Avicenna in Renaissance Italy: The Canon and Medical Teaching in Italian Universities after 1500

by Nancy G. Siraisi

Overview

The Canon of Avicenna, one of the principal texts of Arabic origin to be assimilated into the medical learning of medieval Europe, retained importance in Renaissance and early modern European medicine. After surveying the medieval reception of the book, Nancy Siraisi focuses on the Canon in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Italy, and especially on its role in the university teaching of philosophy of medicine and physiological theory.

Originally published in 1987.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691609492
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	07/14/2014
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #789
Pages:	432
Product dimensions:	9.10(w) x 6.10(h) x 1.00(d)

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Avicenna in Renaissance Italy

The Canon and Medical Teaching in Italian Universities After 1500

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By Nancy G. Siraisi

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1987 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-05137-6

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CHAPTER 1

Text, Commentary, and Pedagogy in Renaissance Medicine

The fortunes of the Canon of Avicenna in Renaissance and early modern medical schools provide a case study of university science and medical teaching, an enterprise that has often been contrasted unfavorably either with contemporary innovations within academia (for example, the revival of anatomy) or with burgeoning scientific activities and interests outside the academic milieu. To the extent that continued use of this medieval Islamic medical encyclopedia, in Latin translation, as a textbook or reference work in western European universities after the end of the Middle Ages has been the object of attention, such use has usually been treated as a negative symbol of extreme conservatism, traditionalism, or medieval scholasticism in medical teaching. The evidence for Renaissance interest in Avicenna's medical writings — between 1500 and 1674 at least sixty editions of the complete or partial text of the Canon in Latin were printed and a substantial body of new commentary was composed — seems, however, to call for a new evaluation of the subject. The more closely one looks at the written output of Renaissance medicine, the more difficult the delineation of "conservative" and "progressive" areas becomes. Rather than attempt any such delineation, it may be preferable to inquire what this material has to tell us about the intellectual formation provided in university faculties of medicine, institutions that in the period under consideration helped to shape the minds of a large proportion of those who interested themselves in the life sciences. Such an inquiry is the purpose of the present work.

I have set out, first, simply to map the extent of Renaissance interest in the Canon: to determine as completely as possible (though doubtless still incompletely) the number and provenance of editions of, commentaries on, and treatises about the work, and to relate them to specific academic, professional, or commercial milieus. Most of these books were the product of, and found their audience in, university circles. But Renaissance medical practitioners also drew on Avicenna, or on works based on his teaching; and the production and dissemination of editions of the Canon and the literature it engendered are part of the history of Renaissance printing and publishing.

Second, I have tried to trace aspects of the intellectual history contained in these works and to accompany editors and authors as they strove to set down and set in order their attitudes to the various currents that shaped their ideas or demanded their attention: Avicenna and Arabo-Latin medicine; medieval Latin scholastic medicine; contemporary Galenism and medical humanism; controversies between Aristotelians and Galenists; contemporary philosophical eclecticism; the idiosyncrasies of Renaissance encyclopedic naturalism and occultism; and the accumulation of new theories and new data in medicine, anatomy, and botany. Canon editions and commentaries yield much information about general trends in Renaissance medicine and the response to innovation among the academic medical community. Tracing the impact and interaction of these developments by way of successive publications of a single text and works related to it offers one path through a complex and often confusing area of intellectual history and history of science. The Canon is indeed only one of a number of texts that might profitably be followed in this way. Recent studies of Renaissance commentaries on philosophical texts have begun to reveal both the full extent of this literature, and also its richness, diversity, and significance for the history of philosophy and of philosophy and science education. Similarly, aspects of the history of medieval and Renaissance cosmology and physical theory have been traced through the literature of commentary. Medical commentaries, which have so far been less explored, are equally informative about the intellectual environment in which they were produced.

Third, I have been interested in the way in which the Canon was used as a teaching text and, in particular, in the question of how the teaching of a scientific subject by means of commentary on a medieval text synthesizing ancient sources was actually accomplished in the Renaissance classroom. Here commentaries must be approached with caution, since they do not necessarily reflect classroom practice directly. Although almost all Latin medical commentaries of the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries probably originated in university lectures, the surviving body of material has not only undergone undetermined amounts of subsequent editing, but also represents only a fraction of all the lectures delivered over the centuries. That fraction is likely to be the work of the more ambitious and energetic (and hence uncharacteristic) professors. (The latter supposition explains why the publication of commentaries on parts of the Canon by living or recently deceased authors tapered off long before the texts themselves disappeared from statutory university curricula or lectures on them ceased to be given; new commentaries stopped appearing in print at the point publication of expositions of traditional texts became unlikely to enhance scholarly or scientific reputations.)

