'T Wonder-boeck

David Joris, 'T Wonder-boeck : waer in dat van der werldt aen versloten gheopenbaert is;
wie een der Ick (segt die Heere) senden sal, ontfangt in mynen naem, die ontfanght my;
wie my ontfanght, ontfanght den die my ghesonden heeft ...: oochghelouet moet hy sijn,
die als een ambassatoer gheconden komt...', Theodorus II de Borne, Deventer, 1542, coll.
Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent/Google Books Project

'T Wonder-boeck wordt als het hoofdwerk van Joris beschouwd. Hij geeft er onbeschroomd zijn ideeën in weer. Hij zegt uit Gods mond te spreken; ongeloof aan hem was die zonde tegen den Heilige Geest welke noch in deze eeuw noch in de toekomende vergeven zal worden. Hij alleen wist wat ter zaligheid nodig is; wie zich hoeden wilde voor het oordeel des Heeren, moest naar hem luisteren, zijn raad opvolgen.

Deze zelfverheffing maakt het begrijpelijk dat Joris zich de meest gewijde namen toe-eigende. Enkele voorbeelden van deze namen uit 't Wonderboeck zijn: 

evenbeeld Gods, gezalfde des Heeren, koning der gerechtigheid, geest des levens, hemelse Adam en verstand Gods."

De laatste Adam, David Jorisz., 1542,

gravure van de hand van de auteur zelf, gebruikt in 'T Wonder-boeck

"Volgens de Schrift is Jezus is de Tweede Mens, de Laatste Adam, het hoofd van een nieuw mensengeslacht."

"Its chief claim to recognition is its use, in the latter part, of the phrase Restitutio Christi, which apparently suggested to Servetus his title Christianismi Restitutio (1553). This concept of the 'Restitution' by the return of ALL the souls into the unity with Christ is probably the oldest presentation of the concept of the 'Reintegration' as described by de Pasqually in the 18th century. It is also the expression of the primitive Rosicrucian teachings, who were first manifested into the Protestant movement and part of the inner teachings of the Anabaptists. In the first edition is a figure of the 'new man', signed with the author's monogram, and probably drawn as a likeness of himself; it fairly corresponds with the alleged portrait, engraved in 1607, reproduced in the appendix to A. Ross's Pansebeia (1655)." (Kingsgarden)

A. Ross, Pansebeia, 1655

houtsnede van de hand van David Joris, 'T Wonder-boeck, Theodorus II de Borne,
Deventer, 1542, coll. Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent/Google Books Project

't Wonder-boeck werd voor het eerst uitgegeven in 1542-1544 in Deventer door Theodorus II de Borne. "This first edition can be theologically located to his ideas during this important transitionary Antwerp period." (A certain measure of perfection, dd. 28/12/2016)
Het is geïllustreerd met 2 houtsneden die door de auteur (en eveneens beeldend kunstenaar), David Joris, gemaakt waren. Er wordt gespeeld zowel met de tekst zelf als met de ingevoerde gravures in die tekst.

tekstvaas, David Joris, 'T Wonder-boeck, Theodorus II de Borne,
Deventer, 1542, coll. Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent/Google Books Project

David Joris, 'T Wonder-boeck, Theodorus II de Borne,
Deventer, 1542, coll. Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent/Google Books Project

De Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent bezit een exemplaar van deze eerste editie (nr Theol 11)(barcode onleesbaar) en die werd in het kader van het Goole Books Project gedigitaliseerd.

De tweede editie dateert uit 1551, door "den auteur selve ghecorrigeert ende vermeerdert", en werd gedrukt door David Ketel (ook Deventer) die in 1554 daarvoor gestraft is met de dood. Alle uitgaven verschijnen anoniem om censuur en veroordeling tot de dood te ontlopen. De twee delen van de oorspronkelijke uitgave worden opgedeeld in totaal vier delen.

David Joris, 'T Wonder-boeck : waer in dat van der werldt aen versloten gheopenbaert is;
wie een der Ick (segt die Heere) senden sal, ontfangt in mynen naem, die ontfanght my;
wie my ontfanght, ontfanght den die my ghesonden heeft ...: oochghelouet moet hy sijn,
die als een ambassatoer gheconden komt...', Dierck Mullem, Vianen, 1584 of 1595, coll.
Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent/Google Books Project

De derde en vierde edities dateren uit 1583-1584 en 1595 (bij beide edities is als jaar van uitgave 1551 vermeld), en werden gedrukt door Jan Canin van Dordrecht en Dierck Mullem in Vianen, nadat hij uit Rotterdam werd verbannen, en uitgegeven in opdracht van de minister Herman Herberts van Dordrecht.

