Healing the body politic: French royal doctors, history, and the birth of a nation 1560-1634.

Perhaps the most vivid image of the French religious wars is Francois Dubois' eyewitness painting of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre (1572). (1) This painting has all the qualities that appeal to an audience. It shows clerics, women, and even children murdered, their bodies strewn across Paris in pools of blood. Dubois' painting illustrates not only the drama of the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre (August 24, 1572), it also provides a window into how contemporaries viewed the religious strife at the end of the sixteenth century. They saw bodies strewn everywhere. (2) Both Protestant and Catholic thinkers visualized the crisis as an analogue of the human body. In perhaps the oldest political metaphor, at least as early as Plato's Republic, the state was perceived in the terms of a corpus mysticum with different parts. As Paul Archambault illustrates in his classic 1967 article, from the ancient world to the Renaissance, philosophers imagined states and countries in terms of a corporeal analogy. (3) In the bl oody fray of the sixteenth-century religious wars, this ancient metaphor had particular resonance, for the French body politic was seen as sick and wounded.

If Dubois produced an artistic expression of a wounded body politic, his fellow Protestant, Francois Hotman, produced perhaps the grandest historical reaction to the French religious wars. In 1573, living in the safety of Geneva, Hotman published his masterwork of political historiography, Francogallia. (4) In his preface, he gives his reasons for calling for the overthrow of tyrannical kings. Tyranny survives through bloodshed. He perceives the violence of the civil wars as an attack on the bodies of all Frenchmen and on the order of the French state itself:

For as I gave increasing attention to the cause of these calamities, it seemed to me that, even as our own bodies decay (whether by external blows and shocks, or by the inward corruption of humors, or by old age), so, too, do commonwealths perish, some by hostile attack, some by internal dissension, and some by senescence. (5)

Hotman proposes political history as a "remedy" to balance the bodily discord of France. He claims that ancient France was an orderly and well-governed place. And he assures his readers that learning the history of French government will help build a new republic based on the ancient harmony of a constitutional past. (6)

Dubois and Hotman's corporeal analogies are not in themselves extraordinary Doctors had long been connected to politics. Guillaume Cappel, a doctor, was the first to translate Machiavelli's The Prince into French (Paris, 1553). However, in late sixteenth-century France, something occurred that gave this analogy a deeper significance. At the close of the religious wars, royal doctors shared this vision of a wounded, unbalanced body politic. They not only treated the king's body, they also became royal counselors and suggested ways in which the king could treat the body of his kingdom. They wrote natural and political history as tools to help the king understand and "heal" the body of the state and its people. They claimed that an understanding of the "natural" traits of its people, geography, and climate would aid a prince in controlling the humors, health, and, ultimately, social and political behavior of his subjects. They thus transformed the ancient corporeal metaphor into tangible political policy.

Julian Franklin, J. H. M. Salmon, and Donald Kelley have all examined the growth of a secular, legal current in French absolutist government. Their fundamental work illustrates how the French crown turned to law and historical studies to consolidate political legitimacy and create an historical political science to gain and retain absolute power. (8) At the same time, however, they have overlooked the central role of the ancient medical tradition in the formation of historical political science and the royal conception of the French nation. (9) While lawyers offered the crown a culture of rational, source-based historical analysis, doctors recommended the study of nature to aid in governing. This article examines how the tragedy of the French religious wars, the birth of the absolutist state and the rise of empirical medicine converged at the end of the sixteenth century to produce a new, multi-faceted humanist political culture. (10) The corporeal analogy of the state led Henri IV to order his doctors to aid in healing the body politic. These royal doctors in turn entered politics confident that the Hippocratic and Galenic traditions of empirical, humanist medicine would help heal the potentially mortal wounds of civil war.

From the dawn of learned culture, doctors and political historians have shared a number of common scholarly practices and interests. Arnaldo Momigliano claimed that Thucydides took into consideration the Hippocratic concept of experience and observation. (11) Doctors sought to cure and prevent illnesses through prognosis, while political historians and philosophers tried to find methods to control political outcomes through the idea of prudence, the virtue by which one navigates the obstacles of human life to find happiness. In The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle connects the metaphor of the ship's helmsman to civil ethics and medicine. In matters of "conduct" and "expediency;" medicine provides the surest method to attain virtue. (12) Mirroring the definition of political prudence and building on Hippocrates, Galen's definition of medical prognosis also uses the metaphor of the helmsman:

In our opinion, a skilled helmsman is one who can predict disturbances long before their time from (certain) indicative signs, and will anchor immediately if he finds a harbor nearby. Should deep water prevent him from anchoring, he would apply every means to guard and protect his ship against damage and without haste, before the onset of terror and confusion. Similarly, the best physicians should be able to foresee whatever is likely to happen to their patients. They should take precautionary measures, a long time in advance, by getting ready and by preparing everything that might be needed against whatever might occur. (13)

To navigate, doctors and princes would have to use the same tools of rhetoric. In order to postulate rules for medical prognosis and for political prudence, they would have to induce general principles from past exempla and observation. (14)

Restoring the glow of ancient wisdom, the pioneering champions of Florentine civic humanism were the first effectively to connect medicine, politics, and civil law. In 1399, Coluccio Salutati (1331-1406), the great humanist chancellor of Florence, wrote De nobilitate legum et medicina, an attempt to create a legal civil science to prevent tyranny. (15) Drawing primarily on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and Cicero's De officiis and De legibus, he compared medicine and law to create a civil "science of certainty." (16) The Nicomachean Ethics and De officiis both concern man's place in nature, his relationship to animal instincts and the attempt to bring reason into politics. Salutati's originality lies in making a detailed study of the principles of medicine in the context of civil science. Through an understanding of medicine, the "reason of nature" could be applied to the reason of morals while the workings of the body and soul could be used to understand the workings of the state. (17) In the end, however, Salutati contends that medicine is inferior to both law and political prudence. (18) Civil law, he claims, was better suited than medicine to the creation of a code of ethics and to understanding and controlling the human soul. (19)

With the decline of civic humanism one hundred years later, Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) sought to create a purely pragmatic political science based on prudenza. With his characteristic bluntness, he stated that princes should think like doctors. (20) Both had to use a knowledge of past particulars to deal with the present. Both prognosticated to take preventative action for the future. (21) Herbert Butterfield has maintained that Machiavelli used the medical metaphor in formulating the first modern inductive political science. (22) Yet one did not need to be a Machiavellian prince to think in medical terms. Searching for a via media between the reality of sixteenth-century politics and Christian ethics, Erasmus echoed his Florentine predecessor when he claimed that the prince needed to be "physician to the state." (23) Following on the heels of Machiavelli's The Prince, Erasmus' Education of the Christian Prince (1516) claimed that doctors and princes both needed to use prudence, for they resembled helmsm en for whom any error in judgment could sink a ship. (24)

