Sergius Kodera's intriguing study takes as its starting point the tension between contrary understandings of matter in Renaissance natural philosophy: matter is a coarse and base substance, a prison of the human soul, but it is also the central constituent of the cosmos that pervades and guarantees the unity of creation. Kodera explores Renaissance characterizations of matter (gendered as female by natural philosophers) and its counterpart, form (gendered as male), showing how understandings of their hierarchical relationship evolved from particular normative relations between men and women during the period. He moreover argues that natural philosophers formulated through their metaphysical theories a politics of the body that furthered the demonization of women — a development with substantial consequences for the fates of women in later centuries.
The highlight of the book is a careful textual analysis of a group of gendered metaphors used to represent matter, a complicated concept that was frequently explained by analogy. Kodera follows the fruitful path laid out by philosophers of modern science who have recently pointed to the power of metaphor not only to describe natural phenomena but also to shape perceptions of reality. Kodera demonstrates how Renaissance philosophers such as Marsilio Ficino, Alessandro Piccolomini, and others expressed through their metaphorical language a worldview that was considerably more misogynistic than that of the classical texts upon which they relied. Their works elaborated upon the Aristotelian view of matter as a sexually aroused woman, instead portraying matter as a nymphomaniac whose pursuit of masculine forms threatens to destabilize physical bodies. Similarly, Ficino, glossing the Ovidian myth of Narcissus, identifies mirrors with the female worldliness of matter; the mirror is a deceiver who is able to capture its male viewer and render him passive (and hence also feminine). In these and other examples, Kodera shows how Renaissance philosophers synthesized classical materials and contemporary technology, folk beliefs, and gender stereotypes to imagine a universe infused with a particularly sinister form of sex difference.
Kodera also examines modifications to and intentional misreadings of classical texts among a group of well-known Renaissance philosophers, including Ficino, Leone Ebreo, and Giordano Bruno. Ficino, for instance, replaces the peripatetic elemental system and strict division of supra- and sublunary worlds with a cosmic system more heavily dependent upon gendered binaries that associated the earthy, less-refined aspects of the natural world with the feminine. Renaissance commentators on Plato's Symposium preferred to ignore the homoeroticism of Aristophanes’ famous speech on love in favor of a reading that emphasized the inferiority of female materiality. While novel interpretations of classical texts were occasionally sympathetic to women, as in the case of the Jewish philosopher-physician Ebreo, more often they expressed virulently negative attitudes toward the feminine. Kodera traces the legacy of these readings into the sixteenth century, suggesting that their continued influence led to the development of new magical and surgical interventions that aimed to control the female body and codify a hierarchical gendered order.
Less successful is a chapter devoted to Ficino's recommendation that readers ingest human blood as a medicine to prevent aging. The author's conclusion that Ficino was influenced by misogynous accounts of lamiae and other female vampires is persuasive, yet Kodera seems unaware of the longstanding presence of blood-based elixirs of health among alchemical texts. Kodera devotes attention elsewhere to the influence of distilled alchemical quintessences on Ficino's cosmology, yet the potential effect of alchemical literature (as well as other traditions concerning blood and the prolongation of life) on his ideas is unfortunately left unexplored.
Kodera's argument unfolds subtly in the central chapters of the book, emerging as it does from his creative analysis of the wide-ranging, highly imagistic passages in his sources. His somewhat free-associative approach to diverse topics makes it occasionally difficult to anticipate what might come next, and some promising ideas receive all too brief a discussion, yet the book never fails to interest as it presents an original and useful treatment of the systematic use of gendered imagery in Renaissance naturalism.
