Monsters, Laws of Nature, and Teleology in Late Scholastic Textbooks

In the period of emergence of early modern science, ‘monsters’ or individuals with physical congenital anomalies were considered as rare events which required special explanations entailing assumptions about the laws of nature. This concern with monsters was shared by representatives of the new science and Late Scholastic authors of university textbooks. This paper will reconstruct the main theses of the treatment of monsters in Late Scholastic textbooks, by focusing on the question as to how their accounts conceived nature’s regularity and teleology. It shows that they developed a naturalistic teratology in which, in contrast to the naturalistic explanations usually offered by the new science, finality was at central stage. This general point does not impede our noticing that some authors were closer to the views emerging in the Scientific Revolution insofar as they conceived nature as relatively autonomous from God and gave a relevant place to efficient secondary causation. In this connection, this paper suggests that the concept of the laws of nature developed by the new science –as exception-less regularities—transferred to nature’s regularity the ‘strong’ character that Late Scholasticism attributed to finality and that the decline of the Late Scholastic view of finality played as an important concomitant factor permitting the transformation of the concept of laws of nature

Weapon Salve in the Renaissance

The weapon salve claimed to be a cure for the healing of wounds at a distance. On the basis of sympathetic or magnetic powers the salve supposedly could heal a wound in a clean and painless manner. Attributed to the Swiss physician Paracelsus, this cure was widely discussed in medical and theological circles throughout the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Several disputes over the weapon salve in the early seventeenth century made the alleged cure widely known and widely discussed. The disputes did not revolve around the efficacy of the cure, but rather concerned the question of whether the nature of the cure was natural or demonic. As such, these disputes had an impact on the ideas of natural philosophy of the time