PIERRE BOAISTUAU - eTheses Repository - University of Birmingham

Fig. 14: A man washing his hands with melted lead, taken from Histoires prodigieuses (Paris, 1560).
The beard, the clothes and the turban-like cap suggests a non-European origin, possibly Jewish 889
Boaistuau rejected Cardano’s explanation that ‘l’eau de laquelle il [the man] se lavoit,
estre faicte de suc de pourpié, et de mercurialle, pour cause de la glutinosité et
lenteur’. 890 However, he did not provide his own explanation but simply gave a short
description of materials which could withstand the heat of fire, using examples from
antiquity and quoting authorities such as Theophrastus, St. Augustine and Juan Luis
Vives. 891 Nevertheless, this story brings to mind two interrelated trends widespread
during Boaistuau’s time: occultism, and books containing the secrets of Nature.
There was great interest in the occult during the Renaissance and in particular in the
middle of the sixteenth century. 892 The knowledge explosion and the recovery of
889
See Biberman, M., Masculinity, Anti-Semitism, and Early Modern English Literature (Aldershot,
2004), p. 11.
890
Boaistuau, P., Histoires prodigieuses, p. 27v.
891
Vives also prepared a commentary on St. Augustine’s City of God – Boaistuau wrote on p. 28v:
‘Ludovicus Vives sur l’exposition de ce mesme chapitre, lequel a doctement commenté et illustré les
livres de la cité de Dieu de sainct Augustin, asseure avoir veu à Paris du temps de ses estudes…’. For
more details on Vives see Chapter Four.
892
A good introduction for more detail on occultism and natural philosophy is Webster, C., From
Paracelsus to Newton: Magic and the Making of Modern Science (Cambridge, 1982). See also
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