashion for literate, individual, physiognomating magi occurred in the
early-to-mid sixteenth century, when physiognomy had still not been entirely
rejected from the agenda of learned natural philosophy. This burst of individ-
ual physiognomical celebrity and individuality only lasted about one hundred
years. In the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century, when physiognomy
was being absorbed into cheap literature on general knowledge, fortune-
telling, entertaining riddles, and parlour games, compiled by the hacks of
Europe’s ‘Grub Street’, these individuals were nowhere to be seen. In Germany,
for example, from the seventeenth century onwards, one saw much more
physiognomy published in between the covers of small, cheap anonymous
pamphlets, such as Physiognomia curiosa (Nuremberg, Albrecht, 1709). In Eng-
land it took the form of texts like Aristotle’s Last Legacy (c.1700). Indeed, it is
surely no coincidence that the appearance of individual physiognomators
coincided with the Neoplatonic magi associated with the most sophisticated
versions of Neoplatonic hermeticism, such as Bruno and Fludd, as well as the
arrival of ‘the fisnomiers’—the ‘gypsies’. Similarly, it is no coincidence that the
disappearance of these individual magi-like physiognomators coincided with
the gradual ‘rejection’ of physiognomy by the mainstream, established, scien-
tific community and the subsequent demise of its intellectual status within the
minds of the broader public.
Yet this apparent demise or textual debasement of physiognomy actually
brought it closer to its origins. For due to the overwhelming audio-visual,
‘unbookish’ nature of fisnomy, as well as what I shall argue in the next chapter
were the more collective oral traditions of ‘physiognomy’, what many of these
texts were expressing was the fact that the subject itself, physiognomy, was
something which no individual author could easily come to identify himself
with, nor grasp in its entirety, scientifically or otherwise. In that sense, the
natural magic of both fisnomy and physiognomy was similar to ‘mystical
knowledge’ for the genuine Kabbalist, for whom it ‘is not his private affair
which has been revealed to him, and to him only, in his personal experience.
On the contrary, the purer and more nearly perfect it is, the nearer it is to the
original stock of knowledge common to mankind’.⁷ For all the Renaissance
authors who tried to write upon the subject, it was anonymous pamphlets and
scholarly compendia of earlier physiognomical writings that dominated the
dissemination of textual physiognomony from the beginning to the end of the
early modern period. The extant copies of one German vernacular work enti-
tled Complexionbuch are dated 1511, 1512, 1513, 1514, 1515, 1516, 1517, 1519, 1530,
1533, 1534, 1535, 1536, 1537, 1539, 1540, 1541, 1546, 1548, 1550, 1551, 1554, 1555, 1556,
1560, and 1698. There were, undoubtedly, many others. The physiognomy
⁷ G. G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York, 1974), 21.

among its contents may have come from Michael Scot and the Secretum, but it
was published as an anonymous body of knowledge. The art of physiognomy
was much more widely known than any of its authors.
Similarly in France and England. One ‘book on physiognomy’ popular with
French- and English-reading audiences was a vernacular version of a Latin
work first printed in Paris in 1542. In its earliest days attributed to the obscure
compiler Richard Roussat, in 1564 it was translated into English by a student of
medicine at King’s College, Cambridge, named William Warde (1534–1604?),
who went on to become the regius professor of physic at Cambridge.⁸ Warde’s
translation continued to be published in England until at least the late seven-
teenth century. Yet neither his name nor Roussat’s name ever became synony-
mous with it. In both France and England, the text was most widely known as
Arcandam. Physiognomy was bigger than any ‘individual’.
Many of the later works carrying identifiable authors’ names are simply
scholarly compendia of earlier writings. For example, Jean Taisnier’s Opus
mathematicum (Cologne, 1562) had Taisnier’s name on it but was a late
sixteenth-century compilation of Scot, Indagine, and Gratarolus. Joannes
Praetorius’s seventeenth-century Thesaurus chiromanticus (Leipzig and Jena,
1661) was a quite exhaustive compilation of all previous writings on chiro-
mancy. However, Praetorius did not do the same for physiognomy because that
compilation had already been done by the most famous ‘individual’ physiogn-
omist of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe, Giovanni Bat-
tista Della Porta. Della Porta’s De humana physiognomia (1586) was basically a
collection of the opinions and physiognomcial traditions of the earlier author-
ities. In that sense his work was a vehicle for what literary scholars today call
heteroglossia—a multiplicity of authorial voices from different eras and places.
Of course, with that very claim one might still argue that Della Porta is there-
fore the individual whose name, until the arrival of the next one, Lavater, came
to be synonymous with physiognomy. However, even Lavater’s success owed
much to a time in which there was a more firmly established sense of individu-
alism and a culture characterized by a new obsession with the notion of
‘genius’. In either case, the respective success of Della Porta and Lavater only
serves to show how exceptional they were. Throughout the early modern peri-
od, if there is one consistent feature of physiognomony, or physiognomy, or fis-
nomy, particularly the hermetic variety, it was that it not only remained beyond
the grasp of any individual quill, it was also beyond ‘writing’ itself.
⁸ Richard Roussat, Arcandam doctor peritissimus ac non vulgaris astrologus, de veritatibus, & praediction-
ibus astrologiae (Paris, 1542).
The Spreading Influence of the ‘Egyptian’
The illiterate ‘seers’
If history is understood as context, context, and more context (as described
by E. P. Thompson), then there is one part of the context of these ‘books on
physiognomy’ that has been neglected by the more strictly history-of-ideas
approach that has so often characterized the scholarly histories of the role of
Aristotelianism and Neoplatonic hermeticism in early modern Europe, and
the discussion of their respective contributions to the birth of modern science.
Moreover, it is a part of the context that takes us into the ‘unbookish’ and dis-
tinctly visual realms of the social and religious history in terms of which the
physiognomy that was captured by the writers and philosophers in those books
has to be understood. One gets to it by asking the following question: besides
the authors of ‘books on physiognomy’ who were the ‘physiognomators’ in
early modern European society?
Despite their absence from the history books, physiognomators were famil-
iar figures in early modern society. Erasmus referred to them in his Apoph-
thegmes (1542), linking them, in true Renaissance humanist style, with their
classical ancestor Zopyrus, but not mentioning a fact which he surely knew,
that Zopyrus was Syrian and not Greek. In that work Erasmus defined a physi-
ognomer as
a feloe hauyng sight in phisiognomie (who professed and openly tooke upon hym, by
the complexion and pleeight of the bodye, and by ye proporcion & settyng, or
coumpace of the face or visage, to bee hable unfallibly and without myssyng, to fynd
out & iudge the naturall dispocicion of any manne).⁹
Paracelsus gave another sort of insight when he referred, albeit critically, to a

story-telling figure called the ‘physiognomer’ and ‘physiognomantier’:
Now the physiognomer also does the same thing, putting forward a story which does
not make us cry because he also talks about the health of people without realising there
are 4 entities he does not understand. This is because what he does wrong is that he
talks about the natural entity and doesn’t say anything about the others, and that
doesn’t really tickle us.
Unfortunately Paracelsus is not very specific about what this ‘story-telling’

involved other than suggesting that, whilst the pyromantier deals with the
spirit, the theologian with God, and the astronomer with the stars as the cause
⁹ Desiderius Erasmus, Apophthegmes (1542), fol. 32v.

of things, ‘the . . . physiognomantier bases his judgements on the nature of the
human self ’.¹⁰
There is other evidence to suggest that these physiognomators were not a
figment of Paracelsus’s admittedly rich imagination. They were distinct and
familiar enough figures in England, for example, to merit special mention by
name in a schoolbook that was first published in 1519. Warning children away
from numerous impieties, the author thought it important enough to have the
children translate into Latin and recite, catechism-like, ‘I beleve nat the reders
of dremes and fisnomiers’. Later in the same schoolbook, the same school-
children were warned to avoid those people ‘that make them selfe wyse and
connuyng to a rede destynyes by lokynge in the strakes of ones hande or
forheed and circles and other fygures in the grownde and drawynge of lottis
and redynge of dremes and prophecyenge and suche other make men foolis:
that beleue them’.¹¹ Whoever these ‘fisnomiers’ were, the same author reveals
various aspects of their story-telling techne of the human self—chiromancy
(the lines in the palm of the hand), metoposcopy (the lines and circles on the
forehead), and possibly even what Francis Bacon later called physiognomy’s
sister art, the interpretation of dreams.
Despite this evidence of his or her existence, there are a number of reasons
why the figure of the early modern ‘fisnomier’ is, on the whole, missing from
early modern history books. Apart from the usual problems of the erosion of
the historical record, there is the equally insurmountable difficulty of distin-
guishing the ‘fisnomier’ from the ranks of other more recognizable early
modern figures such as astrologers, physicians, empirics, quacks, wizards, cun-
ning men and women, the rare glimpses of whom provided by the historical
record suggest that they all practised some form of physiognomy. To take just
one example, in 1578, Pierre Nodé, a minim friar, in a passage denouncing ‘Les
Empiriques Medecins, les Urinaires, ou Phisionomiastres, les Pronosticqueurs,
& Almanatistes suspects en Sorcellerie’ wrote that sorcery ‘has no small affi-
nity with the disciplines of medicine and astrology, to such an extent that it
makes one fear that there are those, even in these very times, imbued with this
magic, who, by only the inspection of urines or of physiognomies, judge, with-
out listening to the patients, of the truth of all sorts of illnesses in all parts of the
body’.¹²
Yet, unlike the academies of the esoteric and textually literate such as the
Accademia dei Lincei in Rome which was inspired by the academy in Naples
¹⁰ Paracelsus, Werke, ed. Will-Erich Peuckert (Stuttgart, 1965–8) 1, 193–4.
¹¹ William Horman, Vulgaria (1519), fol. 19r and 21v.
¹² Pierre Nodé, Declamation contre l’erreur (Paris, 1578), ch. 10 (pagination erratic).
set up by the Italian natural philosopher, playwright, and physiognomer Gio-
vanni Battista Della Porta, there was no Royal College of fisnomiers in the early
modern period which accumulated a library of their manuscripts. Even so, the
main reason for the relative lack of historical records on the early modern fis-
nomiers is not that their manuscripts or the books they read did not have the
protection of a library. It was because many of them were textually illiterate and
thus have left no manuscript records of their consultations or their métier.
Indeed, I would argue that the very absence of extant evidence can be taken to
suggest the existence of an early modern European tradition of textually illiter-
ate fisnomiers. Given that the literacy required for the métier of these physiog-
nomical ‘seers’ was primarily visual not textual, it is very likely an indication
that they explicitly chose not to record their consultations in textual form.
Paracelsus, much as he used the pen himself, is just one example of the fight
against the tyranny of books and ‘bookishness’ that was such a fundamental
social and cultural feature of the age of print.
The rare occasions when actual fisnomiers stumble into the textual histori-
cal records confirm their textual illiteracy and provide further insights into the
wandering figure of the fisnomier. Take the following two examples, in which
there is no mention of books. In 1556, so the surgeon John Hall (1529?–1566?)
tells us, there appeared in Maidstone, England, a ‘diviner’ named ‘Robert
Haris’. His method of divination was ‘by only lokyng in ones face, all secrete
markes and scarres of the bodie’. Four years later, a person named Valentyne
Staplehurst arrived in Maidstone in Kent, claiming that ‘he could tel all thinges
present, past, and to come; and the very thoughtes of men, and theyr diseases,
by onlye lokinge in theyr faces’.¹³ Neither Harris nor Staplehurst is referred to
as a fisnomier, but that is undoubtedly what they were, at least in part. More-
over, their appearance in this historical record not only suggests that many a fis-
nomier may have been illiterate, and that the métier was often seen as the
equivalent of a ‘diviner’, the mention of their arrival in Maidstone shows that
they were at least itinerant, if not nomadic, figures. Thus, one can begin to con-
clude that the early modern fisnomier was, originally, an illiterate, or at least an
‘unbookish’, vagabond diviner.
When put like this, the figure of Paracelsus once more begins to loom large
on the horizon, but not only Paracelsus. An intriguing parallel to these early
English examples is provided by the records of the first sighting of Faust in
Europe, dated 20 August 1507 and 3 October 1513, respectively. Both texts sug-
gest that he too was something of a wandering diviner. More to the point, they
¹³ K. V. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971), 285; J. Halle, An historiall expostulation (1565),
ed. T. J. Pettigrew, Percy Society (1844), 6 and 11.
make explicit reference to his physiognomical skills (chiromanticus) as would
Goethe years later. Furthermore, they show the extent of the hostility of the
church towards that physiognomical skill. Conrad Mundt, a canon of Gotha,
and author of the second sighting, issued a declaration of war on a wandering
fisnomier which is revealing not only of the intensity of this hostility but of the
popularity that such wandering physiognomers established among the
peasants: ‘Eight days ago there came to Erfurt a Professor of Palmistry, named
Georgius Faustus Hemitheus, Hedebergensis, a braggart and a fool. His art, as
that of all diviners, is vain, and such physiognomic science lighter than a water-
bug. The vulgar are lost in admiration for him. Let the theologians rise against
him.’¹⁴ This hostility towards Faust was synecdochic of the church’s increas-
ingly hostile attitude towards these fisnomiers in general.
Having said that, it must be remembered that the figure of the wandering
seer, notoriously the subject of much rhetoric, was a powerful phenomenon
that people had been flocking to see since the Middle Ages. Whilst posterity has
been drawn to the legendary male figure of Faust, there were, in fact, many real,
existing holy women, such as Clare of Montefalco and Angela of Foligno, who
may have been ranked among these fisnomiers. As one recent historian has
written, these women were often said to be endowed with ‘penetrating
prophetic insight . . . which enabled them to see into people’s hearts, inducing
them to confession, repentance, and good deeds but also identifying sinners
and heretics; and these insights were supported, guided, and confirmed by
their visions’.¹⁵
At this point, I want to come back to the point mentioned in Chapter 2
about the danger of underestimating the historical significance of ‘books
on physiognomy’ as presented by the arithmetical calculation of their stature.
There, mention was made of the annotations which Archbishop Cranmer
made to Henry VIII’s Institutions of a Christian Man around 1538. It is worth
repeating here that, in the midst of the epoch-making religious and political
turmoil of the early sixteenth century and the Reformation, popular religion
came under severe attack by the members of the religious establishment, usu-
ally armed with the claim that what the populace was doing was ‘superstition’
not religion. ‘Superstition’ was often equated with ‘magic’ by hostile church-
men. It was essentially a pejorative term used in the early modern period by
those wishing to describe religious ideas and practices that were not their own
and of which they did not approve. Historians should avoid being blinded by
¹⁴ W. C. Coupland, The Spirit of Goethe’s Faust (1885 ), i. 9–11.
¹⁵ C. Frugoni, ‘Female Mystics, Visions and Iconography’, in D. Bornstein and R. Rusconi (eds.),
Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, trans. M. J. Schneider (Chicago, 1996), 130–64.
the innate prejudice in both terms. This is all the more important given the
extent to which ‘superstition’ became such a taboo during the early modern
period, with increasingly sinister, indeed demonic, connotations. As one
English historian has recently argued, the issue of ‘superstition’ was more
important in early modern Europe ‘than any other time in European history’.
Moreover, as many historical studies have shown, the people who were offering
these so-called ‘superstitions’ were very much in demand.¹⁶ This was all the
more disturbing to the established church given that it was not always so easy
for people to distinguish the so-called official ‘church men’, or medical men for
that matter, from the so-called unlawful ‘cunning men’ who, as Gabriel Harvey
claimed, had for their Bible and New Testament, a couple of books full of
astrology and physiognomy.¹⁷
It is in the light of this equation of ‘superstition’ with ‘religion’ that Henry
VIII’s list of the ‘superstitions’ of the ‘superstitious folk’ that broke the very first
commandment—the ‘lots, astrology, divination, chattering of birds, physiog-
nomy, and looking of men’s hands, or other unlawful and superstitious
crafts’—needs to be considered, as does the king’s dismissive description of
them as taking ‘upon them certainly to tell, determine and judge beforehand of
men’s acts and fortunes, which be to come afterward’. Although the king erased
some of this statement, Archbishop Cranmer reinstated those ‘superstitions’
that he thought were most alarming: ‘whereas the same is stricken out, it
seemeth more necessary to remain, forsomuch as the common people do in
nothing more superstitiously. Likewise of astrology, and specially physiog-
nomy.’¹⁸ Cranmer wrote ‘specially physiognomy’ because he knew the dangers
of underestimating the religious, political, and social implications of the very
fact of its popularity.¹⁹ So much so that I would argue that it is the anxiety of
the authorities about physiognomy and its related ‘superstitions’ that provides
us with a major cause of the relative invisibility of the fisnomiers in the his-
torical record. The theologians were ‘rising up’ against them. As will become
evident below, the lawyers were passing laws against them. With the learned
medical establishment increasingly distinguishing and institutionalizing itself
and lending its weight to the wrath of the church and the laws of the state, the
fisnomiers, as weavers of some sort of unwelcome theology, had necessarily to
go ‘underground’.
¹⁶ See Clark, Demons, 474, 479, 457, n 1. ¹⁷ See Introduction.

¹⁸ Thomas Cranmer, Miscellaneous Writings, ed. Revd. J. E. Cox, Parker Society (Cambridge, 1846), 100.
My emphasis.
¹⁹ Cranmer owned a 1531 folio edition copy of Indagine’s Chiromantia. See The Library of Thomas Cran-
mer, ed. D. G. Selwyn, The Oxford Bibliogrpahical Society (Oxford, 1996), 124–5.
Yet, despite their understandable elusiveness, there are fragments of
evidence that reveal glimpses of this underground profession in action. If
Valentyne Staplehurst, Harris, Faust, and indeed Paracelsus himself all reveal
the wandering aspect of the fisnomier’s métier, can these elusive, underground
‘seers’ be glimpsed among the mythical, indeed the distinctly biblical ranks of
the ‘wanderers’? The number of ‘wanderers’ in the early modern period is
impossible to calculate. One of the reasons for this is that the term is so difficult
to define. Early modern Europe’s growing populations could be split into the
‘mobile’ and the ‘immobile’. But are the ‘mobile’ necessarily the ‘wanderers’?
Are the early modern journeyman in search of work (an innate feature of the
early modern economy), or the illegitimately pregnant girls exiled from home,
or the hawkers and pedlars who sold mirrors, and cheap physiognomical
pamphlets and prints across Europe, or the dispossessed poor all to be ranked
among the ‘wanderers’? Was the Grand Tour nothing other than an aristocratic
form of ‘wandering’? What about the mendicant priests or the hermits? In 1571
Peter Severinus (1540–1602) advised those seeking truth to ‘sell your lands, your
houses, your clothes and your jewellry; burn up your books. On the other
hand, buy yourself stout shoes, travel to the mountains, search the valleys, the
deserts, the shores of the sea, and the deepest depressions of the earth’. The
Paracelsian physician Joseph Duchesne (1544–1609) thought physicians should
travel in order to learn about local diseases.²⁰ Should they also rank among the
‘wanderers’? And what about wandering artists like Albrecht Dürer?
Whatever the exact scale of the problem of the ‘wanderers’, one group
of people who undoubtedly do qualify for inclusion among them is the
‘vagabonds’. In fact, like the term ‘superstition’, the early modern use of the
word ‘vagabonds’ was something of a catch-all description, which also in-
cluded the idle, the poor, beggars, errant scholars, as well as the aforementioned
pilgrims, mendicant friars, even journeymen, and so on. Another ‘family
resemblance’ of this group, besides their mobility, was that they were all the
target of hostility, if not persecution. Some hostility was based on a more
economically inclined, moralized prejudice that these people were without
employment, begging when they were fit for work, or looking for financial help
from a parish that was not their own. Some of it was driven by religious preju-
dices. The Dutch historian Johannes Huizinga noted this when he wrote of the
fifteenth-century contempt levelled at the mendicant orders.²¹ Other aspects
of this hostility were driven by prejudices about contagion. In a plague-ridden
society, the wanderers were notoriously regarded as carriers of the fatal malady.
²⁰ A. G. Debus, The French Paracelsians (Cambridge, 1991), 8–9.
²¹ J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924), 161 ff.
One has only to take a cursory glance at early modern proverbs to see that most
of them are detrimental towards these people. As one scholar has written, ‘a
proverb-by-proverb examination of the most widely used compilation of the
century . . . reveals a thoroughly conservative outlook and an often Machiavel-
lian cynicism with repeated condemnations of social mobility and the aspira-
tions of the poor’.²² The fact that many of these wanderers were peddling what
appeared to be some sort of religious medicine, their own brand of opium for
the people, did not endear them to the learned medical establishment increas-
ingly determined to establish and institutionalize its unsteady monopoly.
One good example of the scale of the problem as well as the generally hostile
attitude of all early modern authorities towards ‘vagabonds’ comes again from
England in 1530, and helps to shed further light on Cranmer’s aforementioned
anxiety. In the middle of instigating the acts of parliament that would bring
England into line with the religious revolution that Luther is so often assumed
to have begun on the Continent, the Reformation parliament also found time
to pass an act entitled ‘An Acte conc[er]nyng punysshement of Beggers &
Vacabund[es]’. Yet under this rubric of ‘beggars and vagabonds’ were included
not only all of those groups mentioned above, but also others who had pre-
voiously been allowed to travel, such as ‘Shypmen’, ‘all Proctors & Pardoners’,
and ‘Scolers of the Universities of Oxford & Cambridge’. Thus there were
some highly educated and therefore possibly dangerous people wandering
among the poor and dispossessed, all the more so given the fact that scholars
were also often religious proselytisers. One other notorious group of illiterate,
heretical, wandering, persecuted diviners it did not mention was the ‘Egyp-
tians’, or ‘gypsies’. Yet it is by looking more closely at the ranks of the ‘gypsies’
who wandered among the crowds of vagabonds traversing Europe’s forests and
fields that we can catch sight of some of the aforementioned and hitherto for-
gotten fisnomiers in action.
It is, of course, extremely difficult to separate myth from reality in the his-
tory of the ‘gypsies’. Their origins, the date and place of their first arrival in
the different countries of Europe, their number, appearance, religion, ways of
earning a living, and their alleged practice of palm-reading have all been the
subject of conflicting opinions, many of which stem from the early modern
period.²³ The term ‘Egyptians’ appears to have been in use from at least the
mid-fifteenth century onwards to describe the ‘Egipcianos’ seen in Barcelona
in 1447, the ‘Egypsienen’ in Bruges in 1459, the ‘Egiptenaers’ seen in Liers in
Belgium in 1474 , the ‘Egipteners’ in Haarlem in 1476, the ‘Egiptiacos’ in Tran-
²² D. Kunzle, ‘Bruegel’s Proverb Painting and the World Upside Down’, The Art Bulletin (1977), 197–202,
199. ²³ F. de Vaux de Foletier, Mille ans d’histoire des tsiganes (Paris, 1970).
sylvania in 1476, the ‘Heiden oder Egiptiers’ (‘Heathens or Egyptians’) seen in
Greece 1473, the ‘Égyptians and Égyptiennes’ seen in France in 1498, and the
‘Egipcianos y extrangeros calderos’ in Spain in 1499, to name but a few
instances.²⁴ However, an analysis is made no easier by the number of different
terms used to refer to the ‘gypsies’ in the different European vernaculars, be it
Saracens, Sarazenen (German), Zigeuner (German), Ziginer (Swiss German),
Zygeuner (Slovenian), Gitanos (Spanish), T , igani (Romanian), Cingano (Ital-
ian), Bohémians (French), Boemianis (German), etc., assuming that these are
the same ‘people’. In addition to that difficulty, the epithet ‘gypsy’ and many
synonymous terms such as ‘vagabond’, ‘papist’, ‘Paracelsian’, and ‘supersti-
tious’ were thrown around in the early modern period as general terms of
abuse, often used to attack those other itinerant or nomadic, marginalized
groups, such as the aforementioned ‘poor’, ‘beggars’, ‘vagabonds’, ‘wanderers’,
‘heathens’, ‘errant scholars’, ‘mendicant friars’, ‘pilgrims’, and so on. In early
modern society, the categories of ‘wanderer’, and ‘gypsy’, like the condition
itself, were evidently something of a ‘free-floating signifier’. This is perhaps yet
another indication of the need to try to understand them as being beyond the
discourses that were trying to capture them.
However it is defined, the size of this group, which in itself may have made
it the source of anxiety to the early modern authorities, is now impossible to
calculate. Yet the seemingly democratic nature of the métier of the fisnomiers
among it may also have been the source of some consternation. One historian
has shown that the techniques of the diviners and healers among them were, in
principle at least, accessible to all.²⁵ The same could be said of the sonic and
visual literacy of the fisnomiers among them. Indeed Addison pointed this out
as late as 1711:
There are several Arts which all Men are in some measure Masters of, without having
been at the Pains of learning them. Every one that speaks or reasons is a Grammarian
and a Logician, though he may be wholly unacquainted with the Rules of Grammar or
Logick, as they are delivered in Books and Systems. In the same Manner, every one is
in some Degree a Master of that Art which is generally distinguished by the Name of
Physiognomy; and naturally forms to himself the Character or Fortune of a Stranger,
from the Features and Lineaments of his Face.²⁶
Given this, could it be that an equally disturbing feature of the fisnomiers

among this nomadic part of society was the fact that, whilst the early sixteenth
century was seeing the coming of the book and an increasing distinction
²⁴ R. Gilsenbach, Weltchronik der Sigøjner, 2nd edn. (Frankfurt, 1997), 83, 90, 97, 98, 114, 116, 119.
²⁵ R. Muchembled, La Sorcière au village (Xve–XVIIIe siècle) (Paris, 1979), 24, 26, 49.
²⁶ The Spectator, ed. D. F. Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1965), ii. 365 (No. 86, Friday, 8 June 1711).
between those with and those without the literacy to use them, the physiog-
nomy brought by these fisnomiers was a naturally ‘magic’ ‘religion’ for which
everyone, literate or illiterate, had some sort of innate faculty?
Scholars are now beginning to agree that many of these ‘Egyptians’ came
from north-west India, the product of a fragmentation of nomadic tribes of the
Indus Valley region that occurred around 1000 ce, and that the late fifteenth
and early sixteenth century saw a proliferation of those on the move.²⁷
Moreover, scholars suggest that many of those Indians who came to the West
were of very high rank. This suggests that there may have been more to the
‘Duke Michael of Egypt’, who, with his wife and his daughter were killed by
one ‘Rom Filippo’ in Milan in June 1457 than the elevated title that many such
itinerants seem to have assumed. If the ‘Cingano’, who on 4 February 1469 so
impressed Borso d’Este (1450–71) with his zither playing as to move the Italian
aristocrat to give him a little money, was indeed something of a nobleman him-
self, then, instead of dismissing Borso d’Este’s action as revealing the prejudice,
widely held, that such people were normally untalented barbarians, the
‘Cingano’ in this story might be seen as exemplifying the sort of humility Jesus
expressed in washing the feet of his disciples.²⁸ However accurate such claims
are, it is surely not without significance that the ‘Egyptians’ begin to be sensed
in the historical record long before the arrival of the manuscripts bearing the
‘Egyptian’ wisdom contained in the corpus of writings by Hermes Trismegis-
tus. The register of the bishopric of Arras for the year 1421, to take just one
example at random, has the following entry: ‘Marvel: Strangers came from the
land of Egypt’.²⁹
While the West knows nothing of how important its discovery (as some sort
of ‘new world’?) by these ‘Indians’/‘Egyptians’ was for the ‘Indians’/‘Egyptians’
themselves, the impact of the ‘Egyptians’ was powerful enough to have created
an image that stayed in the minds of some of the New World voyagers (wan-
derers?) trying to make sense of the equally astonishing and epoch-making
appearance of the newly discovered indigenous Indians of that ‘New World’.
One French voyager described the New World ‘Indians’ for his French audi-
ence upon his return, ‘wearing coats of flowing braids, skin and feathers, like
those of the Egyptians and Bohemians in this country, except that they are
much shorter’.³⁰ In the case of the ‘gypsies’, it was not only their clothes that
²⁷ A. C. Woolner, ‘The Origins of the Gypsies in Europe’, Journal of the Punjab Historical Society, 2:2
(1914), 118–37. The Corpus hermeticum, in the section entitled ‘Egyptian Reflection of the Universe in the
Mind’, stated ‘command your soul to be in India’,Yates, Bruno, 32
²⁸ Gilsenbach, Zigeuner, 90, 95. ²⁹ De Foletier, Tsiganes, 7.
³⁰ B. de Gonneville, Campagne du Navire l’Espoir de Honfleur (1503–1505), ed. M. D’Avezac (Paris, 1869),
96.
shocked. Their ‘swarthy’ physiognomy was distinguished enough to be the
subject of analysis in some of the physiognomical treatises themselves. Equally
disturbing was the nature of their textually illiterate, story-telling religion
which, as we have seen, included palm-reading and the interpretation of
dreams as well as the art of physiognomy. Thus, like early modern astrologers,
the gypsies ‘sold meaning’.³¹ The textual tradition of physiognomony in India
provides an illuminating parallel here, for it is thought to have derived from
Indian poets who were the saintly figures who could mentally reach ‘the end of
the great ocean called Kala-purusa, that is, astrology’.³²
Whether or not scholars are correct in claiming they all came from India,
‘their’ identity was very often conflated with that of the Jews. Given the expul-
sion of Jews and Muslims from Spain in 1492, there may have been some real
basis for the confusion. Luther himself linked the ‘gypsies’ with the Jews. In a
chapter on Egypt in his 1547 book Andrew Borde claimed ‘Egipt is a countrey
ioyned to Jury’ and the following chapter dealt with the Jews. Moreover, like
the ‘wandering’ Jews, the ‘gypsies’ seem to have constantly borne the brunt of
Christian detestation and religious persecution. One marginal comment on
the Acts of the Apostles (17: 6) in the Geneva Bible referred to the subversive
nature of the gypsies and linked them with the Jews. Physiognomating ‘gypsies’
appear in medieval art, particularly in folklore concerning the Holy Family
dating from the Middle Ages. There is even one gypsy folk-tale in which a
gypsy (physiognomist?) holds up a lantern to Christ’s face in the betrayal scene
in the garden.³³
However, if there is one fundamental feature of ‘their’ wandering narrative,
it is that they were more or less constantly persecuted all over Europe through-
out the entire early modern period. As one early modern author put it:
They are a people more scattered than Jews, and more hated. . . . A man that sees them
would swear they had all the yellow jaundice, or that they were tawny Moors’ bastards,
for no red-ochre-man carries a face of a more filthy complexion. Yet are they not born
so, neither has the sun burnt them so, but they are painted so; yet they are not good
painters neither, for they do not make faces, but mar faces.³⁴
As with the Jews, by as early as 1492 in Spain, an edict was passed for the ‘exter-
mination’ of the ‘gypsies’. Francis I passed an edict for their expulsion.
³¹ Cited in O. Grell and A. Cunningham (eds.), Religio Medici (Aldershot, 1996), 68.
³² A. M. Shastri, India as Seen in the Brhatsamhita of Varahamihira (Delhi, 1969), 349–51, 362.
³³ Liber vagatorum (Wittenberg [but actually Nuremberg], 1528); Andrew Borde, The first boke of the
Introduction of knowledge (1547), chs. 38 and 39; C. Hill, The World Turned Upside Down (1972), 32; R. Part-
ington, ‘The Gypsy and the Holy Family’, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, 3rd Ser., 35 (Liverpool, 1956), 1–10,
10. ³⁴ A. V. Judges, The Elizabethan Underworld (1930), 344.
Moreover, ‘at the Assembly of the States of Orleans, in 1561, all Governors of
cities received orders to drive them away with fire and sword’. It has been sug-
gested that they arrived in England around 1512—just seven years before the
first mention of the ‘fisnomier’. The 1530 English act concerning beggars and
vagabonds made no mention of ‘gypsies’. However, their presence in England
was perceived to have been disturbing enough by 1530 for the Reformation par-
liament to have singled them out for special treatment by passing an ‘An Acte
concernyng Egypsyans’. This act charged the ‘gypsies’ with the practice of
palmistry. It made no mention of physiognomy. But the act against
‘vagabonds’, a group with which the ‘gypsies’ were so often identified, did, con-
demning all people
goyng aboute in any contrey or abydyng in any Cytie Boroughe or Towne, some of
them usyng dyvers & subtyle craftye & unlawfull games & playes & some of them
feyning themselfes to have knowledge in Physyke, Physnamye, Palmestrye, or other
craftye scyence wherby they beare the people in hande, that they can tell theire
destenyes deceases & fortunes & such other lyke fantasticall ymagenacions.
And once the persecution began it did not stop. The ‘gypsies’ were ruthlessly
pursued by the authorities throughout the entire early modern period. The
practice of physiognomy in England was continuously outlawed. The second
of the two 1530 acts was repeated in 1572 under 14 Elizabeth, c.5, again in 1597
under 39 Elizabeth, c.4, under Queen Anne in 1713 (13 Anne 2, c.26), and under
George II under 17 George 2, c.5. Indeed, it was not until the vagrancy act of
1874 that all reference to physiognomy was dropped. Even then it still referred
to palmistry. A similar story could be told for many other countries.³⁵
But all of this still begs the question: what proof is there that the ‘gypsies’
practised ‘physiognomy’, that they were the ‘fisnomiers’ of the early modern
period? They were certainly perceived as doing and being so. In a minor late
1530s English poem, Hyeway to the Spittle hous, the porter on the gate of a
London hospital allows us some sort of insight into their alleged technique:
Than wyll he feyne merueylous grauyte
And so chaunceth his hostes or his hoost
To demaund, out of what strange land or coost
Cometh this gentylman? forsothe hostesse
Sayth his seruaunt. and is a connyng man
For all the seuen scyences surely he can
³⁵ J. Hoyland, A Historical Survey (York, 1816), 62 and 78; 22nd Hen.VIII, c. 10, The Statutes of the Realm,
9 vols. (1817), iii. 327 and iii. 330. It was repated under Phillip and Mary (IV. i, 242), and Elizabeth (IV. i, 448);
Statutes of the Realm, IV.1, 596; V, 899; IX, 976; The Chronological Index to the Statutes of the Realm from
Magna Carta to the end of the reign of Queen Anne (1828), 248.
And is sure in Physyk and Palmestry
In augry, sothsayeng, and vysenamy
So that he can ryght soone espy
If ony be dyspossed to malady
And therfore can gyue such a medycyne
That maketh all accesses to declyne.³⁶
The poem itself bears such a striking structural resemblance to the 1530 statute
that it should be seen more as an aestheticization of that repressive legislation
rather than a description based on any observation of ‘gypsies’ in action. None
the less, claims about the physiognomating skills of the ‘gypsies’ persisted. In
1586, one person said that among their ranks one could find numerous ‘prac-
tisers of physiognomie, and palmestrie, tellers of fortunes’. Nor were these
physiognomating ‘gypsies’ an English, or a purely European, phenomenon. In
Germany, to take just one of many examples, in 1599 Georg Rudolph Widman
published a book about the legendary Dr Faust in which he claimed that Faust
had learned his chiromancy from the ‘Zigeunern’. Indeed, the connection
between ‘Egyptians’ and palm-reading went back in Germany at least as far as
1418, whilst in France it was known in 1427, long before the arrival of the
Corpus hermeticum, and, as the manuscripts and printed ‘books on physiogno-
my’ show, where one finds palm-reading one usually finds physiognomy.
Moreover, in 1671, John Ogilby’s translation of Montanus’s writing on China
projected this same image onto ‘the ‘gypsies’ in China:
Some (after our manner) pick Pockets by calculating Nativities, and from thence tell
the Fortune that shall attend a Man in his whole Life; Other wheedle them out of their
Money, by Phisiognomy and Palmestry, and such Gipsie-like tricks; others by Dreams;
some from certain words which they observe in speaking; divers from the shape of the
Body, or sitting of a Person, and innumerable many actions more.³⁷
Yet all of these textual descriptions could, of course, be read as being either imi-
tations of previous descriptions, or based on traditional, perhaps inaccurate,
anti-gypsy rhetoric, rather than any observation of reality. If this is how the sur-
viving textual evidence tends to distort our image of the gypsies, is there any
more reliable visual evidence?
The iconography of the ‘gypsies’ is a huge and hitherto neglected subject in
which one encounters the same problem of evidence as one encounters with
³⁶ Robert Copland, Poems, ed. M. Carpenter Erler (Toronto, 1993), 187–245, 202, ll. 359–71. My
emphasis.
³⁷ John Awdeley, The Fraternitye of Vacabondes, ed. E. Viles and F. J. Furnivall, Early English Text Society,
extra series, 9 (1869), pp. xii–xiii, 23; Gilsenbach, Zigeuner, 213, 54, 57, 69, 73, 88, 125, 128, 195, 205; John Ogil-
by, Atlas Chinensis, 2 vols. (1671), ii. 586.
the textual descriptions—that is, the extent to which one visual representation
is simply ‘reflecting’ an earlier representation rather than being any real image
of the way the ‘gypsies’ were. None the less, there is one motif which seems to
dominate the following random sample of visual representations of the
‘gypsies’ from early modern Europe—the outstretched palm of the clients in
the act of having their palm read. In 1664, the French engraver and pupil of
Charles Le Brun, Sébastian Le Clerc, provided a typical example of the way in
which the ‘gypsies’ were identified with palm-reading (Illustration 9).
Moreover, in keeping with the anti-gypsy rhetoric in the textual descrip-
tions, other likenesses not only show them doing some sort of palm-reading;
9. In this representation, the gypsy appears lost in the contemplation of her client’s
hand. Sébastian Le Clerc (1637–1714), La Bohémienne, 1664. Engraving. (Cliché
Bibliothèque Nationale de France.)
they also show them pick-pocketing the client at the same time. Earlier that
same century, another French engraver, Jacques Callot, who is said to have left
France for Florence in Italy with a band of ‘bohemians’, made a famous series
of engravings in 1621 which provide a typical example of this.
In the group of people just to the right of the archway of the house in Illus-
tration 10, one of them is having his palm read and his pocket picked at one and
the same time. The verse itself satirically refers to that danger when it talks of
the client being seduced by the gypsies’ words, whilst the verse on the follow-
ing plate continues in the same vein, making a reference to their Egyptian ori-
gins: ‘When all is said and done, they find that their fate is to have come from
Egypt to this feast’.
Yet despite all of this iconical emphasis on palm-reading, there is another
hitherto overlooked motif frequently depicted in representations of the ‘gyp-
sies’—the act of physiognomating. The painting by Caravaggio (1571–1610)
entitled, according to some catalogues, The Gypsy Fortune-Teller (1598–9)
shows a young man extending his hand to a ‘gypsy’ woman (Illustration 11).
However, in this image she is not reading his hand, she is touching it. It is his
face that she reads, or rather ‘beholds’. (The lighting scheme used by Caravag-
gio, by which the source, a window on the left, casts the gypsy’s face in shadow
and illuminates the young man’s face, itself suggests this.) The same face-
reading feature can just about be seen in the Callot engraving. Moreover, this
10. To the right of the archway, a man is having his palm read and his pocket picked at
the same time. Jacques Callot (1592–1635), ‘At a Resting Place’, No. 3 from the series of
four entitled The Feast of the Bohemians, after 1621. Etching and engraving. (Photo:
Nancy, Musée des Beaux-arts, Cliché Claude Philippot.)
11. The light scheme emphasizes that it is the young man’s face which the gypsy
beholds. Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1573–1610), The Gypsy Fortune-Teller,
1596–7. Oil on canvas, 99 cm ¥ 131 cm. Pinoteca Capitolina, Rome. (Photo: Studio
Fotografico Antonio Idini.)
face-reading can be found in many other visual representations of ‘gypsies’.

Moving north, the three paintings by the seventeenth-century Dutch painter
David Teniers, shown in Illustrations 12, 13, and 14, provide good examples.
Although most widely known for his ‘realistic’ images of the culture of inns and
peasant life, he also often portrayed ‘gypsies’. He painted them in a variety of
very different landscapes, from secluded grottoes to open lanes.
Whilst the outstretched hand might seem to dominate the scene in all of
these representations due to the unusual symbolic nature of the ritual, in each
of these plates the ‘gypsy’ is actually examining—I would argue physiogno-
mating—the face of the client.³⁸ Moreover, this act of physiognomating is a
feature of representations of ‘gypsies’ that can be found in numerous media
throughout the period, be it engravings like the early sixteenth-century one by
Hans Burgkmair, shown in Illustration 15 or in the tapestry from the late fif-
³⁸ This contradicts the claim that it was usually the women who were the chiromancers, A. Fraser, The
Gypsies (Oxford, 1992), p. vii, 47. The palm-reading technique of Gypsy Lee of St Giles’s Fair in Oxford
(September, 1993) appeared to the present writer to involve just as much face-reading as hand-reading.
12. David Teniers (Antwerp, 1610–90), A Gypsy Fortune-Teller and Other Figures in a
Craggy Landscape. Oil on canvas, 108 ¥ 135 cm. (Photo: Collection Rijksbureau voor
Kunsthistorische Documentarie (RKD), The Hague. Copyright: The State Hermitage
Museum, St Petersburg.)
teenth century shown in Illustration 16. Just what the ‘gypsies’ looked like, and
whether or not they looked the same throughout the entire period, would be a
rich area of study in the history of costume. More immediately, I would argue
that these changing representations of the ‘gypsies’, in addition to showing how
the ‘gypsies’ were practising fisnomiers, also provide a visual counterpart to a
theme that will be explored in more detail when we return to the early modern
‘books on physiognomy’ in the next section—the simultaneous persecution
and appropriation of the gypsy métier by the literate establishment.
One might see an intimation of this appropriation in the very act of com-
missioning a painting of the wild ‘gypsies’ from a painter like Teniers in order
to hang it on the wall of a comfortable, established sitting room. Another
step in that same process of appropriation, what might be called the
domestication of the ‘gypsies’, can be seen in a painting by Jacob Duck, shown
13. David Teniers (Antwerp 1610–90), The Interior of a Grotto with Gypsies. Oil on can-
vas, 108 ¥ 135 cm. (Photo: Collection Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documen-
tarie (RKD), The Hague. Copyright: Trafalgar Galleries, London.)
14. David Teniers (Antwerp 1610–90), Landscape with Gypsies telling Fortunes. Oil on
panel, 36 ¥ 63 cm. Private Collection, Switzerland (Photo: Zurich: David H. Koetser
Gallery, Zurich.)
15. Hans Burgkmair the Elder, Gipsy Woman Telling Fortunes to a Market Woman. Pen
and black ink 21.5 ¥ 31.8 cm. National Museum of Stockholm, inv.nr. NM H 132/1918.
[Lower Rhine, Netherlands, c.1530s]. (Photo: Warburg Institute.)
16. The face-reading gypsy can be seen at the top right of the image. ‘La vente des
enfants’, early 16th-century tapestry from the ‘Series of Carrabarra’, woven in Tournai
by Arnould Poissonier, designed by Antoine Ferret, Castle of Gaasbek, Belgium.
(Photo: Private Collection.)
17. Jacob Duck [Dutch, c.1600–67], Interior with Gypsies. Private collection, The
Netherlands. (Photo: Collection Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentarie
(RKD), The Hague.)
in Illustration 17. In this painting Duck has portrayed the ‘gypsies’ using all the
usual motifs, the palm-reading, the pick-pocketing, and, as I would argue, the
face-reading. Some readers would no doubt claim that this is not an act of ‘face-
reading’ but more likely evidence of how the gypsies tried to catch the attention
of their ‘victims’ before pick-pocketing them. Whilst that may have happened
at times, to dismiss this evidence in this way would be to reiterate the prejudice
so often depicted. Furthermore and notwithstanding, this image also suggests
that, by the 1660s, the curious physiognomical skills of the ‘gypsies’, for all they
had been persecuted since their arrival in the fifteenth century, had, temporar-
ily at least, been allowed in from the secret grottoes of the wilderness to the
outer chambers of aristocratic and prosperous households. The same thing
happened to the medicine of Paracelsus around the very same time. If this is a
step towards the appropriation and domestication of the ‘gypsy’ métier it pro-
vides an interesting tension in the interpretation of the following paintings
by the seventeenth-century Flemish painter Jan Cossiers (1600–1671) and the
eighteenth-century German painter Christian Wilhelm Dietrich (Illustrations
18 & 19).
The much more high-brow appearance or ‘physiognomy’ of the gypsy in
Cossiers’s portrayal appears to take Duck’s portrayal of their shoddy presence in
18. J. Cossiers [Dutch, 1600–71], Gypsywoman Fortune-Telling, Another Woman

Pickpocketing. (Photo: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen.)
19. Christian Wilhelm Dietrich [German, 1717–74], Wirtsstube mit Zigeunern.

(Photo: Neumeister Muenchener Kunstauktionhaus.)
aristocratic interiors a step further by suggesting, as I will argue with respect
to some of the books discussed in the next section, that the physiognomical
métier of the gypsy was simultaneously attacked and appropriated by the
mainstream, more textually literate, and socially acceptable fisnomiers of the
early modern period. In the light of this argument, Dietrich’s mid eighteenth-
century portrayal of seemingly less-established ‘gypsy’ fisnomiers takes on a
new significance.
Be that as it may, the most fundamental point being made here is that the
‘gypsies’ were fisnomiers. Whilst posterity has associated them with palm-read-
ing (in itself a physiognomy of the hand), that palm-reading was part of a larg-
er physiognomical, story-telling, religious, and medical métier. It is this that
explains why, in his play Le Marriage forcé, when Molière has Sganarelle go to
see the ‘Égyptiennes’ to ask if he will have a good fortune, he receives the
following reply: ‘You have only to give us your hand . . . and we will tell you
things for your profit’. He is then told: ‘you have a good physiognomy, my
good Sir, a good physiognomy . . . Yes, a good physiognomy: the physiogno-
my of a man who will one day be something.’³⁹ They were not simply looking
at his hand. Having said that, all of the above argument still carries the danger
of overstating the assumption that these gypsy physiognomators were illiterate.
The large number of hitherto unexamined early modern Sanskrit manuscripts
on physiognomy provide one indication of the role of textual physiognomy
in the Hindu tradition. Moreover, the engraving in Illustration 20, in
which the young boy bears all the physiognomical features of a
vagabond/gypsy, articulates just this possibility for those ‘gypsies’ who came to
the West.
However, with no extant records of the details of the physiognomical exam-
inations carried out by the gypsies, one cannot dismiss the possibility that it
was a physiognomy that was very different from that captured in the ‘books on
physiognomy’ that are the basis of this study. Similarly, for all the serious prob-
lems in ascribing some sort of homogeneous, illiterate, ‘gypsy’ identity to these
wandering ‘fisnomiers’, the point is that they were a very real social phenome-
non in terms of which the transmission of the ‘Egyptian’, of ‘books on phys-
iognomy’ as well as the textual literacy required to read them during
the religious and social troubles of the so-called ‘age of print’ have to be
understood.⁴⁰
³⁹ De Foletier, Tsiganes, 144–5.

⁴⁰ For contemporary wandering medical men in India (Baidya or Vaidu) who face read, see T. S.
Randhawa, The Last Wanderers (New Jersey, 1996), 183.
20. Could this gypsy boy read what he was selling? Gypsy Boy Selling Manuscripts and
Print [?], from S. Taubert, Bibliopola. Bilder und Texte aus der Welt des Buchhandels, 2
vols. (Hamburg, 1966), ii. 41. (Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, FA hist 03 D t.01–02.
Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.)
The coming of the hermetic

It was argued earlier that the early modern art of physiognomy was beyond the
quill of any individual author. Similarly the history of early modern printed
and manuscript treatises on the art of physiognomy is beyond the pen of any
single historian. That can only come once scholars have become aware of
the subject and the potential richness of these texts and their contexts. The
evidence surrounding the production and publication of most ‘treatises on
physiognomy’ is often as scant as the evidence about ‘gypsies’. This makes
much of their individual contexts, and thus their histories, irretrievable. Thus,
rather than try to contextualize all of the ‘books on physiognomy’, I want sim-
ply to point to one or two of those works which can be taken as representative
of some of the more significant turning-points in the ongoing metamorphosis
of physiognomy in the early modern period. I want to do this by addressing the
other side of the historiographical debate which has arisen around the issue of
the continued importance and vitality of the Aristotelian natural philosophy
throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and which represents
another aspect of the emergence of the ‘Egyptian’ in early modern Europe.
What was the impact of Ficino’s Neoplatonic hermeticism on early modern
‘books on physiognomy’?
Immediately it could be argued that the impact of Neoplatonic hermeticism
can only be fully understood in terms of some sort of prepared ground, for
example, a fashion for the investigations of the ‘occult’, if not necessarily the
‘hermetic’, among the literate élite. This can be seen in some early editions of
the Secretum in as far as their appearance was an early intimation of a growing
interest among such reformist circles in the first half of the sixteenth century in
the works of the medieval philosopher of the ‘occult’, Roger Bacon.⁴¹ An even
earlier text, first produced in the late fifteenth century, that had absorbed the
art of physiognomy into its pages, is suggestive of the route by which that art
gradually became enmeshed in the work of religious, philosophical, and her-
metic synthesis begun by Marsilio Ficino. That text was a French vernacular
tract entitled the Compost et Kalendrier des Bergiers. One of the few ‘new’ pub-
lications buried among the medieval texts that dominated the first century of
printed physiognomy, very little is known about it or its author. It was pub-
lished anonymously in Paris by a ‘priest-artist’ named Giout Marchant on 2
May 1491, twenty years after the first printed edition of Ficino’s Latin transla-
tion of the hermetic Pimander. It was, in essence, a pre-Reformation handbook
of devotion. Having a section on physiognomy taken from the Secretum secre-
torum made it a handbook of devotion which synthesized Roman Catholic
liturgy with an Islamic or perhaps even a Jewish mysticism—for the Secretum
secretorum also formed part of the Zohar. In that sense it bears traces of Ficino’s
and Mirandola’s syncretic sense of religious traditions. The appearance of the
Kalendar/Compost in print just one year before the fall of Muslim Granada is
itself suggestive of the extent to which elements of either Islamic or Jewish mys-
⁴¹ C. Webster, ‘Alchemical and Paracelsian Medicine’, in C. Webster (ed.), Health, Medicine and Mortal-
ity in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, 1979), 301–34.
ticism had permeated relatively popular Christian thought and practice, and
hence helps to explain the severity of the official Christian backlash which
began in 1492 with the expulsion of the Muslims, Jews, and, as we saw earlier,
the ‘gypsies’ from Spain.
What little context it can be given suggests that, like most things in print, it
was cultivated originally in relatively élite circles. For example, the first ‘Eng-
lish’ translation was the work of Alexander Barclay (1475[?]–1552), a Scottish
divine who became a Benedictine monk. Little is known about Barclay other
than that among his textually literate friends and patrons were Cardinal
Morton [d. 1500], Thomas, duke of Norfolk, Richard, earl of Kent (d. 1523),
and Sir Giles Alington. In the late fifteenth century, printed books, like the
Kalendar of Shepherds, were distinguished by the cultural status of the newness of
print per se and of the textual literacy that was required to read them. Thus, what
is all the more significant about the Kalendar of Shepherds is that it was a form of
literacy which was given its life in printed form in such socially élite, literate,
bookish circles in France and England, yet sold itself throughout Renaissance
northern Europe as the mystical wisdom of an illiterate star-gazing shepherd:
As here before time there was a Shepherd keeping Sheep in the fields, which was no
clerk neither had no understanding of the literal sense, nor of no manner of scripture
nor writing, but of his natural wit and understanding.⁴²
That very claim made an implicit gesture towards some sort of oral tradition
and in part no doubt helps to explain the ridicule it received from the well-
schooled bishops of the day.⁴³ Moreover this gesture towards its oral origins
was, alongside the physiognomy the text contained, another thing it had in
common with the traditions of the Kabbalah and the Zohar in Jewish mysti-
cism that Pico della Mirandola was trying to syncretize with his Neoplatonic
hermetic Christianity. A more explicit sense of the ‘Egyptian’ or the hermetic
in its intellectual framework will be made clearer in Chapter 5. Here we should
note that the connection with hermeticism is perhaps most immediately evi-
dent in the fact that the shepherd was a key figure in the wisdom of Hermes
Trismegistus.
One possible further contextual explanation of the traces of hermetic influ-
ence in this text is suggested by the fact that Pico della Mirandola was in Paris
at this time, hiding from the wrath of the papacy, who, in the 1490s, had
attacked the hermetic synthesis in religion that he, along with Ficino, was try-
ing to achieve by bringing together different religious and mystical traditions.
⁴² The Kalendar & Compost of Shepherds [1508], ed. G. C. Heseltine (1932), 1.
⁴³ For Bishop John Jewel’s derision, A replie vnto m. Hardinges answeare (1565), 552.
Indeed, it is in the light of the catholic church’s persecution and purging of the
Islamic and Judaic mystical influences deep in the heart of its own church that
the work of the Italian cleric Bonifacio Simonetta (b. 1430?), abbot of the
Cistercian monastery of San Stefano al Como (in Lodi), might be considered.
Around the same time the church was attacking Muslims and Jews, Simonetta
was reflecting upon the persecution of Christians by the Romans. Among
his writings which date from this time is a hitherto unexamined text entitled
Astronomica, chiromantica et physiognomica (Milan, 1492). This was surely no
coincidence. The date of this work alone suggests some sort of connection in
Simonetta’s mind between physiognomy and the intensification of both the
dissemination (via the Corpus hermeticum) and persecution of things ‘Egypt-
ian’. Moreover, Simonetta’s printed formulation of the divinatory physiog-
nomical technique was one that had by that time, as we have just seen, come
to be associated with that other Egyptian phenomenon discussed above, the
‘gypsies’.
Indeed, at this point we return to the argument about the appropriation of
the ‘gypsy’ métier. Simonetta’s work is a very early precursor of numerous
attempts throughout the early modern period by early modern ‘individual’
contributors to the tradition of physiognomy in books to textualize, and thus
appropriate, the illiterate physiognomical métier of the ‘Egyptians’ or ‘fis-
nomiers’. Traces of this appropriation of things ‘Egyptian’ by the Christian
West’s literary élite can be seen in the next major contribution to this corpus of
early modern books on physiognomy. Its author, Bartholomaeus Cocles, or
Della Rocca (1467–1504), provides a striking Renaissance example of an intel-
lectual collaboration between high and low, and possibly between literate and
illiterate physiognomy, or even between the educated establishment and the
marginalized ‘gypsies’. The dedication of the work describes him as ‘an illiter-
ate man who proved to be a fruitful wood’.⁴⁴ According to Cardano, Cocles
was an illiterate (literarum ignarus) vagrant (mendicus) barber (tonsor).⁴⁵
Whether or not we should consider the fact that Cardano’s use of the term
‘mendicus’ beside ‘tonsor’ may have implied some sort of relation to the ‘men-
dici’ who, as Cicero informs us, were the priests of Cybele (literally ‘she of the
hair’), the Phrygian Mother of all Gods who was associated with ecstatic musi-
cal rituals; and notwithstanding Cocles’s geographical origins, it appears that it
was whilst walking the streets of Bologna that he found protection and patron-
⁴⁴ Bartholomaeus Cocles, Chyromantie ac physionomie anastatis (Bologna, 1504), sig. aai.

