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PREFACE TO PART TWO: RIVAL PHYSICIAN HISTORIANS OF THE ITALIAN WARS he French really call you a golden river. Now [we have] your sweet book on human anatomy, and it seems witty to them[;] . . . without doubt you are the prince of all orators and physicians of our age”—thus Symphorien Champier expressed his appreciation of Alessandro Benedetti’s Anatomice, a description of human dissection notable for its classicizing vocabulary, citation of exclusively ancient sources, and rhetorical sophistication. The encomium was a response to Benedetti’s warm appreciation of the attacks on medieval Arabic medical authorities and Islam in general that pervaded Champier’s own medical and religious writings. In short, the mutual admiration of the older Venetian practitioner and the younger Lyonnais physician, expressed in an exchange of letters in 1508, rested on shared tastes and interests characteristic of humanist medicine at the turn of the sixteenth century.1 Elsewhere, Champier, who was one of the ‹rst to spread the in›uence of Ficino’s writings north of the Alps, referred to Benedetti as “complatonicus noster.”2 If these declarations of mutual esteem are to some extent misleading —Champier was as dependent on Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine as a basic medical text as were most physicians of his age and exempted its author from some of his strictures on the Arabs, while Benedetti’s humanist presentation of the Anatomice overlaid some features shared with the principal medieval treatise on dissection, the early fourteenth-century Anatomia of Mondino de’ Liuzzi3—they were no doubt heartfelt. It remains unclear whether the two knew anything of each other’s writings 137 T “ beyond the medical works alluded to in these letters. But Benedetti and Champier also had other characteristics in common besides their appreciation of currently fashionable intellectual trends in medicine. One was an interest in the material remains of antiquity: Champier noted the presence of Roman ruins and inscriptions in his native Lyon, whereas Benedetti was both more ambitious in his use of material evidence and more closely involved in the burgeoning culture of antiquarianism and in humanist philological controversy in Italy. In his edition of Pliny published in 1507, Benedetti appealed to—and illustrated—a mutilated inscription as “proof” of his contention that Pliny had lived in Verona.4 But the most striking parallel between Benedetti and Champier is that both combined medical practice and authorship with writing vigorous and polemical civil history—and both wrote of the Italian wars from personal experience. Yet they wrote very different kinds of history and from opposing points of view. Benedetti’s one work on civil history, the Diaria de bello Carolino, is a strongly pro-Venetian and anti-French account of the efforts of the League of Venice to drive Charles VIII of France out of Italy after the invasion of 1494.5 The work’s title and its focus on a single campaign suggest a Sallustian model, though Benedetti had no qualms about comparing himself with Livy in his preface: “This simple style of mine perhaps wakens scorn now as being dry and bloodless, but there will be those among posterity who, when they have compared various histories, will pronounce it more agreeable and rich because among the ancients Titus Livy discharged his task in this way with wondrous success.”6 (Posterity has not been so kind.) In part, the work records Benedetti’s own experiences as a medical practitioner accompanying the Venetian army and an astrologer giving astral counsel to Venetian generals.7 Benedetti’s account of this campaign was a source for later writers (principally the Milanese chronicler Bernardino Corio),8 although its conclusion, which leaves the Venetians celebrating victory in 1495 and the reader with the impression that foreign invasion of Italy had been successfully repelled, was soon overtaken by history. Champier’s own experience of the Italian wars came when he accompanied his patron and patient Antoine Duke of Lorraine to the French victories at Agnadello in 1509 and Marignano in 1515.9 More proli‹c than Benedetti, Champier was tireless in his output, producing a stream—perhaps better, a ›ood—of historical, literary, philosophical, and religious as well as medical works in both Latin and the vernacular. His historical or quasi-historical writings ranged across capsule lives of famous women of antiquity and the Bible in La nef des dames; a work on the Roman, French, and German “monarchies”; chronicles of the house of Savoy; an assemblage of material 138  History, Medicine, and the Traditions of...

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