the body in 13th and 14th c

‘HEAD OR HEART?’ REVISITED:PHYSIOLOGY AND POLITICAL THOUGHT

IN THE THIRTEENTH AND FOURTEENTH CENTURIES

Takashi Shogimen1,2

Abstract: Medical metaphors pervade medieval European political writings. Noattempt has been made to establish the relationship between bodily imageries of thepolitical community and anatomical and/or physiological knowledge. A survey ofbodily metaphors shows that the primacy of the head of the body politic was chal-lenged at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries by an alternative view: thepre-eminence of the heart. This coincided with the penetration of Aristotelian physiol-ogy into scholastic medicine, which triggered debates over the most important mem-ber of the body natural: is it the head or the heart? The medical inspiration for theconceptualization of the body politic illustrates the great impact of the ‘Aristotelianrevolution’ in medieval political thought.

Since ancient Greece, Western political discourse has been full of medicalmetaphors. Plato compared a political leader with a physician. Cicero analogizedtyrannicide with cutting off an infected member. Thomas Hobbes describedthe State as an artificial man and analysed the commonwealth by using ana-tomical, physiological and pathological metaphors. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’sSocial Contract discussed the principle of ‘life’ in the body politic anddescribed its dissolution as ‘death’. Today, too, many speak of the ‘anatomy’of politics and ‘remedial’ policies.3 Medical metaphors are also diverse: someare anatomical or physiological, comparing the organs of the state with bodilyorgans. Others relate to diagnostics: the ideal state and tyranny are analogizedwith healthy and diseased states of a political community respectively. Someothers concern treatment: political rule was often compared with surgery orpharmaceutical treatment. Medical metaphors are thus an integral part ofWestern political language.4

HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XXVIII. No. 2. Summer 2007

1 Department of History, University of Otago, PO Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand.Email: [email protected]

2 This article is part of my research project supported by the Marsden Fund of theRoyal Society of New Zealand. Previous versions were presented at the School of His-tory, Philosophy and Politics in Massey University on 31 August 2006 and to the Work InProgress Seminar at the Department of History in the University of Otago on 27 Septem-ber 2006. Special thanks go to Stephen Conway for his invaluable assistance during itspreparation.

3 Many books on political analysis bear titles with medical analogies. For instance,Henry Kissinger’s recent book is entitled Crisis: The Anatomy of Two Major ForeignPolicy Crises (New York, 2003).

4 Medical metaphors are not exclusive to the West. They can be found in Islamic,Indian and Japanese political writings. The Arabic philosopher Alfarabi (870–950), for

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‘HEAD OR HEART?’ REVISITED 209

The use of medical or ‘organic’ analogies in medieval political writings haslong attracted scholarly attention. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies, Otto Gierke identified ‘organic’ analogies as a distinctive feature inmedieval European political discourses, and this was further explored byother historians.5 Tilman Struve has offered the most detailed and comprehen-sive account of the organic metaphor in the Middle Ages,6 while ErnstKantorowicz illuminated the persistence of the bodily analogy into the six-teenth century.7 More recent scholarship has focused on individual medievalthinkers, in particular the twelfth-century humanist John of Salisbury: varioushistorians discussed John’s ‘anatomical’ conception of the body politic,which underlined the diversity and uniqueness of the bodily parts, whileCary J. Nederman characterized John’s notion of bodies natural and politic as‘physiological’, which stressed cooperation between diverse elements of thebody.8

The celebrated medieval historian Jacques Le Goff also produced a surveyof various political uses of body metaphors in the Middle Ages. He highlighted

instance, compared the physician and the king in the Aphorism (Alfarabi, The PoliticalWritings: ‘Selected Aphorism’ and Other Texts, trans. Charles E. Butterworth (Ithaca,2001), pp. 11–13). The ancient Indian political thinker Súkura compared seven parts ofthe state with the organs of the human body (G.P. Singh, Political Thought in AncientIndia (New Delhi, 1993), pp. 21–2). The Tokugawa Japanese political philosopher OgyuSorai often analogized political rule with medical treatment (Samuel Hideo Yamashita,Master Sorai’s Responsals: An Annotated Translation of Sorai Sensei Tomonsho (Hono-lulu, 1994), pp. 48, 70).

5 Otto Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Ages, trans. F.W. Maitland (Cam-bridge, 1900); F.W. Coker, Organismic Theories of the State (New York, 1910); EwartLewis, ‘Organic Tendencies in Medieval Political Thought’, American Political ScienceReview, 32 (1938), pp. 849–76; P. Archambault, ‘The Analogy of the “Body” in Renais-sance Political Literature’, Bibliothèque d’humanisme et renaissance, 29 (1967),pp. 21–53; D. Hale, The Body Politic: A Political Metaphor in Renaissance English Lit-erature (The Hague, 1971).

6 Tilman Struve, Die Entwicklung der organologischen Staatsauffassung im Mittel-alter (Stuttgart, 1978).

7 Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies (Princeton, 1957).8 W. Strüner, Natur und Gesellschaft im Denken des Hoch- und Spätmittelalters

(Stuttgart, 1975), pp. 120–30; G. Duby, The Three Orders: Feudal Society Imagined,trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Paris, 1980), pp. 264–7; T. Struve, ‘The Importance of theOrganism in the Political Theory of John Salisbury’, in The World of John of Salisbury,ed. Michael Wilks (Oxford, 1984), pp. 303–4; B. Guenée, States and Rulers in LaterMedieval Europe, trans. Juliet Vale (Oxford, 1985), pp. 43–4; Cary J. Nederman, ‘ThePhysiological Significance of the Organic Metaphor in John of Salisbury’s Poly-craticus’, History of Political Thought, VIII (1987), pp. 211–23, reprinted in Cary J.Nederman, Medieval Aristotelianism and its Limits (Aldershot, 1997). Recently Neder-man discussed diversity of organic metaphors in medieval political writings in Cary J.Nederman, ‘Body Politics: The Diversification of Organic Metaphors in the Later Mid-dle Ages’, Pensiero politico medievale, 2 (2004), pp. 59–87.


the metaphors of the head and the heart as the most important parts of the bodypolitic, and called for further research.9 This article revisits the issue Le Goffaddressed from a different angle; it seeks to highlight possible links betweenimageries of the body politic and medical knowledge of the body natural atthe turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The supremacy of the‘head’ in the body politic, which had remained commonplace for centuries intheological and political writings, was challenged by an alternative view —the primacy of the heart — precisely when the medical debate on the pre-eminenceof the head or the heart simmered among medical scientists at the end of thethirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth. As Aristotelian naturalphilosophy penetrated scholasticism in the thirteenth century, the Aristotelianphysiological view that the heart, not the head, is the most important part ofthe body natural provided scholastic political commentators with an alterna-tive notion of the body politic.

This enquiry has a twofold implication for the history of medieval politicalthought. One is that it adds another dimension to our understanding of whatmight be called the Aristotelian revolution. Walter Ullmann once argued thatthe rediscovery of Aristotle in the High Middle Ages disseminated the ideathat human beings are political by nature, not by sin, which in turn contributedto the ‘secularization’ of political theory. The justification of ‘natural man’ andof the political community as a natural entity turned politics into an autonomousfield of human activities that does not require religious sanctions.10 Ullmannthus surveyed the quick and widespread assimilation of Aristotelianism bypolitical thinkers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and wrote: ‘. . . natu-ral science in the proper meaning of the term . . . prepared the ground for theacceptance of Aristotelian naturalism in the social field’. He considered thatthis might be illustrated by the rise of physics, astronomy and medical science,although he did not examine any further the relationship between natural sci-ence and political thought.11 Elsewhere he maintained that the humanist redis-covery of man in the fourteenth century ‘was accompanied by the physicalexploration of man’ as is exemplified by ‘the beginning of a true anatomicalscience’.12 The present article moves forward from here: it shows that the Aris-totelian influence on scholastic political theorizing was not confined only to theareas of political and ethical doctrines but also to medical knowledge.