⁴⁵ L. Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New York, 1923–58), v. 51; Girolamo
Cardano, Opera omnia, 5 vols. (Lyons, 1663), v. 468; Paolo Giovo says Cocles was born in Bologna, Elogia
virorum literis illustrium (Basle, 1577), 106.
age under the wings of Alessandro Achillini (1463[?]–1512), the aforementioned
avowed Averroist professor of natural philosophy and medical theory in the
Universities of Bologna and Padua (the latter chair he shared with Pietro
Pomponazzi (1462–1525) ).
The apparent result of this astonishing encounter between high, literate pro-
fessor and low, illiterate vagabond was that Cocles learned how to read and
write and penned a commentary on the physiognomy from the Secretum secre-
torum. His patron, Achillini, provided the approving and supportive method-
ological introduction, claiming that Cocles had even made ‘experiments’.
Although it has not yet been the subject of any in-depth study, this text
urgently needs to be examined in terms of this context of the penetration of
more hermetic influences so commonly identified with Mirandola and Ficino
into the heart of Western academic natural philosophy, particularly in com-
parison with Nifo’s work on the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica. If the
Kalendar of Shepherds is evidence of the creeping influence of a Neoplatonic
hermetic art of physiognomy at the heart of early sixteenth-century popular
meditation and devotional practice, Cocles and Nifo are timely reminders that
these occult influences were also to be found in the development of the natur-
al philosophies and medical theories at Padua that were slowly giving birth to
the modern scientific mentality, and—with, for example, Pompanazzi’s view
on the immortality of the soul—modern conceptions of the self. As such, they
seem to bring both the Aristotelian and the Neoplatonic together and confirm
what Charles Schmitt called the ‘invasion of hermetic material into Aris-
totelian contexts’, and what Kessler described as a ‘continuous dialogue’
between early modern Aristotelian and Neoplatonic natural philosophy.⁴⁶
Beyond the natural philosophical conflicts, these ‘physiognomies’ were also
deeply embedded in the political and cultural milieu of high Renaissance Italy
and have to be examined as such. In this particular case, for example, Achillini
was a fervent supporter of Giovanni Bentivoglio (1443–1508), the famous
patron of the arts and head of the family that ran Bologna until they were
forced out by Pope Julius II’s henchmen in 1508.⁴⁷ The ‘book on physiognomy’
that was the result of this ‘gypsy’/professor collaboration was dedicated to
Alessandro Bentivoglio’s ‘immortality’. One sign that this mixture may have
proved too controversial was the murder of Cocles on 24 September 1504, days
after the joint publication of his ‘book on physiognomy’. The explanation
of his murder which has been handed to down to posterity was that he had
⁴⁶ C. B. Schmitt, Aristotle and the Renaissance (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 97–101; E. Kessler, ‘The intel-
lective soul’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. C. B. Schmitt, Q. Skinner, G. Kesser,
and J. Ranye (Cambridge, 1988). ⁴⁷ C. M. Ady, The Bentivoglio of Bologna (Oxford, 1937).
predicted misfortune for the head of the famous Bentivoglio family by reading
his face and palms. As always with politics, there was probably much more to it
than meets the eye, but it none the less shows how there was something very
real and important at stake in all of this philosophical inquiry.
One aspect of this which demands a more thorough investigation but which
I would like to draw some passing attention to here are the implications that a
more hermetic variety of physiognomy had for the production and consump-
tion of art. In fact, this very connection between the natural magic of physiog-
nomy and the physiognomy of art was being sounded in nearby Florence by a
young 18-year-old humanist poet and former Paduan student named Pompeo
Gaurico. Gaurico was noteworthy enough at the time to have won a place in
Paolo Giovio’s famous Elogia. On Christmas day 1504, just three months after
the murder of Cocles, Gaurico published his translation of the physiognomy
he found in a Greek manuscript of the Adamantius treatise. But it was not sim-
ply a translation that he published. He incorporated or ‘appropriated’ that
physiognomy into a work on the art of sculpture. Gaurico was not the first per-
son to connect the natural magic of physiognomy with art. Many medieval
manuscripts contained a version of the legend of the encounter between the
famous face-reader Zopyrus and Socrates, in which it is told as an encounter
between Zopyrus (or ‘Philemo’) and a painted image of Hippocrates. As such,
this legend is perhaps the first clear intimation that the art of physiognomy
was involved, in one way or another, with the making and viewing of images.
However, Gaurico was the first to incorporate an entire exposition of physiog-
nomical doctrine into a printed tract on art, and this, significantly enough,
from the pen of a Neoplatonic poet.⁴⁸
Another aspect of this ‘Egyptian’ influence was expressed in the earliest ‘new’
‘book on physiognomy’ by an ‘individual’ author that appeared in the north,
the one written by the aforementioned German reformist priest named
Johannes de Indagine (1467–1537). Little is known of Indagine other than that
he accompanied Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz during his visit to Rome in
1514, and was the astrologer consulted for the dating of the election of the
emperor in 1519 in which he predicted a success for Charles V.⁴⁹ The obvious
context in which to locate Indagine (and his change of name from Rosenbach
to the more hieroglyphic pseudonym Indagine) is the spread of the influence of
Ficino’s and Paracelsus’s ideas, to which Indagine alludes in his Preface.
⁴⁸ See Ch. 4 for a discussion of Gaurico’s hermetic physiognomical understanding of sculpture, and its
relationship to art, memory, and history.
⁴⁹ F. Herrmann, ‘Der Astrolog Johannes Indagine, Pfarrer zu Steinheim a. M., und die Frankfurter
Kaiserwahl des Jahres 1519’, Archiv für hessiche Geschichte und Alterthumskunde, 18 (Darmstadt,1934), 274–91.
Indagine’s physiognomical treatise, first published in a Latin folio in Strasburg
on 7 May 1522, went on to enjoy an enormous European-wide success. By 1523
it had been translated into vernacular German,⁵⁰ by 1536 into Dutch,⁵¹ by 1545
into French (which saw at least twenty-three different editions between 1545
and 1666 alone), and by 1558 into English, the latest extant printed copy so far
brought to light being dated 1697. It was a milestone in the textual develop-
ment of this mystical physiognomical language, if only because it was the first
time that a printed ‘book on physiognomy’ had been illustrated with woodcuts
of particular physiognomies.
More to the point here is that it appears to have been a deliberate appropri-
ation of the ‘Egyptian’ combination of physiognomy, astrology, and palmistry.
Indagine’s physiognomical aim was traditional: to know ‘the inward motion
and affections of the minde and heart, with the inwarde state of the whole
bodie: as also our inclination and aptnes to all our external actions and doings’.
However, the method appears to have been ‘Egyptian’:
I loke upon the hand, and therwithall beholde the whole bodye, with the lyneamentes,
and proporcion of the same, whiche is called his Phisiognomie . . . then I caste my
minde to the hour of Nativitie, moneth, daye, or yere: the whiche knowen, I referre
strait to the rules of naturall Astrologye . . . then plainely iudging none of these by
themselues sufficiente.⁵²
It was more or less the reverse of the method described in the equally popular
Arcandam in which the physiognomator began with a calculation of the nativ-
ity based on the relation of the person’s name to a preordained set of numbers.
If this work by Indagine provides yet another reason why the absorption of
Neoplatonic hermeticism into sixteenth-century European culture can only
fully be understood in terms of its social and cultural context, one finds a sim-
ilar sense of this sort of appropriation a century later, only by that time the
appropriation included an explicit antagonism towards the rival physiognomy
practised by the gypsy. In the text which Samuel Jeake was reading in April
1670, its author, Richard Saunders, distinguished himself as face- and hand-
reader by presenting himself as a serious ‘student of physick’ whilst castigating
the chiromantical practices of ‘those miserable Vagabonds, which we call
Gypsies’.⁵³ Indeed it was this same concern to distinguish this literate type of
physiognomy in books from the type ‘peddled’ by the ‘gypsies’ which also
⁵⁰ Die Kunst der Chiromantzey (Strasburg, 1523). ⁵¹ Chyromantia . . . (Utrecht, 1536).

⁵² Joannes ab Indagine, Briefe introductions, both naturall, pleasant, and delectable unto the art of chiro-
mancy, or manuel divination, and physiognomy (1575), sigs. *ii(v) and Aiiii(v).
⁵³ Richard Saunders, Physiognomie, Chiromancie, Metoposcopie (1653), sig. a2.
shows itself in those ‘books on physiognomy’ from the corpus of works that are
the focus of this study, that could be said to have contributed most to the recon-
figuration of physiognomy and to the continued interest in the subject
throughout the Enlightenment. In particular, one such ‘book on physiogno-
my’ was entitled in its English translation The Art How to Know Men (1664), by
the French natural philosopher Marin Cureau de La Chambre (1594–1675).
La Chambre achieved a brilliant reputation in his time. In 1634 he was cho-
sen by Cardinal Richelieu for the Académie Française, and may even have been
consulted by Mazarin and Louis XIV.⁵⁴ In 1666 he became one of the first
members of the Académie des Sciences.⁵⁵ First published in Paris in 1659,
after he had already published on the subject of chiromancy, his book was
translated into English for the earl of Carlisle in 1664 by John Davies (1625–93),
a Presbyterian dissatisfied with the growing success of Cartesian philosophy. By
1668 it was available in German, with a second edition in 1672 and an edition
as late as 1794.⁵⁶ Moreover, it was conceived as part of an entire corpus of work
by which La Chambre contributed to the gradual redefinition of the self that
was being fought out among Europe’s natural philosophers, in the wake of the
‘scientific revolution’, the rise of Cartesianism, and the accompanying spread
of mechanical philosophy. Yet that contribution has to be understood in terms
of an increasing tension between the rationality of those new mechanistic and
increasingly materialistic philosophical paradigms and the older ‘hermetic’
ones. The attack on the ‘gypsies’ and their physiognomy was carried out iconi-
cally through the frontispiece to all the various translations of La Chambre’s
The Art How to Know Men. (Illustration 21.) In this image the mathematically
precise scientist is portrayed at work in the safety and rationality of his private
laboratory in stark contrast to palm-reading (and thieving) ‘gypsies’ portrayed
in the act of bamboozling the gentilhomme bourgeois in the more hazardous
realm of the public highway.⁵⁷
This process of simultaneous persecution and appropriation is a reminder
that it would be a distortion to see this hermetic physiognomy as being perpet-
uated outside and against the established church. One particularly telling
example of the importance of physiognomy in Renaissance astrological theory
and the questions of self-determination being asked in the highest niches of
European catholicism was the Italian astrologer Luca Gaurico. Brother of the
⁵⁴ Abée A. Fabre, Chapelain et nos deux premières academies (Paris, 1890), 32; B. Haureau, Histoire littéraire
du Maine, 4 vols. (Paris, 1870–7), iii. 298. ⁵⁵ Nouvelle biographie générale (Paris, 1858).
⁵⁶ The earliest extant Italian copy so far discovered is dated 1700.
⁵⁷ This attack on the gypsies might be seen as an attempt to distance himself from Jean Belot, the expert
in the Kabbalah and counsellor to Louis XIII, who was also a member of the Académie Française.
21. The rationalization of an irrational metier. Marin Cureau de La Chambre, The Art
How to Know Men (1665), frontispiece. (Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Rés 801896.
Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.)
aforementioned Pompeo, Luca Gaurico was one of the most prominent, theo-
retically sophisticated, and sought-after astrologers in Renaissance Europe.
Moreover, as personal astrologer to Pope Paul III (Alessandro Farnese), he was
lodged at, and broadcast from, the heart of the established church. In 1551, a
collection of tracts on physiognomy and chiromancy edited by him was pub-
lished entitled Aristotelis physiognomia adamantio interprete (Bologna, 1551),
including the writings of his brother Pompeo, as well as two others entitled
Alia hominis physiognomia, and Chyromantiae axiomata. Its publication is
evidence in itself that church attitudes towards the occult in general, and phys-
iognomy in particular, very much depended upon who was pope at the time.
None the less, it could be argued that the spread of the hermetic influence,
albeit in a more distilled version, owed more to popular writers than to the
more established, heavyweight magi such as Ficino and John Dee, and that
these writers deserve just as much historical attention as the likes of Achillini
and Gratarolus. Indeed, many of the popularizers were outside the university
system, but they were never far from more powerful and prominent practi-
tioners of the occult and the hermetic philosophy. This seems to have been par-
ticularly the case in France, Italy, and England. Take, for example, the author
of one ‘treatise on physiognomy’ published in mid-sixteenth-century France,
Antoine du Moulin (1510?–51). He was a member of a circle of Platonic human-
ists and poets in Lyon dating from about 1540 to 1560, centred on Maurice
Scève, including the female poet Louise Labé, and Guillaume Aubert
(1534?–1600?), publisher of the poetry of du Bellay. Du Moulin not only edit-
ed the legendary French poet Clement Marot (1496–1544), and Aesop’s Fables;
the humanist in him vernacularized Epictetus from the Greek. More to the
point, his contribution to the spread of ‘occult’ and hermetic thinking in early
modern Europe lay in the popular French translations he made of works on
such occult subjects as dreams, divination, astrology, chiromancy, and medi-
cine, as well as the art of physiognomy.
His closest English equivalent was a London writer named Thomas Hill
(c.1528–c.1576). Though not university-educated, Hill was a prolific translator
and popularizer of everything from almanacs to cosmetics and gardening texts,
which sold in large numbers and continued to be popular well into the seven-
teenth century. His A brief epitomye of the whole art of physiognomie, published
in 1556, can be credited with being the first ever printed treatise in English
devoted solely to physiognomy, and an enlarged edition appeared fifteen years
later in 1571 and again in 1613. The less immediately poetic circle of Hill’s
patrons and friends included Henry Dethick (d. c.1613), chancellor of the dio-
cese of Carlisle;⁵⁸ George Keable, a noted practitioner of physic and surgery;⁵⁹
Henry Finch, a London merchant; and Sir Henry Seamer, either the son of Sir
Thomas Seamer, prominent member of the Mercers’ Company and lord
mayor of London in 1526, or Henry Seymour (d. 1578), younger brother of
Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset (1506?–52). Hill also appears to have had
a connection to Sir William Cecil.⁶⁰ If du Moulin was involved in spreading
⁵⁸ Dethick’s opulent family was of Dutch descent. See Dictionary of National Biography.
⁵⁹ F. R. Johnson, ‘Thomas Hill: An Elizabethan Huxley’, The Huntington Library Quarterly, 4(1944),
329–57, 337, fns. 22 and 23. ⁶⁰ Thomas Hill, The gardener’s labyrinth (1577).
Ficino’s hermetic influence through French literary culture, Hill, despite his
less occult philosophical stance, was doing the same in England. Moreover, in
this, Hill was initially encouraged by the English equivalent of Marsilio Ficino,
the Elizabethan magus John Dee. In the 1571 edition, dedicated to the duke of
Norfolk, Hill makes explicit and distinctly defensive reference to Dee:
Mayster Dee, by whose helpe and ayde at the beginning, I receyued such monuments
and principles, as gaue me great light unto this knowledge . . . for that he wisheth well
unto his Countrie men, and hath taken great paynes to do his Countrie good.⁶¹
In fact, this spreading of the hermetic at the popular level appears to have
been something of an international concerted effort. The connection between
du Moulin and Hill, for example, is evident in the commendatory verse which
du Moulin wrote for Hill’s 1571 version of his ‘physiognomy’. Natural philoso-
phers, such as Luca Gaurico and Guilelmus Gratarolus, were perpetuating and
disseminating a more philosophically intense sense of hermetic physiognomy
from some of the most prestigious and influential nodes of communication in
early modern society. At the same time translators such as du Moulin and Hill
(such identifiable popularizers seem to have been less of a phenomenon in six-
teenth-century Germany) were in part responsible for embroiling the art of
physiognomy in the more popular assimilation of late Renaissance hermeti-
cism and occultism and the wider assimilation of Paracelsianism between 1560
and 1600. Furthermore, as Charles Webster has pointed out, this was all ‘nur-
tured within the context of the more generalised alchemical movement’, in
which John Dee played ‘an active part’.⁶²
All of this can be seen to have culminated in the most famous physiognomist
of the later sixteenth century, the Neapolitan natural philosopher and play-
wright Giovanni Battista Della Porta. Della Porta’s variety of writings on
human, animal, plant, and celestial physiognomy were translated into numer-
ous vernaculars and many editions. He also worked through the academies that
were being set up across Europe as alternatives to the established university tra-
dition. Indeed, with regard to physiognomy, this same pattern continued in the
seventeenth century. Some authors, such as Camillo Baldi, pontificated open-
ly about physiognomy from the seats of the most prestigious chairs of natural
philosophy in early modern Europe’s universities. However, Baldi does not
appear to have been typical. A great deal many more talked about it in secret
midnight discussions around the tables in some of the academies that contin-
ued to spring up around Europe as part of a critique of the established syllabi.
⁶¹ Thomas Hill, A contemplation of mankinde (1571), Preface, sig. qq v–qq vv.
⁶² Webster, ‘Alchemical’, Health, 323.
One English example of the development of an occult and hermetic art of
physiognomy outside the university was Robert Fludd (1574–1637). Fludd’s
writing on physiognomy is to be found in his Utriusque cosmi . . . historia
which he probably began at St John’s College in Oxford in the 1590s. By that
stage he was referring to his attempt to construct a science based on hermetic
revelation, and the correspondence between the macrocosm and the micro-
cosm, as ‘Theosophy’.⁶³ It was a conscious attempt to develop some of the ideas
put forward by John Dee, himself greatly influenced by Ficino, in his Mathe-
matical Praeface (1570). In that famous work, John Dee attempted to create the
art of all arts, the interdisciplinary study of all that is in man. The term he sug-
gested for it was ‘Anthropographie’. It was a concept of art to which the art of
physiognomy had its contribution to make.
You must of sundry professions, borow or challenge home, peculier partes hereof:
and farder procede: as God, Nature, Reason and Experience shall informe you.
The Anatomistes will restore to you, some part: The Physiognomistes, some: The
Chyromantistes some. The Metaposcopistes, some: The excellent, Albert Durer, a
good part: the Arte of Perspectiue, will somwhat, for the Eye, helpe forward.⁶⁴
As will be examined in more detail in Chapter 5, it is in Fludd’s text, more than

any other, that one detects the deepest and most sophisticated hue of Neopla-
tonic hermeticism. In developing this notion, Fludd placed physiognomy
among what he called the ‘techniques of the microcosm’: a combination of a
number of arts of the ‘occult’ which Fludd labelled Anthroposophia and thought
to be all the knowledge man can have of himself and the universe.⁶⁵
Yet there were many lesser known seventeenth-century Italian and French
authors who provide just as important an insight into the spread of a more her-
metic sense of physiognomy. Among the Italian writers are figures such as Livio
Agrippa, Antonio Pellegrini, Francesco Sansovino, and Ciro Spontoni, about
whom little else is yet known other than their relatively popular publications.
As obscure as they are, some of them had connections to more established
nodes of communication in early modern society. Giovanni Ingegneri, author
of Fisionomia naturale, was also the bishop of Capo d’Istria, and Domenico de
Rubeis dedicated his Tabulae physiognomicae (1631) to Cardinal Richelieu. A
particularly rich example is the early seventeenth-century Italian physiogno-
mator Cornelio Ghirardelli (d. 1637), whose Cefalogia fisonomia was dedicated
to Lorenzo Campeggi, the Bolognese governor of Ancona, and was replete with
⁶³ F. A. Yates, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972), 96, 98, 148.

⁶⁴ F. A. Yates, Theatre of the World (1969), 190.
⁶⁵ S. Hutin, Robert Fludd (1574–1637) (Paris, 1972), 83–4.
references to the contemporary writers who were a part of Ghirardelli’s circle.
Ghirardelli’s interest in astronomy/astrology led him to the Accademia dei
Vespertini in Bologna, which used to gather at nightfall in the house of Ovidio
Montalbani, the professor of Astronomy and Mathematics at the University of
Bologna. Indeed, Ghirardelli originally wrote his physiognomical treatise for
distribution within the Vespertini. It was his connection with Girolamo
Onofrio, professor at the University of Bologna from 1613 to 1639 and consul-
tor to the Inquisition, which led to its publication at a time when the church
was particularly suspicious about the arts of divination.
On 12 April 1630, under the aegis of Pope Urbano VIII, Ghirardelli, himself
a member of the order of Franciscan minors, was named pater provinciae Vene-
tae. As the legate of Bologna, Ghirardelli had participated in the election of
Cardinal Alessandro Ludovisi as Pope Gregory XV on 9 February 1621 in suc-
cession to Pope Paul V. The existence of a physiognomical eye among these
electors prompts many questions, not only about the intellectual nature of
their understanding of physiognomy but also about the uses to which
Ghirardelli and his friends put their physiognomical skill.
This spread of the influence of a hermetic physiognomy can also be seen in
the rise of an interest in Paracelsian medicine and Paracelsianism more gener-
ally throughout Europe around this time, particularly in the Low Countries
and Germany. One ‘treatise on physiognomy’ firmly embedded in all of this
was written by Johannes-Frederic Helvetius, the physician to Prince William of
Orange. Entitled Amphitheatrum physiognomiae medicum (Heidelberg, 1660),
and dedicated to his prince, it was a detailed presentation of the astrological
physiognomies that made up the human race. It mapped out their physical
appearance, the state of their characters when their internal soul was in harmo-
ny with the natural virtues of their corporeal constitution, and the herbs and
medicines particularly suited to each. This can be seen in turn as part of a wider
movement of writers attempting to save the increasingly beset theories
of astrology and what might today be referred to as ‘alternative medicine’.
Another physiognomist who was attempting to save a medicalized version of
astrological physiognomy was Philipp May:
Medicinal physiognomy is a science that teaches (with the help of Chiromancy), the
way in which one can conserve one’s health, to know, avoid or at least diminish present
and future illnesses, and by which one can know whether a person will suffer a natural
or a violent death.⁶⁶
⁶⁶ Philippe May, La chiromance medicinale (La Haye, 1665), 119.

Indeed, with clear intellectual distinctions yet to be established between the
philosophy of the occult, natural philosophy, religion, and science, all of this
would seem to confirm the claim that Neoplatonism and hermeticism were
‘vital ingredients of advanced thought into the last decades of the seventeenth
century’.⁶⁷ But that is not to say that by the late seventeenth century the
Aristotelian sense of physiognomy had faded from thought. Even amidst
this Europe-wide rise of interest in Paracelsus in the 1660s, or the hermetic
‘physiognomy’ in the writings of such Cambridge Platonists as Henry More
and Ralph Cudworth, there were still some more traditional, more Aris-
totelian, perspectives on physiognomy being articulated at the very same time.
One example is a collection of hitherto unknown seventeenth-century manu-
scripts by James Boevey Esq. (1622–97) (pronounced Boovey), a seventeenth-
century merchant-lawyer from Cheam in Surrey. They provide one potentially
very rich area in which a much more detailed investigation of the intellectual
and practical interaction between the hermetic, the ‘occult’, and the new
seventeenth-century understanding of rationality and reason can be carried
out in one very specific social and cultural context.
The youngest son of a large Dutch family who had fled to England at the end
of the sixteenth century when the Spanish duke of Alva invaded the Low
Countries, Boevey’s father was an elder of the Dutch church at Austin Friars in
London and a prominent financier. James Boevey himself soon became
involved in that world of merchants and financiers, starting out as cash-keeper
for numerous prominent dignitaries connected to his father. After his Grand
Tour, Boevey became an international merchant before then joining Temple
Inn to become a lawyer, but not before a series of litigations had brought him
the experience of a few spells abroad in prison.
From his childhood years, Boevey developed a habit of continuously scrib-
bling things down in notebooks. He always had a candle beside his bed to do
this. One of the manuscripts he wrote was a two-volume entitled, ‘Of the art of
discovering of men’⁶⁸ Together they constitute a very original ‘treatise on phys-
iognomy’ from the middle of the early modern period. Part of its richness and
originality lies in the fact that it was one of thirty-two manuscripts that Boevey
penned between 1665 and 1666 while hidden away in the safety of his isolated
country house deep in Exmoor far from the ravages of the Great Plague and the
Great Fire that affected London during those years. Each one of these manu-
scripts constituted a building-brick in a private philosophical system to which
⁶⁷ Clark, Demons, 157.

⁶⁸ Cambridge: University Library, MS Dd 15. 28 and London: Wellcome Library, MS 699. See also the
article on James Boevey in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004).
Boevey gave what might be seen as the distinctly Aristotelian name ‘Active
Philosophy’. A full list of titles which Boevey sent John Aubrey provides a
further idea of the intellectual framework into which physiognomy was incor-
porated:
1. The Characters, or Index rerum: in 4 tomes. 2: The Introduction to Active Philosophy. 3:
The Art of Building a Man: or Education*. 4: The Art of Conversation. 5: The Art of Com-
plyance. 6: The Art of Governing the Tongue. 7: The Art of Governing the Penn. 8: The
Government of Action[*?]. 9: The Government of Resolution. 10: The Government of Rep-
utation. 11: The Government of Power: in 2 tomes. 12: The Government of Servients. 13:
The Government of Subserviency. 14: The Government of Friendshipp*. 15: The Govern-
ment of Enmities*. 16: The Government of Law-Suites*. 17: The Art of Gaining Wealth. 18:
The Art of Buying and Selling. 19: The Art of Preserving Wealth. 20: The Art of Expending
Wealth. 21: The Government of Secrecy. 22: The Government of Amor Conjugalis: in 2
tomes[*?]. 23: Of Amor Concupiscentiae. 24: The Government of Felicity. 25: The Lives of
Atticus, Sejanus, Augustus. 26: The Causes of the Diseases of the Mind[*?]. 27: The Cures
of the Mind, viz. Passions, Diseases, Vices, Errours, Defects[*?]. 28: The Art of Discerning
Men*. 29: The Art of Discerning a Man’s selfe*. 30: Religion from Reason: in 3 tomes. 31:
The Life of Cum-fu-zu, soe farr wrote by J.B. 32: The Life of Mahomet, wrote by Sir Wal-
ters Raleigh’s papers, with some small addition for methodizing the same.⁶⁹
From this list, Boevey’s ‘Active Philosophy’ would appear to be distinctly

Aristotelian, in so far as it ‘has the practical task of directing man’s activities pre-
cisely as human; its parts are ethics, which directs one’s personal life, ‘oeco-
nomics’, which governs home and family, and politics, which orders the city
and the republic’.⁷⁰ Moreover, there is none of the Neoplatonic astrological
understanding of the cosmos supporting his understanding of physiognomy.
Thus, another aspect of its originality lies in the insight its study could give us
into how a less Paracelsian-influenced physiognomy was incorporated into an
ethics of everyday life at a time when Paracelsianism was of particular interest.
Indeed Boevey, who also owned many books on magic and witchcraft—a list
of which, written out in Elias Ashmole’s hand has survived—provides an
opportunity for examining the coexistence of the rational and the hermetic,
not only because of the widespread interest in Paracelsianism at that time but
also owing to the fact that one of his next-door neighbours in the part of
Chelsea in which he resided as a young man was the famous Paracelsian and
royal physician Sir Theodore Mayerne.
This argument about the respective contributions of the Aristotelian and the
Neoplatonic towards the metamorphosis of physiognomy could be traced
⁶⁹ Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. O. Lawson Dick (1992), [32]. I have since discovered those manuscripts marked
with an asterisk.
⁷⁰ W. A. Wallace, ‘Traditional Natural Philosophy’, in C. B. Schmitt and Q. Skinner (eds.), The Cam-
bridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, 1988), 201–35, 210.
through to the end of the eighteenth century. One major theme in that history
is the rise of a more mechanical approach to the subject. James Parson’s Royal
Society lecture could be taken as emblematic of this, in particular with regard
to the way in which it contributed towards the Baconian suggestion of exam-
ining physiognomy through the mechanics of ‘impression’ and not ‘discovery’.
It is in the context of the gradual establishment of this sense of physiognomy
that the increase in the number of ‘books on physiognomy’ published as some
form of inexplicable ‘curiosity’ has to be understood. The late seventeenth
century saw something of an explosion in the vogue for cabinets of curiosity.
Collections of remarkable natural phenomena were springing up in private
museums all over Europe. They were one consequence of the ongoing taxo-
nomic reordering of man’s understanding of nature and its ‘great chain of
being’, both the consequence and the ongoing cause of a greater distinction
being made between things that were the product of the imagination and
things that were the product of scientific reason. Those ‘curiosities’ were pri-
marily the subjects or the phenomena which could not be fitted into the dom-
inant natural philosophical framework, but neither could they be entirely
dismissed and ignored. Physiognomy became one of them. Whilst there does
not appear to have been a cabinet of curiosity in the form of a private museum
devoted to physiognomical curiosities, a similar idea was expressed in certain
books such as Nicolo Spandoni’s Studio di curiosità nel quale si tratta di Fisiono-
mia, Chiromantia, Metoposcopia (Venezia, 1662), which he dedicated to the
Venetian noble, and lover of curiosities, Iseppo Cassetti. In France and Eng-
land it was exemplified by the publication of The Court of Curiositie (1669).⁷¹
This book claimed to be the work of Marc de Vulson, Sieur de La Colombière
(d. 1658), but was essentially a reissue of the unknown Edmé Gallimard’s
Traicté physiognomique, par lequel un chacun peut apprendre a se bien cognoistre,
et aussi la nature, les moeurs, et inclinations des autres. This understanding of
physiognomy was still to be found in the middle of the Enlightenment in, for
example, Johann Georg Job’s Anleitung zu denen curiösen Wissenschafften, Nem-
lich der Physiognomia, Chiromantia, Astrologia, Geomantia, Oniromantia, Ono-
mantia, Teratoscopia, Sympathia und Antipathia (Frankfurt, Leipzig, [Berlin],
1747).
Yet, despite the spread of the new natural philosophy and the tendency of
the mechanical philosophy to push physiognomy into the realm of curiosity, its
presence constantly exposed the epistemological limitations of the new
philosophies, particularly through its long-standing conviction that the physi-
⁷¹ Marc Vulson, The Court of Curiositie (1669).

cal and the moral or the metaphysical were somehow joined. This ineluctable
sense of some sort of innate relationship between the moral and the material
even occurred in the work of such Enlightenment figures as La Mettrie, physi-
cian and philosopher and author of the famous book L’Homme machine. In La
Mettrie’s case, he articulated this relationship between the moral and the phys-
ical through a passing reference in his famous work to the subject of physiog-
nomy in Jacques Pernetti’s Lettres sur les phisiognomies, first published in Paris
in 1746.⁷² One of the most notable contributions to this distinctly physiog-
nomical debate was made by the Benedictine and Masonic librarian of
Frederick the Great, Antoine Pernetty, in his Discours sur [la physionomie et les
avantages des] les connoissances physiognomiques (Berlin, 1749). Indeed, with
Pernetty we catch a glimpse of the more occult, theosophic, ideas bequeathed
to posterity originally by the Florentine Renaissance hermeticists, which sign-
posted another more occult side to the alleged rationality of the Enlightenment
out of which Romanticism was born. For Pernetty went on to found an
Illuminist sect in 1765.
In the eighteenth century, there were, besides such works of moral philoso-
phy, numerous works which continued the medical contribution to the ongo-
ing developing understandings of what physiognomy was, particularly those
which arose in the context of the discussion during the latter half of the eigh-
teenth century between the mechanists and the vitalists. One way of approach-
ing this context is through the unusual figure of Anton Wilhelm Amo
(c.1703–56). Amo, like Bartholomaeus Cocles in the Renaissance, is a remark-
able but as yet neglected figure with whom to finish this general survey of some
of the more important turning-points in the tradition of writing ‘books on
physiognomy’ that were published in the early modern period, all the more so
for being a figure who does not appear to have ever written a ‘treatise on phys-
iognomy’. Born on the Gold Coast, Amo was the first European-trained
African philosopher and became a professor at Halle, Wittenberg, and Jena
Universities. He lectured on such intellectually heavyweight issues as Leibniz’s
principle of sufficient reason, and his work on jurisprudence is said to have
made a contribution to the abolition of slavery. More directly related to phys-
iognomy was his work on medicine and rationalist psychology that, by that
time, found itself at the heart of the struggle in medicine between the afore-
mentioned mechanists and the vitalists. It was around this issue that the ques-
tion of physiognomy resurfaced. More to the point, Amo was an Enlightened
philosopher who seems to have addressed the ‘occult’ side of this question
⁷² Julien Jan Offray de La Mettrie, Man a Machine (1750), 14–15.

between the mechanical and the vital, at least privately. As a private tutor he
conducted classes in the ars hermetica, including physiognomy and chiroman-
cy. His native Africa may have had its own oral physiognomical tradition about
which nothing is yet known, or else he may have developed his interest in phys-
iognomy and chiromancy through the Western hermetic tradition. He was in
contact with Johann Georg Job, author of the aforementioned compilation of
curious occult sciences published in 1747, Anleitung zu denen curiösen
Wissenschafften. No evidence has yet been found that Amo published anything
on the subject. However, he appears to have taken his interest in the hermetic
back home. By 1753 he was back on the Gold Coast. In the last years of his life,
according to Winckelmann, he was found living the life of a hermit and, like
most physiognomists through the ages, he had developed a reputation among
the locals as a ‘soothsayer’.⁷³ Like the mid-eighteenth-century manuscript on
physiognomy written in Icelandic which was mentioned in Chapter 2, Amo’s
commitment is another indication of the temporal and geographical ubiquity
of this interest in the ‘occult’ and a more hermetic form of physiognomy. Amo’s
connection with the art of physiognomy is just one of many which would ben-
efit from some rigorous scholarly analysis, particularly in terms of how such an
Enlightenment figure may have been central to the understanding of the self
and the world that one finds in, for example, German Romanticism. After all,
Schelling’s idea of organic expression, of the world as God’s body, as the incar-
nation of divine life, was distinctly ‘physiognomical’, and is often traced back
through such naturalist mystics as Jacob Boehme to Paracelsus and popular
German tracts on alchemy, natural magic, and this divine language of
‘physiognomy’.⁷⁴
Physiognomy, Self-knowledge, and Self-transformation

Both the Christian Aristotelian and the Neoplatonic hermetic traditions in
early modern natural philosophy, alongside the more general social phenome-
non of physiognomical ‘superstition’ represented by people like the ‘gypsies’,
were mutually influential stimuli in the metamorphosis of physiognomy. Yet
that still leaves one question unanswered. Why did people even bother with
such a seemingly obscure subject? At that point we could turn to a claim made
by one contemporary historian of Renaissance philosophy: ‘much of the most
innovative debate of the period on questions of attainment of knowledge con-
⁷³ M. Firla, ‘Anton Wilhelm Amo, Kammermohr—Privatdozent für Philosophie—Wahrsager’, Tribus,
51 (Stuttgart, 2002), 56–89.
⁷⁴ A. Koyré, De la mystique à la science, ed. P. Redondi (Paris, 1986), 20.
cerns disciplines whose credentials as scientiae were perceived as questionable:
the ‘unorthodox’ sciences, astrology, alchemy, natural magic and so on.’⁷⁵
Physiognomy was certainly an unorthodox scientia. What was so important
about physiognomy that made it worth fighting over? The answer to this ques-
tion, I would argue, is because it was a subject that dealt with the central ques-
tion of man’s self-knowledge. In other words, the conflict over ‘knowledge by
the visage’ was part of a conflict over the nature of the human being that one
came to know by that ‘visage’, whether one was looking at one’s self in a mirror
or at other people.
Paracelsus observed that ‘the . . . physiognomantier bases his judgements on
the nature of the human self ’.⁷⁶ One twentieth-century commentator on
gypsy ‘magic’ provides an insight into that concern when he writes of how, in
an encounter with a first-class gypsy ‘seer’, ‘you may well be astounded by the
unveiling of the past, by an uncanny glimpse into the future and by a devastat-
ing penetration into your character that would put many a psycho-analyst to
shame’.⁷⁷ Many of the early modern authors made the claim that physiogno-
my helped to establish self-knowledge. As one French author of a ‘book on
physiognomy’ put it in 1669:
the subject of this Treatise I am upon comprehends the principal object which the
ancient Philosophers ever aim’d at, and wherein they placed the greatest part of their
felicity; that was, Nosce Teipsum, Know thy self: which knowledge consists in the exact
experience that every man hath of himself in particular, and an universal knowledge of
men in general.⁷⁸
Francis Bacon explicitly agreed. For Bacon, the art of physiognomy was the sci-
entia which dealt with what he termed the ‘league’, or ‘common Bond between
the soul and body’, that is to say ‘the adjuncts of [Man’s] common and undivid-
ed nature; but chiefly in regard of the knowledge concerning the sympathies and
concordances between the mind and body, which, being mixed, cannot be prop-
erly assigned to the sciences of either’. It was a genuine ‘portion of natural phi-
losophy in the continent of nature’, ‘sister’ of the art of the interpretation of
dreams, and was capable of contributing towards ‘the knowledge of ourselves’,
in other words help man’s fulfilment of the ancient oracle: ‘Nosce teipsum—
know thy self ’.⁷⁹
⁷⁵ N. Jardine, ‘Epistemology of the Sciences’, in Schmitt and Skinner (eds.), Renaissance Philosophy,
685–711, 685. ⁷⁶ Paraclesus, Samlicht, 1, 193–4.
⁷⁷ B. I. Rákōczi, ‘Gypsy Magic’, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, 3rd ser. 35 (1956), 39–46, 39
⁷⁸ Vulson, Curiositie, 113.
⁷⁹ Francis Bacon, Collected Works, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, 7 vols. (1857–9), III.i,
366–7; IV, 375.
The fundamental disagreements were not over whether physiognomy could
do this, but over how one went about doing this, what sort of ‘physiognomy’
one used to do it, what sort of self did it help one come to know, and to what
extent that self-knowledge included the past and the future—in other words,
where one was from and where one was going. Nor was it simply a conflict over
the question of self-knowledge. As a result of the influence of the Neoplatonic
hermetic movement, physiognomy became embroiled in the battle over the
question of whether it was possible to change one’s self. It was a common ques-
tion. One medicalized academic version of the question appeared on many a
university examination paper, such as the one in Oxford on 12 July 1613:
‘whether the innate complexion is capable of being transformed?’⁸⁰ For the
university-educated it was a question which fed into such issues as the extent to
which the Galenic ‘self ’ was rooted in the materiality of the combination of
humours that constituted the innate ‘complexio’, and hence the existence of an
immaterial soul. In terms of the history of the religious mysticism of which it
was so much a part, physiognomy provided the background of concerns about
metempsychosis—that is to say whether or not the soul of a dead human being
returns to this life in the form of an animal.
In the eighteenth century physiognomy found itself at the heart of the
debate about the physical, the moral, and self-knowledge in such publications
as the German pastor Johann Georg Leutmann’s Nosce te ipsum et alios, Oder
die Wissenschafft Sich Selbst und anderer Menschen Gemüther zu erkennen, Aus
Moral—und Physicalischen Grund—Sätzen hergeleitet (Wittenberg, 1719), or
Johann Andreas Fabricius’s (1696–1769), Vernünftige Gedanken von der
Moralischen Erkenntnis der Menschen Gemüther (Jena, 1735), and Johann
Wilhelm Appelius’s Historisch—moralischer Entwurf der Temperamenten, und
der hieraus entstehenden Neigungen des Gemüths, der Sitten und des Naturels des
Menschen (Hamburg, 1737). Indeed, it is this notion of the continuous meta-
morphosis of physiognomy which helps to explain why the one physiognomi-
cal treatise in the distinctly modern library of Le Comte de Sainte Mure (sold
in 1764), La Chambre’s L’Art de connaitre les hommes, was accompanied by more
Enlightened articulations of the same concern, be it in the form of the Dictio-
nnaire philosophique, ou introduction à la connoissance de l’homme (1741), or a
work entitled Introduction à la connoissance de l’Ésprit humain. The bibliophile
Antoine Marie Henri Boulard (1754–1825), mayor of the tenth arrondissement
of Paris, had an entire section in his library labelled ‘physiognomy’. But by that
stage he also had a number of more modern texts which put themselves forward
⁸⁰ Register of the University of Oxford, ed. A. Clark, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1887–9), II.i, 193.
as the route to self-knowledge, such as in his collection of what might be
termed more modern physiognomical treatises like Pernetty’s three-volumed
La connaissance de l’homme moral par celle de l’homme physique (1776), or
Borelly’s La connaissance de l’homme et au perfectione de l’homme physique et
moral (1797); Bonnet’s La palingénésie philosophique sur l’état passé et future des
êtres vivans (1771); Desbus’s, L’art de connatire les homes (1762), or the Abbé
Joannet’s, De la connaissance de l’homme (1775). ⁸¹
Conclusion
The early modern period produced many different physiognomies, be it the
Christian Aristotelian physiognomy of Augusto Nifo or Camillo Baldi; the
Neoplatonic ‘Egyptian’ physiognomy of Pompeo Gaurico and Robert Fludd;
the Calvinist physiognomy of Clemens Timpler; the catholic physiognomy of
Athanasius Kircher; the Kabbalistic physiognomy of Jean Belot; the anglican
mechanical physiognomy of James Parsons, the Pietist physiognomy of
Lavater; or the unbookish physiognomy that happened in the encounter with
a ‘gypsy’. None of them, including those Neoplatonic versions which can be
said to have been based on an episteme of ‘resemblance’, simply relinquished
‘its relation with knowledge’ and disappeared ‘from the sphere of cognition’ as
Foucault put it.⁸² All of them contributed in one way or another to the meta-
morphosis of physiognomy throughout the period. Whilst the Aristotelian
investigations of physiognomy were more continuous with the medieval tradi-
tion, the Neoplatonic investigation of its ‘natural magic’ also had a significant
impact. The emergence of interest in things ‘Egyptian’ was not simply begun
by Cosimo de Medici and Ficino in Florence in the 1460s. In many ways, they,
like the later writers on the subject, were reacting in part to the social phenom-
enon of the ‘gypsies’. For all that ‘books on physiognomy’ remained a relative-
ly marginal affair, none the less what was at issue in the development of
physiognomical theory was not only the question of self-knowledge but also
the much more controversial question of self-transformation.
⁸¹ Catalogue des livres du cabinet de feu monsieur le comte de Sainte-Mure (Paris, 1764); Catalogue des livres
de . . . A. M. H. Boulard (Paris, 1828). ⁸² M. Foucault, The Order of Things (1974), 17.
4
The Physiognomy Captured and Lost
in a Book
The aim of this is chapter is to carry out a basic philological examination of the
words that make up the physiognomical aphorisms found in these ‘books on
physiognomy’. In so doing I shall stress that it is in terms of the epistemologi-
cal debate about the nature of the so-called ‘natural language’ of physiognomy
which they represented that any philological approach has to be carried out.
The many evident disagreements among the aphorisms make it impossible to
establish with any scientific accuracy what any particular feature always meant.
Moreover, the changes they underwent over time are best explained by refer-
ence to the internal hazards involved in textual transmission. Some of the more
intriguing aphorisms refer to a particular historical personage. However, rather
than pointing us in the direction of any certain human origin of a particular
physiognomic, they should be seen more as a reflection of a distinctly visual,
physiognomical conception of history. When the actual words of these printed
physiognomics are examined as a Geertzian web of meaning spun by humans
for themselves, I shall show how they can be revealing about early modern
notions of virtue, beauty, sex and gender, and helped to prepare the way for the
emergence of the eighteenth-century notion of the aesthetic in which beauty
stood as a meaning (often a gendered meaning) in and of itself. It will become
apparent that few physiognomical aphorisms were constantly identified with
one sex or another, but most physiognomical aphorisms appear to be con-
structed upon an understanding of the ineluctable difference of ‘sex’ upon
which the physiognomatable self was based. However, I shall argue that such
differences are probably more a consequence of religious cosmogonies than
early modern medical theories. But, above all, in this chapter I want to suggest
that the ‘physiognomics’ in ‘books on physiognomy’ are themselves evidence of
what may have been the very different, but now irretrievable, language of an
oral physiognomical tradition—a claim which points us, once again, beyond
the pages of these books in the direction of the ‘gypsies’ and the illiterate ‘fis-
nomiers’ discussed in the previous chapter.
Physiognomy Captured and Lost in a Book 173
A Natural Language
We have seen how physiognomy was defined to schoolchildren, most simply,
as ‘knowledge by the visage’.¹ When put like that, with or without a conscious
understanding of the theorized physics of it that we saw in Alsted’s writings (see
the Introduction of this book), physiognomical wisdom seems to have been
broadcast to people’s fisnomy from, and sensed by people’s fisnomy in, every
nook and cranny of early modern society. The often overwhelming number of
painted and carved ‘faces’ which appear to have been crammed into almost
every available space on and in some Renaissance and early modern church
decoration can be taken as a microcosm of this phenomenon. Everything had
a ‘face’. Even the abyss in Genesis had a ‘face’, as did the ‘typeface’ through
which the literate élite of early modern Europe so often encountered it.
That ‘knowledge by the visage’, which was such a ubiquitous phenomenon
of early modern life, was hinted at in the early modern proverbial wisdom
encapsulated in the form, to see something ‘on the face of it’. At one point in
his researches into the past, Erasmus decided to search for the classical origins
of this particular adage. That search led him back to the Latin of that newly re-
discovered antiquity so beloved of high Renaissance humanists like himself:
‘Ex fronte perspicere—To see on the face of it ’. The classical genealogy with which
he then provided this adage was both Greek and distinctly physiognomical—
the ‘expert’ physiognomists of ancient Greece: ‘we are said to see something on
the face of it when we perceive it immediately and, as it were, at the very first
moment of contact. It is taken from the experts in physiognomy, who maintain
that they can discern a man’s character from his facial peculiarities and other
bodily features’.² In his desire to establish a Greek genealogy for this adage,
Erasmus appears to have overlooked the very strong possibility that Zopyrus,
the physiognomist who famously read the face of Socrates, was actually Syrian
not Greek. Similarly, Erasmus said nothing about how to see something ‘on the
face of it’, or to get ‘knowledge by the visage’, did not require having the abi-
lity to read books. It was something even the so-called ‘illiterati’ could do.
Indeed, for all the early modern period was ‘the age of print’, there were more
people who could read ‘faces’ than could read humanist cursive manuscript or
black gothic typefaces, and thus just as much, if not more, knowledge gained
‘by the visage’ than ‘by the book’. Given that this more innate, visual faculty of
‘literacy’ in faces was shared by the literati and the illiterati, the world of phy-
¹ Edmund Coote, The English schoole-maister (1596).

² Desiderius Erasmus, Collected Works, Vol. 33, Adages II. i 1 to II. vi 100, trans. R. A. B. Mynors
(Toronto, 1991), 191.
siognomony encountered in these texts, has, as we shall see, much to tell us of
the world of physiognomy to which they were themselves a closed book.
For example, to understand how the apparently banal aphorisms of phy-
siognomony could be taken very seriously by those who could read, and thus
the sincerity and passion with which the illiterati could take their own phys-
iognomical knowledge and traditions, it must be pointed out that the physiog-
nomony in these books was sometimes presented as if it had the same
irrefutable religious authority and the same mnemonic imperative as God’s
twelve commandments. For example, in the Kalendar of Shepherds, readers and
listeners, ‘clerkes and ley people’, were bound ‘to lerne & knowe on peyne of
everlastynge dethe | as ye lawes of god done shewe how we maye knowe to kepe
his commaundements | and to knowe the remedyes to withstande deedly
synne’. They were to learn these contents:
as parfytely as theyr Pater noster. . . . Therfore ye that do not knowe them | do youre
dylygence to lerne them | for ye be bounde to lerne them | as well as for to lerne youre
Pater noster. For how can you kepe the commaundementes of oure sauyoure Jhesu
cryst | and yet ye knowe them not. Also ye be bounde to breke not one of them on
payne of dampnacyon | for and thou breke one thou brekes all.³
Early modern literati would have been much more sensitive to the seemingly
unimpeachable and immortal authorities of Aristotle and Plato who were often
put forward by writers to defend physiognomy. Even the names of authors
associated with physiognomony, such as Pietro d’Abano and Roger Bacon, still
meant something important among sixteenth-century literate circles. Having
said that, the early modern authors of these texts on physiognomony often
uttered something that both the literati and the illiterati could agree upon
when they claimed that these physiognomics were the ‘secrets of old Philoso-
phers’, ‘Ancient Prophecies’, or the ‘Oracle of Apollo’. What scholars now call
‘the ancient Babylonian omen tradition’ was very much alive for everyone in
early modern Europe.
But what is essential for readers unfamiliar with this period to understand is
that all of these claims had all the more power because of the very different way
in which physiognomy was understood or even experienced as a ‘natural lan-
guage’. When the twentieth-century French historian and philosopher Michel
Foucault wrote of physiognomics, he did so in the context of the Renaissance
understanding of the ‘doctrine of natural signatures’, in which the language of
physiognomy was understood to be ‘coeval with the institution of God’. A
Dutch historian from the early twentieth century, Johannes Huizinga, wrote of
³ Oxford: Bodleian Library, Douce K. 97, sig. Aiir–v.
the ‘living function’ of aphoristic, proverbial ‘crystallised form[s] of thought’
(to which physiognomics had such a close resemblance) that in the Middle
Ages were ‘substantial and unchallengeable’.⁴ In making these observations,
they were referring, in effect, to the ‘natural language’ of which the likes of the
English astrological physician Richard Saunders or the seventeenth-century
English radical, and army chaplain, John Webster, understood the printed
words of physiognomony to be such an important part. In their understanding
of what constituted that ‘natural language’, there was thought to be a natural
link, a ‘resemblance’, between what scholars today call the ‘signifiers’ and the
‘signified’. Thus, the so-called ‘natural signatures’ of physiognomony were
thought to contain a magic and potentially efficacious power in the form of the
‘similitude’ between the word itself and the thing to which it referred. This
power was such that it provided the reader with the potential to manipulate
the properties signified by those words. In turn, their understanding of this
‘natural language’ was embedded in what one historian has suggested was the
most dominant episteme of the sixteenth century, that of ‘a perfect, divinely
inspired language in which Adam named each created thing and captured its
essence, and which scholars, despite the Flood and Babel, might still recover’.
Whilst, as we shall see, it was not a universal opinion, John Webster was cer-
tainly one who thought that ‘perfection would be achieved when all spoke a
language which was universal, original, pre-Hebraic, natural, and transcen-
dent, in that it would be above fallen human languages’.⁵
Physiognomics: Meaning, Origins, Continuity

and Discontinuity
The most popular and burning questions about physiognomy as a subject seem
to be: what did the various physical features actually mean in the early modern
period? How did they come to mean what they meant? Did the meaning of any
particular physiognomic alter during the early modern period? What were
the reasons for those changes? Was there any continuity of physiognomical
meaning across time? The questioners are often unhappy with a response
which seems to avoid the question by claiming that the search for continuity
and change in meaning and language can be a paradoxical and elusive quest,
⁴ M. Foucault, The Order of Things (1974), 34; J. Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924), 209 ff.
⁵ S. Clark, Thinking with Demons (Oxford, 1997), 286; N. Smith, Perfection Proclaimed (Oxford, 1989),
288.
and that it is particularly pronounced in physiognomics, be it in the light of
heavyweight intellectual arguments about the shift in the nature of the epis-
teme that underpinned the Renaissance understanding of the physiognomic,
or of the changes in the logic which upheld it and through which it was joined
to other signs. In that sense, the answer is simply that the question of physiog-
nomical meaning per se itself changes—epistemologically speaking.
The only way to provide any sort of concise, simple, and direct answer is
to present a very brief, analytical résumé of the agreement between and con-
tinuity among the aphorisms. This section does this by examining the
physiognomics relating to the eyes and the voice found in the English ‘books
on physiognomy’. Such an analysis can do no more than make general claims
about degrees of continuity at this very specific level of the much broader his-
torical phenomenon that was ‘physiognomy’ in the early modern period. Its
claims could be supported by the claim that, just as in poetry certain metres
have come to be associated with certain kinds of statement and feelings and
hence a given metre tends to maintain a portion of its meaning, so it would
appear that, in the early modern period, certain features can be said to have
embodied specific meanings through constant repetition, often in a versified
form. In what follows there is a case to be made for seeing these physiognomics
as having been the most commonly known in the English language. A closer
comparative philological examination of those in other languages would be
more revealing. Either way, as will become blatantly clear (and not only
through the absence of footnotes), the results of such an analysis are about as
‘scientific’ or as ‘subjective’ and seemingly arbitrary as an early modern expo-
sition of physiognomical doctrine. Which, in itself, is more evidence of
the need to understand the importance of the early modern epistemological
debate about the nature of language embedded in the apparent banality of
these printed physiognomical aphorisms. As fisnomy is being conceived of in
this study as a sonic and visual phenomenon, the examples that follow have
been based on the physiognomics relating to the eyes and the voice.
The eyes
The physiognomics based around the eyes provide a stark contrast with those
of the voice. On account of their being the most important of physiognomics
in the hierarchy of physical features around which the grammar of the phy-
siognomical eye was structured, it is the eyes which, more than any other phy-
sical feature, refuse the sort of simple synthesis offered by, for example, the
analysis of the physiognomics on the hair. With the eyes it is difficult to be sure
one is comparing the same physiognomics. Take, for example, small eyes. In
one treatise they are described, in separate physiognomics, as a sign of dissim-
ulation, of a liar, of envy, of a traitor. Another will describe them as the sign of
a fool, of being bad mannered, like an ape, of fearfulness, in addition to their
being an indication of deceit. Small and hollow eyes were sometimes said to be
a sign of covetousness, of a crafty and flattering person, as well as a wrathful and
angry person, but if small and inflated, it could be the sign of a murderer and a
poisoner. Thus, on the whole, one can say that small eyes were a bad sign, and
usually an indication of deceit. This is probably on account of the fact that, as
with hollow eyes, one could not see them clearly. For the best eyes were more
easily discernible.
Yet eyes that were too big, though more visible, were still not such a good
sign. There were many different types of large eyes, some looking up, some
looking down, some inclined to look to the left (apathy), some to the right
(adultery). Some moved, some were more fixed, some opened one way, some
opened another, and their meaning changed accordingly. The most common
meaning was sluggishness, or sloth, or dullness, and it was often seen as ox-like.
Yet some large eyes were a sign of cruel rapaciousness, such as one sees in
wolves. Some big-eyed physiognomics blended sloth and unshamefastness
with envy, others with a rustic and unsavoury mind, some with gluttony. Yet if
they had a luminous and humid look, then, as one author put it, it revealed an
elevated soul capable of great things, if somewhat inclined to choler, drunken-
ness, and an excessive desire for glory.
Interestingly, cross-eyedness was often given as a sign of ‘venery’. As such it
makes Descartes’s confession that he was attracted to cross-eyed women some-
what intriguing.⁶ Twinkling eyes were for some a sign of honesty; for others a
sign of anything from theft and betrayal to unfaithfulness and presumptuous-
ness. Similarly smiling eyes could be seen as a sign of dissimulation, yet in some
physiognomics smiling and twinkling are a sign of a just and merry person. A
humid look was, on the whole, better than a dry look.
Similarly, the terms used to describe the colours of the eyes are difficult to
understand. The word red is used to describe what may have been what we now
see as a number of colours, and it is given meanings as different as drunkenness,
courage, cunning, gluttony, libertinism, and a gambler. Nor is it very easy to
know what was meant by the term black. Spots were always seen as bad, be they
a sign of lechery or more generally speaking sin. The ideal colour was often
described as between black and yellow, which some authors appear to have
⁶ Rene Descartes, Les passions de l ’âme, ed. G. Rodis-Lewis (Paris, 1991), 133, fn. 1.
called brown. And the best eyes, average in size, clear, and moist, were usually
seen as a sign of intelligence and honesty.
The voice
A brief analysis of the physiognomics on the voice is a more manageable task,
if only due to the fact that there were fewer of them, and that, unlike the eyes,
they did not always appear in the treatises, thus leaving less room for disagree-
ment. Unsurprisingly, the ‘medium’ voice was more or less always given as a
sign of such virtues as reason, wisdom, prudence, and justice. Similarly the
‘good sounding’ voice was usually seen as reflecting the qualities of peacefulness
and wisdom. The deep cavernous voice was usually understood to be a sign of
magnanimity, boldness, courage, even truth, and often compared to the lion.
It is frequently difficult to distinguish this type of voice from the voice
described as sonorous, which was most often given as a sign of boldness and
eloquence.
At the same time there was another form of ‘deep’ voice which was under-
stood to be a sign of gluttony or greed, in other words, of a person addicted to
the pleasures of the stomach—presumably a voice that sounded as though it
resonated through the stomach. A ‘great’ voice was often seen as a sign of stu-
pidity (as was the ‘thick’ voice), irascibility, and a generally bad nature. It was
often equated with the ass, and in a woman was seen as an ‘evil’ sign. A voice
which started low and ended high was also often given as a sign of irascibility
and violence. Similarly the strong, quaking voice was a sign of violence; a
‘rough’ voice was a sign of stupidity and rancour.
There appears to have been much agreement over the nasal voice, which was
frequently given as signifying envy and mendacity, and the impudence, igno-
rance, and mendacity of a hasty speaker. Similarly, the person who moved
when speaking was also understood to be a liar, whilst the person who was still
when speaking was good, clever, and wise. The ‘sweet’ or ‘fawning’ voice was a
sign of envy, a liar, and a person full of suspicion; the fair or beautiful voice for
the most part was seen as a sign of stupidity. Although it is often difficult to dis-
tinguish between the variety of soft and high voices given in these treatises, the
soft voice appears to have been understood to be a sign of gentleness, often
compared with the sheep, the high voice a sign of timorousness, and both often
understood to be women’s voices. The shrill high voice was seen as a sign of
lewdness and anger, often compared with goats.
A more scholarly and scientific approach to the question of the changes
which the physiognomics in these texts underwent during the early modern
period would necessitate taking all of the aphorisms that appear in all of the
texts from this invented archive (putting those in the most ancient texts to one
side) and assembling them into a series of chronological lists arranged, say, by
physical feature. That is, to a great extent, what Giovanni Della Porta did in his
famous treatise. But it is a task more difficult than it sounds for the contempo-
rary historian with a very different sense of the ‘scientific’ than Della Porta’s. A
spectrum of the entire corpus of the physiognomical signs found in these texts
could be arranged along a number of intersecting continua, each of whose tele-
ology is signposted by increasing degrees of complexity in the element each
continuum represents. Amongst the many problems which arise is the fact
that, in many cases, it is virtually impossible for us now to visualize what is
being suggested by a physiognomic. Thus one cannot always be sure one is
comparing aphorisms referring to the same specific physical feature. Even
when one appears to be able to compare the same physiognomic (in the sense
of the same physical feature) as found in different texts, what is the cause of
such differences and changes? For example, the difference in the meaning of
flat faces one finds in texts based on the physiognomony from the Secretum or
texts based on Michael Scot’s Liber phisionomia seem unlikely to be the conse-
quence of a tangible, bloody revolution led by the flat-faced avant-garde that
changed the meaning of a flat face.⁷ Nor is it immediately obvious that such
changes are the manifestation of some wider, more profound, cultural sea-
change. Indeed, as original or as revolutionary as Scot may have been at the
time, and as much as his physiognomic on the flat face may have been formed
as a consequence of a particularly memorable example of a person with a flat
face whom Scot encountered, even a medievalist is not sure to have enough evi-
dence to perform this very detailed task.
To understand the causes of some changes in the history of physiognomy
and the intellectual apparatus that sustained the configuration of various phys-
iognomical eyes requires looking in much more depth outside the restricted
body of evidence that this corpus of early modern ‘books on physiognomy’ rep-
resents. However, to find the causes of most of the changes in the actual meta-
physical meaning given to any physiognomic (as opposed to the implicit
conception of what the physiognomic was in its intellectual status as ‘a sign’ or
‘signature’), one has to look no further than the relatively closed world of the
texts themselves. Many disagreements and variations on the visible surface
of the physiognomics are caused by the inevitable leakage and persistent
metamorphosis that, as with the passing on of oral traditions, comes with
⁷ Secretum secretorum, ed. M. A. Manzalaoui, Early English Text Society (Oxford, 1977), 381; Thomas
Hill, A brief and most pleasaunt epitomye of the whole art of phisiognomie (1556), sig. Diiii.
the innately hazardous process of written and printed transmission. As with
poetry, an even more profound transformation is introduced in the very act
of transmission by their respective translations from Hebrew into Greek into
Arabic and into Latin, followed by their translation into respective vernaculars
from the late fifteenth century onwards, all the more so for those in whose eyes
the ancient theological language of physiognomy was, like the language of the
Kabbalah, only possible in its original language—to translate it was to lose or
destroy it.
In passing, those changes that are the accidental result of scribal errors trans-
mitted to the printed versions via the manuscripts may actually be a conse-
quence of a more profound modification in the evolution of the medieval and
early modern communications system. For example, some changes were
caused by a thing as deeply important but now as intangible as the medieval
scribe’s substitution of the auditory memory (which some historians argue was
stronger than the scribe’s visual memory) of his or her own dialect in the places
where the dialect of the text seemed impenetrable.⁸ In that sense the work done
by anthropologists on the oral transmission of knowledge provides a model for
understanding the changes inherent in the textual transmission of this corpus
of physiognomical knowledge. Indeed, this oral/textual interface appears in
the fact that some of the treatises give one the impression of having been dic-
tated by the author to a scribe, and the scribe’s distinctly literal written dicta-
tion then being used for the printed version. At the very end of the section on
the eyes Indagine adds ‘also, diuers mennes eyes do runne and droppe, the
whiche do not [show] his nature, but onlye the moistnesse of the braine, with
aboundance of fleume. This is sufficient.’⁹ This could be explained by the fact
that Indagine was dictating the work from memory to a scribe. At this point he
appears to have checked himself just as he began to veer off into physiological
explanation rather than physiognomical signification and the scribe or student
simply wrote down what he said as he did so.
When Lucas Gaurico edited his brother Pompeo’s writings on physiogno-
my, he interwove a small physiognomical table, seemingly of his own making,
into the text written by his brother. If these signs originate with Lucas, their
inclusion might be an indication of his own empirical physiognomical obser-
vations.¹⁰ Other changes occurred more haphazardly in the printing process
itself. The crudely printed table in the Arcandam treatise exemplifies this
perfectly. Here it is difficult to tell which meaning is meant to go with which
physical feature, and a reader could resolve the tension in numerous ways. In
⁸ H. J. Chaytor, From Script to Print (Cambridge, 1945), 19.
⁹ Indagine, Introductions (1558), sig. Hii.
¹⁰ Pompeo Gaurico, De sculptura, ed. A. Chastel and R. Klein (Paris, 1969), 140, fn. 47.
22. The instability of printed knowledge. This tabulated presentation changes the
meaning of a physical feature. Arcandam, The most excellent, profitable and pleasant
book to find the fatal desteny, constellation, complexion and natural inclination of every
man and child by his birth. With an addition of physiognomy very pleasant to read (1592),
sig. L7v–L8 Oxford: Bodleian Library, Ashm 556. (Photo: Oxford: Bodleian Library.)
that sense, contrary to what some historians have argued, the printing process
has introduced or retained an element of instability into the textual world of
physiognomy, and thus provided what might be referred to today by some as
free-floating signifiers and signifieds, or what others might prefer to see as the
gypsy-like quality of an elusive mobility.¹¹
All that can be said on this issue is that there are some changes which
occurred simply as a consequence of the process of translation which some-
times raise questions about the ‘culture’ in which the translation was made
and which could be worth further investigation. It is often quite evident
that a writer has attempted to find more appropriate contemporary language
for the various aspects of the physiognomic, especially for its meaning.
For example, in the mid-sixteenth-century printed edition of Abano’s late
thirteenth-century treatise one finds the following aphorism: ‘qui vocem habet
crassam altam & sonoram, est audax eloquens & bellicosus’. By the eighteenth
¹¹ For a more detailed philological investigation, see M. H. Porter, ‘English “treatises on physiognomy”
c.1500–c.1780’, D. Phil. thesis (Oxford, 1998), ch. 4.
century, the author of Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece had obviously felt it more
appropriate to translate it as: ‘A great and full voice in either sex shews them to
be of a great spirit, confident, proud, and wilful’. Some such changes suggest
the pressure of the reality of the time in which the aphorism was uttered and
provide an insight into the genealogy of the morals which constituted the late
eighteenth-century self—in other words the translation of audax, eloquens,
and bellicosus as ‘great spirit’, ‘confident’, ‘proud’, and ‘wilful’, as well as the
explicit reference to the fact that it refers to ‘either sex’.¹²
Similarly, take the following chronologically arranged series of English
aphorisms which is based on a sign first coined by Michael Scot in the early
thirteenth century:
[1250] Cuius nasus fuerit in medio valde elevatum significat hominem sempe men-
dacem, vanum, instabilem, luxuriosum, cito credentem importunum ingenii boni
grossi nutrimenti et plus simplicem quam sapientem & malitiosum.
[1511] Large nose in myddes/whiche dothe up ryse, | Of a lyer | and greet spekyng is
signe.
[1556] The nose very highe eleuated in the middle which we name a copped nose:
declareth that man to bee an often lyar, vayne, unstable, leacherouse, sone or lightly
credytyng, importunate, hauyng a good wytte, grosse in feadyng, and more simple
then wyse, and malycyouse.
[1676] A Nose more than ordinary elevated in the middle like a ridge, intimates the
person to be much given to Lying, Idle, Unconstant, Luxurious, easie of beleif [sic],
importunate, of a ready flashy wit, of gross nourishment, more simple than wise,
and malicious.
[1764] A nose broad in the middle, and less towards the end, denotes a vain and talka-
tive person, a liar, and one of hard fortune.
All of these seem to agree, particularly over the fact that this sort of nose (which
has a large rising in the middle) was a sign of a talkative liar. Yet in one late sev-
enteenth-century treatise it is given as
[1669] When the Nose is large in the middle upwards, it is a signe the person is addict-
ed to superfluous Romantick stories.¹³
For all the success of the Roman de la Rose, being addicted to ‘superfluous
Romantick stories’ was more a seventeenth-century than a thirteenth-century
phenomenon. Therefore this change might be seen as a less direct, more
¹² Pietro d’Abano, Decisiones physionomiæ, ed. Michelangelo Biondo (Venice, 1548), sig. Ci; Aristotle,
Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece (1764), 108.
¹³ Scot, Phisionomia [not before 1485], [65]; Lydgate, Secrees, 83, ll. 2627–9; Hill, Phisiognomie, sig. Bvii;
Richard Saunders, Palmistry (1676), 192; Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece (1764), 105; Marc Vulson, The Court
of Curiositie (1669), 175.
metaphorical, late seventeenth-century way of saying that someone is a liar. It
is this sort of change which one might characterize as representing the pressure
of late seventeenth-century reality. In this sense, physiognomony is similar to
common law. Thus one can see how, in certain cases, the metaphysical mean-
ings in the physiognomics, for so long dominated by the allegedly natural
phenomena of Aristotelian ethics, zoological analogies, and Christian vices
and virtues, have been replaced by a phenomenon from the realm of late
seventeenth-century culture. Given the fact that the physiognomic is an
expression of the self, then this cultivated self is one that came to be physiog-
nomically expressed as a new nature. One would then have to carry out an
extensive study in order to ascertain just how popular Romantic stories were in
England at that time.
Another example of a change in a physiognomic through which one can per-
ceive the pressure of the reality of different epochs is found in a late eighteenth-
century edition of A New Academy of Compliments (1772). Under the section
headed: Signs to chose Husbands and good Wives, readers would have come across
the following nugget of physiognomical wisdom: ‘an extraordinary long Chin,
with the Under Lip larger than the Upper, signifies a cross-grain’d Person, fit for
little Business, yet given to Folly’. Given that the textual origins of this ‘popu-
lar’ ‘chapbook’ physiognomic appear to lie, once again, in Michael Scot’s trea-
tise, this physiognomic could be read as a hybrid of the medieval and the
modern. Intellectually speaking, it carries traces of Michael Scot’s combination
of the art of physiognomy with issues of selective breeding (‘signs to choose’
partners); a tinge of the seventeenth-century applied mechanics of causality
(cross-grain’d) and utility (‘fit for’), as well as the medicalization and pro-
pathologization of a Renaissance humanist metaphysical building-block of the
human self (the ‘folly’ Erasmus praised). One could also see it as containing
building-blocks of a self-understanding whose parameters are constituted by
the material reality of two very different social organizations—an agricultural
society (‘cross-grain’d’ and not cross-seeded), perched on the cusp of an inten-
sified capitalism (‘little Business’). Be that as it may, for a contemporary histo-
rian trying to find some sort of explanation for change across time, all of these
changes or inconsistencies bring us back to an issue which was often more
implicit than explicit in these printed physiognomics. That is to say the afore-
mentioned, unavoidable, issue of an early modern reader’s conception of the
episteme which underpinned this language of physiognomy.
With regard to the question ‘whence do the meanings of the physiognomics
originate?’, it has to be said that most of the meanings given to any specific
physical feature arise from previous texts. The further back one traces this tex-
tual influence, the more difficult it is to find certain evidence of why the earli-
est textual form of such and such a physiognomic took the form it did, partic-
ularly evidence which is external to the texts themselves. Many physiognomics
appear to have their origin in a purely intellectual process. Some of the phys-
iognomics in the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica, for example, appear to
have been the product of an experimental combination of logical inference and
humoral theory, with or without a zoological analogy, whilst in other texts one
finds physiognomics which seem to have been formed as deliberate logical
opposites or inversions of others.
Beauty and virtue