David Joris, 'T Wonder-boeck, Dierck Mullem, Vianen, 1584 of 1595, coll. Universiteitsbibliotheek 

Gent/Google Books Project, nr. 900000178230 (G. 6793) - gravure naar de houtsneden van de 

hand van David Joris zelf ?, zat niet in de eerste editie

Een exemplaar van deze editie, vermoedelijk uit 1584, bevindt zich in de Universiteitsbibliotheek van Gent: nr. 900000178230 (G. 6793) en is online te bekijken dankzij het Google Books Project.
Eén van de eigenaars van het boek noteerde vooraan in het boek: "het eerste boek in de Nederlanden gedrukt, in het welk figuren in koper gesneden werden." Hij vermeldt David Ketel (Deventer) als drukker van de 1551 editie, het jaartal dat ook op de titelpagina vermeld wordt.
Het boek bestaat uit vier delen in 1 vol. in-folio, ca. 400 p. en is inderdaad geïllustreerd met kopergravures in de tekst. Daarnaast zijn er talrijke, in detail uitgewerkte initialen én houtsneden. De drie houtsneden van de hand van David Joris zelf, zijn vervangen door kopergravures naar de originelen door o.a. Hieronymus Wierix (IRW)(twee van de drie zijn zo getekend).
De twee andere (eveneens door Google gedigitaliseerde) exemplaren van de Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent, nr. 900000187006 (Her. 633) en  G. 6796 (barcode onleesbaar) - dateren ook uit 1584.

David Joris, 'T Wonder-boeck, Dierck Mullem, Vianen, 1584 of 1595, coll. Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent/Google Books Project, nr. 900000178230 (G. 6793) - gravure naar de houtsneden van de hand van David Joris zelf

De wijzende handjes in de marge verdwijnen.

David Joris, 'T Wonder-boeck, Theodorus II de Borne,
Deventer, 1542, coll. Universiteitsbibliotheek Gent/Google Books Project

"Only the first edition contains engraved hands - each one different from the other. The different positions of the fingers of these hands are alledged to convey a mysterious coded message, whose significance has been lost." (Kingsgarden)


Invaluable vermeldt dat het Duitse lettertype werd vervangen door een Nederlands lettertype, maar dat geldt niet voor de boeken in de universiteitsbibliotheek UGent, misschien is dat nog een mogelijk verschil tussen de 1584 en de 1595 editie?

Exemplaar 900000178230 (G. 6793) bevat ook een portret door Van Sieghem van David Joris, "gezegd den Duyvel van Delft"


Totaalzicht:

een geveild exemplaar van David Joris, 'T Wonder-boeck, Dierck Mullem, Vianen, 1584 of 1595

De evolutie van de afbeeldingen:

De laatste Adam, David Jorisz., 1542,
gravure van de hand van de auteur zelf, gebruikt in 'T Wonder-boeck

De laatste Adam, Hieronymus Wierix (IRW), naar David Jorisz., 1584,
gravure gebruikt in 'T Wonder-boeck

De laatste Adam, Hieronymus Wierix (IRW), naar David Jorisz., 1584,
ingekleurde gravure gebruikt in 'T Wonder-boeck

De laatste Adam, Hieronymus Wierix, naar David Jorisz., 1583 - 1584,
gravure, h 241mm × b 163mm, Rijksmuseum RP-P-2002-292

(info o.a. uit Wikipedia  & Invaluable dd. 01/12/2016, deze laatste gebaseerd op de volgende bronnen: Van der Linde 58; Typ. Bat. 5644; Bainton, David Joris, p. 71-3; Cat. Mtschp. Ned. Letterk. I, p. 168; Machiels J 236; Valkema Blouw, 'Printers to the 'arch-heretic' David Joris. Prolegomena to a bibliography of his works', in: Quaerendo, 21 (1991), p. 163-209, esp. 192-6; only three copies in the NCC)

Bread of Dreams - Digest: '9. Ritual Battles and Popular Frenzies'

"With unintentional but certainly bitter irony, many went on saying and repeating that the one and only treasure of the poor - the thesaurus pauperum - consisted in the maintenance of their health. None the less, many of the poor preferred sickness and death to a state of health which forced them to live an insufferable life and bear the intolerable torment of hunger. [...]
The medicina pauperum (medicine of the poor) attempted to apply inexpensive therapies which made use of preventive and curative remedies, the composition of which did not require rare and costly ingredients. On the one hand, the two-way medicinal path led to the complicated
and very expensive triaca (theriac) for the rich, believed to be a powerful remedy for almost all sicknesses, a universal panacea; and, on the other hand, to the 'theriac of the poor', composed only of herbs. For those with 'strong stomachs and used to hard work', like peasants and porters, the great preserver of health was garlic, the 'theriac of the rustic', suited to rough and work-weary people, those selected in reverse, from whom - according to the science of the time - could only be born rustic and obtuse offspring, since 'no son is born who does not obtain his quality and  temperament from the food which his father ate before he was conceived.' From this  presupposition, which seems to have been widely shared, it was deduced that

