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Devotion, Popular Belief and Sympathetic Magic among Renaissance Italian Women: The Rose of Jericho as Birthing Aid

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 January 2016

Suzy Knight
Suzy Knight*
Affiliation:
Queen Mary, University of London
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Extract

The natural world offered Renaissance men and women an abundance of raw materials which could be used to protect and to heal. Healers and wise women used particularly potent plants, gemstones and animal parts, in conjunction with magical ritual and Christian prayer, as preventative and cure. Pertaining largely to an oral and unlettered culture, much of this natural lore has been lost. Fortunately, the Renaissance demand for vernacular translations of classical works brought about a revived interest in botany, whilst cheap print and a wider reading public fostered the proliferation of a new genre of self-help manuals and books of secrets, and it is within these works that some of the oral traditions have been captured in ink. Whilst it may be true that many of the new authors of the Renaissance used print to disparage and demystify many of these popular beliefs, it is often only through the disapproving lens of the vernacular manual that we are able to catch glimpses of folk beliefs in practice. This paper will examine one such tradition: the use of the Rose of Jericho as birthing aid.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 46: God’s Bounty? The Churches and the Natural World , 2010 , pp. 134 - 143
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2010

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References

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11 Bell, How to Do It, 114. For other examples of female ritual, see The Trotula: An English Translation of the Medieval Compendium of Women’s Medicine, ed. Green, Monica H. (Philadelphia, PA, 2002).Google Scholar

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19 See Haines, Herbert and Busby, Richard James, A Manual of Monumental Brasses (Oxford, 1861), cxi. A Rose of Jericho features in Matthias Grünewald’s St Cyriacus panel, which forms part of the Heller Altarpiece (1509—11), at the Städel Museum, Frankfurt.Google Scholar

20 Other areas in Italy refer to them as roses of St Anne or St Margaret: Gasparroni, ‘rosa di Gerico’, 145.

21 ‘ja chassettina d’arcipresso entrovi … ja rosa della Vergine Maria’: ASF, Magistrato dei Pupilli Avanti il Principato [hereafter: MPAP], 180, fols 49r-52v [estate of Jachopo di Marcho di Marcho, speziale in [Piazza] Verzaia, 1496], at fol. 50r.

22 ‘ia rosa della Nostra Donna sopra a done di parto’: ASF, MPAP, 190, fols 71r-74v [estate of Piero d’Antonio Quaratesi, 14 May 1527], at fol. 72r;’i° schatolino entravi ia; rosa della Vergine Maria’: ASF, MPP, 2649, fols 586r-590r [estate of Lorenzo di Bastiano, coriere diVinezia, 21 April 1549], at fol. 588v.

23 For an introduction to Mattioli and his work, see Bell, How to Do It, 45–46.

24 ‘Valerio Cordo nel suo volumetto delle compositioni de medicamenti, scrive dell’Amomo assai inconstantemente. Imperoché nella compositione dell’aurea Alessandrina afferma per certo che l’Amomo non è altro, che questa pianta di Hierico’: Pietro Andrea Mattioli, II Dioscoride dell’ eccellente Dottor P.A. Matthioli co i suoi discorsi, con l’aggiunta del sesto libro de i rimedi di tutti i veleni de lui nuovamente tradotto & con dottissimi discorsi per tutto commentato (Venice, 1548), 31.

25 ‘Rose di S Maria portate di Hierico’: ibid., unpaginated.

26 ‘che le nostre Donne d’Italia chiamano Rose di santa Maria, portateci di Hierico da i peregrini, che vanno al santissimo sepolchro del nostro Signore GIESU CHRISTO’: ibid. 31.

27 von Suchem, Description of the Holy Land, 91; cited in Crowfoot and Baldenperger, Cedar to Hyssop, 123.

28 Lutzenkirchen and Simoni,‘Utilizzazione magica’, 197.

29 See Crowfoot and Baldensperger, Cedar to Hyssop, 123.

30 Ibid.

31 See Belon, Pierre, Les observations de plusieurs singularitez & choses memorables, trouvées en Grece, Asie, Iudée, Egypte, Arabie, & autre pays estranges. Redigeés en trois livres, 3 vols (Paris, 1555), 2: 144.Google Scholar

32 Lutzenkirchen and Simoni, ‘Utilizzazione magica’, 198—200. It is this aspect of the Rose’s legend that is the basis of Hess’s, David story about this plant: The Rose of Jericho, trans, and ed. Caroline Norton (London, 1870).Google Scholar

33 ‘nell’hora del partorire usano di tenere le donne nell’acqua; credendosi, che, come tal pianta s’apre, subito partoriscano’: Mattioli, I discorsi, 31.

34 For a Renaissance Italian interpretation of sympathetic magic, see Porta, Giambattista della, Natural Magick (London, 1658), 16–17.Google Scholar

35 This notion appears in Giovanni Mannello’s late sixteenth-century treatise Delle medicine partinenti all’infermità delle donne (Venice, 1563), 235–40; quoted in Bell, How to Do It, 73.

36 For the continuation of these ceremonies in present-day Abruzzo, see Gasparroni, ‘La rosa di Gerico’, 149.

37 ‘tanta inter christicolae irrespit superstitio’: Mattioli, I discorsi (Venice, 1554), 35.

38 discorsi (Venice, 1557), 38; 1 discorsi (Venice, 1568), 58; Commentaires de Pierre, M. André Matthiole médecin sennois, sur les six livres de Ped. Dioscoride Anazarbeen de la matière médicinale: avec certaines tables médicinales, tant des qualités & vertus des simples mèdicamens, que des remèdes pour toutes maladies, qui peuvent avenir au corps humain, comme aussi des sentences, mots & matières traictées esdicts commentaires (Lyons, 1572), 41; 1 discorsi (Venice, 1597), 50.Google Scholar

39 Bell, How to Do It, ch. 3; Medicina per le donne nel cinquecento: Testi di Giovanni Mannello e di Girolamo Mercurio, ed. Biagi, Maria Luisa Altieri et al. (Turin, 1992).Google Scholar

40 See the judgements of Belon, Observations, 2: 144; Johannes Sturmius, De rosa hierochuntina liber units: in quo de eius natura, proprietatibus motibus, et causis pukhrè disseritur (Louvain, 1608), quoted in Saint-Aignan, ‘Recherches’, 356—61; Parkinson, John, Theatrum botanicum:The Theater of Plantes or an Universali and Compleate Herball (London, 1640)Google Scholar, 1384; Browne, Thomas, Pseudodoxia epidemica, ed. Robbins, Robin (Oxford, 1981), 148–50, 775–76. See also Caroline Norton’s comments in the introduction to Hess, Rose of Jericho, vi—vii.Google Scholar

41 See Gasparroni,‘rosa di Gerico’.

42 Caroline Norton had encountered the tradition in nineteenth-century Italy ‘among the lower classes’ and followed by ‘the simpler sort of peasant woman’: Hess, Rose of Jericho, vii.