Notwithstanding all of those aforementioned iconic issues, when reading the
words of early modern expositions of physiognomical doctrine today, one
often comes face-to-face with what appears to be the implicit issue of an
assumed relationship between beauty and virtue that underlies many physiog-
nomics. For example, many physiognomical tracts contained the following
observation: ‘we must abstain from the co[m]pany of such as be markt &
lame in any me[m]ber, I speake of such as are naturally defectiue and lame
and not by chaunce or witchcraftes’. This explicit equation of deformity
with vice implicitly equated beauty with virtue. It raises wider theological,
social, and cultural questions about how its relationship was considered in
the early modern period to such passages of Holy Scripture as Leviticus
21: 17–24, ‘for whatsoever man he be that hath a blemish, he shall not approach’
(v. 18.)? We have seen in Chapter 1 how there are passages in Canon Law
which reveal that it was upon this basis that, by the fourth century, the
physically deformed were officially excluded from Christian ordination.¹⁴
It certainly makes one wonder upon what basis did Moses ‘chose able men out
of all Israel’—if indeed they were chosen, or whether they simply became
known?
These texts show that early modern virtue had a number of distinct, com-
mon physiognomical ideals. The point can most clearly and simply be illus-
trated by a series of aphorisms taken from the earliest and the latest texts in the
English series, all of which relate to what was considered in these texts to be the
most virtuous type of face:
[1503] The wysage that ys not short no long and that as not gret fatnes and as good
couleur betoknys oon parson werytabyl lowabyl sage and af good wyt fer wysabyl
debonayr and weelordonnyt to alys thyngys.
¹⁴ Indagine, Introductions (1558), sig. Hvv. See above, Chapter 1, III.i.

[1508] A visage neither too short nor too long and that is not over fat with good colour
betokeneth a man veritable, amiable, wise, witty, serviceable, debonair, and well
ordered in all his works.
[1511] Signes be | for ful conclusyoun, | As in wrytng | philisoffres seyn, | Whan face
kepith | dew proporcioun, | These dymenciouns | he kepith in certeyn, | Not engrosyd
| nouthir ovir pleyn, | Jawys and templys | in mene vp-rysyng, | Whiche signe is | of witt
| and greet undirstandyng.
[1528] But he that hath a meane vysage of fourme of chekes and eyes | neyther to fat nor
to leane | he is trusty | louynge | and of grete vnderstandynge | wyse and full of seruyce
and wytte.
[1556] The face meane to the disposicion of the others afore but more fatte, then leane:
declareth that man to bee true in talke, willyng to be bounde to serue, commonly inge-
niouse, wary and perfitie of memorye.
[1556] The face commune betwene long and rounde, leane and grosse: declareth that
man to be congruente to all thynges, but soner to good then euill.
[1558] A mene face not ouer lene, nor very fat, signifieth a man apt to all things.
[1558] A meane slender face is token of an ingenious, studious & wise man.
[1564] The face of them that be very cleane, is meane in the cheekes, and temples, &
somwhat fat. And that face is a true face, louing and not disdaineful. The merry face
commeth of a mery heart, and so the contrary.
[1564] The face well proportioned of colour, and other thinges appertaining, declare a
commendable life, and abundance of vertues.
[1571] The faces of such wel borne and complexioned, are on such wise: that is,
meane of composition in the cheekes, and temples, declining unto a fatnesse. Such
a creature (after Phisiognomie) is iudged iust, louing, faythful, and of a good
understanding.
[1619] Quadrata, sapientem, & constantem, ac boni consilii.
[1676] a mediocrity appearing in the Face neither to short nor long, too Fat, nor Lean,
Aptum significat ad omnia, signifies the person ingenious, and apt to all things that are
laudable and commendable.
[1676] A mean and competent leaneness in the Face, a mediocritie between fat and
lean, indicate a studious, ingenious, prudent person, the puffing, and as it were the
swelling of the Jaw-bones without flesh, presageth the Kings Evil or the like.
[1694] A well proportion’d Face, shew a Person to have virtuous qualities, and to live a
commendable Life, whether they be rich or poor.¹⁵
¹⁵ The Kalender of Shepherdes, ed. H. O. Sommer (1892), sig. K viii; The Kalendar & Compost of
Shepherds (1508), ed. G. C. Heseltine (1930), 153; Lydgate, Secrees, 83, ll. 2640–6; Manzalaoui, Secretum,
381; Hill, Phisiognomie, sig. Diiii; Indagine, Introductions (1558), sig. Iiv; Arcandam, The most excellent,
profitable and pleasant book (1592), sigs. O2v and O3v; Hill, Contemplation (1571), fol. 84v; Fludd, Utriusque
cosmi . . . historia, II. i. 2, 125; Saunders, Palmistry (1676), 202, 2[0]3; Erra Pater, The book of knowledge (1758),
65.
In the physiognomy captured in early modern printed books, it was virtue not
beauty which was defined as a ‘mean’.
Indeed, one might even go further and say that it was the issue of virtue with
which this textual physiognomical eye was originally and primarily concerned.
It is commonplace among scholars of the aesthetic that the modern sense of
beauty was developed by the German aesthete Baumgarten as a discourse on
the human body, and came to maturity at the end of the eighteenth century.
Given this, it is not surprising to find an absence of concern with beauty or aes-
thetics in these texts that date from a much earlier period. In his 1671 treatise
the London astrological physician Richard Saunders wrote: ‘a Nose that is
round and long of a pleasant feature, besides that it is one of the perfections of
Beauty, denotes the Woman or Maid, wise, prudent and chaste, and especially
when she hath a blue eye’. But this was unusual. It was not a sign that this sense
of physiognomical beauty was on the rise, at least not within the pages of
‘books on physiognomy’. Fourteen years later the same sign appeared in ano-
ther treatise. All reference to beauty had, significantly enough, been dropped:
‘a Nose round and long, of a pleasant feature, denotes in the Female Sex, espe-
cially if they have blew Eyes, prudence, chastity, and good conduct in affairs’.¹⁶
In the early modern period, when the notion of beauty was articulated in a
‘book on physiognomy’, it was often, but not always, accompanied by refer-
ences to mental properties that go with it. In that sense it was interpreted in
terms either of virtues or of vices. In fact, this argument, that the purpose of the
hermeneutics of the physiognomical eye captured in these books was less the
discovery and contemplation of ‘beauty’ in and of itself, and more the pursuit
of virtue or ethics, could be taken further. The physiognomical eye, it could be
argued, was intended to help the viewer to guard herself or himself against what
some saw as the sinful seductions of ‘beauty’ in and of itself. In 1556 Thomas
Hill stated that ‘the pleasantnes or bewtyfulnes of the voice, declareth folishnes,
cockebraynes, and stoutnes’.¹⁷ This helps to explain the detrimental meanings
which physiognomical treatises from the earlier part of the period often
attempted to etch into physical features described as ‘beautiful’.
None the less, there is evidence to suggest that the early modern Neopla-
tonic hermetic physiognomical tradition of equating beauty and virtue may
have some bearing on the later developments in, or even the construction of,
that new realm of ‘aesthetics’. Once again this brings us back to the aforemen-
tioned question of the relationship of physiognomy to early modern painting
¹⁶ Saunders, Physiognomie (1653), 175; J. S., The true fortune-teller (1686), 69.
¹⁷ Hill, Phisiognomie, sig. Cv.
and sculpting. For example, the Neoplatonic hermeticist Robert Fludd wrote,
‘Facies non multùm pulchra rarò importat bonos mores’.¹⁸ Whilst the meaning
of the term ‘pulchra’ is open to debate, and despite the qualification of the
claim introduced by the term raro, Fludd’s words nevertheless seem to suggest
some form of Platonic equation of beauty and virtue. Indeed, it may have been
in the most sophisticated Neoplatonic physiognomical eye that one finds the
origins of a notion of beauty which was left to stand as a meaning in itself—an
indication that, in the hermetic realm of the physiognomic at least, the poten-
tially paganesque poetic had yet to be detached from theological accretions.
To substantiate this claim requires returning to the treatise on sculpture
written by Pompeo Gaurico in Florence in 1504. There appears to be a lack
of evidence for why Gaurico chose to link the physiognomy he found in
the treatise by the fourth-century figure of Adamantius with his writing on
sculpture. I would suggest here that this is yet another example of the impact of
the Corpus hermeticum at this time, and that the explanation is found in
Gaurico’s Neoplatonic hermeticism. This is not the place to discuss the classic
art historical issues of how Gaurico concerned himself more with graphics and
animation than questions of technique; or how this aspect of his Neoplatonism
developed from an earlier Epicurean naturalism and was ‘open to expressive
suggestions of the inner vitality deep within the mass of the figure’—issues
which in themselves could be traced through the expressive capabilities of
art up to the Romantic period.¹⁹ The point here is that this text represented
Gaurico’s attempt to articulate what was for Christians a very contentious pas-
sage in Asclepius. That passage described the magical rites by which Egyptians
drew down the powers of the cosmos onto the statues of their gods which,
when infused with the celestial influence, then came alive: ‘since they could not
actually create souls, after having evoked the souls of demons or angels, they
introduced these into their idols by holy and divine rites, so that the idols had
the power of doing good and evil’. A sense of the literal efficacy of the words of
the physiognomical aphorisms which Gaurico found in Adamantius’s Greek
work appears to have made them into, in Gaurico’s eyes at least, a talismanic
technology by which the material reality of the ‘occult’ celestial virtues could be
guided into the statues. This achieved what Ficino described as ‘capturing the
life of the stars, drawing down the life of heaven’, what Pico della Mirandola
described as the marriage of heaven and earth, and is how Giordano Bruno
understood the efficacious power of images. It was a way of furnishing the
sculptures with the ‘occult virtue of divine efficacy’ which would then be
¹⁸ Fludd, Utriusque cosmi, II.i.2, 125. ¹⁹ C. Seymour, Sculpture in Italy: 1400–1500 (1966), 201 ff.
transmitted to the viewers of these statues by the vehicle of what Ficino referred
to as ‘spiritus’. Hermes Trismegistus described the man-made statues of the
gods in the temples as ‘animated statues full of sensus and spiritus who can
accomplish many things, foretelling the future, giving ills to men and curing
them’.²⁰ It is in terms of these words of Hermes that Gaurico’s writing on sculp-
ture can be said to have brought the scientia of physiognomy alongside propor-
tion and symmetry into the construction of art. And not only that. It also
brought the contemplation of art into the hermetic conception and practice of
healing. It made the interface between creation and contemplation of those
works of art an experience that was at one and the same time distinctly reli-
gious, medical, moral, ethical, magical, and occult—in a word, ‘physiognomi-
cal’. Paolo Pino was just one theorist who took Gaurico at his word. He
thought that ‘physiognomy was a useful and honourable part’ of the tech-
niques required by any painter of natural or artificial things, for it required the
ability ‘to see and understand all the qualities and nature of a thing’.²¹
Notwithstanding, that sense of physiognomical beauty had implications
beyond the rise of art theory and the development of an art market. It was also
underpinned by an issue of what is referred to today in English as ‘gender’. At
the end of the period under consideration, Mary Wollstonecraft’s understand-
ing of what might broadly be called the physiognomical gaze revealed the heart
of this tension between beauty and virtue that one finds in physiognomy. Her
writing gives the sense that this physiognomical way of looking was one which
aimed at moralizing what she saw as an inferior and purely physical under-
standing of beauty that had obviously established itself. She advised children
that
the soul of beauty . . . consists in the body gracefully exhibiting the emotions and vari-
ations of the informing mind. If truth, humanity and knowledge inhabit the breast, the
eyes will beam with a mild lustre, modesty will suffuse the cheeks, and smiles of inno-
cent joy play over all the features. At first sight, regularity and colour will attract, and
have the advantage, because the hidden springs are not directly set in motion; but when
internal goodness is reflected, every other kind of beauty, the shadow of it, withers
away before it, as the sun obscures a lamp.²²
At the same time she provides us with an insight into the way in which the issue
of gender underpinned the changing relationship between beauty and virtue in
the physiognomical gaze. This is because she was also concerned to relieve the
²⁰ Giordano Bruno, De la magie, trans. D. Sonnier and B. Donné (Paris, 2000); Yates, Bruno, 37, 41, 56.
²¹ Paolo Pino, Dialogo di pittura (Venice, 1548), fol. 31v.
²² Mary Wollstonecraft, Works, ed. J. Todd and M. Butler, 7 vols. (1989), iv. 390–2.
oppressive consequences which the more purely physical and geometric view
of beauty constructed by educated, middle-class Enlightened men had for
woman when judged only by these standards. She wanted to do this by expos-
ing the sexual prejudice upon which the physiognomical gaze of her patriarchal
society was founded. Wollstonecraft termed it ‘the male prejudice, which
deems beauty the perfection of woman—mere beauty of features and com-
plexion, the vulgar acceptation of the word, whilst male beauty is allowed to
have some connection with the mind’. From this it was widely accepted, she
claimed, that women arrived at ‘maturity’ (defined in terms of physical beauty
alone) by the age of 20, whereas in men (in whom it was considered as a more
physiognomical phenomenon) it was not reached until 30. Hence, the phy-
siognomy of women was understood in a general way according to different
criteria from that of men: ‘strength of body, and that character of countenance,
which the French term a physionomie, women do not acquire before thirty, any
more than men’.²³
If the purpose of physiognomy was to contemplate a person’s physical fea-
tures with the aim of avoiding the numerous vices embodied in that person,
including the seductions of that person’s beauty, or at least the seduction of a
beauty understood in a predominantly physical way; if the aim of the art of
physiognomating can thus be said to be the pursuit of virtue, then it would
appear that the early modern art of physiognomy was more concerned with
distinguishing good from bad, as the classic definition of prudence would have
us believe. In that sense the early modern physiognomical eye had yet to go into
the realms described by Neitzsche as ‘beyond good and evil’.
The vision of what Pico della Mirandola termed the ‘dignity’ of man that
one finds in most ‘books on physiognomy’ is distinctly bleak. One way in
which this almost misanthropic view of mankind insidiously suggests itself is
in the fact that the majority of the physiognomics in these treatises do not offer
a flattering view of human nature. To take just one example: of the eighty-seven
or so physiognomical aphorisms in the 1508 Kalendar, only about fifteen can be
said to be signs of virtue, whilst about sixty-four appear to be signs of vice.
There are about eight physiognomics which cannot be fitted into either cate-
gory of good or evil. As such, the latter reveal the limitations of thinking about
these physiognomical aphorisms in strict black-and-white terms of good or
bad, virtue or vice. The following is an example which one would have to
include under both, ‘great erys betokeneth foly in a man but he is in gode
mynde’.²⁴ In this aphorism folly is not compounded by another very bad
²³ Wollstonecraft, Works, v. 138. ²⁴ Sommer, Shepherds, 147.

quality like deceitfulness or ignorance. The person is foolish but none the less
good, that is to say ‘in gode mynde’, or we would say ‘means well’. Indeed, the
difficulties involved in classifying physiognomics as either good or evil reveal
the highly pragmatic and ‘utilitarian’ aspect of much of the physiognomical
thinking presented in these books. In this ‘applied physiognomics’, any domi-
nant polarity between virtue and vice is displaced by more practical concerns.
Take the following very common sign, ‘a sharpe nose sheweth an angry per-
son’.²⁵ Irascibility, and thus, from a physiognomical point of view, a sharp nose,
might be a vice in an ambassador or a prospective novice, but it could be a
virtue in a soldier. It is from this perspective that one is able to discern the very
strong element of utility in many of the early modern expositions of physiog-
nomical doctrine. This practical perspective helps one to understand how,
beyond the more ethical question of beauty and virtue, the physiognomical eye
was incorporated into a wide variety of hitherto unexamined early modern
social practices, be it the choice of marriage partners, friends, counsellors, sol-
diers, or, as mentioned above, the priesthood. In so doing, it shows how the
hermeneutic process of physiognomating in the early modern period incorpo-
rated both ethics and politics.
Sex and Gender

As implied in Mary Wollstonecraft’s aforementioned observations, the issue of
beauty and virtue also shaded into the issue of what today would be referred to
as ‘sex’ and ‘gender’. To what extent was the ‘sex’ or the ‘gender’ of either the
physiognomator or physiognomatee made explicit in these treatises?²⁶ Was the
physiognomatic eye restricted to men?²⁷ Were there some physiognomatable
features or physiognomatical traits that were seen as exclusively belonging to
the female sex or the male sex, or as being exclusively the property of the ‘mas-
culine’ or the ‘feminine’? This is another very large and as yet unexplored area
of early modern physiognomy, of which the following can only be the briefest
and most general résumé.
It is certainly true that most of these ‘books on physiognomy’ appear to have
been written by, and usually dedicated to, men. Whilst some of the aforemen-
tioned fisnomiers were undoubtedly women, with regard to the sex of the
physiognomical beholder implicit in those treatises, the suggested physiogno-
²⁵ Indagine, Introductions (1575) sig. Hiiv.
²⁶ R. Stoller, Sex and Gender (1968); J. Butler, Gender Trouble (1990).
²⁷ L. Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (1989).
mator in many of those without an identifiable author is often represented by
such male figures as the shepherd (in the Kalendar), the astrologer (in the Com-
post) and the king (in the Secretum). Yet for all the innate ‘patriarchy’ this con-
ceals and perpetuates, none of these texts explicitly claimed that the active,
physiognomating eye was the preserve of either the male or the masculine
eye.²⁸ It is only by the later seventeenth century that one begins to find
physiognomical treatises specifically addressed to women as potential physiog-
nomators, at around the same time that the subject itself starts being described
in these texts as a ‘curiosity’.²⁹
If there were, over time, both male physiognomators and female physiogno-
mators, what about the ‘sex’ of those on the other end of the physiognomating,
in other words the physiognomatees? The late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-
century editions of the Shepherd’s Kalendar suggested that both men and
women could be physiognomatees. It contained ‘a science that have shepherds
for to know the natural inclination of man and woman good or evil by divers
signs on them in beholding them only’.³⁰ As early as 1528 the Secretum refers to
the physiognomatee by using the more neutral and pluralistic term ‘people’,³¹
and from the late seventeenth century onwards, the move towards using this
gender-neutral term alongside ‘person’ to designate the physiognomatees is
quite striking. Guy Miège, for example, in his The Great French Dictionary
(London, 1688), chose the much more neutral term ‘one’, defining physiogno-
my as ‘a guess at one’s nature or inward disposition by the features of the out-
ward lineaments’.
To what extent were the physiognomics themselves either ‘sex’ or ‘gender’
specific? In other words, were there any physiognomics which were thought to
be the particular property of either men or women, or the masculine or the
feminine? There is no disputing the fact that most physiognomics include
terms such as ‘he’ or ‘man’. The innate patriarchy in the use of these terms was
not exclusive to the art of physiognomy. It was part of the more general early
modern tendency to assume a masculine abstract third person. In that sense
this practice may be assumed to be a consequence of what one historian has
argued was a one-sex model understanding of the physiology of the sexes in
which the physical differences and similarities were underpinned by a hierar-
chy of metaphysical perfection, the female body being seen as commensurable
with, but an inferior version of, the male body.³²
²⁸ M. Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today, 2nd edn. (1988).

²⁹ Vulson, Curiositie, sig. A3. ³⁰ Heseltine, Shepherds, 150. ³¹ Manzalaoui, Secretum, 377.
³² See T. Laqueur, Making Sex (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).
However, I would argue that a richer understanding of the issue of gender in
terms of its relationship to physiognomy would be achieved if these ideas about
the distinctions of sex were seen as a consequence, not of a ‘one-sex’ or ‘two-sex’
model, but of the conviction about some sort of innate, ineluctable ‘distinc-
tion’ ‘between’ the ‘sexes’ which gave rise to the symbolism of various religious
cosmogonies rather than the theories of any ‘medical’ tradition. The Zohar
provides just one example. In the Book of Jethro, a passage on the ‘lineaments
of the countenance’ speaks of how the features of the face are ‘formed by inter-
nal forces’ which then moulds, or ‘impresses’ itself upon the outwardly appear-
ing features. It is this notion of ‘impression’ that is the key to understanding the
more ‘mechanical’ and the more ‘mystical’ aspects of Francis Bacon’s under-
standing of physiognomy. Moreover, it is this notion of the ‘impression’ and
‘projection’ of the spirit into ‘form’ that Hegel refused. For Hegel, physiog-
nomical signs were ‘just the reflection of Spirit out of its sensuous existence
back into itself, and a particular [physical] existence is for Spirit something
indifferent and contingent’, the ‘kind of knowing’ to which it gave rise nothing
more than ‘idle chatter, or merely the voicing of one’s own opinion’.³³ The
passage from the Zohar, which is worth citing at length in order to avoid any
further misinterpretation, continues:
Man has a spirit on which the letters of the alphabet are in a way designed. All these let-
ters are enclosed in that spirit, and for a time the designs of those letters enter into the
face; and as they enter, the face appears with the design of these letters upon it. But this
semblance lasts for a short time only, save upon the faces of adepts in wisdom, on
whom it is always visible.
There is a place which is called ‘the world to come’, from whence issues the mystery
of the Torah with its alphabet of twenty-two letters, which is the essence of all things.
Now that ‘river which goes out of Eden’ carries all this along with it, so that when the
spirits and souls emerge therefrom they are all stamped with the imprint of those
letters; the which, when the spirit of a man be thus stamped by it, makes also a certain
impression on the face. Said R. Simeon to them: ‘If so, the likeness of the Mother is not
impressed upon the form of that spirit’.
They replied: ‘This, Master, is the teaching we have heard from thine own lips: The
design of the letters proceeds from the side which is above, and the image of the
Mother is impressed upon the spirit. The design of the Mother which is outwardly dis-
cernible follows the four prototypes—Man, Lion, Bull, and Eagle, in the Supernal
Chariot, and the spirit projects the image of them all for a time, because whatsoever
belongs to the domain of the spirit thrusts itself forward and is both visible and invisi-
ble. All these forms are designed in the shape of the letters, and although they are
³³ G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford, 1979), 193.

hidden they are discerned for a short space by those who have eyes to see, by the wise
who can comprehend the mystery of wisdom, to contemplate therein’.³⁴
Of those ‘books on physiognomy’ that do explicitly discuss the differences

in nature between men and women, most depict man as ‘perfiter than the
woman’. But details of this understanding of the physical differences between
the sexes are rarely given and never questioned in the more popular treatises
themselves. As for the physiognomical traits associated with masculinity or
femininity that followed from this distinction, this is not an issue upon which
one finds a great deal of consistency. One late sixteenth-century English
physiognomist, for example, presented a number of philosophers’ very differ-
ent ideal pictures of the general character of ‘man’ and ‘woman’. He claimed
that in the eyes of Abano, the thirteenth-century Italian philosopher and physi-
cian, men were:
of a liuely minde and courage, and unto brunte or an attempt prest and vehement: yet
slowly moued to yre, slowly pleased, aduised in businesse, in due and fytte tymes stu-
dious, abroade lyberall, stowte, iuste, trustie, unconstant or wandring from place to
place, and true of his worde.³⁵
On the other hand, he wrote of how the Arabic physician, Avicenna, saw
women as
more pittiful and gentle than men: more conuertible, lighter perswaded, sooner
seduced, enuiouser, fearefuller, unshamefaster, more foolishe, lyars, more fraudulent,
more receiue frawde, more esteeming trifles, slower, tenderer, weaker, and more prone,
or sooner drawing into familiaritie, and into companie with another.
But this refers to the general ideal of the man or woman. Moreover, as far as
these treatises go, they were never entirely consistent on this matter. The afore-
mentioned late eighteenth-century English text, Aristotle’s Compleat Master-
piece, when claiming what the art of physiognomy could do, was less convinced
that virtue or vice was the monopoly of any one ‘sex’, claiming that ‘the dispo-
sition, vice, virtues, and fatality, either of a man or a woman, are plainly
foretold’.
In fact this same eighteenth-century text reveals a certain discomfort with
the problem of the physiognomical distinction between the sexes:
In the judgement that is to be made from physiognomy, there is a great difference
betwixt a man and a woman, the reason is, because in respect of the whole composi-
tion, men do more fully comprehend it than women do, as may evidently appear by the
³⁴ Spelling et al., The Zohar, Jethro 73a–74a, 224–5. ³⁵ Hill, Contemplation, sigs. Biiiir–v.
manner and method we shall give in the following section. Wherefore the judgments,
which we shall pass in every chapter, do properly concern a man, as comprehending the
whole species, and but improperly the woman, as being but a part thereof, and derived
from the man . . . But does physiognomy give the same judgement on her, as it does of
a man that is like unto her? By no means, but far otherwise, in regard that the concep-
tion of the woman is much different from that of a man, even in those respects which
are said to be common. Now in those common respects, two parts are attributed to a
man, and a third part to a woman.³⁶
As it is an eighteenth-century text, it is suggestive of a change in the under-

standing of the physiognomy of the sexes. Indeed, paradoxical as it might
sound, one might argue that it is in the ambiguity of such passages that,
physiognomically speaking, women became the privileged site of the limits of
Enlightened rationality. In other words, they represented the aspect of the
human self which remained defiantly ungraspable and uncontainable by a
potentially all-embracing, infallible, rational, physiognomical science. As the
following chapter will make clearer, this sense of women being seen as the phys-
iognomical locus of a self-transforming, physiognomical liberty may have been
an inheritance of the metaphysical framework of the hermetic understanding
of the art of physiognomy which, in aiming at self-transformation, offered all
of its exponents, male and female, one way out of any oppressive physiological
(and astrological), and thus theological or sociological, determinism.
As for the issue of sex and gender as articulated in specific physiognomics,
some treatises, particularly from the latter part of the early modern period, sug-
gested that there was no sexual distinction to be made in the physiognomics.
For example, one late eighteenth-century English treatise contains the follow-
ing note at the end of the section on the hair, ‘Note, that whatsoever significa-
tion the hair has in men, it has the same in women also’.³⁷ In the New School of
Love (1786), the very short physiognomical exposition, which uses the mascu-
line pronoun throughout, is followed by a similar note: ‘Note. That most of the
above observations will hold in either sex’ .³⁸ For all the imprecision in the word
‘most’, it would appear that with regard to the modern feminist issue of
‘gender’ as it is articulated in the English treatises from the later part of the
period, the equivalent issue has for the most part been avoided altogether,
possibly out of a desire not to restrict the market to men or women.
With regard to specific physiognomics being gendered in one way or
another, it must be said that some physiognomics meant one thing for a man
and another thing for a woman, particularly in popular English treatises pub-
³⁶ Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece (1764), 99. ³⁷ Ibid., 101.

³⁸ New School of Love (Glasgow, 1786), 2.
lished in the later part of the period. In Aristotle’s Legacy, one finds: ‘A round
Nose at the extremity [and?] small Nostrils, denotes, in a Man Pride and
incredulity; in a Woman, mu[ch?] given to Love and lust’. Aristotle’s Compleat
Masterpiece offers another:
A nose very sharp on the tip of it, and neither too long nor too short, too thick, nor too
thin, denotes the person, if a man, to be of a fretful disposition, always pining and peev-
ish; and if a woman, a scold, contentious, wedded to her own humours; of a morose
and dogged carriage, and if married, a plague to her husband.³⁹
But there are few about which one can be certain. For example, one writer gives
‘a Forehead without lines, shews a man to be Effeminate’. Yet one can also find
what appears to be the same sign which makes no mention of effeminacy, ‘who
hath the Forehead plain and smooth without lines or wrinkles; is signified to be
litigious, contending for trifles, vain, fallacious, more simple then wise’. Other
explicitly gendered signs appear to be unique, such as ‘a low forhead is no signe
of a manly man’.⁴⁰
There are very few physical features which are always given as belonging to a
woman, or, if in a man, are seen as a sign of effeminacy. Yet the treatises do pro-
vide a sense of an urge for a clear distinction between the male/masculine and
the female/feminine through the fact that signs of the ‘manly woman’ and the
‘effeminate man’ are never complimentary. For example, the male with the
effeminate voice: ‘Shrill, soft, broken tones mark the speech of the effeminate;
for such a voice is found in women and is congruous’;⁴¹ and ‘he that hath a
femynyne voyce is soone angry | and of yl nature’.⁴² Similarly, a great (mascu-
line?) voice in a woman, as far as the Kalendar of Shepherds was concerned, was
not a good sign (‘a great voice in a woman is an evil sign’).⁴³
Moreover, one can sometimes establish a series of relatively unchanging, and
distinctly ‘gendered’, signs. One such is the small round chin. In the mid-
sixteenth century it appeared in some texts in the following form: ‘If the ende
of the chin bee rounde, it is a signe of feminine manners, and also it is a signe
of a Woman. But the chinne of a man must bee alwaies square.’ And one could
still find this physiognomic at the turn of the eighteenth century: ‘round Chin,
denotes a Man effeminate, yet haughty and proud’.⁴⁴ Indeed, there is an even
more impressive continuity in the gendered meaning given to the white face:
³⁹ Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece (1764), 105.

⁴⁰ Saunders, Palmistry (1676), 174, 172; Arcandam, Most excellent (1592), sig. N3.
⁴¹ Cf. Physiognomonics in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes (Princeton, 1984), i. 1237–50:
813b 1. ⁴² Manzalaoui, Secretum, 381.
⁴³ Heseltine, Shepherds, 153.
⁴⁴ Arcandam, Most excellent (1592), sig. O8v; Aristotle’s Last Legacy [1690?], 26.
[1558] a white feminine coloure, soft & cold, declareth a cold, soft and te[n]der person.
[1619] Alba foemineum, mollem, frigidum.
[1653] He that hath it white, womanish, soft, and cold, is tender and effeminate; this
colour suits well with women; for such are good natured, but fit for men.
[1676] a white Flegmatick Face, intimates a Feminine, soft condition.
[1685] A high white complection, bespeaks a man to be good natured, seldome angry,
soon pacefied, and ever faithful to his friend, but fearful and effeminate; and therefore
is best suited with women, to render them more admirable in the Eyes of their
Admirers.
Notwithstanding, a constant feature of the early modern ‘treatises on physiog-

nomy’ is inconsistency. Thus it comes as no surprise to find at least one contra-
diction even if one restricts the analysis to the English series. In a 1564 edition
of the Arcandam treatise one finds: ‘Very White, Strong, Meanness’.⁴⁵
All in all, it is fair to say that the early modern physiognomical eye did not
consciously see itself as an emanation of the male gaze. Nor was it. In fact, there
is some evidence to suggest that, during the eighteenth century, as the art of
physiognomy lost its intellectual status and became more incomprehensible
within the framework of the new scientific paradigm, it came increasingly to be
seen as a curiosity with which women preoccupied themselves. It was a skill for
which women became renowned for being particularly adept. In the mid-
eighteenth century Jacques Pernetti claimed:
Very far be it from me, to intend to exclude Women from the Knowledge of Physiog-
nomy; nay, I am apt to think, that their Minds unembarassed with the Spinosities of
scholastic Sciences, are more clear and vivid, more subtle and delicate, and conse-
quently better adapted for physiognomical Researches.⁴⁶
Citing Rousseau, Wollstonecraft also gives the impression that it was thought
particularly necessary for a woman to have some form of physiognomical
expertise given her position in society in the late eighteenth century, writing
that women
ought to study the mind of man thoroughly, not the mind of man in general, abstract-
edly, but the dispositions of those men to whom she is subject either by the laws of her
country or by the force of opinion. She should learn to penetrate into their real senti-
ments from their conversation, their actions, their looks, and gestures. She should also
have the art, by her own conversation, actions, looks, and gestures, to communicate
those sentiments which are agreeable to them, without seeming to intend it. Men will
⁴⁵ Indagine, Introductions (1558), sig. I; Fludd, Utriusque cosmi, II.i.2, 125; Saunders, Physiognomie (1653),
177; Saunders, Palmistry (1676), 202; True Fortune-Teller, 62; Arcandam, Most excellent (1652), sig. Hviiiv–I
[missing]. ⁴⁶ Pernetti, Letters, 53.
argue more philosophically about the human heart; but women will read the heart of
men better than they. It belongs to women—if I may be allowed the expression—to
form an experimental morality, and to reduce the study of man to a system. Women
have most wit, men have most genius; women observe, men reason. From the concur-
rence of both we derive the clearest light and the most perfect knowledge which the
human mind is of itself capable of attaining. In one word, from hence we acquire the
most intimate acquaintance, both with ourselves and others, of which our nature is
capable; and it is thus that art has a constant tendency to perfect those endowments
which nature has bestowed. The world is the book of women.⁴⁷
Wollstonecraft not only suggests that women were more adept at this form of
visual literacy; in claiming that ‘women from necessity, because their minds are
not cultivated, have recourse very often to what I familiarly term bodily wit’,
she came close to a phrase the English author Thomas Hill used in 1556 to
describe physiognomy, ‘body skyl’. It was evidently thought to be one way in
which women might attain the ‘worldly prudence’ which the expectation of
their chastity and modesty usually forbade them.⁴⁸
From this perspective, one might immediately assume that physiognomy
was taken to have been a form of female ‘sensibility’. However, it would be mis-
leading to suggest that, by the end of the period under consideration, physiog-
nomy, as a consequence of its declining intellectual status, had become the sole
preserve of female ‘sensibility’. In 1771, Henry MacKenzie published his influ-
ential novel, Man of Feeling. At one point, the hero Harley encounters a gen-
tleman conversing with a beggar:
there was something in [the beggar’s] physiognomy which caught Harley’s notice:
indeed physiognomy was one of Harley’s foibles, for which he had been often rebuked
by his aunt in the country; who used to tell him, that when he was come to her years
and experience, he would know that all’s not gold that glisters.
Despite being rebuked and criticized for his physiognomical beliefs by a

woman, his aunt, he persists in them. When conversing with the said gentle-
man on the subject of how ‘charity to our common beggars is often displaced’,
‘Harley looked again in his face, and blessed himself for his skill in physiogno-
my’.⁴⁹ Yet although this suggests it was an element in male sensibility,
MacKenzie’s Man of Feeling was, in some eyes, a rather effeminate man. This
implicit gendering of physiognomical sensibility can be taken as an indication
that the early modern physiognomical eye, indeed the early modern physiog-
⁴⁷ Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1985), 44.

⁴⁸ Hill, Phisiognomie, Preface [unpaginated, 2]; Wollstonecraft, Rights, 142.
⁴⁹ Henry MacKenzie, The Man of Feeling, ed. B. Vickers (1987), 33–4.
nomatable self never escaped what it saw and experienced as the deep, seem-
ingly innate, and natural metaphysical distinction underpinning the physiog-
nomy of ‘the sexes’. It is also a sign perhaps of the social and cultural prejudices
that the physiognomically sensitive Romantics were up against.
An Oral Physiognomical Tradition

In this final section I want to return to the issue of the physiognomical capa-
bilities of the ‘illiterati’ by asking was there an oral tradition of physiogno-
mony, and, if so, how extensive was it? What relationship did that oral
physiognomical tradition bear to that which is represented in the ‘books on
physiognomy’?
Fragments of that oral physiognomical tradition have been handed down to
posterity in the form of numerous early modern physiognomical proverbs.
These are found, paradoxically, in numerous written and printed collections of
adages and proverbial sentences, such as, ‘vultus amici index’. As this particular
proverb shows, and as stated earlier, many of them encapsulated the essence of
the art of physiognomy rather than being actual physiognomical aphorisms.
Moreover, many variations on this proverb have survived, such as ‘the eyes are
the windows of the soul’, ‘the eyes are the mirror of the heart’, ‘the face is the
mirror[/index] of the soul/mind’. There were others which encapsulated one or
other of both sides of the debate about the veracity of physiognomy, such as
fronte nulla fides and fronte multa fides, and similarly ‘fair face fair heart’, ‘fair
face foul heart’, ‘ane thrawart will, ane thrawin Phisnomy’, or its Latin version:
Distortum vultum sequitur distortio morum, or the same version for the hands:
‘he that hath good handes, must nedes have good customes’. Some were essen-
tially physiognomical aphorisms, such as: curled hair, curled sense, ‘red hair,
beware’, ‘the Red is Witty, the Brown Trusty, the Pale Peevish, the Black Lusty’,
‘rarely is a small man humble, a red man faithful, a white man brave, and a tall
man wise’.⁵⁰
Although they were known throughout Europe, little is known about the
actual scale of this sort of knowledge or the overall narrative of these physiog-
nomical proverbs, or indeed proverbs as a whole. In general, proverbs have
been called the ‘small change of [Renaissance and early modern] conversation’.
Erasmus thought they should be included in school notebooks. The English
⁵⁰ See B. J. Whiting and H. W. Whiting, Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases (Cambridge, Mass.,
1968); Daniel Arnoldi, Sententiae proverbiales (Cologne, 1675), 6, 25.
gentleman scholar John Evelyn certainly respected their wisdom and author-
ity. Proverbs were often presented pictorially. Indeed, it has been suggested that
at the time that the Dutch painter Pieter Breughel was painting proverbs, liter-
ary proverbs had reached ‘unprecedented heights of popularity’. Another his-
torian has suggested that, whilst proverbs were very fashionable with late
sixteenth-century English writers, by the eighteenth century there appears to
have been a reaction in which they ‘were first frowned upon and then banished
from polite literature, and, finally, from polite conversation’.⁵¹
What, then, was their relationship to the wisdom of the textual physiog-
nomics in these ‘books on physiognomy’? There certainly appears to have been
something of a symbiotic relationship between the oral and the textual
physiognomical traditions. Many of the ‘books on physiognomy’ contained
physiognomical proverbs. One Galenism that had attained proverbial status
was often turned to by writers as an authority for the justification of this textu-
al physiognomony: ‘This confirms the old Proverb, Animi mores corporis tem-
peramentum sequuntur; The disposition of the soul follows the temperament of
the body’. Johannes de Indagine’s famous treatise is notable for this tendency
to rest the authority of a physiognomical aphorism upon a proverb, such as in
the following case: ‘the face of them that be very cleane, is meane in the cheekes,
and temples, & somwhat fat. And that face is a true face, louing and not dis-
daineful. The mery face commeth of a mery heart, and so the contrary.’ A
further sign of this symbiotic relationship is the fact that, in addition to
incorporating actual proverbs, many of the physiognomical aphorisms in these
treatises partake in the rhetorical nature of the proverb, and not only in the
more popular treatises. Physiognomics with the simplicity of the proverb
‘Unknown unkissed’ can be found in even the most erudite works. The follow-
ing aphorism on the nose is just one of many found in Robert Fludd’s enig-
matic encyclopedia, ‘blunt weak’ [obtusus mollitiem]. Some more expansive
physiognomics were characterized by a distinctly proverbial rhythmic and allit-
erative quality, ‘A round face signifieth folly: and a great face signifieth sloth’,
whilst others were actually versified, ‘Of a red Beard and black Hair, | If th’art
wise, thou’lt have a care’, and some physiognomics, such as the one about the
bearded woman, blended into another ancient genre known as ‘curse tablets’
(tabellae defixionium), ‘Of such a woman you have this Proverb, Foeminam
⁵¹ M. P. Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England (Ann Arbor, 1950), pp. v and vii; N. Orme, Educa-
tion and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England (1989), chs. 5 and 74; Desiderius Erasmus, The Educa-
tion of Children, trans. Richard Sherry, in Richard Sherry, A Treatise of Schemes and Tropes (1550), facs.
(Gainesville, 1961), 204; Evelyn, Numismata, 299–301; B. Claressens and J. Rousseau, Netherlandish Proverbs
(1969), 199; Tilley, Proverbs, p. viii.
barbatam lapidibus eminus salutandam esse. A bearded woman should saluted be
| With Stones at distance at her head to flee.⁵²
Erasmus’s Adages, alongside the famous book of the Bible, are just two mon-
uments to the esteem in which the proverbial oral tradition was held in a soci-
ety evidently soaked in such wisdom. But it was more than just a scholarly
bookish respect, it was a living respect. Jean Belot, the early seventeenth-
century French Kabbalist and author of a ‘book on physiognomy’, invented his
own aphorism for the big nose, ‘whereupon to recreate my self I made this
distick or Epigram, on the praise of one of these Noses, in imitation of Martial:
Cui longu est & pendulus nasus viri | Pendentem habet longuamque valde mentu-
lam’, whilst a litigious lawyer friend of John Aubrey’s, the Anglo-Dutch mer-
chant James Boevey, coined one in honour of his dislike of people with red hair,
‘In a red pelt there is no soul without poison’ [In rusa pelle non est animus sine
felle].⁵³ And the underlining in one Italian edition of Michael Scot’s physiog-
nomical treatise now in the Vatican library suggests that the proverbs in ‘books
on physiognomy’ did not go unconsidered (Illustration 23). Being part of a
wider body of relatively common and frequently repeated knowledge which
had the authority of both a rational and a mystical antiquity, much of this
proverbial physiognomical wisdom could easily stand as a form of what
Aquinas called self-evident truth, or even as an aspect of the original, unwrit-
ten Adamic language.⁵⁴
But, whilst this might be seen as evidence of the vivacity of the oral physiog-
nomical tradition, the question remains, to what extent should these physiog-
nomical proverbs be seen as evidence of both a wider and very different oral
physiognomical tradition, or ‘pre-textual Logos’, which has now been lost and
which Renaissance hermeticists were trying to use poetry and art to recover?
This is a difficult, if not impossible, question to answer. As we have just seen,
there was something of a symbiotic relationship between the printed and the
oral physiognomical tradition. Folk-tales provide further evidence of this and
of popular physiognomical assumptions. For example, there is a legend of a
red-haired family upon whom the beggars were frightened to set their eyes.⁵⁵
The latter is an example of an agreement between the oral and the written tra-
dition. Yet it still raises the chicken or egg question of which one was following
⁵² Vulson, Curiositie, 115; Arcandam, Most excellent (1592), sig. O2v; Tilley, Proverbs, p. vi; Fludd,
Utriusque cosmi, II.i.2, 126, taken from Pompeo Gaurico, De sculptura (Florence, 1504), sig. Cviv; Arcandam,
Most excellent (1592), sig. O2v–O3; Saunders, Physiognomie (1671), 186, 191; T. S. Barton, Power and Knowl-
edge (Ann Arbor, 1994), 97; Saunders, Physiognomie (1653), 171.
⁵³ Tilley, Proverbs, pp. vi–viii; Saunders, Physiognomie (1653), 174. See Jean Belot, Les œuvres de m. Iean
Belot (Rouen, 1640), 302–3; Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1898), i. 113.
⁵⁴ J. Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford, 1980), 32.
⁵⁵ K. M. Briggs, A Dictionary of English Folk-Tales in the English Language, 2 vols. (1971), ii. 2, 16.
23. The memorization of these physiognomical proverbs was obviously important

enough to inspire this graffiti from one reader which emphasises the proverb ‘you rarely
see a small man patient, a red man faithful, a tall man wise’. Michael Scot, La phys-
ionomia natural di Michel Scotto (Vinegia, 1546), Rome: Biblioteca Vaticana, [Racc.
Gen. Class. Ital. V 414], sig. Gvir. (Photo: Rome: Biblioteca Vaticana.)
the other. Moreover, it also raises the issue of the aspects of that oral tradition
which were not captured textually. In his 1653 ‘book on physiognomy’ the dis-
tinctly literate English astrologer Richard Saunders claimed that proverbs
derived from the written physiognomical tradition: ‘He that hath the nose
hairy at the point, or above, is a person altogether simple hearted, whence came
the Proverb, He is an honest man, he hath a hairy Nose’. However, he offered no
proof of this claim. On the other hand, in the passage on physiognomy that
Pompeo Gaurico added to his writing on sculpture, his very definition of
physiognomy, as was his aforementioned notion of the images of the illustrious
that arise in the mind from a sense of their moral character, was interwoven
with, indeed seems to take some authority from, proverbial wisdom:
Physiognomony is a manner of observing by which we deduce the qualities of the soul
from the traits that appertain to the body. In effect, one recognises, according to the
proverb, the artisan through his tools and the nature of the master by his house. Now,
as this rule is reversible and perhaps taken in both senses, it is completely indispensable
to the sculptor; because we would have produced either an image after living models,
as you made me see for Calpurnius, or to imagine the appearance of the dead after their
well known moral characters.⁵⁶
There is other textual evidence that is at least suggestive of aspects of a strong

oral physiognomical tradition that was not captured in texts. Particularly help-
ful for this are the writings of Paracelsus, notwithstanding the scholarly prob-
lems of working out which work is a genuinely Paracelsian one. Even the most
cursory glance at his writings reveals that none of the Paracelsian physiog-
nomics appears to be based on any of the signs one finds in ‘books on physiog-
nomy’. In fact, Paracelsus does not appear to provide very many specific
physiognomical signs in his writings. He comes close to this in a chapter he
explicitly devoted to physiognomy. There he wrote that a person with black
hair will have the nature of a person with black hair:
The person who wants to get to understand the mature beings of nature must know
about things that he cannot see. Because what he sees and how much he sees will be
given a name.
The name for what he sees is nothing for he sees nothing when his eyes only distin-
guish the outside/externality. However, there is nothing external which is not a sign of the
internal. If black hair grows, this indicates a person with such a nature. If there is red hair
then it indicates that. Everything must evolve from that which belongs to it, like a peach
indicates its tree.
Now there is nothing among the hidden things in nature, in the Arcanis, and in all
properties which does not have its own body. The man who likes to steal has his own
body which is different from the body of the person who does not like to steal, like
white is from black.
Just exactly what the nature of a person with black hair was considered to be is
not stated explicitly. It is simply assumed. Even those physiognomics in a
printed treatise which bears the name of Paracelsus as author and which dealt
with what were referred to as the physiognomical signs of death, were really
only a version of the Hippocratic ‘facies’.⁵⁷
There are other ways in which the physiognomy of Paracelsus is clearly
distinguishable from the textual physiognomical tradition. As was shown in
Chapter 1, the physiognomical eye of the written, pseudo-Aristotelian tradi-
tion contained what was described as a ‘characterological prism’. This came
into operation during the more deductive process of physiognomating when
the eye searched for marks of specific metaphysical traits, and those traits were
⁵⁶ Saunders, Physiognomie (1671), 195; Gaurico, De sculptura (1969), 128.
⁵⁷ Paracelsus, Opera (Strasburg: Lazari Zekners, 1603), i. 763.
conceived of as full-blown characters such as ‘the gambler’, ‘the angry man’,
and ‘the shy man’. Paracelsus’s physiognomical eye, as his description of black
hair and his notion of lumen naturae suggests, was supported by a very specific
metaphysics. However, it does not appear to contain any of these deductive
structures. Paracelsus’s own writings contain fragments of what might be
termed nationalistic physiognomy. For example, he was not particularly enam-
oured of the French: ‘And so by Chiromancy and Physiognomy one can tell
what the difference is between us and the French people’.⁵⁸ But this is all. The
writings of Paracelsus do not contain detailed discussions of the theory of what
Johannes Alsted called physiognomia orta. Similarly, as astrological as Paracel-
sus’s conception of physiognomy was, the traditional physiognomies of the
planets and the signs of the zodiac are not prominent in his ideas on physiog-
nomy, thus distinguishing his sense of the physiognomical eye even further
from the textual tradition.
For all that Paracelsus committed his thoughts to paper, he was notoriously
anti-bookish, and this comes out in his writings. Mention has been made of
how the authors of books on physiognomy often refer to the name of an earli-
er authority, be it Albertus Magnus or Polemon. Paracelsus often seems to want
to highlight this distance between his physiognomy and the physiognomy of
the textual physiognomical tradition by frequent reference to an often implic-
it, proverbial, and as such an oral physiognomical authority, rather than any of
the named textual authorities. Take the following passage in which Paracelsus
discusses the flexibility in the meaning of the physiognomical sign:
For there is not only one sign for one quality, . . . it has lots of meaning in it . . . It’s
the same with physiognomy. There are the eyes, nose, mouth, jaws etc., which belong
to the physiognomy. Now, one is looking into the face. One is good, the other evil, one
is in the middle, one has a penchant to this, one to something different, and so there
are many things like this. But the face is a mixed forecast of all the qualities that can be
found in the human being. The same thing with a rock. It might give silver, even
despite bad forecasting. And it might give nothing even if it has good indications. In
the same way the face is a mixed forecasting . . . So that if you want to tell about a per-
son after their physiognomy, you have to take everything together, then you can find
what there is. For example, in desperate situations you can see what there is because in
desperate needs things are coming to the surface, and then physiognomy will show
what character is, for before it could have been that he was hiding his infidelity . . .
When he comes under fire, his pearl will come out, his silver will be put on the balance.
The phrases ‘the same thing with a rock’ and ‘under fire, his pearl will come
out’, covering a spectrum of non-textual wisdom, show how, in Paracelsus’s
⁵⁸ Paracelsus, Sämtliche Werke, ed. K. Sudhoff and W. Matthiessen, 15 vols. (Munich, 1922–33), xii. 443.
eyes, the spectrum of physiognomical hermeneutics ranged from the doctrine
of signatures (the rock) to the sphere of local proverbial wisdom of ‘everything
will out in the end’. Indeed, nuggets of this sort of proverbial sagesse appear
again and again in various guises throughout the passages in which Paracelsus
discusses physiognomy. For example, ‘physiognomy is the recognition of the
inner hidden things of man . . . You can tell what is in the heart of somebody
because he who has a full heart has a mouth that will flow-over.’ A German
proverb to the effect of ‘if you have something to tell other people which is very
important to you, your mouth will give way to a wave of words’ is behind this:
the same proverb that one finds on the work of Jacob Cats, ‘whatever your vice
is, however you hide it, the mouth will reveal it’ [‘Quisque suo vitium, quot tegit,
ore gerit’]. It also appears behind the following physiognomical observation,
which, in turn, takes Paracelsus back to the doctrine of signatures:
although the eyes of human beings show perfectly well the physiognomy of their
hearts’ desires, the ears of their mood’s luxury, the tongue will show what they are filled
with inwards. Such signs can be found in flowers e.g. in those parts of the flowers that
play the role of the tongue.
In the following passage, both the doctrine of signatures as well as some obvi-
ous biblical and genealogical overtones are clearly discernible in his proverbial
claim that ‘one can tell the tree by the fruit’:
what his heart desires, his ears will hear, his eyes will see what he is searching for. That’s
why the same person can be judged by physiognomia coelestis and will give knowledge
by his behaviour. You can tell by the fruit which is the tree.
Indeed, this proverbial logic appears to be based on the empirical and thus
authoritative experience of everyday face-to-face encounters. Paracelsus
describes one such encounter in the following way:
you come to him, begging him to lend you a sum of money, by fidelity. And if you see
that this is his fire, you bring into daylight what is in him apart from being faithful. If
you think that he is faithful make him join you in your desperate need, look how the
fire will behave. It is like the smoke in a smith’s pit, it flees. Thus will the fidelity flee.
That’s why you should know that in all things you should judge by reason of the things
that are shown in nature.
It is the same thing in the face. One face has many faithful signs and a few unfaith-
ful signs. One person has many signs of one thing and few of another thing, but
one should always pay attention to the signs that have been made by nature to mark
somebody.
One could even go so far as to argue that this passage reveals how it was an
everyday proverbial physiognomical experience which was intellectualized and
which entered the written form of the doctrine of signatures in the natural
magic concept of ‘sympathy’. It is the everyday phenomenology of these face-
to-face encounters, often embodied in proverbial wisdom, that appears to be at
the basis of Paracelsus’s art of physiognomy, which he then conceptualizes and
stretches across the terrain he calls his ‘astronomy’ through the notion of signa-
tum, analogy, and into the doctrine of signatures. Given the wider relevance of
physiognomy to the medicine of Paracelsus, evident in such passages as: ‘Each
illness and its remedy are of equal physiognomy, chiromancy and anatomy.
And without this no doctor may be who has understood the reason’; and given
the extent to which the foundations of Paracelsus’s physiognomy appears to be
in proverbial wisdom, then this oral proverbial wisdom can be said to have been
a fundamental aspect of the intellectual foundations of Paracelsian medical
logic, which claimed everyday common experience as the highest source of
wisdom.⁵⁹
The conceptual untidiness of Paracelsus’s physiognomy in its textual form
(sometimes seven, sometimes nine ‘religions’ or ‘faculties’ in his ‘astronomy’;
sometimes ‘habitus’, sometimes ‘proportion’ was said to be one of the three
things that made up his ‘signatum’) suggests that there was more to it in its oral
form than recorded in his writings—as far as one can retrieve it. This is not sur-
prising. Indeed, it seems perfectly in keeping with Paracelsus’s frequent claim
that true medicine came not from reading books but from looking and listen-
ing; from observing the book of nature with a magical eye. It was the illiterate
peasants, not the university-educated physicians, who were the masters of this
sort of medicine—illiterate peasants and old women. Indeed, at this point
Paracelsus brings us back to the argument put forward in the previous chapter
about the social impetus in terms of which the spread of the ‘Egyptian’ wisdom
of the Corpus hermeticum and the particular sort of physiognomy that resulted
from it have to be understood and explained. Paracelsus added another type of
person to this list of the uneducated, un-academic learned, the ‘Egyptians’:
‘Learn of old Women, Egyptians, and such-like persons; for they have greater
experiences in such things than all the Academicians’.⁶⁰
Conclusion
A certain degree of continuity can be established among the physiognomies in
these texts, but not in a very scientific way. The changes and disagreements are
⁵⁹ Ibid., xiv. 182; xii. 343; x. 300; xii. 343; xiv. 183–4; x. 261.
⁶⁰ Cited in A. G. Debus, The French Paracelsians (Cambridge, 1991), 9.
for the most part explicable in terms of the nature of textual transmission.
However, these textual physiognomics need for the most part to be understood
in terms of the different early modern epistemological understandings of the
natural or purely arbitrary link between the signifier and the thing signified.
The origins of any particular physiognomic, when not obviously the product
of a particular form of logic or dialectic, or a previous, earlier text, often appears
to reside in the physical appearance of a famous historical or mythical person-
age. It is more fruitful to approach this issue as representing a physiognomical
conception of history and follow the implications which the innate iconicity of
the language of physiognomony has for the relationship of physiognomy, not
only to the history of hieroglyphics and emblems but also to the history of art
and the creation and perception of images more generally. Notwithstanding
these issues, the physiognomics in these early modern treatises suggest that
physiognomy was more concerned with virtue than with beauty. Having said
that, the Neoplatonic link between beauty and virtue comes through in some
of these treatises, suggesting that physiognomy may have contributed to the
birth of the aesthetic. If physiognomony was more concerned to warn people
away from the seductions of beauty, it also had a more pragmatic, less ethical,
more political element. Applied physiognomics was more concerned in choos-
ing the right person for the job rather than judging them on the purely ethical
grounds of good and bad. Finally, I also argued that there was an oral physiog-
nomical tradition. Oral traditions represented the sort of knowledge to which
everyone had access, including those who could not read books. If the mean-
ings in these texts are some of the meanings through which people throughout
Europe used to understand each other’s eyes, and their own physiognomies,
other people, and the rest of nature’s natural bodies, then, like the many differ-
ent local languages and dialects of early modern Europe, an oral physiognomi-
cal tradition may have provided those who could not read (and even those who
could) with a very different range of physiognomical meanings beyond those
found in the textual physiogomical tradition.⁶¹ Like the physiognomical
métier of the gypsies, there appears to have been some sort of oral physiog-
nomical tradition which, for all that some of it may have been captured in
proverbs or in the writings of the Zohar, is now lost.
⁶¹ F. Loux and P. Richard, Sagesse du corps (Paris, 1978), 11 ff.
5
Physiognomating by the Book
In these two final chapters I want to provide present readers with an idea of how
the reading of the physiognomony in these books worked its natural magic in
such a way as to bring the reader to some form of self-knowledge. I will also try
to offer a way of understanding how, in the early modern period, the hermetic
sense of reading the art of physiognomy gave rise to an ‘internal cinema’ that
was thought to be capable of bringing about a self-transformation, or what was
referred to in the Corpus hermeticum as a ‘regeneration’. With the gestation of
time, and with all the intellectual, religious, social, political, and cultural
changes that took place between the late fifteenth century and the late eigh-
teenth century, this intensely religious process of ‘regeneration’ was lost sight
of, and reading a ‘book on physiognomy’ was transformed into a much more
light-hearted form of recreation. Those changes are encapsulated in the overar-
ching metaphor used in the Introduction of this book, where the reading of a
‘book on physiognomy’ was described as having undergone a ‘shift’ from pray-
ing to playing.
The Rhetoric of Physiognomy

