¹ Paracelsus (1493–1541), De generatione stultorum, in K Sudhoff (ed.), Sämtliche Werke, vol. 14, Munich, Oldenbourg, 1933, pp. 73–94; Felix Platter (1536–1614), Praxeos medicae, Basle, 1656, pp. 2–154; Thomas Willis (1621–1675), De anima brutorum, Oxford, 1672, pp. 504–16. Translations are my own unless otherwise stated. The works listed in footnotes 1 and 2 are henceforth referred to by their abbreviated titles.

² Paul Cranefield and Walter Federn, ‘The begetting of fools: an annotated translation of Paracelsus' De generatione stultorum’, Bull. Hist. Med., 1967, 41: 56–74 and 161–74; idem, ‘Paracelsus on goiter and cretinism: a translation and discussion of De struma, vulgo der Kropf'’, Bull. Hist. Med., 1963, 37: 463–71; Paul Cranefield, ‘The discovery of cretinism’, Bull. Hist. Med., 1962, 36: 489–511; idem, ‘A seventeenth-century view of mental deficiency and schizophrenia: Thomas Willis on “stupidity or foolishness”’, Bull. Hist. Med., 1961, 35: 291–316; Oskar Diethelm and Thomas Heffernan, ‘Felix Platter and psychiatry’, J. Hist. Behav. Sci., 1965, 1: 10–23; F E James, ‘Some observations on the writings of Felix Platter in relation to mental handicap’, Hist. Psych., 1991, 2: 103–8; Joanna Ryan with Frank Thomas, The politics of mental handicap, London, Penguin, 1980; Richard Scheerenberger, A history of mental retardation, Baltimore, Brookes, 1983. Cranefield was the pioneer who resuscitated several of the primary sources. Subsequent writers have tended to take as fact his proposal that they are prototypical discussions of intellectual disability, though Ryan suspects that this may need closer investigation.

³ Alternative interpretations exist. Mans starts from the premise that “[o]nce upon a time there were no mentally retarded people”. Instead, the “many guises of the born fool” and the court jester are all are integrated in the pre- and early modern period. See Inge Mans, Zin der zotheid: vijf eeuwen cultuurgeschiedenis van zotten, onnozelen en zwakzinnigen, Amsterdam, Bakker, 1998, pp. 1, 23. Kanner, himself one of the inventors of autism, excluded pre-nineteenth century texts from consideration: not on the grounds that such people did not exist, only because no one had yet “discovered mental retardation”. See Leo Kanner, A history of the care and study of the mentally retarded, Springfield, Thomas, 1967, p. 3.

⁴ Cranefield and Federn, ‘The begetting’, p. 56.

⁵ See Heinrich Schipperges, ‘Vom Wesen der Natur und vom Walten der Zeit bei Paracelsus’, in Hans Keel and Franz Nager (eds), 500 Jahre Paracelsus, Bern, Hallwag, 1994, pp. 11–15.

⁶ Paracelsus, De generatione, p. 74.

⁷ Ibid., p. 73.

⁸ Ibid., p. 76. The resistance of stultitia to astral explanation contrasts with what he says about lunacy and epilepsy.

⁹ Ibid., p. 79.

¹⁰ Cranefield and Federn, ‘The begetting’, p. 161.

¹¹ In fact, one section of the non-élite laity, the urban artisan class, were probably Paracelsus's intended readership. See Charles Webster, ‘Paracelsus and demons: science as a synthesis of popular belief’, in Instituto Nazionale di Studi sul Rinascimento, Scienze credenze occulte livelli di cultura, Florence, Olschki, 1982.

¹² Paracelsus, De generatione, p. 73. Elsewhere he points out that the disease model is appropriate to madness but not to foolishness: see De lunaticis, in Sudhoff, op. cit., note 1 above, vol. 14, pp. 43–72.