210 T. SHOGIMEN

9 Jacques Le Goff, ‘Head or Heart? The Political Use of Body Metaphors in the Mid-dle Ages’, in Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part Three, ed. Michel Feher etal. (New York, 1989), pp. 13–26.

10 Walter Ullmann, Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages (Lon-don, 1961), pp. 231–79; Walter Ullmann, A History of Political Thought: The MiddleAges (Harmondsworth, 1975), p. 179.

11 Ullmann, Principles of Government and Politics in the Middle Ages, pp. 278–9.12 Ibid., p. 302, n.3. Also Walter Ullmann, The Individual and Society in the Middle

Ages (London, 1967), pp. 112–15.



The other implication, which is a corollary of the first, challenges our mod-ern presumption that medical knowledge — a branch of natural science — hasnothing to do with political knowledge — what we might call social scientificknowledge.13 In the pre-modern era, the disciplinary boundaries were far morefluid than we moderns are inclined to presume. The relationship betweenmedicine and political thought has escaped serious scholarly attention becausemedical (or ‘organic’) metaphors were presumed to be mere rhetoricaldevices designed simply to bolster a premeditated political programme.Exploring the medical background of bodily imageries will establish thatmedical knowledge was not mere ‘embroidery’ but an essential element oflate medieval political language.14

IHead and Heart of the Body Politic

Perhaps the best-known organicist metaphor of the body politic in medievalpolitical writings may be attributed to the twelfth-century humanist John of Salis-bury. His encyclopaedic masterpiece, Policraticus, devoted its Books 5 and 6 to acomparative analysis of the structure and function of the bodies natural and poli-tic. John claims that his bodily analogies are modelled on Plutarch’s work, The

Instruction of Trajan, which was in fact John’s own invention. John begins hismetaphorical argument by distinguishing the soul from the body. The soul corre-sponds, according to John, to those who administer the practice of religion. ‘In-deed, those who direct the practice of religion ought to be esteemed andvenerated like the soul in the body . . . just as the soul has rulership of the whole

13 Studies of the relationship between medicine and political thought exist but arevery few: see Anthony Parel, The Machiavellian Cosmos (Princeton, 1992) and I. Ber-nard Cohen, ‘Harrington and Harvey: A Theory of the State Based on the New Physiol-ogy’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 55 (1994), pp. 187–210.

14 Medical metaphor cannot be understood as mere embellishment if we subscribe toGeorge Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s understanding of metaphor. The leading experts incognitive semantics wrote: ‘metaphor is not just a matter of language, that is, of merewords . . . on the contrary, human thought processes are largely metaphorical . . . [The][H]uman conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined’ (George Lakoffand Mark Johnson, Metaphor We Live By (Chicago, 1980), p. 6). Most relevant to ourenquiry among various functions of metaphor that Lakoff and Johnson highlighted is toconceptualize our experience. ‘We classify particular experiences in terms of experien-tial gestalts in our conceptual system’ and metaphor ‘picks out the “important” aspects inthe experience’ (ibid., p. 83). Seen in this light, medical metaphor emerges as a constitu-tive part of late medieval political language due to its function of highlighting one aspectof political experience (and also of de-emphasizing or hiding other aspects of it) (ibid.,pp. 66–7). Medical metaphor, then, provides a key to giving an adequate account of latemedieval political conceptualization.


body so those who are called prefects of religion direct the whole body.’15 Thesoul’s relationship to the body, according to John, is that the soul stimulates andrules the head. The position of the head is occupied by a prince who is ‘subjectonly to God and to those who act in His place on earth’.16 The ‘heart’ of thecommonwealth is the senate, ‘the office of counsel and rulership’, which aug-ments the ruling office of the prince.17 The ‘eyes’, ‘ears’ and ‘tongue’ of theprince are the governors of provinces, who would rule provinces in the name ofthe prince. Financial officers and keepers are compared to the stomach andintestines. The armed hand is soldiers and the unarmed one is tax collectors.Finally, the feet are compared with peasants ‘perpetually bound to the soil’.18

The humblest class is heavily populated; therefore John compared the ‘body’ ofres publica with ‘not only the eight-footed crab, but even the centipede’.19

According to John, the most important bodily part was clearly the head. Thesuperior function was attributed to the head, namely the prince, only to be sup-ported by the heart, that is the senate of the commonwealth. It was in the head thatall the representatives of the political community resided: the eyes, the ears and thetongue were compared to the judges and the head’s representatives to the prov-inces. Thus the ruling functions were clearly concentrated in the head. Thepre-eminence of the head, however, did not prevent other bodily members fromplaying salient roles for the common good of a society. All the members of thebody politic from the head to the feet cooperate to achieve justice. Hence, the dic-tates of justice override princely commands when they contradict each other. Notonly senators but also the humbler classes such as soldiers and farmers must refuseany unjust command from the head.20 John’s bodily analogy exercised wide influ-ence: the thirteenth-century republican Ptolemy of Lucca drew on John’s organicanalogies in his political works.21 So did the late fourteenth-century astronomerNicole Oresme in his economic treatise On Money 22 and the contemporary femalepolitical thinker Christine de Pizan in The Book of the Body Politic.23

212 T. SHOGIMEN

15 John of Salisbury, Policraticus, trans. Cary J. Nederman (Cambridge, 1990), V, ii,p. 67. The modern critical edition of the original Latin text is John of Salisbury,Policraticus, ed. C.C.J. Webb (Oxford, 1909).

16 John of Salisbury, Policraticus, ed. Nederman, V, ii, p. 67.17 Ibid., V, ix, p. 81.18 Ibid., V, ii, p. 67. Cf. ibid., VI, xx, pp. 125–6.19 Ibid., VI, xx, p. 126.20 Nederman, ‘The Physiological Significance of the Organic Metaphor in John of

Salisbury’s Polycraticus’, pp. 220–1.21 Ptolemy of Lucca, On the Government of Rulers: De Regimine Principum, trans.

James Blythe (Philadelphia, 1997).22 Nicole Oresme, De Moneta, ed. Charles Johnson (London, 1956), pp. 42–6.23 Christine de Pizan, The Book of the Body Politic, ed. Kate Langdon Forhan (Cam-

bridge, 1994), p. 4. For Christine’s use of bodily analogies, see Kate Langdon Forhan,The Political Theory of Christine de Pizan (Aldershot, 2002), especially Ch. 3.



The exalted status of the head may also be attributed to biblical language. Itis widely known that the Church — the community of the believers — wasconsidered to be a body of which Christ is the head. The Bible, the Pauline let-ters in particular, is replete with analogies between the Church and the body.Romans 12.4–5, for instance, reads: ‘for as in one body we have many mem-bers, and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many,are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another’.Ephesians 5.23 is another such example: ‘for the husband is the head of thewife just as Christ is the head of the church, the body of which is the Saviour’.The imagery of Christ as the head of the body (namely the Church) pervadesmedieval ecclesiology.24 The notion of Christ’s headship persisted through-out the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and beyond: John Wyclif, forexample, used this argument to assert the headship of Christ alone, therebyrejecting the primacy of the pope. The conciliarists Pierre d’Ailly and JeanGerson inherited the idea of Christ as the head of the Church.

