1. Introduction

Theodore Beza (1519–1605), pastor of the Reformed Church in Geneva in the late sixteenth century, infused a measure of medieval wonder in narrating an event from war-torn France. According to the story, in 1560 Catholic troops killed three Huguenot soldiers in southern France and buried their bodies hastily on a riverbank, where fellow Protestant forces later discovered them. The Protestant soldiers marveled that the corpses “had lain there for more than three months without undergoing any corruption.” After the soldiers went to retrieve the bodies for a proper burial, they found to their astonishment that “the wounds on one of the bodies were as fresh and red with blood as they were at the hour of his death.”Footnote ¹ It seems more than a little ironic that Beza, writing from the citadel of Reformed Protestantism and generally not given to superstitious tales told by Catholics, trusted the story of uncorrupted Huguenot corpses enough to include it in the standard Calvinist history of the French Reformation, the Histoire ecclesiastique (1580). In touting it as “an indisputable event,” he accepted the possibility that holiness could manifest itself in the human body, a premise embraced by Catholics for centuries.

In other circumstances as well, Protestants in the Reformed tradition looked to the body for signs of a spiritual disposition in ways that shared a fundamental compatibility with Catholic assumptions. Jean Crespin (1520–72), the noted French Reformed martyrologist, recounted an anecdote to dramatize the moral point that the bodies of those who persecuted the people of God could suddenly malfunction in a gruesomely poignant fashion. He described how a Catholic in charge of prosecuting Protestants in Provence was overcome abruptly by “a flow of blood, which excited his shameful regions and caused a massive buildup of flesh and retention of urine.” Having reaped the wages of his bloodlust, the Catholic leader died an agonizing death.Footnote ² Many other contemporary sources also illustrate the continuing hold of corporal expressions of sanctity and sinfulness on Reformed Protestants.Footnote ³ Stories like these evoked accounts by medieval Catholic writers who inscribed divine judgment on the bodies of notorious heretics. It was commonly believed throughout the Middle Ages and sixteenth century, for example, that the heresiarch Arius (250–336) died excreting his insides because of his grave heresy.Footnote ⁴

The cases from Beza, Crespin, and other Reformed Protestant writers run counter to the general depictions of Calvinists’ views about the body in historical scholarship. From different vantage points, historians have maintained that a Calvinist commitment to the transcendence of the sacred precluded its presence in physical entities and organisms in the natural world. Carlos Eire’s study of conflicts over religious images and relics during the Reformation drew attention to Calvinists’ rigid dualism, which delegitimized claims of supernatural power in physical objects.Footnote ⁵ Similarly, Natalie Zemon Davis has distinguished between Calvinist and Catholic targets of aggression in sixteenth-century France. Calvinists directed their fury primarily at church property and religious images to expose the fraudulence of consecrated objects. Conversely, Catholics singled out heretics themselves for destruction, since their bodies comprised “sources of danger and defilement.”Footnote ⁶ Lyndal Roper has affirmed this line of interpretation in her treatment of witchcraft, sexuality, and the body, further specifying that Protestants denied that “the holy could be manifest in parts of the human body.”Footnote ⁷ Examining changing attitudes about reproduction in early modern England, Mary Fissell has also maintained that Protestants’ antagonism to the corporal features of late medieval Christianity helped to sever connections between women’s bodies, pregnancy, and the sacred.Footnote ⁸ Thus, Calvinists appear to have possessed a new, modern vision of the body, subject only to functions and processes that they recognized as natural.

The unsullied corpses of pious Huguenots and the distended abdomens of malevolent persecutors, however, caution against strict dichotomies between Calvinist and Catholic understandings of the body. Recent attention to cultural hybridities has made scholars more sensitive to synthetic constructions of corporality and spirituality in the Reformation period.Footnote ⁹ Yet more importantly, stories such as these and the religious literature from which they emerge point to the confluence of several cultural and intellectual movements that have been analyzed in isolation from one another.

Struggles for souls between Catholics and Protestants coincided with a pivotal moment in the history of medicine, represented most illustratively in the publication of Andreas Vesalius’s (1514–64) De humani corpori fabrica. Published in 1543, it both exemplified a culmination of a long-standing fascination with anatomy and formed a groundbreaking manifesto for an empirical approach to medicine. Vesalius launched a new methodology for deciphering the body by focusing on gathering and disseminating anatomical knowledge. The widespread enthusiasm for anatomy produced what Jonathan Sawday has called a “culture of dissection” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet anatomical investigation did not supplant traditional humoral views of bodily constitution and physical health. Rather, very old, time-honored notions of Galenic physiology and body-soul permeability mixed uneasily with new empirical methods in medical science until the ascendancy of a mechanical Cartesian outlook in the late 1600s.

With these cultural and intellectual crosscurrents in mind, this present study examines Catholic and Reformed Protestant readings of the body among pastoral and polemical writers from the mid-sixteenth to the late seventeenth century. A comparison of this kind allows for isolating confessional distinctions as writers sought to decode the body in light of both a heightened awareness of corporality and deep-seated questions about knowing and believing. Pastoral and polemical writings are particularly useful for this analysis since authors sought to dispel doubts about truth and deception by drawing stark contrasts about the effects of moral and religious choices. Close attention to these sources sheds new light on how both Catholic and Calvinist writers utilized bodily corruption as a motif to promote piety and unmask religious difference. This corporal hermeneutic resonated with the hodgepodge of Galenic theory and Vesalian anatomy that exerted a strong pull on a wide cross-section of intellectuals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Furthermore, this study argues that Catholic and Calvinist pastoral treatises generally relied on similar corporal features to signify a sinful state, but polemical texts made important distinctions about the effects of religious difference. Catholic writers identified the heretical body as the site of humoral contamination, whereas Calvinist theorists regarded the idolatrous body as the locus of inordinate sensuality.