¹³ The two men knew each other in the mid-1520s. Paracelsus advised Erasmus on his kidney stones, and Erasmus helped him become City Physician in Basle. See P S Allen, Opus epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami, Oxford, Clarendon, 1906–58, vol. 7, p. 26. Paracelsus's text dates from the end of the decade.

¹⁴ Desiderius Erasmus, Stulticiae laus, Paris, 1511, p. 65.

¹⁵ Ibid., p. 63.

¹⁶ See A H T Levi's introduction to Erasmus, Praise of folly, London, Penguin, 1971, p. xliii.

¹⁷ See Mans, op. cit., note 3 above, p. 62. A contents list appears in Johann Geiler's edition of Sebastian Brant, Navicula sive speculum fatuorum, Strasbourg, 1510, in which he places the phrase from Ecclesiastes at the head of each section. A trompe l'oeil effect in Hieronymus Bosch's painting La nef des fous encapsulates the point: the ship's mast imperceptibly turns into a tree growing on the bank (the tree of knowledge of good and evil).

¹⁸ Paracelsus, De generatione, p. 74.

¹⁹ Paracelsus, De generatione, p. 77. Irrational fear is a classic component of Galenist melancholia; its juxtaposition here with fools hints at the overarching role of melancholy in pre-modern psychopathology.

²⁰ See, among others, James, ‘Some observations’, p. 105.

²¹ Paracelsus, De generatione, p. 78.

²² Gregor Reisch, Margarita philosophica, Freiburg, 1503, bk 11, ch. 6.

²³ Paracelsus, De generatione, p. 87.

²⁴Idem, Die Bücher von den unsichtbaren Krankheiten, in Sudhoff, op. cit., note 1 above, vol. 9, p. 293. Cranefield and Federn, in ‘The begetting’, p. 172, rightly point out this Pauline framework, without letting it modify their historicist view of foolishness. On the comparison between Paracelsus and Luther, see Andrew Weeks, Paracelsus: speculative theory and the crisis of the early Reformation, New York, State University of New York Press, 1997, pp. 10–11.

²⁵ Michael Dols, Majnun: the madman in medieval Islamic society, Oxford, Clarendon, pp. 370–4. See also Sandra Billington, A social history of the fool, Brighton, Harvester Press, 1984, p. 16.

²⁶ Paracelsus, De generatione, p. 89. Erasmus makes the same point, in Levi (ed.), op. cit., note 16 above, p. 53.

²⁷ See, for example, Heinz Wyss, Der Narr im schweizerischen Drama des 16. Jahrhunderts, Bern, Haupt, 1959, pp. 7, 41.

²⁸ Paracelsus, De generatione, p. 89.

²⁹ For the Romans the noun morio, as distinct from the broadly applied morus (“foolish”), maintained the root sense of a kept fool, a social occupation with associated behaviours.

³⁰ Mans, op. cit., note 3 above, p. 52.

³¹ See also Billington, op. cit., note 25 above, p. 17.

³² Cranefield and Federn, ‘The begetting’, pp. 167, 170; Kilian Blümlein, Naturerfahrung und Welterkenntnis: der Beitrag des Paracelsus zur Entwicklung des neuzeitlichen, naturwissenschaftlichen Denkens, Frankfurt, Lang, 1992, p. 201.

³³ Scheerenberger, A history, p. 29; Diethelm and Heffernan, ‘Felix Platter’, p. 20. This tradition goes back at least as far as Ralph Major, Classic descriptions of disease, Springfield, Thomas, 1932, p. 263.

³⁴ See, for example, Raymond Battegay, ‘Felix Platter und die Psychiatrie’, in Ulrich Tröhler (ed.), Felix Platter (1536–1614) in seiner Zeit, Basle, Schwab, 1991, 35–44; Hans Christoffel, ‘Einer systematische Psychiatrie des Barocks: Felix Platters “Laesiones Mentis”’, Schweizer Archiv für Neurologie und Psychiatrie, 1956, 77: 14–22.

³⁵ See Antoinette Stettler, ‘Jean Fernel, Felix Platter und die Begründung der modernen pathologischen Theorie’, Gesnerus, 1977, 34: 331–51.