If princes were to think like doctors, doctors for their part began to think like princes. Always close to the prince in any court, medical men were useful vessels of humanism poised to mix natural and human learning. (25) As Nancy Siraisi has shown, beginning in the Middle Ages, medical practitioners revived the ancient tradition of the historie and began writing narratives of particular illnesses. (26) Humanist doctors expanded this practice and were avid writers of history at the very moment that the "Renaissance sense of the past" was taking shape. (27) Carrying with them the baggage of Greek empiricism, humanist doctors thought in historical terms, taking into account the "analysis of causes and the recollection of particulars." (28) Like their classical predecessors, humanist doctors wrote histories of their own experiences as well as biographies of other doctors. (29) By the mid-sixteenth century, French doctors included medical biographies and autobiographies in works that were otherwise medical. For example, at the end of his collected works on surgery and medicine, the Calvinist military surgeon Ambroise Pare (1517-90), included a section entitled, "Apologie et traicte contenant les voyages faits en divers lieux." (30) In the Galenic tradition, this section is a semi-autobiographical work that contains Pare's medical observations from the time of his service as the king's military doctor. (31)

The relationship between medicine and history was not simply based on a shared rhetoric of exempla used in the explanation of causes. The medical tradition furnished analytical tools to the great legal scholar, Jean Bodin (1529-96), in his attempt to create a universal history of mankind, the world, and the cosmos. (32) In his Method for the Easy Comprehension of History (1566), Bodin ambitiously outlined his project for a new kind of universal, encyclopedic history. In a complex way, Bodin fulfilled Machiavelli's challenge to create an applied political science. (33) Drawing on earlier propositions by Francois Baudouin and Christophe Milieu, Bodin expanded the range of history to make "a portrait of the human race" and of political constitutions. (34) However, Bodin went further than his predecessors. In his project to bring "natural explanations into the field of human behavior and politics," he did something that the ancients never did: he mixed political and natural history. (35)

Bodin's interests were eclectic even in the context of Renaissance learned culture. (36) To create an applied political science, he turned not only to historians, but also to works of medical and natural history. He consulted the works of Hippocrates, Galen, Polybius, Strabo, and Livy along with more standard political historians. Bodin felt that to understand human history, it was necessary to understand human physiology. Bodin's approach, claims Marie-Dominique Couzinet, sought a form of political "therapy" for the "social body." (37)

Echoing Hippocrates' founding work, Airs, Waters and Places, and Galen's subsequent idea that the four elements of earth, fire, air, and water make up the physical universe, Bodin set out to understand how nature -- the stars, climate, and geography -- influenced the moral, behavioral and political characteristics of various peoples and countries. (38) Book V of the Methodus looks more like Pliny the Elder's Natural History than it does the royal chronicles, or even the civic histories of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. His work would act as an inspiration to Enlightenment visionaries of nationalism such as Montesquieu. (39) Yet how influential was his approach at the end of the sixteenth century?

In his quest to outline the principles of earthly wisdom in his Traite de la Sagesse (1601), Montaigne's famous disciple Pierre Charron (1541-1603) quoted passages from Bodin's theories of climate and government. (40) Rather than a legal theory of politics, Charron, a priest, turned to the Stoic philosophy of Seneca, the historical works of the Roman historian Tacitus and their neo-Stoic heir, Justus Lipsius (1547-1606). He set out to formulate a political wisdom capable of controlling the dangerous passions of religious fanaticism and the mob. (41) The fear of civil and religious strife is a major theme in the second book of De la Sagesse. Charron warns of "factions," "leagues," "popular emotions," "sedition," "tyranny," and "civil war." (42) To control the "vulgar," "base," and "mechanical" populace the prince must, in effect, rule desire. (43) Passions and humors affect the body, thus the state must study the body to maintain political and natural order. (44)

Secondly, in regard to vice, chaos and injustice that are found in passions, we can more or less compare man to a republic, and the state of the soul to the royal state, for which the sovereign, in order to govern so many people, turns to magistrates, to whom he gives laws and regulations for the exercise of their duties, in which are held the knowledge of the greatest and most important accidents. (45)

Where Bodin was interested in the creation of a historical political method based on natural knowledge, Charron recommends a personal form of prudence for the individual and the prince. The physical characteristics of the human body directly affect politics through humors and passions. One must, he insists, know the "humors and naturals of peoples" and the "natural of the state" in order to effectively apply the "remedy of prudence" to manage the accidents and troubles inherent in politics. (46) The first section of the first book of De la Sagesse concerns the "knowledge of one's self, and of the human condition." (47) It examines in detail the make-up of the human body and its senses, emotions, and passions. With this knowledge, the sovereign can manage the body of the state. (48)

At the same time, Charron was not completely convinced that the science of observation, history, and natural knowledge was the best thing for the state. In the last book of De la Sagesse, he warns that "science is particular, unnecessary; servile, mechanical, melancholy, opinionated, and presumptuous." (49) "Sagesse," or true wisdom, is something different. Charron was never completely willing to put his faith solely in the earthly wisdom of political prudence and nature. An aristocratic priest, he believed that wisdom in affairs of stare above all needed to come from the "natural" and "modest nobility" of innate beauty and peace. (50) It is barbarous to think, he says in reference to a quote from Thucydides, that utility should come before laws. (51) Bodin would surely have agreed. Thus Charron called for a knowledge of the body and its passions, yet he hesitated to turn to systematic scientific study.

If political theorists rejected a systematically scientific approach to politics, does the story of medicine and its relationship to politics end here? Is it necessary to wait until the eighteenth century for natural science to permeate the conception of human politics? The answer is no. If we leave the confines of the discipline of the history of political philosophy and turn to medical theory, we find that doctors in fact addressed in systematic detail the question of how natural knowledge relates to politics. (52)

By the turn of the sixteenth century, the terms of the corporeal metaphor had become more complex than previously. The metaphor of the body was nor limited to the state. Since ancient Hebrew and Greek times, books and wisdom have been conceived in terms of a "corpus." (53) This biblio-metaphor persisted in medieval and Renaissance thought. As Ernst Curtius so elegantly illustrated, from Shakespeare to Descartes, thinkers used the metaphor of the book to describe human bodies as well as nature. (54) In the sixteenth century, the great empirical curmudgeon Paracelsus revolutionized medical studies by insisting that observation rake precedence over written authority. He claimed that physicians should instead "read" the sick and learn from their ailments. Nature, he claimed, was a series of books, written by God. To read these books, one would have to wander the earth observing, for its pages could only be turned by the movement of the feet. (55) By the early seventeenth century, Descartes professed to cast away book-learning altogether with the intention of going our into the world to "read" his earthly surroundings. (56)