2. The Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Early modern premises about the body drew deeply from long-established views that reached all the way back through the Middle Ages to antiquity. The second-century medical theorist Galen (129–216) synthesized the corpus of Greek anatomical knowledge and bequeathed it to the Greek-speaking Byzantine world. As Arab and Greek texts filtered into Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Galenic tradition soon emerged as the leading medical authority in universities. Its fundamental principle of physiology recognized four basic fluids, or humors — blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm — as the essential substances in the body. A healthy constitution arose from the proper balance of the four humors.Footnote ¹¹ Humoral complexions produced specific psychological traits, so that, for example, those with a prevalence of blood were believed to possess a highly charged, sanguine personality; those with black bile were melancholic and pensive; those with yellow bile were choleric and irascible; and those with phlegm were sluggish and mentally dull.Footnote ¹²

With increased access to Galenic texts, theologians blended humoral pathology with Christian anthropology, resulting in a close identification between bodily and spiritual welfare. Following Aristotle (384–322 BCE) and early church fathers, Scholastic theorists posited an essential and inextricable union between body and soul.Footnote ¹³ The unity of body and soul allowed theologians and ecclesiastics ample latitude for theorizing about the physiological effects of moral and spiritual pollution.Footnote ¹⁴ Similarly, exceptional piety often manifested itself in fantastic physiological expressions, a tendency that became more pronounced from the twelfth century onward.Footnote ¹⁵ Caroline Walker Bynum has traced a growing physicality in religious devotion, for which she offers an abundance of evidence, from the rawness of blood piety in Northern Europe, to the prominence of female bodily functions — such as giving birth and lactating — in women’s spirituality, to the popularity of the cult of saints. Stigmata, sweet bodily aroma, and uncorrupted corpses were universally recognized physical features of sanctity.Footnote ¹⁶ By the late Middle Ages, therefore, the body had long functioned as a semiosis of sin and virtue, piety and impiety.

The revival of classical learning in the Renaissance brought renewed attention to Galenic texts and to the reemergence of anatomy, first in the universities of Bologna and Padua.Footnote ¹⁷ Outside the university, anatomy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries caught hold among surgeons, other medical practitioners, and even nuns in Northern Italy. Katharine Park has uncovered the practice of “holy anatomies” performed in convents by nuns seeking corporal evidence of saintliness in departed sisters. Physicians in private settings also opened women’s bodies to deliver the unborn, to determine causes of death, and to learn more about the female reproductive system. The corpses of men and children also underwent postmortem examinations.Footnote ¹⁸ Over the course of the sixteenth century, dissection became institutionalized in many medical schools across Europe and attracted strong public interest. The construction of anatomical theaters to accommodate audiences of physicians, students, and lay enthusiasts proliferated in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote ¹⁹ In addition, large numbers of anatomical texts and illustrations also found their way into print from publishing houses in Venice, Strasbourg, Bologna, Paris, Antwerp, and other cities in the sixteenth century.Footnote ²⁰ Consequently, the appearance of Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica in 1543 reflected an increasing absorption with the body that had developed over the course of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

Vesalius, as well as other anatomists such as Johannes Dryander (1500–60) and Charles Estienne (1504–64), challenged the standard textual approach to understanding the human body and persuaded more universities throughout Europe to hire anatomists. On a theoretical plane, Vesalius undermined certain aspects of the Galenic model, which led to the fusion of older, ambiguous notions of humoral movement with sharper, more empirical descriptions of physiological functions.Footnote ²¹ Thus the period from the mid-1500s to the ascendancy of a mechanical Cartesian outlook in the late 1600s marked a unique, Vesalian moment in which time-honored notions of Galenic physiology and body-soul permeability coalesced with pioneering empirical methods in medical science.Footnote ²²

This empirical approach to the body and its dissemination via dissection and illustration made a profound impact across many segments of learned society. Anatomists reported their findings in case histories, called observationes or historia, giving rise to a flourishing new genre of medical writing. Gianna Pomata and Nancy Siraisi have remarked on the “veritable explosion of clinical and anatomical reports” in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These reports contained autopsy narratives that belonged to a new intellectual emphasis on observation in the natural and human sciences.Footnote ²³ Human anatomy moved beyond medical and scientific texts into art, poetry, and literature. Painters such as Melchior Meier (fl. ca. 1572–82: Apollo, Marsyas, and the Judgment of Midas, 1581) and Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69: Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp, 1632) depicted dissected bodies, while a wide variety of writers from George Herbert (1593–1633: The Temple, 1633) to Noël Le Breton (1617–1707: Crispin Médecin, 1674) employed anatomy as a motif in their poems and plays.Footnote ²⁴ Thus an assortment of medical practices, social institutions, and cultural conventions devoted to the probing of the innermost corporal spaces occupied a central place in European cities.Footnote ²⁵

The burgeoning interest in the body also reverberated across pastoral and polemical discourses in the Reformation even among Reformed Protestants, long considered highly skeptical about the intermingling of corporal and spiritual domains. A number of recent studies have highlighted that anatomical investigation revealed for all Protestants, as well as Catholics, the unfathomable wisdom, genius, and glory of the divine creator.Footnote ²⁶ Andrew Cunningham has marshaled abundant evidence that anatomy functioned didactically to show forth the supreme handiwork of a good, compassionate, and wise God. Anatomists and their followers probed the marvels of human anatomy to understand in greater detail the brilliance of its designer, a lesson that all Catholics and Protestants embraced.Footnote ²⁷ In a similar vein, Roger French has argued that for Calvinists and Lutherans, “the book of nature stood side by side with the Bible in giving respective natural and revealed knowledge of God.” Protestant anatomists such as Guillaume Rondelet (1507–66), Conrad Gesner (1515–65), and André du Laurens (1558–1609) conceived of “anatomy as the theatre of God’s creation.”Footnote ²⁸ The Calvinist physician Helkiah Crooke (1576–1635) spoke for generations of Reformers when he exclaimed that “there is nothing either in heaven or earth, or in the administration of them both . . . that is not equalled, yea the divine glory giveth us warrant to say, exceeded in the frame of man.”Footnote ²⁹ John Calvin (1509–64) himself declared that “the glory of God ought in a measure to shine in several parts of our bodies,” and for that purpose the creator designed the tongue and mouth to profess his wonders and to sing his praises.Footnote ³⁰ He went on to applaud those “who developed medicine, devoting their labor to our benefit.”Footnote ³¹ From the mission field, the Dutch Calvinist pastor Philip Baldaeus (1632–72) criticized Hindus for denying the dignity of the human body by rejecting the Christian teaching of a bodily resurrection.Footnote ³²

A more detailed understanding of the human body not only gave witness to divine glory, but more importantly, it also functioned as an instrument to come to a truer understanding of the self and a greater awareness of God. In his physiological treatise Mikrokosmographia (1615), Crooke lauded anatomy as a means “for a man to attaine to the knowledge of himself” and to “the knowledge of the immortall God.”Footnote ³³ John Donne (1572–1631) and the Huguenot Pierre de la Primadaye (ca. 1545–ca. 1619) reversed human and divine roles, employing the image of the divine anatomist who plumbed the innermost parts of men and women to ascertain hidden motives and desires.Footnote ³⁴ Taken as a whole, these observations by Calvinists across the Continent indicate that, as Sawday has argued, “under the prompting of a Calvinist theology, protestant divines saw in this new science [anatomy] a complement to the authority of the scriptures.”Footnote ³⁵