³⁶ Platter, Praxeos, p. 2. The names of the groups are familiar from Galen; it is their relative classificatory importance that distinguishes Platter from both Galen and Renaissance Galenism.

³⁷ Its designation of a faculty (sometimes the imagination, sometimes the ratio), or of an “operation” that went on within the faculty, overlapped with broader usages indicating a quotidian cleverness in general: “wit” came to be the standard translation. Platter employs it here in its scholastic sense, while demoting the role of the faculties in general. I have used ingenium alone where he uses it in this way, and an English word with ingenium in brackets for broader usages.

³⁸ See Jeffrey Wollock, The noblest animate motion: speech, physiology, and medicine in pre-Cartesian linguistic thought, Amsterdam, J Benjamins, 1997.

³⁹ Platter, Praxeos, p. 2. Although Vesalius had cautioned against localizing the faculties in the ventricles, it was still common in the later sixteenth century.

⁴⁰ A later translator of this volume, Nicholas Culpeper, also translated Galen's discussion of head size and shape in the Ars medica, to which he added unacknowledged glosses and interpolations of his own labelling a specific human type: “If there be not capacity enough in the Skull to hold the Brain … the Man must needs be a fool”, etc. (See Galens Art of physick, London, 1652, p. 15.) Platter does not rewrite Galen in this way.

⁴¹ Culpeper's translation here (“drones beget drones”) fleshes out these implications by replacing Platter's broad adjectives with a substantive label suggestive of deeper difference. See Felix Plater [sic], Abdiah Cole and Nicholas Culpeper, Platerus Golden practice of physick, London, 1664, p. 1.

⁴² Platter, Praxeos, p. 6.

⁴³ Ibid., p. 81.

⁴⁴ Ibid.

⁴⁵ Paracelsus, De generatione, p. 82.

⁴⁶ Véronique Dasen, Dwarfs in ancient Egypt and Greece, Oxford, Clarendon, 1993, p. 247. A drawing from the early thirteenth century shows a goitrous figure carrying a fool's staff with a serpent's head, indicative of the Fall and perhaps of atheistical folly: see Henri Beek, De geestesgestoorde in de middeleeuwen, Haarlem, De Troorts, 1969, p. 96.

⁴⁷ Beek, op. cit., note 46 above, pp. 113–14. The story does not appear in the primary text referred to in the author's footnote.

⁴⁸ There is one defect of Platter's stultitia that is elsewhere sometimes described in developmentalist terms characteristic of the intellectual disability model, namely mutism, usually associated with deafness. For example, Luis Mercado (Opera omnia, Frankfurt, 1608, p. 172, q. 180) claims that congenitally deaf people cannot grasp essences, i.e. the kind of knowledge that comes from sorting and abstracting concepts. That is because only the spoken word can evoke images in the ingenium; deaf people are incapable of developing “concepts” and “knowledge” (scientias) from words, and can only perceive the world as a series of unsorted “accidents”. Hence they are incapable of abstraction. Mercado also talks about stultitia and fatuitas (p. 164–5), but he does so purely in humoral terms: they are dispositional, not developmental. Platter's own account of deafness in the Praxeos (p. 250) does not have developmentalist overtones, although he does bring up the goitrous Alpine peasants again as an example here; he classifies them this time with the elderly, to illustrate how deafness is caused by copiousness of humours and catarrh.

⁴⁹ Something similar in the Italian Alps is reported by the Low Countries physician Pieter van Foreest, Observationum et curationum medicinalium ac chirurgicarum, Frankfurt, 1634, vol. 1, pp. 354a–355a. Van Foreest, who founded the medical school at Leiden and had studied in Padua, notes in his section on stultitia that the inhabitants of the Valtellina are matelli (vernacular for “fools”); the cause is the excessive dryness of their imaginations. He does not say in what their folly consists and does not mention goitre.

