The vernacularization of Paduan medicine and philosophy in the seventeenth century: Troilo Lancetta's Raccolta medica, et astrologica

Abstract

In 1645 Troilo Lancetta saw to the publication of a compilation of texts, Raccolta medica, et astrologica, under the anagrammatic and implausible pseudonym Lootri Nacattel. Most of these texts were translations into the Italian vernacular. They include writings by Girolamo Cardano; Hippocrates; Aristotle, and his commentators; Girolamo Fracastoro; Lancetta’s teacher, the philosopher Cesare Cremonini; and a handful of ancient Greek and Latin historians, in addition to excerpts from Lancetta’s medical writings. The presentation of the selected texts advances a set of polemics against the practice of bloodletting as a cure for fevers and against astrology, especially its use in medicine. The collection employs a range of authorities both classical and recent to bring anti‐Galenic and anti‐astrological teachings, already present in the University of Padua, to a broader readership. This transfer reinforced Lancetta’s identity as an erudite expert in philosophy and in medicine, an identity that he cultivated in other publishing endeavors, which included Latin editions of Cremonini’s psychological and dialectical writings. Lancetta’s Raccolta reflects a sophisticated employment of medical humanism, which used Aristotelian and Hippocratic texts to undermine interpretations of Galen and promoted Cremonini’s teachings about Meteorology as part of arguments about the subalternation of medicine to philosophy, the vanity of astrology, and the denial of the predictive power of prodigious meteorological phenomena.