'the meat of the cow, steer and pig, the bread of red wheat, beans,

cheese, red wine and other heavy foods cause strong semen and bad

temperament: the son that is conceived will have great strength,

but will be wild and of animal wits. From this results that

among men of the countryside it would be a miracle if one turned

out to be of acute intelligence and prone to study, especially

where such coarse foods are eaten. The opposite occurs among citydwellers,

whose sons we see have more intelligence and ability. '

[Giuseppe Rosaccio, Fabrica universale dell'huomo sotto titolo di Microcosmo dichiarata 

(...) (Venice: G. Imberti, 1627), pp. 45-46]"

[Giuseppe Rosaccio (1530-1620), Italian geographer and physician (Wikimedia Commons, dd. 11/07/2016)]

"Fortunately for the peasants of the plain and the cacamarroni (literally, 'chestnut-shitters') of the mountains, popular medicine was less poisonous and probably more effective than the medicine of the rich. [...] The poor of the city, in fact, were very often forced to devour foods that were 'fetid, putrid and verminous ... [filled] even with mice, worms, snakes or other most disgusting and abominable animals'. " [Giulio Cesare Luigi Canali, La carità del prossimo celebrata, spiegata e promossa in più ragionamenti [...], Bologna: Gaspare de Franceschi, 1763, (ch. 5, n. 3), II, p. 32]

"'Plenty' was the great absentee; rare were the days when songs could be sung to praise its return and the defeat of 'Famine' (a literary exercise as well, modelled on the very popular theme of the struggle between Carnival and Lent in which, as in all the forms deriving from folk rituals, archaic apotropaic virtues were obscurely presented). In 1597, Giulio Cesare Croce 

Giulio Cesare Croce 

[Giulio Cesare Croce (1550–1609) was an Italian writer, actor/producer of cantastoria [a theatrical form where a performer tells or sings a story while gesturing to a series of images: these images can be painted, printed or drawn on any sort of material] and enigma writer. He wrote more than 400 works in Italian and Bolognese dialect. To be a literary man in his period meant living at court, having patrons, or else being left to one's own devices for financial purposes. Croce was never a true literary man in the strictest sense of the word since he preferred laymen audiences to the court. In fact, he was principally a story teller and a blacksmith and most likely wrote for his own personal satisfaction. As such, his stories and inspiration come from the lower class, from the audiences at the market, who, if able to read, bought his works. This is in stark opposition to many contemporary authors who were inspired by the whims of their patrons. (Wikipedia, dd. 11/07/2016)]

- after the good summer harvest which seemed to spell an end to the seven years of tribulations during which he himself had been heavily hit [...] - exalted the return of plenty to Bologna, praising the vice-legate Orazio Spinola for his decisive and victorious intervention during the years of dearth. In the excited dialogue between Plenty and Famine, Spinola's intervention is described as fundamental to the safety of the community for which Croce presented himself as intermediary and spokesman: a bard assigned to the expression of the city's collective conscience. Victor at last, Plenty can let its ringing voice be heard:

A baker in front of his oven. From a 15th-16th century Book of Hours, attributed to Jean Bourdichon © Bibliothèque municipale de Lyon (Ms 5141, f. 11v-12).

'The bread has grown in size, just as your insolence

Had so lowered and diminished,

That with difficulty its presence was seen;

And if it was black, badly cooked and, worse, dense,

Now all the bakers have the order

To make it good, white, large and with care;

And all the granaries are wide open

And what was worth sixteen is now worth eight,

So that misers hang themselves from the pain;

Bread is no longer seen on display

Already spoiled, as it used to be,

But bright as snow, and well-baked;

The bean, which sat on the throne,

And which seemed like sugar to the artisans,

Is now little appreciated or valued;

Now, in these plains, thanks to God,

Goods abound, and all the countryside

Produces abundant grains in great plenty;

Such that Bologna will once again

Be glorious and great, and neither

Will there ever be heard laments and complaints:

Never more will there be seen atop the dung-heap

So many wretched, afflicted and lifeless people,

Wrapped up in the straw and refuse;

In the future, they will be strong men,

Proud and robust, they will gather vigour,

Not weak and half-dead like before;

A healthy colour will return to their faces,

Strength will be put back where it belongs,

And natural warmth to its rightful state... '