Religious writers of all stripes witnessed dissections, read anatomical treatises, and borrowed insights from confessional opponents about the body and health. Levius Lemnius (1505–68), a physician and Catholic priest from Zeeland, studied under Vesalius in Padua and wrote several treatises on physical and temperamental constitutions. Beza, in arguing against astrology, cited the axiom from the “most erudite Galen” that “the habits of the soul follow the temperament of the body.”Footnote ³⁶ Simon Goulart (1543–1628), lead pastor of the Genevan church after Beza, cited and quoted Lemnius and Vesalius in relating unusual (and occasionally sensational) accounts of physical and psychological disability. Goulart, for example, referred to Lemnius in making the point that alterations in humoral complexion often followed changes in the soul.Footnote ³⁷ Though it is not clear that he was referring to anatomy per se, Calvin lauded the practice of medicine as a “good and godly art.”Footnote ³⁸ Anatomy fascinated his close friend Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560), who attended dissections at the University of Wittenberg, read Vesalius, and promoted anatomy as a means to understand the creative brilliance of God.Footnote ³⁹ In his De anima (1540), Melanchthon maintained that knowledge of the body was necessary to understand the soul. Richard Suggs has noted that Melanchthon believed that one’s physiological condition often reflected an internal spiritual state.Footnote ⁴⁰

Widely used Catholic confessional manuals, such as the one written by Martin Del Rio (1551–1608), certainly concurred with Melanchthon. Spanish confessors followed the guidance of these manuals, which urged priests to consult with medical practitioners when parishioners claimed to have visions.Footnote ⁴¹ Derek Hirst has recently observed that English Protestants developed explanations for individuals’ religious commitments based on calculations of their humoral complexions.Footnote ⁴² And Julie Crawford has uncovered a “reformist physiognomy” among Puritans in the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁴³ Physicians began performing dissections at the University of Leiden, a bedrock of Calvinism, in the 1580s, and the medical faculty opened an anatomical theater in 1597.Footnote ⁴⁴ Thus an eclectic range of evidence suggests that the rise of empiricism in medical science resonated widely across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries among Catholic and Protestant religious figures.

3. Pastors Reading Bodies

The intense theological disputes of the sixteenth century obliged religious authorities and activists to expose falsehood and distinguish it from truth. The very purpose of pastoral and polemical writing aimed at drawing those distinctions as vividly as possible for pastors and lay enthusiasts. More attuned to dangers of sin and rebellion, they could then instruct parishioners who were confused or beguiled by seductive appeals. Cesare Baronius (1538–1607), a leading Catholic intellectual, introduced his multivolume Annales ecclesiastici (1588–1607) by reiterating the need for churchmen to expose the sham facade of newfangled Protestant teachings. He warned that unwary Catholics should “watch diligently the coils with which the lethargic serpent first wraps itself . . . it appeals to the divine scriptures under an honorable pretext; this is characteristic of all heretics, to profess themselves defenders of the divine scripture, veiling their impiety with that beautiful cover.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Protestants also harbored concerns about deceit and uncertainty, but they pointed their fingers at priests and prelates for cloaking the Gospel with false religion. For example, William Tyndale (1490/94–1536) chided Thomas More (1478–1535) that “youre church teacheth not to know the scripture: but hideth it in the latine from the comen people. And from them that understond latine they hide the true sense with a thousand false glosses.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Since religious writers of all confessional stripes warned that “even the devil transforms himself into an angel of light,” no one took lightly the question of whom one could trust.Footnote ⁴⁷

The deceit of appearances that engaged theologians and religious figures such as Baronius and Tyndale reflected a preoccupation with epistemological ambiguity across many facets of early modern European culture. It is worth remembering that in the sixteenth century long-established sources of authority and ways of knowing were giving way to doubt as humanists scrutinized ancient texts, cartographers mapped exotic lands, and anatomists probed strange interiors. On the stage, playwrights dramatized the dichotomy between a hidden, genuine human interior and a visible, illusory corporal exterior.Footnote ⁴⁸ Shakespeare’s Hamlet, deliberating over the authenticity of his father’s ghost, puzzled at penetrating what is visible to ascertain what is true. By the end of act 2, Hamlet broods, “The spirit that I have seen / May be the devil: and the devil hath power / To assume a pleasing shape: yea, and perhaps / Out of my weakness and melancholy, / As he is very potent with such spirits, / Abuses me to damn me.”Footnote ⁴⁹ And in the laboratory, anatomists peeled back layers of human flesh to expose the divine origins of the inner self, obscured by ignorance and convention.Footnote ⁵⁰ Anatomists and illustrators depicting the body supposed that “the truth always lies within, in the interior, hidden by a surface sheath, which one has to penetrate.”Footnote ⁵¹

Penetrating the external to ascertain inward character required a hermeneutic to discern the truth that lay within. In legal proceedings, investigators searched for a devil’s mark on the bodies of accused witches, while judges, inquisitors, and prosecutors routinely inflicted pain on the body in order to extract the truth out of unreliable, deceptive subjects.Footnote ⁵² To lay bare the truth, Catholic, Calvinist, and Lutheran authorities also regularly relied on the body as a signifier of religious difference. Accounts and visual representations of monstrous bodies proliferated with the outbreak of religious and political strife in the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁵³ And, as discussed previously, the belief that moral disorder made itself evident in physical dysfunction had a very long pedigree in medieval Europe. Pastoral and polemical authors in the Reformation frequently appropriated this well-worn motif and transformed it by reading devout, impious, heretical, and idolatrous bodies with a regard for anatomical precision. In this Vesalian moment, as anatomical analysis — yet still within a Galenic paradigm — had gained broad currency across Europe, Catholic and Reformed Protestant writers were providing empirical detail to describe the effects of true and false devotion on the body. Ecclesiastical authorities, theologians, and religious partisans also operated from the premise that the body offered glimpses into the state of the soul. In the cloudy religious confusion of the Reformation, it became necessary to instruct pastors and laypeople in corporal analysis so that they might distinguish true devotion from phony enthusiasm.