An important aspect of Christ’s headship is his divinity. Unlike the head ofa human society, according to John of Salisbury, degeneration to tyranny can-not be an issue. It was not until the pope assumed the title of Vicarius Christi

(Vicar of Christ) instead of Vicarius Petri (Vicar of St Peter) from the elev-enth century25 that an ecclesiological nightmare of papal heresy was debatedby theologians and canonists.26

The primacy of the head was challenged in the thirteenth century. This canbe witnessed in theological defences against the menace of an alternativeview: the superiority of the heart to the head. When Thomas Aquinas enquiredinto the headship of Christ in the Church, for instance, he discussed the viewthat Christ should be compared to the heart, not the head. The Dominicantheologian acknowledged Aristotle’s view in De animalibus that the heart isthe principal of senses, motions and life, from which it could be inferred ana-logically that Christ should be compared to the heart that is not dependent onany members of the Church. Against this, Aquinas argued that ‘the heart is ahidden member, whilst the head is an apparent one. The heart can signify thedivinity of Christ or the Holy Spirit, whilst the head can signify Christ himselfaccording to his visible nature, whose invisible nature of divinity flows in.’27

Elsewhere Aquinas enquired whether Christ was the head of the Church in

24 It has been debated, however, whether Christ was the head (caput) due to his divin-ity or to his humanity. See Yves Congar, L’ecclésiologie du haut Moyen-Age (Paris,1968), p. 83.

25 A classic study of the papal title is Michele Maccarrone, Vacarius Christi: storiadel titolo papale (Rome, 1952).

26 The best overview of this can be found in Brian Tierney, Foundations of ConciliarTheory (Leiden, 2nd edn., 1995) and Brian Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility1150–1350 (Leiden, 2nd edn., 1988).

27 Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de veritate, q. 29, a. 4, in Opera omnia,22 (Rome, 1973), p. 860: ‘Ad septimum dicendum quod cor est membrum latens, caput


terms of his humanity, and argued affirmatively. In this context, he againreferred to the Aristotelian position that the heart was the ‘origin of livingforces’ and ‘the primary origin of all the members’. But Aquinas wrote thatthe head is ‘the origin of the forces of animals that pertain to sense and move-ment’. He did not think that Christ was ‘the origin of the members of theChurch in terms of being natural, that is, being a human, but in terms of faithand love, by which the members of the Church are unified’.28 In these argu-ments, the Aristotelian primacy of the heart was not flatly dismissed.29

Aquinas was clearly aware of the possible Aristotelian objection to thetraditional theological discourse. On this point he was not alone. The earlyfourteenth-century Austin theologian Augustinus Triumphus serves as a casein point. To the question whether the pope is the head of the Church,Augustinus answered affirmatively and hastened to add that

in metaphorical locutions, it is not inconvenient that one and the same arereferred to by various names according to various similarities. The popetherefore is the head of the Church according to [a certain] likeness . . .However, he can be referred to as the heart due to other conditions.

Augustinus made reference to Aristotle’s De animalibus and concluded thus:‘although Christ could be compared primarily with the heart, and the popecould be compared with it as an instrument, which invisibly vitalizes theChurch, Christ is compared with the head according to the visible nature, bywhich one man is superior to another.’30 Augustinus acknowledged the validityof a metaphorical discussion based on the Aristotelian supremacy of the heart.

214 T. SHOGIMEN

autem apparens, unde per cor potest significari divinitas Christi vel Spiritus Sancti, percaput autem ipse Christus secundum naturam visibilem, cui natura divinitatis invisibilisinfluit.’

28 Thomas Aquinas, Commento alle Sentenze di Pietro Lombardo (10 vols., Bologna,1999–2001), libro terzo, distinzioni 1–22, p. 682: ‘Ad quintum dicendum, quod cor estprincipium virium vitalium in toto corpore, et est primum principium omnium membrorumquantum ad esse ut dicit Philosophus . . . sed caput est principium virium animalium quaepertinent ad sensum et ad motum. Et quia cum dicimus Christum principium essemembrorum Ecclesiae, non intendimus quantum ad esse naturale, secundum quod sunthomines, sed quantum ad fidem et caritatem, per quam Ecclesiae membra uniuntur.’

29 Thomas Aquinas, De regimine principum ad Regem Cypri (Turin, 1924), p. 2: ‘Inuno etiam homine anima regit corpus, atque inter animae partes irascibilis et concupis-cibilis ratione reguntur. Itemque inter membra corporis unum est principale, quod omniamovet, ut cor, aut caput. Oportet igitur esse in omni multitudine aliquod regitivum.’Aquinas was aware of the importance of the two bodily parts, yet remained undecidedabout the superiority of one to the other. On his medical knowledge, see Mark D. Jordan,‘Medicine and Natural Philosophy in Aquinas’, in Thomas von Aquin: Werk undWirkung im Licht Neuerer Forschungen, ed. Albert Zimmermann (Berlin, 1988),pp. 233–46.

30 Augustinus Triumphus, Summa de ecclesiastica potestate (Rome, 1584), q. 19,a. 2, p. 118: ‘Ad primum ergo est dicendum, quod in Metaphoricis locutionibus non est



These examples evidence some of the ecclesiological defences of tradi-tional biblical language. But the Aristotelian bodily metaphor was not alwaysseen in a negative light. The magnum opus, De regimine principum (OnPrincely Government), of the Austin friar Giles of Rome (1243/47–1316), forexample, elaborates his view of political leadership and government by refer-ence to bodily metaphors, including the primacy of the head.31 Originallyintended as a didactic work for the young Philip the Fair, the book discussedin the framework of Aristotelian political science three types of government:government of self, government of family and civil government. It circulatedwidely, was translated in various vernaculars, and was highly influential as awork of the ‘mirror of princes’ genre.32

According to Giles, the civil community was comparable to the humanbody. The body consists of diverse functions and movements of various mem-bers, which are regulated in a twofold way: one is reciprocal justice (iustitia

commutativa) and the other is distributive justice (iustitia distributiva). Thebodily members regulate each other to maintain order, which is the state ofreciprocal justice. One member is affluent in one thing but may be deficient inothers; in which case another member will provide, and vice versa. Thus bothdeficiency and excess of each and every member will be reduced to the pointof equilibrium. For example, feet can walk but do not move without directionfrom the head. The head can give commands to bodily members but cannotwalk by itself. Thus feet and head are mutually dependent. Likewise, the civilcommunity has members with diverse functions who support each other toachieve a collectively sufficient life. In a civil community a member in afflu-ence supports another in need; mutual help realizes reciprocal justice.

However, all the members must be ordered by and with reference to anorgan, the heart, which is the fount of life and motions and this is called thestate of distributive justice.33

A body natural cannot be sustained unless the heart infuses (the vital spirit)appropriately into members thereby maintaining its distributive justice.Likewise, a kingdom or a civic community cannot be maintained unless a

inconveniens unum et idem diversis nominibus appellari secundum diversam similitudinem:Papa igitur est caput Ecclesiae, propter similitudines superius dictas. Potest tamen corappellari propter alias conditiones . . . ideo licet cordi possit comparari Christusprincipaliter, vel Papa instrumentaliter, secundum quod invisibiliter vivificat Ecclesiam:magis tamen comparatur capiti secundum visibilem naturam, qua homo homini praefertur.’