(Il solennissimo trionfo dell'Abbondanza, per la sua fertilissima entrata nella Città di Bologna; il di primo d'Agosto 1597. Con l'amaro pianto, che fà la Carestia, nella dolorosa sua partita, in Dialogo (Bologna: Gio. Battista Bellagamba, 1597), fols. 5r.-6v.)[e-book]

This portrait painted by Plenty corresponds to the octaves of Girolamo Accolti, the 'Allegrezza de' poveri sopra il crescimento del pane' (published in Rome and republished in Bologna: Vittorio Benacci, 1597) (Cheerfulness of the poor over the growth of the bread', in which is written 'Of wheat we have great plenty', octave 1,5), and 'Il gran lamento fatto da Nicolotto Fornar da Pesaro. Per non poter fare il pane piccolo e nero come prima. Con il grandissimo pianto della Carestia nell'uscir di Bologna' (Bologna: Vittorio Benacci, 1603) ('The great lament made by Nicolotto Baker of Pesaro. Of not being able to make the bread small and black as before. With the very great weeping of Famine on leaving Bologna'. Newly composed by Alessandro de' Monti),

'Since the bread has increased in size,
White and beautiful and even well-baked,
Fancy breads, twice baked,
And no one can be satisfied.
We poor bakers.
Scottish-style and side-table breads,
With the finest flour,
From evening to morning
We are forced to make... (fol. 1 v.)
Even the husk and the pollard
Are not sold, but are thrown away... (fol. 2r.)'

The bakers, much hated by the poverelli ('little poor') and singled out by everyone as profiteers and creators of hunger, frequently saw their shops attacked and plundered by the mob. Together with the usurers and tax collectors they were the first to face the popular fury, as in the attack on the oven of the Gasse district of Bologna in August, 1677.

[...]

The popular furore had entered some time ago into the 'museums' of realistic literature, whether it examined the immense reservoir of human activities and appearances with regard to trades and professions, or specialized in the typological analysis of the various faces of famine. In this excited atmosphere of social tensions, uprisings and looting, it is not surprising that G. B. Segni rifled a page by Garzoni  [Giovanni Garzoni (1419–1506) was an Italian humanist and physician from Bologna, where he was professor of medicine and teacher of rhetoric  (Wikipedia, dd. 11/07/2016)] (even more sensational plagiarism was committed with casual frequency during a century when copyright was an unknown expression), replacing it in a real-life scenario of social disorder and disintegration, even though it remains essentially an exemplum: a rhetorical model of the abstract theme of human frenzy.

Whoever would like to see the misery of this present famine and starvation in its most wretched form should go to certain cities and lands that are tyrannized, where the taxes could not be higher, and see bread put in the warehouses and storerooms which is as black as coal or as grey as a donkey's hide, and of such a mixture that even hearty eaters could not stand it, and so small it seems like the balls of zarabottana, and so expensive that those responsible are wished a thousand evils, and sold with such an appearance that it seems to come from the executioner's hand, and so often contested that clubs, daggers and pikes are necessary in order to possess it, and brought out in such low quantities that many poor families die from hardship and hunger, cursing the traitorous usurers, the villainous rich and the murderous tax-collectors who are to blame for such a wicked and cruel famine. He would then hear all the people scream; he would see the common people rioting, with good reason; the poor crying into the wind; the peasants from outside claiming greater power; the hospitals filling up; the doors of the rich echoing with miserable voices; the square full of acts of rage; the warehouses and storerooms surrounded by calamitous and unhappy people; the earth crying out and the air sighing, the sky weeping for so much dearth and such an unbearable famine. He would witness many thefts, much stealing, much plundering of granaries, many virgins raped for a piece of bread; many husbands become voluntary scoundrels for a penny, that he would recognize as true the saying of Regnicolo Foretano, 'In times of famine due to lack of bread, there is no better foodstuff than human flesh.' What Quintilian also meant when he said 'Non habitant simul pudor et fames' ['Shame and hunger do not dwell together']. He would see many rich people murdered, so much clashing of arms that everything would exhaust itself. The customs-houses would be ransacked, the warehouses emptied, the banks broken into, the bakers beaten or pilloried, or forced to walk the rope in public, or hanged by the neck, for behaving like gluttons and scoundrels. 

