ABSTRACT
My investigation into the deployment of gender distinctions by early modern intellectuals in order to define truth and to legitimate particular means of attaining truth begins in the mid-sixteenth century with the polemics surrounding the witch trials. The witch trials, long the purview of social historians, may at first seem remote from the philosophical inquiry that we associate with Descartes. This distance collapses, however, once we recognize that the late Renaissance obsession with demonology, a subject of intense interest to political theorists and physicians as well as theologians both Catholic and Protestant, mediated questions of philosophical as well as theological import. Stuart Clark has shown that to gauge the power of illusion wielded by demons was also to call into question the validity of human perception. Throughout the sixteenth century, vision was considered the most noble of the senses, but also the most vulnerable to demonically induced error. When Descartes in his Meditationes de prima philosophia (1641) established the foundations for future knowledge despite the possible distortions caused by a melancholic imagination or an evil demon, he was evoking a problem that had arisen in the demonological literature of the late Renaissance: how can we be sure that what we see is, indeed, outside of us? The attention that Descartes paid to optics in his mechanistic physics, and particularly his rejection of the Aristotelian doctrine of species, further reveals how important it had become by the early seventeenth century to ascertain finally the reliability of visual perception. The skeptical crisis of the late Renaissance, heralded by Charles Etienne’s 1562 translation of Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of pyrrhonism from Greek into Latin, was fueled by a pervasive loss of faith in the veracity of visual perception.1