Calvinist and Catholic writers shared broad agreement about how to decipher an individual’s internal moral state from his or her external bodily disposition. Instructions for decoding the body appeared in pastoral literature to educate Catholic confessors, Reformed ministers, and devout laypeople of many varieties in the reciprocity between corporal discipline and spiritual welfare. The stomach and intestines loomed large in these writings, as a gorged belly connoted a lack of restraint that could lead to further degradation. Contemporary medical theory also emphasized the function of the stomach “as a position of particular importance in . . . mental and physical health.”Footnote ⁵⁴ For example, the Flemish physician Franciscus van Helmont (1614–99) reiterated this view in his Spirit of Diseases (1694), observing that “the belly is the seat of life.”Footnote ⁵⁵ For Catholics, the doctrine of transubstantiation accorded a central spiritual function to the stomach, since that was where humans absorbed the divine. Devotional writers, pastors, and spiritual autobiographers preoccupied themselves with the digestive process, casting the stomach as the point of intersection between body and soul.Footnote ⁵⁶

Because of close connections between flesh and spirit, writers gave attention to the spiritual dimensions of consumption and digestion. A lively theme in devotional literature focused on the spiritual ramifications of diet, which in turn point to moral perceptions about food consumption and digestion. Philip Rovenius (1574–1651), a Dutch Catholic churchman in the mid-seventeenth century, associated overeating in his Golden Incense Burner (1636) with spiritual malaise, whereas a moderate diet correlated with restrained sexual appetites. Concurring, the Jesuit Thomas Villacastin (1570–1649) added that curbing bodily appetites in the belly and abdomen freed the soul from sin. For Catholic theorists, Protestant heresy introduced disorder into the body that inverted the proper relationship of the stomach, as well as other body parts, to the soul, a form of moral pollution that resulted in the deadly sin of gluttony. Martin Luther’s (1483–1546) robust girth and famous appetites embodied the carnal perversions of heresy. Writing from Antwerp, Adriaan van Meerbeeck (ca. 1563–1627) attributed a quotation to Luther in which he confessed, “I am of flesh and bone and can no less endure without women as without wine.”Footnote ⁵⁷ For van Meerbeeck and many Catholic writers, this example only confirmed what they already knew: heretics were people whose loins and belly completely ruled them.

Some Protestants do not appear to have related abuse of the stomach to misuse of religion. In fact, Lyndal Roper’s treatment of Martin Luther’s rather ample girth shows that his fleshly physicality represented a contrast to the medieval ascetic ideal. Luther’s portly presence embodied Lutheran values of “a man who had a wife and children, a model for a church with married clergy, whose theology forthrightly attacked monasticism.”Footnote ⁵⁸ These domestic values certainly appealed to Calvinists, but at the same time many Reformed authors did link diet and physical health with spiritual wellbeing. The Huguenot writer Pierre La Primaudaye described in his French Academy (1586) the difficulties the stomach caused the soul as, “so through a troubled and defiled bodie, heavily loaden with food & strang meates, the brightnes and clearnes of the soule must needes become pale.”Footnote ⁵⁹

Contemporary writers also perceived at least an indirect relationship between immoderate diet and concupiscent desire. Both the Puritan minister Richard Baxter (1615–91) and Catholic confessors advised fasting to curb sexual lust. Baxter recommended abstinence on a sliding scale commensurate with the intensity of desire. If temptation proved particularly obdurate, he called for eating only one meal a day of lettuce and “cooling herbs,” avoiding strong drink, “hot spices or windy meats.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Robert Burton (1577–1640) concurred and advocated fasting as an “excellent means to keepe the body in subiection, a preparative to devotion.”Footnote ⁶¹ All Reformed leaders invoked Saint Paul’s injunction to subdue the body, promoted moderate consumption, and commended fasting as an aid to devotion. Calvin, for example, wrote: “What else then is the flesh by the old man? And so, since the whole nature of man is rebellious and obstinate against the Spirit of God, we must labour and fight and exert our utmost energy to obey the Spirit.”Footnote ⁶² Thus Catholics and Calvinists cast suspicion on a corpulent midsection as a possible symptom of profligate self-indulgence.

Gender distinctions emerged in readings of the sexualized body. Contemporaries regarded women as prone by nature to sexual assertiveness and blamed the condition on the confluence of cold and moist humors in their bodies. Medical literature frequently explained sexual aggression in women in terms of anatomical abnormalities rather than of dietary regimes.Footnote ⁶³ In the popular religious violence in France, mobs frequently smeared Huguenot women with mud, stripped their cadavers, and even penetrated them with phallic objects to depict them as whores and prostitutes.Footnote ⁶⁴ It was considered necessary for husbands and fathers to watch over their wives and daughters, lest their bodies get the best of them.

Pastoral treatises, however, appealed to men to restrain themselves, providing advice on how to recognize and counter anatomical influences on sexual desire. Baxter considered body temperature as a contributor to “filthy lusts” and recommended that sufferers “reduce it [body temperature] to a temper less inclined to lust.” If that failed, the minister recommended bleeding and “such purges as copiously evacuate serocity.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Burton sounded a similar refrain: he charged that Catholics overemphasize ceremonies, eating fish on Fridays and fasting, “and by that meanes makes them to overthrow the temperature of their bodies, and hazard their soules.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Henry Adriani’s (d. 1607) sermon book, popular in the Low Countries, conveyed a more mainstream message about the body and unrestrained sexual desire. He reminded Catholics that most sinful actions take place outside the body, but sexual impurity invades the body, which is the temple of the Holy Spirit.Footnote ⁶⁷ Like many other religious writers of the period, Villacastin believed that Saint Paul’s admonition to mortify the flesh imposed a strict bodily regimen to keep the lusts of the flesh in check.Footnote ⁶⁸ Those who failed to heed these admonitions could count on their physical appearance to announce their secret sins to all. According to de la Primaudaye, “the venerous act spoileth beautie, defileth the bodie, drieth it up, & causeth it to stinke, maketh the face pale, wanne or yellow, weakneth the members and ioints, indengreth Sciaticke goutes, collick, passions, griefes of the stomacke, giddines of the head, or dimnes of sight, the leprosie & pocks.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Just as the physical form provided evidence of moral degradation, the body also bore witness to a soul afflicted by despair. Tracking the development of mental health care, David Lederer has brought to light the extensive practice of spiritual physic, a cluster of therapies to assuage individuals suffering from emotional, spiritual, and mental distress. Confessors and pastors of all denominational complexions blended corporal treatments, such as purgatives and bleedings, with religious remedies, including auricular confessions, sermons, and catechism lessons to treat people troubled with forms of psychological disorder.Footnote ⁷⁰ The English minister Richard Napier (1559–1634) offers a fascinating example of a prolific practitioner who treated thousands of clients in the early seventeenth century. Michael MacDonald has exploited the rich case studies Napier left behind to document his work and the blend of humoral pathology, religious dogma, physical science, and anatomy that informed his treatment of insanity and other psychological disturbances.Footnote ⁷¹