[Giovan Battista Segni, Trattato sopra la carestia e fame, sue cause, accidenti, provisioni e reggimenti, varie moltiplicazioni, e sorte di pane. Discorsi filosofici, (Bologna: Gio. Rossi, 1602)]
(Camporesi 1996, '9. Ritual Battles and Popular Frenzies', pp. 103-107)

Taal en het Land van Kokanje: intoxication by verbal accumulation

In the Land of Cockaigne - revelation of the mundus inversus ('world turned upside down') - the happy time returns; indeed, it is blocked in. It reappears in an immobile circle, just as the rhymed and obsessive words of the propitiatory lullabies, spells and litanies compose bits of repeating, calming, sedating and drugging words. In this verbal dimension, the consoling word of the minstrel is utilized by the poor as a surrogate for the frustrations of psychic and bodily miseries: as an opiated word which, even across the anaphoric techniques of repetition - the wheel of words returning like the wheel of time - tears itself from the ordinary, opening fleeting but necessary parentheses of consolations glimpsed in dreams, of phonic and verbal surrogates for existential sadnesses and bodily miseries. The dream of plenty magically suspends, subdues and soothes the pangs of unsatisfied bowels.
Many people, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, were reduced to living mainly on beau langage and feasting on names instead of tasting things.  For them, these 'succulent' enumerations were like a little compensation for everyday poverty. But let us note well: this compensation obtained by force of words is only possible if a certain intoxication first attenuated the feeling of distance which separated the dream from the reality, and intoxication cannot here be but the fruit of verbal accumulation. Each term in these enumerations, taken in isolation, is nothing but a desire or a lie; it is the magnificent abundance, the uninterrupted flow of words charged with captivating flavours that create the illusion. In this state of euphoria provoked by the juggling of words, one ends up believing that one has played with things. (R. Garapon, La fantasie verbale et le comique dans le théâtre français du moyen âge à la fin du XVIIe siècle (Paris: Colin, 1957), p. 87)
The artifice of the word opens up consoling horizons to the starvation and catatony of the listener. The histrio turpis ('deformed actor') - man of filth, contaminated mediator - assumes the mask of consoler and therapist. Not by accident the minstrel, at a certain moment in his historical course, is attributed with demonic characteristics, to the point of almost perfectly resembling the lunatic."
(Camporesi 1996, '6. The World Turned Upside Down', pp. 79-81)

Bread of Dreams - Digest: '6. The World Turned Upside Down'

"If winter was always very difficult for the poor, existence became all the more trying in the years of famine, and the most defenceless found themselves 'lying on the ground, poor and wretched'. They sought refuge inside the straw, on refuse and manure. Tormented by chilblains, racked by coughs, infested by lice and ringworm and emanating intolerable smells - wandering dung-heaps, who in 'their own dung even grow fat / I as if they were beetles or worms', unsatiated stomachs 'where the dung both leaves and enters' (Baldassare Bonifacio) - they slowly came back to life when the warm weather arrived and the pangs of hunger lessened; famine seemed in retreat. The exultation of the survivors fed the unjustified illusions of future health, strength and vigour. The discouraging images of prostration and starvation were put away." [...] The resurrection of the famished beggars - the 'half dead' with ashen and dried-out skin - and the abandoning of the bed of dung and the wrapping of straw, indicated the first part of a return to a more humansocial dimension. [...] The disasters of a hunger epidemic, of a seven-year famine (like the one which raged in much of northern Italy between 1590 and 1597), left marks too profound to be wiped out from one day to the next. [...] The accelerated deterioration of physical and mental health during the years of stupefying starvation was for many people an irreversible process towards intellectual disorderand degradation that the return to 'normal' - to the low level of daily undernourishment - would not succeed in wiping out."
(Camporesi 1996, '6. The World Turned Upside Down', pp. 78-79)

"The image of the world, seen from below, appears uncertain, flawed, ambiguous, unbalanced and unhomogeneous, as in the visions of the drugged and the possessed. [...] The natural and divine order is broken up and altered: chaos takes priority over a rational design that presupposes a centre towards which the whole immense periphery converges in unity. The 'expanded conscience' overflows everywhere. The same articulation of time changes the frame of reference:
'time outside of time' is posed as the anti-model of 'time that is within time'. The progressive is nullified in the regressive.
The city of Balordia (literally, 'folly'), kingdom of the idle, lives in a mythology of ebb and flow, unanchored in historical time. This compensatory dream projected from the popular utopia conquers ever more extensive territories in which 'superior' rationality no longer finds a place. [...]
The pauper/slacker lives in the 'time of laziness': the metahistorical time of predictability and insecurity institutionalized in security, set loose from working time, the risk of the future and the fear of history.