The book of the body of nature had a special significance in the world of medical humanism. Alongside the spread of Paracelsian medical empiricism, a greater revolution occurred in the field of anatomy. Not since the ancient world had human cadavers been opened and so systematically studied. (57) The practice of anatomical dissection for teaching purposes began in about 1300 in Italy and later spread to the rest of Europe. (58) In 1315 in Bologna, Mondino dei Liuzzi (1270-1326) was an influential force in the revival of medical dissection. The first printed edition of his Anathomia went through twenty-three editions between its first printing in Pavia in 1478 and 158O. (59) Anatomical studies thrived in the new world of printed books, where, by 1555, engravings rather than woodcuts compellingly illustrated anatomical observations. (60) Even Charles Estienne, the printer of Cappel's translation of Machiavelli and brother of the legendary humanist printer, Robert Estienne, combined anatomy with the high art of humanist printing to produce his lavish De dissectione partium corporis humani (1545), which contained sixty-two full folio illustration plates. However, it was Andreus Vesalius (1514-64) who set the standard for the anatomical sciences with his De humani corpora fabrica (1543), a work of unprecedented accuracy and scope. Not only did he send his printer, Joannes Oporinus, himself a professor of Greek, detailed instructions on how to correlate his text and his illustrations, in 1543 he went to Basel to oversee the printing of the book himself. (61)

Vesalius' work was far more complete and accurate than any previous work of anatomy and through his beautiful printed edition, the world had an ever clearer vision of the inner architecture of the body and its organs. As Andrea Carlino has shown, this revolution in anatomy and the printed culture of medical learning changed the very nature of the corporeal metaphor. The notion of the body became more complex and at the same time demystified. Painters searching for realism turned to these diagrams of skeletons and muscles. (62) As Vesalius stared into the crevices of the human body, so curious political thinkers began to stare into the shadowy recesses of the workings of the corpus mysticum of the state.

In November 1613, Madame Elisabeth, the daughter of Henri IV and Marie de Medicis, fell ill with a fever. For nine days she lay gripped with a dangerous dysentery. Henri IV's personal doctor and counselor, Rodolphe Le Maistre, took charge of the situation. An accomplished Montpelliertrained humanist, Le Maistre described his observations of the princess illness in a work entitled La Santd du Prince. Ou le soing qu'on y doibt observer (1614). (63) After a close examination of Madame's exeretuis, Le Maistre, drawing on Hippocrates, concluded that rather than a bleeding, a purgation was necessary. Contrary to the practices of the rime, Le Maistre was always hesitant to bleed royal patients. (64) He considered royal blood too important to risk in a procedure he felt was "inexact and imprudent." (65) From observing his royal patient, Le Maistre drew the following political maxim: "Those who run towards the Enemy without proper reconnaissance are subject to repentance, & they risk being considered rash." (66) Put s imply, a medical error on the royal body is an affair of state. (67)

La Sante du Prince reflects an extraordinary convergence of natural and historical learned culture. In his dedication to Marie de Medicis, Le Maistre invokes the classical pillars of political prudence. The prince must employ observation, experience, and history to rule the state effectively. (68) However, there is a twist. Who better to give counsel to a king than a doctor versed in the ways of observation and prognosis? (69) Le Maistre's book is a series of fifteen "histories" covering the health of the royal family during a sixyear period. (70) It serves to illustrate his own ability to "discern danger and find remedies." Much like Ambroise Pare's "Apologies," and Turquet de Mayerne's (1573-1655) Epistole, the histories are a mix of a medical log and political history. (71) In each case, Le Maistre describes a royal malady followed by the medical politics of treating it: the opinions of other doctors, the correct remedy, and the negotiations, arguments, and ruses involved in applying the remedy. It is a so rt of social history of how to be an effective royal doctor. Interspersed in these narratives are general maxims about the pitfalls of medicine and the difficulty of treating and serving princes.

The rhetorical practice of inducing maxims from observations was a staple of both the Hippocratic tradition of aphorisms and the humanist political tradition that sought to extract knowledge from historical texts, representing it in easily applicable maxims of statecraft. Peter Burke has noted that, by the sixteenth century; both the Hippocratic and the Tacitean traditions sought to teach methods of prognosis through the inductive rhetoric of aphorisms. (72) Expert in Greek and Latin as well as in the Hippocratic and Galenic approaches to observation, analysis, and description, Le Maistre was both a classical scholar and translator of Tacitus and a court doctor. Not surprisingly, he wrote commentaries on the Aphorisms of Hippocrates and translated a collection of medical and philosophical maxims. (73) He believed that the medical principles of knowing and governing one's own body could be applied to governing the body of the state. In his dedication to Gaston d'Orleans, he claims that his book contains "good counsels" on how to use the teachings of Galen to become a better prince. (74) As one poem found in the works of Le Maistre describes, controlling the "perturbations of one's spirit" aids in "judgment and prudence":

Maintain thus Reason, in the highest established place,
Those who maintain their senses, bridle their appetites:
They keep their senses fastened under their yoke:
And thus Reason is always followed by Prudence. (75)

He never succeeded in teaching Gaston d'Orleans to control his passions, but throughout his works, Le Maistre stuck to his theme of mixing medical observation with pragmatic politics. In his role as preceptor to Henry IV's children, he wrote L'Institution du Prince. Ensemble La Sagesse des Anci ens (1613). Repeating an absolutist mantra of the day, Le Maistre insisted that an effective ruler needed to be schooled in the art of prudence. (76) He posed the question of political education in natural terms: "Prudence, which is the perfection of man, is not hereditary: it comes from Experience and by Instruction." (77) The young heir to the throne would need to learn the "observation of politics, and the contemplation of Counsels, Enterprises, and the great Plans of Great Princes, & Great Republics." (78) For this "serious Instruction of both the Body and Soul," the young Louis XIII would need to study "History." (79)

A man used to prescribing medicine, Le Maistre now prescribed history. Le Tibere Francais, ou les six Premiers livres des Annales de Cornelius Tacitus (1616, 2nd ed.) links Le Maistre's classical medical training with the humanist tradition of translating Tacitus. (80) At the turn of the sixteenth century in France, counselors and scholars close to the French throne began a movement of translating Tacitus. (81) Of the eleven individuals who translated Tacitus between 1582 and 1660, eight were either royal counselors or were in some way connected to the throne and five were members of the Academic Francaise. (82) Amongst these works, Le Maistre's stands out, for not only is he the only doctor to translate Tacitus, he is the only author who claims that Henri IV personally commanded him to translate the "Oracle of Princes." (83) Most interestingly, Le Maistre takes up Hotman's theme. France has been broken by civil war; now prudence must repair the kingdom. However, where Hotman sought a return to ancient freedoms and a balanced monarchy, Le Maistre in contrast sees observation and history as tools of the absolutist cause. Plagiarizing a passage from Justus Lipsius, he claimed that France's problem was that its order had become unbalanced: "The PEOPLES have mutinied against Royalty" (84) He promises that the maxims of Tacitus will help the monarch control sedition, revolting armies, plots, the reign of unbridled liberty and an agitated senate. (85) Taking the ancient corporeal metaphor literally, Le Maistre had found a cure which he could prescribe and even provide in person.

