Cardano's Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (review)

Anthony Grafton, Cardano's Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 284 pp.

Ostensibly an account of Girolamo Cardano, a sixteenth-century astrologer and polymath, Grafton's latest book, itself an example of the sort of erudition that it charts, is also a response to recent critical trends. Indeed, the book might have been entitled The Return of Renaissance Man. Grafton's Cardano is, above all, a "hard and irreducible individual." Curious, eclectic, ambitious, and self-promoting, Cardano exhibits the characteristics of the traditional Renaissance magus. But there is a difference. Unlike Dr. Faustus and his ilk, whose thirst for knowledge aspires to transcendence, Cardano is described as intensely pragmatic, at times downright mundane. His intellectual repertoires are invariably characterized as tools, wielded to good effect. Cardano, however, was not all business: he complained that the many small animals he had received as gifts had made his house filthy, while elsewhere he included playing with pets as one of life's "undeniable goods." Grafton skillfully uses Cardano to offer up an account of the subject constrained, contradictory, and humbled, yet still capable of efficacious action.