El Humanismo Medico en la Universidad de Alcala: Siglo XVI (review)

In the early sixteenth century the University of Alcalá rose to be the principal center of humanistic learning in Spain. It owed its preeminence to the zeal of Cardinal Cisneros, whose cherished project (and the university’s most celebrated product) was the celebrated Complutensian polyglot Bible. Antonio de Nebrija, the most famous Spanish humanist to make his career in Spain, ornamented the faculty from 1513; and in 1528 the university acquired a Colegio Trilingue, where Latin, Greek, and Hebrew were taught. In the middle years of the century, the medical faculty included several prominent and prolific medical authors—most notably Cristóbal de Vega, Fernando Mena, and Francisco Valles—and a number of other physicians and surgeons of note were educated at Alcalá. In the informative volume under review, the author examines the relation of these men to the tradition of philological humanism at the university as well as to medical humanism in Italy and Germany. Her work brings together a number of issues usually considered separately in such a way that they mutually illuminate one another: humanistic learning in Spain in the mid- and later sixteenth century, after the imposition of intensified religious constraints; the relation between Renaissance humanism and the sciences; the relation of Latin and the vernacular in sixteenth-century Spanish culture; and the linguistic characteristics of neo-Latin in Spain.

Following introductory chapters about medical humanism, medicine in Renaissance Spain, and the history of the university, Martín Ferreira analyzes the careers and writings of a series of authors connected with the medical faculty of Alcalá as either professors or students. She engages in a detailed analysis of the genres of medical writing that these men produced, with special attention to commentaries and translations. Her investigation of the methodology adopted by the three leading medical humanists reveals the thoroughness of their training in Greek as well as Latin, their habitual use of base texts in Greek, and their involvement in textual emendation and criticism in a manner parallel—and, in the author’s opinion, at a level equal—to the most celebrated medical humanists of the previous generation in Italy and Germany. Her detailed analysis of their style and expression in Latin further reveals that some of these authors (notably Mena and Valles) endeavored to express themselves in classicized and elegant language. At the same time, she recognizes that both the genre of commentary and the recommendations for therapy exhibited many continuities with the Middle Ages.

This volume is the work not of a historian of medicine but of a specialist in neo-Latin, whose main concern is to trace the permeation and development of humanistic ideals, language, and philological method in a scientific field. Her focus on the significance of the choice to write in Latin or the vernacular may tend to overemphasize the remoteness of academic medical authors from therapeutic practice in sixteenth-century Spanish medicine. For example, Valles was—as she notes—involved in both worlds, at least to some extent: in addition to his prolific output of learned medical commentaries produced in his academic capacity, in the role of protomedicato of Castile he also wrote a handbook in Castilian for apothecaries. Nevertheless, her contention that language, writing, and philology played a central role in the professional activity and self-presentation of Vega, Mena, and Valles (as of other medical humanists) is essentially correct. Readers interested in the intellectual aspects of Renaissance medicine as well as the history of medicine in Spanish universities will find this a useful study.