Poison: Knowledge, Uses, Practices, ed. Caterina Mordeglia and Agostino Paravicini Bagliani

‘Instinctively captivating’, says one of the editors of the theme of these twenty multidisciplinary essays on poison, and there is indeed much to engage and inform the reader here. The essays range in period, from ancient to contemporary; in discipline, from history to hagiography and drama to demonology; and in language of delivery (ten in Italian, six in English, four in French). Quality varies. Some of the best essays—Franck Collard on poison in French literary epics and chivalric romances, Agostino Paravicini Bagliani on poison prevention at the papal court—are very good. Some of the essays disappoint, for different reasons. An essay on the Greek poet Nicander is too closed into its own academic field and specialist vocabulary to contribute to the ‘dialogue between scholars’ that the volume aspires to. It was good that the volume closes by coming right up to date, with Marco Ansaldo’s piece on modern dictators’ precautions against the poisoning of their food, and their use of poisons against their opponents, but it does not go much beyond assembling the obvious cases.

The creative heart of the volume lies in the essays on literature, religion, food and medicine. Though the essays are sequenced chronologically not thematically, there are obvious and rewarding pairings. In one duo of contributions juxtaposing love-potions and hate-potions, Federica Boero draws out the comic context of the various terms for poison found in the Latin plays of Plautus (no one dies), whereas Caterina Mordeglia examines the dramatic function of poisons in two of Seneca’s tragedies, Medea and Hercules on Etna (characters die horribly). For medieval literature, Collard reveals the gap between scientific toxicology and fictional poisonings: fictional accounts avoid technical terms, invent elaborate production methods, and imagine literally eye-popping, instant death. Another excellent pairing comes with Paravicini Bagliani, on the practice of pre-tasting the pope’s food, traced to its emergence in the later thirteenth century, and Bruno Laurioux on the problems of detecting poison in a medieval (elite) cuisine that favoured highly-spiced, acidic or extremely sweet dishes. In two essays on religion, both using patristic and early hagiographical works, Sandra Isetta discusses interpretations of Christ as antidote to the poison of sin, and saints as healers of the devil’s poisons, and Francesco Santi the sounds associated with poison, the literal hissing and rustling of snakes and scorpions, and the figurative, magical whispers that spread poisons. Toxicology is well served by Gabriele Ferrario’s argument for the originality of Maimonides’s treatise on poisons (1199), a work aiming to provide the general populace with cheap, accessible remedies, which became a classic, and Danielle Jacquart’s suggestion that poison came to be seen in medical literature as a cause of plague from the early fifteenth century. Extending the connection of poison to other phenomena, Marina Montesano traces the intertwining of poison with witchcraft to St Jerome’s translation of a passage from Exodus, and sees both the stereotypical association of poison with women and the ‘cabinet-of-horrors’ ingredients of witches’ poisons as having origins in ancient discourse revived from the twelfth century onwards. This neatly accompanies Walter Stephens’s exploration of the complex of relations among poison, maleficium and sacrament (early witches as poisoners, using venomous animals and desecrated hosts to produce potions to summon demons and cause harms).

This discussion by paired categories of course leaves some of the essays orphaned—the inconclusive discussion of possible poisoning of consuls in 43 BC (Luciano Canfora and Francesco Galassi); a classification of poisonous animals in medieval bestiaries (Michel Pastoureau); poetry as poison in early modern literary theory (Tasso, Campanella, Milton: Francesco Brenna); a tangential account of the friendship in the 1660s between a Danish anatomist and an Italian physician who had experimented on scorpions (Nuno Castel-Branco); and a description of poisons and antidotes in two Wagner operas (Guido Paduano). As is evident, this is a cultural history of poison: there are few actual poisonings, and the focus is firmly and successfully on representations of poisons and poisoners, on the figurative, extended uses of poison, and on where people thought poisons might come from and be deployed against them.