Nonetheless, the surviving commentaries offer a good deal of information about the goals, methods, and assumptions of university medical teaching. They cast light on the balance between exposition of the author and exposition of the subject, on the extent to which the content of teaching was determined by the medieval tradition of commentary on the same text, and on the degree to which lectures on the Canon varied according to the interests of individual teachers. As for the permeation of lectures on the Canon by current intellectual and scientific concerns, the question is not whether this occurred, since the flexibility of commentary as a form had always made such permeation inevitable, but how, and to what extent. Mordechai Feingold has recently shown with regard to Oxford in the later sixteenth and first half of the seventeenth century that the reputed conservatism of university teaching needs to be carefully delimited, in that teachers whose announced conclusions remained conservative might nonetheless choose to inform their students of the existence and implications of alternative views. In the second decade of the eighteenth century, according to another recent study, lectures on Aristotle's Meteorology delivered at Padua included accounts of seventeenth-century discoveries in pneumatics and of Cartesian physics. The reduction of commentary to a mere shell for teaching of another kind — exemplified in medicine by Morgagni's ingenious use of his prescribed lectures on Canon 1.1, at Padua in 1713, to teach seventeenth-century physiology (see Chapter 6) — had not yet occurred a century earlier; instead, the sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century commentaries that form a large part of the subject of this book maintain an uneasy balance between scholastic tradition, the Renaissance enthusiasm for all things Greek in medicine, philosophical eclecticism, and (often unaccepting) presentation of new scientific data and theories. Although in lectures on the Canon the bent toward scholastic tradition is naturally considerable, teaching based on the Canon evidently had much in common with some of the other approaches to medical and natural philosophical subject matter in the same epoch. These commentaries cannot be written off as the product of a scholastic backwater unrepresentative of the culture of the age.

The period between about 1500 and about 1625, which is the principal focus of this book, constitutes only one phase of long history of the use of Avicenna's eleventh-century medical encyclopedia in western Europe. I have chosen to concentrate on this time span because, despite Avicenna's justified reputation as a medieval school author, the later period is arguably that in which the most thorough study of the Canon was undertaken by scholars in the Latin West. It is also that in which the work aroused most controversy, and in which the process resulting in the obsolesence of Avicenna's place in Western medicine began. For about the first two hundred years after its introduction into university curricula in the thirteenth century, the Canon, although subjected to occasional criticism, was generally and on the whole rightly esteemed as a sophisticated systematization and summary of almost all available medical learning. By about the mid-seventeenth century, despite the Canon's great historical importance, its irrelevance to current developments in European physiology was clearly apparent; its long survival thereafter in various university curricula (at Bologna part of the work retained a nominal position until 1800) must be attributed chiefly to academic inertia, as eighteenth-century educational reformers were not slow to point out.

But in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, notwithstanding the emergence of powerful and indeed ultimately revolutionary forces of change in science and philosophy, the Canon, like other textbooks used in medieval universities, could reasonably be regarded as having a valid place in science education. The Galenic medicine and Aristotelian natural philosophy on which Avicenna's synthesis was based retained their hold over the minds of most educated men; in and outside the schools the approach to nature was still in large measure book-oriented, classicizing, and scholastic; and teaching scientific disciplines by means of commentary on ancient texts remained common practice. Hence, rather than constituting a reactionary rear guard, those university teachers who continued to show an active interest in the Canon by publishing commentaries upon it and by collaborating in the preparation of editions of the work fell within the mainstream of contemporary intellectual life. Their commentaries and editions reveal the history of successive attempts to modernize the presentation of Avicenna's text and the teaching of his ideas, attempts that served to shore up the position of the work in some university curricula in the short run and also contributed to its subsequent obsolescence.

The inspiration for these attempts was derived from the importation of some of the ideals of Renaissance humanism into medicine beginning in about the last quarter of the fifteenth century. The humanist insistence upon attention to original texts in the original languages stimulated a closer attention to Avicenna's relation to his Greek (especially his Galenic) sources than had hitherto been undertaken; and despite the limitations of Arabic studies in sixteenth-century Europe, some efforts were made to approach the Arabic text directly. The humanist desire for more accurate, or at any rate more elegant and readily understandable, translations lay behind various revisions of the Latin text and partial translations into Latin from a Hebrew version. And the vigorous humanist polemic against the medieval translators of Greek and Arabic works, and against Arabic medicine in general and Avicenna in particular, both penetrated some commentaries on the Canon itself and engendered reactive efforts to defend Avicenna's work. Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, therefore, the long life of the Canon in the schools of the West seems at least in part due to the efforts of sixteenth-century scholarly editors and commentators who, far from being oblivious to such phenomena as Renaissance Galenism and the humanist attack on Arab medicine and Latin medical scholastics, attempted to approach the Canon itself in the spirit of medical humanism. Thus, although Renaissance interest in Avicenna's medical writings is a phenomenon much smaller in scale than Renaissance Aristotelianism or Renaissance Galenism, it has much in common with these larger intellectual movements. In all three cases, there is obvious and important continuity with an antecedent scholastic tradition; but at the same time the reality and significance of change are also undeniable. Indeed, the interest in Avicenna was intimately associated with contemporary Galenism, since Avicenna tended to be judged, by friend and foe alike, on the basis of his adequacy as a summarizer and interpreter of Galen's thought.

