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Cornelius Gemma and His Neoplatonic Reading of Hippocrates

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Cornelius Gemma and His Neoplatonic Reading of Hippocrates CHAPTER FOUR CORNELIUS GEMMA AND HIS NEOPLATONIC READING OF HIPPOCRATES 1. Introduction Cornelius Gemma (1535–78), the royal professor of medicine at the Uni- versity of Louvain and son of the famous cosmographer-mathematician Gemma Frisius (1508–55), called upon the authority of Hippocrates on many occasions in his major work On the Divine Signs of Nature (De natu- rae divinis characterismis) (Antwerp, 1575).1 However, it was not the practi- cal elements of the Greek physician’s medical teaching that attracted him primarily. Rather, Gemma believed that Hippocrates was a leading fijigure among the ancient sages. In support of this conviction, he developed a particular interpretation of Hippocrates, heavily relying on his belief in the “ancient theology” (prisca theologia). This belief, stemming from the work of the Florentine Platonist Marsilio Ficino and developed within the stream of Renaissance Platonism, was much in vogue among his contem- poraries.2 The present chapter thus aims to deliver the fijirst analysis of the historical and intellectual context of Gemma’s Hippocratism based on the prisca theologia belief. His approach was also influenced by the views of two leading physicians of the time, Fernel and Girolamo Cardano (1501–76), as shown on Gemma’s list of predecessors at the beginning of his work: Indeed I know that many [scholars] advanced diverse arguments of the same kind in many books, among which principal are Girolamo Fracastoro, On the Sympathy and Antipathy of Things, and Jean Fernel, On the Hidden Causes of Things. Add to these the huge compilation of Cardano as well as Levinus 1 On his life and work, see Ferdinand Van Ortroy, Bio-Bibliographie de Gemma Frisius, fondateur de l’école belge de géographie, de son fijils Corneille et de ses neveux les Arsenius (Brussels, 1920); Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York, 1941), VI: 406–409; Jean Céard, La nature et les prodiges: l’insolite au seizième siècle (Geneva, 1977), 365–73; Tabitta Van Nouhuys, The Age of Two-Faced Janus: The Comets of 1577 and 1618 and the Decline of the Aristotelian World View in the Netherlands (Leiden, 1998); Steven Vanden Broecke, The Limits of Influence: Pico, Louvain, and the Crisis of Renaissance Astrol- ogy (Leiden, 2003), 186–96, 212–26; Hiro Hirai (ed.), Cornelius Gemma: Cosmology, Medicine and Natural Philosophy in Renaissance Louvain (Rome, 2008). 2 On the prisca theologia belief in the Renaissance, see Ch. 2 n. 6. cornelius gemma 105 Lemnius, On the Hidden Wonders of Nature, Pomponazzi, On Enchantments and Caspar Peucer, On Divinations [. .]; for the time being, not to mention the Platonists such as Psellus, Marsilio Ficino and the leader of our time, Jacques Charpentier, disappeared, alas, by an untimely death!3 Before examining the case of Fernel and Cardano, some words on the gen- eral situation of Hippocratic medicine in the Renaissance are in order.4 Above all, the publication of the Hippocratic corpus in Greek from the Aldine Press dated from 1526, while Latin translations of the corpus were executed by Marco Fabio Calvo (ca. 1440–1527) in 1525 and then by Janus Cornarius (1500–58) in 1546. These two versions were the most circulated translations of the sixteenth century.5 Initially, however, most physicians were interested in Hippocrates only through Galen’s commentaries on treatises such as Aphorisms, Prognostic or On Regimen in Acute Diseases from the Hippocratic corpus. These texts were central to medical educa- tion in medieval universities, and remained so during the sixteenth cen- tury. In addition, texts such as Epidemics in its partial form and On Airs, 3 Cornelius Gemma, De naturae divinis characterismis (Antwerp, 1575) [hereafter NDC], 1.1, 26 = book 1, chapter 1, page 26: “Scio equidem plures eiusdem generis argumenta vel plenis voluminibus varia pertractasse: quorum principes Hieronimus Fracastorus De sym- pathia et antipathia rerum; Johannes Fernelius De abditis rerum causis; adde his Cardani ingentem farraginem, nec non Levini Lemnii De naturae occultis miraculis, Pompona- tium De incantamentis, De divinationibus Gasparum Peucerum [. .]. Ut interim sileam viros Platonicos Psellum, Marsilium Ficinum, et nostrae aetatis antesignanum Jacobum Carpentarium, nimis heu praematura morte sublatum.” On Fracastoro (1478–1553), see Girolamo Fracastoro fra medicina, fijilosofijia e scienze della natura, ed. Alessandro Pastore and Enrico Peruzzi (Florence, 2006); Concetta Pennuto, Simpatia, fantasia e contagio: il pensiero medico e il pensiero fijilosofijico di Girolamo Fracastoro (Rome, 2008). On Lemnius, see Carel M. Van Hoorn, Levinus Lemnius, 1505–1568: Zestiende-eeuws Zeeuws Geneesheer (Kloosterzande, 1978). On Pomponzzi, see Bruno Nardi, Studi su Pietro Pomponazzi (Flor- ence, 1965); Giancarlo Zanier, Ricerche sulla difffusione e fortuna del De incantationibus di Pomponazzi (Florence, 1975); Martin L. Pine, Pietro Pomponazzi: Radical Philosopher of the Renaissance (Padua, 1986), esp. 235–74. On Psellus (1017/18–after 1078), see Christian Zervos, Un philosophe néoplatonicien du XIe siècle: Michel Psellos (Paris, 1920). 4 See Vivian Nutton, “Hippocrates in the Renaissance,” in Die hippokratischen Epid- emien: Theorie-Praxis-Tradition, ed. Gerhard Baader and Rolf Winau (Stuttgart, 1989), 420–39; Nancy G. Siraisi, “Hippocrates in the Eyes of Some Sixteenth-Century Medical Commentators,” in Geschichte der Medizingeschichtsschreibung: Historiographie unter dem Diktat literarischer Gattungen von der Antike bis zur Aufklärung, ed. Thomas Rütten (Rem- scheid, 2009), 233–63. Cf. Wesley D. Smith, The Hippocratic Tradition (Ithaca, 1979), 13–31. 5 On Calvo, see Dizionario biografijico degli italiani 43 (1993), 723–27. On Cornarius, see Brigitte Mondrain, “Éditer et traduire les médecins grecs au XVIe siècle: l’exemple de Janus Cornarius,” in Les voies de la science grecque, ed. Danielle Jacquart (Geneva, 1997), 391–417; Marie-Laure Monfort, L’apport de Janus Cornarius à l’édition et à la traduction de la collec- tion hippocratique, Ph.D. diss. (Université Paris IV-Sorbonne, 1998)..
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