Historians wishing to reconstruct former ways of reading have developed a
methodology in which they talk of the ‘encounter’ between the ‘world of the
text’ and the ‘world of the reader’. It is this ‘encounter’ that produces the mean-
ing of the text. In that ‘encounter’ the reader is said to ‘appropriate’ the text. In
that encounter the reader can create the meaning of the text, but that act of cre-
ation is limited by the form and content of the text being read. In other words,
like Marx’s view of man’s relationship to history, as much as readers try to make
a text their own, the text also makes them. A more early modern way of putting
it would be to talk of the ‘natural magic’ that happens between a person and a
book during the act of reading.
The now standard textbook on the history of reading has raised the follow-
ing fundamental question, ‘can we . . . document more directly the ways hum-
ble folk appropriated the texts that they bought, borrowed or listened to?’¹ The
following analysis is an attempt, in part, to reconstruct the way in which ‘books
on physiognomy’ were read by more ‘humble folk’, or rather, given the limi-
tations of the extant evidence, the more ‘humble ways’ in which they were
read. That is to say it deals with readings which were not driven by the de-
mands of any particular professional discipline but by engaging with the
subject on its own terms as an alleged provider of a way of coming to some sort
of self-knowledge.
Some ‘books on physiognomy’ were undoubtedly read and ‘studied for
action’ by the wide variety of the disciplined professionals who owned copies of
them.² The reading of many a ‘book on physiognomy’, for example, would
have given the Renaissance humanist in any scholar plenty of material upon
which to practise his philological investigations, encouraging a search through
a labyrinth of newly acquired, but preciously ancient, manuscripts in Latin,
Greek, Arabic, and Hebrew, in an attempt to discover the ancient roots of the
subject.
Wearing his more abstract hat as an Aristotelian natural philosopher, any
decent Renaissance scholar would have transformed or appropriated a banal
textual exposition of physiognomical doctrine into a sophisticated-sounding
semiotic system. Distinctions would have been made in his mind between this
‘celestial’ physiognomic and that ‘sub-celestial’ physiognomic; between those
‘sub-celestial’ physiognomics that were ‘elementary’ and those that were
‘mixed’; between ‘signs’ which were ‘necessary’ or ‘contingent’, ‘proper’ or
‘common’, ‘permanent’ or ‘transient’; and between signs classifiable according
to size, colour, movement, even light.³
The pure logician in any Renaissance scholar had much to learn from the art
of physiognomy about the logic of what was known as ‘the syllogism’. In fact,
the art of physiognomy provided European logic with a syllogism all of its
own.⁴ Known everywhere as the ‘physiognomical syllogism’, it was often pre-
sented in diagrammatic form (Illustration 24). The early modern lawyer con-
cealed inside this logician would have been more concerned with assessing the
utility of the physiognomical syllogism for his more practical métier. James
Boevey, the mid-seventeenth-century Anglo-Dutch merchant-turned-lawyer
¹ G. Cavallo and R. Chartier (eds.), The History of Reading in the West (Cambridge, 1999), 281.
² A. Grafton and L. Jardine, ‘ “Studied for action”: How Gabriel Harvey read his Livy’, Past and Present,
129 (1990), 3–51.
³ See Johannes Alsted, Encyclopaedia septem tomis distincta, 4 vols. (Herborn, 1630), ii. 767 ff.
⁴ See, for example, Augustus Niphus, Parua naturalia (Venice, 1550 [–1551]), fol. 6v.
Physiognomating by the Book 209
24. Diagram of the physiognomical syllogism, Giambattista Della Porta, De humana

physiognomonia (Vici Æquensis, 1586), 27. Private collection
mentioned in Chapter 3 as the author of his own manuscript on physiognomy,

was one who did exactly this. His manuscript treatise on ‘the art of going to law’
reveals that the lawyer in him soon discovered the ultimately rhetorical nature
of the physiognomic. He gave the following example: ‘He hath a soft skynn;
ergo, he is witty. He is an hairy man; ergo, he is lecherous’, and argued that it
showed that the connection between the ‘signe’ and the ‘signified’ was contin-
gent rather than necessary. For all that this reveals Boevey’s ‘modern’ position
on the issue of the epistemology of the language of physiognomy (that it was an
arbitrary, conventional, language, rather than a language which somehow con-
tained a natural link between the words and what those words meant), it does
not mean that he therefore simply dismissed it. Indeed, in Boevey’s opinion,
this made physiognomical syllogisms more useful to an ‘Orator’ then to a legal
‘Disputant’.⁵ At which point our Renaissance lawyer could have reverted to the
⁵ James Boevey ‘The Art of Going to Law’, Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library,
B673M3A72 [1665–6], 109; I. Maclean, Logic, Signs and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 2002), esp.
4.3.3.
Renaissance humanist deep in himself. A glance at the latest Renaissance schol-
arly edition of the Opera omnia of the celebrated ancient Roman writer Cicero
would have provided him with an intriguing classical precedent for exactly this
use of physiognomical rhetoric in a court of law in Cicero’s Pro Quinto Roscio.⁶
It was by donning his Renaissance medical cap, on the other hand, that our
Renaissance scholar would have provided himself with the largest number of
competing theoretical perspectives in terms of which to appropriate this art of
physiognomy. As we have seen, although physiognomy was never originally a
part of Galenic or Hippocratic medicine, it had been absorbed into both, par-
ticularly since the thirteenth century. One pseudo-Galenic text carried the fol-
lowing, much-quoted statement: ‘In those who practise medicine without a
knowledge of the subject of physiognomy, the judgement goes to seed, wal-
lowing in darkness’. Less blatant was the Therapeutics for Glaucon, in which
Galen advised the study of the eyes of the healthy for the character of the soul
as well as of the sick for prognosis.⁷ Mention was made in Chapter 3 how
Alexander Achillini, the late fifteenth-century professor of natural philosophy
at Bologna and Padua, attempted to read physiognomy in Aristotelian terms in
order then to reconcile it with his Averroist perspective.⁸ Most would have
examined its conclusions in the light of the famous Galenic aphorism often
cited in the treatises themselves: ‘the mores of the soul follow the temperament
of the body’. In 1611, Jacques Fontaine, a Galenic physician from Aix-en-
Provence (d. 1621), who was mentioned in the Introduction to this book, took
this so far that he published a book entitled Phisiognomia Aristotelis, in which
he gave a Galenic physiological explanation of each of the physiognomical con-
clusions found in Aristotle. At this point we can return to the aforementioned
issue of physiognomy and the history of law. For the lawyer in the humanist in
this particular physician found a distinctly legal practical outlet for this appar-
ently less rhetorical, more ‘scientific’ form of physiognomical knowledge—the
persecution of witches.⁹
Yet in some ways the art of physiognomy was more simple than that. Given
that the physiognomony in these books was the more or less systematized prod-
uct of a seemingly common-sense way of seeing and listening, is there a way in
which the physiognomy found in these books was read that distances it from
the clearly defined academic philosophical frameworks through which it was
⁶ E. C. Evans, ‘Physiognomy in the Ancient World’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s.
59, 5 (Philadelphia, 1969), 43. ⁷ T. S. Barton, Power and Knowledge (Ann Arbor, 1994), 206, fn. 18.
⁸ B. P. Copenhaver, ‘Astrology and Magic’, in C. B. Schmitt and Q. Skinner (eds.), The Cambridge His-
tory of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, 1988), 264–300: 271–2.
⁹ Jacques Fontaine, Des marques des sorciers (Lyon, 1611), 4 ff.
analysed and appropriated, and brings it closer to its instinctive, even pre-tex-
tual, audio-visual roots? With regard to such less scholarly, less ‘bookish’ read-
ings of a ‘book on physiognomy’, one question recently posed in relation to ‘the
physiology of reading’ is of relevance here: ‘what is it that passes from page to
mind when someone reads, and how does it have an effect?’¹⁰ What occurs in
the following analysis might be helpfully thought of as an attempt to establish
and investigate the ‘physiognomy of reading’. One enters the realms of the
‘physiognomy of reading’ by focusing initially upon the early modern art of
rhetoric—in the case of these texts, the rhetoric that underpinned an early
modern exposition of physiognomical doctrine in textual form.
The early modern interest in emblems and hieroglyphs as well as in phys-
iognomy was part of the rediscovery of the troubling Egyptian aspect of the
antiquity and classicism that constituted such a fundamental part of the peri-
od known as the Renaissance. Another part of that reawakening classicism was
the rediscovery not only of classical rhetoric but also of the visual power of the
rhetoric of the art of physiognomy. The second-century Roman political ora-
tor Polemon represented the best classical example of how to use physiognom-
ical rhetoric as a ‘new magic’ in the ‘winning of [his audience’s] souls’.¹¹ The
most famous seventeenth-century physiognomist, the Italian natural philoso-
pher and playwright Giovanni Battista Della Porta, was also very aware of this.
This is most clearly and simply demonstrated by turning to his famous text, the
opening pages of which included a woodcut of Cardinal Luigi d’Este—the
man to whom he had originally dedicated his De Physiognomia Humana (1586)
(Illustration 25). The verse underneath the Cardinal’s face invited readers to
inspect this image of the great hero of Este, ‘whose soul is even more dignified
than his dignified face’. This was then followed by an extended physiognomi-
cal interpretation of Este’s face that clearly shows the rhetorical power of the art
of physiognomy. It was, as Della Porta described it, ‘an example of the way in
which to put into practice the rule of physiognomy’ using the ‘effigy’ of the
most illustrious and reverend cardinal.¹²
Whilst this is yet another suggestion of the need for historians to explore the
development of the early modern portrait in terms of the spread of this interest
in physiognomical rhetoric, in what follows we shall focus on the impact of the
rhetorical aspect of the physiognomony present in the (often illustrated) books
on the subject. As stated above, the physiognomy that happens between two
people is different from the physiognomy that happens between a person and
a book. None the less, examining the rhetorical structure of an exposition of
¹⁰ A. Johns, The Nature of the Book (Chicago, 1998), 386. ¹¹ Barton, Power, 97.
¹² Giambattista Della Porta, Della fisonomia dell’huomo (Naples, 1610), sig. Aov.
25. ‘Physiognomical rhetoric’ of one sort or another often accompanied early modern
portraits. Woodcut of Cardinal Luigi d’Este, Giambattista Della Porta, De humana
physiognomonia (Vici Æquensis: Apud Iosephum Cacchium, 1586), 4. Private
collection.
physiognomical doctrine is the first step towards reconstructing how readers

read early modern ‘books on physiognomy’, and, as a result, might provide
some indirect evidence of the process of physiognomation as it occurred
between a fisnomier and a client.
Despite one or two exceptions, the basic structure underlying any textual
exposition of physiognomical doctrine, be it the physiognomy in ancient
papyri, medieval manuscripts, or Renaissance and early modern printed texts
and pamphlets, is more or less exactly the same—a list. Numerous early mod-
ern authors even went so far as to present this essential structure in some sort of
tabulated form (see Illustration 22). In the enormously condescending eyes of
posterity, these lists of physiognomics (like the individual physiognomics
themselves) appear too crude, illogical, or simply inane to be taken seriously.
Even if one dares to speak of the ‘narrative structure’ in a list of physiognomics,
it consisted of nothing more than a simple, straight line running, usually, from
the head to the feet. It lacked all those more interesting features so characteris-
tic of Renaissance dialogues, sixteenth-century plays, or the seventeenth-
century romances that in the eighteenth century gave way to the rise of the
novel: the cut and thrust of witty dialogue, the dramatic twists of plot, and the
temporal development of characters. However, it is this apparent banality
that turns out to have been a fundamental aspect of what made these texts
interesting.
Two very specific rhetorical effects ensued as a consequence of the afore-
mentioned literary banality of these lists of physiognomics. Both were charac-
terized by a form of engagement with the text on what might be described as
the text’s own terms. One was a consideration of what the physiognomics
implied about the ‘physiognomy’ of another person. The second was a reflec-
tion upon what the physiognomics implied about the reader’s own ‘physiog-
nomy’. As will become evident, both routes could lead to the consideration of
the nature of the divine and the contemplation of the physiognomy of the
Godhead. Either way, the rhetorical result was universally the same. It was the
readers who metaphorically supplied those narrative and dramatic deficiencies
by placing themselves ‘inside’ the text, or by placing the text ‘inside’ them-
selves. Those readers then became the central ‘characters’ around whom the
potentially efficacious physiognomical narrative was spun. In brief, a dialogue
commenced. Readers began to physiognomate themselves, or each other. The
plot thickened.
Let us put aside the issue of the different epistemological understandings of
the printed physiognomics in one of these texts which any reader may have
had, and simply assume that an exposition of physiognomical doctrine was
being read alone, in private, for example, by a nun at the turn of the sixteenth
century. Her solitary, self-reflective process of self-physiognomation could
have been triggered off by a single aphorism. Taking an arbitrary entry point,
she would have read that ‘thin lips signifieth lecherousness and lyings’.¹³ There
were numerous pathways in her mind along which this physiognomical oracle
would have travelled towards her understanding of what had long been under-
stood in the Christian West as her ‘inner self ’.¹⁴ If she had thin lips, and knew
¹³ The Kalendar & Compost of Shepherds [1508], ed. G. C. Heseltine (1932), 153.
¹⁴ Taylor, Sources of the Self, 129 ff.
she was slightly lecherous and susceptible to lying, the impact of the alleged
truth of the aphorism could have been quite powerful, even uncanny. For
until that moment she may never have considered herself a person nor-
mally disposed to such vices, but now felt that this aphorism spoke as an
authoritative and timely omen.
This rhetorical effect was all the more likely if she had already been strongly
struck by, and convinced about, the truth of one of the physiognomics she had
read earlier in the text. From then on, she may have felt that she had to guard
herself against the vices of lechery and lying. Indeed, she may have come to
credit the physiognomic with the powerful and memorable revelation of an
aspect of her personality of which she had hitherto been unaware, or had been
trying to deny or to suppress in herself. It was, after all, a widely accepted
notion that it was not good to lie. In addition, there was an abundance of wide-
ly known physiological explanations for a variety of physiognomical aphorisms
which she could have drawn upon to underpin the veracity of the aphorism,
available in such popular works as Manfredi’s Liber de homine.¹⁵
If she had thin lips but was a model nun, utterly convinced that she did not
have an inclination to lechery or to lying, she could have resisted the ancient
wisdom of the aphorism and concluded that the sign was either wrong or not
applicable to her. She may then have moved on to the next aphorism, or have
decided to call into question the overall validity of physiognomy as a scientia
and drop the manuscript on the spot. Or she might have concluded, Socrati-
cally, that despite the natural meaning of her physical appearance, she had suc-
ceeded in overcoming the vices to which the unquestionable natural truth of
this physiognomic and her own physiognomy so naturally disposed her. This is
how Socrates is said to have responded to what he admitted was the true, albeit
unfavourable, assessment of his snub-nosed physiognomy by the famous
Syrian physiognomist Zopyrus.
Even if she was, in reality, distinctly blubber-lipped, the aphorism about
thin lips might still have troubled her with its suggestion that she was suscepti-
ble to lechery and lying. She could have rejected the verity of either the apho-
rism or the entire discourse of physiognomony as an acceptable scientia, yet still
contemplated the plausibility of the suggestion that she was inclined to lechery
and lying. Similarly, she could have rejected this particular sign but located
these vices in another of her physical features. Such may have been our hypo-
thetical reader’s reaction were she a blubber-lipped, ‘hawked-nosed’ nun, who
then encountered the following aphorism later in the same text: ‘A hawked
¹⁵ Girolamo Manfredi, Liber de homine (Bologna, 1474), Lib II, cap. V.

nose that boweth to the upper lips signifieth malice, deceit, untruth, and
lechery’.
Of course, our blubber-lipped nun may also have been distinctly snub-
nosed, and yet still felt the inner twang of the recognition of a tendency to lech-
ery and lying in herself. In this case, she may have then returned to her lips and,
in this re-examination, begun to think of, or even actually see, them as thin.
After all, how thin are thin lips? Whilst there is an obvious and real distinction
between blubber lips and thin lips, long faces and round faces, big chins and
small chins, certainty in such self-description is neither as easy nor as visually
self-evident as one might imagine. This is perhaps especially the case when
someone is beholding themselves. In the middle of the seventeenth century,
even a person as ‘rational’ and ‘enlightened’ as the duc de Rochefoucauld had
exactly this problem. One of the parlour games in the salon of Mademoiselle de
Montpensier, the ‘Grande Mademoiselle’, consisted of inviting the guests to
compose written ‘portraits’ of themselves. From Rochefoucauld’s self-portrait,
which she included in the collection she published in 1659, we learn that he had
always been told that he had ‘too much chin’. Indeed, even the empirical reflex-
ion provided by a mirror did not help him reach a decision on the matter: ‘In
the old days I used to be told that I had too much chin: I have just felt it, and
also looked in the glass to see if this is so, and I really cannot say whether it is
true or not.’¹⁶
To some modern minds, part of the lack of what we see to day as ‘scientific’
certainty in these physiognomical signs lies not only in the absence of any ver-
ifiable, causal explanation for each one, or the absence of a causal explanation
of their interrelationship, but also in the fact that many of the physiognomical
aphorisms in any list appear to contain contradictory meanings. Here we need
to return to something that was pointed out in Chapter 1. For the original
grammar of the process of physiognomating allows us to understand how it
provided Renaissance readers with the means to circumvent such apparent log-
ical obstacles to its sense. Take for example ‘Long ears signifieth folly, but it is a
sign of good memory’.¹⁷ One might think ‘folly’ and ‘a good memory’ a con-
tradiction in terms. After all, memory has often been associated with intelli-
gence and wisdom. Yet has there ever been a person who, for all the perfection
of their memory, could not be accused of ‘folly’? At moments of intimate con-
fession, even the most arrogant and stubborn of such people might be prepared
to admit a streak of folly. Similarly, a large enough dose of folly might easily suc-
ceed in persuading an amnesiac of his or her excellent memory. Being able to
¹⁶ The Maxims of the Duc de la Rochefoucauld, trans. C. Fitzgibbon (1957), 19, 24.
¹⁷ Heseltine, Kalendar, 153.
see that folly symbolically embodied in a physical feature could have provided
them with a concrete and daily reminder of an abstract vice that they ought to
avoid in themselves, and that they should remember to try to avoid or over-
come in society at large.
As we saw in Chapter 4, the more complex physiognomic consisted of many
apparently different meanings attached to or discoverable within one physical
feature:
The nose retorte and crokyng upwarde, and long, hauyng the ende congruently
grosse: declareth that man to be bolde, proude, a niggarde, enuyouse, couetouse,
Ireful, leacherouse, a lyar, a deceauer, vayne gloryouse, unfaythful, a stryuer, and a
brawler.¹⁸
However, from a rhetorical point of view, when given time to breathe, when
whatever music the words may have had was given time to resonate ‘inside’ the
reader, the different meanings in this sign were not seen as contradictions. They
became small genealogies of related metaphysical traits—the interlaced strands
of morality from the metaphysical web of the self. To that extent, it is worth
repeating that these physiognomics could be seen in terms of the semiotic con-
cept of culture espoused by Weber and Geertz, ‘that man is an animal suspend-
ed in webs of significance he himself has spun’.¹⁹
In the search for metaphysical meaning rather than physiological explana-
tion, such physiognomics required a more drawn-out meditative form of con-
templation. Their range of meanings was weighed and considered at greater
length in terms of their relationship to each other, with new meanings teased
out of their seeming incompatibilities and even their interstices. In this partic-
ular case, the reading nun might have reflected upon the relationship between
being proud and being envious. Or she may have considered whether there was
a contradiction between being bold and being unfaithful. She could have
resorted to the hierarchy built into the classical grammar of this art which was
perpetuated in many early modern ‘treatises on physiognomy’ such as the one
suggested by the Italian professor Camillo Baldi. One could also alter the
meaning given to a particular physical feature in relation to a different, perhaps
even contradictory, meaning given to the same feature. In this way one began
to meditate upon the genealogy of the ‘mores’ attached to the feature in order
to reach some form of conclusion. As was shown in Chapter 1, in one fourth-
century anonymous Latin ‘treatise on physiognomy’, the eye-lashes of loquaci-
ty, the forehead of a thinker, and the eyes of raging madness might eventually
¹⁸ Thomas Hill, A brief and most pleasaunt epitomye of the whole art of phisiognomie (1556), sig. Bviv.
¹⁹ C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 4–5.
be resolved into a loquacity which is less rude and a character which is impetu-
ous rather than mad.²⁰
Whilst the physical feature (the ‘signifier’) which constituted part of the
physiognomical ‘sign’ formed such a fundamental part of every physiognomi-
cal aphorism in these books, a reader’s engagement with any physiognomical
aphorism was not always driven by the physical feature. That engagement was
sometimes driven by the words of the meaning attached to it, in other words by
the metaphysical aspect of the physiognomic (the ‘signified’). As such, this
form of engagement would have wound the reader through any one of a
number of the deductive ‘prisms’ through which her physiognomical self-
meditation could have been refracted at any point. As was also pointed out in
the first chapter of this book, at the centre of this (in)finite flux of metaphysi-
cal states was a ‘characterological prism’. It was, in effect, a pantheon of fully
fledged characters (or ‘types’) in the theophrastian sense. This sort of physiog-
nomy, in its theorized form, was what Johannes Alsted called Physiognomia
orta. It was also the part of his understanding of physiognomy that had an ‘Aris-
totelian’ precedent.²¹ Indeed, for all the importance of the philological conti-
nuities and changes discernible in the wording of printed physiognomics as
they were transmitted across the early modern period, it is perhaps the changes
that took place in this characterological prism, be it the prism offered by any
‘book on physiognomy’, the now untraceable characterological prism that was
carried around by any particular reader in his or her mind, or the more tangi-
ble one that could be said to have dominated the local, public, or national
sphere of any region or period, which played the most significant role in this
physiognomical process of self-understanding, and would benefit from further
investigation.
The aforementioned contemplation of the marks of ‘folly’ provide a good
example. A more educated, bookish sort of person might follow the hidden
textual labyrinth in this single physiognomic and immediately start to think
about the universality of this aspect of the human condition and come upon
the memory of a passage in Erasmus’s influential book ‘In Praise of Folly’, in
which the author, intriguingly, introduced the ‘character’ of Folly in the fol-
lowing, distinctly physiognomical way:
To what purpose, think ye, should I describe my self, when I am here present before ye,
and ye behold me speaking? For I am, as ye see, that true and onely giver of wealth,
²⁰ Camillo Baldi, In Physiognomica Aristotelis commentarii (Bologna, 1621), 41; Traité de physiognomonie:
anonyme latin, ed. J. André (Paris, 1981), 57–60.
²¹ See Physiognomonics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes (Princeton, 1984), i. 1237–50:
807a35–808b10; Alsted, Encyclopaedia, ii. 767–80.
whom the Greeks call Moria, the Latines Stultitia, (and our plain English, Folly:) Or
what need was there to have said so much, as if my very looks were not sufficient to
inform ye who I am? Or as if any man, mistaking me for Wisedome, could not at first
sight convince himself by my face, the true index of my mind? I am no Counterfeit, nor
do I carry one thing in my looks and another in my breast: No, I am in every respect so
like my self, that neither can they dissemble me, who arrogate to themselves, the
appearance and title of Wisemen, and walk (in purpura simiae) like Asses in Scarlet-hoods;
though after all their hypocrisie, Midas’s ears will discover their Master.²²
Either way, the point I wish to make here is that the reader could think about
the physical appearance of folly, or the universal ‘character’ of folly in and of
itself.
Similarly there were other micro-prisms inside this intellectual prism
through which this self-meditation could have been refracted, be it the micro-
prisms of an astrological, an ethnological, a mineralogical, or a zoological form
of physiognomical contemplation. For example, when engaging with the
aforementioned aphorism: ‘A hawked nose that boweth to the upper lips signi-
fieth malice, deceit, untruth, and lechery’, our imaginary reader may have felt
the sting of the implicit analogy between her nose and the nose of the hawk as
it flew across what Paracelsus would have called her ‘inner firmament’, where-
upon the hawk may have begun to take on a new significance for her in her own
private emblematic world, and perhaps then even her domestic world. Other
possible analogies with minerals and plants may have taken on a purely med-
ical resonance, and contributed to her understanding of her microcosmic rela-
tion to the macrocosm. In turn, that understanding of what the theorists called
the macrocosm/microcosm analogy may have been refracted through an
unconscious and now irretrievable understanding of ‘the physics’ or the astro-
logical workings of the universe—an issue to which we shall return below when
considering the workings of the hermetic physiognomical eye.
The ‘mood’ of her self-contemplation may also have taken her into the dif-
ferent layers of time which were embedded in the various micro-prisms inside
this process of physiognomical self-contemplation. In the pupil of the phys-
iognomical eye, the face being examined became a temporal prism through
which the lights of the past, the present, and the future were refracted—a fea-
ture which brought the physiognomical eye close to the medical gaze. As the
Hippocratic oath stated: ‘Declare the past, diagnose the present, foretell the
future’.²³ As much as this would have been seen as a form of temporal divina-
tion, it was not necessarily an ‘out-of-the-ordinary’ experience. It was, and still
²² Desiderius Erasmus, Moriae Encomium, trans. John Wilson (1688), 5.

²³ V. Nutton and R. Porter (eds.), The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine (Cambridge, 1996), 58.
is, not at all unusual for older, ‘more experienced’ people to suggest that the life
a person has led in the past is expressed through and can be read in their face,
even if it does take the form of banal generalizations. Yet, in the early modern
period, discerning one’s more constant and fundamental, or even natural, dis-
position was often understood in terms of what was called ‘natural magic’. As
such, it provided knowledge of what so many early modern people, natural
philosophers or not, were searching for—the hidden ‘secrets of nature’.
It was this more ‘natural magic’ form of engagement, which, I would argue,
was the most universal and common form of reading ‘physiognomy’ in books
throughout Europe from the beginning to the end of the early modern period,
whether it was ultimately ‘Aristotelian’ or ‘Neoplatonic’, or a mixture of both,
or neither. When examined from this more rhetorical point of view, one sees
that it was not so much an academic exploration of the ‘truth’ of physiognomy
in the sense of Girolamo Cardano’s claim that ‘physiognomics without doubt
contains great truth’, constantly examining the logic of its own observations.²⁴
Rather, it was a form of reading driven by the widely accepted proverbial
notion that gestured towards the tenaciously occult aspect of nature and that
Paracelsus picked from the oral culture of his day—that somehow, inexplica-
bly, ‘truth will out’. In the case of a private physiognomical self-examination,
the reader had the physiognomical text as the disembodied, potentially mysti-
cal, interlocutor. In the case of Indagine’s very widely known tract, there was
also a portrait of the physiognomist to compensate for his absence, which in
some cases, the reader made more real by hand painting.
Appropriations
The illiterate shepherd’s physiognomical prayer
If this basic sense of ‘engagement’ (for all it was demonized, satirized, and even-
tually medicalized as ‘hypnosis’) with the ‘natural magic’ of a ‘book on phys-
iognomy’ reveals the universality and continuity in the non-disciplined, more
‘humble’ reading practices surrounding these ‘books on physiognomy’, what
were the specific changes which this form of engaging with physiognomy in
book form underwent across the period? In what follows I want to argue that
by examining the overarching conceptual apparatus of ‘books on physiog-
nomy’, one sees how, through the evolution of the influence of the hermetic
²⁴ Cited in Maclean, Logic, 319.

tradition in early modern Europe, it was a reading practice that underwent a
fundamental transformation described above as ‘a shift from praying to
playing’.
The reading that was a form of praying is particularly evident in the late
fifteenth-century French vernacular work entitled the Compost et kalendrier des
bergiers. As the progeny of a medieval manuscript tradition (for all its claims to
contain the oral wisdom of an illiterate shepherd), the material in this book
arose out of a conceptual universe, very different from the present one, in
which religion and medicine were still inextricably bound together.²⁵ Generi-
cally speaking, the shepherd’s curious text was a hybrid of two mutually
complementary genres. One was medical, the other devotional: the regimen
sanitatis; and the book of hours. Christendom’s readers had long been familiar
with both. The former gave one advice on how to look after one’s body; the lat-
ter on how to look after one’s soul. The one offered physical medicine for the
‘temperament’, to ensure one did not die before one’s soul was properly pre-
pared and worthy to enter the garden of virtues after death. The other provid-
ed the spiritual medicament for that metaphysical grooming. Each was deeply
infused with the star-taste of an astrological influence.
From the very opening page of this book, the illiterate shepherd dramati-
cally addressed the audience’s most intimate, burning, and sacred concerns—
being and time. First, he pinned the audience to a two-faced temporal
axis—the finite time of this life, and the infinite time of the immortal after-life.
Having done this, the shepherd then revealed how, as this finite time passed,
the members of his audience underwent an unavoidable metamorphosis
through the ‘twelve ages of man’: ‘And now to show how man changeth twelve
times even as the twelve months do’. This metamorphosis was bound (by a
spatio-temporal axis) to the flow of the environment’s changing seasons and a
universe which was unfolding through them.
Meanwhile, he constantly sang out a refrain about the three things it was
most urgent for all those who wished for rebirth in immortality to remember:
salvation, prudence, and self-knowledge (nosce te ipsum). First, the shepherd
boldly declared the overriding importance of ‘salvation’: ‘the thing that we
desire most in this world is to live long, and the thing that we most fear is to die
soon . . . he should live long that the end of this present life should be in the life
eternal, that is to say, the life everlasting in heaven’. Of the seven things that the
shepherd thought it was essential for anyone to know, by far the most impor-
tant was whether one was ‘in the grace of our Lord or not . . . for who that
²⁵ For one possible textual precursor, see Zurich: Zentralbibliotheck, MS C.101, fol. 58r ‘visonomia’.
receiveth in this grace receiveth salvation and who that receiveth otherwise
receiveth damnation’.
Knowledge of this ‘grace’ and the attainment of salvation required ‘pru-
dence’. ‘Prudence’ required the reader to pursue a ‘diligent keeping of himself
with discreet providence to know and discern which is good and which is bad’.
Salvation and prudence were, in turn, linked to the third and most fundamen-
tal theme: ‘know thyself ’. It was only through this prudent, religio-medical
knowledge of one’s self, other people, and thus God that one could receive the
grace and wisdom that would ensure one’s salvation: ‘who that knoweth him-
self knoweth God and shall not be damned and who that knoweth him not
knoweth not God, and shall not be saved’.
All of this cosmological contemplation was summed up by the shepherd in
two very simple, memorable commands. One of them was implicit, the other
was explicit: study thy temperament; and ‘study on youre synne’.²⁶ The former
meant knowing the illnesses to which you were prone; the latter meant medi-
tating upon the virtues and vices to which you were inclined. In societies still
racked by famine and plague, the former came with very practical, fundamen-
tally urgent, suggestions about the food appropriate to particular physical con-
ditions. In a society in which disease and disaster were heavily moralized, the
latter offered the more metaphysical fruits and diseases of the self that were
to be found hanging from the branches of the ‘trees of knowledge’ in an
illustrated presentation of the ‘deadly sins’. In either case, be it temperament or
character, real food or spiritual food, all was irradiated astrologically, that is to
say religiously, with the influence of the stars.
The illiterate shepherd’s intention was to make his readers and listeners par-
ticipate in a form of self-‘reading’. As strange as it may sound, there was a reli-
gious precedent for it. In the study of one’s sin, the listing of the virtues and
vices was part of a long-standing tradition in the history of confessional prac-
tices. Monks and nuns in monasteries and convents throughout medieval
Europe had often listened to lists of sins being read out in the refectory. Alter-
natively, they had read them out to themselves while alone in their own cells.
Either way, their inner eye registered the seemingly instinctual motions of their
soul. Its movements revealed to them a clean or guilty ‘conscience’. Thus, tak-
ing the shepherd at his word, the late fifteenth-century audience for this text
asked themselves whether they were susceptible to a particular vice, whether
they bore the stain of a particular sin. But now there was a difference. Now the
shepherd was offering his audience a physiognomical way of contemplating
²⁶ Heseltine, Kalendar, 4, 2, 80, 52, 79, and 60; Oxford: Bodleian Library, Douce K. 97 sig. Aiiv.
their souls. The exposition of physiognomical doctrine that formed a part of
the shepherd’s text was also essentially a list of virtues and vices. In the shep-
herd’s mystical eyes, the purpose of engaging with the art of physiognomy was
appropriated into a religious practice. It was to act as the reader’s entry-point
into a process of confessional self-meditation.
It is in this way that reading the physiognomy in this book became a form of
confessional prayer. As strange as it may now seem, there was a medieval prece-
dent for this physiognomical aspect of the confessional tradition. The confes-
sional manuals of Alain of Lille advised the priest ‘to note the sinner’s
appearance and complexion in order to assay his disposition: “One man is
more impelled to a certain sin than another; a choleric person is more driven to
wrath, a melancholy one to hatred, a sanguine or phlegmatic one to lust” ’.²⁷
But it was a physiognomical prayer that now bore two very significant differ-
ences. The first was that, unlike the traditional vices and virtues, those aspects
of the inner self were not just the metaphorical fruits hanging from the
branches of some abstract tree of knowledge. They were symbolically and
mnemonically embodied in the specific physical features of the reader. This
meant that physiognomical confession was now something sinners could try to
do for themselves—to themselves and to others. It circumvented the need for
a pastoral ‘middle man’, more commonly known as the priest. As such, the
shepherd’s late fifteenth-century physiognomical prayer provided readers with
a ‘do-it-yourself ’ confessional practice which resonated with some of the more
radical claims being made by the early reformers in their rejection of the special
vocation of monasticism, and which contributed to the onset of the
Reformation.
Another difference between this and mainstream church confession lay in
the fact that the moral meanings attached to the physical features in the shep-
herd’s section on physiognomy did not perfectly match the lists of virtues and
vices presented earlier in the Kalendar. Take, for example, the following two
signs with which one early English edition of the Kalendar’s physiognomical
section opens:
They that have red hair be commonly ireful, and lack wit, and be of little truth.
A man that hath black hair and a red beard signifieth to be lecherous, disloyal, and a
vaunter, and one ought not to trust in him.²⁸
²⁷ T. C. Price Zimmermann ‘Confession and Autobiography in the Early Renaissance’, in A. Molho and
J. Tedeschi (eds.), Renaissance: Studies in Honor of Hans Baron (Florence, 1971), 125–6.
²⁸ Heseltine, Kalendar, 152.
The shepherd makes no specific mention of ‘untrustworthiness’, a ‘lack of wit’
or ‘disloyalty’ in his trees of vices. There is no exact correlation. Yet, as a conse-
quence of this, a correlation can be looked for. Thus the physiognomical sign
of ‘lacking wit’ can be interpreted as a form of ‘sloth’. The shepherd says that
the ninth branch of sloth is ‘ignorance’. This ‘ignorance’ is itself broken down
into three elements: (1) ‘indiscretion’; (2) ‘that they ought not to understand’;
and (3) ‘not willing to know’. Similarly, the ‘vaunter’ might be incorporated
within the vice of ‘pride’, disloyalty could conceivably be linked to ‘covetous-
ness’ (through adultery), and a physiognomical sign ‘of little truth’ could con-
ceivably be incorporated either into ‘pride’ (under ‘false goodness’) or ‘covetise’
(under false witness).
A further reason why this physiognomical prayer was frowned upon by the
church authorities was because it was bound up with things hermetic, Egypt-
ian, Jewish, and Arabic. In so being, it actually added further cognitive dimen-
sions to the experience of the trees of vices and virtues that represented the
metaphysical building-blocks of the contemplated Christian self. Hermetic
physiognomy, with its links through an astrologized physiognomy to a poten-
tially very different, non-Christian set of metaphysics and mythologies,
opened up further labyrinths of meaning in the natural galaxy of the audience’s
inner selves. In other words, this divine language of physiognomy provided
windows into a universe of the self riddled with a hierarchy of metaphysics
emanating from the One, or with polytheism, or even with the seraphim of the
Kabbalah. In addition, it was a process that was potentially as applicable to
every single person and as unique in each case as the tangled branches of any
single tree. In retrospect, this appropriation of physiognomical engagement
may appear to be a tributary of the tradition of self-reflection most often iden-
tified with Montaigne.²⁹ At the time, given the hermetic influence pervading
this text and that was being disseminated throughout Western Europe, it was
also a sign that the church was in danger of losing its grip on the deepest parts
of the soul—to the extent that it can be said ever to have really had such a deep
grip in the first place. For past historians of the Reformation have under-
estimated the extent to which the deepest and most all-pervasive religion in the
so-called Christian West was an astrological one.
The hermetic physiognomical eye

To say that the Renaissance art of physiognomy was bound up with what are
generally referred to as ‘the sciences of the occult’ not only means that it was
²⁹ Taylor, Sources of the Self, 178–84.
seen as a body of knowledge that dealt with things (beyond ‘effects’, this also
meant ‘significations’) for which the cause was hidden, if not inexplicable. It
also means that it was enmeshed with ancient Jewish, Orphic, Pythagorean,
Islamic, Egyptian, Indian, and Christian mysticism. In light of the tendency in
Western European historiography to assume that the rediscovery of antiquity
that was such a feature of the Renaissance was synonymous with Rome and
Greece, even putting the alleged ‘Egyptian’ nature of hermetic wisdom to one
side, it is worth noting in passing that the aforementioned analogy of the late
fifteenth-century physiognomatable self and the tree of knowledge also carried
echoes of an Oriental mysticism.³⁰
If the physiognomical contemplation found in the Shepherd’s Kalendar car-
ries traces of the hermetic philosophy being disseminated by the late fifteenth-
century circles of Florentine Neoplatonists, then, as it became more enmeshed
with hermeticism, reading physiognomy in a book appears to have been
absorbed into a hermetic process of gnosis, an active, ‘gradual’ process of purifi-
cation that involved actively wiping ‘the dust’ from ‘the mirror’, a ‘re-birth’, or
literally a ‘renaissance’. The influence of the Kabbalistic tradition was very
important in this development. As Scholem pointed out, the Kabbalah was a
magic used on one’s self as an aid to contemplation:
Though Cabala is primarily a mysticism, a way of trying to know God, there is also a
magic which goes with it, which can be used mystically or subjectively on oneself, a
kind of self-hypnosis, as an aid to contemplation . . . Or it can be developed into an
operative magic, using the power of the Hebrew language, or the powers of the angels
invoked by it, to perform magical works.
Thus, as it became mixed with the Neoplatonic hermeticism of the Corpus

hermeticum and the Kabbalah, the art of physiognomy became an aid to
self-transformation, or what Ficino and Pico della Mirandola were referring to
as ‘regeneration’.³¹
I want to approach the reconstruction of this self-transforming hermetic
physiognomical eye by bringing the reader’s attention to the innate iconicity
of the hieroglyphic language of physiognomony and what might be termed
the ‘multi-media’ aspect of reading physiognomy in a book. So far we have
assumed that the reader’s interaction with this text was a solitary private affair.
However, it could also have been more public. Any reader perusing a physiog-
nomical treatise in the vicinity of, say, her fellow nuns, would also have used the
³⁰ For earlier Indian buddhist and pre-Buddhist Taoist influences, see P. Demiéville, ‘Le miroir spirituel’,
Choix d’études bouddhiques: (1929–1970) (Leiden, 1973), 131–56; M. W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins
(Michigan, 1952), 2, n. 3. ³¹ F. A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), 93.
26. This representation of early 16th-century communal reading practices provides an

insight into how the group may have interacted when reading a ‘treatise on physiogno-
my’, Urs Graf, ‘Monks Reading’, from Guigo de Castro, Statuta ordinis cartusiensis
( Johann Amorbach, Basle, 1510). Woodcut. (Photo: Warburg Institute.)
hard physical reality of their bodies or the sound of their voices to illustrate
some of the text’s physiognomics. The woodcut in Illustration 26 helps us to
visualize this more communal form of reading a ‘treatise on physiognomy’.
This woodcut is not taken from a ‘treatise on physiognomy’. Nor is there any
evidence to suggest that it was intended to represent a group of Carthusian
monks reading one. None the less, despite what appears to be its specific satir-
ical content, it is an image that provides us with a visual basis upon which
to build a more anthropological insight into how a communal form of
engagement with physiognomy in book form would have been enacted. By
referring to this image, one can imagine how, when a ‘treatise on physiognomy’
was read in a monastery, each brother could have been examined in a collective
fashion in terms of whether he was an illustration or embodiment of any par-
ticular physiognomical aphorism in the text.
More self-reflexive concerns, even within such a group reading of a ‘treatise
on physiognomy’, may have led a reader to compare the physiognomies of
the members of the group to his or her own physiognomy. Or, like the duc
de Rochefoucauld, it may have led her to ask her colleagues their opinion on
whether or not her own lips were thin, her nose hawked, her eyes sunken.
Either way, the ‘natural magic’ aspect of this ‘engagement’ with those other
people encapsulated the proverbial notion of coming to know one’s self
through others, or how the eyes of an old friend are the best form of mirror.³²
Moreover, as the nun engaged her sisters in this confessional prayer, her sense
of ‘beholding’ absorbed other visual and sonic media—the more ‘realistic’ or
‘naturalistic’ forms of their ‘physiognomies’ and voices. And, as the reading
or invocation of this confessional prayer wound her through this audio-visual
dialogue with the others around her, it took on a distinctly theatrical
character.
When read alone and in private, if a reader wanted to know if she had this or
that particular physical feature as described in the text, she would have looked
at her own body. In other words, she would have used her own physiognomy
to visualize a physiognomic. In so doing, her contemplative eye moved her
from the linear realm of textual literacy to the non-linear realm of visual lit-
eracy. This was more difficult for the shape or colour of her eyes, or for even the
most hawked of hawked noses. Such visions required the use of a looking-glass.
The resort to a looking-glass introduced yet another object of visual contem-
plation into this reading practice beside her own physiognomy and the treatise
on physiognomy—a visual reflection of her physiognomy.
At this point, itself a reminder of the emblematic image of Samuel Jeake with
quill in hand, poised between his mirror and his book with which the Intro-
duction to this book opened, we must bear in mind that one moral virtue long
associated with looking in mirrors was Prudence. This was the very same virtue
that the illiterate shepherd of the above-mentioned Shepherd’s Kalendar said
was one the seven things which one needed for salvation. Actual prudential
mirror-gazing was such an innately visual part of Renaissance literacy that it
had created its own iconographic tradition (Illustrations 27 and 28). Using a
³² For variations on this, see M. P. Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs (Ann Arbor, 1950), 243.
27 and 28. Prudence was often portrayed looking at herself in the mirror, Cesare
Revardino/Georges Reverdy [French, fl. 1529–57], Prudentia [B. XV. 481.28]. (Photo:
Warburg Institute.); J. Kips, 17th-century English engraving of Prudence. (Photo:
Warburg Institute.)
looking-glass, literally, to help one come to know one’s self and to pierce one’s
self-illusions did not always get one anywhere, and it also carried risks. As
Marsilio Ficino wrote:
I have often looked for myself . . . I have gazed at this face in the mirror . . . but I could
never say I have . . . seen myself. For when I seek myself, it is exactly the same Marsilio
that is both seeker and sought . . . it is spirit alone I seek, since I seek myself, who am
indeed pure spirit.³³
Moreover, there were, for example, the potential dangers of vanity, pride, and
folly. But, if used properly, it could help in the quest for nosce teipsum. Many
knew of the claim that Socrates used mirrors for moral instruction, urging his
pupils ‘to look at themselves frequently in the glass, that he might beg any of
them who should be gratified at his own beauty not to spoil the dignity of the
³³ P. Tudor-Craig, ‘Ficino and Portraiture’, in M. Shepherd (ed.), Friend to Mankind. Marsilio Ficino
1433–1499 (1999), 101–5.
body by a dishonourable state of mind’. The same legend was celebrated
enough to be known in visual form.³⁴
If a mirror was used while reading physiognomy in a book, this does not
mean it was Socratic and thus Greek in origin. Like the aforementioned tree of
knowledge, this form of mirror-gazing had also been a long-standing element
in the Buddhist and Taoist traditions. In the ritual of one tantric school, for
example, during the ceremony of abhisheka, the initiated was presented with a
mirror. He was to contemplate his image in it in order to penetrate the illusory
character of his person and all things.³⁵ Given this, the Renaissance practice
of reading physiognomy in a book with the aid of a looking-glass may have
carried much more than just the classical echoes of ancient Greece. Yet the
looking-glass was not the only visual technology implicit in this reading
practice of self-examination. It was a reading practice that also included the
hand-painted illustrations, woodcuts, and engravings that lined the pages of
many ‘books on physiognomy’. Likewise, this reading practice could also have
incorporated images outside of the text, with the reader turning to a painted
portrait or sculpture of himself or of someone else.
Other equally visual, but more ‘occult’, aspects involved in the ‘natural
magic’ of reading the shepherd’s ‘treatise on physiognomy’ were the visual
representations produced in the mind’s eye. For when reading a ‘treatise on
physiognomy’, there were two other of the reader’s mental faculties that came
into play with the reason that was directing the reading, both of which had a
distinctly visual and active nature: imagination and memory.³⁶ This is not the
place to discuss the scholars’ conceptions of the imagination or the memory
and their place in the human ontology. All I want to emphasize here is the fact
that when one engaged one’s imagination with this ‘natural magic’, the innate,
iconic nature of the language of physiognomony shone through the printed
words on the page, irrespective of how this ‘kinematic’ aspect of the phenome-
non was then understood in further, more abstract, intellectual terms. As
the Italian hermeticist Giordano Bruno put it: ‘to think is to speculate with
images’.³⁷
For example, the physiognomic ‘an aquiline nose is a sign of magnanimity’
contained within it the latent image of an aquiline nose. When read or heard,
an image of an aquiline nose formed in the eye of the reader’s imagination. In
³⁴ ‘Speculum Commune’, from P. Joannes David, Duodecim specula: Devm aliqvando videre desideranti
concinnata (Antwerp, 1610).
³⁵ R. Tajima, Étude sur le Mahāvairocana-sūtra (Dainichikyō) (Paris, 1936), 14, 114. Cf. M. Shinkô,
Bukkyô-daijiten, 10 vols. (Tokyo, 1931), i. 184 and 601 for a person between two mirrors faced with the
infinite.
³⁶ C. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 136. ³⁷ F. A. Yates, The Art of Memory (1966), 298.
this way it was possible to make contact with the hidden visual episteme of this
language by visualizing abstract categories such as ‘magnanimity’, and some
Aristotelians could even have conceived of them in terms of the Aristotelian
notion of ‘substantial form’. Given the frequency with which the aquiline nose
was described as a sign of magnanimity in the early modern period, magna-
nimity itself would often have been automatically visually represented before
the early modern mind’s eye in the form of an image of an aquiline nose.
To modern minds, this iconic aspect of its language carries overtones of
Wittgenstein’s observation: ‘(Meaning is a physiognomy)’.³⁸ To early modern
European philosophers of language, as rational and empirical as many of them
were trying to be, this aspect of the character of the language of physiognomy was
what made them feel that it could contribute to the dream of a universal language
of ‘real characters’.³⁹ To the hermeticist it was part of the astrological divinity of
this original, pre-textual, hieroglyphic, Adamic language.⁴⁰
Once the virtual physiognomics of this Adamic language formed in the eyes
and ears of our reader’s imagination, by the ‘natural magic’ workings of the
mind, they were then captured in, or sent to, her distinctly visual memory.
These ‘virtual’, visual, dream-like memories, like those of their ‘real’ audio-
visual counterparts, had the potential of mediating her vision of any real flesh
and blood nose or any real, oil-painted represented nose, or the hearing of any
actual or imagined voice.⁴¹ And vice versa. Thus an aphorism about a thick
neck, or wide nostrils, or a hoarse voice not only conjured up images of a thick
neck or wide nostrils and the sound of a hoarse voice: they also stimulated the
visual and aural memories of particular thick necks, wide nostrils, and hoarse
voices. And those visual and sonic memories had their origins either in
the experience of earlier, everyday realities or the previous experience of the
beholding of various representations: for example, in the hoarse sound of a
neighbour’s grating voice, embedded in its immediate analogue—the sound
of an ass ee-aawing; in the very real, thick neck of a very real, thick-necked
solider, or the image of the thick-necked figure of Stupiditas in Giotto’s famous
fresco in the Scrovegni Chapel.⁴²
At this point it is worth mentioning that the fisnomical use of external
images as well as internal images created in the eyes of the imagination and
³⁸ L. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, 2nd edn. (Oxford, 1958), 151e,
568.
³⁹ Francis Bacon, Collected Works, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, 7 vols. (1857–74), III.i,
399–400. ⁴⁰ U. Eco, La recherche de la langue parfaite (Paris, 1994).
⁴¹ J. Aitchison, Words in the Mind (Oxford, 1994), 41–3, and 68–72; Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investi-
gations, 139, 54e.
⁴² For a learned and rich misunderstanding of this application of physiognomy to images, see H. Steinke,
‘Giotto und die Physiognomik’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 59 (Berlin, 1996), 523–47.
29. This late 15th-century mirror-like diptych brought together the contemplation of
the physiognomy of Christ through word (Lentulus’ famous forged description of
Christ) and image (painted profile of Christ). Diptych. Right panel: Bust of Christ
blessing. Left panel: Lentulus’ letter, Netherlands, 1490–9. Oil on wood, 38.5 cm ¥
27.3 cm. Museum Cartharijneconvent, Utrecht (Photo: Ruben de Heer.)
memory through the words of physiognomony explains the function of certain

