Senior Fellow in Research Area 1: "Competing Communities"

November 2024

Agates, Mandrakes, Bulls and Figs: Nature’s Objects as Topoi and Loci in the Early Modern Arts of Memory

This is a case study on the close correspondences between emergent literary, artistic and scientific genres and their communities in their interplay with the arts of memory in the early modern period. The art of memory, a highly popular topic in the 16^th century, was originally developed in the context of Greek and Roman rhetorics. It consists of imagining a spatial structure – such as a house with different rooms (loci) – and then furnishing this space with objects and people (imagines). In this art, it is crucial to visualise and memorise a mental structure, with its loci and imagines, in the greatest possible detail. These imagines functioned not merely as neutral containers for the memoranda, the contexts that were to be remembered. Over the course of the 16^th century, such imagines increasingly began to serve as powerful topoi covering a wide array of often complex memoranda and arguments in a highly abbreviated form: just as we today tend to conceptualise complex financial transactions as bulls and bears, for instance.

Kodera’s project will examine these developments in the context of the perception of a set of chosen natural objects in early modern hieroglyphics, astrology, emblem books, mythopetics, fables, books of recipes and treatises on natural philosophy and magic. His claim is that certain particular assemblages of images, texts as well as implicit and explicit arguments in topical images must be investigated in close detail and across textual genres in order to better understand the joint emergence of early modern European literary, scientific and artistic communities.

Respecting an influential order of natural things, Kodera’s points of departure will be a stone (the agate), a plant (the mandrake) and an animal (a bull interacting with a fig). This project will investigate the specific properties of these three  natural objects in emblem books, natural histories, myth, fable, magic, astrology and literature, clarifying how each of these seemingly disparate objects were transposed into an amazingly coherent contemporary metaphysical, scientific, moral, psychological, astrological and political context, and into a material for creating certain artefacts.

Since receiving his doctorate in 1994, Sergius Kodera has been teaching early modern and Renaissance philosophy at the the University of Vienna’s Department of Philosophy. He completed his habilitation in 2004 and has held fellowships in London (Warburg Institute), Vienna (IFK), New York (Columbia University) and Berlin (FU). He has written about and is a translator of Renaissance authors such as Marsilio Ficino, Machiavelli, Leone Ebreo, Girolamo Cardano, Giovan Battista della Porta, Giordano Bruno, Francis Bacon and Kenelm Digby. Currently, he is working on a biography of della Porta in English. His main areas of specialisation are the history of the body and sexuality, magic and media, and urban space and the art of memory from an interdisciplinary perspective. For a list of publications, please see https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3119-2749.