ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The ‘learned practitioner’: professors of secrets and the medical marketplace of late Renaissance Italy

• In Event: Practitioners, Artisans and Instruments in the Making of Premodern Science, III

English Abstract

This paper investigates the commixture of artisanal and scholarly knowledge in 16th-century Italian collections of medical and craft recipes known as ‘books of secrets’. Even when ascribed to graduate physicians, the recipes disclosed in these books underscore a medical practice that relies on the effectiveness of single, powerful drugs rather than on complex regimina. The origin of these recipes, often recounted in narrative inserts that endorse their trustworthiness and the reliability of the ‘professors of secrets’ revealing them, could lie in the writings of medical auctoritates, the practice of wandering healers, the workshop knowledge of craftsmen, and the domestic wisdom of the common folk alike. Whatever their source, recipes were empirically validated and oftentimes perfected by the professors thanks to a combination of medical training, technical skills, and individual ingenuity, which allowed them to appropriate the knowledge passed on for generations as their own, original ‘secrets’.
This paper explores the implications of these claims of originality, as well the diversified medical world that emerge from the narratives woven within Italian books of secrets. It argues that, while both aspects speak of the desire to carve one’s niche in an increasingly crowded marketplace, they also highlight the professors’ (self-)portrayal as learned practitioners, capable of mediating between the practical wisdom of empirics and the theoretical knowledge of university physicians.

Author

• Ruben Celani, University of Notre Dame, IN