These physicians of the soul relied on outward physiological expression to instruct other pastors in remediating spiritual distress. The Jesuit Martin Bresser (b. 1584) described to confessors the humoral contingencies involved in the examination of consciences. He wrote, “In a normal disposition, a cold combination [of humors] such as phlegmatic and melancholic ones, causes anxieties. The reason is that in these individuals, by a deficiency of natural heat, the air around the heart is pressed together and congealed in a certain way, and thus the heart itself is compressed.” Conversely, Bresser added that the careful examination of the conscience leads to the profusion of choleric and sanguine fluids that enlarge the spirit around the heart, which brings about bravery and boldness in the individual.Footnote ⁷² Similarly, Jeremiah Drexel (1581–1638), another Jesuit, maintained that a commitment to sobriety and frugality would cause “all devotion to wealth to flow out of our bodies.”Footnote ⁷³ Writing metaphorically, Peter Canisius (1521–97) associated the spiritual benefits of confession with the therapeutic practice of purgation. He wrote, “for those who have undigested food enclosed within or have humors or phlegm harmfully affecting the stomach, they are relieved by vomiting: for such it is with those who have sinned, if they hide and hold back sin in themselves, it is pushed inside and they will be almost suffocated from the phlegm or humors of sin.”Footnote ⁷⁴ For Bresser, Drexel, and Canisius, confessors needed to employ a combination of spiritual and medical therapies, since these priests functioned as physicians of the soul.Footnote ⁷⁵

The anatomical signs of sin and heresy described by pastors and confessors functioned in much the same way as the accounts of monstrous births produced by a host of writers. Many studies have analyzed the remarkably popular genre of monsters and grotesque childbirths that appeared in wonder books, pamphlets, and theological treatises. Stories of babies born with fantastic physical abnormalities highlighted the sin of the parents, especially the mother. For example, Oliver Heywood, a Nonconformist minister in seventeenth-century England, remarked in his diary on the birth of a deformed child as God’s punishment for his mother’s dissolute manner of life. Heywood was by no means alone in his moral diagnosis, as Julie Crawford has shown among English Puritan pastors.Footnote ⁷⁶ The monstrous-birth literature differs from the anatomical readings of pastors and confessors in at least one respect. Monstrous births tended to possess macrodimensions not characteristic of the corporal manifestations of moral corruption in pastoral writing. A number of scholars have shown that such births served to foretell impending calamity and warn of divine wrath. Ronnie Hsia, Jennifer Spinks, Philip Soergel, and others have pointed out that tales of monstrous births related by Protestants and Catholics in the sixteenth century reflected anxieties about the Apocalypse and the fragmentation of Christendom.Footnote ⁷⁷ While pastoral writers certainly believed that disease marked the wages of sin, they did not apply them as prophetic warnings to society at large.

Within Catholic and Protestant pastoral literature on care for the body, it comes as no great surprise that it discussed the wiles of Satan and his minions. In a manual written for confessors, Drexel sounded a familiar alarm that a preoccupation with the body gives the devil the opportunity to snare the soul.Footnote ⁷⁸ Similarly Canisius warned that the devil works through anger, which in turn will ruin the body, though he, like most priests, did not provide specific detail either about how the devil utilized anger or how it wreaked physical havoc.Footnote ⁷⁹ Perhaps he assumed Satan worked through bodily humors, for that is exactly what Baxter maintained in A Christian Directory of Practical Divinity, first published in 1673. Chastising fellow Nonconformist pastors in England, he claimed that some often conflate the disease of melancholy with “notable operations of the spirit of God.” Rather, Baxter asserted that the devil plays on one’s dominant humors, so that it is “much easier to tempt a cholerick person to anger, then another; and a flegmatick person to sloth, and a sanguine or hot tempered person to lust, and wantonness; so also a melancholy person to thoughts of blasphemy, infidelity, and despair.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Burton theorized that the means by which the devil takes possession of someone is by stirring up the melancholy humor, which he referred to as the “Devil’s bath.” He wrote, “Blacke colour is a shooing horne, a bait to allure them, in so much that many writers make melancholy an ordinary cause, and a Symptome of despaire.”Footnote ⁸¹ Burton prescribed a good diet, fresh air, exercise, and reading scripture to remedy religious melancholy.Footnote ⁸²

4. Polemicists Reading the Body

Thus far this study has argued that when Catholics and Reformed Protestants wrote in a pastoral or devotional capacity, they portrayed the body in similar modalities with an eye for empirical detail. A conspicuously corpulent frame, an elevated body temperature, a washed-out complexion, as well as other physical markers, signified moral disorder for writers alerting their communities to the dangers of the world, the flesh, and the devil. In polemical discourse, however, Catholics and Calvinists diverged in how they depicted the corporal effects of false belief and worship.

Catholic polemicists cast the heretical body as corrupted by humoral disturbances that gave rise to overpowering lust, anger, and moral blindness. Most writers did not really offer (or even operate from) any well-developed scheme about the direction or mutation of moral contamination. Some authors seem to have worked from a body-to-soul track, emphasizing that unchecked sensuality leads to heresy: so that the body, susceptible to temptations, posed a constant threat to the state of the soul. Yet others appear to posit a soul-to-body bearing, contending that the possession of heretical views in the soul carried profoundly deleterious consequences for the body. Nevertheless, they all believed that the movement of moral pollution across permeable boundaries blinded victims to religious truth.

A host of Catholic controversialists, theologians, and pedagogues asserted that the sensory apparatus of the body functioned as a portal for the entrance of heresy into the soul. Carnal temptations led the careless along a path of disorderliness and sensuality that ultimately led them to become heretics. As Baronius put it, “nearly numberless examples . . . make it clear that hardly a heretic deviated from the faith who was not already polluted by the filth of other sins.”Footnote ⁸³ According to this line of thought, heresy constituted an advanced stage in a decadent life. That “Hammer of Heretics” Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621) pressed a similar case, namely, that the carnal temptations stimulate the lower regions, which leads to the corruption of the rational capacities of the mind. Consequently, Bellarmine contended that heresy should be regarded as a “work of the flesh.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Likewise, Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638), who otherwise had little in common with Bellarmine, agreed about the power of carnal desire, contending that “fleshly creatures fight for the entire kingdom of pleasure, but spiritual creatures resist it.”Footnote ⁸⁵

The depraved lecher who eventually succumbs to heresy developed into a common trope in anti-Protestant writing. The widely read French poet Pierre Ronsard (1524–85) caricatured a Huguenot as the youthful merchant, braggart gentleman, debauched scholar, and simple woman who were incapable of sensible judgment and who allowed lust and gluttony to rule them.Footnote ⁸⁶ Catholic readings of the concupiscent heretical body often led authorities or mobs to degrade Protestant corpses in explicitly sexualized ways. Many Reformed descriptions of Catholic violence against Huguenots in France in the 1560s and 1570s recounted how authorities or mobs would strip the corpses of their victims, both male and female, despoil them in various ways, and leave them exposed publicly for a period of time. One such incident recorded by Crespin involved a young man whose “completely naked body was put on spectacle, the degenerate mob taking pleasure in these things, such that they cannot be put into print.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Denis Crouzet has examined these acts of violence across France during the religious wars and has argued that communities laid bare the corpses of heretics, especially female ones, to expose the carnal basis of heresy. Suspected of having sex with the devil and luxuriating in sensual decadence, Protestants held to a religion that championed fleshly pleasures, according to stock Catholic depictions.Footnote ⁸⁸

