Spies and Porters of the Mind in Andre Du Laurens’ Discourse of the Preservation of Sight

Abstract

Explaining, in a dramatic allegory, how Love (specifically love at first sight, or love melancholy) enters into and corrupts the body of man, the French physician, André du Laurens describes how an improbable accomplice, or set of accomplices (the eyes), are deceived into complicity in the destruction of the castle of the human body. Richard Surphlet’s contemporary English translation of du Laurens’ popular medical text, renders it as such: