Communities of Learned Experience: Epistolary Medicine in the Renaissance

2. The Court Physician Johann Lange and His Epistolae Medicinales

Writing in 1589, Nicholas Reusner situated the published Epistolae medicinales of Johann Lange, longtime court physician at the court of the Elector Palatine in Heidelberg, as follows: Among his works is this miscellany of Epistolae medicinales, rich in varied and rare erudition as also in authoritative explanation of all kinds of very worthy things . . . Indeed I am not ignorant that a number of people have composed outstanding works in this genre by writing and publishing similar collections of epistolae medicinales. Especially deserving of commendation are Giovanni Manardo, Luigi Mondello, Giovanni Battista Teodosi, Pietro Andrea Mattioli, Nicolò Massa, Vettor Trincavella , and if there are others besides those named I do not have their names. But these are all Italians; unless I am mistaken, Lange is the only German. Reusner was Lange’s distant relative; his words occur in the preface he wrote for a posthumous edition of Lange’s Epistolae prepared by yet another relative , Georg Wirth, for a time a court physician to Charles V and Philip II and Lange’s confidant and heir. Lange’s German world was, as Reusner’s preface makes clear, shaped in important ways by his membership in a family network of physicians and jurists. After arguing, with numerous historical examples, ranging from antiquity to the recent past, that “really there can be a perpetual possession of that art [of medicine] in outstanding families , as was recorded of the Asclepiads,” and that “[t]his [family tradition] was also accustomed to be noted in other arts and disciplines,” Reusner went on to specify the names and relationships of distinguished physicians c h a p t e r t w o The Court Physician Johann Lange and His Epistolae Medicinales 40 Communities of Learned Experience and jurists in the Wirth-Reusner-Lange family network: an earlier Georg Wirth, physician to Louis II, king of Hungary and Bohemia; his brother Peter Wirth, theologian and dean of the faculty of arts at the University of Leipzig; Michael Wirth, a jurist who was dean and rector of the University of Leipzig and later chancellor of Saxony; Bartholomaeus Reusner and Hieronymus Reusner, physicians; and Christoph Reusner, jurist. No doubt Reusner’s insistence on Lange’s German identity reflects familial pride and perhaps also a reaction against dismissive treatment of northern Europe culture by some Renaissance Italians. Nonetheless, he was essentially correct both in associating Lange’s work with that of the early and midsixteenth -century Italian pioneers of the genre of published collections of epistolae medicinales and in emphasizing the significance of Lange’s different cultural and regional context. The contents of Lange’s “medical letters” (as will become apparent, not all letters, and not all strictly medical) range across an array of topics and formats wide enough for Reusner to claim that they were useful for the Republic of Letters in general and for all students of literature, as well as for medicine and natural philosophy. But collectively they illustrate four major elements, frequently interrelated, of Lange’s formation and career: (1) a professional identity partially shaped by medical humanism, (2) the multifarious duties of his long service as court physician to successive rulers of the Rhineland Palatinate, (3) the intellectual interests of a local and regional circle of men of learning (physicians and others), and (4) contemporary and local social and religious controversy. At different times historians have noted all four of these aspects of Lange’s life and work, though not always viewing them with equal attention and in relation to each other. The objective of this chapter, after a brief biographical summary, is to reexamine some of the letters in the light of these four themes and, especially, their interaction. Lange (1485–1565), who was born in Silesia, followed other members of his family to the University of Leipzig, where he matriculated in 1508, received his master’s degree in 1514, and taught arts for several years. At Leipzig, where he was among the first group of humanists to teach at that university, he lectured on Cicero, Pliny, and the pseudo-Aristotelian De mundo. According to his own account, Lange also lectured on pseudo- Johann Lange and His Epistolae Medicinales 41 Proclus, De sphaera, and taught cosmography at Leipzig. The long discourse on the voyages of exploration in the New World and the East in one of his letters, which also includes travel advice for a journey to Calicut, although...