Secretly the students have a portrait made of their teacher, depicting the “fourme and schappe of Ypocras [Hippocrates] in parchemyne [parchment],” and they bring this image to Philomon. They demand, “‘Byholde this figur, and deme [judge] and schewe to us the qualités of the complexion of it.’”102 Philomon studies the portrait and then declares that the man depicted in it is lecherous, deceitful, and greedy. The students are shocked. Their adventure in cross-disciplinary knowledge testing has gotten away from then, and they nearly kill Philomon on the spot. To appease them, he explains that he was answering them merely according to “‘my sciens’” but that after all, he does recognize that the picture “‘es [is] the figure of the wyse Ypocrase.’” The confused students rush back to their master, seeking his explanation and reassurance. Hippocrates listens to their account and then remarks:
“Trewly Philomon saide sothe, and he lafte noght of the leste letter of the treuthe. Nevertheles, sithen I biheld and knewe me schapli to these thynges filthy and reprovable, I ordeyned my soule kyng above my body, and so I withdrewe my body fro thise thynges and I overcome it in withholdyng of my foule luste.”103
[“Truly Philomon spoke the truth, and left out not the least letter. Nevertheless, since I beheld and knew myself inclined to these filthy and blame-worthy things, I ordained my soul king over my body, and so I withdrew my body from these things and I overcame it by withstanding my foul desire.”]
The exemplum then draws to a close with a striking redefinition of Hippocratic medicine: “This es the praysyng and wisdome of the werkes of Ypocras, for phisik es noght elles bot abstynens [abstinence], and conquest of foule covetus lustes [desires].”104
The exemplum emphasizes the abstract and formal character of physiognomic knowledge and how such abstraction limits what physiognomy can know. Philomon examines “it,” a picture, rather than “him,” Hippocrates. The depicted face is a matter of “fourme,” “schappe,” “figur,” and “qualités,” and it is this image that grounds Philemon’s two contradictory judgments—first, that the man in the portrait is wicked, and second, that the image represents “wyse” Hippocrates. The antithesis between Philomon’s pronouncements testifies to an incoherence in physiognomy’s way of understanding other people, the object of its gaze: it ignores their social identity to insist on their somatic legibility. The Hippocratic triumph over physiognomy consists in setting Philemon’s two aporetic pronouncements into dynamic and transformative relation. If physiognomy never resolves the tension between knowable bodies and volatile agencies, Hippocrates masters that tension within the self. He says of his disposition to vice, “I biheld and knewe me schapli to these thynges.” The word “schapli”—meaning conformed or inclining—echoes the “fourme and schappe” of Hippocrates’ portrait, yet the physician shows not only that “schap” can be comprehended but that its consequences, and therefore its meanings, can be controlled. Hippocrates’ “I” and “me” (“I … knewe me”) are further troped into soul and body: “‘I ordeyned my soule kyng above my body.’” Into the static equations of physiognomic rules, Hippocrates injects temporality, reflexivity, and agency.
Though Philomon’s pronouncement departs from the truth “nought the least letter,” one may suspect that this letter kills (littera enim occidit, 2 Cor. 3:6). The Pauline echo is given support by the fact that the treatise’s physiognomic chapter concludes with a quotation from “seynt Poule”: “‘No man sale [shall] be crouned [crowned], bot als [unless] he has lawfully and stalworthly stryvene [heartily struggled]’” (2 Tim. 2:5).105 Just prior to this biblical quotation, the treatise switches to a second-person address:
And thus ther thou knowes thi self or any other schaply and bowable to any vice by way of thi compleccion, do thi self and councele other to do as Ypocras did, and make thi soule to reule thi body by gode resoun and discrecion, withstandyng by vertue tho vyces to whilke thou art conable borne of compleccion.106
[And where you know yourself or any other shaped and inclined to any vice because of your complexion, do for yourself—and counsel others to do—as Hippocrates did, and make your soul rule your body according to good reason and discretion, withstanding by means of virtue those vices to which you are disposed on the basis of complexion.]
Here the treatise veers toward penitential self-discipline and leaves behind the semiotics of small noses, little ears, and hairy shoulders that occupy the bulk of the physiognomic text.
The significance of Hippocrates and Philomon can only be evaluated if the exemplum’s position in the physiognomic text is taken into account. This narrative, arguing for the determinative power of self-governance, constantly circulated alongside physiognomic rules. It is recounted in the works of such medieval thinkers as Albertus Magnus (d. 1280), Roger Bacon (d. 1294), Pietro d’Abano (d. 1316), and Michele Savonarola (d. 1468), all of whom treated physiognomy with intellectual seriousness and respect.107 Physiognomic rules imply, in their very syntactic form, the mutual determination of physical body and moral disposition. They promote the fantasy that readers can be inducted into an esoteric knowledge that transforms the apprehension of bodies into characterological insight. What this means for readers’ own corporeality the rules leave unexamined. The exemplum, by contrast, shows self-cultivation triumphing over natural disposition to the point that physiognomy’s pronouncements become futile. It refocuses attention away from knowing others to knowing oneself. The point is not that the story makes the science conformable to dogma. The adage astra inclinant, sed non obligant was sufficient to squeeze physiognomy into orthodoxy. Instead, the popularity of this disjunctive conjoining shows that medieval readers found the compound of exemplum and rules good to think with. Story and treatise articulate starkly different versions of embodied subjectivity, and so whatever understandings of the physical self emerge from reading the text as a whole are informed by their dissenting interplay. This is a both/and model of writing about the body, which calls for readers’ active parrying of colliding models of causation, signification, and subjectivity.
Book
What did medieval men and women understand phisik to encompass? Medieval English book-making functions as an important source for recovering contemporary understandings of the discourse. Compared to theology, for instance, medicine generated relatively little commentary about its audience, purpose, and discursive status in late medieval England. While people fiercely debated what counted as religious doctrine and who had a claim to read and write it, medicine catalyzed few polemical articulations. The 1421 and 1423 efforts at elite reform are among the only ones. Instead, epistemological evaluation and metapragmatic reflection were often recorded in the material artifacts of books. Manuscripts embody in their contents and layout medieval ideas about medical genres, intellectual traditions, and the relation between literacy and healing. Take, for instance, the redefinition of phisik that concludes the story of Philomon and Hippocrates: “Phisik es noght elles bot abstynens, and conquest of foule covetus lustes [Medicine is nothing other than abstinence and the conquest of foul, covetous desires].”108 With this line, the exemplum seems to subordinate the scientific and technical aspects of the Hippocratic art to the project of moral self-governance. Set in contrast to physiognomy’s somatic determinism, phisik is made the standard-bearer for the subject’s freedom from nature.
Yet, just as the story’s constant attachment to the physiognomic rules tempered its critique of them, so phisik’s redefinition here was qualified by the textual and material frameworks in which it was articulated. A quick tour through the contents of the codex in which the words appear, now Sloane MS 213, gives a sense of the discursive environment in which it assumed meaning. The chapter on physiognomy is part of a larger vernacular treatise on natural philosophy, which also treats astrology, meteorological and calendrical prognostics, the four humors, and uroscopy. The treatise helps constitute the Middle English portion of the manuscript, a section of more than thirty folios that also includes texts on medicinal oils and waters, bloodletting, and geometry. Most of the Latin texts in the manuscript appear to be