Bruegel, Het Land van Kokanje (Luilekkerland), 1567,  olieverf op paneel52 x 78 cm, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, München, inv. 8940

The Land of Cockaigne, in the drugged logic of the impossible, becomes a driving image, able to penetrate the mental cosmos in which the natural (and the real) have been supplanted by the artificial and the unreal. In this dream universe, the mechanical and physical laws no longer make sense: macaroni falls from heaven like edible rain; the earth, no longer worked, miraculously produces pre-cooked foods; the trees do not toss down buds and leaves, but hams and clothes; the animals, their own butchers, spontaneously roast themselves for the comfort of men's stomachs. Work is abolished, time suspended, fatal old age staved off by the fountains of youth, and the women, in their bodily splendour, are triumphant over their straddled and subjected husbands.
But this dismal land of idleness - from which risk has been banished, untouched by the storms of history, without fear and without future - appears sunk in a perspective that is not only dream-like but positively funereal, in a world where plenty is reflected in the negative face of sterility: where nature, overturned, forms inhuman and monstrous landscapes, beyond every possible logic and far from every perspective of life. A 'nature' where the artificial has destroyed the natural, turning it upside down, altering its biological laws, the periods for the maturation of produce and even the time of animal gestation. [...]
(Camporesi 1996, '6. The World Turned Upside Down', pp. 79-80)

"Poverty and madness eventually coincide, in the way that the face of a child struck by athrepsia (a diseased condition caused by malnutrition), undernourishment or the mal dal simiot ('monkey disease', as it was known in Modena), his worn-out skin all wrinkled, appeared similar to that of an old senescent monkey.
The double face of puer/senex, dear to the mystic religions, was utilized at the popular level as the concrete image of the overturning of the natural order. The tiny malnourished senescent was placed on a baker's peel, put in the lukewarm oven and taken out three times with the incantation:

'Into the oven you go, and out
you come, so that the monkey
may remain inside.'

The ambiguous, enigmatic, entangled and reversible logic of popular mental stereotypes presents itself as a cultural anti-model which, because of its subtle attraction, also contaminates the rationalistic Aristotelian culture. In the folk vision of the world, preceded by ingenious anachronism, space is presented as a dimension of time and the universe as a place of ordered chaos where the possible and the impossible dwell together in the same percentage of probabilities. Time is either still or is measured with the unabstract metre of sweat and toil. The land that can be ploughed with a pair of oxen from dawn to sunset becomes a day: a unit of time substitutes for a unit of surface area. The years are counted in terms of empty and full, the seesaw of famine and plenty. The 'year of hunger' is placed in the centre of the calendar of the poor. The 'longest day' is the one during which one does not eat. Time becomes an expandable and shrinkable variable, articulated by the stomach's pulsations, the gut's thinning out or filling up and the fatigue of labour. The popular ceremonial of eating also reproposes a different use of time, alternating long days of the most frugal nourishment - a regimen of survival bordering on starvation - with interminable ritual excesses, dietary orgies and colossal feasts, disorder and drunkenness quite different from the noble banquet based entirely on the aesthetic values of food, a visual cuisine to be displayed."
(Camporesi 1996, '6. The World Turned Upside Down', p. 82)

"It is in this social panorama, traversed by profound anxieties and fears, alienating frustrations, devouring and uncontrollable infirmities and dietary chaos that adulterated and stupefying grains contributed to delirious hypnotic states and crises, which could explode into episodes of collective possession or sudden furies of dancing. The forbidden zones, those most contaminated by the ambiguous, ambivalent magic of the sacred, seemed to emanate perverse influences and unleash dark energies. Psychological destitution, together with the torment of an ailing body, acted as detonator of the epileptic attacks and tumultuous and surging group fits, in which men were attracted and repelled by centres of powerful fascination and places of sacrifice, like the altar. The pathological trance into which entire groups fell [...] forms the alarm call originating from a feverish world: a social body altered in its physiological and psychic equilibrium, where 'marvel' could be confused with 'miracle', which in its turn could appear as 'trickery', 'enchantment' or 'diabolical invocation'.
The horrible dances of the sick inside churches, where the troubled presence of the contaminated and the impure was united with the consecrated and the supernatural, resulted in spectacular, bewildering performances. [...]"
(Camporesi 1996, '6. The World Turned Upside Down', pp. 83-84)

"At Ferrara in 1596, according to the Modenese chronicler Giovan Battista Spaccini, it is believed that the cause of many illnesses, of which numerous people even die, is the bad breads which the people eat, namely that of beans, cabbage and plain oil'. (G. B. Spaccini, Cronaca modenese (1588-1636), ed. G. Bertoni, T. Sandonnini and P.E. Vicini (Modena: Ferraguti, 1911), I, p. 38)
The dark spectre of food poisoning and the crisis (even fatal) of 'evil' breads weighed heavily on
the cities of the Duchies and Papal Legations. Because of the criminal intervention of cynical speculators, 'vulgar' bread could sometimes hide destructive traps. Or else, as happened at Modena in 1592, it could lead to a dangerous slide into the dull and delirious senselessness of intoxification.
Adulterated breads had been put into circulation by the untori of the Public Health: criminal attacks orchestrated by the 'provisionary judges' who were supposed to oversee the well-balanced  provisioning of the public-square.