31 Struve, Die Entwicklung der organologischen Staatsauffassung im Mittelalter,p. 185.

32 Approximately three hundred and fifty manuscript copies of De regimine principumare extant. Charles F. Briggs, Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum: Reading andWriting Politics at Court and University, c. 1275–c.1525 (Cambridge, 1999), p. 20.

33 Giles of Rome, De regimine principum (Venice, 1502), I, ii, 11. Also Struve, DieEntwicklung der organologischen Staatsauffassung im Mittelalter, pp. 184–5.


king or a prince distributes honours and goods appropriately thereby main-taining distributive justice in it.34

Mutually dependent bodily members are regulated by the principal organ: theheart.35

Giles of Rome is also widely known for his pro-papal treatise De ecclesiastica

potestate, which inspired Pope Boniface VIII’s Unam Sanctam, a documentthat pronounced the universal jurisdiction of the pope. The anonymous politi-cal treatise Rex pacificus presented a diametrically opposed view of papaljurisdiction in spiritual and temporal matters.36 The work, which responded tothe political conflict between Pope Boniface VIII and Philip the Fair, framesits political view in a dualist cosmology. The universe entails a twofoldnature: one is spiritual and angelic and the other is corporeal and earthly. Theauthor argues that the human being is the microcosm of the world; therefore,he also entails a dual nature: spiritual and corporeal. The human body has twoprincipal organs: heart and head. ‘The heart and the head have distinct func-tions, just as in the worldly government there are distinct jurisdictions: spir-

itual represented by the head and temporal represented by the heart.’37 Thevital importance of the organs is demonstrated by the fact that the lack ofeither the head or the heart would result in death. The author compares thehead with the pope, who teaches orthodox doctrine to the members of thebody, the community of the faithful. The nerves stem from the head, forminga system comparable to the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and binding all membersto one another and to the one head, Christ, who is represented by the pope,thereby constituting unity.

216 T. SHOGIMEN

34 Giles of Rome, De regimine principum, I, ii, 11: ‘Sicut ergo corpus naturale nonsubsisteret, nisi in eo reservaretur quaedam distributiva iustitia, ut quod cor membrisdebite influere: sic regnum vel civitas non potest subsistere, nisi reservetur in eadistributiva iustitia, ut quod rex sive princeps debite honores et bona distribuat.’

35 However, Giles of Rome’s ‘organic’ understanding of the body politic was eclec-tic. He also described kings and princes as the head of a kingdom (caput regni). TilmanStruve ascribed this to Giles’s Platonic view that a human is a microcosm of the universe(Struve, Die Entwicklung der organologischen Staatsauffassung im Mittelalter, pp. 186–94).Plato’s attribution of pre-eminence to the head in the body natural is discussed below.

36 Rex pacificus (Quaestio de potestate papae) was first published in the Acta interBonifacium VIII, Benedictum XI, Clementum V, et Philippum Pulchrum (s. l. 1614), pp.49–93. I used César Egasse du Boulay’s edition in Historia universitatis parisiensis(6 vols., 1665–73), which, however, does not print the entire text. Paul Saenger arguesthat the principal author is John of Paris. The authorship was suppressed since the workwas designed to be a collective response of the University of Paris to Philip the Fair(‘John of Paris, Principal Author of the Quaestio de potestate papae (Rex pacificus)’,Speculum, 56 (1981), pp. 41–55).

37 Rex pacificus, in du Boulay, Historia universitatis parisiensis, p. 941: ‘Et sicut incorpore humano cordis et capitis sunt distinctae operationes, sic in regimine mundanodistinctae sunt iurisdictiones, videlicet spiritualis, quae repraesentatur in capite, ettemporalis quae repraesentatur in corde.’



The heart, on the other hand, is compared with the prince who exercisestemporal jurisdiction. From the heart the veins spread to distribute blood tothe whole body. Citing Isidore of Seville and Aristotle, the author argues thatthe heart is the most important organ, ‘without which there is no life’. Variousdemonstrations of the superiority of the heart follow this: first, the authormaintains that the heart is the first (before the head) to emerge in the foetus.Second, the laws and statutes were compared to the blood, which is pumpedout by the heart. Just as the body natural cannot sustain itself without theblood being distributed to its every corner, so the commonwealth cannot besustained without laws. Thus the author concludes:

from what has been said, therefore, it is clear that, just as there are two prin-cipal parts in the human body, the head and the heart, which have distinctfunctions respectively and do not interfere with each other, so there are inthe universe two separate jurisdictions, the spiritual and the temporal,which have distinct functions.38

This conclusion resembles John of Paris’s clear-cut dualism.In the late fourteenth-century anonymous treatise Somnium viridarii (The

Dream of an Orchard), too, we find dualist arguments that compare spiritualand temporal powers with head and heart respectively. Its argument, how-ever, was not original. The textual resemblance between Rex pacificus andSomnium viridarii is remarkably manifest; clearly, the author of Somnium

viridarii simply reproduced arguments in the Rex pacificus.39

Perhaps the most interesting of all the uses of bodily metaphors is to befound in Marsilius of Padua (c.1275–1343)’s Defensor pacis (The Defenderof the Peace). This innovative work, aimed to identify the one and only causeof wars and strife in early fourteenth-century Christendom, frequently drewan analogy between the civil community and the animal body, thereby allud-ing to medical knowledge. This may be attributed to Marsilius’ early aca-demic training in medicine. Although he was born into the Mainardini, aprominent family in the civic administration of Padua, which was one of thecentres in legal studies, he opted for medical studies before moving to theUniversity of Paris, where he became a master of arts but failed to completestudies at the Faculty of Medicine. Thus Marsilius seems to have returned to

38 Rex pacificus, p. 941: ‘Patet ergo ex praedictis, quod sicut in humano corpore suntduae partes principales distincta et diversa officia habentes, scilicet caput et cor, ita quoduna de officio alterius se non intromittit, sic in orbe duae sunt iurisdictiones distinctae,scilicet spiritualis et temporalis, habentes officia distincta.’

39 Sominium viridarii, in Melchior Goldast, Monarchia Sancti Romani Imperii(3 vols., Hanover, 1611–14), Vol. 1, I, c. 37, pp. 70–1; c. 44, p. 73; II, c.102, p. 164. AlsoJeannine Quillet, La philosophie politique du Songe du Vergier (1378): Sources doctrinales(Paris, 1977), p. 47.


Padua and resumed medical studies with Peter of Abano, a leading medicalscientist of the fourteenth century.40

The Defensor pacis consists of three ‘Discourses’. Discourse I discussedthe formation of a civil community and the diversification of its functionstherein. When Marsilius turned to the nature of princely authority, he explainedthat ‘the city and its parts, established in accordance with reason, are analo-gous to an animal and its parts perfectly formed in accordance with nature’.41

Referring to Aristotle’s De partibus animalibus (On the Parts of Animals) andGalen’s De foetuum formatione (On the Formation of the Foetus), he main-tained that ‘a particular organic part of the animal is formed first in time and innature, and within it a natural virtue or potential together with a certain heat asits active principle’. For Marsilius, the power and heat play a causative role informing and differentiating various parts of the animal. The bodily part that isformed first is, according to Aristotle and ‘others of the more expert of thephilosophers’,42 ‘the heart or something analogous to the heart’ and is ‘morenoble and more perfect in its qualities and characteristics than the other partsof the animal’.43 Marsilius compared the heart with government or ‘principate’(principatus). One part ‘which is analogous to the heart’, namely civil gov-ernment, is formed from ‘the soul of the universal body of the citizens or itsprevailing part’, in which consists ‘a certain virtue or form with the activepotential or authority’ to establish the remaining parts of the political commu-nity. Government’s ‘virtue or form’ is the law and its ‘active potential orauthority’ is the authority to judge and command advantageous or just sen-tences in civil terms.44 Thus ‘the authority of principate granted to a particularman is analogous to the heat of the heart’.45

The comparison between the heart and the principate implies that theChurch was not the ruling part of the civil community. Marsilius famouslyrejected that the Church was a rival institution of government. He maintainedthat the Church was a part of the civil community along with other sectorsincluding agricultural, military and commercial parts. Marsilius’ view of the

218 T. SHOGIMEN

40 Nancy Siraisi, Arts and Sciences at Padua: The Studium of Padua before 1350(Toronto, 1973), pp. 163–5.

41 Marsilius of Padua, Defensor pacis, ed. C.W. Previté-Orton (Cambridge, 1928),I, xv, 5. The translation is adapted from Marsilius of Padua, The Defender of the Peace,ed. and trans. Annabel Brett (Cambridge, 2005), p. 90.