The survival of the Canon in sixteenth-century and later academic medical curricula was not confined to any one region of Europe. But regional intellectual traditions ensured that active interest in providing and publishing improved versions of the Latin text accompanied by a modern body of commentary was predominantly an Italian and (though to a somewhat lesser extent) Iberian undertaking. For the most part, this book deals with the Canon in the Italian universities. This emphasis was partly dictated by the numerical predominance of commentaries and editions of Italian provenance — professors from Padua and Bologna predominated in the writing of commentaries, and Venetian presses in the publication of both commentaries and editions — and partly by my own earlier studies of Italian scholastic medicine, which made me want to trace later stages of the regional academic medical tradition of which Taddeo Alderotti was a leading early representative. Medieval and Renaissance Italian universities have for the most part been studied on an individual rather than a comparative basis; this book essays a comparative approach to one restricted area of medical teaching in these institutions. Yet among the Italian universities Padua was in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century an international center famous among contemporaries as among modern historians of medicine for innovative work in anatomy and physiology and for the teaching of practical medicine. It was also, as is equally well known, still a notable center of Aristotelian natural philosophy. Although Padua's preeminence seems more due to general liveliness and productivity and to sociopolitial factors than to any peculiarly Paduan ideas or attitudes (which, if they existed, have proved singularly hard to track down), the investigation of the position of the Canon in such a milieu seemed a task of particular interest.

At Padua and Bologna, universities that had been centers of medical instruction since the thirteenth century, a standard and highly traditional curriculum of lectures on set books was in the course of the sixteenth century supplemented and consequently reduced in importance by the expansion and development of private medical teaching and of public anatomical and botanical instruction. And anatomy at Padua in particular early produced very striking and widely celebrated scientific results in the shape of the achievement of Vesalius. Although the lectures on set books were in important respects slow to change, they were in fact affected in a variety of ways by the local and immediate scientific, professional, and institutional context. Thus, at Padua neglect of statutory lectures on the Canon and demands for curricular reform of a kind that would remove Avicenna from the schools were counterbalanced by other reform proposals that proposed sections of the Canon as the appropriate text for a unified overview of medicine (see Chapter 4). In this way, the history of the Canon becomes intertwined with that of university reform and with that of the antecedents of medical textbooks of the variety known as the "institutes of medicine." Furthermore, those who accepted the statutory obligation to lecture on portions of the Canon at Padua included at least two men who themselves made significant contributions to the development of medical education and the introduction of new standards of demonstration, evidence, and proof into medicine and physiology, namely Giambatista Da Monte (d. 1551), well known for his emphasis upon clinical instruction in a hospital setting and his role in the founding of the Paduan botanic garden, and Santorio Santorio (d. 1636), who is remembered for his part in developing physiological measurement, instrumentation, and quantification. The commentaries on the Canon of these men, and also those of their less distinguished colleagues, reflect the authors' encounters with the ideas, activities, and controversies of the Paduan medical milieu.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• Contents, pg. vii
• Acknowledgments, pg. ix
• Abbreviations, pg. xi
• I. Text, Commentary, and Pedagogy in Renaissance Medicine, pg. 3
• 2. The Canon of Avicenna, pg. 19
• 3. The Canon in the Medieval Universities and the Humanist Attack on Avicenna, pg. 43
• 4. The Canon in Italian Medical Education After 1500, pg. 77
• 5. Renaissance Editions, pg. 127
• 6. Commentators and Commentaries, pg. 175
• 7. Philosophy and Science in a Medical Milieu, pg. 221
• 8. Canon 1.1 and Renaissance Physiology, pg. 294
• Conclusion, pg. 353
• Appendices. Latin Editions of the Canon Published after 1500 and Manuscripts and Editions of Latin Commentaries on the Canon Written after 1500, pg. 359
• Selected Bibliography, pg. 377
• Index, pg. 397