'On the 21st, a Sunday, with Monday approaching, Master ...
[blank in the manuscript] Forni, Judge of provisions in the square
of Modena, was arrested, along with the bakers, for having had
forty sacks of bay leaf ground to be put in the wheat flour to make
bread for the square, where it caused the poverty to those who
bought it to worsen, so that for two days there were many people
sick enough to go crazy, and during this time they could not work or
help their families.'  (Spaccini, Cronaca modenese, I, pp. 3-4)"

(Camporesi 1996, '6. The World Turned Upside Down', pp. 84-85)

"Temporarily losing their reason or permanently weltering in hunger, many peasants preferred to leave home and turn to begging rather than helplessly witness their children's agony. Changed into a 'house of death', the hut becomes a murderous trap and tomb for the least protected:

'a few days ago [April 1601] in the town of Reggio . . . a peasant,
along with his wife, so as not to see their three sons perish from
hunger in front of their eyes, locked them in the house and set out in
the name of heaven. After three days had passed the neighbours,
not having seen them, decided to knock down the door, which they
did. And they found two of the sons dead, and the third dying with
straw in his mouth, and on the fire there was a pot with straw inside
which was being boiled in order to make it softer for eating.'
(Spaccini, Cronaca modenese, II (1919), p. 117)"

(Camporesi 1996, '6. The World Turned Upside Down', p. 85)

Bread of Dreams - Digest: '7. 'Famine of Living' and 'Times of Suspicion''

"the micro-society of the family [...] explodes like a crazed cell[:]
Aberrant frenzies ignited by hunger [dissolve] every emotional and social bond.
'Hunger is crueller than the plague, because man is in need for much more time, but the plague is more abominable because as soon as it gives us time to catch our breath, it takes away our memory, removes every thought of repentance, and causes the confessors to be absent; the notaries no longer come to write the testaments, the doctors flee, the fathers are sick and tired of their sons, who turn their backs on their fathers, the mothers abandon their daughters and they shun their mothers, one relative does not recognize the other, friends become enemies.'
[Giovan Battista Segni, Discorso sopra la carestia, e fame (Ferrara: B. Mamarello, 1591), p. 46]

The testaments to which Segni refers pertain to the death ritual of the rich: they were the 'passports to the world beyond' (Jacques Le Goff) which foresaw vast endowments to churches and convents, so that the dying passed away with a peaceful conscience, socially and religiously relieved of every  misdeed. The poor amused themselves, in the absence of goods and the difficulties arising because of them, by enacting parodies of testaments, in order to laugh a little at this act sacred to the religion of things'"
(Camporesi 1996, '7. 'Famine of Living' and 'Times of Suspicion'', pp. 87-88)

Anonymus, s.n., 1578, schilderij, Leuven, Sint-Jacobskerk
"Une intense agitation s'observe devant l'église : des prêtres en surplis sortent pour aller donner la communion aux malades et aux mourants; des tombes sont hativement creusees dans l'enclos paroissial, autour des cercueils prêts ii à y être enfouis. Une charrette passe dans la rue, chargée de cercueils ; à droite, un malade est conduit en chaise au lazaret; au premier plan, un cadavre presque nu a été jeté dans une fosse béante, hors de la terre consacrée de la paroisse; au coin de l'enclos, un oratoire abrite !es statues de saint Sébastien et de saint Roch devant lesquelles un couple prie. Cette toile (véritable instantané pris sur le vif) illustre le moment où la mortalité croit tellement qu'il ne sera bientôt plus possible d'enterrer !es morts individuellement : ils seront alors déversés, sans même un linceul, dans des fosses ouvertes n'importe oú." (Jacqueline Brossollet et Henri Mollaret, Pourquoi la peste? le rat, la puce et le bubon (Découvertes Gallimard Sciences), Paris (Gallimard), 1994, pp. 42-43

"The strong passions of the heart, ruling Contagion, can be called the first grave-diggers of man. All the doctors proclaim with one voice that especially Rage, Melancholy, and Terror are cause for flight as much as the Plague itself . . . Thucydides recounts that in the very serious plague which he describes, the melancholic and fearful fell dead more than the others. Various doctors have observed likewise in their own times, and among others Sennerto attests that not a few have been taken by this disease from just the Terror conceived observing from afar, or even without seeing but only hearing that the funeral Cart was passing under their windows, on which were carried the corpses of the dead.
Others, frightened only by a funereal Dream, have so lost heart that, once fallen ill, they have eluded all treatment ... Once the imagination is wounded and the spirits and humours put into disordered
movement by some frightening spectacle, the pestilential poison is all too easily taken, and even without the plague people sometimes die of pure Consternation and Black Humour."
[L.A. Muratori, Li tre governi, politico, medico ed ecclesiastico, utilissimi, anzi necessari in tempo di peste, 3rd edn (Milan: Vigoni & Cairolo, 1721), p. 119] (Camporesi 1996, '7. 'Famine of Living' and 'Times of Suspicion'', p. 89)

