The scholarship devoted to French sixteenth-century Paracelsian medicine continues to recognize significant uncertainties concerning the physician Roch Le Baillif, sieur de La Rivière, and his short account of the antiquities and singularities of Brittany, which include curative baths for leprosy, gout, dropsy, paralysis, ulcers and other diseases: Petit traité de l'antiquité et singularités de Bretagne armorique en laquelle se trouve [sic] bains curans la lepre, podagre, hydropsie, paralisie, ulcers et autres maladies (1577). Hervé Baudry, in the compelling introduction to his learned critical edition of le Petit traité has not hidden the necessary speculative dimension of his own approach and has carefully presented earlier interpretations before suggesting his own reading of Roch Le Baillif's life and treatise. Baudry's analysis rests upon the considerable expertise and understanding of Le Baillif he has developed in the course of examining Le Baillif's role in the spread of Paracelsian concepts within France. The results of this research have appeared in his monograph, Contribution à l'étude du paracelsisme en France au XVIe siècle (1560-1580). De la naissance du mouvement aux années de maturité: Le Demosterion de Roch Le Baillif, 1578 (Paris, 2005), and in his critical edition of the Demosterion (Paris, 2005), Le Baillif's interpretive summary of Paracelsian medicine. It was after the release of these publications that Le Baillif, heretofore a figure relatively unknown or somewhat dismissed, achieved greater visibility as a pivotal player in the diffusion of Paracelsianism in France. In his introduction to the current work, the Petit traité, Baudry has sought to deepen further knowledge and appreciation of Le Baillif and his work, a goal fraught with difficulties.
Le Baillif was a controversial personage in his own time, and remains so within the historiography that touched upon his life and his work. Born in the Norman city of Falaise (Calvados) ca. 1540, he died in 1598 in the Breton city of Rennes (Ille-et-Vilaine). Even consensus about these bare biographical facts was reached only recently. Uncertainties about the likelihood of Le Baillif's graduation from the school of medicine in Caen with a doctoral degree, his command of Latin, his religion (catholic or protestant), his political opportunism, and the extent of his medical knowledge, are greatly complicated by the fact that until recently Roch Le Baillif was confused with yet another sieur de La Rivière (Jean Ribit), a protestant physician of King Henry IV (d. 1610).
Baudry favors a positive portrait of Le Baillif, denying the imputations of monoglot provincialism and fundamentalist bigotry (by Hugh Trevor-Roper), as well as of charlatanism, serial killings, imprisonment, and ignorance. He documents the physician's Latin scholarship, his widely circulated publications, his successful resistance to academic opponents, his group of important supporters (Nol Du Fail, Bertrand d'Argentré, Jean du Jon), and his respected medical practice, all of which earned him positions as physician to viscount Henry of Rohan (1535-1575), to the king (médecin ordinaire du roi Henry III), to the duke of Mercoeur (Philip of Lorraine, governor of Brittany and Henry III's brother in law), and to the Breton nobility and Parlement of Rennes. Baudry, being interested neither in hagiography nor in advocacy, admits readily, however, that Le Baillif does not rank among the great scholars and scientists of his time. Rather he considers that Le Baillif's life and work, in their undeniable commitment to and diffusion of Paracelsus's (1493-1541) innovative medicine, suffers the pangs of a culture experimenting with new forms of knowledge.
Paracelsus's writings, composed in German, were translated into Latin after 1560. In this form, they disseminated throughout Europe tenets that promoted a new philosophy grounded in the Hermetic Neo-Platonism of the Renaissance as opposed to the Aristotelian and Galenic medicine of the contemporary European educational establishment. Paracelsianism firmly rested upon the theory of signatures whereby signatures, which signaled the correspondences between the world of nature (macrocosm) and the world of man (microcosm), were legible and manipulable by philosophers. Within this cosmology Paracelsus situated a belief in a chemical creation of the world, asserting that the human body, as a chemical system, could have its condition changed, treated, and healed by chemical therapy. The resulting availability of practical therapeutics where Galenic remedies had failed was thus part of a novel comprehensive world view, a combination which endowed Paracelsianism with a strong appeal. The circumstances in which Le Baillif encountered and adopted this philosophy remain unclear. It was, however, while in the medical service of the Rohan family, protectors and leaders of Protestantism in Brittany, that Le Baillif worked on the Demosterion and, based in the castle Les Salles (Perret, Côtes d'Armor), conducted a Paracelsian exploration of the Breton countryside, recording profuse notes on its natural phenomena, and on its geological, mineral, and medicinal resources. Despite his subsequent loss of these notes, Le Baillif's empirical observations formed a basis for the material surveyed in the Petit traité.
