Theatrum Naturae: La ricerca naturalistica tra erudizione e nuova scienza nell'Italia del primo Seicento (review)

This volume, translated as "natural research between erudition and the new science in early seventeenth-century Italy," brings together lightly revised versions of previously published studies. Taking their lead from historians of Renaissance philosophy such as Eugenio Garin and Nicola Badaloni, Alessandro Ottaviani and Oreste Trabucco have researched the rich tradition of natural investigations produced in southern Italy between 1550 and 1650. They favor close reading of texts, which they claim to associate with historical contextualization of "the research practice carried out by men of flesh and blood, including by corresponding, discussing books and co-operating in editorial work" (p. 14). However, while effectively charting networks and exchanges, they hardly discuss practices of knowledge; they engage critically with recent Anglo-American history of science and remain firmly within the tradition of history of ideas. They draw their broader historiographical framework from that venerable strand of Italian scholarship that interprets the history of southern Italy (the mezzogiorno) as characterized by recurrent cycles in which surges of intellectual energy nourished by international contacts were followed by aborted reforms and political repression. Surprisingly, Ottaviani and Trabucco do not translate this into specific historical analysis; social and political settings such as the dynamics of Spanish domination and the turmoil of the 1640s remain on the distant horizon.

An important engine for natural investigations in the 1610s and 1620s was the Academy of the Lincei, many of whose members were based in Naples and on which Sabina Brevaglieri and Federico Tognoni have recently produced valuable studies. The first of this book's three chapters is devoted to the Neapolitan Linceo Fabio Colonna, a lawyer by education who devoted his life to natural investigations. Not convinced by David Freedberg's interpretation of the Lincei as driven by a coherent and taxonomy-oriented plan of investigation, the authors effectively document the diverging, and sometimes clashing, approaches within the academy, for example, in relation to the contested issue of the generation of minerals.

Still following Colonna, the second chapter moves to the Mexican Treasure (1651), a vast commentary on Mexican fauna and flora and the academy's main collective project. Colonna's approach to the business of identifying plants is skillfully placed within the contemporary transformation of botanical research but also in the longer history of the discipline. Physicians and naturalists cooperating with Colonna are singled out, but further insight into their social and intellectual identity would have been helpful. Well connected, Colonna also gathered and passed on information about the civet, an animal whose production of a scented liquid from an area close to the genitals obsessed Renaissance naturalists. Reconstructing this obsession—but not its cultural significance—the authors also engage with De hyaena odorifera (1638), the report of a dissection of the civet by Pietro Castelli, whose career as a physician and botanist in Rome and Sicily, including his attempted reform of the medical curriculum, provides one of the book's unifying themes.

Anatomical investigations from the 1630s to the 1650s are the main focus of the third chapter, where historians of medicine will find valuable information about the network of anatomists connecting Naples to Germany and Denmark via Padua. A key player was the well-known Neapolitan surgeon Marco Aurelio Severino, whom foreign medical students and fellow anatomists in Padua would come to meet as part of their Italian tour. The chapter gives tantalizing glimpses of their conflicts but is particularly effective at conveying Castelli's growing sense of isolation and Severino's struggle to promote reforms locally while desperately seeking help and connections abroad.

To those unfamiliar with the history of southern Italy, much remains implicit in this book, and the prose is sometimes unnecessarily convoluted, but persistent readers will be rewarded with useful information and food for thought about the relations between centers and their so-called...