portraits of Jesus Christ. Christ was often seen as the ideal embodiment whom
one was to imitate. Moreover, the famous ‘description’ of Jesus Christ written
by Lentulus was often found in physiognomical treatises, as well as painted
beside portraits of Christ. Was it through the use of this verbal and iconic
description of Christ that this hermetic form of physiognomical prayer
involved readers and viewers in a controversial, physiognomical form of the
contemplation of the face of God? If so, it was an aspect of the Renaissance
hermetic construction and contemplation of images that was the culmination
of a long-standing medieval meditative practice in which intense visualization
was seen as the climax of mystical introspection.⁴³ Given the ‘occult’ power of
⁴³ For contrary views on this, see Dom. C. Butler, Western Mysticism (2000), l ff., 55 ff., 87 ff., 117 ff.; and
C. Frugoni, ‘Female Mystics, Visions and Iconography’, in D. Bornstein and R. Rusconi (eds.), Women and
Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, trans. M. J. Schneider (Chicago, 1996), 130–64.
images, or the natural magic of the process of ‘imitation’ (part of the process of
‘impression’), these icons of Jesus Christ may at times have been used in this
physiognomical prayer. In all such cases, those works of art, like the reflection
from the looking-glass, became exemplary participants in the illuminating,
and potentially efficacious, physiognomical contemplation of the moral
topography of one’s self, and thus, given the way in which the early modern self
was understood, ultimately of God.
What all of this adds up to is the fact that the more intense, hermetic read-
ing of the shepherd’s physiognomical prayer was actually a textual exegesis in
which imagined visions and sounds arose through the typeface of the words,
passed before the inner eyes and ears of the reader’s mind, and, in so doing,
blended with the contemplation of the actual flesh and blood, the actual
sounds and the real images that passed before the physical eyes and ears of the
confessors who were in the group reading it, or in the reader’s vicinity whilst she
was reading it. This constant, random switching between text, flesh, voice,
image, and sound; between reality and representation; between reason, imagi-
nation, and memory; between one’s self and other people, was not only dis-
tinctly ‘unbookish’, and not only required more visual (and sonic) literacy than
textual literacy, it is also what gave the performance of this naturally magical
prayer a theatrical, indeed a proto-operatic, character.
In the encounter of the hermetic reader with a physiognomical treatise, in
private or public, the text acted like a projector generated by the light of the
reader’s physical and inner eyes. As a result, the text’s physiognomics were pro-
jected onto the internal screens of the reader’s own imagination and memory.
But this internal screen did not exist in a vacuum. Nor was this internal screen
a tabula rasa, to use Locke’s later conception. For that screen was infused with
the very particular visual culture of the said reader. Thus, on the internal
screens in Renaissance hermetic minds, these physiognomics became the
catalyst for the visual articulation of a series of other emblems and images from
that visual and sonic culture which had hitherto been buried or frozen in the
reader’s memory. Together the articulation of this series of inner audio-visual
associations triggered by the encounter with a ‘book on physiognomy’ consti-
tuted what might most helpfully be referred to as an internal emblematic slide-
show or ‘cinema’. The mythologies and meanings encased in its ‘emblems’ and
symbols constituted the more cognitive, meaningful, or psychological part of
this distinctly visual internal moral ‘cinema’.
The ‘cinematic’ nature of this experience is further suggested by the fact that,
in the hermetic tradition, the sense of a chord being struck in our reader was
not a blind, unconceptualized intuition. In many cases the ‘inner’ intuition of
the truth of either a part or the whole of a single physiognomical aphorism may
have been compounded in some cases by a conscious awareness of what the
Aristotelian scholastics had tried to articulate with their notion of ‘synderesis’.
As late as 1664 one finds this notion within the writing on physiognomy. The
French physiognomist La Chambre made this connection explicit in his trea-
tise: ‘Prudence and Synderesis, or Remorse of Conscience, are two habits of the
Understanding, whereby Moral Actions are regulated. But they are different in
this particular, that the Synderesis prescribes to all the vertues the end which
they ought to have; and Prudence treats only of the means whereof they ought
to make use, in order to their arrival thereto.’⁴⁴ This was not the case for St
Augustine. In his enormously influential discussion of inner ‘self-presence’, he
had famously spoken of that ‘incorporeal light . . . by which our minds are
somehow irradiated, so that we may judge rightly of all these things’.⁴⁵ Yet
Paracelsus is one example of someone within the ‘hermetic’ tradition who took
this further. In Paracelsus’s eyes, it was not only a distinctly corporeal light, it
was an inner physiognomical light—what he called lumen naturae.
The writings of the Renaissance Neoplatonic occultists such as Marsilio
Ficino or Giordano Bruno contain much about this inner light and vision.
Even before the anxiety produced by Copernicus’s heliocentric vision of the
universe, Ficino had offered Western Europe a ‘religion of the world’ which
placed the sun at the centre of the human self.⁴⁶ The dangers were evident in
the fact that the Apostate Emperor Julian (331/72–363) had tried to drive out
the newly established Christianity and return to a philosophical ‘religion of the
world’ in which the sun was worshipped as the supreme god.⁴⁷ This notion was
encapsulated most visually in the series of plates engraved by Theodor de Bry
for Robert Fludd’s Utriusque cosmic . . . historia (1617).
It is often said that Fludd’s illustrations were an integral part of the exposi-
tion of his philosophy. They were, in fact, part of the visual episteme of his phi-
losophy. This is particularly evident in the series of eye-like images representing
Fludd’s conception of the act of creation ex nihili (Illustrations 30 and 31).
However, the relationship of Fludd’s visual episteme to his writing on physiog-
nomy can be most clearly seen in the engraving which serves as the frontispiece
for his tract on the scientia of physiognomy (Illustration 32). This engraving
can be said to represent the hermetic physiognomical eye. It shows a man and
a woman not just looking at each other, but physiognomating each other.
Some mystical Jewish influences are discernible in the visual suggestion that
⁴⁴ Marin Cureau de la Chambre, The Art How to Know Men (1665), 167.
⁴⁵ Taylor, Sources of the Self, 134.
⁴⁶ See Marsilio Ficino, Quid sit lumen, ed. B. Schefer (Paris, 1998). ⁴⁷ Yates, Bruno, 58.
30 and 31. These two images show the first two stages of God’s creation of the world
‘ex nihili’. The eye-like form of the second stage (as well as the subsequent stages) is
striking and self-evident. Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris meta-
physica, physica atque technica historia, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), i. De Macrocosmi
Historia, 26, 29. Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Rés 107538 (1–3). (Credit pho-
tographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.)
they are gazing at each other’s foreheads—a visual allusion to the tradition of
this ‘knowledge by the visage’ in Jewish mysticism in which truth was said to
shine from the forehead of Adam. But there is something else which is just as
important as the two people in the process of physiognomating each other.
That is the fact that both are physiognomating at the same time as they are
being physiognomated, not only by each other, but also by God. In this por-
trayal of this reciprocal act of physiognomating, both physiognomators are
located in the middle of the pupil of the providential eye of an omniscient,
omnipresent, all-seeing physiognomating God—the three parts of the eye
being equated elsewhere in Fludd’s text with the Trinity. Once again this repre-
sentation of the physiognomical eye might be seen to carry non-Christian
influences, or at least have parallels with concepts outside Christianity. For, like
the Islamic notion of firāsa, of the Kabbalistic theosophic notion of hakkarath
panim, the optic nerves of Fludd’s physiognomical eye had their roots in,
and were an illuminating participation in, the divine, providential gaze of
32. The Neoplatonic, hermetic, physiognomical eye, Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi
maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, 2 vols. (Oppen-
heim, 1617–21), ii. De Supernaturali, Naturali, Praeternaturali et Contranaturali Micro-
cosmi historia, in Tractatus tres distributa, 117. (Photo: Warburg Institute.)
God.⁴⁸ The nature of the ‘light’ that drove these inner visual projectors was
often conceived of as so intensely divine that the projecting eye of this internal
‘cinematic’ exegesis was fused with the celestial rays of the stars and the sun,
whilst in turn being irradiated by a divine illumination. Thus, in this intensely
meditative sense, the reading of physiognomy in a book was driven by the theo-
sophic light of the infinite eye of the Godhead, the first cause. Through the play
⁴⁸ Yates, Bruno, 404; Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi . . . historia, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), I.i,
11–12.
of the images in the projection of that theosophic light, the hermetic physiog-
nomical eye became the soul of its own internal cinema.
To understand the images that constituted the ‘cinema’ of this form of phys-
iognomical reading and contemplation, we need to turn to consider Robert
Fludd’s brief etymological definition of the term Physiognomia: ‘Indeed Phys-
iognomy is called a sign of nature’.⁴⁹ Those signs of nature, those ‘signatures’,
those physiognomics, like the emblem books and the interest in Egyptian
hieroglyphics that were so characteristic of the Renaissance and to which the
physiognomics in these books bore a strong family resemblance, carried with-
in themselves a labyrinth of natural mythology, part of what Marsilio Ficino’s
eyes recognized as the ‘religion of the world’, and a natural mythology which
was itself an astrological interface with an ancient theology.⁵⁰ Fludd was sim-
ply saying that this knowledge of nature, this gnomos of physis, this ‘knowledge
by the visage’, even in textual form, was a manifest knowledge. It was manifest
in the audio-visual signs of nature in and beyond the printed words on the
pages of his ‘treatise on physiognomy’. As such, Fludd was placing the reading
of physiognomy in books firmly within the long-standing hermeneutic
tradition of the ‘book of nature’ that the Renaissance had inherited from the
Middle Ages.⁵¹ It was a tradition in which the nature of the book as well as the
book of nature was seen as a system of natural signs created by God. Those signs
were not only being broadcast from the printed pages of the ‘book on physiog-
nomy’ itself, but also from the people and the nature ‘outside’ the printed
page—from the sky itself, as well as the face of the person who was beholding
it.⁵² Those signs were the windows and doorways into the pre-textual ‘logos’ of
an astrologically irradiated, potentially self-purifying mythology that, ulti-
mately, revealed the nature of the creator, if only one knew how to behold and
control them. In the thirteenth century, Michael Scot’s Liber introductorius had
placed physiognomy on the cusp of all of this. It was the troubling emergence
of the ‘Egyptian’ in Western European culture that brought it, as some
thought, ‘back to life’. It was Robert Fludd who took it as far as it could go in
purely book form.
‘Inner writing’
This hermetic appropriation of the natural magic involved in the encounter
between a reader and a ‘book on physiognomy’ can be characterized in even
⁴⁹ Fludd, Utriusque cosmi, II.i.2, 118. ⁵⁰ D. P. Walker, The Ancient Theology (1972).
⁵¹ Cited in G. Josipovici, The World and the Book (1971), 29.
⁵² E. R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (New York, 1953), 319–26.
33. Physiognomy was just one tool that constituted the ‘techniques of the microcosm’,
Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque tech-
nica historia, 2 vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), ii. Tractatus Primi Sectio Secunda (title
page) ‘De technica Microcosmi historia’, 1, Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Rés
107538 (1–3). (Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier
Nicole.)
more intense detail by considering it in the context of Robert Fludd’s ency-
clopaedic Utriusque cosmic . . . historia as a whole. In so doing, I want to show
how Fludd’s work has to be understood in terms of ‘the pagan theory of the
ascent of the soul through the spheres’ in order to achieve its ‘final regenera-
tion’.⁵³ Doing so helps to prepare the way for understanding the general
change that the reading of a ‘book on physiognomy’ underwent during the
⁵³ Yates, Bruno, 108.

early modern period, from praying to playing, or what some might prefer to
call ‘from totalization to vulgarization’.
As the title-page of Robert Fludd’s tractatus intimates (Illustration 33), the
art of physiognomy was just one technique in a small toolbox of ‘techniques of
the microcosm’ (De technica microcosmi). However, nowhere in his writings
does Fludd explicitly explain how these ‘techniques’ were supposed to be used.
This is very likely a consequence of how this hermetic knowledge was guarded
as a ‘secret’ knowledge. As Frances Yates wrote of the connection between
incantations and the Art of Memory: ‘I am not sure if this is the right explana-
tion of the unexplained connection . . . but it is a possible one’.⁵⁴ With that
reservation I should like to argue that, like the string and wind instruments
played together to produce a concerto, these ‘techniques of the microcosm’
were there to be used in conjunction with one another. When the hermetic art
of physiognomy is considered as a part of this combinatorial toolbox of ‘tech-
niques’, the natural magic that occurred when reading a ‘book on physiog-
nomy’ appears to dissolve into a larger, experimental ‘reading’ practice. It was
a process of natural magic which, in its most ‘occult’ form, was an exercise in
applied physics, which had the medico-moral objective of controlling the
spiritus of the celestial influence that infused everything in order to bring
about some form of self-transfiguration, or ‘regeneration’ in the divine. As with
Pomponazzi’s notion of the efficacy of talismans, incantation, and prayer,
when looked at in this more rhetorical way, reading a physiognomony
appears to have become a form of prayer which used the aforementioned ‘inter-
nal cinema’ in some form of what today might be called a medicalized
art therapy. Another way to describe this use of the technique of physiog-
nomy would be to call it a catalyst in a practice very much related to Ficino’s
‘Orphic singing’, in other words a micro-opera of God’s revealed self.⁵⁵
The present state of scholarship does not allow us to date precisely the
moment when ‘treatises on the art of physiognomy’ entered into this hermetic
attempt to bring about some form of self-metamorphosis. For the moment all
that can be said is that its absorption was part of what scholars often refer to as
the syncretic element in Renaissance Neoplatonism. The Corpus hermeticum
did not contain any exposition of physiognomical doctrine. However, there are
a number of crucial ‘moments’ in the numerous narratives which it contains
that were distinctly ‘physiognomical’. It is perhaps those moments which pro-
vided the windows through which the art of physiognomy was dissolved in this
⁵⁴ Yates, Bruno, 198, 201; Yates, Memory, 241.

⁵⁵ For the musical side of this, see the works of G. Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic (Chicago, 1993).
hermetic process of ‘regeneration’, or, to use Giordano Bruno’s words, this
‘inner writing’.⁵⁶
Bruno’s phrase ‘inner writing’ can be used to describe both the means and
the end of this physiognomical self-contemplation as laid out in Fludd’s works.
In other words, it was basically a form of self-literacy. To understand this self-
literacy, one needs to understand the hermetic conceptions of the mechanisms
of natural magic. Some of this understanding can be seen in Bruno’s under-
standing of the process of ‘fascination’, ‘which acts by virtue of a luminous and
subtle spirit . . . emitted, a little like a ray, by open eyes. In the effort one uses
to fix the image of the other in beholding them, these rays wound him, touch
him in his heart, effect his body and his spirit, and make him express love, hate,
envy, melancholy.’⁵⁷ Moreover, the mechanism that contributed to this process
of ‘inner writing’ was understood in astrological terms. As one historian of
Renaissance occult philosophy has written, ‘in the Picatrix, the whole art of
magic . . . consists in capturing and guiding the influx of spiritus into materia’.
To control one’s self-literacy, one had to understand and work with the Neo-
platonic conception of the astrological mechanics that bound the macrocosm
and the microcosm. Like Giordano Bruno, the obscure seventeenth-century
English hermeticist Hardick Warren thought that
the spirits which wander all over the body, these containing the Idea or form of the par-
ticular parts to be formed, being ayr and moist, are ready to receive any impression,
which is conveyed in at the eye, and doth frame the thing answerable in some sort to
the thing received: As I have read of a Negor [sic] woman, that conceived a beautiful
white child by the help of her Imagination, it being fixed upon a beautiful picture in the
Act of Generation, which is wrought by nothing else but that reciprocal quality, and
tender property of those ayral and moist spirits which are in every seed in conception.⁵⁸
John Dee was another, more famous, Renaissance magus whose writings help
us to understand this. In his famous Mathematickall Praeface, Dee wrote:
The Whole Frame of Gods Creatures, (which is the whole world,) is to vs, a bright
glasse: from which, by reflexion, reboundeth to our knowledge and perceiuerance,
Beames, and Radiations: representing the Image of his Infinite goodness, Omnipo-
tency, and wisdome.⁵⁹
⁵⁶ A. J. Fegustière, Hermétisme et mystique paienne (Paris, 1967), 220, 225, fn. 1, 229, 231, 235, 240, 249;
Yates, Memory, 326–7; Giordano Bruno, Œuvres complètes, 7 vols. (Paris, 1994–9), iii. De La Cause, Du
Principe et de l’Un, ed. G. Aquilecchia (Paris, 1996), xvii. For Giordano Bruno’s reference to his own phys-
iognomical skill, see Jordani Bruni Nolani opere latine conscripta, facs., 3 vols. (Stuttgart, 1962), II.ii, 76.
⁵⁷ Cited in Giordano Bruno, De la magie, trans. D. Sonnier and B. Donné (Paris, 2000), 95, fn. 7.
⁵⁸ Yates, Bruno, 52. Hardick Warren, Magick and astrology vindicated (1651), 16–17, 24, 14.
⁵⁹ N. H. Clulee, ‘At the Crossroads of Magic and Science: John Dee’s Archemasterie’, in B. Vickers (ed.),
Occult and Scientific Mentalities (Cambridge, 1988), 64.
In John Dee’s eyes, physiognomating one’s self with the aid of a physiognomi-
cal text (and the mirror?) sent one on a form of ‘internal’ contemplative travel,
in search of one’s fundamental inclination. This inclination was not only under
the influence of the stars and, as such, an astrological phenomenon, it was an
ontological fact, as profound and deeply rooted in the human psyche and
physiology and nature as Freud’s unconscious. This inclination, the funda-
mental virtues and vices which constituted it, as well as the nose that Dee
saw when he peered into the South American obsidian looking-glass which
he owned, were more than just the reflections of celestial influences. They
were actual celestial radiations in and of themselves.⁶⁰ Thus, this form of
physiognomical contemplation, through the text or through images, driven by
the lights of reason and natural law, was itself ultimately part of the divine
celestial radiation. For Dee, this internal journey across the dark recesses of
one’s ‘inner’ self was guided, as was shown earlier, by the light of his mind’s
internal theosophic eye and the external light that irradiated the physical
eye one used to gaze into the looking-glass. It was a journey that took one
across the terrain of one’s own internal galaxy, a galaxy constellated by virtues
and vices, what Paracelsus called man’s ‘inner firmament’. The art was a
technique that allowed one to try and gain some sort of control over this
astrological mechanism, cultivate the virtues, and conquer or purge the vices
in one’s self.⁶¹ This aim fitted the Christian scheme of things which accepted
that the stars inclined but did not determine. It thus left open the possibility
of free will, the possibility of being able to control and manipulate one’s
natural inclination, or, in the case of the wise Socrates, actually to change one’s
natural inclination.⁶² As Giordano Bruno said in his book The Cause, the
Principle and the One, stars, gems, and plants contained virtues which, through
a material cause and a vital, animistic, and symbolic principle, could alter
the spirit and engender new affections or passions in the soul, as well as in the
body. It was the manipulation of this material cause and this ‘symbolic princi-
ple’ that made one an internal artist, what Mirandola and Gaurico might have
agreed to call a sculptor of one’s inner self, and which helped to make the her-
metic reading of a tract on physiognomy a part of what Bruno saw as an ‘inner
writing’.⁶³
Indeed, this process might even usefully be referred to as a sort of ‘alchemy
of the self ’, in which one’s natural inclination to the good (and, as Bruno
saw it, the common will to love) was the psychological equivalent of the
⁶⁰ Yates, Bruno, 22. ⁶¹ See Taylor, Sources of the Self, 186–92. ⁶² Yates, Bruno, 52.
⁶³ Giordano Bruno, Œuvres complètes, 7 vols. (Paris, 1994–2000), iii. De La Cause, Du Principe et de l’Un,
ed. G. Aquilecchia (Paris, 1996), 134.
philosopher’s stone and the immortality that it ensured.⁶⁴ This concept of an
alchemy of the self is certainly a helpful metaphor for explaining how reading
a ‘book on physiognomy’ involved the use of a temporal grammar to discern
the layers or signs of the past, the present, and the future character in the self.
In other words, seeing the reading of a ‘treatise on physiognomy’ as part of a
more general attempt to explore the alchemy of the self highlights the fact that
this self-transformation was also thought to involve a certain sense of the
manipulation of time. This astrological manipulation of time is certainly dis-
cernible in John Dee’s understanding of a true, empirical, experimental sci-
ence; for him, it was one which enabled a person ‘to investigate the secrets of
nature; namely, the ability to acquire knowledge of the future, the past, and the
present through wonderful works, by which it forms judgements better than
ordinary judicial astrology’.⁶⁵
Other scholars might be able to explore this apparent connection between
physiognomy, astrology, and alchemy in more detail. As the link between the
art of physiognomy and the art of chiromancy was examined to some extent in
Chapter 3, I want here to draw the reader’s attention to the fact that the art of
physiognomy was also linked with another ‘technique of the microcosm’—the
art of memory. If ‘physiognomy’ was both a technique and expression of self-
transformation, the art of memory was a technique aimed at making that
self-transformation permanent. How so?
As we saw in Chapter 4, whether understood as occult wisdom or common
sense, these seemingly banal sentences formed part of a common stock of
memorized knowledge. Indeed, some of the authors of their written and
printed forms appear to have dictated them from memory.⁶⁶ A link between
the art of physiognomy and the art of memory was long-standing. It had long
been known by the authors of physiognomical treatises, and dates from at least
the fourth century ce. As the fourth-century Anonymous Latin treatise put it,
‘whosoever wishes to practise physiognomy must first commit the meaning of
the signs to memory’.⁶⁷ This connection was continued in numerous Renais-
sance and early modern ‘treatises on physiognomy’, such as those by Grataro-
lus, Della Porta, Jean Belot, and Richard Saunders.⁶⁸
⁶⁴ The number of manuscript treatises on physiognomy bound with alchemical works is considerable.
For example, Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Lyell 36 (15th century).
⁶⁵ Clulee, ‘Crossroads’, 59.
⁶⁶ Indagine, Briefe introductions (1558), sig. Hii; Richard Saunders, Palmistry, the secrets thereof disclosed
(1676) 2[0]3. ⁶⁷ André, Traité de physiognomonie, 58.
⁶⁸ See, for example, Fludd, Utriusque cosmi, II. i.2, 47 ff.; Richard Saunders, Physiognomie, Chiromancie,
Metoposcopie (1653), sig. Eee–Eee4.
34. One of the other techniques of the microcosm with which physiognomical con-
templation was combined was the art of memory, Robert Fludd, Utriusque cosmi
maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, 2 vols. (Oppen-
heim, 1617–21), ii., Tractatus Primi Sectio Secunda, Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon,
Rés 107538 (1–3). (Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier
Nicole.)
Another connection with the art of memory lies in the fact that physiog-
nomics such as ‘a litle nose a disceitful person’, or the various attempts to
versify them, were phrased in such a way as to help them pass more easily
into the reader’s memory.⁶⁹ As many present-day advertisers and headline
writers know, and as the early modern authors of these works also knew, this
⁶⁹ Indagine, Introductions (1558), sig. Iviv.
simplicity and brevity rendered things all the more memorable: ‘the Brevity of
these [physiognomical] Rules will render them infinitely useful to the memo-
ry’.⁷⁰ This connection between the art of physiognomy and the art of memory
was also in part visual. For the art of memory was itself fundamentally based
upon the stimulation of the visual memory. It was a commonplace for even the
least hermetic of Renaissance intellectuals that the surest way to remember
something was to translate it into an image. Francis Bacon certainly accepted
this rule of the art of memory:
We find in the art of memory, that images visible work better than other conceits; as if
you would remember the word philosophy, you shall more surely do it by imagining
that such a man (for men are best places) is reading upon Aristotle’s Physics; than if you
should imagine him to say, I’ll go study philosophy.
It is well known that the art of memory involved placing those images or
emblems in a specific architectural setting. The most famous example was
Guilio Camillo’s ‘memory theatre’. That ‘memory theatre’ was what Camillo
called ‘an artificial spirit or mind endowed with windows’. Erasmus knew of it.
It was described to him in a letter dated 8 June 1532:
The author has different names for his theatre: artificial spirit or mind endowed with
windows. He says, in fact, that all the things that the human mind conceives and that
cannot be seen with the eyes of the body, can be, however, with careful consideration,
expressed with some bodily signs, so that everyone can see directly with his own eyes all
that which otherwise is submersed in the profundities of the human mind. And he has
used these names for his theatre because it can be seen with the eyes of the body.⁷¹
This is not the place to go into the details of the various techniques of the art
of memory, one aspect of which involved creating ‘active images’ (imagines
agentes) for the aforementioned internal cinema.⁷² What needs to be empha-
sized here is that both the art of memory and the art of physiognomy were
forms of visual (and sonic) literacy. Both were innately emblematic, both
visual and both architectural. The Neoplatonic, hermetic art of memory was
thus an edifice of a ‘mind endowed with windows’ (Illustration 34). The art of
physiognomy was an edifice endowed with windows into the soul. In the her-
metic tradition, together they provided what the Neoplatonic Moses called
‘windows into heaven’, that is to say celestial windows onto the unmediated
revelation of the divine.
⁷⁰ Saunders, Palmistry (1676), 204.

⁷¹ Desiderius Erasmus, Opus epistolarum, ed. P. S. Allen, 12 vols. (Oxford, 1941), x. 29–30. I owe this trans-
lation to Lina Bolzoni. ⁷² See Yates, Memory, 9–11
The question remains: how were these techniques of the microcosm to be
used in this more metaphysical ‘alchemy of the self ’? I would argue that we can
come close to explaining Fludd’s inclusion of the art of physiognomy among
these ‘techniques of the microcosm’ if we understand it in terms of what
Frances Yates has taught us about Giordano Bruno’s ‘memory wheel’. In
Fludd’s hermeticism, as influenced as it was by Bruno, the art of memory was
used to collect together, in one memorable system, the things which would
help to sustain one’s self, to fill one’s inner abyss, and to push one further along
the path to salvation and immortality—an attempt to control what Ficino
understood as the flow of spiritus into materia. In other words, the physiog-
nomics were used as mnenomic windows into passages, characters, and events
from the immortal universe that were described in works of the great poets and
the images of the master painters. One such example were the quite large, shin-
ing, humid eyes of Homer’s Pallas, or the very small, dry, sombre eyes of duplic-
ity and treachery which Achilles attacks in the Iliad, and with which Pompeo
Gaurico was suggesting some statues should be endowed.⁷³ Another example,
taken from a mid-seventeenth-century English translation of a Kabbalah-
inspired French ‘treatise on physiognomy’, also shows this same idea still at
work:
We may from the Eyes discover the good or ill disposition of persons; therefore Homer
calls Minerva a blue-eyed Lass, and Venus black-eyed . . . to represent the prudence of
the one, and luxury of the other: And that is the reason the left eye is attributed to
Venus; for if in a woman that eye be shining, and move, the eye-lids fat, it signifies much
inclination to Venery, especially if that Woman be olive-coloured or yellowish with her
black eyes, as Venus is described by Hesiod . . . never look for any shamefastness in such
a woman.⁷⁴
In his book on De sculptura (Florence, 1504), Pompeo Gaurico was attempting

to reify a passage from the Picatrix. The inclusion of a section on physiognomy
was part of an aim to bring sculptures alive by having them radiate the effica-
cious virtues of its language. Yet, as Pompeo Gaurico said, physiognomy was
not useful simply for actual sculpting but for the entire human species (omni
generi humano).⁷⁵ In Fludd’s work, the divine language of the art of physiog-
nomy became a technique for the self-sculpting to which Pico referred in his
famous oration. One used its efficacious physiognomics to remember the
various metaphysical qualities which sustained one’s desired self. Being able to
control and bring together the virtues required for the ‘marriage of heaven and
⁷³ Pompeo Gaurico, De sculptura (1504), ed. A. Chastel and R. Klein (Paris, 1969), 146, 140.
⁷⁴ Saunders, Physiognomie (1653), 173. ⁷⁵ Gaurico, De sculptura (1969), 129.
earth’ and the attainment of immortality necessitated having them embodied
symbolically in the various members of the human body. To each of the physi-
cal features and metaphysical qualities that made up a physiognomic were
attached visual and sonic myths. In the eye of the hermetic’s imagination, the
physiognomic was a window into those myths. Those myths could lead one in
various directions, through the mythologies of astrological lore, the mytholo-
gies wrapped around and infused in the labyrinthine vines of hieroglyphic
emblems, mythologies which consisted of the words of the great, if pagan,
poets, and the images of the great painters and sculptors, or the writers of
ancient theology. Sustaining the rebirth or regeneration in this way using the
art of astrology and the art of memory kept the light of that spiritual regenera-
tion shining through one’s eyes. It was in that way that the people with eyes to
see would know that one was regenerated.
This hypothesis certainly seems to fit very closely with John Dee’s under-
standing of the purpose of natural magic: ‘[to collect] together the virtues
[which are in the substance of the terrestrial world] and join them to that virtue
by which strange and [or miraculous] actions are produced’.⁷⁶ Indeed, one can
take this further. For Fludd’s understanding of the self-transforming power of
the hermetic art of physiognomy, as evident in his engravings, involved the
intermediary help of the angels. His Kabbalistic recourse to the angels (or
‘Sefiroth’) in his attempt to take some sort of control over this mechanism dis-
tinguished him from the less esoteric Ficino. But it was itself an echo of John
Dee’s famous conversations with the angels in which the angel Gabriel told him
Hebrew was the language of Adam, the primal language, and then dictated var-
ious revelations and prophecies in the language of Enoch.⁷⁷ The aforemen-
tioned ‘inner chord’ struck in Fludd’s ‘physiognomical consciousness’ by these
physiognomics became the universal vibration of the ‘inner lyre’ of Ficino’s
very musical ‘religion of the world’, which, as another of Fludd’s illustrations
makes clear, involved the rebirth of the soul (Illustration 35). Generated in the
divine light of the theosophic eye, projected onto the mind’s internal screen by
the inner eye of imagination, the immortal ‘cinema’ of these windows of the
soul—whose mythologies in some cases took one through the ‘windows of
heaven’ far into the realms of the astrological and the mythical self embedded
in an ancient theology—was sustained and perpetuated by the omnipresent
eye of the art of memory.
⁷⁶ Clulee, ‘Crossroads’, 61, fn. 27. The phrases in brackets are my suggested alterations to Clulee’s
translation.
⁷⁷ John Dee, A true and faithful relation of what passed for many yeers between Dr. John Dee . . . and some
spirits (1659), 92.
35. Hermetic ‘regeneration’ was understood in musical terms, Robert Fludd,

Utriusque cosmi maioris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, 2
vols. (Oppenheim, 1617–21), ii. Tractus Primi Sectio Secunda, Bibliothèque Munici-
pale de Lyon, Rés 107538 (1–3). (Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de
Lyon, Didier Nicole.)
From regeneration to recreation

In what way do other treatises from the early modern period reveal how the
overarching conceptual framework, into which the art of physiognomy was
placed and by which the aforementioned, more universal, form of physiog-
nomical engagement was appropriated, actually changed across time? The
number of ‘treatises on physiognomy’ in manuscript and print throughout
early modern Europe is too large for the overarching conceptual apparatus of
each one to be examined here in detail. Such a study would provide an illumi-
nating comparative, chronological picture of the conceptual changes which
physiognomony underwent in each country in Europe. The following is based
primarily on the treatises which make up the English series. In themselves they
suggest a number of fundamental changes that happened more generally across
Europe in the early modern period.
The first of those changes occurred primarily between the late fifteenth and
the early seventeenth centuries. It seems to have been characterized by what
might usefully be described as a change in the depth of field of this physiog-
nomical eye, a change that can be most conveniently symbolized by the alter-
ation that the Elizabethan author Thomas Hill made to the title of the second,
expanded 1571 edition of his ‘treatise on physiognomy’. Entitled in print A con-
templation of mankinde, the sole surviving fragment of manuscript of this work
in Hill’s hand reveals that it originally bore the more self-reflexive title ‘The
Mirror of Knowledge’. In other words, these ‘books on physiognomy’ give the
impression that there was a general turning of the physiognomical eye away
from the occult physiognomical self-meditation and ‘regeneration’ towards a
more exclusive, and seemingly objective, focus on the contemplation of other
people.
For Hill, developing one’s physiognomical eye provided one with a baseline
of natural knowledge for assessing what he called the natural ‘state and condi-
cions’ of the people with whom one came into contact and with whom one had
to negotiate along life’s path. In other words, reading a physiognomical treatise
provided one with a tool for constructing the most basic structure, not of one’s
self, but of one’s social relationships across the social spectrum, from friends to
enemies:
[It] teacheth the thyrde part of wysdom, and first part of prudence, that is: how to dis-
cerne the disposicions of al men by their fourme and shape, whereby we maye knowe
whom to make oure frendes and familiers, whom to preserve from beyng our foes, &
whom to auoyde as daungerous to haue to doe with all.⁷⁸
This was not a new phenomenon as far as the theory of the physiognomical eye
was concerned. As was shown in Chapter 1, this more socially oriented phys-
iognomical eye can be found in Pietro d’Abano’s thirteenth-century treatise.
The Speculum physiognomiae which Michael Savonarola wrote for Leonello
d’Este in the mid-fifteenth century also had this very practical objective. But by
the sixteenth century it was starting to be driven by a very different under-
⁷⁸ Thomas Hill, A contemplation of mankinde (1571), Preface.
standing of, and a new Renaissance perspective on, the empirical, observable,
rational relationship between the viewer and the object.
As with any historical change, changes in these reading practices were never
complete and clear cut. Even in the later eighteenth century there were ‘trea-
tises on physiognomy’ published, such as Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece,
which still contained vestiges of the originally more self-reflexive, devotional,
form of ‘engagement’ ‘Now since philosophy informs us, that nosce te ipsum is
one of the first lessons a man ought to learn, it cannot surely be accounted a
useless piece of knowledge for a man to be acquainted with the cause of his own
being’—as well as echoes of the use of the ‘mirror’.⁷⁹ Yet despite such nuggets
of self-reflection in the conception of the physiognomical eye as presented in
this later text, all sense of how the grammar of the art of physiognomy could be
used to know one’s self had been lost. A sign itself of the way in which the new,
more empirical, natural philosophy managed to infuse the culture of everyday
life.
As this more outward focus of the textual physiognomical eye came to the
fore, reading a physiognomical treatise appears to have been conceived of
as providing readers with a tool to aid them in some quite specific areas of the
general process of social filtering, rather than the more mystical process of
regeneration. Thus, just as the more self-reflexive side of physiognomical con-
templation had found itself absorbed in the more religious walks of early mod-
ern life, so the more socially oriented physiognomical gaze offered in these
printed texts was increasingly appropriated into a number of different but
interrelated fields of social encounter. For example, in the Secretum secretorum,
this physiognomical form of looking and listening was enveloped within a
conceptual framework suited to a more political ‘walk of life’. The cognitive
framework driving the Secretum’s physiognomical eye, whilst still embedded
within the classical concept of a mystical prudence, was now being refracted
through what the authors Lydgate and Burgh called ‘polityk prudence’. In their
physiognomical treatise, Lydgate and Burgh offered advice on how the king
‘must prudently Afore conceyve in his providence’; how the king must be ‘pru-
dent and wys | and of discrecyoun’; And how, ‘amonge all other thynges of this
worlde I wyll that thou knowe a noble and meruaylous science that is called
physonomy by the which thou shalt knowe the nature and condycyon of
people’.⁸⁰
⁷⁹ Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece (1764), 9, 27.

⁸⁰ Lydgate and Burgh’s Secrees of old Philisoffres, ed. R. Steele, Early English Text Society (1894), 1, l. 3, and
12, l. 373, 32, l. 1029a, 3, l. 60; Secretum Secretorum, ed. M. A. Manzalaoui, Early English Text Society (Oxford,
1977), 377.
It was this physiognomical prudence that was to help the king discover how
to treat his subjects wisely, and how to choose the right counsellors and minis-
ters to help him govern. There was still an element of self-reflection that it
required of the king—he must avoid all impolitic excesses such as largesse and
avarice. But it was a self-reflection that was oriented outwards, for it concerned
itself only with the regulation and orchestration of the king’s appearance and
manner in the physiognomical eyes of his subjects. In that sense its physiog-
nomical eye was the eye of political science. Rather than the successful entry of
a Christian into the garden of virtues, it was more intent on gaining and regu-
lating the physical and metaphysical virtues necessary for ensuring the success-
ful rule of a king in this life:
God Almyghty save | and conferme our kyng
In al vertu | to his encrees of glorye.⁸¹
Thus, in sharp contrast to the illiterate Shepherd’s mystical physiognomical

prayer, the spatial and temporal optical nerves as well as the objectives of the
physiognomical eye of the Secretum were very much rooted in the realms of this
world. It was a way of looking driven by a physiognomical prudence aimed at
political success in the here and now, with the eye of its political science set
more firmly on other people than on one’s self.
This shift in the orientation of the physiogomical eye was not simply a con-
sequence of the evaporation of the ‘occult’ or the hermetic framework. Fludd’s
hermetic physiognomical eye, as self-meditative as it could be, offers us quite a
detailed insight into some more quite specific social practices into which
the reading of a more occult ‘treatise on physiognomy’ appears to have been
appropriated:
And truly, if this art is considered by a person of discretion and wisdom it will bring
him great fruit and utility; certainly it will teach him with whom to deposit things,
whom to trust, to enter marriage, to teach young boys, to mingle with honest men, to
avoid filthy and obscene men, not to rashly form alliances and acquaintances, to avoid
the improbity of wicked people without harm and danger; and thereafter, this Science
makes those people who are skilled in it and cultivate it, prudent and fortunate. For, as
we first observe the man, through this we can judge the disposition of his soul to good
or evil.⁸²
None the less, as the new natural philosophy refused all sense of the divinely
inspired, fisnomic inner light of the viewer which was capable of unleashing the
power of the similitude in the natural language of physiognomy, that outward
⁸¹ Lydgate, Secrees, 1, ll. 1–2; Manzalaoui, Secretum, 253. ⁸² Fludd, Utriusque cosmi, II.i.2, 118.
gaze of the physiognomical eye underwent a radical change in what might be
called the depth of its focal field.
Of all such social encounters, the most prominent, and the one that became
all the more dominant from the mid- to late seventeenth century onwards, was
the search for a partner, or what might usefully be termed ‘generation’. Indeed,
it became so dominant that the second fundamental aspect of the change
which the reading practices that sprung up around the art of physiognomy
underwent during the early modern period might be described as a shift from
concerns about ‘re-generation’ to concerns about ‘generation’. This relation-
ship between physiognomy and generation was not new. As was shown in
Chapter 1, since at least the thirteenth-century treatise written by Michael
Scot, physiognomony had been linked with the Aristotelian issue of genera-
tion. In fact, as will become clear in the final chapter, if the readers’ graffiti in
extant copies of physiognomical treatises are any indication, Michael Scot’s
treatise was one of the most widely read in early modern Europe and was read
with exactly this concern in mind. None the less, there is much more evidence
in other treatises to suggest that there appears to have been an increasing
tendency to use physiognomony not so much in search of a business partner
but in search of a marriage partner, or breeding partner, and in some cases one
might even say the business of breeding. Given the contributions of natural
philosophers to the developing notion of the self, this was enough to make this
relationship different from its medieval form.
Indeed, the evidence in these treatises for this wider socio-cultural shift from
regeneration to generation also articulates another aspect of the transformation
that occurred in the overarching nature of the physiognomical eye as pres-
ented in these English treatises. The same evidence also shows that the practice
of reading a ‘treatise on physiognomy’ in the early modern period underwent a
fundamental change from praying to playing. It was stated in the Introduction
that before this devotional physiognomical prayer of occult self-meditation
became an amusing, bawdy parlour game, it first became something of a
‘curiosity’ – a sign in itself that it still had some intellectual or other value in the
late seventeenth century. One finds intimations of its relegation to the status
of ‘curiosity’ in numerous later seventeenth-century treatises: ‘this treatise of
physiognomy and palmistry . . . for the benefit and advantage of those who are
curious enquirers into the secrets of nature’.⁸³
It has been argued in this book that this was a consequence of the spread of
a new rationality. In the wake of the new natural philosophy, as the new
⁸³ Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece (1764), 96.

mechanical philosophies took root and a new form of rationality began to pen-
etrate everyday life, the development of a sense of the play of nature, the oblit-
eration of physiognomy’s classical grammar, the survival of only fragmented
nuggets of its hermetic grammar, and the consequent lack of new ‘scientific’
validity of both according to the established scientific methods, all served to
contribute to the development of its reputation as at best a pseudo-scientific
‘curiosity’. As was mentioned in Chapter 3, one text which exemplified that
stage of the transition of physiognomy was aptly named the Court of Curiositie.
Whilst the physiognomy is presented in all seriousness, gone is all sense of pri-
vate devotion. Instead it is surrounded by a playfulness which will eventually
absorb it. The reader is informed that the section on dreams was invented not
‘to unhinge the Brain, or torture the Phancie; but rather to Divert, and Exer-
cise in your Ladyships that pleasant Ague of the Diaphragm, Laughter’. Vulson
sandwiched his entertaining account of physiognomy between the interpreta-
tion of dreams and a game of chance based around a table of questions typical
of those asked of astrologers, all of which he then contrasted with the more seri-
ous tone of the physiognomy. Yet, despite this, the overall presentation of the
contents of this ‘cabinet’ is as a form of theatrical entertainment, one which
might be attractive to ‘noble’ women in particular:
But lest I be accus’d of too much Rudeness for detaining you so long in the Porch of this
Palace, I will now open the Portal, and give you free admittance into this Court of
Curiosity; where, that the Entertainment may in some measure Answer your Expecta-
tion, it is the earnest desire of your Ladyships most obedient Servant . . .
This sense of the physiognomical eye as a curious form of entertainment and

game was developed further in such texts as Wits Cabinet; or, A Companion for
Young Men and Ladies. In this work the physiognomony itself was absorbed
into these more playful elements. In other words, alongside its longstanding
partners—palmistry, moles, and interpretation of dreams—the exposition of
physiognomical doctrine was conceived of as a form of entertainment side-by-
side with ‘the Art of Drinking’ and ‘Pleasant Riddles for Merry Company’ as
well as, significantly, advice on courtship, ‘the Whole Art of Wooing and
making Love, with the best Complemental Letters, Elegant Epistles, Amorous
Addresses, and Answers in a most Pleasant and Ingenious Strain, with the
Newest Songs, sung at Court and both Theatres’.⁸⁴
Thus, despite the return of the more hermetic forms of physiognomy in the
1650s and 1660s, by the late seventeenth century the physiognomical eye was
no longer the preserve of the would-be magi. It was being appropriated into
⁸⁴ Marc Vulson, The Court of Curiositie (1669), sig. A3v; Wit’s Cabinet (1686), title-page.
notions of the social graces, the lighter, more communally entertaining side of
‘Education and Accomplishment’, or what was to be called by some ‘sensibi-
lity’. Yet it was still a social grace in which lurked the notion of generation in the
most common and fundamental aim of the physiognomical search for a part-
ner. By the early eighteenth century, the penny chapbooks were suggesting this
latter more ludic form of appropriation even more clearly. They often declared
that the utility of the physiognomical eye lay in the finding and choosing of
partners: ‘How every one may know their Partner’s Disposition and Temper, by the
hair, eyes, and nose, &c.’⁸⁵ Indeed, in these texts that very process of the phys-
iognomical search for a partner had itself become something of a game, a game
sometimes enveloped in bawdy humour. Aristotle’s Complete Masterpiece could
be taken as providing the best symbol of all of this. This eighteenth-century
text still contained some of Michael Scot’s original physiognomical aphorisms,
but they were interspersed with short, light-hearted verses such as:
Thus those who chiefly mind the brutal part,
May learn to chuse a husband by this art.
And he that will of a good wife make choice,
May chuse her by observing of her voice.
This ludic aspect of partner-seeking or generation had been apparent as early as

1690. In Aristotle’s Legacy, for example, the reader was presented with a Wheel
of Fortune just prior to the exposition of physiognomical doctrine. The aim
was to have the reader throw a dice, and the numbers on the dice corre-
sponded to a particular set of verses entitled ‘How to know Good or Bad
Fortune to Men, in Love Matters and Business, by Changes on the Dice, in the
Wheel of Fortune’. Many of the answers were distinctly physiognomical, with
a hint of smutty humour:
She will be brown, and of a middle Age;
A brisk and lively Wench, I will engage:
But in her love, with others you shall share,
yet of the main Chance, she will have a care.
O Me, a Red-Hair’d Man will be your lot;
But he to please You, has a good thing got;
You Children will have many, and much pleasure,
Then be content without a World of treasure.
The bawdy humour had become even more evident by the middle of the eigh-
teenth century. The New School of Love, for example, cloaks its advice on how
⁸⁵ New School of Love (1786), 2.

to woo and the physiognomical search for a partner with plenty of risqué verse:
‘Let not the Bridegroom be afraid | Though he encounter with a Maid | She’ll
squeak, she’ll cry | She’ll faint she’ll die’. And if the ribald humour at the heart
of this admittedly random game of love-searching can be said to have come and
gone, the appropriation of physiognomy into the notion of the game was
a more permanent feature of these more popular texts. A late eighteenth-
century text, A New Academy of Compliments, consisted of the now traditional
future-telling and partner-seeking art of physiognomating: ‘The most Exact
and Approved Fortune-Teller: As to what relates to Good or Bad Fortune in
either Sex, especially to maids, Widows, Widowers, and Batchelors’ . . . ‘Signs
to chuse Husbands and good Wives’, as well as the same types of partner-
seeking games, some of which seemed to equate love and business: ‘Several
Queries resolved in Matters of Love and Business, by throwing a Die, or prick-
ing at a Figure’. The number thrown or letter pricked corresponded to a par-
ticular question and a particular answer to questions such as: ‘As to what Kind
of a Husband a Widow or maid shall have’, and once again there were numer-
ous physiognomical answers.⁸⁶
Thus, if this shift from re-generation to generation was at the same time one
that involved a shift from praying to playing, one final question can be asked.
What was the role of the occult understanding of physiognomy in this trans-
formation of the ways in which reading a ‘treatise on physiognomy’ was appro-
priated? Once again it must be said that the shift from regeneration to
generation was not a consequence of the demise of the hermetic form of phys-
iognomy. Indeed, as much as the hermetic art of physiognomy was bound up
with the notion of ‘re-generation’, the hermetic philosophers also had a partic-
ular physiognomical understanding of generation. The frontispiece of Robert
Fludd’s ‘treatise on physiognomy’ articulated just this relationship between
physiognomical ‘re-generation’ and ‘generation’. It represented the human
level of the notion of divine fecundity which underpinned Fludd’s earlier
vision and visualization of the Creation. It was a conception of human fecun-
dity enmeshed in Neoplatonic notions of love, of the ‘eros’ of ‘spiritus’, and
hermetic conceptions of re-generation/reproduction.⁸⁷ Thus, whether one was
reading a hermetically influenced ‘book on physiognomy’ or not, that reading
⁸⁶ Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece (1764), 106, 108, and 109; Aristotle’s Legacy [1690?], London: British
Library, Cup.403h.37, 3, 4, and 5; New School of Love (Glasgow, 1786), 11; New Academy of Compliments
(1772), 56–7, 61–2.
⁸⁷ Bruno, Œuvres Complètes, vii. Des Fureurs Hèroiques, ed. M. A. Granada (Paris, 1999), 330 and 578
(n. 75), 360.
practice was one that often came to be appropriated in the practice of search-
ing for a mate. Indeed, as far as the more occult-influenced physiognomical eye
was concerned, it was a reading practice which in some cases appropriated the
hermetic desire for self-perfection and immortality via self-transformation into
the generation of offspring.
The following definition of physiognomy would have been acceptable at
any point in the period: ‘Physiognomy is an ingenious Science, or Knowledge of
Nature, by which the Inclinations and Dispositions of every Creature are
understood’. The words may have been the same. But what had changed was
man’s understanding of nature, man’s relationship to nature, and the concep-
tion of what constituted ‘knowledge’. Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece con-
tained vestiges of the originally more self-reflexive, devotional form of
‘engagement’:
Now since philosophy informs us, that nosce te ipsum is one of the first lessons a man
ought to learn, it cannot surely be accounted a useless piece of knowledge for a man to
be acquainted with the cause of his own being.⁸⁸
Yet all sense of how physiognomy could be used to know one’s self had gone.
This was not only because the understanding of the grammar of physiognomy
had been lost. It was also due to the fact that, by that stage, the conception of
the self had changed profoundly, with the result that the realm of physiogno-
my, to the extent that it was still recognizable as physiognomy, had been
transformed into a concern with the mechanics of the cause and external
‘impression’ of the self rather than the less mechanical meaning and the more
occult internal ‘impression’ of one’s self.
Indeed, it can be argued that what had begun a significant part of its early
modern life as part of the oral, then the printed, hermetic wisdom of Egyptian,
Islamic, and Jewish mysticism was by the end of the early modern period being
published in a variety of cheap collections of extremely popular, even bawdy,
material, some of which carried intimations of racial overtones. The title of one
1729 anonymous Italian publication states this evolution from ‘praying’ to
‘playing’ very clearly—The Golden Key; or, The art of winning the lottery, fol-
lowed by a treatise on physiognomy and chiromancy from the work of a modern
Cabbalist.⁸⁹
⁸⁸ Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece (1710), 104; Aristotle’s Compleat Masterpiece (1764), 9.

⁸⁹ La chiave d’oro, ovvero l’ arte di vincere alla lotteria, seguito da un trattato di fisognomia e di chiromanzia
ad opera di un cabalista moderno (n. pl., 1729).
Conclusion
Historiographically speaking, this chapter has attempted to complement the
work of scholars such as F. A. Yates and D. P. Walker on the history of the her-
metic philosophy in early modern Europe, whilst the following chapter, which
tests the hypotheses offered in this chapter by examining the graffiti found on
extant copies of early modern ‘books on physiognomy’, is a contribution to
what might be termed the history of the margins. Together they argue that, as
a result of Neoplatonic hermetic syncretism, the physiognomics in this series of
texts came to provide some readers with a labyrinthine, audio-visual world of
symbolic entry-points into the mythological meaning which was, at one time,
thought to be dissolved in, if not actually indistinguishable from, the nature
(physis) of the human body and the human self. Those symbols and meanings
were, in fact, the remnants of an ancient religion (prisca theologia) of a now for-
gotten mythical self-knowledge. When combined with the art of memory, the
art of physiognomy became what Robert Fludd called a ‘technique of the
microcosm’, aimed at guiding and controlling the celestial influence that regu-
lated the microcosm and the macrocosm in order to bring about and sustain a
regeneration of the self, what Bruno referred to as an ‘inner writing’. As a result
of the rediscovery of hermeticism in the autumn of the Middle Ages, reading a
‘book on physiognomy’ became an intense exercise in a mystical form of self-
meditation. However, with the gradual penetration into everyday life of the
seventeenth century’s more empirical culture, the refusal of an increasingly
dominant natural philosophy to accept the divine fisnomic capacities of the
scientific viewer, and the less reverential attitudes taken towards the ancient
language of physiognomony as presented on the pages of these increasingly
vulgarized texts, reading physiognomony became, for a while, nothing more
than a respectable ‘curiosity’. By the early eighteenth century it was a reading
practice that had been transformed into nothing more than a bawdy, commu-
nal parlour game.
6
Living Graffiti
In one extant copy of the Kalendar of Shepherds, the passage referring to the spe-
cial way in which shepherds and simple people know God has been under-
lined.¹ In the ensuing analysis it will be argued that the graffiti in these ‘treatises
on physiognomy’ reveal a number of different reading practices of ‘humble
folk’ or even the ‘poorest members of society’, including those who could not
quite read books. Indeed, many of them can be taken as an indication of the
way in which the innate iconicity of the language of physiognomony inspired
some form of visual representation. The first is a scholary examination refer-
encing of the sources of the physiognomy in the text. The second is the more
‘humble’ reading practice of children in the process of learning the language of
physiognomy as part of a shared process of developing both a textual and a
visual literacy. The severe limitations of using graffiti as empirical evidence cer-
tainly become apparent when one tries to use them to establish with indis-
putable clarity whether specific readers at specific times prayed or played in the
ways suggested in the previous chapter. Notwithstanding those limitations, it
is further argued that the perusal of these texts not only involved the use of a
mirror, but, when seen in the light of the internal moral projection which it was
claimed these books stimulated, some of these seemingly meaningless graffi-
toed traces at times become what, for brevity’s sake, can be described as the her-
metic graffiti of a Renaissance soul.
Backward Projection
‘Direct’, detailed evidence of an early modern reader having read a ‘book on
physiognomy’ is rarely come by. The working hypothesis of the previous
chapter has been based on a process of anthropological back-projection—by
observing the way in which these texts are read today and deliberately project-
¹ Oxford: Bodleian Library, Vet. A3c. 238, sig. I2.

ing that back onto the past. As Marc Bloch wrote, ‘it is always by borrowing
from our daily experiences and by shading them, where necessary, with new
tints, that we derive the elements which help us to restore the past’. In order to
admit the limitations of such an exercise, it should also be seen as an exercise in
what Foucault called a ‘history of the present’, or what E. H. Carr described as
‘an unending dialogue between the present and the past’.² Another way of
describing this would be to see this process as articulating the enigma of the
continuity and discontinuity between the present and the past, between our
present sense of ‘ourselves’ and an early modern sense of ‘ourselves’. For, on the
one hand, it is historically naïve to assume that ‘they’ (the readers of the early
modern period) were exactly like ‘us’ (contemporary readers). Indeed, that very
act of projecting ourselves backwards into the position and mindset of an early
modern reader brings us face-to-face with all of the religious, scientific, politi-
cal, social, economic, and cultural changes that have taken place between then
and now, and which have contributed to our present understanding of ‘the self ’
that we use to carry out that backward projection.
It is undeniable that all of those developments have contributed to a process
of metamorphosis by which our present sense of ‘self ’ is in some ways pro-
foundly different from the early modern sense of ‘self ’. So much so that some
now claim that our present, allegedly post-genome, ‘post-human’ condition
represents some radical and fundamental discontinuity with our past ‘human
condition’. However, that very same act of anthropological back-projection
which helps us to reconstruct how they read these ‘books on physiognomy’ also
allows us to experience an understanding of a historical and ontological conti-
nuity between our past and present sense of ‘self ’ in the form of the basic,
almost visceral ‘intersubjectivity’ we feel we share with the nature of the people
of the early modern past.
There are no early modern newsreels or films of these reading practices. In
addition, the internal ‘cinema’ generated as part of the most intense, prayer-like
hermetic form of textual self-physiognomation, or the laughter and wit which
arose spontaneously among a party of readers as they playfully perused these
pages, also appears to have vanished without trace. Visual representations of
reading practices, such as the woodcut of the Carthusian monks (Illustration
26), bring us closer to ‘live footage’. But even they are, strictly speaking, indi-
rect evidence. Until a first-hand detailed early modern diary account of the
reading of a ‘treatise on physiognomy’ is discovered, the only surviving direct
² M. Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, trans. P. Putnam (Manchester, 1954), 44, 47; M. Foucault, Discipline
and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan (1979), 31; E. H. Carr, What is History?, ed. R. W. Davies, 2nd edn.
(Basingstoke, 2000), 24.
Living Graffiti 257
evidence of such actual readings are the traces of graffiti left by former readers
on the extant texts themselves. Is it possible to use such graffiti to ‘document
more directly the ways humble folk appropriated’ these texts?
One expert in the field is understandably sceptical:
This is a difficult task because, unlike the reading styles of the learned and the lettered,
‘popular’ reading has left no traces on the print objects themselves. Careful scrutiny of
the marginal notes that Gabriel Harvey, a professional reader in the service of various
aristocratic patrons, made in his copy of Livy has made it possible to reconstruct how
he read, and similar annotations in Jean Bodin’s Universae naturae theatrum made by
the university professors give a notion of the uses and interpretations of that work, but
this seems totally unavailable to historians of the poorest members of society. Simi-
larly, historians lack anything like the first-person accounts of reading left by some
popular readers of the eighteenth century who wrote the stories of their lives.³
Marginal Graffiti
When examining the graffiti in these books, one has to be aware that graffiti
constitute a form of writing with a long history. The Lascaux caves or the walls
of Pompeii are just two of the most well-known forms of what might be con-
sidered historical graffiti. Less well-known and studied but equally important
are the graffiti found on the walls of monasteries, including, very often, repre-
sentations of human faces.⁴ The balustrades of the upper gallery of the
seventeenth-century chapel built by Christian IV at Fredriksborg slot, in
Hillerød, outside Copenhagen, to take just one example, contain an astonish-
ing amount of seventeenth-century graffiti scratched into the stone by former
church-goers. Indeed, just as graffiti are an art form now being taken seriously
as a valid form of expression by the aficionados of the ‘art world’; just as this sort
of physical interaction with the text becomes increasingly impossible in the
world of hypertext; so graffiti are a writing practice that is increasingly coming
under the lens of serious historical scholarship.
Within the discipline of history itself, the consideration of graffiti as poten-
tially significant evidence is bound up with the historiographical tradition of
the history of the margins. As Carlo Ginzburg has shown, the late nineteenth-
century art historian Giovanni Morelli thought that it was through the mar-
ginal details that the individuality of the artist avoided subordination to
³ G. Cavallo and R. Chartier (eds.), The History of Reading in the West (Cambridge, 1999), 281–2.
⁴ R. Kostova, ‘The Silent Communication: Graffiti from the Monastery of Ravna, Bulgaria’, Mitteilun-
gen der ANISA 17, Heft. 1 (1996), 57–77.
cultural traditions, those details being repeated ‘by force of habit, almost
unconsciously’. Sigmund Freud also found them very revealing in works of art
as well as psychoanalysis, which, he wrote, ‘is accustomed to divine secret and
concealed things from unconsidered or unnoticed details, from the rubbish-
heap, as it were, of our observations’. An analysis of the graffiti in this obscure
corpus of early modern ‘books on physiognomy’ certainly calls for what
Ginzburg described as ‘an interpretative method based on taking marginal and
irrelevant details as revealing clues’.⁵ The study of graffiti in the margins of
books on such an obscure subject like physiognomy makes it even more mar-
ginal. Yet, however marginal it might be, one question has yet to be addressed:
why are these markings being referred to as ‘graffiti’, and not ‘marginal annota-
tions’ or more generally ‘marginalia’?
The term ‘graffiti’ is being used because both ‘marginal annotations’ and
‘marginalia’, whilst claiming a bibliographic objectivity, imply some sort of
deliberate scholarly commentary. Some of the markings in ‘books on physiog-
nomy’ are of a very scholarly nature, made by the quill of a model Renaissance
humanist, and hence accurately described as ‘marginal annotations’ or ‘mar-
ginalia’. Some might even be said to have added up to an entire commentary,
such as Camillo Baldi’s on the pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonica. However,
most of them are not. And quantity aside, what is more to the point is that this
particular analysis is more concerned with the markings made by (humble?)
people who appear to have been engaging with the text on its own terms, in a
non-scholarly, non-professional, or a less consciously intellectual or learned
way. The traces of such interactions, like the now irretrievable faces of the
people who made them, were and are their own very particular type of
commentary.
Indeed, if one has to be pedantic, neither are such traces of readers’ interac-
tions always to be found in the margins. They were often made in the middle
of a paragraph, or on the back or front cover of the volume. In fact, some of
them are found in the middle of a woodcut or an engraving. Consider, for
example, the smoking pipe placed in the mouth of a woodcut of the Virgin
Mary in a sixteenth-century printed version of the Kalendar of Shepherds
(Illustration 36); or the human genitalia added to engravings of the gladiator
in a 1603 edition of Giovanni Battista Della Porta’s De coelestis physiogno-
moniae (Illustration 37), and those erased from a late fifteenth-century edition
of the Compost et kalendrier des bergiers.⁶ It seems difficult to describe these
⁵ C. Ginzburg, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. J. Tedeschi and A. Tedeschi (Baltimore,
Md., 1989), 96–125.
⁶ Paris: Bibliothèque Nationale, MV33, sig. Hiiiv.
36. An early modern, graffitoed pipe placed in the mouth of the mother of God. The
Kalender of Sheephards (c.1585). A Facsimile Reproduction, ed. S. K. Heninger, Jr
(Delmar, New York, 1979), 73 and 75, 80, 86, prepared from the copy in the Bodleian
Library, Malone 17. sig. E5. (Photo: Oxford: Bodleian Library.)
things with any degree of accuracy as ‘marginal annotations’ or ‘manuscript

notes’.⁷
Even if this is enough to allow for the use of the term ‘graffiti’, it still begs the
question of the purposefulness of examining graffiti per se. If ‘rich and detailed
accounts of physiognomy, passions, habits, and regimens’ still seem to have
little to do with ‘ “knowledge itself ” ’, then some might feel that the act of
⁷ See M. Camille, Image on the Edge (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 11.