⁵⁰ Paracelsus, Von Apostemen, Geschwären, offnen Schäden, und anderen Gewächsen am Leib, in Sudhoff (ed.), op. cit., note 1 above, vol. 4, ch. 19, pp. 222–5.

⁵¹ Cranefield and Federn, ‘Paracelsus on goiter’, p. 463, followed by Scheerenberger and James, calls this “the earliest mention of cretinism” and adds the term to his own translation of Paracelsus's title.

⁵² Paracelsus, ‘De struma’, pp. 223, 224.

⁵³ See Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, The beggar and the professor: a sixteenth-century family saga, University of Chicago Press, 1998.

⁵⁴ “Batavian” in Roman literature was synonymous with “barbarian”. It is difficult to separate anthropology from satire in this usage. Erasmus saw the Batavian country people as having a “coarse understanding” rendering them incapable of sincere faith (Familiarum colloquiorum opus, Frankfurt, 1555, p. 245), and himself as having tried to “tame” them through contact with the humanities. Nevertheless, the picture some have drawn of Erasmus constructing a new identity as a wandering European guru in order to shake off the taint of these origins is complicated by his taste for irony. His first work was indeed written and entitled “Against the barbarians”; these however were not country people but the local monks whose brotherhood he had fled because they thought that letters would not tame people but “infect” them. On the other hand he was sensitive about being called homo Batavus himself. (See Erika Rummel, The confessionalization of humanism in Reformation Germany, Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 55; idem, Erasmus and his Catholic critics, Nieuwkoop, De Graaf, 1989, p. 152.) Not only stultitia but monstrosity was said to be common in such areas. While the conditions were quite distinct from the other, both proved to intellectuals in the adjacent metropolis of Basle or Leiden that their yokels were more backward in religion and culture than anyone else's.

⁵⁵ See Cranefield, ‘The discovery’, p. 500.

⁵⁶ Felix Platter, Observationum, in hominis affectibus, Basle, 1614, p. 1.

⁵⁷ Cranefield, ‘The discovery’, p. 501. See also Muriel Laharie, La folie au moyen âge, XIe–XIIIe siècles, Paris, Le Léopard d'Or, 1991, p. 83. In Russia the equivalent word krest'yanin meant “peasant” until the revolution.

⁵⁸ “They are incapable of ideas and have only a sort of violent attraction for their wants.” This reflects two separate passages, one about “idiots” and their lack of abstract ideas and the other about “changelings” unable to control their will: John Locke, An essay concerning human understanding, Oxford, Clarendon, 1975, pp. 160, 265.

⁵⁹ In Observationum, a later resumé of the same material, Platter gives stultitia relatively more emphasis.

⁶⁰ Giambattista da Monte, In artem parvam Galeni explanationes, Venice, 1554, p. 127r.

⁶¹ Platter, Praxeos, p. 89.

⁶² Ibid., p. 98.

⁶³ Ibid., p. 105.

⁶⁴ Ibid., p. 106.

⁶⁵ Ibid., p. 144.

⁶⁶ Cranefield, ‘A seventeenth century view’, pp. 291–2, 307.

⁶⁷ Klaus Doerner, Madmen and the bourgeoisie, Oxford, Blackwell, 1981, p. 25.

⁶⁸ Willis, De anima, dedicatory epistle. See Akihito Suzuki, ‘Mind and its disease in Enlightenment British medicine’, PhD thesis, University College London, 1992.

⁶⁹ Thomas Willis, Two discourses concerning the soul of brutes, transl. Samuel Pordage, London, 1683.

⁷⁰Idem, Pathologiae cerebri, et nervosi generis specimen, Amsterdam, 1668, p. 3, plus the chapter on melancholy in De anima, p. 454.

⁷¹Idem, De anima, p. 504.

⁷² Ibid., p. 506.

⁷³ Ibid., p. 508.

