Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science, Tuesday 23rd February

In a dark dark town there was a dark dark street and in the dark dark street there was a dark dark shop and in the dark dark shop...
Was every nightmare you ever woke screaming from.
The Last Tuesday Society resides at Viktor Wynd's Little Shop of Horrors, which is a veritable cabinet of curiosities. I arrived early for Philip Ball's lecture, and having paid my £7 entry was provided with a very fine gin and tonic. This is a marked improvement on those lectures I attended at university, where one was expected to provide one's own gin and tonic. This fortified me for a tour of the shop downstairs. If, dear reader, you find yourself in the market for a pickled foetus, a display of taxidermy, a gilded cow snout, a skull once owned by Aleister Crowley, the preserved erection of a gentleman hanged in the Seventeenth Century (I was tempted), the cast of a dicephalous skeleton or shrunken heads at reasonable prices, this is the place to come. Bring a chequebook and an expression of prurient glee. I liked it very much.
An apt setting, then for the night's lecture. Philip Ball is a science writer whose work has covered topics as various as music, cosmology, pattern formation in the natural world and political philosophy. He's also a trained clown. A Renaissance man of sorts, then, discussing Paracelsus, another kind of Renaissance man; a natural historian, metallurgist, alchemist, drinker and glutton. Ball's lecture took Paracelsus very much on his own terms, not as the legend Browning wrote of, or the wizard whose statue adorns the halls of Hogwarts, but a Neoplatatonic mystic, and the first man to try to come up with a comprehensive theory of everything. A practical sort of chap, he had little time for the doctors of the day, who relied on a Galenic model of humoral medicine, and rarely saw their patient, diagnosing by uroscopy. Paracalsus declared 'all they can do is stare at piss', and preferred a more holistic approach, subscribing to the microcosm/macrocosm idea. He was very well travelled (or possibly just frequently run out of town by angry uroscopists), but often impoverished. We owe him thanks for the idea that specific illnesses should be treated with specific cures - no one had really thought of that before. Things move on of course, otherwise we'd all still be rubbing our syphilis sores with mercury while our noses rotted off, but Paracelsus started things moving. He was unpopular, with a flair for the dramatic, and Ball's lecture communicated this very effectively, with wit and style. He's a compelling speaker, and I wouldn't hesitate to see him speak again. He concluded with a quote from the man himself; 'I am different. Let this not upset you.'
I went to the pub for a drink afterwards. Me and the barman are going to save up and go halvsies on a shrunken head. We're different. We're with Paracelsus. Oh, and mine's a pint.

Ill met by moonlight...

Welcome to Alarums and Excursions, your guide to all things Renaissance (both fair and foul) in London. I'll be posting as often as I can manage with reviews of everything there is to do around here that comes in Early Modern flavour. Next week I'll be reviewing Phillip Ball (author of The Devil's Doctor) lecturing on Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Science and Magic, hosted by The Last Tuesday Society and planning a trip to the Seven Stars on Chancery Lane, which has been around since 1602. I'm also tempted by Rory Kinnear in Measure for Measure at the Almeida and (if I'm feeling brave) Richard III at the Riverside Studios, where Sadie Frost is tackling my favourite female role in Shakespeare's canon, Lady Anne. It's looking like a promising few months for Renaissance stagings, as Greenwich Theatre makes a return to producing in-house shows with Volpone and The Duchess of Malfi coming up in March. I await reports from my spies south of the river. As for tonight? I have an exposition of sleep come upon me.