37. Graffitoed genitalia and skirts on the illustrations found in Della Porta’s famous
physiognomical treatise, Giovanni Baptista Della Porta, Coelestis physiognomoniae libri
sex (Naples, 1603), Rome: Biblioteca Vallicaliana, S.Borr.H.III.98, p. 78, K3v. (Photo:
Mario Setter Biblioteca Vallicaliana.)
contemplating graffiti when one could be reading Shakespeare is a sign that the
métier of the Western historian of Western Europe took a wrong turning and
has arrived at a (turning) point where it really must have nothing better to do.⁸
Opinions are certainly divided over the possible significance of the knowledge
one can gain by considering graffiti. One recent attempt to categorize all mar-
ginalia provides a historical spectrum of opinion on the matter. That spec-
trum is framed, at this contemporary end, by a contemporary bibliographer
for whom hand-written marginalia ‘spring up spontaneously around a text
⁸ S. Shapin and C. Lawrence (eds.), Science Incarnate (Chicago, 1998), 2.

unaware of their presence’ and are ‘wayward in their very nature’. At its other,
early nineteenth-century end, sits Mary Shelley, for whom marginalia were, in
a phrase reminiscent of the title of this book, ‘a reliable mirror of the soul’.⁹
Using the graffiti found in a historical document as evidence for how that
text was read is certainly often hazardously speculative. It raises numerous, usu-
ally unanswerable, questions. For example, assuming it can be clearly estab-
lished which different hands are responsible for which marks, and assuming
that the marks of these hands can be accurately dated (a huge, and often insur-
mountable problem), one is still left with the problem of the actual (and usu-
ally untraceable) narrative of any interaction between pen and page. Was the
underlining of a series of particular phrases in the text made in one sitting, or
were they made over a period of time through consecutive readings? Were they
made in the order in which they appear? In cases where the age, sex, or even the
identity of the reader who made these marks is not known, or known by name
alone, to what extent can one discern the identity of that person by these marks
themselves? Why has a reader underlined certain passages and not others? Is
there any meaningful pattern to the arrangement of these graffiti?
Whatever question one is asking, as far as the use of graffiti in the recon-
struction of early modern readings of physiognomy in books is concerned, the
extant treatises which make up this canon of physiognomical texts are too scat-
tered for a single person to be able to examine them in their entirety. Moreover,
even if these treatises were collectable in their entirety and all of the graffiti in
those that bore them examined in detail, generalizations based on comparative
quantitative figures might still be distorted by the incompleteness of the evi-
dence. Given the degree of distortion introduced by the hazardous survival of
the evidence, such a quantitative comparative analysis might provide more
scholarly false trails than genuine historical leads, and, even worse, cover them
with the dubious patina of statistical science. Yet, with perseverance and dis-
tinct reservations, some suggestive patterns and meanings emerge, highlight-
ing phenomena which certainly deserve further investigation.
The Graffiti of the Learned

If graffiti are a form of defacement, many of the graffiti on these texts have
themselves been defaced through natural fading, or concerted attempts to erase
⁹ R. C. Alston, Books with Manuscript (1994), p. xiii; W. E. Slights, ‘The Edifying Margins of Renaissance
English Books’, Renaissance Quarterly, 42: 4 (1989), 682–716; L. Lipking, ‘The Marginal Gloss’, Critical
Inquiry, 3 (1977), 609–55, 612.
them, such as the clipping of the margins of the book that was such a common
practice in the history of the book. An octavo edition of Johannes de
Indagine’s physiognomical treatise which was published in Lyon in 1582 is just
one example of the graffiti that have faded over time and deliberately been
erased.¹⁰ Either way, vital evidence with which the trained eye of the historian
in the guise of detective can work has been destroyed by the passing of time.
The manuscripts which the Middle Ages handed down to the Renaissance
contained huge swathes of textual commentary created in their copious mar-
gins by readers and scribes. Those commentaries were part of the medieval
labyrinths of meaning from which Renaissance humanists were attempting to
escape, interpretations from which they were trying to purify both themselves
and their culture. The humanist desire to capture and consider only the origi-
nal text itself helped to create a new conceptual universe since known as the
Renaissance. One consequence of this was that these marginal comments were
not included in the printed Renaissance version of the text. Indeed, from
around 1500, when printers across Europe began to include printed marginalia
as part of their presentation of the content of the actual main text itself, mar-
gins became smaller, and the medieval practice of glossing waned somewhat
further.
Yet, as some of these physiognomical treatises show, there was still a demand
for such marginal résumés of the main text. In those treatises which were
printed without marginal indexes, readers often provided them in their own
hands. Thus, many of the hand-written markings in the extant copies of phys-
iognomical treatises represent an attempt by a former reader to construct an
index in the margin of the page, which was then to be used by the reader as
either an easy reference guide, or as an aid to memorization.¹¹ The scholarship
or pragmatism of some readers even went so far as to compile an entire index in
manuscript at the back of the book.¹²
At times these marginal ‘glosses’ take the more obviously Renaissance schol-
arly form of an attempt to provide the exact textual authorities for a particular
passage in the main body of the text. Thus, in the margins of a late sixteenth-
century quarto edition of Della Porta’s De humana physiognomia (Hanover,
1593), for example, one (Swiss?) reader provided very scholarly references to
precise passages in the Latin translation of specific texts of Aristotle, Galen, and
Cicero.¹³ This sort of marginalia was yet another of the early modern
¹⁰ Geneva: Bibliothèque Publique Universitaire, Se 6344 Res, 108–16.

¹¹ For example, London: British Library, C.27.k.6, sig. Jviii.
¹² Florence: Biblotheca Nazionale, I.7.357: Giovanni Battista Della Porta, Coelestis physiognomoniae
(Naples, 1603). ¹³ Basle: Bibliothek der Universität: HI VIII 24: 1, sigs. 4v and 5v.
European-wide legacies of Renaissance humanism. One can perhaps detect the
autumn of this sort of Renaissance humanism and the rise of the more prag-
matic approach to learning advocated by some mid-seventeenth-century
writers on education in the markings which the English royalist and antiquary
Richard Symonds made in his 1644 Venetian edition of Della Porta’s Fisonomia.
At one point he has underlined the passage in which Cicero is quoted as
saying:
The face is the looking-glass of the mind [Il volto e specchio della mente],
but without going as far as to give the exact reference from Cicero.¹⁴
Much of the graffiti which can be found in the extant copies of early modern
‘books on physiognomy’ represent traces of another equally significant form of
learning—the learning of the language of physiognomony by children. Take
one densely graffitoed sixteenth-century English copy of the Kalendar of Shep-
herds. The person responsible for the majority of the graffiti appears to be a
child named ‘Thomas Betteley’, who, on ‘august ye 27, 1696’ performed these
calligraphic acts on a text that was by that stage between 120 and 190 years
old.¹⁵ The lack of any secure antiquarian sensitivity on the part of the parents
preventing his getting hold of it might be of interest or surprise to some con-
temporary readers. Despite the rise of antiquarianism at the end of the seven-
teenth century, it might even suggest that ‘books on physiognomy’ had not yet
taken on a lifeless antiquity in all eyes.
More tangible is the fact that the graffiti made by this child on the pages of
this text were done in imitation of the graffiti made by an earlier reader. More-
over, after young Betteley, the book seems then to have passed into the hands
of one ‘Joseph Cartwright’, who, in 1700, proceeded to imitate the graffiti of
both Betteley and even the previous readers of that book.¹⁶ These are thus signs
that this sort of interaction was a trans-historical, universal, and continuous
practice. More pertinent is the fact that the graffiti in these ‘books on physiog-
nomy’ bear witness to an inter-generational practice of learning to read, write,
count, and draw. For the children’s graffiti on the aforementioned copy of the
Kalendar of Shepherds consist not only of a repeated name but also of a series of
repeated letters from the alphabet, repeated numbers, or attempts to imitate or
copy out a phrase from the main body of the text as a calligraphic exercise, writ-
ten the right way up or upside down, vertically, horizontally, even diagonally,
across the page. It is at this point that the ritual of possession inherent in the
¹⁴ London: British Library, 718.h.38: 97.
¹⁵ Oxford: Bodleian Library Auct. QQ. Supra II 30, sig. Aviiv–Aviiir.
¹⁶ Oxford: Bodleian Library, Auct. QQ. Supra II 30, sigs. Bi, Bviv, Bvii, Cii, Cviii, Evv, and Eviii.
writing of the name dissolves into a ritual of learning. Indeed, given the
number of times children repeatedly scrawled their names throughout the text,
one might interpret such actions as the first intimations of both the discovery
and the creation of a textual self.
Moreover, the graffiti in some of these texts provide clear evidence of the
spread of this learning virus in so far as they show that these ‘treatises on physi-
ognomy’ were passed from child to child, both within and outside the family.
The unique extant copy of Robert Copland’s English translation of the Secret
of Secrets (1528) is a particularly good English example. In 1630, a century after
it was first published, it was owned by ‘Robert Doe of Enfield in the County of
P p p p P’. Beneath Robert Doe’s inscription, there is written a list of other
names: ‘Anthony Doe’, ‘Joyne Doe’, ‘Edward Doe’, and ‘William Doe 1636’.
Another inscription found later in the text runs: ‘Robert Doe was the right
onor to this book but now I give it to my well beloued [. . .?].’¹⁷ This fraternal
ritual of hand-me-down also happened between friends. One early sixteenth-
century copy of the Compost of Ptholomeus was owned by a sixteenth-century
child named ‘Joannes Hodgson’. The writing on the back page suggests that he
then gave this book to a friend:
To his beste friend
Thomas H[??????]
H H Hodyggon.¹⁸
Nor was this a phenomenon of the economy of the book that existed only
between literate boys. One extant 1700 edition of Aristotle’s Masterpiece carries
the names of ‘Ruth Tomlinson’, ‘Sarah Webster’, ‘Hanah Marpets’, and most
prominently ‘Ruth Swindell 1745’. Although a lively second-hand book-
market could explain the names of these different ‘owners’, it is just as likely
evidence of the same ritual of book-giving between girl friends. The absence of
evidence for this ritual having occurred between friends of different sex is prob-
ably a distortion introduced by the fragmented nature of the evidence that has
survived. It certainly occurred between brothers and sisters. The ‘Jon’ and
‘James’ who have signed this particular copy of Aristotle’s Masterpiece as well are
very likely Ruth Swindell’s brothers. Hence, these reading and learning rituals
were part of a common textual culture.
Given that the exposition of physiognomical doctrine in these books was the
textual form of a visual language, then this exchange of texts can also be said to
be an exchange of a common visual culture, a common way of seeing things, a
¹⁷ Cambridge: University Library, Sel. 5.60, sigs. Ciiiv, Givv, Aii, Bii, Biv, Ciiv, Iiv, and Diiv.
¹⁸ Harvard: Houghton Library, STC 29481.2, sig. Cviiiv.
shared physiognomical eye. In one case, it was an exchange of a common way
of seeing in which the innate distinction between the male and female sexes
that underlay the grammar of the art of physiognomy itself was sometimes
asserted. When Ruth Swindell’s brother, James, entered his name in the book,
he placed it under the chapter devoted to ‘The Anatomy of the Organ of Gen-
eration in Man’, thus emphasizing the most fundamental aspect of his physi-
ognomy that distinguished him from his sister.¹⁹ This sort of graffiti is, of
course, not specific to ‘treatises on physiognomy’. None the less, it does con-
firm that systematized physiognomony in written and printed form was some-
thing in which children were educated, and which some children learned as
part of the process of learning to read.
However, it should not be taken as evidence that, from around the mid-
seventeenth century onwards, systematized ‘knowledge by the visage’ under-
went a relegation in its intellectual status to that of a ‘childish’ thing. Apart from
the fact that adults continued to read physiognomy, from at least the fourth cen-
tury physiognomy had been thought of as a language, an ‘alphabet’ of the body,
that children should learn in their earliest years. As one of the most authoritative
and widely distributed of the ancient physiognomical treatises put it:
For just as in the study of letters, which, according to the Greeks, consists of 24 ele-
ments by which the voice and conversation of all things is comprehended, so in physi-
ognomony, the broader observation is disclosed from the elements of that which is
proposed. If we learn all the syllables during the earliest years of childhood, then once
we have understood their value, we will very quickly see the series of letters from which
any word which presents itself is composed.²⁰
It has yet to be established to what extent the art and science of physiognomy
was an official part of the early modern European school syllabus. However, it
was none the less evidently a part of early modern children’s shared textual and
visual culture.
But all of this still begs the question of how the learning of physiognomy was
related to what may have been more official school learning. I would suggest
that this learning of the language of physiognomy points once again towards
the historiographical debate about the coexistence, even the complementarity,
of the rational and the occult, in this case in the form of two very different con-
cepts of language. This becomes evident by considering one basic aspect of the
various ways in which children learned foreign languages in the early modern
period. Early modern dictionaries which aimed at teaching children foreign
¹⁹ London: British Library, 1506/676: sig. Ai, 125, 129, 165, and 172.
²⁰ Traité de physiognomonie, ed. J. André (Paris, 1981), 52.
languages show how fundamental was the human body to the process of learn-
ing to read and write in any language. For the words for the human body were
often the first words or names for things to be learned by heart. In Shakespeare’s
Henry V, the French princess’s attempt to learn the English language is just one
less bookish example of the same process. The first question she asks is ‘Com-
ment appelez-vous la main en anglais?’ She then continues with the word for
the fingers, nails, arm, elbow, neck, and chin, and makes a hash of it.²¹
When early modern foreign language learning and early modern physiog-
nomical language learning are considered in the light of one another, it appears
that, in some eyes at least, learning a ‘foreign’ language not only involved learn-
ing the words for the particular members of the human body, it also meant
learning the meanings of those corporeal members. In other words, it involved
understanding how the members which made up the human anatomy were a
language in themselves, incarnated elements of a Holy Scripture, part of the
emblematic character of God’s natural language. Moreover, the meanings of
that language took one into what Robert Fludd called the ‘indexes of nature’,
what was for Ficino and hermeticists ‘religion of the world’, and the divine
realms of an ancient theology.²²
The Graffiti of the Soul

Generation
If it can be said that the graffiti in ‘treatises on physiognomy’ provide evidence
of this ‘religion of the world’ being learned and committed to memory by
young and old alike, to what extent do they provide evidence that some of these
treatises were engaged with, and appropriated, in the ways suggested in the pre-
vious chapter? In some cases the graffiti in the extant copies of the texts in this
corpus of physiognomical literature show how a reader has brought out an
implicit theme with a remarkable degree of consistency and conscious reflec-
tion. This seems particularly evident for the concern of the physiognomical eye
with the issue of ‘generation’.
Take, for example, the underlining in one extant copy of a 1571 edition of
Thomas Hill’s physiognomical treatise. They appear to have been made by at
least two different hands. The first hand (in black ink) shows that the reader has
underlined a variety of aphorisms which, in nearly every case, refer to the dif-
²¹ William Shakespeare, Henry V, III. v. 1–55.
²² F. A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (1964), 41.
ferent aspects of the sexual act, such as, for instance, the phrases ‘the earnest
desire to the veneriall acte’, and ‘a fornicator’. Every mention of the genitalia
themselves has been underlined. On folio 179v, where the meaning of the short
backbone is given as ‘hastie in the venereall action’, the meaning has been
underlined. The same reader has also underlined the sign ‘when the pappes
begin to arise’—whose meaning is given as ‘that (such shortly after) to be
prouoked unto the veneriall acte’ (fol. 184v). This same text gives large bellies as
a sign of abnormal sexual appetite. This too has been underlined.
Further evidence of this concern can be found in the chapter devoted to the
physiognomy of the ‘yard and the testicles’. Each time either one of these words
or their cognates has been used in the main body of the text, they have been
printed in the form of a code. The code is relatively simple to work out. The let-
ters that make up the word have been printed backwards (though not in the
sense that one would need a mirror to decode it). In addition, each vowel of the
word is represented by a number 1–5, a corresponding to 1, e to 2, i to 3, o to 4,
and u to 5. Thus ‘yard’ is printed as ‘dr1y’, ‘penis’ as ‘s3n2p’. Notwithstanding,
the same reader not only went to the trouble of cracking each of these coded
words, he or she also wrote the solution in the margin of the text. Just how ‘edu-
cated’ (or shame-ridden) this reader may have been is demonstrated by the fact
that the word ‘testicles’ has not only been decoded, but the reader has tried to
preserve some Renaissance-educated sense of decorum by writing the solution
in the margin in Greek. On folio 192r, the meaning of a ‘hairy belly’ has been
underlined. That the meaning is given as ‘very leacherous’ is further evidence
of this reader’s concern with the sexual act. So consistent does this concern with
sexual practice seem to be in graffiti that one is then led to assume that the
reason why the signs for small feet and long feet have been underlined is
because they are given as a sign of those who are ‘small, comely, fayre . . . prone
unto the veneriall act’, ‘small, fayre & tender . . . a fornicator’, ‘long feet . . .
aptest, and doe lightly conceyue with childe’. Moreover, the same pattern of
underlining is also found in the epitome with which the author has followed
the main text. Similarly in the section on moles, two passages about moles on
the genitalia have been underlined, one of which is a presage of child-bearing
capacities: ‘A Mole on the 23v3rp r2bm2m itselfe, doth portend that he shall
beget men children: and she contrariwise, beare women children’. And whilst
there are two passages underlined that seem to have nothing to do with the
theme of sexuality, one of these is the underlining of a sign which was given ear-
lier in the main text as meaning ‘bigge genitale’.²³
²³ Oxford: Bodleian Library, Antiq. F. E 1571/, fols. 184v, 191r–v, 193v, 192r, 201r and 203r. 127v and 129r; fols.
179v, 184v, 191, 203; [2]13v), [2]14r) [foliation is erratic.]
The text just discussed, a 1571 edition of Thomas Hill’s Contemplation of
mankinde, was heavily derivative of the Liber physiognomiae of Michael Scot,
whose contribution to the development of the theory driving the medieval
physiognomical eye was to link it more closely with the notion of generation
and embryology. As was pointed out in Chapter 3, Scot’s work, in one guise or
another, may have been the printed physiognomical treatise most widely read
between the late fifteenth and the late seventeenth centuries. Many editions of
this work survived. Indeed, it seems to have been a work which was more heav-
ily graffitoed than any other text in the physiognomical canon. Moreover, that
graffiti most often suggests that it was with exactly these concerns about gener-
ation that they were read.
In one late fifteenth-century printed edition of Scot’s Liber physiognomiae
now in the Vatican library, where the text runs ‘coitu sit mutua relatio’, a read-
er has written in the right-hand margin ‘Coitus est mutua relatio’.²⁴ Similarly,
one Baesl University library copy of Michael Scot’s Liber physiognomiae is an
example of a text where the underlined passages have also been complemented
by the writing out of the themes to which those passages refer in the margin of
the page. In this case those themes again relate to notions of generation such as
‘Vir agens’, ‘Mulier patiens’, ‘Luxuriae radix’, and ‘tempus concubitus’, ‘Testi-
culi utriusque’, ‘Spermatis fontes’.²⁵ A copy of Scot’s text found in the Biblio-
thèque Publique Universitaire of Geneva is also typical.²⁶ In the margin beside
the section dealing with birth prior to seven months (sig. c) a sixteenth-
century reader has written ‘Nasc, ante mesam septimum’. There are more
manuscript notes next to the sections dealing with the fluxation of the blood
according to the moon (sig. ci); how the baby in the uterus is fed by the
mother’s menstrual blood through the umbilical cord (sig. civ); how the infant
exits via the uterus (sig. cii), as well as other underlining of passages in the sec-
tion on lactation. Indeed, in the passages devoted to milk and the disposition
of the child’s parents, the appropriate nutrition and the inappropriate nutri-
tion, this reader’s manuscript notes also include references to Plutarch, Eras-
mus, and Galen. The part of the text which deals with how the woman’s foot
reveals the form of her vagina, and how the lips of her mouth reveal the state of
her skin (sig. Div) has been marked with an asterisk. Though nothing in the
actual section on physiognomony in this text has been underlined except the
aphorism relating to the bearded woman (sig. Gvi), the passage in which Scot
defines physiognomy has been marked, as are the references to the claim that
²⁴ Rome: Vatican Library, Incun. IV. 232, fol. 7.
²⁵ Basle: Bibliothek der Universität, K.L.X.1, sigs. A4r–v.
²⁶ Geneva: Bibliothèque Publique Universitaire, Cb 577(2) Res.
38. One reader’s careful drawing of the physiognomical signs of infertility in a woman
are very suggestive of what was in his mind, Ciro Spontoni, La Metoposcopia Ouero
Commensuratione Delle Linee Della Fronte (Venice, 1629), Florence: Firenze: Biblio-
theca Nazionale, 1272.6, fol. 123 (Photo: Bibliotheca Nazionale Firenze.)
Hippocrates, Galen, and ‘Almansori’ have written authoritatively on the

matter.
Taken as a whole, this seems proof enough of this late sixteenth-
century/early seventeenth-century reader’s overwhelming physiognomonical
concern with the sexual act, and related notions of fertility and generation. Nor
does it appear to have been particular to this reader. The number of extant
early modern copies of Scot’s work with this sort of graffiti is striking. Nor is
this concern visible only in the graffiti of Scot’s texts. Illustration 38 is taken
from one Italian edition of Spontoni’s Metoposcopia in which the seventeenth-
century owner has hand drawn a number of female heads whose lines indi-
cate a woman having a malady of the womb.²⁷
²⁷ For a hand pointing to a passage dealing with the rarity with which Jewish sperm generates a face, see
Girolamo Manfredi, Liber de homine (Bologna, 1474), Oxford: Bodleian Library, Inc.d.I.ii 1474/2, fol. 24.
From praying to playing
Do the graffiti on these texts allow us to see any readers praying or playing
physiognomically? In order to appreciate the moments of clarity and order in
the graffiti in these texts, let us first begin with an example of graffiti at its most
chaotic and impenetrable. The following chunk was found in the middle of an
early sixteenth-century exposition of physiognomical doctrine:
A persone that hath a very longe thycke necke sygnyfyeth glotonye force & great lech-
ery. A manly woman that is great and rudely membred is by nature melancolyous
varyaunte & lecherous. A persone that hath a great longe bely sygnyfyeth small wyt
pryde and lechery. A lytell bely & large fete sygnyfyeth good understandynge good
counceyle and true.²⁸
Whilst the markings appear to have been made by the same ink, the same pen,
and the same sixteenth-century(?) hand, there is no other sense of pattern.
Sometimes the words representing the physical feature are underlined.
Sometimes it is the words representing the metaphysical meaning discoverable
in that physical feature that have been underlined. And sometimes, as in this
passage, it is somewhere in between the two. In this case, the metaphysical
meaning of one aphorism has been underlined: ‘melancholyous varyaunte
[&] lecherous’. The underlining then continues across into the next aphorism,
but only as far as its first three words—‘A persone that’. This is followed by
a small gap, then the underlining of the three words that make up the
physical feature: ‘a great longe bely’. The next part of the underlining contin-
ues only as far as the adjective contained in its metaphysical meaning: ‘sygny-
fyeth small’.
Written in the margin besides this underlined passage, in what appears to be
the same ink, the same pen, and again the same hand is: ‘manly woman’. Taken
in conjunction with the underlining of the same phrase in the main text, this
suggests a particular concern on the part of the reader with the phenomenon of
the ‘manly woman’. Yet beyond that, marginalia such as these appear so
random and any interpretation so speculative as to be inexplicable other than
in terms of the process of underlining having taken on a mindless life of its own.
It is at exactly this point that one might feel it necessary to come back to the
issue of marginality, and the claim made by Freud, that such seemingly cha-
otic, unimportant details, what Freud called the ‘rubbish-heap’, are an entry-
point into the unconscious. In this case it would appear that what remains of
the route to that reader’s unconscious takes the form of the ‘manly woman’. But
²⁸ London: British Library, 717.a.5, sig. r iiv.

just how far one can go with this sort of analysis is another question. This issue
of ‘manly woman’ may have been of profound importance to the reader. But in
the absence of any other known evidence about that reader, a positivist histori-
cal analysis comes up against a historical brick wall.
There are other passages in the section on physiognomony in this same copy
of the Compost of Ptholomeus which appear to have been underlined by the
same (sixteenth-century?) hand and which, through careful questioning,
appear less chaotic and therefore more interpretable. Take, for example, the
marginalia in the section on hair. Unlike the passage just discussed, this con-
tains distinct traces of order and consistency. With one exception, only the
meanings in the aphorisms have been underlined, not the physical features.
Even in the one exception, only part of the physical feature has been under-
lined, suggesting a greater concern with the meaning:
hangynge heer sygnyfyeth wyt
with malice.²⁹
A similar pattern is found in the section of aphorisms dealing with the eyes
where, once again, no physical features have been underlined.
And yet still they leave one unable to draw any firm conclusion beyond
claiming that the ambiguities of the evidence are too great. Should all this
underlining be interpreted as evidence of a reader attempting simply to memo-
rize these particular passages? Or was the reader underlining aphorisms which
he or she recognized in himself or herself or in other people?
The weakness in the memorization thesis lies in the fact that only the mean-
ings of hard hair, black hair, and red beard, and black crispy and yellow crispy
hair have been underlined. Similarly, in the section on eyes, the aphorisms for
‘great wide iyes’, ‘ardaunt & sperkelynge’ eyes, and ‘whytyshe and flesshely’ eyes
have not been underlined at all.³⁰ If the reader was attempting to learn this part
of the text, then why only underline some of the aphorisms and not these? One
could argue that the reason the latter have not been underlined is because the
reader was already familiar with them. However, that argument is weakened by
the fact that the aphorism for ‘black hair and red beard’ has been underlined.
This aphorism had attained proverbial status and as such was probably much
more widely known than the sign for ‘great and wide eyes’ which was not
underlined. Furthermore, the weakness of the self-physiognomation thesis lies
in the fact that more than one type of hair and shape of eyes has been under-
lined. No-one can naturally have black hair, red hair, yellow hair, crisp hair, and
²⁹ London: British Library, 717.a.5, sig. qivv. ³⁰ London: British Library, 717.a.5, sigs. qivv and ri.
hanging hair. So the reader could not have been thinking only of himself or
herself while doing the underlining.
This, then, brings us to the suggestion that the passages underlined must be
those which represented physiognomical features (either physical, psychologi-
cal, or both) which the reader recognized about himself or her self and/or other
people known to the reader. Even if this admittedly speculative possibility is
accepted, one is then faced with some of the unanswerable questions rehearsed
earlier. Was the reader interacting with this text in private (in one or more ses-
sions), or with another person or a group of other people who were sitting
around the reader at the same time?
The ambiguities of this evidence mean that the possibilities are still numer-
ous. The reader may have been alone, and, on coming across a particular apho-
rism, was reminded of either himself or her self, a friend, or a person the reader
had once seen. In fact, it is not beyond the realms of possibility, for example,
that these markings were made by a local cunning man or wizard in the course
of a number of physiognomical consultations with respective clients. Having
said that, it is through exactly this more anthropological sort of consideration
of the graffiti that one discovers that some of them do, in fact, represent traces
of the actual performance of the universal form of engagement with a physiog-
nomical treatise. Or at least it is this form of engagement which more than any
other interpretation helps to give sense to much of the graffiti in these books.
Other extant physiognomical treatises offer much stronger evidence for
claiming that the graffiti represent the traces of a single reader who had read the
text in search of signs that represented attributes of his or her own real or ideal
self. In the margins of the physiognomical section in one copy of the 1618 edi-
tion of the Kalendar, the same hand in the same ink has drawn the same point-
ing finger four times next to four different aphorisms: the ‘little short visage
and a small necke, a litle slender nose’, ‘long ears’, ‘great long bellie’, and ‘clear
and shining nailes of good colour’.³¹ Unlike the previous example, all of these
could conceivably be found in a single person. The fact that three of these
aphorisms carry the complimentary meanings of ‘good memory’, ‘good under-
standing’, ‘wit’, and ‘increase of honour’, and that the criticism (‘follie’)
implied in the fourth is not devastating, suggests that these marginalia show
signs of wishful thinking on the part of the reader.³²
The strength of this hypothesis about the search for attributes of one’s self is
that it allows one to make sense of some otherwise impenetrable marginalia.
For example, it suggests that one late seventeenth/early eighteenth-century
³¹ One finds the same pattern of graffiti in manuscripts, Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Digby 11, fol. 93r–v.
³² Oxford: Bodleian Library, Douce C. subt. 214, sigs. Pii–Piiv.
reader of Saunders’s Physiognomie (1671) does not appear to have liked what he
or she found under the ‘signs of a bold impudent person’ and those of a ‘wrath-
ful and cruel person’. Both have been scratched through with a huge ‘X’ in a
(bold, wrathful, and impudent?) gesture of disagreement, even obliteration.³³
But perhaps the most suggestive example of this universal form of engage-
ment with an exposition of physiognomical doctrine are the graffiti made by
one of the two hands which marked the 1571 edition of Thomas Hill’s Con-
templation of mankinde mentioned above. The hand concerned appears to be
that of a late seventeenth/early eighteenth-century unknown woman, possibly
named ‘Arabella Bray’. Reproduced below, the different passages that have
been underlined will instinctively suggest to most readers that she has careful-
ly underlined specific physiognomical aphorisms because they were suggestive
of people she knew:
The stature which bendeth naturally forward,
and not of age caused: doth denote a warie per-
son to himselfe, a niggarde, laborious, a grosse fee- D.C.
der, long angrie, not lightly creediting, secrete, and
yet of a dull witte and severe or cruell.
The head long

in fashion to the Hammer, to be prudent and wa-
rie, And in the forepart of the heade, a hollownesse: R.W.
to be wylie & yrefull.
Such which have the heares of the eye broowes

shed over the nose, and spred upwarde unto the J.S.
temples: are denoted foolish persons: applyed for
the forme to the Hogge.
Such which be verie naked of heare on the

breast, or at (the least) have verie little or fewe
heares to be seene: are invirecundious [sic], persons H.M.
applyed unto women.
Given that the initials are all different, they might be taken to refer to friends
(or enemies) rather than family.³⁴
With one exception, these graffiti show a relatively consistent care taken to
underline the whole of the physiognomic (the physical feature and its mean-
ing). As such, the absence of underlining in certain places appears to be explic-
able in terms of the inefficiency of the pen or the nerves of the reader’s hand as
³³ Washington D.C.: Library of Congress; BF 911. 52: 248–249.
³⁴ Oxford: Bodleian Library, Antiq.f.E.1571/1, fols. [2]14, [2]18, 208r, 207v–208r.
it moved across the page. One might even be tempted to assume that those
aphorisms which have been underlined but carry no corresponding initials in
the margin actually refer to particular attributes of the underliner’s own self. In
that case Arabella may have had a ‘nose round . . . blunt at the ende’, ‘nosethrils
large’, a ‘face of a small cause sweating’, ‘armes very long’, ‘pale [in body
colour]’, and ‘nayles narrow and long’ (and thus she may even have been ‘stowt:
applyed to the Lyon’, ‘yrefull’, ‘craftie, leacherous, and a great feeder’, ‘strong,
bolde, honest, and gentle’, ‘vicious, & wicked’, or ‘cruell, and fierce’).³⁵
There are, of course, other possible explanations. Yet notwithstanding the
ambiguities, what these last two examples of sixteenth- and early eighteenth-
century graffiti reveal are the actualization of the two sides of the same coin of
engagement with an exposition of physiognomical doctrine in book form. In
the first of those, it is carried out in private, and one searches for attributes of
one’s self or other people known to one’s self. The second of them is more
public, in the sense that one is actually surrounded by people who may even be
participating in this interaction with the text. Although the first of the above
examples appears to date from the sixteenth century and the second from the
early eighteenth century, no diachronic change is being implied. Moreover, the
fact that one finds graffiti of this nature on extant copies of early modern physi-
ognomical treatises from around Europe suggests that this form of engagement
could arise whenever and wherever a list of physiognomical aphorisms was
encountered.
But if these graffiti provide a typical example of the universality of this form
of engagement with a ‘book on physiognomy’, how do we use graffiti to cross-
check the argument about the ways in which this universal form of engagement
was appropriated? How do we get from their universality to their particularity?
How can we be sure that one set of such universal traces are those made by a
person in the process of a private confessional act of self-physiognomation,
whilst another set of the same traces are those of a communal bawdy parlour
game? How does one distinguish between the graffiti of ‘re-generation’ and the
graffiti of ‘recreation’? In other words, how is one to know whether these ink
traces are to be interpreted as the graffiti of praying or playing?
This question helpfully reveals some of the strengths and weaknesses of graf-
fiti as historical evidence. For establishing such distinctions would require an
examination of the rest of the graffiti one finds elsewhere in the text in which
they are found. The analysis of the graffiti could be driven by the question of
whether the traces of this ‘engagement’ that one finds in the exposition of
³⁵ Oxford: Bodleian Library, Antiq.f.E.1571/1, fol. [2]19r–[2]22v.

physiognomical doctrine were made or experienced in terms of the particular
conceptual apparatus that surrounds the physiognomy in any specific text.
However, it must be pointed out that it is rare to find such a complete set of
graffiti. Of those texts examined so far, it is usually either the exposition of
physiognomical doctrine or the rest of the text which contains the richest graf-
fiti, not both together in the same text.
Let us begin with the hypothesis about physiognomical praying. If one
interprets the aforementioned marks of engagement in terms of the conceptu-
al structure of the Kalendar of Shepherds, then those readers who also engaged
with the physiognomy can be said to have been participating in a form of
private confession in the guise of a medico-moral self-examination. What
evidence is there that this ever actually happened?
The underlining made by former readers which can be found throughout
many extant copies of the Kalendar of Shepherds certainly suggests that the text
was read in terms of what was argued in the previous chapter were the most
prominent ideas in its overarching conceptual framework: prudence, nosce
teipsum, and salvation. One example of this is the graffiti found in a 1526 edi-
tion of the Kalendar. It appears to have been a late sixteenth-century hand
which has written the numbers 1–6 in the left-hand margin beside the section
dealing with ‘the coniectoures wherby we may knowe if we be in grace of god
ben suche’.³⁶ This seems quite strong evidence of a concern on the part of the
reader with being in the ‘grace of God’—a concern which, as the text explains
elsewhere, is a concern with both the actual state of one’s self as well as one’s
future salvation. In a 1518 edition of the Kalendar the section entitled ‘Six ben-
efits given to us by god’ has been highlighted in the margin by a pointing hand
drawn by a sixteenth-century reader in search of God’s grace. On the very next
page one finds the same pointing hand, this time highlighting the section deal-
ing with the six ways: ‘how [the Shepherd] knew himself ’.³⁷ Another extant
copy of the Kalendar owned in the 1660s by a ‘Roger Miloud’ contains the
following underlining: ‘The seventh, and the last thing that each man ought to
know, is to know himself ’.³⁸ Another copy has the following underlined: ‘What
nede it you to stodye on a thynge that is nought: stodye on your synne and
what grace by god in you wrought is’.³⁹ In many other copies, the underlining
in the section on the trees of virtues and vices suggests that other readers did
³⁶ London: British Library, C.71. fol. 2, sig. Giiv.

³⁷ Cambridge: University Library, SSS.35.13, sigs. Giii and Giv.
³⁸ Oxford: Bodleian Library, Vet. A3c. 238, sig. P4v and sig. I3.
³⁹ Oxford: Bodleian Library, Auct. QQ. Supra II 30, sig. Aii.
precisely this—studied their sin. In all of these cases, the traces of the reader’s
interaction with the shepherd’s mystical text suggest that the reading of this
particular text was indeed actually experienced as something of a devotional
practice, with the emphasis placed on self-knowledge, the contemplation of
one’s sins, and the search for grace. These all constituted the necessary prereq-
uisites for salvation in the shepherd’s vision of things. They are all evidence of
an active engagement with the main themes which characterized his physiog-
nomical prayer.
However, until all of the surviving copies of the texts in this corpus have been
examined, it has to be said that there are simply not enough graffiti on the
copies which have survived to enable one to provide an equivalent analysis.
With regard to the initials of different people placed beside particular physiog-
nomical aphorisms in a copy of the 1571 edition of Thomas Hill’s tract, assum-
ing these markings are early eighteenth century, then in terms of what
conceptual framework is one to read them? That of the text itself? Those of
other texts in the series? Or those contemporaneous with the time in which the
marks were made? And, if the latter, what does that mean? After all, it is pos-
sible that some of the humbler folk or even the mystically inclined philoso-
phers of the early eighteenth-century could have read and experienced these
signs in terms of a pre-eighteenth-century conception of ‘the sign’, or rather in
terms of their understanding of that earlier conception of the physiognomic.
At the same time one might, of course, argue that these markings were made
some time in the eighteenth century by, for example, a late witch-hunter. The
physiognomics underlined could denote the physiognomical features of those
who were to be condemned. In such a scenario, the initials might indicate those
villagers who bore the underlined features and who were to be executed. As
speculative as such a suggestion is, the involvement in the persecution of witch-
es of such physiognomists as the Aix-en-Provence physician Jacques Fontaine
leaves such a hypothesis open, awaiting more concrete evidence of such a prac-
tice to come to light. One further hint provided by the books on physiognomy
of such a form of legal physiognomical scrutiny, if not persecution, is one
French author’s suggestion that ‘Magistrates’ may ‘by Physiognomy under-
stand the disposition and inclination of the Inferiors and Subjects’.⁴⁰
On the other hand, given that by the late seventeenth century the notion of
curiosity had entered some conceptions of the act of physiognomating, these
markings might equally represent the reading of a late sixteenth-century trea-
tise of natural/moral philosophy by an early eighteenth-century female reader
⁴⁰ Marc Vulson, The Court of Curiositie (1669), 113.

out of a sense of light-hearted antiquarian curiosity. That antiquarian aspect
appears more prominent given the fact that by 1784 this copy of Hill’s work had
been bought as a form of antique by the famous antiquarian ‘Charles Chad-
wick of Healey Hall’.⁴¹
Similarly, one might understand the same graffiti in terms of the con-
ceptual framework found in the small books of fortune-telling games and rid-
dles which also contained physiognomy. In that case, these very same marks
might just as easily represent the remnants of a group of people, children or
adults, or both, who early in the eighteenth century gathered around a late
sixteenth-century physiognomical treatise in order to play what was basically a
form of fortune-telling bawdy parlour game. By the eighteenth century, phys-
iognomical fortune-telling had long been considered less intellectually
respectable than philosophising or praying, all the more so by the late eigh-
teenth century.
One often finds readers providing quite clear graffitoed intimations of this
more satirical and playful attitude towards physiognomy in the form of a writ-
ten comment. One extant copy of the 1623 Paduan edition of Della Porta’s
Fisonomia naturale reveals that it was bought ‘From a stall in Chancery Lane
near Holborn on August 22nd 1761’. By that time it would appear that one par-
ticular reader had established some sort of playful, ironic stance towards Porta’s
skill, if the insertion of a verse from ‘Gay Fables’on the inside cover is anything
to go by:
Sagacious PORTA’S skill could trace
Some Beast or bird in every face
The Head, the eye, the nose’s shape
Proved this a mole & that an ape.⁴²
Similarly, in 1659, the Swiss-German philosopher and physician ‘Joannes

Chanlon Sleebi’ may have been content enough to sign his name on the 1658
edition of Cardano’s Metoposcopia he had proudly purchased. But a century
later, in 1765, when it came into the possession of one ‘Joan Casp. Lippertus
Furthensis Bojus’, he felt urged to pen the following remark: ‘That the cele-
brated author of this tract gave him self needless creases in the face with such a
huge labour of ineptitude. All the worse to those who believe it.’⁴³ These satir-
ical, playful remarks seem very far from the more prayer-like attitude displayed
in the passage from Job 37: 7 written out by John Dee across the title page of
one of his ‘books on physiognomy’, or the phrase written in the 1630s by one
⁴¹ Oxford: Bodleian Library, Antiq.f.E.1571/1, sig. [qq v]v.
⁴² London : British Library, 1600/27. ⁴³ Zurich: ETH, 1013 [AE 367], 28.
Robert Doe in his 1528 edition of the Secretum secretorum: ‘My soul prais thou
the Lord alwais my God I will confess whilst breth and Life prolong my Days
my loving no time shall ceas’.⁴⁴
Having said that, the concerns and anxieties reflected (if not necessarily
expressed) in even the most playful and bawdy form of physiognomical
fortune-telling could be just as serious and profound. Indeed, how the playful
and the godly may have been mixed is made evident if these same aforemen-
tioned underlined passages and initials are interpreted not in terms of the mag-
istrate’s pen but in terms of the sentiment and spirit of the following verses
found in one of the eighteenth-century physiognomical chapbooks:
Let no Distractions now abound,
Nor Whig nor Tory longer grumble;
But let the Glass go chearful round.
Yet for their Sins let all be humble.
It suggests that the book and the looking-glass are still being used as part of this
reading practice. But far from the hermetic medico-moral seriousness of the
shepherd’s private physiognomical prayer of self-examination, it sounds very
much like something written by John Gay of Beggar’s Opera fame.
Yet whilst such graffiti provide intimations of a fundamental shift in atti-
tudes, from praying to playing, or from totalization to vulgarization, it has to
be said that the shift was neither sudden nor complete. There was still some
continuity across the shift, still some people engaging with physiognomy very
seriously, however their more serious understanding of it may have changed
from that of those who took it seriously three centuries earlier. This is perhaps
best symbolized by the passages underlined by two famous readers: one from
the beginning of the period; and one from the end.
In the long autumn of the Middle Ages, one distinctly philosophical early
sixteenth-century reader who engaged with Rhazes’s exposition of physiog-
nomical doctrine underlined a physiognomical aphorism which seemed
applicable to himself—Rhazes’s physiognomical description of ‘the philosoph-
ical man’.⁴⁵ That reader was the famous Renaissance humanist Conrad Gesner.
At the end of the eighteenth century another famous philosophical man did
more or less the same thing. Before Lavater published his famous tome on
physiognomy, he first published a work entitled Aphorisms on Man. The very
last aphorism read: ‘If you mean to know yourself, interline such of these apho-
risms as affect you agreeably in the reading, and set a mark to such as left a sense
⁴⁴ Cambridge: University Library, Sel. 5.60 sig. Hiiiv.
⁴⁵ Zurich: Zentralbibliothek, Inc.311, fol. 10[?].
of uneasiness with you; and then show your copy to whom you please’. In one
extant copy of this work of Lavater’s, the famous owner of it not only followed
this suggestion, he also commented upon the suggestion itself: ‘This is true
Christian philosophy far above all abstraction’. For all that the art of physiog-
nomy had by then been reduced by science and social ridicule to nothing more
than a laughable parlour game in many people’s eyes, this particular reader’s
engagement with physiognomy flew in the face of such satire. In fact, this
reader’s graffiti provided an intimation of the important role that a more
serious and esoteric, Kabbalah-influenced conception of physiognomy would
play in the dawning revolutionary Romantic vision of the world. For that
reader was William Blake.⁴⁶
‘Cinematic’ Physiognomy
Finally, is there any evidence to suggest the actuality of a more audio-visual
engagement with these ‘treatises on physiognomy’? With regard to the use of
actual visual representations, one sometimes finds phrases, even names and ini-
tials, graffitoed in the middle of the woodcuts that line many of the pages of
various ‘books on physiognomy’, thus suggesting their use during the act of
reading (Illustration 39). Similarly, from the markings in one copy of a 1522 edi-
tion of Indagine’s treatise that appear to have been made by a late sixteenth-
early seventeenth-century young child, of particular relevance is the graffiti in
one of the woodcuts of the hands from the section on Chiromantia (Illustration
40). In the original woodcut, the illustrated, life-sized hand was cut off at the
wrist, surrounded by a blank margin, thus giving the impression of being a rep-
resentation, suspended in the middle of a blank page (Illustration 41). It is in
this gap which surrounds the representation, and which originally served to
emphasize that it is a representation, that the graffiti were made. As a result, the
way in which the graffitoed wrist then descends to the end of the page gives the
impression of its having been inserted with the express intention of effacing the
gap which emphasizes the distinction between the representation and the real-
ity. The end result of this is such that the ink of the graffiti is not so immediately
distinguishable from the ink of the original woodcut. This not only makes the
entire image look more life-size and life-like; it also appears to be an attempt to
blend together both the world of representation and the world of reality, to
⁴⁶ ‘Annotations to Lavater’s Aphorisms On Man’ [c.1788], in The Complete Writings of William Blake, ed.
G. Keynes (1966), 65.
39. Johannes ab Indagine, Introductiones Apotelesmaticae elegantes in Chiromantiam,

Physionomiam, Astrologiam naturalem, Complexiones hominum, Naturas Planetarum
(Strasburg/Frankfurt, 1522), (Photo: Basle: Bibliothek der Universität.)
establish a natural link between the sign and the thing signified. It seems to dis-
solve the image into the natural three-dimensional reality of the reader’s own
self and the reader’s own surroundings.
With regard to the use of images and mirrors as part of this reading ritual,
there are overtones of it buried in other evidence. For example, with regard to
the suggestion that this physiognomical prayer or physiognomical game was
performed with the aid of a looking-glass, many physiognomical treatises
themselves contain subliminal suggestions about a relationship between a
mirror and the text. A metaphorical relationship between the mirror and the

(Strasburg/Frankfurt, 1522). (Photo: Basle: Bibliothek der Universität.)
physiognomical treatise is often found in numerous titles of ‘books on

physiognomy’, such as Ancelme Petit Douxciel’s Speculum physionomicum
(Langres, 1648), Harmannus Follinus’s Speculum naturae humanae (Cologne
1649), whilst De La Bellière’s La Fisionomia con ragionamenti (Paris, 1644) had
a subtitle: o lo specchio per vedere le passioni di Coascheduno. It was a tradition
which went back at least as far as Michael Savonarola’s Speculum physiognomi-
cae. Similarly, one author described his ‘treatise on physiognomy’ as a ‘myrour
of helth’, and explicitly advised the reader: ‘Of this said booke make oft a lok-

(Strasburg/Frankfurt, 1522), fol. 29. Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Rés 126655.
(Credit photographique Bibliothèque Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.)
ing glas’.⁴⁷ This was a common restatement of the famous Augustinian rule:
‘That you may see yourself in this little book as in a mirror and may not neglect
anything through forgetfulness, let it be read to you once a week’.⁴⁸ For one
author of a ‘book on physiognomy’, the mirror in which one looked was dis-
tinctly social. Self-knowledge necessitated reflecting upon ‘what company you
⁴⁷ Manzalaoui, Secretum, 275.

⁴⁸ Sister R. M. Bradley, ‘Backgrounds of the Title Speculum in Medieval Literature’, Speculum, 29
(Cambridge, Mass., 1954), 100–5, 104.
most phancy, they are the mirrour wherein you may take a survey of your own
self; for every individual person affects him that most resembles himself ’.⁴⁹ La
Chambre was another author of a physiognomical treatise who was aware of
the necessity of having to look in the mirror, ‘for it is most certain, that we can-
not by our selves come to a perfect knowledge of our selves: and our Souls may,
in that respect, be compar’d to our Faces, inasmuch as the former, as well as the
latter, can only view themselves in Mirrours’.⁵⁰
Other texts from this physiognomical canon contained subliminal visual
suggestions about the use of the mirror. The Kalendar of Shepherds, for exam-
ple, contains a woodcut in the section dealing with astrological physiognomy
in which the figure of Venus is looking at herself in the mirror and the image is
surrounded by physiognomical description (Illustration 42). Some editions of
Pernetti’s mid-eighteenth century Lettres philosophiques sur les physionomies,
such as that published by Jean Neaulme, in The Hague in 1748, have a fron-
tispiece which consists of two putti, one of which is being unmasked, while the
other is looking into a mirror.⁵¹
In terms of actuality rather than subliminal suggestion, the search for a late
fifteenth-century monk or a nun simply looking into a mirror, let alone phys-
iognomating themselves in one, proved vain. However, the convalescents at
Westminster Abbey in the early fourteenth century used to walk in the garden
on the south side of the infirmary and sometimes watched the fish in the infir-
mary’s fish pond. Their pond-gazing may have focused from time to time on
the reflections of their own healing physiognomies floating on the water’s sur-
face. Indeed, by the mid-fourteenth century, monks had begun to keep their
own razors. Whilst this ‘flight . . . into private shaving’ appears to have for a
long time been carried out by the sense of touch alone, some of them may have
also possessed mirrors, despite the mysterious absence of such objects from the
records.⁵²
There is no iconic tradition which specifically connects the reading of a
physiognomical treatise and gazing into a mirror. However, I would argue that
this is due to the fact that physiognomical mirror-gazing is buried in other,
more general, iconographic themes. One such iconographic theme in the early
modern period was devoted to the reading of books and looking in mirrors
(Illustrations 43 and 44). Of course, one might argue that these images advo-
⁴⁹ Vulson, Curiositie, 114.

⁵⁰ Marin Cureau de la Chambre, The Art How to Know Men (1665), sig. B2v.
⁵¹ Geneva: Bibliothèque Publique Universitaire, Md 410**.
⁵² B. Harvey, Living and Dying in England, 1100–1540 (Oxford, 1993), 90, fn. 85, 132–3; J. Bond, ‘The Fish-
ponds of Eynsham Abbey’, The Eynsham Record, 9 (1992), 3–17.
42. Venus looks at herself in a mirror. This woodcut is surrounded by physiognomical

description, The Kalender of Shepherdes, ed. H. O. Sommer (1892), sig. K iiii. (Photo:
Warburg Institute.)
cate the very opposite of this physiognomical prayer. In other words they could
be read as suggesting that time spent reading books is a good thing, whilst time
spent preening oneself in the mirror is attacked. As such they could be seen as
a part of the attempt to visualize what was often perceived in the wake of the
Reformation to be a fundamental antagonism between two forms of literacy,
one textual, the other visual. Indeed, it could even be argued that, as a conse-
quence of early modern religious reform, these images were one way in which
visual literacy was used to etch textual literacy deeper into the predominantly
visual literacy of the human mind.
In addition to this iconographic tradition, there were many textual tradi-
tions which tried to regulate mirror-gazing to the same textual end. In the
influential medieval text Roman de la Rose, for example, mirror-gazing could
just as easily bring you to ruin as to self-knowledge.⁵³ As one late sixteenth-
century text put it:
there is nothyng more meete, especially for yong Maidens then a Mirrhor, there in to
see and beholde how to order their dooyng, I meane not a Christall Mirrhor, made by
handie Arte, by whiche Maidens now adaies, dooe onely take delight daiely to tricke
and trim their tresses . . . the Mirrhor I meane is made of another maner of matter, and
⁵³ P. Ariès and G. Duby (ed.), A History of Private Life, 4 vols. (Paris, 1989), ii. 392.
43. Eglon Hendrik van der Neer (1634–1703), Portrait of a Young Lady Seated at a Table
Holding an Open Book, 1665. Private collection. (Photograph courtesy of Richard
Green Gallery, London.)
is of muche more worthe then any Christall Mirrhor; for as the one teacheth how to
attire the outwarde bodie, so the other guideth to garnishe the inwarde mynde, and
maketh it meete for vertue.⁵⁴
This same antagonistic dualism between the text and the image is explicit in the
quotation from 2 Corinthians 7: 1 which accompanies the engraving shown in
Illustration 44, ‘having therefore these promises, dearly beloved, let us cleanse
ourselves from all filthiness of the flesh and spirit, perfecting holiness in the fear
of God’.
⁵⁴ Thomas Salter, A mirrhor mete for all mothers (1579), sig. Avi.
44. Jan Luiken, Het leerzaam huisraad (Amsterdam, 1711), 54. (Photo: Warburg
Institute.)
Much more work would need to be done before one could determine
whether a more physiognomical form of mirror-gazing was gradually under-
mined by this sort of moral and religious condemnation, alongside its recon-
figuration by the new mechanical philosophy. Yet for all that this sort of
dualism seems fundamentally antithetical to this physiognomical prayer, there
was another textual tradition which very much supported the aim of this more
physiognomical form of mirror-gazing. Similarly, many Renaissance readers
and mirror-gazers would have been familiar, for example, with the claim that
Socrates ‘made use of a mirror for moral instruction. For he urged his pupils,
we are told, to look at themselves frequently in the glass, that he might beg any
of them who should be gratified at his own beauty not to spoil the dignity of
the body by dishonourable state of mind’.⁵⁵ Moreover, as we saw in the previ-
ous chapter, it was a tradition that was also represented iconographically in the
early modern period. Therefore, despite the number of people like Edward
Bourne who supported the former textual perspective on life by citing James I:
23–4, ‘a natural man, who, having neglected God’s word, beholds his face in a
glass, and straitway forgets what manner of man he is’,⁵⁶ there are numerous
authorities which could have been marshalled in support of the more physiog-
nomical form of mirror-gazing. Seneca is just one: ‘the mirror was invented
that man might recognise himself ’. Indeed, Seneca even went so far as to sug-
gest that every one should always carry a mirror with them.⁵⁷ And many visions
of this sort of self-reflection were driven by a distinctly physiognomical con-
ception of the experience: ‘A lady must look in a mirror for two reasons: to see
her face and to see her conscience’.⁵⁸
Of all the iconographical traditions in which the looking-glass aspect of this
inter-medial reading of a physiognomical text lay buried, perhaps the most
important was Prudence—one of the concepts which underpinned many
forms of ‘the physiognomical eye’. The briefest glance at the iconography of
Prudence reveals one consistent attribute—Prudence was often represented
holding a book while she contemplated herself in a looking-glass. In Giotto’s
vision of Prudence, the book lay open on a lectern while the gaze of Prudence
was focused on the mirror. The material proximity between the physiognomi-
cal treatise and the looking-glass is shown by the fact that the hawkers who sold
cheap ‘treatises on physiognomy’ across the Continent of Europe also sold
looking-glasses.⁵⁹
Of course, one could argue that such mirrors may have been used by
hawkers to reflect the sunshine in order to gain the attention of potential
customers from afar; or to allow his customers to see what they looked like as
they tried on the jewellery he had for sale. However, one could equally argue for
a more physiognomical use. In the case of an eighteenth-century chapman, it
may also have been used to allow the customers to see whether or not they bore
any resemblance to the images of the various people on the posters he had come
to sell them (Illustration 45).
⁵⁵ M. A. Wallace-Dunlop, Glass in the Old World (1882), 216.

⁵⁶ Edward Bourne, A looking-glass discovering to all people what image they bear (1671), 11.
⁵⁷ Wallace-Dunlop, Glass, 216–17.
⁵⁸ Ariès and Duby, Private Life, ii. 391.
⁵⁹ M. Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (Cambridge, 1984), 117, 121–2. T. Norris’s London
Bridge bookshop, ‘The Looking-glass’, sold physiognomical treatises to chapmen until 1735. See Pasadena:
Huntington Library, *AG104 E72 (1).
45. Martin Engelbrecht, A Seller of Images, 1730. After S. Taubert, Bibliopola. Bilden
und Texte aus der Welt des Buchhandels, 2 vols. (Hamburg, 1959), ii. 103, Bibliothèque
Municipale de Lyon, FA hist 03 D t. 01–02. (Credit photographique Bibliothèque
Municipale de Lyon, Didier Nicole.)
Yet, as we have seen in this study, what people saw in a looking-glass in the
early modern period depended in part upon what was in their mind when they
looked into it. And what was in their mind in turn depended upon who
they were, when they were, and, to some extent, what sort of mirror literacy
they had. This is not the place to examine in detail the effect on mirror literacy
of the significant developments that took place in the technology of the
mirror during the early modern period. Suffice it to say that for the classically
educated among the population of early modern Europe, looking in a mirror
was just as frequently associated in their minds with the notion of vanitas and
folly as it was with the wisdom of self-knowledge. When Hans Holbein the
Younger read his 1515 edition of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, one of the illustrations
he penned in its margins was the act of looking in a mirror.⁶⁰ Other images,
such as the portrait by the German painter Hans Burgkmair (1473–1551) of
himself and his wife blurred those genres. Those same genres existed not only
in reality but also in dreams. Dreaming about looking into a mirror, as opposed
to actually looking into one, was, according to one authority on the matter, a
sign of what today would be called vanity, and what they called ‘self-love’:
To Dream within a Glass thou dost behold
Thy Face shews great Love of thy self, tis told;
And if thy self thou Trim and do pin there,
It shews thou thinkst that few with thee compare.⁶¹
When believers in early modern ‘magic’ looked in a mirror, rather than simply
the anatomy of a face, some saw the soul of the infernal regions, where the dead
seemed alive.⁶² This was known to the learned minds of the sixteenth century
as captopotromancy. But that sort of divination from mirrors was a far cry,
intellectually speaking, from the contemplation of the pure mathematics of the
looking-glass reflection calculated so precisely by the French mathematician
Pierre de Fermat in about 1660. In laying down the basis for what became
known as the laws of reflection and refraction, Fermat’s mirror-gazing led him
to concentrate on the invisible process taking place ‘underneath’ the actual
visual image as it were. As such, he went on to claim that the path taken by a ray
of light between two fixed points in an arrangement of mirrors, lenses, and so
forth is that which takes the least time, assuming that in a medium of refractive
index m light travels more slowly than in free space by a factor m. This was a
mode of reflection which characterized the vision of the enlightened author of
the entry for ‘miroir’ in that monument to the end of the early modern period,
the famous Encyclopédie of 1750. Divination may have been a far cry from this
intellectually, but not temporally. Even in Samuel Jeake’s day, temporally
mid-way between the former mid-sixteenth-century magical and the latter
mid-eighteenth-century mathematical reflections, the French philosophizing
priest Mersenne was still embroiled in dismissing occult arguments about the
appearance of angels in mirrors. Indeed, it is exactly this latter sort of mirror lit-
eracy that helps to explain the drama and shock evident in Theodor de Bry’s
⁶⁰ Desiderius Erasmus, Eloge de la folie (Paris, 1959), 32.