If, as Antoine de Baecque has claimed, the metaphor of the king's body and the state allowed eighteenth-century revolutionaries to "describe and imagine the degeneration of the nobility and the impotence" of Louis XVI, the sixteenth-century metaphor instead gave the crown the intellectual tools to construct a new national imaginary. (86) De Baecque maintains that during the revolution, sovereignty passed from the body of the king to the greater body of citizens of the republic. (87) Yet the work of Le Maistre and the tide page of Hobbes' Leviathan illustrate that absolutists already saw the "people" as the body of the nation with the king at its head. (88) In any case, their two bodies were inextricably intertwined. Long before the tide of public opinion turned against the king's body, Le Maistre used the corporeal metaphor to build an empirical political science to aid in the regeneration of a healthy kingdom and people. (89) He used history, but it was to situate the king's body, the state, and its people a ll as objects of observation and control. Eighteenth-century revolutionaries neither created the corporeal metaphor, nor the new popular nation. Instead, they modified the existing humanist metaphor of the national body by cutting off its head. (90)

While Rodolphe Le Maistre's interests brought together practical medicine with daily politics, his fellow royal doctor Abraham-Nicolas de La Framboisiere (1560-1636) was a more a theoretical philosopher. La Framboisiere sought to create a total system of royal, natural philosophy based on medical principles. In the dedication to Louis XIII of his collected works, he suggests that the concept of politics not be limited to a city or a province, but rather that it should be perceived in the wider terms of "Human Health." (91)

La Framboisiere posed the same problem as Rodolphe Le Maistre. A ruler who desires "stable and constant" subjects must learn the "nature" of their bodies. Thus human laws must be consistent with the laws of nature.

In particular, during times of strife, he claims that natural philosophy can be used as a weapon in human affairs and statecraft to limit uprisings and the power of "les Grands" -- those great aristocrats who menace royal authority.

In nature, a PRINCIPALITY will recognize an arsenal filled with all sorts of necessary arms to attack & overthrow the cruel tyrants of our bodies, to combat and chase away the sworn enemies of our health, who come from every corner to ambush and surprise us, & who openly make war to trample over us, & trouble the state of our natural disposition. These are not at all the weapons of Mars, but those of Apollo: They do not deprive life, rather they bar death. (92)

Natural philosophy offered more than a simple weapon. In allying royal statecraft with science, La Framboisiere fashioned a new role for the monarch. War and religious strife unbalanced the old order. He offered the king a return to order on new terms, going beyond the old interdependent cosmography of medieval feudalism. (93) Order is returned, but the king stands over it -- like a doctor rather than a god -- using a mastery of nature to observe and maintain the "order of the Architecture." (94)

In his quest to illustrate the process of Max Weber's "disenchantment of the western world," Marcel Gauchet observes that absolutist monarchs altered the old Christian cosmography. (95) He echoes W. H. Greenleaf's thesis that humanist natural philosophy was a potential threat to the unity of medieval cosmography and political order. (96) When kings sought new methods of imposing power through secular means, they discarded the religious legitimacy that arose through their mediating agency between heaven and earth. The transformation of royal power occurred when what Gauchet calls the "sovereign organ" of royal power "objectified" society in order to control the "collective body." (97) Rather than an intermediary between God and earth, the monarchy became the ever more secular head of the national entity. Before Gauchet, S. K. Heninger pointed out that

Renaissance poets emulated divine creation in the use of metaphors to build a finite version of God's infinite natural cuvre. (98) In representing the body as an analogy for the "people" and then observing it as an object, Gauchet suggests that the French monarchy conceived the terms for the invention of a national entity.

Gauchet's idea of the "objectifying state" justly describes La Framboisiere's new vision of monarchy. Old authority gave way to new tools of "rational" power. In his "Panegyric," La Framboisiere maintains that although the king's authority is biological -- salic and hereditary -- the king must also rely on natural philosophy to maintain order. (99) To rule the "government of France, the king must in fact rule the government of Nature." (100) Quoting Euripides, he unashamedly compares the natural philosopher king to a god without immortality, "Un Roy comme un Grand Dieu vie en sa Royaute, rien ne luy peut manquer hors l'immortalite." (101) Before Descartes and eventually Newton turned God into a technician, La Framboisiere's doctor-architect king ruled over a mechanical and natural kingdom:

It is a great happiness to command so many people who are so sublime in spirit, so opulent in wealth, so great in force, & with his little finger he makes function all his machines, & he applies them to his designs, like an Architect does with the pieces of his building. (102)

In this context, says La Framboisiere, philosophy is what a king must use to govern a republic. Man rules animals by reason, but man must rule man by the "order of discourse, which Logicians call, Method." (103) Method is a God-given tool that connects divinity to human understanding. (104) La Framboisiere claims to have used the method of the order of learning to "construct" his book, which he calls a "Temple of Medicine," (105) a mirror of the order of "Citizens in a City." (106) First, he claims that the prince must know the natural history of his kingdom and of the universe. Second, he must know medicine and pharmacy to diagnose and treat problems. Finally, the king must know the liberal arts to apply his knowledge and express himself. (107) "In that way, the Principality of nature serves the understanding of affairs of State, & for acquiring the capacity to Royally command one's subjects." (108) Not only should kings receive the prudence and authority provided by "Natural History," so ministers of state should learn "the Anatomy that shows the eye the admirable construction of the body." (109)

Henri IV made sure that his son followed the instructions in the works of Le Maistre and La Framboisiere. He surrounded him with humanist physicians. The young Louis XIII's official preceptor was Jean Heroard (1551-1628), who had already been the doctor to kings Charles IX and Henri III. (110) A converted Catholic from a Protestant family, Heroard is best known for writing an extraordinary journal that contains a day-by-day account of Louis XIII's medical, psychological, intellectual, and personal life between the ages of one to twenty-six. (111) It is a monument to Galenic observational culture gone mad. In 2,500 manuscript folios, Heroard's brief, observational notes reveal the daily diet, fluids and solids, health, social and sexual behavior, psychological state, and education of the young king.

Where Le Maistre's Histoires examines fifteen cases, Heroard's Journal measures thousands upon thousands of daily cases for his one royal patient.

Heroard is mentioned by Le Maistre in La Sante du Prince, and Heroard even owned a copy of La Framboisiere's (Euvres. (112) Not only did he examine the king's body, he, like his two colleagues, recommended that the king use medical empiricism to rule his kingdom in his De l'Institution du Prince (1609). Heroard's princely manual is a less sophisticated version of the works of Le Maistre and La Framboisiere. As one of the figures closest to Louis XIII, perhaps he knew what sort of material the king would most likely read. He begins his book by comparing the human body to the body of the state. (113) He then compares himself to Philip of Macedonia's personal doctor, Nicomachus, in order to prove to the king that doctors should not limit themselves to the pure practice of medicine. He insists that the king use "Empiricism of State" just as a doctor would use it on a human body to maintain its healthy balance which is threatened by unexpected disasters: (114)

One also sees that the body of a State, whatever form it has taken, is composed in the same way [as a human body]: & maintains its integrity by an exact observation of the good & diverse laws, & falls just as quickly by ambition, avarice, or prodigality, or by some other similar cause, one sees their forces failing, & their vigor fading, & slipping away in decadence according to the weakness, or strength of the body. (115)