⁷⁴ Ibid., p. 506. The influence of climate and region on human characteristics comes from the Hippocratic Airs, waters, places. This was particularly influential on Lievin Lemmens [Lemnius] (1505–68). He noted in language similar to Willis's that crass stupidity, in the form of “coarse animal spirits” (spiritus crassi) and “stupid apprehension” (ingenium stupidum), was typical of the country people of Batavia, he himself being from neighbouring Zeeland. See his De habitu et constitutione corporis, Erfurt, 1582, p. 17, widely read in England as The touchstone of complexions, London, 1633, p. 25. Possibly Pordage has it in mind when Willis's classical Greek reference to the stereotype of stupid “Boeotians” becomes in his translation “Batavians”.

⁷⁵ Willis, De anima, p. 508.

⁷⁶ See Richard Neugebauer, ‘A doctor's dilemma: the case of William Harvey's mentally retarded nephew’, Psychol. Med., 1989, 19: 569–72.

⁷⁷ See Adrian Tinniswood, His invention so fertile: a life of Christoper Wren, London, Cape, p. 240.

⁷⁸ Thomas Willis, De cerebri anatome, Amsterdam, 1664, p. 51.

⁷⁹ The suggestion of a first is Cranefield's, op. cit., ‘A seventeenth century view’, p. 311. See Alexander of Aphrodisias, ‘Problems’, in The problems of Aristotle; with other philosophers and physicians, London, 1647, G7r; Albertus Magnus, Quaestiones super de animalibus, in B. Geyer (ed.), Opera omnia, Cologne, Monasterii Westfalorum, 1955, vol. 12, p. 299.

⁸⁰ Several important Renaissance medical writers had reproduced the story: Paracelsus himself in De generatione, p. 79; Lemnius, Occulta naturae miracula, Antwerp, 1559, p. 11, translated as The secret miracles of nature, London, 1658, p. 18; Tommaso Campanella, De sensu rerum et magia, Paris, 1637, p. 202, where he uses it as a justification for priestly celibacy; and Girolamo Cardano, De subtilitate, bk 12, in Opera omnia, Lyons, 1663, vol. 3, p. 558. Both Campanella and Cardano predate Willis in saying that the animal spirits congregate in the brain in wise men, thereby performing their procreative function badly. Meanwhile, the wise man's own excessive meditations cause a thickness of humours leading to melancholy. Cardano's word here for “thick” (pinguis) can, as in English, also mean dull or doltish. This shows that modern categorizations are misleading: the organic environment of both the father's wisdom and the son's unwisdom is the same, and both belong to adjacent subsets of brain dysfunction.

⁸¹ Willis, De anima, p. 508.

⁸² Ibid., p. 510.

⁸³ Pordage uses the same English word for both stupiditas (whenever it appears in Willis's Greek synonym μωροσιs) and for stultitia.

⁸⁴ See Robert Martensen, ‘The circles of Willis: physiology, culture, and the formation of the “neurocentric” body in England, 1640–1690’, PhD thesis, University of California, San Francisco, 1997.

⁸⁵ This is a standard formula whose sociological context is obvious. For example, Mercado's congenitally deaf are fit only “for mechanical matters and what they can make with their hands”, op. cit., note 48 above, p. 172.

⁸⁶ Willis, De anima, p. 513.

⁸⁷ Ibid., epistle dedicatory.

⁸⁸ Ibid., p. 514.

⁸⁹ Ibid., p. 513.

⁹⁰ Ibid., epistle dedicatory.

⁹¹ One line (1088) of Plautus's satirical comedy Bacchae supplies five of Willis's terms. Others use it too; the Renaissance papal physician Paolo Zacchia quotes the line in full in the section ‘On ignorant people, fools, etc.’ in his Quaestiones medico-legales, Rome, 1621.

⁹² Willis, De anima, p. 506. At the start of this tradition in Galen, crassus had referred not to the intangible realm of psychology but to the thickness of the humour itself, particularly in melancholy where it led to amentia.

⁹³ As did Harvey himself. Robert Frank, Harvey and the Oxford physiologists, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1980, p. 64.

⁹⁴ See notes 40 and 41 above.