Francis Coster (1532–1619) deployed this theme to explain that the origins of the Reformation derived from the inability of the first generation of Protestant leaders to control their own lusts. He maintained that Luther, Martin Bucer (1491–1551), Calvin, Beza, and others “having abandoning the vanities of the world with a sincere spirit . . . dedicated themselves to the coenobitic life . . . but gradually they were enticed away by their senses.” Clearly by “senses” Coster meant sexual desires, for in other works he charged various Calvinist ministers in Geneva — Pierre Richier (ca. 1506–80), Pierre Viret (1511–71), Beza, and Calvin — of committing adultery with women and young girls during their pastoral ministry.Footnote ⁸⁹ Coster also repeated the libel that Calvin had been branded as punishment for sodomy when he was a canon in Paris.Footnote ⁹⁰ The Jesuit historian Johannes Bolland (1596–1665), in contrasting the saintliness of Ignatius Loyola (1491–1556) with the worldliness of Luther, made a similar case: “Having been conquered by anger, ambition, and lust, Luther turned from the religious life to a profane one.”Footnote ⁹¹ The poet, priest, and pamphleteer in France, Artus Désiré (1510–79), concurred, writing that heretics are people “who desire to live in carnality.”Footnote ⁹² For many Catholics, the allegations of unbridled sexuality no doubt helped explain how a generation of priests and monks could renounce their vow of celibacy, marry, urge others to do the same, and disparage the sanctity of virginity. Rejecting the true church and giving themselves over to the flesh, all of these heretics belonged to the patrimony of Satan.Footnote ⁹³

On other occasions, Catholic polemicists placed emphasis on the power of heresy in the soul to produce profound changes in the heretic’s body. Canisius, for example, explained that rebellion against the Catholic Church implants malice in the soul, “which will show itself on the exterior . . . one’s complexion becomes pale, the eyes are sunk down, the mind is inflamed, and the limbs become cold.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Coster, his fellow Jesuit, utilized quite explicit humoral theory when expounding on this transformation, writing “though they [Protestants] had previously been members, they were transformed (how sad!) into phlegm and into to a deadly abundance of humors that usually afflict the stomach, and since the stomach is not a place of filth, but naturally desires wholesome food, these are people who have too little waste, too much juice, and are able to collect blood too easily. Finally, like the filthy dregs that flowed out through the outhouse, they also flow along, one sullied with a harlot, one sullied with thieving, and another with crimes. Because this is what ordinarily happens to those who are overcome with phlegm, they are certainly expelled from the heavenly body of saints as dangerous phlegm and excessive pituita, just as if religion became sick and vomited them out.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Coster’s diatribe overlaid the metaphor that heretics corrupt the body of Christ (and are vomited out) with an actual description of humoral changes in the heretic’s body. Namely, he claimed that Protestants were “transformed into phlegm and a deadly abundance of humors” and “these are people with too little waste, too much juice.”

Coster’s physiological analysis has implications for how contemporaries understood the body in relation to heresy and gender. According to the humoral pathology of the day, those dominated by the cold and wet humor, phlegm, possessed a sluggish physical constitution and obtuse mental faculties. This would mean, then, that not only were Protestants mentally dull, but that their phlegmatic character also rendered them gullible, an easy prey for the seductions of literalism, and self-indulgent, a victim of their unrestrained libido. Coster’s depiction also contained not-so-subtle gender insinuations, for phlegm was considered the prevailing humor in women, who were also typecast as dimwitted, credulous, and lacking in self-discipline. Since heresy comprised the ultimate perversion of truth, heresy perverted the humoral regime of the (male) body, feminizing the basic fluids and giving male heretics over to all of the mental and moral weaknesses attributed to women, manifested in whoring, thieving, or other “crimes.” It is also telling that Coster singled out the stomach (stomachum and ventriculus) as the primary targets of the foul humors. For as noted earlier, the stomach assumed a preeminent position, regarded as the place of spiritual devotion, “where God is welcomed into the self.”Footnote ⁹⁶

Many other writers relentlessly pressed the physiological and psychological consequences of heresy in treatises, tracts, and sermons. Two primary effects were anger and lust. Richard Verstegan (1550–1640), English author of the martyrology Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis (1587), portrayed Protestants as heretics whose religious perversions had rendered them mad, delighting in cruel tortures and destroying sacred property.Footnote ⁹⁷ Verstegan’s martyrology vividly illustrated the cruelty of schismatics in England and Calvinists in France and the Low Countries: they hanged, drowned, dismembered, and crucified priests. A woodcut in the 1587 edition even displayed Protestants feeding a horse on grain poured into the disemboweled cavity of a dead priest.Footnote ⁹⁸ In explaining the persecution of Catholics in the Low Countries, Bolland remarked that heresy breeds anger, which begets hatred, which gives rise to cruelty.Footnote ⁹⁹ Thomas Stapleton (1535–98) contended that heresy produces “lust and madness,” just as Bellarmine warned that a stubborn commitment to error leads to “interior darkness and delirium.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Fixated on the sensuality of heretics, Désiré charged that Calvin “visited among the great homes / to solicit in secret / ladies, to move them for his lust and lewdness.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ On the other hand, as many Catholic writers such as Baronius pointed out, one could distinguish a Catholic from a heretic by the fruits of peace, modesty, and mercy.Footnote ¹⁰²

The modes of religious expression that Reformed Protestants considered most corrosive to the body were devotional observances that they condemned as idolatry. Fostering genuine worship of God occupied a central place in Reformed Protestant thought throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Eire concluded that Calvin “asserts that one cannot be a Christian without a proper knowledge of worship, and even places worship before salvation in order of cognitive importance.”Footnote ¹⁰³ The false worship of idolatry entailed bestowing any reverence owed to God onto a material object or apprehending God in any tangible fashion.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Not only did Calvinists detest ascribing sanctity to physical objects, but they also condemned as idolatry any activity, teaching, or habit of mind that detracted from the glory and transcendence of God. Just as all other Reformed theologians, Calvin traced the roots of idolatry to innate human depravity, maintaining that fallen individuals and societies naturally distort the “seed of religion” God implanted in them. In rebellion against God, the unregenerate, the sinister, and the ignorant pridefully and stubbornly “measure him [God] by the yardstick of their own stupidity.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Consequently, “even though they are compelled to recognize some god, they strip him of his glory by taking away his power . . . so they, by fashioning a dead and empty idol, are truly said to deny God.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