42 Annabel Brett notes that Marsilius’ discussion of the embryo resembles the viewof his contemporary Paduan medical scientist Dino del Garbo. See Marsilius, TheDefender of the Peace, p. 91, n. 6.

43 Marsilius, The Defender of the Peace, p. 91.44 Ibid., p. 92.45 Ibid., p. 93.



Church’s raison d’être is markedly utilitarian.46 The religious part is a neces-sity for citizens to ‘live well’ in this world as well as in the next by inducingvirtuous behaviour from citizens, which makes the sufficiency of civil lifemore readily fulfilled and ensures that citizens will be better disposed to theotherworldly life.47 Thus he highlighted the utility of religion for the moralfoundations of civic life. The coercive authority to judge, command and exe-cute sentences, however, was monopolized by civil government. Marsilius’analogy between the heart and the principate therefore suggests that the civilgovernment is the only ultimate authority in a civic community.

So far we have seen a variety of head/heart metaphors in late medievalpolitical writings. Was the use of Aristotle’s natural philosophy merely arhetorical tactic that bolsters a premeditated political programme? Somemodern commentators certainly think so. Maurice de Wulf denied any needto consider bodily metaphors as anything more than rhetorical devices andwith this view Ewart Lewis concurs.48 Otto Gierke, by contrast, suggests butdoes not explore possible links between bodily metaphors and medicalknowledge.49 Tilman Struve goes further by highlighting the Aristotelianemphasis on the heart; however, he does not examine any medical sourcesapart from Albertus Magnus’s commentaries on Aristotle’s works on natu-ral philosophy.50

However, the functional pre-eminence of the head or the heart was not dis-cussed only in the context of the body politic. As the teaching and research inmedicine began to assimilate a scholastic modus operandi in the latter half ofthe thirteenth century,51 medical thinkers critically compared and attempted toreconcile mutually conflicting authoritative texts. The debated medical issuesinclude the origin of sperm, the existence of a female seed taking an active partin conception, and — most significantly for us — the respective role of the head

46 Janet Coleman, A History of Political Thought from the Middle Ages to the Renais-sance (Oxford, 2000), p. 148. But Marsilius emphasized that the primary reason for thenecessity of the Church is divine revelation.

47 Marsilius of Padua, Defensor pacis, I, vi, 9.48 Maurice de Wulf, ‘L’individu et le groupe dans la scolastique du xiiie siècle’,

Revue Néo-Scolastique de Philosophie, 22 (1920), pp. 341–57 at p. 355; Lewis, ‘OrganicTendencies in Medieval Political Thought’, pp. 868–9.

49 Gierke, Political Theories of the Middle Ages, pp. 22–30, 128–37.50 Struve, Die Entwicklung der organologischen Staatsauffassung im Mittelalter,

pp. 301–15.51 On the reception of scholastic method in medical research and teaching, see for

instance Per-Gunner Ottosson, Scholastic Medicine and Philosophy: A Study of Com-mentaries on Galen’s Tegni (Naples, 1984) and Luis García-Ballester, ‘The Construc-tion of a New Form of Learning and Practicing Medicine in Medieval Latin Europe’, Sci-ence in Context, 8 (1995), pp, 75–102, reproduced in García-Ballester, Galen andGalenism (Aldershot, 2002).


(or the brain) and the heart.52 The introduction of the Aristotelian physiologi-cal view into political argument was not merely a polemical weapon in a rhe-torical arsenal in response to the increasing tension between spiritual andtemporal powers but possibly represents a new medical notion of the humanbody.

IIHead and Heart of the Body Natural

Enquiries into the pre-eminent part of the body natural have a long history. Asurvey of ancient medical authorities will provide a useful background to theunderstanding of the medieval debate.

The celebrated ancient medical thinker Hippocrates does not loom large inthe medieval debate on the primacy of head or heart. In his surviving writingswe find scant evidence of interest in dissection. The works of Hippocrates andhis school seem to suggest that they were aware of connections between thebrain and the rest of the body through the vascular and pneumatic channel sys-tems. The Hippocratic writings that circulated widely and constituted part ofthe medical curriculum in the Latin intellectual world of the thirteenth andfourteenth centuries were the Aphorisms, the Prognostics and the Regimen in

acute diseases,53 none of which include substantial discussion of the physio-logical functions of the heart or the brain.

Perhaps more relevant to our present concern is Plato’s Timaeus, whichasserted the primacy of the head. Following the ancient Greek medical scien-tist Alcmaeon (fl. after 500 BC), Plato maintained that the brain was the centreof the sensory and motion system. The head, which copied ‘the round shape ofthe universe’, is ‘the divinest part of us and lord over all the rest’,54 and theother members were made by ‘the god’s offspring’ only because the headalone would have to roll on the earth’s uneven surface, which is obviouslyinconvenient.55 The heart, on the other hand, is the seat of the Spirited element;it was considered as ‘the knot of the veins and the fountain of the blood whichmoves impetuously round throughout all the members’ and was established in‘the guardroom’. This corresponds to the lower standing of guardians or the

220 T. SHOGIMEN

52 Danielle Jacquart, ‘Medieval Scholasticism’, in Western Medical Thought fromAntiquity to the Middle Ages, ed. Mirko D. Grmek (Cambridge, MA, 1998), pp. 197–240,at p. 216.

53 Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine (Chicago, 1990),p. 65. For a full description of surviving medieval manuscripts containing Hippocraticwritings, see Pearl Kibre, Hippocrates Latinus: Repertorium of Hippocratic Writings inthe Latin Middle Ages (New York, revised edition, 1985).

54 Plato, Timaeus, in Francis MacDonald Cornford, Plato’s Cosmology: The Timaeusof Plato translated with a running commentary (London, 1937), p. 150.

55 A.E. Taylor, A Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus (Oxford, 1928), p. 275.



garrison in Plato’s republic.56 The superiority of the head in Plato’s under-standing of the body natural is doubtless clear.

Plato’s view can be traced back to the Pythagorian school that attributed theseat of the soul to the brain. The rival Empedoclesian school, by contrast,ascribed the seat of the soul to the heart: the view that would be preferred byAristotle. Aristotle considered that an animal requires a common sensorium,which is anatomically identified with the heart on the grounds that from theheart the blood vessels spread to all the members of the body. The heart wasalso of primary importance because it is the first organ to form in the foetus.The heart is also believed to be situated in the centre of the body and providesthe body with vital heat. The heart was the hottest part of the body. The heatgenerated by the heart was considered to play an important role in the makingof the foetus as well as in the production of pneuma that flows throughout thebody.57

It is important to note that the primacy of the heart was defined vis-à-vis thebrain; as G.E.R. Lloyd observed, ‘the opposition between brain and heart isone of the corner-stones of his physiology’.58 According to Aristotle, the braindoes not contain blood and is the coolest part of the body. The only functionthat he attributed to the brain is to regulate the body temperature by coolingthe heart and the blood. Whilst the heart entailed important sensory andrevitalizing functions, the brain was limited to a thermo-regulatory function.This contrast implies that Aristotle ascribed little functional importance to thebrain.

