Communities of Learned Experience: Epistolary Medicine in the Renaissance

Abstract

In this pithy volume, Nancy Siraisi reminds us how far the history of science has come from early 20th-century models of geniuses working in isolation.Communities of Learned Experience puts the theme of networks center stage, making useful connections to current research on communities of knowledge and republics of letters both humanistic and scientific even as it contributes more particularly to the history of medicine.Through this book, readers gain vicarious enjoyment of the three inaugural lectures that Siraisi recently delivered at John Hopkins University's new Singleton Center for the Study of Premodern Europe.In 87 pages, she offers a distillation of the encyclopedic learning, rigorously forensic analysis, elegant argumentation, and wry humor that are the hallmarks of her career of research and teaching in the history of medicine, especially but not exclusively within the context of 15th-century Italy.So, too, readers get a taste of Siraisi's recent interest in 16th-century physicians' humanistic predilections for history, antiquarianism, and other forms of literary and archaeological study well outside their occupational remit [Siraisi 2007].Rather than a targeted argumentative intervention, then, this book is an expert introduction to the world of early modern medical inquiry.Siraisi surveys the macro-historical fields of science, medicine, anatomy, and botany even as she analyzes individual practitioners, circumstances, and networks micro-historically.At the heart of this book, we find minute scrutiny of the epistolae medicinales of two 16th-century physicians.The letters of Siraisi's first protagonist, Johann Lange (1485-1565), reveal predominantly courtly and humanistic cultural priorities.Lange was personal physician to the Elector Palatine of Heidelberg and lived during the early decades of the 16th century, when the expansive tendencies of literary humanism had not yet confronted the

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