Employing the same terms as La Framboisiere, Heroard recommends that the king learn natural philosophy to apply observation to statecraft. Beginning with letters and arts, the king will learn,

the correct use of reason, offered by the sciences of the knowledge of natural things, of their numbers & of their effects, of solid bodies, as well as of human understanding by proportions & diverse measurements, & without moving from his place, he will go around the world, climb to the heavens, & see clearly the means by which he can build machines, in order to in the end understand by history the state, & the nature of worldly affairs. (116)

Much like La Framboisiere's "Temple of Medicine," Heroard insists that to govern, the king must learn the liberal arts and the natural sciences. His justification is the same as that of Le Maistre and La Framboisiere. With clear reference to the religious wars, Heroard warns that the king must always be ready for the "fury and violence of accidents" and that only "prudence" can possibly lift up the "poor, battered and fallen carcass" of the state. (117) In turn, the king's "preceptor" should teach prudence to help the king "pilot" his own body and the government. (118) Keeping within the traditional definition of prudence, Heroard recommends that the king gain experience with his own eyes and by reading history. (119)

This program of empirical, scientific statecraft was part of a larger cultural movement around the French throne. In 1598, Justus Lipsius, the great Dutch scholar of Tacitus, published his Politicorum sive civilis doctrine libri sex, which sought to teach princely prudence through historical examples, many drawn from the Roman historian. 120 French absolutists applied Lipsius' model in their own royal manuals. In his Morales. L'institution du jeune prince (1607), dedicated to Louis XIII and partly plagiarized from Lipsius' Politica, Adam Theveneau, a lawyer, suggests a radical change in the function of the prince. (121) Rather than the heart of the body of the nation, he insists that the king use political prudence to be the "eye" of the state. (122) In the prudential tradition of Lipsian Tacitism, Theveneau's ideal king was less the father of the nation than its primary and rather alienated observer: he would have to step out of his inherited and natural place to learn his craft through experience and the re ading of history.

Royal doctors merged the greater rigor of the medical tradition to the Tacitist pedagogical movement. With their physical proximity to the royal body, they could actually hand books to the king and, in the case of Heroard, he assigned them as royal reading. In her work on Heroard, Madelaine Foisil reproduces the inventory of Heroard's personal library as well as the list of books he assigned as reading to Louis XIII that both illustrate the convergence of historical and medical empirical culture. The inventory mentions forty-four works under what appear to be Foisil's headings of piety and theology, philosophy, history, medicine and surgery, science and natural science, and literature. Louis XIII's personal tutor was a reader of Girolamo Savonarola, Jean Calvin, and the Koran!rrr

If Heroard's religious beliefs remain ambiguous, his interest in works of observation was not. Among his books were a seven-volume edition of Aristotle's works, the Histories by Herodotus and Thucydides, the works of Tacitus, and the Antiquites Gauloises (Paris, 1599) by Claude Fauchet, a translator of Tacitus. (123) Along with critical political history and antiquarianism, Heroard owned works from his own profession: several different editions of Galen and Hippocrates; and the Opera of Andrea Mattioli, the great Italian empiricist expert on materia medica. (124) His other medical works most notably included Jean Riolan's Opera anatomica (Paris, 1609), Alexander Massaria's Practica medica (Frankfort, 1601), Girolamo Mercuriale's Commentarii ... in Hippocratis Prognostica (Venice, 1597), Francois I's Italian physician, Vidus Vidius' Ars medicinalis (Venice, 1611), Jacques Guillemeau's luxurious, illustrated CEuvres de chirurgie, and the same 1613 edition of Abraham-Nicolas de La Framboisiere's CEuvres that we have already discussed. The works on natural history include an unidentified Livre de la nature des plantes; (125) several volumes of Conrad Gesner's Historia animalium; (126) and an unidentified Anatomie et infirmite du Cheval (Heroard had also practiced as a veterinarian). Finally, as in any good French humanist library, Heroard owned several Greek and Latin dictionaries and a copy of Lucian's Works.

Heroard's library is a bibliographical realization of La Framboisiere's "Temple of Medicine" which combined natural history with medicine, the liberal arts, and human politics. His intellectual interests and influences resembled those of Le Maistre and La Framboisiere, and we know that he tried to apply the theories in his Institution du prince as pedagogical practice.

Heroard records in his journal that he assigned several of the books in his library as reading to Louis XIII. Even in the context of the French Renaissance, the image of a five-year old perusing the pages of Gesner, Vitruvius, Mattioli, and Alciato seems unrealistically virtuous. While admitting that Louis had little intellectual inclination, Heroard claims that these were the books he made Louis read. In the July, 1605 entry, Heroard notes that Louis demanded to see "le livre ou est le lion," referring to the Gesner's work of animals. (127) At such a young age, Louis surely never gained an empirical method from reading lavishly illustrated works of anatomy, natural history, and geography. Yet Heroard's reading list reveals a particular vision of what he felt the young king should know. Louis was neither a brilliant king nor a man of letters. Besides a propensity for hunting, we can never know if he retained any interest in the natural studies to which Le Maistre, La Framboisiere, and Heroard exposed him. In any case, he learned enough to put his trust in Cardinal Richelieu and his method of reason of state. Nothing, Richelieu says in his Political Testament, is more important to a state than foresight. He specifies that ministers of government, like doctors, must use prudence to prognosticate dangers before they arrive. (28)

Although it is difficult to assess fully the influence of these doctors, their aspirations are clear. They envisioned a new monarchy, whose power was based on rational, observational techniques aimed at the unification and pacification of the kingdom. They offer a window into the burgeoning culture of the modern state at a crucial moment. At a time when science sat at the same table with astrology and a belief in witchcraft, absolutism was neither a simple political theory nor the reasoned product of an inevitable march towards empiricism. It was a meeting point between science and magic that reflected the cracks already growing deep within the cosmology of Christendom. French absolutists ignored Francis Bacon's complaint that vulgar, ignorant men and princes should not carelessly unroll the volume of nature in the simple search for political power. They tried to repair the hierarchy of the heavens and the world -- so gravely damaged by Luther and Galileo -- on an absolutist plan. (129) It appears, as Marcel Gauchet suggests, that without being fully aware of the extent of their political innovation, they put into motion a scientific revolution in politics that ultimately undermined royal mystical authority. (130) By formulating an empirical vision of kingship, these doctors aided in radically altering the place of the monarchy in the great chain of being. In an attempt to imagine and then grasp the body of the nation, absolutist monarchs brought political science behind the curtain of the infinite authority of medieval religious hierarchy. Yet, as Michel Foucault has remarked, the very nature of empiricism implies finitude. (131) Perhaps unintentionally, kings found themselves in the all-too-human realm of the "order of things." The body of their kingdom and their own royal head were indeed less imaginary than natural, physical, and finite. They would ultimately learn this basic lesson of medicine two hundred years later, in the cold science of Dr. Guillotin. (132)

RUTGERS UNIVERSITY, CAMDEN

(1.) Dubois' painting is found in the Musee Cantonal des Beaux Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland. Dubois was a Protestant who witnessed the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, and only barely escaped. Both Marie de Medicis and the Duke de Guise figure in his historical painting.