⁹⁵ C F Goodey and Tim Stainton, ‘Intellectual disability and the myth of the changeling myth’, J. Hist. Behav. Sci., 2001, 37: 223–40. See Locke, op. cit., note 58 above, p. 571.

⁹⁶ Pordage, like Locke, was a supporter of Shaftesbury. During the period when he was translating Willis he also engaged in the poetry wars with Dryden that surrounded the Monmouth rebellion.

⁹⁷ Willis, op. cit., note 69 above, p. 213.

⁹⁸ For the lowest grade, Willis uses blenni, which comes from the same passage in Plautus. It has in itself no particular connotations of severity but does signify moisture. Pordage translates it as “drivling fools”. On its rare appearances in earlier medical texts it describes phlegm, an ordinary usage that contrasts with the frisson which the English word “dribbling” in such a context begins to imply. Again, blennus can also be an epithet for rusticus, “peasant”.

⁹⁹ Willis, op. cit., note 78 above, p. 51.

¹⁰⁰ Thomas Willis, The anatomy of the brain, in Dr Willis's practice of physick, transl. Samuel Pordage, London, 1684, p. 57.

¹⁰¹ See note 49 above.

¹⁰² Van Foreest, op. cit., note 49 above, p. 354b. For Platter the humoral pathology here was excessive moisture (see note 48 above).

¹⁰³ Da Monte's labourers were dry-brained (like Van Foreest's Alpine rustics) as well as structurally deformed.

¹⁰⁴ Before the onset of scientific racism, black people were psychologically inferior only when the occasion, such as a political justification for slavery, demanded.

¹⁰⁵ I am grateful to Patrick McDonagh who let me consult ‘The image of idiocy in nineteenth-century England: a history of cultural representations of intellectual disability’, PhD thesis, Concordia University, Montreal, 1998, and whose suggestion this is.

¹⁰⁶ From a history of madness perspective, law rather than medicine has been seen as the main conceptual source of intellectual disability, inasmuch as the Court of Wards divided the incompetent between those foolish from birth and those who were mentally ill with “lucid intervals”. However, this still begs all the questions which the present article asks about the precise content of foolishness. See Richard Neugebauer, ‘Mental handicap in medieval and early modern England: criteria, measurement, care’, in David Wright and Anne Digby (eds), From idiocy to mental deficiency: historical perspectives on people with learning disabilities, London, Routledge, 1996, and for a critical view, Tim Stainton, ‘Medieval charitable institutions and intellectual impairment’, J. Dev. Disabil., 2001, 8: 19–30.

¹⁰⁷ Historians of intellectual disability commonly plug the pre-modern historical gap with examples of purely physical monstrosity; this does not seem to need justifying, presumably because they are taking as read the modern institutional practices that link them under a common pathological heading; for example Scheerenberger, A history, pp. 3–10.

¹⁰⁸ Platter, Praxeos, p. 2.

¹⁰⁹ Martensen, op. cit., note 84 above, p. 231.

¹¹⁰ See C F Goodey, ‘From natural disability to the moral man: Calvinism and the history of psychology’, Hist. Hum. Sci., 2001, 14: 1–29. Locke's membership of the Oxford anatomy club and attendance at Willis's lectures are of less significance than his maturer inclinations in religion and politics.

¹¹¹ See, for example, Heinrich Buess, ‘Basler Mediziner der Barockzeit’, in Beiträge zur Geschichte der Naturwissenschaften und der Technik in Basel, Olten, Graf, 1959, 103–12.

¹¹² Caspar Bauhin, De hermaphroditorum monstrosorumque partuum natura ex theologorum, Frankfurt, 1614, p. 262.

¹¹³ See Eckhard Kessler, ‘The intellective soul’, in Charles Schmitt (ed.), The Cambridge history of Renaissance philosophy, Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 494.

¹¹⁴ One fruitful research area might be the many commentaries on Galen's discussion of brain size and shape and of cranial sutures, discussed by da Monte among others.