⁶¹ Oniropolus; or, Dreams Interpreter (1680), 20.
⁶² L. Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, 8 vols. (New York, 1923–58), v. 132.
46. Theodore de Bry, Emblemata saeculario (Frankfurt, 1596), pl. 40. (Photo: Warburg
Institute.)
late sixteenth-century representation of one of those rarer moments of techno-

logically aided self-reflection, perhaps even physiognomical divination, the
inscription of which reads ‘So as you will be able to be known by yourself,
inspect this foreseeing mirror’.⁶³
But of all the evidence for this practice of physiognomating by the mirror, it
is, suitably enough, the iconography of the ‘gypsies’ which provides the most
telling material. Take, for example, the obscure engraving by the Master of the
Die shown in Illustration 47. Virtually nothing is known about it. Notwith-
⁶³ Thanks to Michael Screech for this translation.

47. Master of the Die (BXV.226.75). (Photo: Warburg Institute.)
standing its irreducibly visual qualities, how are we to read it as a historical doc-
ument? I would argue that this engraving is evidence of an early modern phys-
iognomical examination being carried out with the aid of a mirror. The image
quite clearly shows a relatively well-to-do young woman looking into a small
hand-held mirror, while a distinctly swarthy, gypsy-like figure watches over her
shoulder as though supervising the process. There is no printed treatise in the
image. But that might just be the point. For, as was argued in Chapter 3, the
gypsies may have been masters of a visual (and oral) rather than a textual phys-
iognomical literacy. Being a well-to-do individual, it is possible that the mirror
which the woman in this image is using is her own, and that she is using it to
check and in that sense ‘appropriate’ the gypsy’s reading of her face. Indeed, the
48. A rich, provocative representation of a physiognomical consultation. Philipp Mey,

Chiromantia et Phisiognomia Medica, wie auch Chiromantia Curiosa (1702). (Photo:
Basle, Bibliothek der Universität.)
most basic physiognomical appreciation of the content of the image (the one
with which art historians feel so uncomfortable yet use so often) itself provides
further grounds for this interpretation—in the form of the detection of an
expression of anxiety or concern on the gypsy’s face.
The speculation in such a reading of the image is rendered more convincing
by the frontispiece from Phillip Mey’s Chiromancy (Illustration 48). This image
indisputably portrays an early eighteenth-century consultation between a
physiognomist and a client. In terms of what was argued in Chapter 3 about the
appropriation and domestication of the gypsy métier by the end of the seven-
teenth century, I would argue that the wig and coat on the wall suggest that the
Turkish/gypsy-like appearance of the physiognomist is simply the uniform he
has put on because it is the image that goes with the image of the physiogno-
mist. The relatively well-to-do social status of the client can perhaps be taken as
evidence of the extent to which the gypsy-physiognomating referred to in
Chapter 3, which so troubled the Reformation authorities, had by the early
eighteenth century been co-opted or tamed by the establishment, rather like
what happened with Paracelsianism. That is to say, the gypsies they went to see
were gypsies made in their own image of what a gypsy should look like.
But more to the point here is that the open book upon the table in the
physiognomist’s consulting room is a book on physiognomy. The signs of the
zodiac indicate that, like Robert Fludd’s hermetic variety, it is a distinctly
astrological form of physiognomy. The fact that it lies open before a mirror sur-
rounded by astrological signs suggests that reading ‘books on physiognomy’
was a process that literally involved both a textual and a visual literacy, due to
the fact that such books were actually sometimes read with the aid of a mirror.
If this is evidence of the external audio-visual dimension of reading ‘books
on physiognomy’, is there any evidence for the alleged internal moral
cinematic aspect of the experience amongst the graffiti? This internal moral
‘cinema’, by its very nature, was not written down. It was performed in the
mind of the reader. Notwithstanding, some of the graffiti found in these texts
are certainly more a form of drawing than a form of writing. Moreover, the
spectrum of that type of graffiti ranges from seemingly chaotic squiggles and
doodles, through human faces, to more recognizable abstract geometrical
figures (Illustration 49).⁶⁴ Can any of these graffiti be interpreted as traces
of an actual reader’s actual experience of the internal moral ‘cinema’ that was
allegedly produced in the encounter between the reader and these texts?
This concept of an ‘internal cinema’ certainly gives meaning to some of the
graffiti which might otherwise be too easily disregarded, in particular that
which is of a more deliberately figurative nature, especially those attempts
which various readers made to draw a human figure. Some examples of this,
such as the faces drawn on the cover of one French edition of the Compost des
bergiers are more immediately suggestive merely of childish playfulness of a
youngster named ‘Guyon de sardiere’. Indeed, the seemingly sixteenth-
century character of these squiggles is a timely reminder that playfulness with
physiognomy was not simply a product of eighteenth-century rationality and
satire. Indeed, as playful as the graffiti of these children may seem to be, and
⁶⁴ Oxford: Bodleian Library, Douce Fragm. d. 6, Kalendar of Shepherds [1550?], sigs. Bv and Bvii.
49. Abstract human shape drawn at bottom of the page, Oxford: Bodleian Library,
Douce Fragm. d. 6, Kalendar of Shepherds [1550?], sig. Bvii. (Photo: Oxford: Bodleian
Library.)
may even have been, it is a playfulness that should not necessarily be assumed
to be exclusive to early modern children and, as a result, taken any less serious-
ly. Traces of a similar sort of playfulness can be found, for example, in the face
drawn at the end of the above-mentioned thirteenth-century manuscript expo-
sition of physiognomical doctrine now in the Vatican. Given that its prove-
nance and readership were ecclesiastical, does it bear a suggestion of the
carnival at the heart of scholasticism, or even traces of what Johannes Huizin-
ga referred to as Homo Ludens?⁶⁵ Or, at the very least, in terms of the argument
⁶⁵ J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens (1949).
being put forward in this book about a shift from praying to playing, should it
be taken as an indication that the medieval scholastics, for all their arid intel-
lectualism, also had a sense of humour in their appreciation of scientia, rather
than the equivalent of the more satirical humour with which physiognomy was
attacked as a pseudo-science at the end of the period?
If the apparently playful element in some types of the more visual graffiti
prevents us from taking them seriously as traces of this internal moral ‘cinema’,
there are other traces which appear to be less playful. In Bodleian MS Douce
45, one folio consists of a short list of specific physiognomical aphorisms (Illus-
tration 50). Beside it, in the margins, a former reader has drawn a number of
profiles of faces. It is difficult for the contemporary eye to see how the apho-
risms written on the page are linked with the graffitoed visual representations
of faces in the margins. But it is precisely that hidden link which could be the
indication that these are traces of that internal cinema. Before dismissing this
possibility as too speculative, let us turn to one Renaissance reader and writer
who developed something of a habit of drawing faces in his manuscripts of
alchemical or natural philosophical works, the English magus John Dee. Dee’s
habit of decorating his texts in this way should not be assumed to be meaning-
less or impenetrable ornament (Illustrations 51 and 52). In some cases, it is
interesting to see that these human and animal faces are the culminating point
of a process of predominantly abstract ornamentation initiated by a capital let-
ter.⁶⁶ In John Dee’s case, it might be worth investigating further whether this
practice may have been understood as a form of decorative exegesis of the open-
ing line of the gospel of St John ‘and the word was made flesh’. For it begins
in ‘the word’ (the capital letter) and finishes in an image of ‘the flesh’ (the
face).⁶⁷ Similarly, such graffiti might be considered in the same light as the self-
portrait which Mantegna placed in the ornamental decorations in the Camera
dei Sposi in Mantua.⁶⁸ Even more to the point, given Dee’s interest in the Kab-
balah, one might even begin to see such graffiti as a conscious or unconscious
echo, if not a direct invocation, of the internal visions of the ‘physiognomies’ or
faces of the ‘Sefiroth’ or angels, the contemplation of which provided one with
a pathway through one’s meditative ascent to the face of God.
No other material relating to this has been found on the books themselves.
However, I would like to argue that it is in the context of this hermetic internal
⁶⁶ W. H. Sherman, John Dee. The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance (Amherst,
Mass., 1995), who points out that these faces ‘only appear in alchemical or natural philosophical texts’ (88);
Oxford: Corpus Christi College, MS 144, f. 33r and 34r; Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 1451, pt. II,
fols. 11v, 17v, 35r, 51v, 53v, 55r; Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Digby 119, fols. 24r, 114r, 115r, 117r, 118r.
⁶⁷ See, for example, Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Canon misc. 555, fols. 83v and 80r.
⁶⁸ I owe my knowledge of this ornamental self-portrait to Dr F. Quiviger.
50. Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Douce 45, fol. 50r. (Photo: Oxford: Bodleian Library.)
51. Bodleian Library, MS Digby 119, ‘Recepta varia alchemica’ (14th century), ff. 24r.
(Photo: Oxford: Bodleian Library.)
moral ‘cinema’ that some of the visions experienced by the English Romantic
poet and political radical William Blake should be understood. One account of
Blake’s imagined physiognomies also brings us back to the physiognomical
sense of history mentioned in Chapter 4, which I argued developed out of Neo-
platonic hermeticism. John Varley, an acquaintance of Blake’s and the author
of a book entitled A Treatise on Zodiacal Physiognomy (1828), has left a descrip-
tion of how Blake used to have intense visions when he was reading history
books. At one point when reading a history of the Scottish chiefs, both William
Wallace and Robert the Bruce appeared before him. Blake asked them to
52. Manuscript profile drawn by John Dee, Oxford: Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole
1451 (15th–16th century), 53v. (Photo: Oxford: Bodleian Library.)
remain before his eyes whilst he made a sketch of them. One account describes
how Blake was
sitting, meditating, as he had often done, on the heroic actions and hard fate of the
Scottish hero, when, like a flash of lightning, a noble form stood before him; which he
instantly knew, by a something within himself, to be Sir William Wallace. He felt that
it was a spiritual appearance . . . The warrior Scot, in this vision, seemed as true to his
historical mental picture, as his noble shade was to the manly bearing of his recorded
person . . . The face was, nearly a front view, remarkably handsome—open in its
expression, and full of an ardent, generous courage: the blue eye being bright and
53. This representation of Caractacus, the leader of the British resistance to the
Romans, was another of Blake’s historical physiognomical visions, from The
Blake–Varley Sketchbook of 1819: In the Collection of M. D. E. Clayton-Stamm, ed. M.
Butlin (1969). (Photo: Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.)
expanded, and the lips of a noble contour, seemed cheering his devoted followers to
deeds of glory. All was gallant sunshine over that fine countenance, which, while you
looked on it, might almost induce you to believe the reality of the vision . . . I confess,
I looked upon them with no small pleasure; for each bore a strong resemblance to the
pictures my mind had before inbibed of both heroes, from all the historical descrip-
tions I had ever heard, or read.⁶⁹
⁶⁹ Jane Porter, ‘The Scottish Chiefs’ (1841), in A Bibliography of William Blake, ed., G. Keynes (New York,
1921), 473–4; The Blake–Varley Sketchbook of 1819: in the Collection of M. D. E. Clayton-Stamm, ed. M.
Butlin (1969).
Conclusion
In this chapter I have tried to contribute to the methodology and historiogra-
phy of the history of reading by examining the ‘graffiti’ that is often found in
extant copies of early modern ‘books on physiognomy’. I examined the extent
to which the patterns in this graffiti can be said to provide evidential support
for the hypothesis offered in the previous chapter about the fundamental
shift in the experience of reading a treatise on physiognomy, from praying to
playing. The graffiti examined provides indications of a number of different
reading practices, be it the scholarly examination of the sources of physiogno-
mony, or the learning of the language of physiognomony by children. It further
suggests that the committing to memory of passages of physiognomonical doc-
trine was often carried out within the framework of concerns about the notion
of ‘generation’ and ‘reproduction’. Moreover, I have also argued that some of it
can be taken as evidence of the engagement of early modern reader with the
language of physiognomy in their attempts to discover something about them-
selves or people known to them. Besides providing evidence that the reading of
physiognomy was often carried out with the aid of visual images, including the
use of a mirror, I have also examined the extent to which the extant graffiti
on these texts might be fruitfully thought of as providing evidence of the
hermetic ‘internal cinema’ that was part of the natural magic of engaging with
the language of physiognomy in textual form.
Conclusion
Fisnomy-to-Fisnomy
The Introduction to this book opened with a written self-description of the
physiognomy of a late seventeenth-century English protestant merchant
named Samuel Jeake, owner of, among other things, four ‘books on physiog-
nomy’. I have tried to show how the indistinct emblematic image of Jeake’s
physiognomy, which arises through the present-day reader’s mind via the writ-
ten words Jeake used to describe himself, can be grasped through the play of the
shadows and the light of the ongoing reconfiguration of the relationship
between what was understood to be ‘science’, ‘art’, ‘natural magic’, and ‘occult’
in early modern European culture.
I have tried to show in this study the how the physiognomony which Samuel
Jeake was reading that day in 1670 was one written form of the audio-visual sci-
entia of a way of looking and listening that Renaissance Europe had inherited
from the Middle Ages and antiquity. I have argued that, during its transmission
across early modern Europe, the language of physiognomy had become
enmeshed, textually and culturally, in what was referred to as the troubling
emergence of the ‘Egyptian’. That ‘Egyptian’ phenomenon was largely a con-
sequence of the spreading influence of the hermetic Neoplatonic philosophy
coming out of Florence in the late fifteenth century—a movement which
attempted to mix and synthesize Jewish mysticism, Islamic mysticism, and
‘Egyptian’ mysticism with Christianity. As a result, the art of physiognomy
came to be seen as a part of the newly re-discovered natural language of an
ancient theology, whose mysterious hieroglyphic characters astrologically
infused every leaf of the book of nature with symbolic meaning and hidden
mythologies. The famous Hebrew scholar Gershom Scholem once described
how Jewish mysticism introduces ‘a sphere, or a whole realm of divinity, which
underlies the world of our sense-data and which is present and active in all that
exists’. Scholem’s observation could be used as an accurate description of the
hermetic notion of ‘spiritus’, or the ‘gestin’ in Paracelsus’s theories, or, in turn,
the ‘Egyptian’ hermetic understanding of the Kabbalistic language of physiog-
nomony as seen in the work of Robert Fludd.¹
By using the methodology developed by historians of reading, I have further
argued that Fludd’s attempt to systematize, experimentally, the language of
physiognomony took the form of a Kabbalah-influenced combination of what
he called the ‘techniques of the microcosm’. The ‘internal cinema’ produced in
the imagination by the rhetorical nature of the hermetic art of physiognomy as
developed by Robert Fludd was nothing less than a scientific ‘experiment’ in
what Fludd understood to be an applied physics. In that physics, Fludd’s ‘phys-
iognomical consciousness’ became the universal vibration of the ‘inner lyre’ of
Ficino’s distinctly musical ‘religion of the world’. By reading it with the eye of
his imagination, and combining it with the art of astrology, the art of chiro-
mancy, and the art of memory, it was thought capable of using, among other
things, the efficacy of the language of poetry and art to engage with and manip-
ulate the mechanisms of the divine, celestial rays. By bringing about such a
marriage of heaven and earth in man in this way, the art of physiogn-
omy made the invisible manifest and intelligible through the illumination
and the sustainment, not only of profound self-knowledge but also self-
‘re-generation’. In other words, I suggested that Fludd’s experiment had close
affinities with what Giordano Bruno called an ‘inner writing’, and might fruit-
fully be thought of as an attempt to construct an alchemy of the self. For early
modern sculptors, painters, engravers, musicians, poets, and actors influenced
by that hermetic movement, the influence of this hermetic form of physiogno-
my was made manifest in their work. For regenerated hermeticists and magi it
was made manifest in themselves and their faces, and was either present or
absent in the faces of everyone they met.
The particularities of Fludd’s art of physiognomony should not be under-
estimated. It is certainly difficult to gauge just how widely spread such text-
ually literate, hermetic notions of the art of physiognomy were in early modern
Europe. ‘Books on physiognomy’ evidently reached readers from across the
entire social spectrum of those few people in early modern Europe who had
endowed themselves with the still relatively uncommon skill of textual literacy
required to read them. However, from a quantitative perspective, those ‘treat-
ises on physiognomy’ were small, not all of them had absorbed this heteroge-
neous hermetic influence, and even in those that had, these intellectually com-
plicated and mysterious theories were presented in a watered-down, and often
undigested, form. I have further argued that, for all the emphasis placed in this
¹ G. G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York, 1974), 11.

Conclusion 303
study upon the Neoplatonic hermetic tradition and its influence on the art of
physiognomy, natural philosophers firmly within the Aristotelian tradition
also made a contribution to the ongoing metamorphosis of physiognomy.
Indeed, there is a strong case to be made that the ground for much of this
hermetic mysticism had long been prepared by that Aristotelian tradition
in natural philosophy. One can see this in particular in the influence of the
encyclopaedic work of the thirteenth-century natural philosopher Michael
Scot and the physiognomy which he included in his influential Liber introduc-
torius. Furthermore, as the early sixteenth-century Paduan commentaries
show, the Renaissance Aristotelian tradition, which themselves absorbed
some hermetic influences, made their own contribution to the development
of a modern, more scientific, understanding of ‘physiognomy’. If this was
evident in the early sixteenth-century writings of Nifo, the work of Clemens
Timpler and Camillo Baldi showed that this continued into the seventeenth
century.
Whilst this is a position that is now finally becoming part of the historio-
graphical orthodox, I argued that the general impact of things ‘Egyptian’ in
Renaissance and early modern Europe, including the ‘Egyptian’ art of phys-
iognomy in particular, needs to be approached and understood in terms wider
than the more restrictive realm of the history of ideas that characterizes that his-
toriographical debate. I did this by suggesting that the spread of the troubling
emergence of the ‘Egyptian’ in early modern Europe was more than just an
intellectual phenomenon of the socially élite, textually literate, predominantly
male world of the early modern universities or academies. The circulation of
precious, expensive manuscripts and printed hermetic books and the develop-
ment of a theorized hermetic physiognomical eye that arose as a consequence
of that literate movement were, in part, I claimed, a reaction to an earlier social,
religious, possibly even illiterate phenomenon described in this book as the
coming of the ‘gypsies’.
I further argued that the ‘characters’ of the physiognomony captured in the
‘books on physiognomy’ that circulated in Europe need to be read with more
than just a philological eye. Whilst many of the inconsistencies so evident in
the physiognomical aphorisms which one finds in different texts can be
explained by their hazardous transmission through the world of medieval
scribal and early modern printed publication, they can still provide us with evi-
dence of assumptions about early modern understandings of literacy, sex and
gender, and virtue and beauty. I stressed how, epistemologically, the hermetic
language of physiognomy was not only another facet of the ‘natural magic’ of
the language of dreams, but had its own innate iconic nature, which, in early
modern Neoplatonic eyes, came to be understood as part of the pre-textual,
hieroglyphic, language of the ancient Egyptians. I also suggest that in those
‘books on physiognomy’ one can detect traces of both a physiognomical con-
ception of history, as well as what appears to have been a very different oral
physiognomical tradition. It is in the light of that oral tradition that the méti-
er of the story-telling ‘gypsy’ fisnomier has to be understood, and it is a tradi-
tion which the textual tradition can be seen as an attempt both to repress and
appropriate.
Overall, the marginality of these texts makes it difficult at this stage in the
research to link the dissemination and understanding of ‘books on physiogn-
omy’ in early modern Europe to specific political and economic causes. The
coming of the plague and other early modern environmental conditions seem
to have had some role to play in the rise and fall of demand for them. For now,
the most prominent factor in explaining the dissemination of ‘books on phys-
iognomy’ appears to have been religion. The fractured state of the late medieval
church explains much of both the attraction and detestation of the mysticism
and ancient theology which enveloped the ‘natural magic’ of physiognomy
under the spreading influence of the Corpus hermeticum, and in the wake of the
theological story-telling medicine of the early modern ‘gypsies’. Gershom
Scholem once claimed that ‘Mysticism is a definite stage in the historical devel-
opment of religion and makes its appearance under certain well-defined con-
ditions’. It is a description that fits well with developments in the early modern
period. In Scholem’s terms, both the Indian or ‘gypsy’ fisnomiers and the Neo-
platonic hermetic art of physiognomy could all be seen as part of the mysticism
which promised to fill the ‘abyss’ between man and God created by institu-
tionalized religion and reintroduce a sense of unity—in other words as the
moment when ‘the world of mythology and that of revelation meet in the soul
of man’.² This would then explain why, generally speaking, the more hermetic
way of beholding the world physiognomically was both condemned and
appropriated by both church and state which persecuted their Jewish and
Islamic mystics, and the ‘magicians’, astrologers, ‘gypsies’, and ‘enthusiasts’
who experienced the world through its lens.
If religion was the driving factor in all of this, what were the main factors
which contributed to what has been described as the continuous metamor-
phosis of the art of physiognomy? The first of those factors were the changes
that occurred in the understanding of the epistemological status of the lan-
guage of physiognomony. To grasp this involves returning to the very words
² G. G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York, 1974), 7–8.

Conclusion 305
that Samuel Jeake read in Richard Saunders’s ‘book on physiognomy’ in 1670,
and with which he described his own phyz in his diary. I said above that those
words have to be understood in the context of the early modern debates about
the nature or epistemology of language. One part of the historical context for
understanding the importance of this debate was the early modern Christian
notion of original sin. The ensuing ‘Fall of man’ had deprived him of his divine
ability to see and comprehend all of nature. The famous story of the construc-
tion of the Tower of Babel was a legend that symbolized one of the conse-
quences of that Fall—the confusion of languages which ensued. For those
readers unfamiliar with this issue, it is worth repeating that that debate was suc-
cinctly captured in the exchange between two of Jeake’s English contempo-
raries, John Webster and Seth Ward.
For John Webster, as for many authors of books on the subject, physiogno-
mony was a special type of language that had been handed down to them from
Adam through successive translations into the written languages of Hebrew,
Syriac, Chaldean, Arabic, Greek, and Latin.³ It was a ‘natural language’ in
which there was embedded a mysterious ‘resemblance’ between the words and
the things they signified. When read within the framework of the hermetic phi-
losophy, the efficacious power of those natural signatures could be tapped and
the properties they signified manipulated and made manifest—in Robert
Fludd’s case, with the help of the angels. Webster was just one of many pos-
sessed of a deeply held conviction about the existence of some sort of recover-
able ‘natural language’ or living hieroglyph underneath the Latin or the
European, regional, and local vernaculars and cants that people spoke and read,
which had been fed and influenced by the spread of the élite form of hermeti-
cism that Marsilio Ficino had begun in late fifteenth-century Florence. The
recovery of that natural language could, by unleashing its innate ‘similitude’,
restore man’s divine powers through a rebirth of the ‘resemblance’ to God in
which man was originally made.
It was for this reason that Webster, like Paracelsus, criticized the universities
which understood and taught ‘nothing of Caelestial signatures, which are in
some measure made known by the quantity, light, colour, motion, and other
affections of those bodies: . . . nothing of Subcaelestial Physiognomy, whether
Elementary, Meteorological, or Mineralogical, but are utterly ignorant in all
these, as also in Botanical, and Anthropological Physiognomy . . . and so never
seek to penetrate into the more interiour nature of things.’⁴ On the other hand,
³ David Laigneau, Traicté de la saignée contre le vieil erreur d’Erasistrate (Paris, 1635), 369.
⁴ John Webster, Academiarum examen (1653), 76.
and at the same time, there were many at the cutting-edge of investigations into
the nature and epistemology of language who refused all such claims, and for
whom language was a purely conventional thing. In other words, they thought
that the link between the word and the thing it signified was an arbitrary affair
agreed upon for a time by a community, but liable to change. One such was
Webster’s English contemporary Seth Ward. Ward accepted that a language in
which every word ‘were a definition and contain’d the nature of the thing’,
could be called ‘a naturall Language, and would afford that which the Cabalists
and Rosycrucians have vainley sought for in the Hebrew, And in the names of
things assigned by Adam’. However, he denied ‘that ever there was any such
Language of Nature’. In Ward’s eyes, the writings of natural philosophers like
Agrippa and Porta, so appreciated by Webster, were a ‘cheat and imposture
which they put upon us, eluding credulous men with the pretence of specificall
vertues, and occult celestiall Signatures and taking them off from observation
& experiment (the only way to the knowledge of nature)’. To put it simply and
briefly, Ward’s opinion can be said to have won the day.
Yet the gradual reconfiguration of people’s understanding of the language of
physiognomy brought about by this movement was, in turn, driven by other
factors, some of which can also be seen in what is now left of Samuel Jeake’s
physiognomy. The series of diary entries which charted young Samuel Jeake’s
growing height were an indication of the development of the new form of
physics that was being ushered in by early modern Europe’s natural philoso-
phers that was very different from the Paracelsian- and Alstedian-influenced
‘collative physics’ with which young Jeake was faced as he read Saunders’s ‘book
on physiognomy’ in 1670. During the very same time that Jeake was growing
up, and as a result of the impact and spread of a new understanding of mathe-
matics, the ‘value’ which appeared to be objectively out there in nature was
increasingly being re-written and coming to be understood in terms of pure,
indisputable, mathematical fact. In that mathematics, size, in the newer sense
of demonstrable measurement, became an increasingly important category. By
the time young Samuel Jeake was 19, Galileo had already made his famous
statement about how the language of the book of nature ‘is written in the lan-
guage of mathematics, and its characters are triangles, circles, and other geo-
metric figures without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single
word of it’. In that new ‘language of geometry’, as Galileo put it, ‘to know
means to measure according to a known measure, and the knowable is that
which is either immediately measurable or whose measurement can be
deduced’.⁵ This was far from the mystical Pythagorean and Kabbalistic combi-
⁵ B. Vickers (ed.), Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 1988), 152.
Conclusion 307
natorial mathematics with which the art of physiognomy had for so long been
enveloped. Indeed, such was the religious fervour and conviction of this new,
non-symbolic form of mathematical calculation that Leibniz, inventor of the
calculus, thought even religious differences could be resolved by saying ‘let us
calculate’.
The series of measurements which Samuel Jeake senior took of his only sur-
viving son’s growing physiognomy were exactly the sort of new, mathematical
observation of nature that Francis Bacon had requested in the list of 130 sub-
jects in his Catalogue of Particular Histories, which he felt it was the mission of
that new science of man to investigate. This project included ‘the History of the
Figure and External Limbs of Man, his Stature, Frame, Countenance and
Features; of the variety of the same according to the [Peoples] and Climates or
other smaller differences’ and the ‘History of the Growth and Increase of the
Body, in the whole and in its parts’.⁶ It was a change in mathematical under-
standing which seems unremarkable to early twenty-first century minds. But
to those unfamiliar with it at the time, that new seventeenth-century mathe-
matics did to early modern reasoning and experience what contemporary neo-
liberalism has done to a planned economy, or what Derridean ‘deconstruction’
has done to contemporary ‘logocentric’ rationality.
Throughout this book I have argued that a main theme in the history of
physiognomy was the way in which it was so often understood to be a part of
self-knowledge, or, in the case of hermeticism, self-transformation. Another
facet of the impact of the new seventeenth-century natural philosophy on the
metamorphosis of early modern European physiognomical self-understanding
can also be seen in the physiognomy which Samuel Jeake left on the pages of his
diary in the form of his self-description. Jeake’s diary was the scientific by-
product of someone who was using himself and his life as a sort of ‘experiment’
to test the validity of astrology, objectively, empirically, and rationally, accord-
ing to the new scientific standards. This is why, when Jeake turned to his mir-
ror to help him with his description of his short, mole-ridden physiognomy, his
immediate motivation may have been the fear of blindness and death, but his
weakened sense of vision produced neither skulls nor angels, nor visions of the
future nor the past in the glass. The Baconian empiricist that intellectually reg-
ulated Jeake’s eyesight meant that he just looked in his looking-glass in order to
describe, in as ‘plain’ a language as he could, exactly what he saw. From his grey
eyes and his large nose to the lines in his palms and the moles on his body, our
diarist, for all he was an advocate of the science of astrology, did not explore the
astrological meanings that hermeticists thought mysteriously infused in the
⁶ Francis Bacon, Collected Works, ed. J. Spedding, R. L. Ellis, and D. D. Heath, 7 vols. (1857–9), I.i, 407–8,
iv. 267–8; J. M. Tanner, A History of the Study of Human Growth (Cambridge, 1981), 25–6.
members of one’s physiognomy and the language of physiognomony. As such,
Jeake’s more purely classificatory physiognomical language, which simply
noted only the size and shape of different parts of his anatomy, can be seen as
an early indication of the new observational and descriptive approach to nat-
ural bodies that was to come to fruition and be most often identified with the
work of the Swedish natural philosopher and natural historian Carl Linnaeus
(1707–78).
With regard to the general process of the ongoing reconfiguration of early
modern European physiognomony in so far as it was located in the realms of
self-knowledge, Jeake’s written physiognomy was an indication of another
aspect of the new philosophical order of things that was then taking root in
everyday life—the spreading and deepening influence of an everyday under-
standing of the human self that, for simplicity’s sake, can be said to have been
driven by the philosophical perspective of the French philosopher René
Descartes. This becomes evident when we consider the absence of any vision of
Jeake’s ‘inner self ’ through his own written physiognomy. Jeake’s brief descrip-
tion of the materiality of what French astrologers and later police authorities
called the main signalements of his own individual physiognomy may have
flowed from his quill with relative ease. However, a résumé of the more meta-
physical aspects etched into that short physiognomy seemed to have been for
Jeake something of a taller order. Jeake said nothing explicitly about the soul or
the ‘inner self ’ onto which those particular external aspects of his physiogno-
my provided a window. He did not lose himself in the potentially transforming
ancient theological labyrinth of their meanings and symbolism—at least not in
the pages of his diary. Indeed, for the adult author, a retrospective description
of the mind of that physiognomy, unlike that of his body, was the equivalent of
sailing between the ‘Scylla and Charybdis’ of a present and a former self: ‘The
Description of my Mind must be totally omitted as inconvenient for me to
relate, and liable to certaine exposure: it being not possible for me in this par-
ticular to saile between Scylla & Charybdis’. It was a conceptual difficulty com-
pounded by a psychological (even a religious) reluctance on Jeake’s part to
confess his ‘inner’ side, a desire to keep what was ‘liable to certaine exposure’
private:
I kept formerly a Catalogue of sins committed by me, in order to a deeper humiliation.
But now considering, that God hath blotted out as a thick Cloud my Transgressions,
& as a Cloud my Sins: why should I give occasion to Man to revive the memory of that
which God will remember no more.⁷
⁷ An Astrological Diary of the Seventeenth-Century, ed. M. Hunter and A. Gregory (Oxford, 1988), 118 and
98.
Conclusion 309
In Descartes’s eyes, the mind (what he called the cogito) was something that
was to be understood as a private mental entity, distinct from the body. Con-
trary to how it appeared through the hermetic lens, the ‘physis’ of the Cartesian
body or the Cartesian mind was not infused with the ‘gnomos’ of symbolic
meaning. In Descartes’s vision of the self, as Descartes himself wrote, ‘the first
and chief prerequisite for the knowledge of the immortality of the soul is our
being able to form the clearest possible conception of the soul itself, and such
as shall be absolutely distinct from all our notions of body’. For all Descartes
tried to distinguish the body from the mind, he could not deny that they were
linked in some way. In his system, the link between mind and body was the
physiological mechanics of what he called the pineal gland—ironically, a ‘fic-
tional’ piece of the anatomy he had never actually seen with his own eyes.
Notwithstanding that, Descartes’s self, his thinking ‘I’, as he constantly
repeated, was a thing in and of itself, independent of the body:
I clearly apprehended nothing, so far as I was conscious, as belonging to my essence,
except that I was a thinking thing, or a thing possessing in itself the faculty of thinking.
But I will show hereafter how, from the consciousness that nothing besides thinking
belongs to the essence of the mind, it follows that nothing else does in truth belong
to it.⁸
Thus Jeake’s articulation of his physiognomy in his diary side-stepped what

many others saw as the ‘natural magic’ of physiognomy that happened even
when one beheld one’s own (or anyone else’s) body. In other words Jeake can be
said to have suppressed the more hermetic physiognomical way of beholding
the self and the natural world which surrounded it. He may not yet have seen
the allegedly ‘natural language’ of physiognomy that he read in Saunders’s text
a few weeks before first penning his self-description as a ‘game’, but he cer-
tainly does not appear to have treated it as an ancient theology. In that sense,
the moment when we find Samuel Jeake poised between various technologies
of his quill, his book, and his mirror is now an emblematic indication of how
the art of physiognomy, on its translation from mystical prayer to inconse-
quential entertainment, had become, in his, and in many other eyes, some-
thing of a ‘curiosity’.
The Cartesian body was itself a philosophical construction that arose out of
the developments of post-Vesalian anatomy and, in turn, prepared the ground
for Hallerian physiology. That ‘body’ was understood as nothing more than
some form of ‘purely’ physical, mechanistic extension from which the herme-
tic understanding of its physiognomy that one finds in the anatomical theories
⁸ René Descartes, Method, Meditations, trans. J. Veitch (1901), 88, 92.
of Paracelsus or Fludd had been amputated. Indeed, when taken together, the
developments in early modern medicine and early modern natural philosophy
were such a major factor in the history of the reconfiguration of ‘physiognomy’
that they can be said to have contributed to a process that might be described
as the splitting of the physiognomic.
With regard to the more material side of the physiognomic, the early mod-
ern developments in anatomy, physiology, and medical semiotics contributed
to changing the medical conception of ‘the physiognomic’ out of all recogni-
tion, by approaching and trying to explain the ‘occult’ effects of the ‘league’ of
mind and body from within a self-referential system of the human body,
detached from the mechanics of celestial influence. If this can be seen most
clearly in the work of such anatomists and physiologists as Vesalius, William
Harvey, and later Albrecht von Haller, the writings of the French physician
Jean Riolan (the younger) (1580–1657) provide one example of the role in the
gradual transformation of the language of physiognomy brought about by the
development of the semiotic systems which regulated the early modern med-
ical gaze. In that gaze, to use Thomas Sydenham’s phrase, physicians started to
focus on the ‘face of the disease’ rather than the face as a mirror of the soul. As
Riolan wrote, the face was a small table which contained the whole of man.
From the face one could apprehend man’s genius, take the measurements
(mensura) of the entire body, demonstrate age and beauty, separate the sexes,
and show the dignity of man. One could even ‘derive the signs of physiogn-
omy’. Riolan could accept that the face was ‘the most certain exemplar of our
soul’, in which ‘the hidden theatre of the soul’ was made manifest. Yet he had a
very different understanding of the ‘analogy ‘or ‘similitude’ that those physiog-
nomical signs represented from that of a hermeticist. One late seventeenth-
century English translation of his writings provides a clear idea of what the
physiognomic had become in medical eyes, ‘the Skin of the Face, is the
Looking-Glass wherein are seen the Diseases of the Body, especially of the
Liver, Spleen and Lungs, for look what Humour bears sway in the bowels, the
same shews it self forth in the Face’.⁹
The same development that contributed to the splitting-off of the medical
physiognomic from the hermetic divine vision of it as implied in the notion
that ‘the eyes are the windows of the soul’ can be traced through the emergence
of the discipline and practice of ophthalmology. In 1650, the French physician
David Laigneau was convinced that a ‘white weak circle’ in the eye was the
⁹ Jean Riolan the Younger, Anthropographia (Paris, 1618), 430; Anthropographia et osteologia (Paris, 1626),
86, 667; A sure guide; or, The best and nearest way to physick and chyrurgery (1671), 191 (and 196–9).
Conclusion 311
54. The divine ecstasy of scientific discovery, Abbé Desmonceaux (1734–1806) Traité
des maladies des yeux et des oreilles (Paris, 1786), frontispiece. (Cliché Bibliothèque
mark of timidity and weakness, and ‘divers colours’ the marks of ‘trompery’.¹⁰
By the end of the period, in works such as the Abbé Desmonceaux (1734–1806)
Traité des maladies des yeux et des oreilles (Paris, 1786), every sense of such meta-
physical meanings that physiognomists attached to the points and circles and
even the colours of the eyes had been eradicated. The frontispiece to Desmon-
ceaux’s text shows Desmonceaux in the midst of a divine ecstasy as he contem-
plates the human eye he holds in his hand. Thus, just as the hermeticist saw
physiognomy as part of an ancient theology, so this is evidence in itself of the
¹⁰ David Laigneau, Traicté pour la conservation de la santé (Paris, 1650), 756 ff.
extent to which the discoveries of that new material natural philosophy were
themselves made theological. It was such exclusively (and religiously) material
concerns which, at the end of this period, brought Coleridge to describe doc-
tors as ‘shallow animals. . . . having always employed their minds about Body
and Gutt, they imagine that in the whole system of things there is nothing but
Gutt and Body’.¹¹
The other side of this splitting of the physiognomic, the more metaphysical
side of the physiognomic that underpinned what Bacon called the ‘sister’ art of
physiognomy, the interpretation of dreams, and what Riolan referred to as the
‘hidden theatre of the soul’, found itself at the foundations of a discipline
which was born out of the consideration of the passions and the emotions, ‘psy-
chologia’.¹² The writings of the seventeenth-century Jesuit English physician
Thomas Wright provide just one example. Wright felt that ‘it can not be doub-
ted of, but that the passions of our mindes woorke diuers effects in our faces’.
However, in Wright’s opinion, the contemplation of the face alone had its lim-
its. For ‘he, that by externall phisiognomie and operations, will diuine what
lieth hidden in the heart, may rather conceiue an image of that affection that
doth raigne in the minde, than a perfite and resolute knowledge’. For all the
utility of these ‘smal shadow[s]’ offered by ‘externall physiognomie’, as far as
Wright was concerned, the face was not the ‘roote and kore where the Passions
reside’, it was not the natural ‘similitude’ it was in hermetic eyes, ‘but onelie the
rhinde and leaues, which shew the nature and goodnesse of both the roote and
the kore’. For Wright, there were some other passions the knowledge of which
required one to ‘dwell in an other soile than the face’ and to ‘wade deeper into
the soule’.¹³
I have tried to emphasize throughout this study that such changes are not to
be understood as the decline of physiognomy. The physiognomic may have
been split, but its splinters shot off in numerous directions, be it through the
arts or the sciences. Even at the end of the period, traces of the hermetic con-
ception of the language of physiognomy were to be found in the understand-
ing of art and poetry of many prominent Romantic figures. For Coleridge,
physiognomy was part of the ‘forming form shining through the formed form’,
and as such part of the definition and perfection of ideal art. It demonstrated
the Platonic notion of ‘the power which discloses itself from within as a prin-
ciple of unity in the many’. Indeed, so all encompassing was this that for
¹¹ Cited in V. Nutton and R. Porter (eds.), The Cambridge Illustrated History of Medicine (Cambridge,
1996), 100.
¹² Oratio Hennert, De physiognomia publice habita (Traiecti ad Rhenum, 1782), 45.
¹³ Thomas Wright, The passions of the minde in generall (1601), 49–56.
Conclusion 313
Coleridge there was even ‘a physiognomy in words, which, without reference
to their fitness or necessity, makes unfavourable as well as favourable impres-
sions’.¹⁴ Coleridge’s physiognomical visions were a long-term consequence of
the way in which the hermetic understanding of physiognomy became
enmeshed in the development of the early modern aesthetic.
To echo a question often raised in the historiographical debate about the
relationship between the hermetic and the rational, to what extent can the her-
metic understanding of physiognomy be said to have contributed to the devel-
opments that brought about the birth of modern science and the modern self?
It is certainly true that, wherever one looks along the interface of this split in the
physiognomic, one finds traces of that hermetic physiognomy. For example, in
Elsholtz’s work, we encounter, once again, clear evidence of the aforemen-
tioned interweaving of both natural magic and the new mathematics. The very
term ‘Anthropometria’ may have been coined by the aforementioned Elsholtz
in distinction to the more hermetic science of ‘anthropographie’ outlined in
John Dee’s famous Mathematicall Preface. Similarly, it appears to have been an
attempt to distance his subject from the term ‘anthropomantry’, a form of ‘div-
ination’ using dead bodies which, in the minds of the early modern learned,
was associated with the Roman emperor famous for having introduced the reli-
gion of sun worship into Rome that played such an important role in (almost
preventing) Constantine’s famous conversion to Christianity, Elagobalus
(218–22). Yet for all his promotion of the new mathematical concern with pure
measuring is evident in his ‘anthropometron,’ Elsholtz also included material
on the seemingly retrograde subject of the significance of moles, the lines on
the forehead, and even the lines on the feet (Illustrations 55, 56, and 57).
One could argue that if this hermetic physiognomy had anything to con-
tribute to the birth of modern science and the modern self, then that contribu-
tion should be seen as indirect or ‘negative’, in the sense that hermeticism
provided a framework through, but ultimately against, which the new natural
philosophy was constructed. The fact that Thomas Wright’s description of his
goal as wading ‘deeper into the soule’ is so reminiscent of the goal of the ‘inner
writing’ of the hermetic art of physiognomy is just one intimation of this.
Kepler’s work is further evidence that the impact of Neoplatonic hermeticism,
with all its troubling ‘Egyptianism’, seems to have been significant enough for
the advocates of the new natural philosophy to have seen it as something
against which they had to construct their own vision and understanding of the
world. In his Harmonice mundi, Kepler explicitly distanced his mathematics
¹⁴ Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Collected Works, ed. K. Coburn, 16 vols. (1969), VII.ii, 215, II,i, 51.
55. Sigismund Elsholtz, Anthropometria (Padua, 1654), 28. (Cliché Bibliothèque

and his astronomy from the more hermetic ‘Egyptian’ variety propounded by
Robert Fludd: ‘I have stolen the golden vessels of the Egyptians to build with
them a tabernacle for my God far from the confines of the land of Egypt’.¹⁵
William Harvey’s evident familiarity with the subject of physiognomy is
another example. In his writings on the generation of animals, he included the
following passage:
For since a skilful artificer accomplishes his works by the ingenious use of one instru-
ment to one end, the same to the same and the like to the like, so that from the
¹⁵ Vickers, Occult and Scientific, 292.

Conclusion 315

substance and form of the instruments a man may easily judge of their use and action,
no less certainly than Aristotle has taught us to know their natures from the bodies of
animals and the shape of their parts; and as the art of physiognomy from the lineaments
of the face and its parts (such as the eyes, nose, forehead), pronounces on men’s abili-
ties and character, what shall prevent us from making our conjecture that from the
same structure of the parts we should expect their office to be the same.¹⁶
¹⁶ William Harvey, Disputations Touching the Generation of Animals, trans. G. Whitteridge (Oxford,
1981), 446. Harvey’s Latin original has: ‘ingeniis ac moribus hariolatur’ (296–7). ‘Hariolatur’ suggests proph-
esy and divination rather than simply looking and staring, whilst ‘ingeniis ac moribus’ would be better trans-
lated as intelligence and manners.

Such a passage is suggestive of the way in which the art of physiognomy was
used as some sort of basis upon which, and against which, to react. It was in this
way that the new mechanical philosophy (picking up on the structural work of
Vesalian anatomy) reconfigured the physiognomic, turning away from consid-
erations of the meaning of the form and the form of the meaning towards a
physiognomic understood in terms of the function which followed form.
Indeed, one might push this argument even further by applying it to the
physiognomical epiphany that, as we saw in the Introduction, Robert Boyle’s
‘fancy’ created for him whilst he was contemplating water in 1684. Boyle sensed
the realm of the physiognomy of things but knew that, whatever it was, it was
Conclusion 317
not ‘science’ in as far as he had set himself to understand it. In other words, it
was in some ways a negative of what he was trying to create. Just how far this
can be taken is hard to say. Can Boyle’s scientifically demonstrated vacuum be
helpfully thought of as the Christian natural philosophical parallel (or antithe-
sis) of those early modern Jewish and Christian mystics who described their
God as a mystical ‘nothing’? Notwithstanding, as we saw in the work of the
African philosopher Amo, even in the midst of the Enlightenment the realms
of the ‘occult’, as well as the physiognomical eye required to see them, was a
phenomenon that continued to highlight, prescribe, and both safeguard at the
same time as they challenged the epistemological realms of the rational and the
scientific.
I have argued that the physics of Fludd and Bruno provided a counter-
model against which the new seventeenth-century natural philosophers con-
structed their universe. At this point a word needs to be said about a now
old-fashioned thesis put forward some years ago by Frances Yates. Is there any
way in which the hermetic art of physiognomy could be said to have con-
tributed, more ‘positively’, to ‘modernity’? The contribution of hermetic phys-
iognomy to modern science might be seen in a slightly more ‘positive’ sense
when one considers that the religious zeal with which many Enlightened sci-
entists adopted that new science, and with which they believed they could
order and explain everything, was a re-articulation of the same enthusiasm
with which the hermeticists whom they attacked had held their ‘enigmatic’
beliefs. The famous ‘facial angle’ developed as part of the scientific system of
physiognomy of the Dutch anatomist Petrus Camper (1722–89), as well as the
numerous schemes of a scientific physiognomy that were developed in the
course of the nineteenth century, are indications of the fact that the satire of
Clubbe and Hogarth was well founded.¹⁷ It was evidence of the Enlighten-
ment’s famous confidence and sense of progression in which it was thought
that science could transcend its own epistemological limitations by conquering
and scientifically explaining those physiognomical enigmas that they had once
rejected as the mysticism and poetry of the hermeticist. In retrospect it can be
seen as an early intimation of what the twentieth-century German philosopher
Theodore Adorno came to see as the Enlightenment ‘radiating its own disaster’
‘triumphantly’.
In this book I have also attempted to use the history of physiognomy to
point towards and partly reconstruct a change I have characterized using the
overarching metaphor of a shift ‘from praying to playing’. It is a shift which
¹⁷ Petrus Camper, Dissertation physique, trans. D. B. Quatremère d’Isjonval (Utrecht, 1791); Revd. John
Clubbe, Physiognomy (1763).
covers the change from a Kabbalistic-influenced belief that the natural magic
of physiognomy was, in fact, the original language of Adam, to the notion that
physiognomy was nothing more than an unscientific human convention as
random as the lottery and not to be taken so seriously. Part of that shift can be
symbolized in the 1729 Italian publication entitled The golden key; or, The art of
winning the lottery, followed by a treatise on physiognomy and chiromancy from the
work of a modern cabbalist.¹⁸ Yet that same shift which can be discerned in the
reading of ‘books on physiognomy’ can also be discerned in the intense reli-
gious fervour that circled ominously around what Boyle showed to be the nat-
ural vacuum at the heart of the aforementioned, new, non-symbolic form of
mathematical calculation. For example, it transformed the French mathemati-
cian and theologian Pascal’s notion of faith into the probabilistic and mathe-
matical concept at the heart of the market—the bet: ‘If God does not exist, one
will lose nothing by believing in him, while if he does exist, one will lose everything
by not believing. . . . we are compelled to gamble . . .’. It is a shift which also cov-
ers the general change from a belief in a divine providence regulating the laws
of the universe, the astrological laws over which magi like Robert Fludd were
trying to gain some control with their ‘techniques of the microcosm’, to a con-
viction about the random play of fortune symbolized by the arbitrariness of the
pin with which the reader was called upon to use to interpret an illustrated pro-
file by pricking one of the compartments of the wheel of fortune in a 1799 pub-
lication entitled The Ladies’ Physiognomonical Mirror.
The dangers of positing some sort of uni-linear shift, and locating it in a par-
ticular time and place, are evident in the following remark of Kepler with
regard to the hermetic understanding of the nature of language:
I too play with symbols, and have planned a little work, Geometric Cabala, which is
about the Ideas of natural things in geometry; but I play in such a way that I do not for-
get that I am playing. For nothing is proved by symbols, nothing hidden is discovered
in natural philosophy through geometric symbols; things already known are merely
fitted [to them]; unless by sure reasons it can be demonstrated that they are not
merely symbolic but are descriptions of the ways in which the two things are
connected and of the causes of this connexion.¹⁹
Indeed, in trying to reconstruct and understand diachronically this funda-

mental ‘shift’ from Renaissance private mystical meditation to Enlightened
communal entertainment, Johannes Huizinga’s famous, but now largely for-
gotten, 1938 work Homo Ludens is a timely reminder that, whether one is think-
¹⁸ La chiave d’oro, ovvero l’ arte di vincere alla lotteria, seguito da un trattato di fisognomia e di chiromanzia
ad opera di un cabalista moderno (n. pl.,1729). ¹⁹ Cited in Vickers, Occult and Scientific, 155.
Conclusion 319
ing diachronically or synchronically, the distinction between the serious and
the playful, the religious and the comic, the prayers and the players should not
be overdrawn: ‘If ever an élite, fully conscious of its own merits, sought to seg-
regate itself from the vulgar herd and live life as a game of artistic perfection,
that élite was the circle of choice Renaissance spirits. We must emphasise yet
again that play does not exclude seriousness. The spirit of the Renaissance was
very far from being frivolous. The game of living in imitation of Antiquity was
pursued in holy earnest . . . yet the whole mental attitude of the Renaissance
was one of play.’ If, according to Plato, ‘God alone is worthy of supreme seri-
ousness’, then the hermetic understanding of the language of physiognomony
shows us the moral seriousness with which it was taken in their contemplation
of the divine and the ultimate.²⁰
Similarly, it should be remembered that the awakening of a form of serious
physiognomical sensibility in the dawn of Romanticism is further evidence
that this shift in the experience of physiognomical ‘reading’ was neither ubiq-
uitous nor permanent. Yet that is not to say that it came back full circle. The
cyclical aspect in the history of Neoplatonic hermetic physiognomy is more
spiral, or even helix-shaped, than circular. The proto-Romantic senses of phys-
iognomical ‘re-awakening’ or ‘dawning’ were certainly a reaction to the over-
bearing rationality of the Enlightenment, and there were many people who
once more began to take physiognomy seriously, be it as a poetic, a religious, or
even a scientific phenomenon. Yet those understandings of physiognomy were
fundamentally different from the ultimately irretrievable late fifteenth-centu-
ry hermetic notion of physiognomical ‘anastasis’ or ‘re-generation’ from which
they drew so much inspiration. Thus, as much like Giordano Bruno or Jacob
Boehme as the German Romantic Herder seemed when he wrote of physiog-
nomy as being ‘the exposition of the living nature of a man, the interpreter as it
were of his genius rendered visible’, it is evidence at one and the same time of
the fact that physiognomy did not decline, but that it did metamorphose.²¹
Indeed, the fundamental shift that the experience of reading physiognomy in
books had undergone, from praying to playing, provides an intimation of the
enlightened satire and sceptical derision faced by the new physiognomical sen-
sibility that awakened in the auroras of Romanticism. Once again Coleridge
provides clear evidence of what the Romantic sensibility was up against:
To the philanthropic Physiognomist a face is beautiful because its Features are the sym-
bols and visible signs of the inward Benevolence or Wisdom—to the pious man all
²⁰ J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens (1949), 205–6, 239–40.
²¹ J. G. Von Herder, Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, ed. F. E. Manuel (Chicago,
1968), 256.
Nature is thus beautiful because its every Feature is the Symbol and all its Parts the
written Language of infinite Goodness and all powerful Intelligence. But to a Sensual-
ist and to the Atheist, that alone can be beautiful which promises a gratification to the
appetite—for of Wisdom and Benevolence the Atheist denies the very existence.²²
To close this study in the way it began, on a more general, wide-ranging