(2.) On the connection between bodies and violence in the religious wars see Crouzer, 115-27.

(3.) Archambault; see also Greenleaf's reading of the metaphor of the body politic in the sixteenth century and Craig, 137.

(4.) Hotman wrote his work six years earlier in 1567.

(5.) Hotman, 1972, 142-43. This edition contains the Latin text with an English translation as well as a remarkably erudite historical introduction by the editors (3-134). For the original French translation see Hotman, 1999, pref., 9.

(6.) Mesnard, 331.

(7.) The classic historical tradition of studying the French king's body in the realm of religion, politics, and law begins with Kantorowicz, 195-232, and is continued by his heirs at the University of Iowa, Giesey, 19-49, and Hanley see the various maxims of the metaphor of the body listed in the index, 383. Also see French literary studies of royal corporality, Apostolides, 1981, 1985; Boureau; Marin; Merlin-Kajman, 7-20.

(8.) Franklin; Kelley 1970; Salmon, 1987, 119-35.

(9.) Medicine at the Courts does not examine the role of doctors in the formulation of political and historical theory.

(10.) See Foucault, xiii, for an early insistence that the history of science in the sixteenth century be seen as a complex and often contradictory subject. More specifically, Kelley stated in 1973 that humanist historians such as Jean Bodin came from an electic intellectual tradition. Recently, Anthony Grafton and Nancy Siraisi have reiterated the idea that humanist philosophies were formulated in contexts often much broader than our often artificial modern academic disciplines allow. Kelley, 1973, 123-24; Grafton, 1999, 15. Cardano's intellectual complexity is underlined in Rowland's review of Grafton's work, 29. Also see Siraisi, 2000, 5. Miller, 26-27, equally illustrates the intellectual eclecticism of humanism.

(11.) Momigliano, 1985, 11.

(12.) Aristotle, II.i.7-II.ii.9.

(13.) See Galen, 1988, 49; and 1979. On his methods of demonstration and deduction see Lloyd.

(14.) On the common rhetorical approach of medicine and politics see Siraisi, 1991, 586.

(15.) Garin, "Introduction," in Salutati, vii-lviii at xlvi.

(16.) Salutati, 17.

(17.) Ibid., 17, 36.

(18.) Ibid., 83-139, 215.

(19.) Ibid., 99. Also see Poggio Bracciolini's short treatise, Utra artium medicina an iuris civils, prastet, in La disputa, 15-33.

(20.) Machiavelli, 1553, 98.

(21.) Siraisi, 2000, 1.

(22.) On the relationship between Machiavelli's political history and the natural sciences, see Butterfield's analysis of Machiavelli's historical practices and the rise of the inductive method (59.86).

(23.) Erasmus, 97.

(24.) Ibid., 82, 141.

(25.) See the various essays in Medicine at the Courts.

(26.) Siraisi, 1991, 587.

(27.) Siraisi, 2000, 3. On the concept of the "renaissance idea of the past" illustrated with useful examples, see Burke, 1969.

(28.) On Greek medical empiricism see the classic work by Edelstein, 195-203.

(29.) Siraisi, 2000,4. On doctors writing natural history see Cook, 95-105. On the classical heritage of French humanist medicine see Medical World, 85-107.

(30.) Pare, 1190-1228. For a standard biography see Dumaitre. For general studies of the cultural context of Pare's work see Ambroise Pare.

(31.) On Pare's work in context see Medical World, 105.

(32.) On Bodin's interdisciplinary history see in general Kelley, 1973. Also see Couzinet, 299-303. On Bodin's eclectic cosmography see Lestringant, 277-89.

(33.) Greenleaf, 125-41.

(34.) Kelley, 1973, 140-41.

(35.) Ibid., 141.

(36.) On the relationship between natural and human learning in Bodin's works see Ibid., 23-25; Couzinet, 19-30; and Blair, 3-13.

(37.) Couzinet, 126-30, Even the use of the concept of "method" has deep medical connotations in the Galenic tradition that equated a "methodist" school with empirical, observational medicine, as opposed to a philosophical, speculative branch. On the Galenic empirical tradition and the connection between politics and medical geography see Frede, "Introduction," in Galen, 1985, ix, xxix-xxxi.

(38.) On Bodin's Hippocratic influences, his cosmology and its relationship to politics as well as a contextualization of his thinking on nature see Glacken, 434-47. Also see the classic study of Bodin's work on climate and peoples: Tooley, 68-69. On the history of national custom and ethnicity see Kelley, 1990, 83-100.

(39.) Fournol, 117.

(40.) Charron, I:322-33. This is a reprint of the very useful critical edition of 1824 by Amaury Duval. See his notes on Charron's citation of Bodin: I:326 n.8; 331, n.24.

(41.) Pintard, 60-61. On the idea that "science" and moral philosophy were inseparable for humanists see Tuck's introduction to Hobbes, ix-xlv, at xxi.

(42.) Charron, II:398. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted: "Les emotions populaires sont causees par les factions, les ligues, la tyrannie, et produisent les seditions et les guerres civiles."

(43.) Ibid., I:396: "Le peuple (nous entendons icy le vulgaire, la tourbe, er lie populaire, gens, soubs, quelque couvert que ce soit, de basse, servile, et mechanique condition) est une besre a plusieurs testes." Also see II:398, where Charron describes that the prince must act to calm his people and stop them from following "emotions populaires."

(44.) "Ibid., II:296.

(45.) Ibid., I:148: Secondement pour le regard du vice, desreiglement et injustice qui est en ces passions, nous pouvons a peu pres comparer l'homme a une republique, et l'estat de l'ame a un estat royal, auquel le souverain pour le gouvernement de tant de peuples a des magistrats, ausquels pour l'exercice de leurs charges il donne loix et reiglemens, se reservant la cognoissance des plus grands et importans accidens.

(46.) Ibid., II:295-96, 400. Charron recommends Machiavelli as a good source for extracting "remedies" of prudence (407): "La premiere chose requise avant toute oeuvre, est la cognoissance de l'estat: car la premiere reigle de toute prudence est en la cognoissance, comme a este dict au livre precedent .... Parquoy d'autant que cette prudence regente et moderatrice des estats, qui est une adresse et suffisance de gouverner en public, est chose relative qui se manie et traicre entre les souverains et les subjects: le debvoir et office premier d'icelle, est en la cognoissance des deux parties, scavoir des peuples et de la souverainete, c'est a dire de l'estat. II faut donc premierement bien cognoistre les humeurs et naturels des peuples (295-96)."

(47.) Ibid., I:1: Qui est la cognoissance de soy, et de l'humaine condition.

(48.) Ibid., II:290.

(49.) Ibid., III:93: La science est particuliere, non necessaire, ny gueres urile, point active: servile, mechanique, melancholique, opiniastre, presomptueuse.

(50.) Ibid., II:287, III: 268.

(51.) Ibid., II:300-01.

