Abstract
‘What is it to be human?’ This most Aristotelian of questions divided the Aristotelian sciences. Early modern discourses of the passions (what might now be called the emotions) occupied an uneasy borderland between the mental and the bodily, the rational and the physiological, the intellectual and the appetitive. Neither one thing nor the other, the passions moved ambiguously in a state of constant liminality. ‘These passions then be certaine internall actes or operations of the soule bordering vpon reason and sense … causing therewithall some alterations in the body.’1 Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde of 1601, the longest treatment in English of the period, struggles even to locate its subject: are the passions properly of the body (since they are expressed in physical movements of, say, the blood in the face or the heart) or of the mind (since they appear to be caused nonetheless by some mental motivation)? The association with psychological activity raises the passions above mere instinct or mechanism, and yet in the process drags the mind down into an indecorous connection with organic pathology. For the passions are uncertainly rational, and intrinsically unruly, threatening to spread their disease to the highest faculties: ‘the inordinate motions of the Passions, their preuenting of reason, their rebellion to virtue are thornie briars sprung from the infected roote of original sinne.’2
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Notes
T[homas] W[right], The Passions of the Minde (London: V. S., 1601), p. 14.
Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1965), p. 309.
Thomas Vicary, The Englishemans Treasure: with the true Anatomie of Mans bodie (London: George Robinson, 1587), p. 9.
Levinus Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions, translated by Thomas Newton (London: Thomas Marsh, 1576), p. 59.
Juan Huarte, Examen de Ingenios. The Examination of mens Wits (London: Adam Islip, 1594), p. 264. The English version is translated from Spanish via Italian.
Jean de Lery, Histoire d’vn voyage fait en la terre dv Bresil (La Rochelle: Antoine Chuppin, 1578), p. 110: ‘not only without concealing any parts of their bodies, but also having no shame or embarrassment, they live and go about their business as naked as when they came out of the mother’s womb’ (my translation).
Excerpted and translated in Purchas his Pilgrimes, 5 vols (London: William Stansby, 1625), IV, 1291.
Léry, Histoire d’vn voyage, p. 131. ‘I do not mean, however, to contradict what the Holy Scripture says about Adam and Eve, who, after their sin, were ashamed when they recognised that they were naked, nor do I wish in any way that this nakedness be approved; indeed, I detest the heretics who have tried in the past to introduce it over here, against the law of nature (which on this particular point is by no means observed among our poor Americans)’, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, translated by Janet Whatley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 68.
Alexander von Humboldt, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of America, 3 vols (London: Routledge, 1851), I, p. 305.
Select Documents Illustrating the Four Voyages of Columbus, translated and edited by Cecil Jane, 2 vols (London: Hakluyt Society, 1930), I, p. 6; discussed in Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 68.
Pero de Magalhães, The Histories of Brazil, facsimile edition and translation by John B. Stetson, 2 vols (New York: Cortes Society, 1922), II, p. 83.
Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnology, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 42, citing Guillermo Lohmann Villena (ed.), Gobierno del Perú (Paris and Lima, 1967), p. 17.
‘ac humanitate tam longe superantur ab Hispanis, quam pueri a perfecta aetate, mulieres a uiris, saeui, et immanes a mitissimis, prodigiose intemperantes a contentibus, et temperatis’; Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, Demoerates secundus, ed. Angel Losada, 2nd edition (Madrid: Instituto Francisco de Vitoria, 1984), p. 33; translated in Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, p. 117. The final phrase (denique quam Simiae propre dixerim ad hominibus), Pagden notes (p. 233), is erased from the manuscript used in Losada’s edition.
Dr Juan de Cárdenas in 1591, cited in Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, p. 88.
Bartolomé de Las Casas, Argumentum apologiae, translated by Stanford Poole in In Defence of the Indians (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974), p. 32.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, VII, 1145a; see also Albertus Magnus’s commentary, Ethicorum, VII; discussed by Pagden, Fall of Natural Man, p. 21.
Las Casas, The Tears of the Indians, translated by J[ohn] P[hilips] (London: Nathaniel Brook, 1656), p. 2.
Joseph de Acosta, Historia Natural y Moral de las Indias (Seville: Juan de Leon, 1590), p. 374.
Pero de Magalhães, ‘Historia da prouincia Sancta Cruz’, Histories of Brazil, I, p. 33.
Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, (reprinted London: Fontana Press, 1993), pp. 400–402.
Letter of Pedro Vaz de Caminha to King Manuel, 1 May 1500, W. B. Greenlee (ed.), The Voyage of Pedro Álvares Cabral to Brazil and India (London: Hakluyt Society, 1938), pp. 10–11.
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Cummings, B. (1999). Animal Passions and Human Sciences: Shame, Blushing and Nakedness in Early Modern Europe and the New World. In: Fudge, E., Gilbert, R., Wiseman, S. (eds) At the Borders of the Human. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27729-2_3
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