The rival authority in ancient medicine was Galen (129–199), a physicianfrom Pergamum, who argued that there are three principal members in thebody. According to Galen, the principal organs of the body natural are heart,brain and liver, and sometimes testicles were added as the fourth importantorgan. In the light of his own empirical observation, Galen understood thatthree bodily systems revolve around the three principal organs: the nervoussystem stems from the brain, the arteries originate in the heart and the veinscome from the liver. Thus the brain and the spinal cord, which form the ner-vous system, control sense and motion, while the arteries and veins, whichwere not distinguished by Aristotle, constitute the circulatory system.59 Thisbasic formula can be found in the medieval Latin translation of Galen’s

56 Cornfield, Plato’s Cosmology, p. 282.57 Julius Rocca, Galen on the Brain: Anatomical Knowledge and Physiological

Speculation in the Second Century A.D. (Leiden, 2003), pp. 28–30.58 G.E.R. Lloyd, ‘The Empirical Basis of the Physiology of the Parva Naturalia’, in

Aristotle on Mind and the Senses, ed. G.E.R. Lloyd and G.E.L. Owen (Cambridge,1978), pp. 215–39.

59 Nancy G. Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils: Two Generations of ItalianMedical Learning (Princeton, 1981), pp. 186–7. On Galen’s physiology, see especiallyRocca, Galen on the Brain and Rudolph E. Siegel, Galen’s System of Physiology andMedicine (Basel, 1968).


best-known work Tegni.60 Whereas Aristotle’s physiology was monistic,Galen’s was pluralistic. He was aware of the contradiction with Aristotle.

The medieval West inherited Arabic medicine along with the medicalteachings of the ancient Greeks. The medieval Islamic philosopher Avicenna(980–1037) was well aware of the disagreement between Aristotle and Galen.Avicenna responded to it by drawing a distinction between the perspectives ofphysicians and philosophers. He notes that many philosophers and physicianssubscribe to Galen’s opinion. Thus Avicenna remarks: ‘subtly demonstrated,the words of the Philosopher [Aristotle] are much nearer the truth, althoughthe words of physicians are more manifest (magis manifestus) at first glance’.61

Avicenna considered that physicians who do not rely on sense experiencealone but take philosophy seriously would agree with Aristotle. AlthoughAvicenna acknowledged that for physicians it is immaterial whether all facul-ties are centred in the heart or each has its own separate centre, he decided thatAristotle should have the final word.

Medical works of ancient Greek and medieval Arabic authorities weretransmitted to the medieval Latin West through translation. Plato’s Timaeus hadbeen firmly established as an authoritative text on natural philosophy in thetwelfth century.62 Meanwhile, Salerno emerged as the first medieval Westerncentre of medical studies as a result of introducing Arabic medicine. One ofthe key figures in the translation of Arabic medical writings is Gerard ofCremona (fl. 1150–87 in Toledo, Spain). Gerard translated Galen’s Method of

Healing and he and his colleagues produced a translation of Avicenna’sgigantic Canon.63 While Avicenna’s Canon enjoyed wide circulation, Galen’smajor medical works were not translated into Latin before the middle of thethirteenth century. Hence, many references to Galen by thirteenth-century

222 T. SHOGIMEN

60 Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils, p. 187, n. 105, where Siraisi refers toTegni Galieni in Articella nuperrime impressa (Lyon, 1515).

61 Avicenna, Avicennae Arabum medicorum principis (Venice, 1608), I, 1, 5, 1, p. 30:‘De aliis vero duabus diuisionis partibus, in una earum medici a magno philosophorumdiuersificati sunt. Philosophorum namque magnus dixit, quod membrum tribuens, et nonrecipiens, est cor: ipsum enim est omnium virtutum prima radix: et omnibus aliismembris suas tribuit virtutes, quibus nutriuntur, et viuunt, et quibus comprehendunt, etquibus mouent. Medici autem, et quidam primorum philosophorum has virtutes inmembris partiti sunt: et non dixerunt, quod sit membrum tribuens, et non suscipiens. Etphilosophi quidem sermo, quum subtiliter certificatur, est veracior. Sed medicorumsermo in primis quum attenditur, est magis manifestus.’

62 The literature on the reception of Plato’s Timaeus is enormous. The starting pointis obviously A History of Twelfth-Century Western Philosophy, ed. Peter Dronke (Cam-bridge, 1988).

63 Vivian Nutton, ‘Medieval Western Europe, 1000–1500’, in Lawrence I. Conrad,Michael Neve, Vivian Nutton, Roy Porter and Andrew Wear, The Western Medical Tra-dition 800 BC to AD 1800 (Cambridge, 1995), p. 143.



authors were dependent on Avicenna, which resulted in a rather confusedunderstanding of Galen.64

Aristotle’s works on natural philosophy were not translated until theearly thirteenth century. Aristotelian natural philosophy was banned fromlectures in Paris in 1210; however, its effect was negligible since Aristotelianlearning had already been solidly established at universities and nothingprevented Aristotle’s writings on natural philosophy from being trans-lated. Probably before 1220, Michael Scot translated three of the five treatisesof the De animalibus — the Historia animalium, De partibus animalium andDe generatione animalium — into Latin.65 Both Michael Scot’s translationand William of Moerbeke’s rival versions circulated widely in the thirteenthand fourteenth centuries.66

Aristotle’s works on natural philosophy did not loom large in the curricu-lum of the Faculty of Medicine because they were read and taught in the Fac-ulty of Arts, where all future medical students were required to enrol beforeproceeding to their specialist training. In the thirteenth-century University ofParis, students in the arts faculty were expected to study all of Aristotle’sworks on natural philosophy including De animalibus.67 Hence, although themedical educational curriculum was dominated by non-Aristotelian worksincluding Galen’s Tegni and Ars Parva, Avicenna’s Canon and Hippocrates’Aphorisms, students were already familiar with Aristotle’s naturalphilosophical views prior to admission to the faculty of medicine. Further-more, at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris it was forbidden to lecture on sub-jects of the arts curriculum, with the exception of the Aristotelian De

animalibus and the Meteorologia, which were both considered to be essentialto physicians.68

Against this backdrop, we should turn to scholastic discussions of therespective functions of head and heart at the turn of the thirteenth and

64 Temkin, Galenism, pp. 95–116. Also Nancy G. Siraisi, ‘The Medical Learning ofAlbertus Magnus’, in Albertus Magnus and the Sciences: Commemorative Essays 1980(Toronto, 1980), pp. 391–2.

65 Bernard G. Dod, ‘Aristotelis Latinus’, in The Cambridge History of Later Medi-eval Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny and Jan Pinborg (Cambridge,1982), p. 48.

66 Ibid., p. 52.67 C.H. Lohr, ‘The Medieval Interpretation of Aristotle’, in The Cambridge History

of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Kretzmann et al., pp. 84–5. It was not only in Paris butalso in Louvain and Cologne that all members of the Faculty of Medicine were requiredto have first completed their studies in arts. See Pearl Kibre, ‘Arts and Medicine in theUniversities in the Later Middle Ages’, in Pearl Kibre, Studies in Medieval Science:Alchemy, Astrology, Mathematics and Medicine (London, 1984), pp. 217–18.