note, the history of physiognomy provides an appropriate occasion to say
something about one of the most common epithets used by historians to
describe the early modern period—‘face-to-face society’. It is a description
which arose in the wake of the development of the telegraph, telephone, radio,
cinema, and later the television, and now takes on a new resonance in the so-
called ‘face-time’ of the contemporary digital age, all of which are the modern
and post-modern developments of the earlier, but equally ‘disembodied’,
forms of communication of writing, print, painting, and engraving.
During the communications revolution marked by the ‘coming of the book’
and the ‘age of print’, despite the periodic and violent ravages of plague and
famine, the population in Europe increased from c.80 million to c.190 million
between c.1500 and c.1800.²³ Throughout the period, relatively few members
of that population had the textual literacy to enable them to read books. Yet, in
contrast to that special ability, each had a face, and, for all the pictorial legends
of the tribes of the eyeless disseminated by seventeenth-century writers such as
John Bulwer, most had eyes and ears with which to physiognomate and be
physiognomated.²⁴ Indeed, one intimation of how important the cultivation
of this innate, proto-literate fisnomic faculty may have been considered in the
early modern period can be found on the printed pages of Edmund Coote’s
popular English schoolbook, The English schoole-maister, the first edition of
which was dated 1596, and which was still being published in the eighteenth
century. From the late sixteenth century to the mid-eighteenth century, Cootes
defined physiognomy for untold numbers of schoolchildren and readers quite
simply as ‘knowledge by the visage’.
With that in mind, this study has tried to show some of what is still to be
learned about early modern history by thinking of early modern culture and
society as a fisnomy-to-fisnomy, or physiognomy-to-physiognomy, society. In
Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Capulet’s matchmaking wife at one point tries
to persuade Juliet of the virtues of Paris as a potential lover by suggesting
that she rely on ‘knowledge by the visage’, in other words her ‘own’ fisnomic
faculty:
²² Coleridge, Works, i. 158.
²³ C. Cipolla (ed.), The Fontana Economic History of Europe, 6 vols., Vol. 2, The Sixteenth and Seventeenth
Centuries (1974), 38. ²⁴ John Bulwer, Anthropometamorphosis (1653), 101, 104, and 110.
Conclusion 321
Read o’er the volume of young Paris’ face,
And find delight writ there with beauty’s pen.
Examine every married lineament,
And see how one another lends content;
And what obscured in this fair volume lies
Find written in the margin of his eyes.
[I.iii. 82 ff.]
Just as the history of the natural magic of physiognomy should not be seen as
one of the rejection of an antique superstition, but of a continual metamor-
phosis across the entire period, this passage should also serve as a reminder that
the quest for the perfect language did not only take place through the scholar-
ly medium of words in books. The hitherto unexamined social and cultural
implications of the history of physiognomony arise out of the fact that the
recovery of this divine language was not only an attempt to recover a way of
looking and listening. Its recovery was also looked and listened for, and
thought to be expressed in, the hieroglyphic characters of people’s actual phys-
iognomies—the way they looked, the way they talked, the gestures they
made—as well as in the representations made of them by artists. In that sense,
any future historians of the subject need to bear in mind that the hermetic sense
of self-regeneration in which physiognomony came to be enveloped had
numerous social counterparts, such as the necessity of carefully choosing the
person with whom the act of generation was carried out, with all the dreams of
utopian social engineering which that observation implies. Even at the end of
the period, when Kant said that all physiognomy could amount to was the cul-
tivation of ‘taste’, he, like Lavater, saw it as a scientia which had the social poten-
tial to improve human relationships:
Physiognomy is the art of judging what lies within a man, whether in terms of his way
of sensing or of his way of thinking, from his visible form and so from his exterior.—In
doing this we judge him when he is in a state of health, not sickness, and when his mind
is calm, not in commotion. . . . taste, which is a merely subjective ground for one man’s
being pleased or displeased with other men. . . . cannot serve as a guiding principle to
Wisdom, which has the existence of a man with certain natural qualities objectively as
its end (which is, for us, quite incomprehensible). . . . physiognomy, as the art of
detecting someone’s interior life by means of certain external signs involuntarily given
up, is no longer a subject of inquiry. Nothing remains of it but the art of cultivating
taste—not, indeed, taste in things but in morals, manners and customs—so that, by a
critique that would promote human relations and knowledge of men generally, it could
come to the aid of this knowledge.²⁵
²⁵ Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view, trans. M. J. Gregor (The Hague, 1974),
120.
In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Duncan’s famous words about the Thane of
Cawdor, ‘there’s no art | To find the mind’s construction in the face: | He was a
gentleman on whom I built | An absolute trust’ (I.iv. 12) show that, however
innate and intuitive it appears, ‘fisnomy’ was, and is, not an infallible doorway
to truth. None the less, as I have tried to stress throughout this book, ‘physiog-
nomy’ was something that happened between people from all walks of early
modern life, from monarchs to peasants, from nuns to children, from lawyers
to merchants, from courtly poets to wandering beggars, from painters to gyp-
sies. Just as it happened between people and animals and people and nature, so
I have also tried to show how it often occurred between people and likenesses
of people, be it the broadsheet woodcuts of early modern fugitives, the
betrothal portraits of princes and princesses that formed such an important
part of the political culture of the merging and generating of dynasties, or the
painted Renaissance limewood sculptures of the holy that were an important
part of early modern devotional practices.
The potentially wide-ranging, inter-disciplinary, study of ‘fisnomy’ arises
from the fact that that fisnomy was the most basic, primary mechanism
through which the dynamic of most ‘face-to-face’ encounters in early modern
Europe was mediated and regulated. It was an early modern hermeneutic fac-
ulty as ineluctable as a sense of the weather. Whether mysticism or common
sense; as intuitive or as scientific, as serious or as laughable as its seemingly nat-
ural magic was taken at different times and in different ways to be; as different
as the philosophical, aesthetic, and stylistic frameworks through which the
attempts to capture it were articulated; everyone was sensitive to the sort of
marginal, audio-visual ‘information’ with which their innate physiognomical
consciousnesses provided them. That physiognomical consciousness was the
pre-verbal ‘prism’ through which people came to interpret each other, be it in
local, regional, national, or ‘New World’ terms. The remnants of those many
different ‘physiognomical eyes’, expressions of the variegated forms of this
physiognomical consciousness, examples of this visual and sonic fisnomic lit-
eracy ‘in action’ can be found in a wide range of textual and visual sources that
now constitute the archives of early modern Europe—far beyond, but not
always entirely independent of, the ‘books on physiognomy’ that have been
the primary focus of this study. It is in those remnants that one finds traces of
how those ‘face-to-face’ encounters were either constructed or articulated.
There is much fruitful comparative research and analysis to be done to
retrieve those respective and mutual early modern physiognomical perceptions
in order to examine and compare them in more detail with each other in terms
of the context of a particular ‘walk of life’, or ‘national culture’, or, as some
Conclusion 323
might prefer, ‘field’ or ‘discourse’, including the ‘discourse’ of physiognomony
itself.
However, some of that ‘physiognomy’ is, and will always be, beyond the
reaches of any early modern historical source. An example is the illiterate phys-
iognomical skill that, as was mentioned in the Introduction, Sir Thomas
Browne detected in the beggars and medicants of his day. It is worth repeating
here:
I have observed that those professed Eleemosynaries, though in a croud or multitude,
do yet direct and place their petitions on a few and selected persons; there is surely a
Physiognomy, which those experienced and Master Mendicants observe, whereby they
instantly discover a merciful aspect, and will single out a face, wherein they spy the sig-
natures and marks of mercy. For there are mystically in our faces certain Characters
which carry in them the motto of our Soules, wherein he that cannot read A. B. C. may
read our natures.²⁶
Whilst historians have no sources to enable them to capture this sort of ‘illit-
erate’ physiognomy in any detail, the ‘physiognomy’ discussed in this book
might also provide a basis for better understanding of the significance of a
popular ballad published in mid-seventeenth-century England in illustrated
broadsheet form entitled ‘Mirth for Citizens; or, A Comedy for the Country’
(Illustration 58). Both sung to the tune of ‘Ragged, torn, and true’ (a tradi-
tional tune dating back to the sixteenth century and still alive in John Gay’s The
Beggar’s Opera), the refrain of the latter spoke of the dangers of cuckoldry in
marriage. In so doing it alluded to how very common, if tragically unreliable,
this sense of ‘knowledge by the visage’ was:
Shewing
A young Farmer his unfortunate marriage,
His wife is so churlish & curlish in carriage.
He married her for beauty, for’s own delight
Now he repents it both day and night.
By physiognomy
Adviseth youngmen that at Wenches skip,
To be sure to look before that they leap,
To leap at a venture, & catch a fall,
Raising the forehead breaks horns and all.
²⁶ Sir Thomas Browne, Religio Medici, ed. Jean-Jacques Denonain (Cambridge, 1953), 90–1. My empha-
sis. With regard to the important uncorrected erratum in this passage in many editions of the text, see fn. to
l. 2138.
58. ‘Mirth for Citizens; or, A Comedy for the Country’, 17th-century English broadsheet ballads. (Photo: Harvard Houghton Library.)
Conclusion 325
To conclude on a methodological note, we can return to E. H. Carr’s
description of history as ‘an unending dialogue between the present and the
past’. This study has shown how history is an ‘audio-visual’ dialogue between
the present and the past. For all the inherent methodological limitations in
trying to write the history of such an ‘unbookish’ audio-visual subject, the
study of early modern ‘physiognomy’, when looked upon from the radically
different perspective of the early twenty-first century, raises fundamental ques-
tions about such crucial issues as, for example, the evolution of the so-called
‘European-ness’ of early modern European self-understanding, free of the
limitations imposed by any Darwinian understanding of the term ‘evolution’;
the development of religion, science, art, and entertainment in early modern
European culture; or even the ‘historical psychology of human expres-
sion’ which the anthropologist and art historian Aby Warburg thought could
only really be caught ‘in a cinematographic spotlight’.²⁷ The historical optic
through which this work has been written might ultimately be characterized
with the Dickenisan epithet of ‘the old curiosity shop’. However, perhaps
this attempt to explore, historically, the metamorphosis of a way of looking
and listening might have something to contribute to the development of a
contemporary optic. At the very least, it is hoped that this study of the art of
physiognomy opens up a hitherto neglected plane of audio-visual experience,
the historical metamorphosis of which can be traced across the early modern
period in European culture from the beginning to the end.
²⁷ E. Gombrich, ‘Aby Warburg: His Aims and Methods’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes,
62 (1979), 270.
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INDEX
Abbey of Saint Saviour and Saint Bridget alphabet 192, 265 (of the body)
75 Alsted, Johann Heinrich 10, 27, 28, 33,
ABCs 97 78, 114, 124, 173, 203, 217, 306
abyss 173, 304 (between man and God) Alva, Duke of 164
Académie 158 (des Sciences), 158 America vii, 110
(Française) Amo, Anton Wilhelm 167 ff, 317
Accademia 125 (dei Gelati), 131 (dei analogy 2, 60, 184
Lincei), 163 (dei Verspitini) anastasis 319
Achilles 243 anatomy 26, 39, 71, 162, 308, 310, 315
Achillini, Alessandro 20, 53, 113, 117, 124, ‘ancient theology’ 1, 13, 21, 42, 116, 179,
125, 210 235, 244, 266, 301, 304, 308, 309,
‘active images’ 242 311
‘active philosophy’ 165 Angela of Foligno 133
actors 302 angels 9, 224, 244, 289, 298, 305, 307
Adam 8, 13, 15, 21, 175, 232, 244, 306 anglicanism 171
Adamantius 49, 55, 61, 67, 113, 125, 156, animals 3, 5, 52, 53, 59, 313
159, 187. ‘animistic principle’ 239
Addison, Joseph 137 Anne, Queen 140
Adorno, Henrico 118 Anonymous Latin 50, 56, 57, 60, 65, 74,
Adorno, Theodore 317 240
Aesop’s Fables 160 anthropocentrism 52, 59, 71
aesthetics 172, 186 ff, 313 anthropography 162, 313
‘age of print’ 150, 173, 320 anthropological back-projection 255
‘ages of man’ 2, 58, 220 anthropology 83 (physical), 114, 226,
Agrippa, Henricus Cornelius 84, 272
301 anthropomantry 313
Agrippa, Livio 94, 162 anthropometria 313
Aix-en-Provence 210, 276 anthroposophia 162
Albertus Magnus 12, 36, 37, 63, 71, 97, antipathy 12
104, 114–15, 117, 175 antiquity 17 (Greek), 46–7, 60, 118, 263,
Albrecht, Archbishop of Mainz 156 277
Alcabitius 36 Antwerp 123
Alchemy 39, 65, 72, 169, 240 appearance 3
Alexandria (the library at) 60 Appelius, Johannes Wilhelm 170
Alfred the Great 68 Aquinas, Thomas 12, 71, 200
Alington, Sir Giles 153 Arabic vii, 19, 36, 39, 179, 223, 305
almanac 97 Arcandam 37, 81, 129, 180, 196
348 Index
Arcona 162 Baglivi, Georgius 112
Aristotelianism 18, 36, 37, 42, 46, 47, 49, Baldi, Camillo 81, 125, 161, 171, 216, 200
52, 53, 54, 60, 66, 68, 71, 74, 75, 76, 77, Bale, John 65
94, 107, 120, 121, 123, 124, 125, 130, 151, ballads (popular) 323
159, 164, 165, 168, 171, 174, 183, 208, Barcelona 136
219, 229, 262, 303, 314 Barclay, Alexander 153
Aristotle’s Complete Masterpiece 182, 193, Baron, Theodore Hyacinthe 113
247 Basel 114, 122, 125
Aristotle’s Last Legacy 128 Baumgarten 186
Aristotle’s Legacy 107, 195, 251 beard 2, 199, 268, 271
Aristotle’s Masterpiece 105, 264 ‘bearded woman’ 271
arm 3, 124, 274 Beaumont, John 113
Arras, bishop of 138 beauty 172, 184 ff., 206, 303
art 18 Bede, the venerable 66
Asclepius 187 beggars 135, 136, 140
Ashmole, Elias 6, 165 Beggar’s Opera 278, 323
ass 24, 218 ‘beholding’ 226, 304, 309
Assyrians 48 belly 58, 267, 270, 272
astrologers 3, 36, 131 Belot, Jean 10, 38, 39, 109, 171, 200,
astrology 5, 37, 39, 42, 73, 99, 134, 139, 240
157, 160, 218, 223, 239, 240, 283, 302, Benedict, Lorenz 80
307 Benincontri, Laurentius 36, 116
astronomers 10 Bentivoglio, Giovanni 155, 156
astronomia 25 Bernard, Charles 112
astronomy 154 Besançon 122
astro-physicists 10 Bible 15, 37, 39, 41, 67, 97, 105, 134, 139,
Aubert, Guillaime 160 200, 285, 287, 297
Aubrey, John 82, 200 ‘biology as destiny’ 49
audio-visual dialogue viii, 226, 325 Biondo, Michelangelo 53, 126
audio-visual experience 325 black gothic 173
audio-visual signs 235 Blake, William 27, 279, 298–9
Augsburg 95 Bloch, Marc 256
Austin Friars 164 blood 60
Averroism 53, 124, 125, 210 Blyth, Captin (of the Bounty) 114
Avicenna 63–4, 71, 95, 193 Bodin, Jean 257
Aztecs 48 Bodleian library 117
body 3, 57, 307, 309
Babel, Tower of 175, 305 body and soul 21, 52, 29
Babylonia 48, 74, 83 body divination 47
back 88 body history 21
Bacon, Francis 30, 117, 131, 169, 192, 307, ‘body skyl’ 197
312 Boehme, Jacob 31, 168, 319
Bacon, Roger 75, 152 Boethius 78
Baghdad 63 Boevey, James 96, 164, 200, 208
Index 349
Bologna 53, 63, 81, 108, 122, 125, 154, 159, Canterbury, Archbishop of 6
163, 210 captopotromancy 26
bones 57 Caravaggio, Michaelangelo Merisi da
Bonnet, Charles 40, 171 143
book of hours 220 Cardano, Girolamo 20, 37, 112, 154, 219,
book of nature 10, 51, 78, 235, 301, 306 277
‘books on physiognomy’ Ch. 2 passim, Carlisle, Earl of 158
302 Carlos I, King of Spain 123
Borde, Andrew 139 Carmagnola 94
botany 114 Carr, E. H. 325
Boulard, Antoine Marie Henrie 170 Carrabarra, Series of 147
Bourne, Edward 287 Carthusian monks 225
Boyle, Robert 28, 29, 30, 33, 34, 316, 318 Caryl, Joseph 16
Brahe, Tycho 26 Cassetti, Iseppo 166
brain 33, 53 Castile 48, 68
Brandis, Lucas 121 Catechism 98
breeding 249 Cats, Jacob 204
Brescia 94, 104 causal explanation 215
Breughel, Pieter 199 cause (material) 239
Browne, Sir Thomas 14, 17, 25, 323 cause and effect 224
Bruges 136 Cecil, Sir William 160
Bruno, Giordano 25, 27, 29, 34, 44, 128, celestial influence 10, 254
187, 227, 232, 238, 239, 243, 254, 302 celestial radiation 239
Bry, Theodore de 232, 289 celestial rays (mechanisms of ) 302
Buddhism 228 celestial signatures 305
bull 192 celestial windows 242
Bulwer, John 320 Chadwick, Charles 277
Burckhardt, Jacob 120, 126 Chaldean 305
Burette, Pierre Jean 113 Chancery Lane 277
Burgh, Benedict 95 chapbooks 278
Burgkmair, Hans, the Elder 147, 289 chapmen 110
business 251 character 3, 14, 15, 19, 25, 27, 28, 33, 46,
Butler, Thomas 113 57–9, 63, 86, 163, 192, 216, 240, 303
‘character as destiny’ 49
calculus 38, 307 ‘characterological prism’ 202
Callot, Jacques 143 Charles V 3, 123, 156
Calvinism 124, 171 Charles VIII 108
Cambridge 38 Chaucer, Geoffrey 27
Cambridge Platonists 31, 164 Cheam (Surrey) 164
Camera dei Sposi 298 ‘cheap print’ 128
Camillo, Guilio 242 cheek 6
Campeggi, Lorenzo 162 Chelsea 165
Camper, Petrus 32, 317 chest 55, 124
Canon Law 7 children 264
350 Index
children readers 118 Conduit, John 38
chin 86, 183, 195–6 confessional practices 221 ff., 274
China 81, 141 confessional prayer 222 ff.
chiromancy 16, 26, 38, 66, 77, 88, 94, 95, confusion of languages 305
98, 108, 113, 116, 117, 131, 133, 134, 140, conscience 221
141, 150, 154, 159, 160, 162, 163, 240, Constantine (Emperor) 313
249, 279, 302 contemplation of others 246
Christ (appearance of ) 49 Conty, Evrart de 51
Christian Aristotelianism 25, 171 conventionality of language 306
Christian IV 257 conversation 165
Church Fathers 66 Coote, Edmund 320
church hostility 133 Copenhagen 80, 109, 119, 257
Cicero 67, 154, 210, 262, 263 Copernicus 9, 10, 125, 232
cinematic physiognomy 279–99 Copland, Robert 110
cinematographic spotlight 325 corporeality 21
Cingano 138 Corpus hermeticum 17, 18, 44, 126, 141,
circulation of the blood 26 154, 187, 205, 207, 224, 237, 304
civility 125 Cortés, Jéronimo 123
Clare of Montefalco 133 cosmogonies 172
classification 308 Cossiers, Jan 148
climate 30 countenance x, 189, 192, 307
Clubbe, Reverend John 317 Coventry 110
Cocles, Bartholomaeus (Della Rocca) Cracow 80, 81, 119
107, 108, 113, 117, 123 Cranmer, Thomas 99, 133, 136
Coleridge 312–13, 319 criminal law 3
‘collative physics’ (physica collativa) cripple 104
78 Cudworth, Ralph 164
College of Jesuits 113 cuneiform 49
Collegio Romano 23 cunning men and women 36, 131
Cologne 121 ‘curiosity’ 33, 34, 39, 44, 118, 166, 191,
colour 27 249, 250, 254, 277, 309
Colville, Anne 75 customs 1
‘coming of the book’ 320 Cybele 154
commedia dell’arte 27
common law 183 Daniel of Beccles 68
communication (embodied and Dark Ages 65
disembodied) 320 Darwin, Charles 31, 325
complexion 3, 21, 139, 170 Daston, Lorraine 32
Complexionbüch 122, 128 Davies, John 158
Compost des Bergiers 11, 39, 82, 108, 115, De secretis mulierum 12, 114, 115, 117
122, 152, 191, 220, 258, 293 dead bones 121
Compost of Ptholomeus 11, 37, 98, 264, Dead Sea Scrolls 48
271 ‘death of the author’ 35
conception 238 deconstruction 307
Index 351
Dee, John 15, 95, 160–2, 238 ff., 244, eagle 192
277, 296–8, 313 ears 88, 215, 218, 272
deformity 6, 7, 184 East Sussex 1
Della Porta, Giovanni Battista 3, 20, Ecclesiastes 14
38–9, 73, 81, 83, 113, 114, 115, 129, 132, education 3, 30, 165, 251
161, 179, 211, 240, 258, 262–3, 277, Egyptian 17, 25, 42, 120–171, 187, 205,
306 223, 235, 301, 303, 313
Delorme, Charles 104 Elagobalus 313
demonstrable measurement 306 eleemosynaries 323
Derrida, Jacques 307 elements 74
Descartes, René 26, 38, 56, 158, 177, Elizabeth I 140
308 ff. elocution viii
Desessarts, Abbé 116 Elsholtz, Sigismund 313
Desmonceaux, Abbé 311 emblem books 6, 231
d’Este (family) 73, 138, 211, 246 emblems 218, 231, 235, 244 ff., 309
destiny 16 embryology 70, 125
Dethick, Henry 160 emotions 312 ff.
dialect 180 empirical experience 29
Dickens, Charles 325 empirical experiment 22
diet 30 empiricism 28, 247
Dietrich, Christian Wilhelm 148 empirics 131
Digby, Sir Kenelm 23 Encyclopédie 116, 289
discourse 323 engagement 219, 226, 247, 253, 272
discovery 30, 166 England 100, 101
disease 310 engravers 302
d’Isnard, Antoine Danty 114 enigmas 317
disposition 130 enlightened rationality 194
divine language (of physiognomy) Enlightenment 44, 45, 116, 158, 166, 167,
168 317, 319
doctrine of signatures 28, 47, 51, 59, 72, entertainment 39, 250
103, 174, 204–5 enthusiasts 304
Dodoens, Rembert 46–7 enthymeme 53
Douxciel, Ancelme Petit 281 Epictetus 160
drawing 3 Epicurean naturalism 187
‘dream memories’ 229 epiprepeia 55, 61
dreams (interpretation of ) 30, 87, 131, ‘epistemic shift’ 32
139, 141, 160, 166, 169, 229, 250, 289, epistemology, see language
303; (language of ) 303 Erasmus 130, 173, 198, 200, 217, 242,
dress viii 268, 289
du Bellay, Joachim 160 Erfurt 133
Dublin (Philosophical Society) 85 ‘erkennen’ 30
Duck, Jacob 145, 148 Eros 252
Dutch 1 Erra Pater 37, 118
dynasty 2 errant scholars 135
352 Index
esoteric viii, 31, 44 Faust 132, 141
ethics 65 Favier, Abbé 115, 117
ethics 183, 190 features 30
Euclid 38 feet 3, 12, 55, 84, 88, 124, 267, 313
Evelyn, John 38, 199 Ferret, Antoine 147
‘everyday life’ 254 fertility 269
evolution 31, 325 Ficino, Marsilio 10, 11, 13, 17, 26, 28,
Exmoor 164 37, 38, 41, 42, 44, 46, 116, 117, 120,
Exodus 15 126, 152, 155, 156, 160, 161, 171, 187,
experiment 307 188, 224, 227, 232, 237, 243, 266,
experimental 3 305
expression 32 field 323
eye of God 233 Fiesole 113
eye of imagination 19, 44, 228 ff., 302 Finch, Henry 160
eye of memory 19 fingers 12, 14, 124
eye-brows 12, 31, 124 firāsa 19, 56, 61–6, 233
eye-lashes 56, 216 fire of London 164
eyeless 320 first cause 234
eyes viii, 3, 4, 9, 12, 13, 20, 34, 48, 54, 55, fish pond 283
56, 85, 88, 104, 124, 162, 176 ff., 180, ‘fisnomical consciousness’ 46–78
186, 188, 189, 204, 216, 226, 242, 271, fisnomiers 128, 131 ff., 150, 154, 172, 212,
307, 310 ff., 315 304
fisnomy vii, 18, 19, 21, 23, 28, 30, 42, 44,
Fabricius, Johann Andreas 170 128, 248, 254 (divine capacity), 320
face viii, 3, 4, 6, 14, 15, 16, 20, 28, 29, 33, (proto-literate faculty)
34, 48, 51, 55, 88, 130, 132, 137, 139, 156, ‘fisnomy-to-fisnomy’ 301–25
157, 173, 179, 185, 187, 192, 198, 199, Florence 17, 85, 103, 113, 126, 143, 156,
203, 218 (temporal prism), 230, 274, 171, 301, 305
283, 287, 291, 294, 298, 302, 315 Fludd, Robert 10, 21, 44, 53, 81, 108, 114,
‘face of God’ 230, 298 128, 162, 171, 187, 198, 232 ff., 236, 243,
‘face of nature’ 51 244, 247, 254, 266 , 293, 302, 305, 310,
‘face of the disease’ 24, 310 313, 318
‘face-time’ 320 folk-lore 139
‘face-to-face’ x, 204, 313, 315, 320 ff. Follinus, Harannus 281
facial angle 317 folly 183, 189, 215, 216, 217, 227, 289
facial expression 56 Fontaine, Jacques 26, 210, 276
Faeschl, Remigius 114, 118 forehead 3, 12, 13, 29, 55, 56, 63, 66, 68,
‘Fall of Man’ 305 104, 124, 131, 194, 216, 232
famine 221 form 192, 312, 316 (meaning of), 314–16
fancy 34 (form and function), 316 (form of
‘fantasticall ymagenacions’ 140 meaning)
Fantoni, Giovanni Battista 40 Forman, Simon 5
Farnese, Alessandro 159 Förster, Richard 83
fascination 236 fortune 16
Index 353
fortune-telling 252, 278 Geneva 268
Foucault, Michel 32, 171, 174, 256 genitalia 12, 267
four humours 99 Gent, William 117
four principal qualities 26 geomancy 116
France 11, 47, 100, 137 geometry 10, 38, 117, 306
Francis I 139 George II 112, 140
Franciscan minors 163 Gerard of Cremona 62
Frankfurt Book Fair 98, 110 Gerard, Antoine 108
Franklin, Benjamin 6 Germany 3, 97, 100, 101, 126
Franz, Johann Georg Friedrich Gesner, Conrad 112, 115, 278
83 ‘gestin’ 26, 301
Frederick II 69 gestures 196
Frederick the Great 167 Ghirardelli, Cornelia 108, 162
Fredriksborg slot 257 Ginzburg, Carlo 61, 257
free will 21, 239 Giotto 229, 287
Freemasons 167 Giovanni, Fantoni 85
Freud, Sigmund 239, 258, 270 Giovio, Paolo 156
friendship 125 Globalisation 82
front 20, 198 Glogoviens, Joannes 80
future 49 ‘Glorious Revolution’ 1
gnomon x
Gabriel (angel) 244 gnomos 235, 309
Galen 26, 47, 60, 63, 71, 124, 199, 210, Godhead 213, 234
262, 268–9 Goethe 130
Galilei, Galileo 2, 32, 53, 306 Gold Coast 167
Gall 33 Gotha 133
Gallimard, Edmé 166 grace 221
game 18, 250, 251, 252, 300, 309 grafitti 44, 254, 255–300
garden 2 grammar 56
Gargasamhita 47 Granada 152
Garrick, David 27 Grand Tour 111, 135, 164
Gassendi, Pierre 25 graphology 125
Gaurico, Luca 37, 158, 161, 180 Gratarolus, Guilelmus 39, 103, 118, 129,
Gaurico, Pompeo 37, 156, 171, 180, 187, 160–1, 240
201, 239, 243 Gray, John 278, 323
‘Gay Fables’ 277 Greece vii, 50, 137, 179, 305
Geertz, Clifford 172, 216 Gregory XV (Pope) 163
gender 42, 57, 63, 172, 188, 190 ff., 303 Groatsworth of Wit 108, 110
genealogy of morals 182, 216 Grub Street ix, 128
generation 70, 125, 238, 249, 251, 265–6, gut 312
268–9, 300, 313 Gwithers, Dr 85
genes 22 ‘gypsies’ 17, 42, 120–171, 126, 128, 136 ff.,
Genesis 15, 173 168, 172, 290, 303, 304; see also
genetics 49 Egyptians
354 Index
Haarlem 136 hermetic philosophy viii, 10, 11, 13, 17,
habitus 26, 205 19, 21, 22, 29, 37, 42, 117, 128, 152, 153,
Hadrian (Emperor) 49 160, 161, 163, 164, 168, 186, 187, 223,
Hague, The 283 229, 254, 293, 301, 302, 303, 305, 307,
Hain bei Darmstadt 11 312, 313
hair 3, 12, 48, 49, 51 , 53, 87, 193, 199, hermeticism and modernity 317
200, 202, 222, 251, 271, 272 hermits 135
haircuts viii Hesiod 243
Hajek, Hagecius ab 13, 17, 95 heteroglossia 129
hakkarath panim 67, 233 hieroglyphics 6, 13, 23, 224, 229, 235,
Hall, John 132 244 ff, 301, 304, 305, 321
Haller, Albrecht von 39, 40, 41, 117, Hill, Thomas ix, 94–5, 108, 112, 125, 160,
310 186, 197, 246, 266, 267, 273, 276
Haly Abenragel 5 Hillerød 257
hands 3, 14, 15, 88, 157 Hinduisim 150
Harris, Robert 132 Hippocrates 30, 47, 59, 60, 156, 202,
Hartlib, Johannes 88 210, 218, 269
Harvey, Gabriel 36, 37, 39, 134, 257 historical optic 325
Harvey, William 26, 310, 314 historical psychology of expression 325
hawkers 110, 135 ‘history from below’ 99
Hawthorne, Nathaniel 107 history of ideas 303
head 3, 55, 84, 272 history of reading 22, 41, 208 ff., 299
health 163 history of sound and vision 22
health and salvation 104–5 history of the body 21
heart 53 history of the book 41
‘hebdomars’ 2 history of the margins 99, 254, 257
hebrew vii, 8, 15, 16, 17, 65, 179, 223, 305, Hobbes, Thomas 25, 81
306 Hoernen, Arnold Ther 121
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 192 Hogarth, William 86, 317
Heidelberg 124, 163 Holbein, Hans, the younger 289
height 1, 2, 306 holy women 133
heliocentric 9 Homer 243
Helvetius, Johannes-Frederic 39, 163 homo ludens 294, 318
Hemmingsen, Niels 37, 103 hsiang shu 48
Henrici, André 88 Huartes, see Navarro
Henry VIII 99, 133 Huizinga, Johannes 135, 174, 294, 318
Herder, Johann Gottfried 319 human form 33
Herder, Michael 98 humanists 10, 13, 16, 17, 47, 160, 173,
hereditary 70 208, 210, 262, 278
hermeneutics 78, 163 Humboldt, Alexander von 31
Hermes Trismegistus 10, 17, 116, 120, humoral theory 184
138, 153, 188 Hüpfuff 95
hermetic and rational 313 Hurnheim, Hilgart von 75
hermetic grafitti 255 husbandman 109
Index 355
hypertext 257 inner self 213, 223 ff., 308 ff.
hypnosis x inner-writing 44, 235 ff., 254, 302,
313
iatrophysiognomia 112 Inquisition 163
Ibn Arabi 19 institutionalized religion 304
Iceland 109 intellectual faculty 25
iconography 141, 283 ff. intentionality 35, 115
Iliad 243 interior nature of things 305
illiteracy ix, 21, 42, 126, 132, 136, 153, 172, interior spirit 25
173 ff., 198 ff., 219, 323 internal affections 27
illiterate seers 130 ff. internal artist 239
illness (morality of ) 104 ‘internal cinema’ 207, 231 ff., 237, 244,
Illuminists 167 256, 293–300, 302
image 3, 312 internal travel 239
imagination 34, 36, 228 ‘intersubjectivity’ 256
imagines agentes 242 introspection 230
imitation 230 invisible (manifest) 302
immortality 155, 220 ff., 240, 243, 309 Iraq 48
impression 30, 166, 192 Ireland 110
incantations 237 Isaiah 15
incarnation 168 Isidore of Seville 67
Incas 48 Islamicism ix, 61–5, 154, 223
inclination 21 30, 239 Italy 97, 100, 143
Indagine, Johannes ab 11, 112, 114, 117,
126, 129, 156, 198, 219, 262 Janot, Jean 107
index 11, 262; of nature 266 Japan 48
India 139, 224 Jardin des Plantes 114
individual (discovery of ) 126, 129 Jeake, Samuel 1, 2, 4, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17,
individualism 126, 127 28, 30, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 44, 79, 94, 96,
Indus valley 138 107, 109, 157, 289, 301 ff., 305, 306,
information (audio-visual) 322 307, 308, 309
Ingegneri, Giovanni (bishop of Capo Jena 129
d’Istria) 162 Jerome, Saint 15
innate biology 21 Jesus Christ 138, 250 (portraits)
innate complexion 170 Joannet, Abbé 171
innate faculty 19, 138 Job 15, 277
innate iconicity 224, 228 ff., 255, 303 Job, Johann Georg 166, 168
innate types 27 John of Wales 75
inner chord 244 journeymen 135
inner eye 231 Judah al-Harizi 65
inner firmament 239 Judaism ix, 139, 154, 223 ff., 301
inner intuition 232 judicial astrology 11, 38, 115, 240
inner light 26, 232, 248 Julian (Apostate Emperor) 232
inner lyre 244, 302 Julius II 123, 155
356 Index
Jupiter 3 34, 42, 208, 213, 229, 304, 305, 306,
jurisprudence 167 317; of nature 306; of physiognomy
306
Kabbalah ix, 10, 13, 31, 38, 48, 69, 117, ‘lanterns of the soul’ 20
128, 153, 171, 179, 200, 223, 224, 233, Lascaux caves 257
243 ff., 279, 302, 306, 318 Latin vii, 179, 305
Kalendar of Shepherds 36, 39, 105, 106, Laud, William 6
107, 118, 152, 153, 155, 174, 189, 191, 195, laughter viii
222 ff., 226 ff., 255, 258, 263, 272, 275, Laurenziana (Biblioteca) 36–7
283 Lavater, Johannes Caspar vii, 31, 32, 39,
Kant, Emmanuel 30, 34, 321 40, 83, 100, 117, 129, 171, 278, 279,
Keable, George 160 321
Keckermann, Bartholomeus 124 lawyers 114
Kent, Earl of 153 Le Brun, Charles 56, 86, 142
Kepler, Johannes 313, 318 Le Clerc, Sebastian 142
Kessler, E. 155 Le Fenon, Jean 107
Ketham, Johannes de 64, 103, 122 Lebon, Jean 125
‘kinematic’ (aspect of reading) 228 legs 55
King’s College, Cambridge 129 Leibniz 167, 307
Kircheim, Hans von 103, 104 Leipzig 129
Kircher, Athanasius 23, 29, 34, 113, Lentulus (description of Christ) 230
171 Leonato 54
kiyafa 62 letters 15
klimata 59 Leutmann, Johann Georg 170
knee 124 Leviticus 7
Kniphof, Johann Hieronymus 40 L’homme machine 24
‘know thyself ’ 221 liberal arts 3
‘knowledge by the visage’ 28, 169, 173, library catalogues 115 ff.
232, 235, 265, 320, 323 library classification 115, 119
Koyré, Alexandre 10 licensing laws 101
Kuhn, Thomas 32 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 83
light 27, 234, 305
La Chambre, Marin Cureau de 112, 116, Lille, Alain of 222
158, 170, 232, 283 Lilly, William 5
La Mettrie, Julien Jan Offray de 24, 28, Lincoln’s Inn 16
167 Linnaeus, Carl 114, 308
Labé, Louis 160 lion 192
lactation 268 lips 86, 87, 88, 213, 214, 215, 226, 268
Laguna, Andre de 123 literacy ix, 126, 284 (textual and visual),
Laigneau, David 38, 310 303
Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 40 literati 173
Lancisi, Giovanni Maria 85 liver 53
language 8, 13, 18, 19, 42; adamic 200, ‘living hieroglyph’ 305
229, 244, 306; epistemology of 17, 26, Livy 257
Index 357
Lloyd, Owen 83 Mantua 298
Locke, John 29, 30, 231 manuscripts 3
logic and dialectic 116 Marchant, Giout 152
logocentric rationality 307 Marchant, Prosper 115
Loire (France) 109 marginalia 258, 259, 262
‘longue durée’ 79, 103 marks of provenance 118
looking glass, see mirror Marot, Clement 160
Lorry, Anne Charles 113 marriage of heaven and earth 243,
lottery 318 302
Louis XIII 104 Martin, Gabriel 115
Louis XIV 6, 56, 158 Marx, Karl 207
Lovejoy, Arthur 32 Marxism 42
Low Countries 97, 100, 122, 163, 164 Marzio, Galeotto 13, 17, 19
Lowicza, Szymonz 86 Master of the Die 290
Loxus 50, 52, 60, 71, 73 materia 44
Lucretius 26 materialist philosophy 24
Ludovisi, Cardinal Alessandro 163 mathematics 2, 10, 31, 117, 306, 313 ff.
lumen naturae 26, 203, 232 Mattheus (King of Hungary) 13
lungs 53 May, Philipp 163
Luther, Martin 139 Mayas 48
Lutheranism 11 Mayerne, Sir Theodore 165
Luttrell, Narcissus 117 Mazarin, Cardinal 158
Lydgate 75 mechanics ix, 12, 24, 26, 29, 34, 166, 168,
lying 125 171, 249, 316
Lyon 81, 113, 160, 262 medical gaze 218
medical literature 98
Machiavelli Niccolò dei 136 medical semiotics 40, 310
Mackenzie, Henry 197 Medici family 13, 36, 41, 171
macrocosm/microcosm 18, 21, 28, 162, medicine 5, 7, 8, 18, 24, 42, 71, 74, 117,
218, 238, 254 160, 163, 167, 176, 304
Madrid 123 medieval church 304
magi 44, 126, 128, 160, 250, 300 Meek, William 118
magic viii, 1, 9, 13, 17, 25, 117, 133, Melampodi 5
165 Melampus 5
magicians ix, 304 melancholy 3, 270
magistrates 276 memory, art of 44, 180 (auditory,
Maidstone 132 visual), 215, 228, 237, 240 ff., 242, 244,
Maisonneuve, Gabriel de 109 302
make-up viii memory wheel 243
mala physiognomia 3 mendicants 135, 323
Manfredi, Girolamo 122, 214 Mercer’s Company 160
manipulation of time 240 Merseberg 121
‘manly woman’ 270–1 Mersenne 25, 289
Mantegna 298 Mesopotamia 48, 81
358 Index
metaphysical archetypes 27 morals, manners and customs 321
metaphysics 42, 116 More, Henry 31, 164
metonyme 16 Morelli, Giovanni 257
metoposcopy 13, 88, 95, 112, 131, 162, Morgan, Thomas 112
269, 277, 313 Morton, Cardinal 153
Michelangelo 36 Moses 17, 184, 242
microscope 34 motion 27, 305
Middle Ages 13, 32, 42, 44, 47, 254, Moulin, Antoine du 23, 160, 161
278 mouth 124, 268
Middle English x, 16 Mundt, Conrad 133
Miège, Guy 191 Murray, Alexander 63
Milan 94, 138 Museo Aldrovandi 125
milk 268 musicians 302
mind and body 26, 30, 169, 309 ff. Muslim 139, 152, 153, 154
Minerva 243 mystical knowledge 128
mira 20 mysticism ix, 10, 32 (number) 42, 48,
miracles 20 224 ff., 301, 304
Mirandola, Pico della 10, 13, 17, 42, 46, mythologies 223, 301, 304
117, 152, 153, 155, 187, 189, 224, 239, 243
mirrors 20, 169, 198, 215, 224 (dust), naevi, see moles
226 ff., 238–9, 246, 247, 280 ff., 288 nails 272
(literacy), 289 (divination), 307, 309 Napier, Richard 5
mirror of the soul 20, 261, 310 Naples 83, 112, 131
Mirth for Citizens 323 nation 81
Mizauld, Antoine 103 natural astrology 11, 15 n, 23
modern art 32 natural force 25
modern science (birth of ) 313 natural history 30
modern self 313 natural language 8, 172, 173 ff., 248, 266,
moles 3, 4, 6, 7, 12, 250, 267, 307, 313 301, 305, 309
Molière 150 natural magic viii, 10, 13, 17, 19, 25, 27,
monasteries 74 (Austin), 75 30, 37, 38, 42, 44, 123, 169, 207, 219,
(Benedictine, Augustine, Franciscan), 226, 228 ff., 244, 300, 301 ff., 303, 304,
75 (Cistercian), 154 (San Stefano) 309, 313, 321
Montaigne, Michel de 223 natural mythology 235
Montalbani, Ovidio 163 natural philosophers 47
Montanus 141 natural philosophy 17, 20, 28, 249, 276,
Monteferrato, Livio Agrippa da 104 309, 312
Montpellier 60, 114 natural predictions 37
Montpensier, Mlle de 3, 215 natural signatures 8, 175, 305
Moors 139 nature of language 318
moral and physical 167, 170 Naudé, Gabriel 115
moral philosophy 167, 276 Neaulme, Jean 283
moral topography of self 231 neck 124, 229, 272
morale 116 neo-liberalism 307
Index 359
Neoplatonic ix, 10, 13, 17, 21, 25, 31, 37, organicism 168
41, 42, 44, 46, 53, 126, 128, 130, 138, Oribasius 67
152, 153, 156, 157, 164, 165, 168, 170, Origen 66
186, 187, 206, 219, 224, 232, 237, 242, original sin 305
252, 254, 298, 301, 303, 313, 319 Orleans 410
nervous system 33 Orpheus 17
New World 111, 138, 322 Orphic religion 224
Newton, Isaac 6, 37, 38, 39, 107, 109 Orphic singing 237
Newton, John 75 Ossory 65
Newton, Thomas 112 Ovid 20
Nichols, Sutton 105 ‘owl-man’ 3
Nifo, Augustus 123, 155, 171, 303
Nine Pennyworth of Wit 110 Padua 20, 83, 154, 210, 277, 302
Nodé, Pierre 131 painters 302
nomads 132 painting 186, 188, 320
Norfolk, Duke of 153, 161 Pallas 243
Norwich 75 palmistry, see chiromancy
nosce teipsum 169 ff., 220, 221, 227, 247, palms 3, 307
275, 290 pamphlets 93–4
nose 3, 12, 18, 87, 88, 124, 171, 182 ff., 186, papist 137
190, 199, 200, 201, 214, 215, 216, 218, Paracelsus 10, 25, 28, 38, 39, 47, 51, 52,
226, 227, 229, 240, 272, 274, 307, 315 56, 88, 101, 114, 125, 130, 131, 132, 135,
nostrils 229 148, 156, 161, 163, 164, 165, 168, 169,
nothing (mystical) 317 202, 205, 218, 219, 232, 239, 301, 305,
Nuremberg 128 306, 309
Paris 3, 51, 72
observation and experiment 306 Park, Katherine 32
occult viii, 12, 13, 17, 20, 24, 26, 29, 31, Parlement de Paris 107
33, 44, 101, 152, 160, 223, 249, 301, 317 parlour game 45, 128, 215, 251, 254, 274,
Ogilby, John 141 277
‘old curiosity shop’ 325 Parson, James 166, 171, 196
Old French x Pascal, Blaise 318
Ong, Walter 83 passions 4, 20 (of the mind), 239 (of the
oniromancy 163 soul) 259, 312
Onoforio, Girolamo 163 Pater Noster 174
ontology x, 35, 42, 124 pathognomy 56
Opera 237 patient 24
Oppenheim 81 patriarchs 17
opthalmology 310 ff. patriarchy 189
oracle 48, 49, 174 Paul III (Pope) 158
oral folk lore 21 Paul V (Pope) 163
oral tradition 48, 126, 153, 168, 172, 179, Paul VI (Pope) vi, 11
198 ff., 206, 304 Pavia 94, 107
orality 47 Pedena (Italy) 84
360 Index
pedlars 110, 135 28; mirror 318; perception 58; prayer
pedomancy 313 276, 284; rhetoric 211 ff; sensation
Pegasus 40 29; sensibility 319
Pellegrini, Antonio 162 physiognomics 175 ff, 240, 244
penis 267 physiognomist 293
Pepys, Samuel 108 physiognomy: in action 55;
perception of images 206 anthropological 27, 88, 94, 305;
Perman, John 117 astrological 48, 283, 293;
Pernetti, Jacques 86, 115, 167, 283 botanical/phytognomy 14, 27, 56,
Pernetty, Antoine 167, 170 103, 163, 305; celestial 27, 103, 204,
Persia 87, 121 217; characterological 27, 33, 203;
perspective 162 ethnological 218; of handwriting 125;
Peterhouse, Cambridge 95 meteorological 27, 305; mineralogical
phenomenon xi 27, 47, 56, 218, 305; of sound 23;
Philemo 156 subcaelestial 305;
Phillip II 123 theriological/zoological 27, 103; of
philosopher’s stone 240 things 316; in words 313
‘phisionomiastres’ 131 physiology 12, 21, 39, 40, 180, 309, 310
phonocritics 23 physis x, 235, 254, 309
phonognomia 23 phyz 305
physical anthropology 83 phyzonomy 19
physical appearance 48, 49 Picatrix 238, 243
physicians 5, 8, 20, 24, 26, 111, 112, 113, pick-pockets 143 ff.
114, 131 Pietism 171
physics 9, 22 (applied), 31, 44 Pietro d’Abano 72, 74, 77, 83, 121, 181,
physiognomantier 130, 131 193, 246
physiognomate ix pilgrims 135
physiognomating 49, 50, 57, 58, 59, 189, Pimander 152
202, 238–9 pineal gland 309
physiognomation 212 Pino, Paolo 188
physiognomators 128, 130, 131 Pinzio, Paolo 81
physiognomer 130 plague 103 ff., 135, 164, 221, 304
physiognomia coelestis, see celestial Planetbüchlein 98
physiognomia orta, see characterological planets 10, 12, 27
physiognomic (splitting of ) 310 ff. planned economy 307
physiognomical: aphorism 172 ff.; plants 2, 12, 14, 46, 47, 163
appreciation of image 292; Plato 17, 47, 174, 312, 319
consciousness 46, 55, 57, 58, 302, 317, poetry 18, 39, 42, 117, 156, 200, 302
322; contemplation 59; epiphany 313; Polemon, Antonius 49, 54, 55, 126, 211
eye 18, 47, 50, 51, 55, 59, 71, 72, 78, 86, political science 248
163, 179, 186, 197, 218, 233 ff., 235 (soul politics 190
of its own cinema), 246 (depth of polytheism 42
field), 249, 265, 322; gaze 188; history Pompeius, Nicolas 88
172; intelligence 21, 28, 49; intuition Pomponazzi, Pietro 123, 155, 237
Index 361
poor 135, 136 radio 320
population 135 (mobile/immobile), 320 Ragged, torn and true 323
portraits xi, 3, 39, 126, 211, 219 Ralph, Benjamin 86
Porzio, Simone 20, 84 rationality ix, 18, 32, 249
positivism 271 Ratisbon 74
posters 287 Rayy 33
‘praeternatural’ 20, 44 Razors 283
Praetorius, Johannes 88, 129 reading 23, 35, 207 ff. (methodology),
‘praying to playing’ 35, 36, 39, 45, 207, 319
220, 237, 245, 249, 252, 253, 255, reading practices 224 ff., 237 ff., 247 ff.,
270–9, 309, 317 ff. 256 ff., 293 (audio-visual dimension)
pre-textual language 304 ‘real characters’ 224
pride 227 reason 33–4
primal language 244 reason of state 5
print 43 (revolution), 83 (invention of ) re-birth, see ‘regeneration’
printing press 79 reflection 142, 215, 238
prisca theologia 17, 18, 254 Reformation parliament 11, 136, 140
prism 59 ‘regeneration’ 44, 207, 224, 236–8, 244,
problemata 33 247, 249, 252, 302, 305, 319 (anastasis)
prognostication 16, 33 regimen sanitatis 220
prophecies 174 religion viii, 26
Prophet, The (Allah) 19 religion of the sun 103
prophets 17 religion of the world 26, 232, 244, 266,
proportion 26, 73, 183 302
protestant dissenter 1 religious medicine 136
Protestantism ix, 10 Renaissance vii, 5, 17, 18, 36, 42, 44, 47,
Prousteau, M. 115 120, 121, 128, 237, 301, 318
proverbs 19, 136, 174, 198 ff. Renaissance humanists 47, 263
providence 318 representation and reality 279
Prudence 105, 189, 197, 221, 226 ff., 232, reproduction 252, 300
243, 247, 275, 287 resemblance 3, 8, 171, 175, 305
pseudo-Aristotle 47, 49, 52, 53, 56–60, Rhazes 62–5, 77, 98, 112, 268
63, 65, 84, 121, 123–5, 155, 183, 210, 258 (Almansori), 278
pseudo-science viii, 25 rhetoric 18, 207 ff.
psyche 239 Rhodes (Lancashire) 75
psychoanalysis 258 Richelieu, Cardinal 158, 162
psychology 27, 86, 167, 310, 312 Riolan, Jean, the younger 310
(psychologia) ritual 2
Pythagoras 10, 17, 31, 224, 306 Robert the Bruce 298
Roche, Daniel 35
quacks 5, 131 Rochefoucauld, Duc de la 215, 226
quill 309 rock 203
Qur’an 61–2, 67, 125 Roehnus, Johannes 94
race 59 Roelants, Jan 123
362 Index
Roman de la rose 182, 284 scientific revolution 18, 43
romances 98 Scot, Michael 12, 69, 77, 78, 94, 103–7,
Romanticism 26, 31, 32, 34, 45, 167, 168, 117, 122–5, 129, 179, 182, 183, 200, 235,
187, 198, 279, 312, 319 249, 267, 269, 303
Rome 50, 81, 131 Scotland 2, 81, 110
Rosenbach, see Indagine Scripture 14, 15, 20, 21
Rosicrucians 306 Scrovegni chapel 229
Roussat, Richard 129 sculpture 156, 187, 188, 201, 239
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 196 Scylla and Charibdis 308
‘Royal College of Fisnomiers’ 132 sea monster 53
Royal Society 165 Seamer, Sir Henry 160
Rubeis, Domenico de 162 Secrets 33, 36–7, 97, 174, 219, 240, 249
Rudolf II 11, 13 (of nature)
Rye (east Sussex) 1 Secretum secretorum 39, 64–6, 68–9,
71–2, 74–6, 95, 112, 114, 122, 129, 152,
Sabbio, Vincenzo 94, 104 155, 179, 191, 247 ff., 264, 278
Saint Augustine 232 seers 5, 42, 130 ff, 135, 169
Saint John’s College, Oxford 162 sefiroth 298
Saint Peter and Saint Paul (abbey school self 32, 33, 35, 42, 60 (and animal), 120,
of ) 114 131, 169, 197–8
Saint-Bonnet le Chateau 109 self (continuity and discontinuity)
Sainte-Mure, Comte de 170 256
salvation 220, 221, 243, 275 self (metaphysics of ) 216
Samudrikatilaka 47 self-alchemy 239 ff., 243, 302
Sanskrit 47, 150 self-awareness 127
Sansovini, Francesco 162 self-contemplation 218
Sarton, George 80 self-description 3, 215, 307
Saunders, Richard 5, 8, 10, 11, 15, 17, 38, self-hypnosis 224
39, 96, 107, 108, 109, 110, 157, 174, 186, self-knowledge 169–71, 207, 228, 282,
201, 240, 273, 305, 306 302, 307, 308; mystical 254
Savonarola, Michael 73–4, 246, 281 self-literacy 238
Scève, Maurice 160 self-love 289
Schact, Johann Oosterdijk 40 self-meditation 44, 222 ff., 248, 249,
Schelling 168 254
Schirlentz, Nicolaus 94 self-metamorphosis 237
Schmitt, Charles 76, 123, 125, 155 self-perfection 253
scholars 136 self-physiognomation 213, 274
scholasticism 294 self-portrait 298
Scholem, Gershom 68, 224, 301, 304 self-reading 221
Schönsperger, Hans 95 self-sculpting 239
School of Love 108 self-transformation 18, 21, 44, 45, 120,
science 317 170, 171, 194, 207, 224, 240, 253, 307
scientia viii, 18, 19, 301 (audio-visual) Seneca 287
scientific knowledge 29, 31 ‘sensibility’ 251
Index 363
seraphim 223 social mobility 136
Settala, Ludovico 5 social practice 248
Severinus, Marcus Aurelius 112 social relationships 321
Severinus, Peter 135 social spectrum 302
sex 42, 57, 63, 172, 190 ff., 265, 267 ff. ‘sociology of the text’ 112
(sexual act), 303 Socrates 66, 67, 156, 214, 227, 239, 286
Seymour, Edward (Duke of Somerset) Solomon 20
160 sonic culture 231
Seymour, Sir Henry 160 sonic literacy 231, 242
shadows 312 sonic myths 244
Shakespeare x, 54, 260, 266, 320, 322 soothsayer 168
shape 30 Sorbière, Samuel 25, 28, 29
shaving 283 sorcery 131
Shelley, Mary 261 soul 21, 283, 304
Shen Hsiang Ch’iian Pien 48 soul (image of ) 20, 53
shepherds 19, 153, 219, 221 ff. sound and vision 23, 25, 28
Shepherd’s Kalendar, see Kalendar of Spain 97, 100, 123, 137, 139, 100
Shepherds Spandoni, Nicolo 166
shipmen 136 ‘species’ 33, 243
Shirley, James 6 Spencer, Edmund 36
shoulders 48, 55, 58, 124 Sphere of Sacro Bosco 117
Shrewsbury 114 spiritus 26, 28, 44, 164, 188, 237, 238, 243,
sidereal influence 26 252, 301
sight 2 Spontoni, Ciro 112, 162, 269
sight and sound 51 Spurzheim 33
sign theory 25 stars 26, 27
‘signalements’ 308 Stationer’s Register 94
signatum 26, 205 statues 188
signatures 25, 28, 235, 306 stature 2, 3, 30, 60, 307
signifiers and signifieds 306 Steinfurt 124
signs 46, 276 Stourbridge 38
silence 23 Strasbourg 81, 95, 157
similitude 175, 248, 305 Stupiditas 229
Simonetta, Bonifaccio 117, 154 sublunary elements 20, 26
sin 221 ff., 275, 308 substantial form 229
size 35, 306 summa alandimmû 48
skin 51 sun worship 232
slaves 51, 167 supernal chariot 192
Sleebi, Johannes Christoph 112 supernatural 12–13, 20
Sloane, Sir Hans 96 superstition viii, 13, 29, 30, 40, 42, 99,
small pox 3 117, 133, 134, 135, 168, 321
smell 51, 170 surgeons 117
Smyrna 49 Swabia 103
social encounter 247, 249 Swedenborg, Emmanuel 31
364 Index
Swift, Jonathan 112 Tias, Charles 108
Switzerland 11, 96, 100 Timpler, Clemens 84, 124, 171, 303
Sydenham, Thomas 24, 310 toes 124
syllogism 208, 209 ‘totalization to vulgarization’ 278
symbolic meaning 301, 308, 309 Tournai 147
symbolic principle 239 Tournes, Jean de 81
symbols 2, 318 travel 114
symmetry 16, 188 ‘tree of knowledge’ 221
Symonds, Richard 82, 263 Trinity (the Holy) 233
sympathy 12, 205 True Fortune Teller 107
syncretism 237, 254 truth 28
synderesis 232 Turin 94
Syon (Middlesex) 75 typeface 173
Syriac 305
‘unbookish nature’ (of physiognomy)
tabula rasa 231 128
Taisnier, Jean 129 unconscious 239, 270
talismans 237 Unglerium, Florianum 81
Taoism 226 universal language 229
taste 321 Universities (medieval) 36
techne 131 University: of Bologna 163; of Freiburg
technique of the microcosm 21, 44, 237, 75; of Halle 167; of Jena 167; of
240, 243, 254, 302, 318 Leipzig 124; of Orleans 115; of Paris
teeth 3, 124 71; of Turin 85; of Wittenberg 88,
telegraph 320 167
telephone 320 Urbano VIII 163
television 320 urine (inspection) 131
temperaments 74, 220, 221
Temple Inn 164 vacuum 29, 317
temporal grammar 240 vagabonds 132, 135–7, 140, 150, 157
Teniers, David, the younger 144 ff. vagina 268
textual literacy 302, 320 vagrancy act 140, 154
theatre 27 Valencia 119
‘theatre of the soul’ (hidden) 310 value 306
Theodore (Archbishop of Canterbury) Van Eyck 86
66 vanity 227, 289
theology 17, 31, 39, 116, 117, 124 Varley, John 298
Theophrastus 58, 86 Vasari, Giorgio 86
theosophic eye 103, 217 Vatican 80, 294
theosophy 162, 233 Vaughan, Thomas 38
Thirty Years War 124 vegetables 14
Thomann, Johannes 74 Velasio, Sylvester 122
Thompson, E. P. 130 Venice 94, 104, 119, 166
Thraseborough, Clemencia 75 Venus 243, 283
Index 365
vernacular 122, 305 (regional, local) weather 30, 66, 103
Verona 94 Weber, Max 32, 216
Vesalius 26, 125, 309, 315 Webster, Charles 40, 161
vices and virtues 183, 186, 189–90, 193, Webster, John 75, 174, 305 ff.
221 ff., 239 Wenssler, Michael 122
Vienna 104 Westburg, Walter 114
virtual memories 229 Westminster Abbey 283
virtue 172, 184 ff., 206, 303 Wheel of Fortune 251
visage 28, 130, 169, 184–5, 272 Widman, Georg Rudolph 141
visenomy 23 wigs viii
visiognomy 23 William, Prince of Orange 163
visionogni 23 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 168
visionomia 23 ‘windows’ (‘into heaven’) 242
visual: culture 35, 231, 264; episteme ‘windows’ (‘mind endowed with’) 242
229; language 264; literacy 21, 173, ‘windows of the soul’ viii, 18, 89, 310
197, 226, 242; memory 242; myths Winter, Robert 125
244; representation 142; turn 23 witchcraft 165, 184, 210
vitalism 168 witch-hunter 276
voice viii, 3, 23, 24, 30, 51, 178 ff., 181, Wits Cabinet 107
195, 225, 229 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 94, 229
Vulson, Marc 107, 110, 117, 166 wizards 131
vultus 68, 198 Wollstonecraft, Mary 188, 190, 196
vysenamy 141 womb (malady) 269
vysonamy 23 women 196–7
Wood, Anthony 6
walk viii Wright, Thomas 20, 312, 313
Walker, Alexander 33 writing 47, 129, 320
Walker, D. P. 254 Wyclif, John 16
Wallace, William 298 Wyer, Robert 10
Walton, Izaak 29
wanderers 135, 137 yard 267
Warburg, Aby 3, 250, 325 Yates, Frances 237 ff., 243, 254, 317
Ward, Seth 305 ff.
Warde, William 81, 129 Zara, Antonius 84
Warren, Hardick 238 Zimmern (convent) 75
water 34 zodiac 27, 103, 183, 218
way of looking and listening 21, 25, 28, Zohar, The 48, 68–9, 152, 153, 192,
41, 57, 301, 321 206
way of seeing 264 Zopyrus 66, 67, 130, 156, 173, 214

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OXFORD HISTORICAL MONOGRAPHS

CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD

Physiognomy . . . nothing of the truth of which is openly professed by

List of Illustrations xiv

1. From Giovanni Battista Della Porta, De humana physiognomonia

1a. ‘Books on physiognomy’ printed in Europe, c.1470–c.1639 91

bce Before the Common Era

Physiognomy and Ancient Theology

3. Engraving of the moles on a woman’s face, from Richard Saunders, Physiognomie,

4. An emblem, known throughout Europe, and formed around the contemplation in

¹³ A. Koyré, De la mystique à la science, ed. P. Redondi (Paris, 1986), 21.

¹⁷ Michael Scot, Physionomia (Venice, [c.1477]).

In his book entitled De homine (Milan, 1490), the ﬁfteenth-century Italian

¹⁸ N. H. Clulee, John Dee’s Natural Philosophy (1988), 240–1.

of this physiognomical knowledge through quotations of passages of Scripture,

The variety of different religious and philosophical (or epistemological)

From the Fisnomy of the Microcosm to the

Whatever form it took, it was an observation based on the mysterious,

cultural history of the art of physiognomy as they are for understanding

⁵⁰ W. A. L. Vincent, The Grammar Schools (1969), 64.

This epistemological realignment of an ontological, physiognomical, experi-

Résumé of the Argument

He was correct to claim that the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise contained none of

The Intellectual Prism of Classical

In this passage Shakespeare quietly ironized an (empirical?) illogicality in

¹⁸ Barton, Power and Knowledge, 103–31; Maclean, Logic, esp. 4.3.3.

One important innovation in the developing ‘grammar’ of the physiognomical

With no ‘rational principle, in and of itself ’, Polemon’s epiprepeia opened

²² Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 814b1–5.

²⁵ André, Anonyme, 57–60. ²⁶ Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 805a 20–5.

These two distinctions represented, in effect, a priori grids or micro-prisms

³³ Aristotle, Physiognomonics, i, 807a 30, and i, 805a 25–30.

The Arabic Textual Traditions

⁴⁰ Private conversation with J. Thomann.

⁴⁴ The Holy Qur’an, trans. Abdulla Yusuf Ali (Maryland, 1983).

⁴⁹ Förster, Scriptores, i, pp. clxxvii–clxxviii, and ii, 161–79.

The Medieval Latin Textual Traditions

The art of physiognomy in the Middle Ages

⁶⁸ G. G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York, 1974), 156–60.

⁷⁵ See M. R. McVaugh, Smells and the Medieval Surgeon (forthcoming).

The Textual Presence of Physiognomy before Print

Intellectually or taxonomically speaking, throughout medieval Europe,

⁴ C. Brotherton-Ratcliffe, ‘Illustrations of the Four Last Things in English Pre-Reformation Books of

Deﬁning a ‘treatise on physiognomy’

¹⁶ Oxford: Bodleian Library, Harding E 329 (1772), 57, 61–3.

Nor was this conceptual distinction, so troublesome to the calculation, new to

¹⁹ Copenhagen: Royal Library, MS Thott 835 [unpaginated, fol. 3r].

1a. ‘Books on physiognomy’ printed in Europe, c.1470–c.1639

1b. ‘Books on physiognomy’ printed in Europe, c.1640–c.1780

2. ‘Books on physiognomy’ printed in England, c.1470–c.1780

³² Eamon, Secrets, appendix.

3. Annual book production in England, 1480–1700 (5-year totals)

³⁷ K. V. Thomas, Man and the Natural World (1983).

Price and Distribution

⁴⁴ Michael Scot, Phisionomia magistri Michaelis Scoti ( [Paris], [1509?] ).

⁴⁷ Spufford, Small Books, 93. ⁴⁸ Johnson, ‘Book prices’, 104.

⁵² L. Fontaine, Histoire du colportage en Europe (XVe–XIXe siècles) (Paris, 1993).

⁶⁰ London: British Library, 1606/313, title-page.

Intellectual and Environmental Dynamics of Production

⁸² Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, I 142.

The ‘re-discovery of antiquity’

¹ Michael Scot, La phisionomie de maistre Michel Lescot (Paris, 1540).

This particular case of an Aristotelian interest in the ‘occult’ would beneﬁt