The Petit traité first appeared, in French, as the last chapter of the Demosterion, which was published in Rennes in 1578. A popularization of Paracelsian medicine presented in 300 Latin and French aphorisms, the Demosterion also contains, in addition to the Traité, tracts on chiromancy, conjuration, and a lexicon of Paracelsian terms. The appearance of the work, and the presence of Roch Le Baillif himself in Paris aroused great sensitivity in the Medical Faculty of Paris to the challenges of Paracelsian medicine; Le Baillif was forbidden to practice and to lecture in Paris, a sentence upheld by the Parlement de Paris in a resounding trial (1579) which banished the physician from the capital and prompted his return to Rennes.
The present edition of the Petit traité makes it clear that it is its modern editor who decided to separate it from its original location within the Demosterion. While acknowledging that Le Baillif ultimately determined to publish the Traité as part of the Demosterion, Baudry convincingly justifies his editorial decision. First, he notes that the work differs from the Demosterion's other chapters in that it gives equivalent importance to the Rohans' genealogy, to Brittany's history and geography, and to medical issues. From this Baudry deduces that the Traité, which was initially composed while Le Baillif was in the service of Henry, viscount of Rohan, may have been ambitiously conceived as an antiquarian and cosmographic project, to be dedicated to the viscount. After the viscount's death (1575), however, Le Bailly suffered two losses, patronage and domicile with the Rohans, and the rich notes he had taken while surveying Brittany. In search of new patrons, he redirected his dedication of the Traité to the Breton nobility even as he retained the passages devoted to the history of the Rohan family. Deprived of his notes, he was able to produce only a truncated version of his originally conceptualized opus, albeit one that in its focus on Brittany's mineral waters was capable of being integrated within a book devoted to Paracelsian medicine. Additional features militate in favor of the Traité's initial autonomy. Its title page in the first edition of 1578 gives it a distinct identity and a separate date (1577); indeed the text is known to have circulated previously as an independent pamphlet.
Baudry's critical edition of the Petit traité is richly enhanced by his introduction and by an extensive apparatus of footnotes which situate Le Baillif's epistemological and informational choices within both contemporary and modern scientific and interpretive frameworks. This intense scholarly contextualization illuminates the originality with which the Petit traité navigates the tumultuous encounter of confluent cultural streams. From an historiographical viewpoint, the Traité's short history of Brittany and of its nobility from the Deluge to the sixteenth century retains the by then largely discarded myth of the Trojan origins of European people. Le Baillif, however, gave the myth a unique twist: ignoring the British founding figure of the Trojan hero Brutus, he invented a son of Aeneas, Armoreus, as the eponymous founder of Armorica (continental Brittany), and as the father of Ruhan, the ancestor of the Rohan lineage. Le Baillif's eulogy and propaganda, in the wake of the reunion of the duchy of Brittany to the kingdom of France (1532), fueled a local "patriotism" that emphasized the province's separate (though not autochthonous) origins and the purity of its early nobility.
If inventiveness characterizes Le Baillif's attempts at local history, phenomenological empiricism and Paracelsian theory inform his topographical considerations. These focus on the mineral and medical properties of local waters, duly explored by Le Baillif and accompanied by a partial translation of Paracelsus' treatise De Balneis (On the Baths), but also by considerations derived from the occultist treatises of Cornelius Aggripa (d. 1535) and Jerome Cardan (d. 1576). In the concluding section devoted to stones and their apotropaic properties, the Petit traité crisply applied Paracelsus' plea for homeopathic and isopathic measures based on his theory that the shape (signature) of the remedy directs its healing action.
Baudry's meticulous editorship and interpretive study presents a Norman author writing on Brittany, a physician laboring on the threshold of a new medicine, a scientist oscillating between mythic, magic, and empirical hermeneutics. This dense portrait of Roch Le Baillif epitomizes a moment of Europe's history when the actively combined agency of curiosity, exchanges, and frontiers was re-drawing its epistemological map.