68 Vern L. Bullough, ‘The Medieval Medical University at Paris’, Bulletin of Historyof Medicine, 31 (1957), pp. 197–211. Also Kibre, ‘Arts and Medicine in the Universitiesin the Later Middle Ages’, p. 223.


fourteenth centuries. Scholastic debate on discrepancies between the Aristo-telian and the Galenic views did not surface until about 1210 when Aristotle’sworks on animals were translated from Arabic;69 the first Latin work thatexamined the differences, the Anatomia vivorum, dates back to c.1225.70 Butthe individual who might be responsible for wider academic discussion ofconflicting ancient medical authorities is Albertus Magnus (c.1200–80). TheDominican theologian examined a number of contradictions between Aris-totle, Galen and others in his De animalibus. Albertus was not a medical sci-entist by training; however, he expressed serious interest in medicine andidentified it as an autonomous discipline: ‘Augustine is to be preferred ratherthan the philosophers in case of disagreement in matters of faith. But if thediscussion concerns medicine, I would rather believe Galen or Hippocrates,and if it concerns things of nature, Aristotle or anyone else experienced in nat-ural things.’71 This remark, however, is problematic: natural philosophy,whose authority remains Aristotle, is inseparably related to medical science,whose authorities were, Albertus declared, Galen and Hippocrates. Thiswould result in a problem of how to reconcile differences between ‘philoso-phers’ including Aristotle and his commentator Averroes and ‘physicians’such as Hippocrates, Galen and Arab medical thinkers including Avicennaand Haly Abbas.72 But scholasticism at the turn of the thirteenth and four-teenth centuries was to distinguish a via philosophorum (the way of philoso-phers) from a via medicorum (the way of physicians). The pre-eminence ofthe heart or the head was to become a constitutive part of the debate betweenthe two ‘ways’.

Albertus’ position on this was that, although he recognized the distinctauthority of ‘physicians’, he ultimately agreed with Aristotle. Albertus wasdetermined to defend the Aristotelian primacy of the heart and was critical ofmedieval Galenism that insisted on the equal importance of the three systems:the heart and arteries; the liver and the veins; the brain and nerves.73 The pri-mary reason for his preference for the Aristotelian position was philosophi-cal: Albertus considered that the Galenic equal importance of the three organsstemmed from the Platonic ‘error’ that the human soul was divided into threemajor organs; therefore, Galen’s physiology was for him philosophicallyflawed.74

224 T. SHOGIMEN

69 Sybil D. Wingate, The Mediaeval Latin Versions of the Aristotelian Scientific Cor-pus, with Special Reference to the Biological Works (London, 1931), pp. 72–5.

70 Siraisi, ‘The Medical Learning of Albertus Magnus’, p. 40.71 Cited in ibid., p. 382.72 Luke E. Demaitre, Doctor Bernard de Gordon: Professor and Practitioner

(Toronto, 1980), pp. 78–9.73 Albertus Magnus, De animalibus, c. 15 in Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie

des Mittelalters, 15 (1916), p. 302.74 Siraisi, ‘The Medical Learning of Albertus Magnus’, pp. 401–2.



It is not difficult to enumerate supporters of the Aristotelian cardiocentricview. Taddeo Alderotti (d.1295), a leading medical scientist at the Universityof Bologna, was clearly a loyal heir to the Aristotelian doctrine. Nancy Siraisiwrote that he ‘strongly asserted both the general primacy of the heart and itsspecific dominance over sense and motion’.75 Taddeo’s arguments revolvedaround the views of Aristotle and Avicenna by considering the heart to be the‘principal member’, ‘ “first root” of the virtues’ and ‘the principal instrumentof operation’ in the human body. He was an out-and-out Aristotelian when herejected that the nerves have their origin in the brain and attributed their originto the heart.76

Like Marsilius of Padua, Giles of Rome was one of the medieval politicalthinkers who had a serious interest in medicine. He produced a medicaltreatise De formatione corporis in utero (On the Formation of the Body in theUterus). Giles’s physiological views were largely Aristotelian and anti-Galenic. He drew on Aristotle and his followers extensively and favour-ably.77 For example, he referred to Averroes to argue that the heart was theseat of nutritive virtue and the organ of final nourishment, thereby rejectingGalen’s view, which attributed the function to the liver. Giles explains thatthe stomach produces faeces, the liver removes waste material from theblood, and the heart completes the process of producing the pure blood withits nutritive function. ‘The blood purified by the liver is compared with theblood from the heart rather as must is to wine.’78 Giles also argued that theheart is the common principle of generation in every individual man andwoman. It is from the heart that the male seeds, supported by the testes,gain their power of generation.79 This is also unmistakably an Aristotelianargument.

Peter of Abano (c.1250–c.1315), who taught medicine to Marsilius of Padua,was one of the giants in late medieval medicine. His best-known work, Con-

ciliator differentiarum philosophicarum et medicarum (The Mediator of Dif-ferences between Philosophers and Physicians), written in 1303, attempted toreconcile over two hundred ‘differences’ or disagreements between a via

philosophorum and a via medicorum. The work was so widely acclaimed thatit was printed as soon as printing technology was invented.

‘Difference 38’ in the Conciliator discusses whether principal bodily mem-bers are plural. Peter’s position is somewhat eclectic as he argued that thebodily organ could be called principal in two ways: fundamentally and pri-marily (radicaliter et primo) and in appearance and secondarily (manifestive

75 Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils, p. 192.76 Ibid.77 M. Anthony Hewson, Giles of Rome and the Medieval Theory of Conception (Lon-

don, 1975), pp. 52–3, 241.78 Ibid., p. 75.79 Ibid., p. 89.


et secundo). Fundamentally and primarily, there is only one principal organ,which is the heart. In the heart reside both soul and intellect. Clearly Petersubscribed to Aristotelian physiology. In appearance and secondarily, how-ever, the principal organs include the heart, the liver and the brain, therebyaccommodating the Galenic position.80 This way of reconciling the two posi-tions resembles Avicenna. The ‘primary’ pre-eminence, however, was attrib-uted to the heart, thereby expressing his preference for the Aristotelianposition. Indeed, Peter demonstrated analogously the primacy of the heart.

Peter for instance used the theological analogy of the Trinity. Just as theTrinity consists of three (God, Christ and the Holy Spirit), so the body con-sists of three principal organs: the heart, the brain and the liver. But the Trinityof divinity can be reduced to one: God. Similarly, the principal bodily organscan be reduced to one: the heart.81 More interestingly, Peter also employed apolitical analogy. He wrote that plurality is imperfect and results in confusion,and compared this with the ill disposition of plural governments.82 Peter alsoattributed the primacy of the heart to its central location in the body andanalogized this with the centrality of the king in the realm.83 Later, he alsocompared the heart with the fortress of a state.84

Similar metaphors can be found in the anatomical writing of Henri deMondeville (d. c.1320), one of the pioneers of surgery in the early fourteenthcentury, who commented on the status of head and heart in the body natural.As Marie-Christine Pouchelle has shown, Mondeville discussed society byreference to the human body; he discussed social order in terms of the mem-bers of the body and compared social solidarity with anatomical cohesion.85

Mondeville addressed the question ‘what part of the body represents theking as sovereign: the head or the heart?’. Although Mondeville was awarethat the king was often compared with the head, which is in spatial terms thehighest position, he attributed the role of the heart to the king as the centre ofthe body. In his view, ‘the heart is the principal organ par excellence . . . Itgives to all other members of the whole body vital blood, warmth and spirit. Itis . . . found in the centre of the cavity of the chest and in the centre of the entire

226 T. SHOGIMEN

80 Peter of Abano, Conciliator differentiarum philosophorum et precipue medicorum(Venice, 1504), f. 56r. On Peter’s biography, see Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magicand Experimental Science (London, 1923), Vol. 2, ch. 70, especially at pp. 875–84.

