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1. Medieval philosophical axiom. Cf. the scholastic dictionary of Erasmus Sarcerius.
2. ’80: Everyone is struck by it, but some are transformed…
3. [’95] adds that this event took place in Toulouse. The following exemplum concerns Gallus Vibius, an orator; his case is recorded by Marcus Annaeus Seneca (the rhetorician): Controversiae, 9, and was well-known from such compendia as Ravisius Textor’s Officina (s.v. maniaci et furiosi) and Coelius Richerius Rhodiginus’ Antiquae Lectiones, VI, 35.
4. Lucretius, IV, 1035–6.
5. Pliny, XI, xlv.
6. Current examples drawn from Lucian, the Goddess of Syria, I; Pliny, VII, iv; then, for Iphis, the Cretan girl who became a youth, Ovid, Metamorphoses, IX, 793 ff – For Antiochus, until [C], Antigonus (wrongly). Pontanus is Johannes Jovinianus Pontanus, a Renaissance scholar and philosopher.
7. Episode related in Montaigne’s Journal de Voyage for September 1580.
8. Robert Burton later cites these examples, which Henry Cornelius Agrippa ‘supposeth to have happened by force of imagination’ (Anatomy of Melancholy, Part I, Sect. 2, Memb. 3, Subsection 2)
9. H. C. Agrippa, De occulta philosophia, I, lxiv.
10. St Augustine, City of God, XIV, xxiv. The priest was called Restitutus. These exempla are in Coelius Richerius Rhodiginus, Antiquae Lectiones, XX, xvi.
11. Some scholars, as well as popular superstition, attributed such impotence to diabolical magic.
12. [A], replaced by [C]: A body from elsewhere. For the man who has time to compose himself and to recover from this trouble, my advice is that he should divert his mind to other thoughts (if he can, for it is difficult) and that he should escape from such ardour and tension of imagination. I know of some who have found it useful to bring to the job a body which they had quietened and tamed elsewhere. And in the case of the man who is frightened of an attack of magic impotence, you should extricate him by persuading him that you can furnish him with counter-enchantments of miraculous and certain effect. But it is also requisite that the women whom one may legitimately approach should drop these ritual and affected manners of severity and refusal, and that they should constrain themselves a little to conform to the exigencies of our wretched century. For the heart of an attacker…
13. Such magico-medical medallions were favoured by Ficino and other Renaissance Platonists. Jacques Peletier, the mathematician, is mentioned again in ‘An apology for Raymond Sebond’. Among his Latin treatises on mathematics is one On the meeting of lines (1579) and one on the mystical meanings of numbers (1560).
14. Herodotus, II, clxxxi.
15. Cf. Plutarch (tr. Amyot), Preceptes de mariage, VIII.
16. [A] (instead of [C]): arise, and this fearfulness increases and redoubles on all subsequent occasions: and without some counter-mine you cannot easily get the better of it. One man, perhaps…
17. St Augustine, City of God, XIV, xxiv, incorporating the comments of Vives.
18. ’95: death. And would to God that I knew only from the history books how often our stomach, by the refusing of one single fart, may bring us to the very gates of a most excruciating death. And if only that Emperor who gave us liberty to fart in any place had also given us the power to do so! Yet against… The Emperor who intended to make this decree was Claudius.
19. Since the ‘consort’ (the female organ) has no erections. ’95: For the action of the aforesaid is sometimes to invite inopportunely but never to refuse, inviting moreover wordlessly and quietly. By which…
20. Love (Eros, Cupid) is a daemon in Plato’s Symposium.
21. Until the eighteenth century the Kings of France (and of England) were credited with the power to cure scrofula (the ‘King’s evil’).
22. Apparently the doctor cited by Pedro Mexia in his Silva de varia lecion, II, vii.
23. This theme is taken up again in ‘An apology for Raymond Sebond’.
24. Ovid, De remedio amoris, 615–16.
25. Pliny, VII, ii, and IX, x.
26. Virgil, Eclogue, III, 103.
27. Standard exempla given by Coelius Richerius Rhodiginus, Antiquae lectiones (XX, xv) explaining the power over the body of the rational soul and of the faculty of imagination. For Jacob’s ewes which produced variegated lambs, cf. Genesis, 30:36–9 and St Augustine, City of God, XII, xxv.
28. Until [C]: human occurrences…