Pieter Bruegel, Triomf van de dood [detail], 1562, schilderij, 160 x 120 cm, Madrid, Prado

"But in times of Suspicion - when one hears of 'cases of the plague far away, yes, but which necessitate the precautions of health observances, and of railings or gates, when one must force out of the City as from the State, within a few days, the beggars, vagabonds, gypsies, mendicants, lepers, invalids and similar sorts of people not engaged in some trade and without the will to procure their bread, if not by the all too comfortable begging for it' [Muratori, Li tre governi, p. 23] - the entire variegated universe of those on the margins of society, always and everywhere watched with suspicion and fear, became the potential vehicle of contagion and carrier of epidemics. And on the twelfth day of May, 1498, the Officials of Disease went around the hospitals, chased [them]  out [...], and wherever they were found throughout the city they sent them out of Florence.' [Luca Landucci, Diario fiorentino, dal 1450 al 1516, continued by an anonymus writer till 1542 (Florence: Sansoni, 1883), pp. 299-300] The pestilential disease reaped most of its victims from among the poorest people - labourers, small artisans[...]; among those who did not have the necessary means to leave the inhabited centres rapidly."

'Where the cities are of a large population and the families, mostly of the poor, live in close and crowded houses, the plague causes incredible slaughter . . . [F]or this reason in the quarters most
crowded and overflowing with poor inhabitants, when the disease has entered therein, a frightening desolation is seen in a short time. ' [Muratori, Li tre governi, p. 23] The conditions of those who were forced by indigence to remain in the city [...] became most difficult; the 'poor people' risked 'the manifest danger of dying then from hunger and hardship' [Muratori, Li tre governi, p. 22]: [...]
the poor of the city are without those people who could give them alms or provide them with work, and as a result every day they receive less from the granary and storehouse, so that they remain exposed to the daily risk of dying from hunger, not less than that of the plague. [Muratori, Li tre governi, p. 25]

Anonymus (German), 16th century, woodcut. © Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz / Jörg P. Anders

"In the 'afflicted city', dominated by the nightmare of the 'lazaret/slaughter house', [Muratori, Li tre governi, p. 96] smokey and malodorous from the vapours of sulphur, pitch, animals' horns (especially birds' beaks), old shoes, hair, nails and cattle manure, 'it is too easy for one to lose courage and die of fear, on seeing and hearing the ministers of the lazarets and grave-diggers go around with  horrible faces, odd clothes and frightening voices and carry away the sick and the healthy, the dead and the living, as long as there is something to pilfer. Nor can it be said what horror is inspired by the frequent  sound of their bells. ' [Muratori, Li tre governi, p. 97]

Johannes De Ketham, Fasciculus Medicine Antwerpen, Antwerpen (Claes De Grave), 1512
2 personnages sluiten hun neus af, de dokter draagt een spons, gedoopt in azijn
 om de veronderstelde geïnfecteerde lucht te filteren

In a world where the sad winds of Insecurity, Fear and Suspicion blew, the terror of the plague - multiplying the 'antidotes', internal and external 'preservatives', 'pouches', and 'amulets of arsenic', poisonous or innocuous - had as an unfailing consequence the realization of the 'great Chaos of Pharmaceutical Preservatives'. In this dance of prescriptions containing arsenic, sublimate, quicksilver, and of 'curative or preservative aromatic pouches', magic, superstitious practices and apotropaic astrology re-emerged - if ever they had been renounced - with unusual popularity and desperate impetus. The 'archaic attitudes' of the popular world and the magical base of its culture
shattered even the inconsistent rational barriers of a medical science more unsteady and contradictory than ever, groping in the dark.
'The astrologers and the superstitious have inverted many seals, medals, bulletins, rings, cards and similar things with figures, signs, numbers and even sacred words. Some, and mostly in Germany,
exalt and call a marvellous preservative the wearing of a dried toad hung from the neck - or burned and reduced to ash and enclosed in a pouch - during times of contagion. Others in the same manner recommend the wearing of Quicksilver, well closed and sealed with wax inside a walnut ... and they tell of its wonderful effect. According to others, Emerald, Sapphire, Hyacinth and other gems hung from the neck, in such a way that they touch the external regions of the heart, so frightens the plague that it dares not approach.' [Muratori, Li tre governi, p.128]
(Camporesi 1996, '7. 'Famine of Living' and 'Times of Suspicion'', pp. 89-91)