The Bible and Natural Philosophy in Renaissance Italy: Jewish and Christian Physicians in Search of Truth by Andrew D. Berns (review)

The Bible and Natural Philosophy in Renaissance Italy, as promised in the Introduction, ‘explores the reciprocal relationship between biblical interpretation and natural philosophy in sixteenth-century Italy’ (p. 3). To the late modern mind, these two disciplines may seem uncomfortable bedfellows, but as Andrew D. Berns amply demonstrates, the intersections between biblical interpretation and a variety of sub-disciplines in Renaissance Italian natural philosophy can make for fruitful and absorbing scholarly analysis. The book is not only about the role of scripture in natural philosophy, or natural philosophy in interpreting scripture, but the individual case studies which make it up constitute learned analyses of how biblical texts were analysed, explained, and put to use – alongside engagement with a broad swath of ancient, medieval, and early modern sources – in ostensibly scientific explorations of natural phenomena.

The main purpose of the book is to show how many northern Italian medical men imagined scripture not necessarily as in some way especially authoritative, but as on par with other ancient scientific sources; that is, they invoked the Bible in scientific treatises in order to resolve natural philosophical disputes, and in so doing, they ‘expanded the classical canon to include the Bible’ (p. 74). This is made clear through a number of examples in the first two chapters. Sixteenth-century botanists, like Aldrovandi, argued – against their ancient forebears – that to understand properly plants mentioned in the Bible, one had to study them firsthand. And in commentaries on an ancient medical treatise by Dioscorides, Italian physicians like Amatus took the opportunity, among other things, to correct Jerome’s Vulgate. Similarly, Guilandinus emended both the Vulgate and Septuagint in virtue of his own discoveries in natural philosophy; and he and his colleagues contended with ancient pagan authorities on natural philosophy like Pliny and Varro with appeals to the biblical text as an authoritative account for certain aspects of natural history.

The third chapter details a long genealogy of ideas regarding the curative properties of precious stones associated with biblical texts, and, more specifically, outlines the sixteenth-century context of Jewish and Christian medical thought wherein hyacinth was identified with the biblical tarshish. Berns’s investigation provides us access to a world of a peculiar philological, geological, biblical, and philosophical make-up, along with a portrait of a physician (de ‘Pomi) who put his knowledge of Greek and Hebrew lexicography to use in bringing together scripture and science.

The issue of Jewish–Christian relations in the sixteenth century, touched on variously throughout the third chapter, is brought to the forefront in Chapter 4. Among other things, Berns here argues that what lay in the background of a friendly Jewish–Christian epistolary exchange over unusually deformed children was the question of whether to baptise (in the case of Christians) or circumcise (in the case of Jews) these ‘monsters’. The chapter shows how religious concerns, even where there appears to be an inchoate desacralisation of the biblical text, were inextricably bound up with scientific discourse, and in some cases drove the research itself; even if at the same time a congenial relationship between Jewish and Christian physicians suggests that their ultimate concern was the ‘advancement of scientific knowledge’ (pp. 192–93).

The final chapter details Portaleone’s understanding of incense and how that understanding was shaped by his consideration of a wide array of sources, his own work as a botanist, and his consultations with local spice grinders. The cornucopic array of Portaleone’s sources not only gave him privileged insight into identifying biblical incense, but also permitted him the ability to make it himself, or at least to describe how to do so, despite the long-standing proscription against it in premodern Jewish tradition. In this way, the chapter is a contribution to the increasing awareness by historians of connections between scholars and artisans in early modern Europe...