This perversion in Calvinists’ worship not only defiled the soul, but also contaminated the body. Reformed writers, prompted by the new emphasis on anatomy in their day, celebrated the human body as a marvel of creation that proclaimed the magnificence of the divine creator. United to God in their bodies as well as in their souls, Christians bore the imprint of Christ. Calvin asserted in a 1544 treatise that “the body of a faithful man is intended for the glory of God and will share in the immortality of his kingdom and is to be conformed to that of our Lord Jesus; so it is quite absurd to abandon it [the body] to pollution, as to prostitute it before an idol.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ He asked rhetorically, “the Lord’s Supper, is it received in the mind only, and not also in the hands and mouth: hath God engraved in our bodies his arms and badges, that we should pollute ourselves with most foul mire and filth?”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Across the Reformed Protestant world, theologians, pastors, and partisans maintained that bowing down before an image, venerating a relic, ingesting a host, or attending such practices brought pollution and damnation into bodies as well as souls. Reformed thought linked idolatry to an immoderate carnality brought on by original sin. Calvin held that original sin produced moral weaknesses in human bodies, pushing them to “inordinate desiring,” especially in sexual appetites.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Since humans were naturally predisposed to sensuality, it followed that the sensory features of the Roman Mass — with its pictures, statues, colorful vestments, incense, musical instruments, and chants — drew congregants away from true, spiritual adoration of the invisible God.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In the early 1600s, André Rivet (1572–1651), the Huguenot theologian at the University of Leiden, stated in his treatise against “papist Catholics” that the flesh distorts the good judgment of those who wish to worship idols.Footnote ¹¹¹ The prominent English theologian and archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Tenison (1636–1715), associated idolatry with “an inordinate love of riches, honours, and bodily pleasures, whereby the passions and appetites of man are made superior to the will of God.”Footnote ¹¹² Similarly, Henry Hammond (1605–60) in a discourse on idolatry contended that “filthynesse and abomination is sometimes rendered [as] idolatry.”Footnote ¹¹³ As Calvinist pastors went into mission fields in Asia, Africa, and America in the 1600s, the encounter with indigenous peoples reinforced their conviction that natural human inclinations turned them away from the true spiritual worship of God toward tangible objects they can see, touch, and smell.Footnote ¹¹⁴

Though many Reformed writers contended that a heightened carnality led to idolatry, at times they also asserted the opposite connection, namely, that it was idolatry that sparked a greater inclination to immorality. Calvin queried “what reason is it that our bodies should be defiled and profaned before idols” since worshipping idols only gives people a greater inclination to sin.Footnote ¹¹⁵ He charged that idolatry threatened fathers and husbands because those who do not genuinely worship God “will have an adulterous wife and filthy harlots as daughters, boldly playing the wanton.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Johannes a’ Lasco (1499–1560), superintendent of Calvinist refugee communities in Emden, warned Protestants about the dangers of living among Catholics because their idolatry would contaminate even true believers.Footnote ¹¹⁷ John Rainolds (1549–1607), a Puritan polemicist, reiterated a prevalent argument among Reformed Protestants that worshipping idols violated the covenantal pledge to God and thus amounted to spiritual adultery, which led ineluctably to corporal lewdness.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Stationed in Ceylon, the Dutch missionary Baldaeus remarked that “idolatry made people odious,” observing in the mid-1600s that God had afflicted the “corrupted flesh” of idol-worshipping South Asians with a smallpox epidemic “in order to make known the corruption of their flesh.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ In a similar manner, a Reformed pastor in Jakarta, Johannes Roman (d. 1658), recorded in the consistory acta in 1648 that the “despicable idolatry” of heathens bore fruit in their “immorality, drunkeness, and lust.”Footnote ¹²⁰ For Baldaeus, the sexual immorality of heathens derived in principle from the corporal nature of Hindu gods, asserting that “God made all things through his Word, but the heathens believe . . . that all things had their origin in the virile member of their gods.”Footnote ¹²¹ Though it is difficult to establish cause from effect in Reformed discourse on the relationship between idolatry and sexual impurity, it is clear that idolatry functioned as a broad hermeneutic for reading bodies.

While an awareness of anatomy contributed to Reformed usage of the body in polemical discourse, the prophetic tradition in the Old Testament shaped the interconnections between idolatry and sensuality. Reformed Protestants identified deeply with the children of Israel in the Old Testament. Narratives of God’s people enduring harsh persecution by oppressive tyrants, fighting off hostile pagans, returning home after years in exile, and being called back to repentance time and again by godly prophets seemed fundamentally similar to Reformed experiences in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote ¹²² Jonathan Sheehan, for example, has shown that Reformed polemicists moralized about Jewish idolatry not only to critique Roman religious observances, but also to admonish Catholic rulers in the political divisions of the seventeenth century.Footnote ¹²³ In the fractious disputes over proper worship in the sixteenth century, the Old Testament armed Calvinists with loads of ammunition to attack idolatry and assail its polluting effects on the body.

Their scrutiny of Mosaic law, accounts of the Israelites, and prophetic writings in the Old Testament persuaded Reformed leaders that sexual immorality accompanied idolatry. Since Christians were bound in spiritual marriage to God, the veneration of images or participation in Mass constituted a betrayal of that relationship, which was nothing less than adultery. Just as Jews in the Old Testament violated their covenant by whoring after other gods, so also did Christians commit adultery and fornication by worshipping idols. Viret made it clear that adultery was not merely a metaphor to shame idolaters, asserting that the idolatrous Israelites in King Josiah’s reign not only engaged in spiritual lewdness, but also bodily pollution through fornication and adultery. In the prohibitions against consanguinity in Leviticus 18, he also pointed out that Jewish law equated those who relinquished marriage for adultery with apostates who made offerings to strange gods.Footnote ¹²⁴ Viret’s outlook was identical to the views of his colleague John Calvin, who, in commenting on Hosea 7:5, contended that, “faith and sincerity of heart constitute spiritual purity before God. Therefore, when men become corrupt in their whole life, and degenerate from the pure worship of God, they are judged rightly as adulterers.”Footnote ¹²⁵ The same line of interpretation emerges in English Puritanism. Hammond, for instance, explained that idol worship accompanied sodomy and other forms of sexual debauchery in the Old Testament. Like Viret and Calvin, he emphasized that this immorality was no mere metaphor: “The idolatrous practices of the Jews by fornication, whoring, and the like is more than a rhetorical trope, having Thus much of Reality in it also.”Footnote ¹²⁶

