Fasiculo de medicina in volgare, Venezia, Giovanni e Gregorio De Gregori, 1494. Vol. 1, Facsimile dell'esemplare conservato presso la Biblioteca del centroper la storia dell'Università di Padova; Vol. 2, Il "Fasciculus medicinae" ovvero le metamorfosi del libro umanistico (review)

Tiziana Pesenti. Fasiculo de medicina in volgare, Venezia, Giovanni e Gregorio De Gregori, 1494. Vol. 1, Facsimile dell'esemplare conservato presso la Biblioteca del centro per la storia dell'Università di Padova; Vol. 2, Il "Fasciculus medicinae" ovvero le metamorfosi del libro umanistico. Treviso, Italy: Antilia, 2001. xxii + 217 + 52 pp. Ill. L 300,000.00 (88-87073-26-0).

The most widely known medical incunabulum is famous for its illustrations, but it originated in a medley of minor tracts on uroscopy, bloodletting and astrology, diseases and wounds, gynecology, and sexology. This "little bundle of medicine," or Fasciculus medicinae, compiled in early-fifteenth-century Bohemia, was not much copied by hand. In 1491 it was printed (with an added plague treatise) by the Venetian brothers Giovanni and Gregorio de Gregori, who in 1494 published a vernacular version, Fasiculo de medicina in volgare.¹ If the printers were interested in marketing the text, modern attention has been virtually limited to the images. Now, both aspects are celebrated by an exquisite facsimile and a masterly commentary. A rare copy of the Fasiculo, now at the University of Padua, is reproduced with amazing authenticity—not only in the delicately colored woodcuts, but down to the smudges, fingerprints, and moisture stains.

In the companion volume, whose richness defies summary, Tiziana Pesenti unravels the history of the collection, the context of its publication, and the significance of the illustrations. She offers an array of original and cogent insights, drawing on her extensive research but also building on current scholarship, and with judicious revisions of the authoritative historiography from Karl Sudhoff to Andrea Carlino: the brothers de Gregori are convincingly portrayed as astute entrepreneurs. Johannes Ketham becomes the owner rather than the writer of the original "bundle." Fascinating detective work reveals that the Fasiculo's first page portrays neither a physician in his clinic nor a lecturing professor, but Petrus de Montagnana as a "poster boy" for Humanism, an expositor, and a stand-in for a more famous but banned grammaticus. The translator, Sebastiano Manilio, proves to have been not a physician but a Humanist editor.

Pesenti emphasizes that, except for eliminating some "barbarisms," Manilio "changes neither the letter nor the style" of the Latin text (p. 139). However, we discern various traces of the interpretive process. Whether they reflect the individual interpreter, linguistic dynamics, or a cultural climate, inflections give a distinctive character to the Italian version. Everyday usage is introduced for scholastic terms, such as calculus, "el quale mal de arenelle tragli piu vulgari si chiama." Explanatory interjections range from the sobering "extase cioe mancamenti di spiriti" to the accentuation of "unum ethiopem" as "un saracino . . . cioe un homo negro." At least a dozen different terms replace the straightforward "coitus." A moral tone may be injected—for example, when the height of sexual pleasure, "in tali delectatione," becomes "delectatione in tale acto vituperabile"; one wonders about the omission of a contraceptive potion that was attributed to "the experience" of Saint Albert the Great in the Latin original.

A systematic comparison of the Fasciculus and the Fasiculo reveals the remarkable changes between the publications of 1491 and 1494, due particularly to the influence of Humanism and the surging interest in anatomy. The latter is evident in the substantial addition of Mondino Liuzzi's "Anathomia," and in the dramatic transformation of the illustrations, from diagrams of the "disease man" and the "pregnant woman" to naturalistic portrayals of the body. In a trenchant analysis of the most widely recognized woodcut, Pesenti argues that it is not an evocation of Mondino, as generally assumed, but the first realistic portrayal of a lecture on anatomy at the University of Padua. This academic image complemented two other representations of medical life—namely, of a consultation by uroscopy, and of a visit to a plague victim. Thus, like the vernacularization of the...