L'esperienza del passato: Alessandro Benedetti filologo e medico umanista.

Giovanna Ferrari. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1996. 357 pp. IL 69,000. ISBN: 88-222-4465-6.

Up until the present Alessandro Benedetti (1452-1512) has had a divided reputation. He is remembered by historians of medicine and science primarily as the author of a brief work on anatomy that has been grouped with other "pre-Vesalian" treatises and as a participant in the controversy over Pliny. To others, he is known as a historian of current events, the author of a Diaria de bello carolino published in 1496. It is the achievement of Ferrari's thorough and exacting study to bring together all aspects of Benedetti's life, work, and culture. In the course of so doing she reveals a great deal about the nature of humanist medicine and the profound connections for cultivated physicians of the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries between study of the ancients, study of nature, study of contemporary human bodies, and study of contemporary political events and human affairs.

Ferrari uncovers the full extent of Benedetti's humanistic education and interests. His earliest education took place in the humanistic ambiance of his native Verona when the elder Ermolao Barbaro was bishop; subsequently he graduated in arts at Padua, where his associates included Giorgio Merula and the younger Ermolao Barbaro. In the following years, Benedetti made a number of short trips to places in the eastern Mediterranean, perhaps in the capacity of medico condotto in Venetian possessions or for Venetian communities abroad. Along the way he acquired a collection of Greek manuscripts substantial enough to be regarded as important by Janos Lascaris. In the absence of any documentary record, Ferrari casts doubt on the assumption that Benedetti taught medicine or anatomy at Padua. She points instead to evidence that he spent much of his career as a medical practitioner in Venice, where his reputation for learning in philosophy, medicine, and anatomy earned him respect in both political and humanist circles and where his contacts ranged from Marin Sanudo to Giorgio Valla to Cassandra Fedele.

Ferrari argues that Benedetti's Anatomice (first printed 1502) reflects not university teaching at Padua but the civic and humanist environment of Venice in the 1480s and 1490s. Innovative in its classicizing repudiation of Arabo-Latin scholastic medicine and presentation of anatomy as a suitable subject for contemplation by rulers and men of authority, the work also rests on pre-existing traditions of anatomical dissection and of physiological and philosophical debate in Italy. The actual sequence and method of dissection resembles that laid out in the early fourteenth-century Anatomia of Mondino de' Liuzzi. But as the graecism of the title Anatomice indicates, Benedetti sought to develop a medical terminology based on ancient authors, often by transliterating Greek terms. He avoided citing medieval works and abandoned scholastic forms of presentation. His discussion of physiology is marked both by a notable interest in the Aristotelian works on animals and by awareness of Renaissance Platonism (as well as, of course, by frequent references to Galen). The prefaces to the five books invite the Emperor Maximilian and various Venetian and Veronese political and intellectual notables to contemplate moral and philosophical aspects of anatomy. At the same time, Benedetti insisted on his own manual skill and the record of his personal experience both as a dissector and medical practitioner, as well as on the importance of dissection for both physicians and surgeons.

Ferrari's account also illuminates the intersection of scientific, philological, and antiquarian interests in Benedetti's edition of Pliny (1507). Like many other physicians of his day, Benedetti valued the Natural History as a source of information about remedies, materia medica, and their nomenclature. Consequently, he was drawn into the well-known controversy over Pliny's reliability. Casting himself as a defender of Pliny, Benedetti was critical of Ermalao Barbaro's Castigationes plinianae on the grounds that some of the latter's emendations were unnecessary. Finally, Benedetti was convinced that Pliny, like himself, was of Veronese origin. Ferrari reveals Benedetti's assumptions and methodology by a detailed investigation of his readings for one book of the Natural History (book 11) and by a lively account of his strenuous endeavors to defend Pliny's Veronese origin by the use - or misuse - of epigraphic evidence and assertions that Pliny's Latin included terms resembling words in Veronese dialect. Benedetti's edition and defense of Pliny drew down on him an attack by the elderly Niccolo Leoniceno, Pliny's chief opponent. Ferrari's careful, and to some extent revisionist, analysis of the respective positions of Leoniceno and Benedetti argues that both were erudite humanist physicians, who shared a generally classicizing and philological approach to medicine, lout that this general orientation encompassed a range of different positions. Thus, Leoniceno, in his capacity as a professor, wished to construct a system that would be Galenic, rational, and coherent; whereas Benedetti, as a practitioner, was more aware of the diversity and apparently random character of many diseases, patients, and remedies.

It is impossible to do justice in a short review to this meticulously researched and documented work which places not only Alessandro Benedetti but many other medical personages of his age in their cultural, intellectual, and social setting. Ferrari's work will be of lasting value to historians of medicine, humanism, natural history, and intellectual life.

NANCY G. SIRAISI City University of New York, Hunter College