The precarious plight of the Israelites surrounded by pagan neighbors offered a multitude of cautionary tales for Reformed Protestants in the midst of Roman Catholics. Viret, Calvin, and Beza cited numerous passages from the prophets warning the Jews to separate themselves from the pagan rites of foreigners, lest the children of Israel be enticed into the snares of damnation.Footnote ¹²⁷ Other Reformed polemicists utilized Old Testament stories as well — many of which interwove accounts of sexual seduction — to alert the faithful to the dangers of idolatry. Heinrich Bullinger (1504–75) noted that Balaam the sorcerer recruited beautiful young women to seduce the young men of Israel in order to lead them to worship Baal.Footnote ¹²⁸ Tenison held up Solomon, who permitted pagan rites in Israel because of his numerous foreign wives and concubines, as the archetype of a life destroyed by seduction and idolatry.Footnote ¹²⁹ Genevan ministers, as well as Lasco, expressed particular anxiety for Protestants known as Nicodemites, who lived in Catholic territories and practiced dissimulation. While recognizing the reality of persecution, Calvinists adamantly maintained that all Christians had to refrain from all forms of idolatry. Nicodemism from this point of view was nothing more than a “miserable subterfuge” that reeked of blasphemy.Footnote ¹³⁰ This was because Catholic rites carried contamination to anyone who came in contact with them, since the “pollutions and defilements” brought contagion, just as the Judeans became infected with the northern kingdom of Israel’s diseases and vices. Calvin warned ominously, “All who are neighbours to idolaters should take caution, lest they contract any of their pollutions.”Footnote ¹³¹

Associating idolatry with sensuality and operating from an Old Testament frame of reference, Reformed polemicists identified sexual defilement as the defining characteristic of idolatrous bodies. An array of Calvinist writers singled out priests, monks, and nuns as the tortured corporal objects of inflamed sexual desire. Bullinger accused priests of “swimmying and stincking of most shamefull vices, even of the filthynesse of whoredom.”Footnote ¹³² Viret contrasted the priests and prelates who extolled celibacy and scorned marriage, but themselves “engage in lewdness for their pleasure.” To avoid procreating, Viret charged, unrestrained priests and monks adopted the method of Onan, who in Genesis 38:9 “wasted his seed on the ground.”Footnote ¹³³ Unsparing in his criticism of Catholic clergy, Calvin also blamed lay and religious women for their complicity in priestly impurity. Pretending piety, they promise to go on a pilgrimage, knowing that “an adulterer is ready at hand who offers himself [as] a companion. . . . And we know further, that when many women meet at unusual hours in churches, and have their private masses, there are hidden corners, where they perpetrate all kinds of licentiousness.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Certainly Reformers writing in this mode were tapping into a long-standing anticlerical motif by constructing images of rapacious priests and of nuns with uncontrollable sexual habits. Even before Luther, Hussites fearing impending Apocalypse identified the Roman Church as the Antichrist described in the book of Revelation, referring to the papacy as the “Whore of Babylon.”Footnote ¹³⁵

Yet Calvinists were not simply recycling a well-worn polemical genre, but they pressed the case that sexual pollution in priests proceeded from the idolatrous body.Footnote ¹³⁶ As the chief perpetrators of idolatry, priests and nuns embodied its worst manifestations. Viret likened papists to pagan idolaters, just as John Rainolds insisted that “the spiritual whoredom” of idolatry led its practitioners into sexual “filth.” Thus the most salutary outcome of the Reformation, according to Thomas Tenison, was purging churches of “Romish idols.”Footnote ¹³⁷

5. Conclusion

The Reformation overlapped new developments in medical science beginning in the fourteenth century, in which exploratory anatomy enveloped Galenic humoral pathology and medieval psychosomatics. These intersecting currents gave way in the late 1600s and 1700s to a mechanistic conception of the natural world and a rigid division of knowledge between material and spiritual spheres. In the Reformation, Catholics and Calvinists portrayed body-soul connections analogously, particularly when they wrote as pastors. They tried to show anatomically that what was good for the soul was good for the body. Interesting distinctions did emerge in the polemical fracas, as Catholics tended to see humoral corruption as the physiological response to heresy; formed by an Old Testament framework, Calvinists equated idolatry with sexual decadence. Though writers often referred metaphorically to sexual debauchery to connote unfaithfulness to God and his Word, they also depicted idolatry as a tangible agent that exacerbated the human proclivity to sensual desire, leading to uncontrollable lust. Ironically, Catholic and Calvinist polemicists arrived at roughly the same place: the sexualized body signified heresy and idolatry.

There is evidence to suggest that perhaps laypeople read bodies as perceptively as their leaders intended. It is of course extremely difficult to penetrate the perceptions of people who left precious few hints of their inner thoughts. Any deductions that laypeople saw the polluting effects of false belief and worship in their confessional enemies must be quite preliminary and tentative. Yet there were some intriguing coincidences that bear further study. Protestants of all stripes stereotyped the Roman clerics and religious as subsumed by sexual depravity in monasteries, convents, and confessional booths. The defiled, sexualized bodies of idolaters in Reformed polemical literature tapped into a clichéd, anti-Catholic clerical motif in late medieval and Reformation Europe. For example, the English Protestant and physician William Turner (d. 1568) allegorized that the Whore of Babylon prostituted herself before rulers, unleashing across Europe the “Roman pox,” a Protestant epithet for syphilis. Writers like Turner exploited the gender inversion and sexual perversion (male pope as prostitute) at a time of palpable fear about the contraction of syphilis. According to Protestant lore, priestly fornication set the Roman pox loose on Europe and the visibly scarred, sickened syphilitic symbolized a corrupt Catholic Church.Footnote ¹³⁸ Likewise, Denis Crouzet, as previously noted, has contended that the sexual positioning of Huguenot female corpses sent a clearly understood message to communities that heretics had wholly given themselves over to carnality. The Catholic martyrologist Pieter Opmeer (1526–94) claimed that Dutch beggar soldiers who hanged nineteen priests from Gorcum in 1572 acted as crude anatomists: “they dissected in a fashion the bodies of almost all of them, they opened the stomachs, scrutinized the inner most entrails, examined the abdomen,” only to parade around with body parts and sell fatty tissue as medical remedies.Footnote ¹³⁹ Catholics in the French religious wars returned the favor with mutilations, eviscerations, and mock processions with body parts on sticks. In Tours in 1562, a crowd disemboweled a prominent Calvinist, placed his heart on a lance, and “carried it throughout the town, crying here is the heart of the President of the Huguenots.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰

Yet ultimately the motivations and meanings that underlay these anticlerical characterizations and gruesome displays of violence remain clouded in mystery. What does seem clear is that Catholics and Calvinists developed new capacities to read bodies — heretical, idolatrous, diseased, sexualized, and gendered — as a result of the complex interactions between fields of human endeavor often considered unrelated. The bodies of men and women were all at once a marvel of anatomy, a subject of art, and a metaphor for Christian society. The body also continued to serve as a barometer of the soul because corporality remained integral to perceptions of religious difference in an age of confessional conflict and epistemological uncertainty.