81 Peter of Abano, Conciliator, f. 56v.82 Ibid., f. 55v.83 Ibid., f. 56r: ‘Quare colligitur 2 ca. de membro principali virtutis nutritive locus

cordis fuit in medio: quia hic est locus Regis; ad hoc ut sit regnum ipsius proportionatumequaliter omnibus suis circumferentiis.’

84 Ibid.85 Marie-Christine Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages, trans. Rose-

mary Morris (Cambridge, 1990), ch. 7.



chest as befits its role as the king in the centre of his kingdom.’86 HereMondeville compares the centrality of the heart in the body natural with thatof the king in the body politic. He of course did not fail to appeal to the author-ity of Aristotle.

Le Goff singled out Mondeville’s emphasis on the centrality of the kingas comparable to the heart in the human body.87 However, Mondeville’sviews of the ‘principal organ’ were somewhat ambivalent. Elsewhere hewrote that the stomach was ‘not only a principal and noble member, but theprincipal member par excellence, and the noblest, because if it ceases itsfunctions, the principal members are destroyed’.88 In another section of thesame work, Mondeville follows Avicenna yet appears more faithful toGalen than to Aristotle: ‘A member is called principal because it was firstcreated and governs all the other members or some of them; such are theheart, the brain and the liver.’89 Thus Mondeville’s physiological positionseems inconsistent. However, it is nonetheless noteworthy that when hesubscribed to the Aristotelian supremacy of the heart, he employed a politi-cal metaphor.

Medical scientists did not only comment on secular politics but also onchurch government. The Genoese physician Galvano da Levanto (fl. c.1300)serves as a case in point: in the light of Aristotelian and Galenic physiologies,Galvano explains various offices of the Church. Drawing on the Galenicmodel, Galvano identifies four principal organs in the Church: the pope, bish-ops, archbishops and patriarchs. Yet the Aristotelian supremacy of the heartas the source of the spirit prevailed in Galvano’s understanding of humanphysiology, which was analogically applied to the mystical body of Christ.This resulted in the rejection of the traditional biblical language; Galvanodescribed both Christ and the pope as the heart of the Church. He only

86 Henri de Mondeville, Chirurgie de Maître Henri de Mondeville, ed. and trans.E. Nicaise (Paris, 1893), p. 60: ‘Le coeur est l’organe principal par excellence . . . Il donneà tous les autres membres du corps entier le sang vital, la chaleur et l’esprit . . . LeCoeur . . . se trouve au milieu de la cavité de la poitrine, et au milieu de toute la poitrine,comme le veut son rôle, comme un roi au milieu de son royaume.’

87 Le Goff, ‘Head or Heart?’, pp. 22–3.88 Henri de Mondeville, Chirurgie de Maître Henri de Mondeville, p. 67: ‘L’estomac . . .

est, eu égard à ses fonctions, non seulement un membre principal ou noble, mais lemembre principal par excellence et le plus noble, parce que s’il cesse ses fonctions, lesmembres principaux sont détruits.’ Also, Pouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the MiddleAges, p. 122.

89 Henri de Mondeville, Chirurgie de Maître Henri de Mondeville, p. 369: ‘unmembre est appelé principal parce qu’il est créé en premier lieu et qu’il gouverne tous lesautres membres ou quelques-uns d’entre eux; tel sont le coeur, le cerveau, le foie’. AlsoPouchelle, The Body and Surgery in the Middle Ages, p. 121.


reserved for the Roman Church the conventional depiction of the ‘head’ of allother churches.90

IIIConclusion

I have demonstrated by various examples that late medieval medical scientistssubscribed to the Aristotelian primacy of the heart. However, this is not tosuggest that Aristotle’s view was predominant. Indeed, students of TaddeoAlderotti favoured Galen’s physiological view. The anatomist Mondino deLuzzi (d.1326) was not interested in reconciling Aristotle and Galen and pre-ferred to rely on Galen. Turisanus was sceptical of the Aristotelian teaching ofthe heart.91 Similarly, Bernard de Gordon, a leading physician at the Univer-sity of Montpellier in the late thirteenth century, followed Galen rather thanAristotle by ascribing the common sensorium to the brain, not to the heart.92

Clearly medical scientists in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries debatedthe pre-eminence of the head or the heart. Aristotle’s physiology was power-fully influential, although Galenic physiology did not lose support.

Around the same period, the Aristotelian metaphor of the heart was assimi-lated into discussions of the body politic. Probably this synchronic develop-ment was no coincidence, for it was compulsory for medieval universitystudents to study Aristotle’s texts on natural sciences in the Faculty of Artsbefore proceeding to advanced studies in theology, law or medicine. TheAristotelian primacy of the heart therefore did not belong to a core of special-ist medical knowledge; it was commonplace among secular masters and theo-logians alike. For instance, William of Ockham, who as far as we know had nomedical interest or training at all, noted Galen’s contradiction with Aristotleon the primacy of head or heart in his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics.93

The Aristotelian medical views were an integral part of medieval universityeducation and research.

An intriguing consequence of this was that the discussion of pre-eminentbodily organ(s) penetrated not only medical but also political writings in thethirteenth and fourteenth centuries. On the one hand, Aristotelian physiologyelevated the functional status of the heart in the body politic. On the other, thesuperior part of the body natural — the heart or the head — was a simmeringissue among medical thinkers, who not only commented on politics byreference to medical metaphor but also applied political metaphors to theirexposition of the body natural. The analogy between the heart and temporal

228 T. SHOGIMEN

90 Joseph Ziegler, Medicine and Religion, c. 1300: The Case of Arnau de Vilanova(Oxford, 1998), pp. 84–5.

91 Siraisi, Taddeo Alderotti and His Pupils, pp. 192–5.92 Demaitre, Doctor Bernard de Gordon, p. 116.93 William of Ockham, Expositio in Libros Physicorum Aristotelis, vii, c. 2, 2, in

Guillelmi de Ockham Opera Philosophica, 5 (St Bonaventure, 1985), p. 610.



government was used in academic language to discuss politics and medicine.The analogies between political thought and medicine were not a casual simi-le. They represent a scholarly belief in the likeness between the bodies politicand natural.

The impact of the Aristotelian revolution in medieval political thought hasoften been measured by the doctrinal influence of Aristotelian political scienceand ethics and less directly by the methodological bearing of Aristotelianlogic and metaphysics. Aristotle’s medical views may also be taken intoaccount as a parameter whereby to gauge the scale of the Aristotelian revolu-tion. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries laid the foundation for modernEuropean political thought, but the process of its making has been concep-tualized as the intellectual fusion and conflict between Christian theology,Roman and canon law and Aristotelian political and moral science. In this pic-ture, natural philosophy plays no significant role. But the rediscovery of Aris-totle influenced late medieval political thought not only on a conceptual levelbut also on the level of metaphorical imageries. Medical roots of discourseson the body politic reveal a hitherto overlooked intellectual source of medievalpolitical theorizing, thereby illustrating the fluidity of disciplinary boundariesin medieval academic activities.

Takashi Shogimen UNIVERSITY OF OTAGO


the body in 13th and 14th c

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