(52.) Anthony Grafton has exhorted modern historians to break through the boundaries of modern academic disciplines to study humanist knowledge in its own interdisciplinary context; "Introduction," xi, in Bredekamp.

(53.) "Curtius, 305-40.

(54.) Ibid., 322, 335.

(55.) "Paracelsus, 172-78.

(56.) "Descartes, 36: "Sitot que l'age me permit de sortir de la sujetion de mes precepteurs, je quittai entierement l'etude des lettres; et me resolvant de ne chercher plus d'autte science que celle qui se pourrait trouver en moi-meme, ou bien dans le grand livre du monde, j'employai le reste de ma jeunesse a voyager, a voir des cours et des armees." Cited in Curtius, 322.

(57.) On the history of dissection and the relationship between anatomical studies, humanism, and printing see Eisenstein, 566-74; also see in general O'Malley, Berrelli, and the more recent work by Carlino that concentrates on the symbiosis between anatomy and printing. Although in some ways an outdated work, Ball, 21-51, is still useful. On the history of medical books and illustrations in France see Histoire de la midecine.

(58.) Alston, 222.

(59.) Eisenstein, 538-39.

(60.) Carlino, 44.

(61.) Bal1, 84-88; Carlino, 39-53.

(62.) Carlino, 59-70.

(63.) A second edition appeared in 1616, also published without the printer's name. I have been unable to obtain biogaraphical information on Le Maistre. He is absent from the French national biographical dictionaries.

(64.) Le Maistre, 1614, 23.

(65.) Ibid., 57.

(66.) Ibid. Ceux qui courent a l'Ennemy sans recognoistre, sont subiects a la repentance, & d'estre tenus pour temeraires.

(67.) Ibid., 18: "Telles menees [saignees] sont non seulement messeantes, mais indignes de gens d'honneur, & trop dangereuses aux maisons des Princes, dont la vie est si precieuse."

(68.) Ibid., aij r.

(69.) On doctors offering their skills of observation to a prince in the eighteenth century see Geyer-Kordesch, 155-81.

(70.) On medical histories and autobiographical works of observations see Siraisi, 1991, 585. Also see Nutton, 50-62.

(71.) For an example of a French Calvinist doctor in London drawing out political maxims from medical observations, see Turquet de Mayerne's letters in his Opera medica. For the context of Turquet de Mayerne's thought and the political theories of his father, see Mousnier, 1955.

(72.) Burke, 1991, 486.

(73.) Le Maistre, 1613a. He also published a translation of maxims intended to aid in calming the spirits in order to keep the sang-froid of prudence (Le Maistre. 1628). On page 1 of the preface, Le Maistre shows how physical self-control leads to personal prudence: "GALIEN Philosophe & Medecin excellent, au livre intitule des Perturbations de l'esprit, propose la lecture des vers de Pythagoras pour remede & Antidote singulier contre relIes Perturbations: disans s'en estre utilement servy a son propre usage, & qu'il les lisoit deux fois le jour soir & matin: Moyen de tenir l'Ame en tranquilite, la rendre victorieuse des passions, & la munir de Prudence, vraye perfection de la felicite humaine."

(74.) Le Maistre, 1613a, 7v-r: "Ge grand Medecin [Galien], qui par son eloquence admirable a remply l'univers de son nom, propose la lecture de ses sentences pour remede & antidote singulier contre les perturbations de l'esprit . . . . L'experience aussi fera tousjours paroistre que ce moyen est singulier et propre pour former un iugement & Prudence de perfection si vous l'accompagnez de l'examen ordinaire des actions, suivant l'ordre presript par ce grand philosophe."

(75.) Idid., 6: Maintiens donc La Raison, au plus haut establie, / Qui maistrisent tes sens, bride leurs appetits: / Ils tiennent sous leur joug les sens assujettis: I Mais tousjours la Raison de Prudence est suyvie.

(76.) Le Maistre, 1613b, 4r.

(77.) Ibid., 22: La Prudence, qui est la perfection de l'homme, n'est pas hereditaire: elle vient par l"Experience des choses et par l"Instruction.

(78.) Ibid., 21: SUR quarorze ans, il ne faur plus un Prince que cc divin Artifice de la Meditation, secret admirable des Philosophes, avec l"Histoire, qui est la vraye Eschole de Sagesse: L'y exercer puis apres pour tousiours sans aurre estude, a l'observation des affaires: & a la contemplation des Conseils, des Entreprises, & des Desseins des grands Rays, des Grands Princes, & des grandes Republiques: afin de former du rout son Iugement a cela: & par ce moyen le rendre capable du maniement d'un Estat.

(79.) Ibid., 7: Lage de Monseigneur le Dauphin [the future Louis XIII], SIRE, vous convie de penser desormais cela, & y employer desja les prdparatifs necessaires, attendant l'opportunite d'une Instruction plus serieuse, selon la disposition & du Corps, & de l'Esprit.

(80.) I am unable to locate the first edition of this work.

(81.) On the influence of the Roman historian Tacitus in France and in the humanist movement, see Burke, 1967 and 1969, 149-71 at 150; Toffanin; Spini, 124-28; Stackelburg; Schellhase; Salmon, 1980, 307-31, and 1987, ch. 1; Oestreich. For a more recent study of variably accuracy see Morineau; for studies of the influence of Tacitus' rhetorical style see Croll, 14-17; on the Tacitean tradition of learning from exempla and particulars see Arnaldo Momigliano, 1947 and 1990; Fumaroli, 57-69; Tuck. On Tacitus' influence in France between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries see Soll, 1997 and 2000.

(82.) Soll, 1997, 189.

(83.) Le Maistre, 1616, aij verso. Le Maistre even complaints that Henri IV forced him to work hard on the "difficult" project: "[Henri IV m'a commande] quelques temps apres d'essaye de mon coste, si le TACITE tant estime entre les Escrivains, se pourroit voir si bien habille a la Francoise....Labeur extremement penible, & meritant plus de loisir, que ne m'en petmettoient les grandes occupations de ma charge. Mais qui me laissa au moins ce contentement, d'avoir a l'avanture provoque l'envie de QUELQU'UN a faire mieux (aiij verso-recto)." On Henri IV, the Paracelsian tradition and Calvinist doctors see Trevor-Roper, 84-87.

(84.) Le Maistre, 1616, aiiij verso-recto: Des PEUPLES au contraire se mutiner contre la Royaute: susciter des seditions dans les armees: sapper par mavaises artifices, les fondemens des souverainetes, ou les prattiquer par dons & recompenses: couvrir de beaux praetextes les conspirations, & les trahisons. Plus vous y lires, les confusion d'une liberte flottante, ou nouvellement recouverte: les armees en ordre de combat, les resolutions d'affaires de paix, & de guarre, agitees par un Grand Senat. HISTOIRE (die-je) enseignant le bien pour l'ensuivre, & le mal pour s'en garder: remplie au reste de Maximes d'Estat, qui paraissent autant d'Oracles, pour l'instruction des Rois, & de ceux qui tiennent le timon des gouvernements. This passage is a rough translation from Justus Lipsius' dedication to his critical edition of Tacitus, 1.

