Communities of Learned Experience: Epistolary Medicine in the Renaissance

Introduction

The numerous Latin letters on medical subjects written by sixteenthcentury physicians constitute one small part of a much larger universe of early modern European learned and scientific correspondence. For a generation now, the role of correspondence in early modern erudition and exchange of ideas, of arguments, of objects of interest to collectors has been a focus of much historical and historiographical attention. Numerous and valuable studies have been directed to such topics as humanistic epistolarity , the concept and realities of the Republic of Letters, and the correspondence network of a celebrated individual. Recently, the sixteenth-century rise and spread of the practice of publishing printed collections of medical letters, explicitly designated in the title of the volume as epistolae medicinales or something similar, has also begun to play a part in this historiography. Ian Maclean has provided a valuable overview and analysis of such collections by twenty-one different authors published between 1521 (the date of the first edition of the Epistolae medicinales of Giovanni Manardo, the humanist physician of Ferrara whose work initiated the genre of printed collections of medical letters) and 1626, with attention not only to content and authors but also to printing history. Among recent studies of the correspondence of individuals, the work of Candice Delisle on the letters of the physician and naturalist Conrad Gesner takes thoughtful account of their dissemination (whether as individual items transmitted beyond the original recipient or collected in a printed volume) and of the process of editing them for publication. Detailed studies of the correspondence of individual physicians (such as in the last-named example) can throw much new light not only on an Introduction 2 Communities of Learned Experience author’s medical interests and activities but also on his local situation and loyalties (political or religious), intellectual and scientific milieu, and network of correspondents. Latinate physicians in sixteenth-century Europe, particularly those who had received their medical formation in universities , can, in general and broadly speaking, be considered as belonging to a scientific community. Most members of that community had many aspects of medical theory and practice in common, yet they might gain their life experience of medical activity in a variety of social and professional settings—for example, those of the university, of the court, and of urban medical practice—and inhabit very different geographic, religious, and political environments. In short, collections of medical correspondence produced in these various milieux illuminate the writers’ different worlds of learned experience as well as their ideas and activities. Within the compass of the present work it is possible to indicate only a few examples of what such collections have to offer historians—and not just historians of medicine and science but also cultural, intellectual, and (to some extent) social historians. But since it is evident that most printed collections of Latin medical letters published in the sixteenth century came either from Italy or from the German lands (though many of the Italian collections were subsequently republished in northern Europe), it seems appropriate to examine some instances from each geographical region and, in particular, to look at any examples of medical correspondence exchanged between regions. Especially in the latter such cases, the presence or absence of references to religious issues or to disputed medical innovations, most notably Paracelsianism, is likely to be of interest to others besides historians of medicine strictly defined. In the age of Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the negotiation of religious boundaries affected every area of intellectual life; at the same time, in the realm of natural philosophy and medicine, the three principles, ideas about separation , and alchemical therapies of Paracelsus and his followers represented a radical departure from Aristotelian-Galenic learned tradition. Accordingly, following this introduction, chapter 1 presents some examples of and considerations relating to medical letters sent between regions of Italy and the German lands. The two succeeding chapters discuss, respectively , letter collections by one German and one Italian author, each of Introduction 3 whom kept his correspondence almost entirely within a regional network , broadly defined. The number of editions of collected Latin medical letters published over the course of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries is in itself suf- ficient to justify their classification as a recognizable minor genre of Renaissance learned medical discourse. Not only did numerous authors contribute to the genre, but the collected medical letters of some writers appeared...