(85.) Ibid., aiiij recto-verso. In La Sante du Prince, Le Maistre also repeats an old Tacitist theory that eloquence must be sacrificed for accurate observations if history is to be a tool of prudence. (1).

(86.) Baecque, 15.

(87.) Ibid., 25.

(88.) On Hobbes' reservations about his own metaphor that the "people" make up the body of the state being construed as sympathetic to popular government see Tuck, intro., xxxiv-xxxvii, to Hobbes.

(89.) On eighteenth-century examples of the corporeal metaphors and the idea of the regeneration of the body and nation see Sparry.

(90.) I described a loss of royal authority as the head being cur off the body politic. See James I, 64-65.

(91.) Framboisiere, 1624, aiiij verso.

(92.) Ibid. [Dans la nature, une PRINCIPAUTE] appercevra un arsenal muny de toutes sortes d'armes necessaires pour attaquer & deffaire les cruels tyrans de nos corps, pour combattre et chasser les ennemis jurez de notre sante, qui nous viennent a chaque bout de champ dresser des embuscades, pour nous surprendre, & qui font mesme la guerre ouverte pour empieter sur nous, & troubler l'estat de nostre disposition naturelle. Ce ne sont point toutefois les armes de Mars, mais d'Apollon: Elles n'ostent point la vie, mais rembarrent la mort.

(93.) The classic work on the cosmography of the Middle Ages is Lovejoy, 99-182. For an erudite study of the order of the medieval cosmos see Lewis.

(94.) La Framboisiere, 1624, Ijjj recto.

(95.) Gauchet, 65.

(96.) Greenleaf, 144.

(97.) Gauchet, 66.

(98.) On the Renaissance uses of analogy, the poet as creator and the king's place in the great chain of being see Heninger, 325-52.

(99.) La Framboisiere, 1631, 60-63.

(100.) Ibid., 60.

(101) Ibid.: A King lives in his Royalty like a Great God, nothing can escape him except immortality.

(102.) Ibid. C'est une grande felicite de commander a tant de gens si sublimes en esprits, si opulens en richesses, si grands en forces, & que de son petit doigt il face mouvoir toutes ses machines, & les applique a ses desseins, comme un Architecte fait les siennes aux pieces de son bastiment.

(103.) La Framboisiere, 1624, Iiiij recto.

(104.) Ibid.

(105.) Ibid.

(106.) La Framboisiere, 1631, 63.

(107.) Ibid. "1. La Nature, en LA PRINCIPAUTE DE LHOMME sur toutes les Creatures du Monde Tome I (generalement en l'histoire de la Nature universelle -- particulairement en l'histoire des Cieux, des Elemens, des Meteores, des Mineraux, des Plantes, des Animaux.) 2. l'Art de Medecine, au GOUVERNEMENT necessaire a chacun pour vivre longuement en Sante; aux LOIX, que les Medecins doivent exactement observer, pour proceder methodiquement a la guerison des maladies internes. Pharmacie, es ORDONNANCES DES MEDICMENS, que les Apothicaires doivent tenir preparez en leurs boutiques, tant pour la preservation, que pour la guerison des maladies internes & externes. 3. La Grace de bien entendre, de bien parler, de bien vivre, la Logique, l'Oratoire, la Morale -- LA GOURONNE DOCTORALE."

(108.) La Framboisiere, 1624, iiij recto. At the conclusion of the dedication to the young Louis XIII, he states again, "Voyla comment SIRE, cest HISTOIRE NATURELLE vous servira d'instruction aux affaires de vostre Estat."

(109.) Ibid.

(110.) For a brief but excellent biography see Madelaine Foisil's introduction to Heroard, 1989, 1:46-53.

(111.) Ibid., 48-51. Heroard probably converted around the time of the St. Bartholomew's day massacre when he was conceivably in attendance at court. Foisil provides conflicting evidence about his date of conversion, although it seems a certainly that Heroard converted before becoming Louis XIII's doctor in 1601. Trevor-Roper, 86, claims that he was an ardent Paracelsian.

(112.) La Maistre, 1614, 16. Foisil provides a list of the book in Heroard's library, Heroard, 1989, 1:54-55.

(113) Heroard, 1609, 19.

(114) Ibid., 20-21. "Car il est bien certain que tout ainsi comme le corps humain est compose de contraires humeurs, & de parties, les unes simples, & les autres meslees, les unes principales, les autres subalternes; & que de la legitime composition d'icelles, s'engendre La sante du corps, & que celle-cy venant a se desmentir de ceste integrite, s'ensuit soudain la maladie accompagnee de divers accidents, selon la qualite, ou grandeur de la cause."

(115) Ibid., 21. On voir pareillement que le corps d'un Esrat, quelque forme qu'il aye prise, est compose de mesme sorte (qu'un corps humain]: & se conserve en son entier par une exacte observation des bonnes & diverses loix, & dechoit aussi tost que par ambition, par avarice, ou prodigalite, ou par quelque autre pareille cause l'on recognoist leur force defaillir, & flestrir leur vigucur, & s'en aller en decandance selon l'effort foible, ou puissant d'icelle.

(116.) Ibid., 53. le droict usage de la raison, donne par lea sciences de la cognoissance des choses naturelles, celles des nombres & de leurs effects, tant sur les corps solides que sur l'entendement humain par leurs proportions & diverses mesures, & faict sans partir d'une place, courir toute la terre, puis escheler les cieux, & ouvert les moyens d'en faire les machines, pour a la fin comprendre par l'histoire de l'esrat, & la nature des affaires du monde.

(117.) Ibid., 22.

(118.) Ibid 24, 34.

(119.) Ibid., 53.

(120.) For a study of the works of Le Maistre, La Framboisiere, Heroard, and Theveneau in the context of royal pedagogical manuals see Flandrois, 31-40.

(121.) The French national biographies contain no information on Theveneau.

(122.) Theveneau, 320. On his plagiarism of Lipsius see Soll, 1998, 221-23.

(123.) Foisil does not provide full bibliographical indices to Heroard, 1989.

(124.) This probably refers to Mattioli's Commentaires sur les six livres de Dioscorides, of which the French translation of 1572 (Lyon: La Veuve G. Cotier) was reedited numerous times.

(125.) Probably Gesner's Catalogus plantorum (Zurich: C. Froschoverus, 1542).

(126.) Gesner's Historia animalium, liber I, De quadrupedibus viviparus and liber II, oviparis (Zurich: C. Froschoverus, 1551-54).

(127.) Heroard, 1989, 1:147-48.

(128.) See Richelieu, 253.

(129.) Bacon, 276. On Bacon's reference to the book of nature and his reservations about political power and the mastery of nature see Glacken, 472-73.

(130.) For a fascinating study of the "modern," or at least innovative culture of the nascent French nation state, see Descimon and Guery, 219-21, 280, 361-94.

(131.) Foucault, 315.

(132.) On Dr. Joseph Alexandre Guillotin and his search for a humane device of execution see Arasse, 9-27.

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