renq63205 545..715 Edinburgh Research Explorer Never under Saturn: Girolamo Manfredi, physician and astrologer Citation for published version: Azzolini, M 2010, 'Never under Saturn: Girolamo Manfredi, physician and astrologer', Renaissance quarterly, vol. 63, no. 2, pp. 643-U367. https://doi.org/10.1086/655293 Digital Object Identifier (DOI): 10.1086/655293 Link: Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research Explorer Document Version: Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of record Published In: Renaissance quarterly Publisher Rights Statement: © Azzolini, M. (2010). Never under Saturn: Girolamo Manfredi, physician and astrologer. Renaissance quarterly, 63(2), 643-U367. 10.1086/655293 General rights Copyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. Take down policy The University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorer content complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 06. Apr. 2021 https://doi.org/10.1086/655293 https://doi.org/10.1086/655293 https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/never-under-saturn-girolamo-manfredi-physician-and-astrologer(cc0d4e4b-fda1-4d3c-b355-35e7f7f7caef).html Tommaso Duranti. Mai sotto Saturno: Girolamo Manfredi, medico e astrologo Mai sotto Saturno: Girolamo Manfredi, medico e astrologo by Tommaso Duranti Review by: Monica Azzolini Renaissance Quarterly, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Summer 2010), pp. 643-644 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Renaissance Society of America Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/655293 . Accessed: 17/03/2014 05:52 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . The University of Chicago Press and Renaissance Society of America are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Renaissance Quarterly. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 129.215.19.193 on Mon, 17 Mar 2014 05:52:39 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ucpress http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=rsa http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/655293?origin=JSTOR-pdf http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp Tommaso Duranti. Mai sotto Saturno: Girolamo Manfredi, medico e astrologo. Bologna medievale ieri e oggi 10. Bologna: CLUEB, 2008. 212 pp. index. illus. tbls. chron. bibl. €19. ISBN: 978–88–491–3129–1. In this study Tommaso Duranti examines the life and works of the Bolognese physician and astrologer Girolamo Manfredi. Now known only to a handful of historians, Manfredi lived and operated with remarkable success in fifteenth- century Bologna, rising to a notable level of prominence both within the university and at the court of the Bentivoglio of Bologna. As indicated in the foreword by medieval historian Carla Frova, this book is essentially the biography of a fifteenth- century intellectual. It is divided into four chapters, starting with Manfredi ‘‘the man,’’ to continue with Manfredi ‘‘the university professor,’’ followed by ‘‘the doctor’’ and concluding with ‘‘the astrologer.’’ A short epilogue on Manfredi’s death and burial brings the book to a close. The first, brief chapter takes as its departure the relatively well-known story of Manfredi’s involvement in a spate of negative prognostications against the Duke of Milan in 1474. With their public prognostications for the year, Manfredi and other astrologers from Bologna and Ferrara displeased greatly the Duke of Milan, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, who read the prognostication of the death of an Italian prince as a veiled allusion to his own death. A series of diplomatic documents (some already known, others presented here for the first time) document the intervention of Galeazzo’s ambassador and other Sforza courtiers in order to rectify the situation and discourage the astrologers — even at the cost of issuing death threats —from repeating such mistakes in the future. This chapter seems to serve the purpose of introducing the book’s character to its reader, and anticipates some of the aspects of Manfredi’s life that are treated in more detail in chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 2 is articulated into three parts: the first, very broad and general, on the University of Bologna and its faculty of arts and medicine, the other two on Manfredi’s academic career and his participation in the publication project of Ptolemy’s Geography. Chapter 3 is, once again, introduced by a very general section on the place of medicine in late medieval society, and proceeds with four other sections, each dedicated to one of Manfredi’s works: respectively his De homine, his treatise on plague, his unpublished Anatomia, and his Centiloquium de medicis et infirmis. Like the other chapters, chapter 4 is prefaced by a general section on the place of astrology in medieval society, followed by some considerations on the various astrological traditions and authorities present in the period, continuing with a brief outline of Pico’s polemics against astrology and concluding with a more detailed analysis of Manfredi’s annual prognostications. This is a useful and readable book: it has the merit of unearthing a number of unpublished documents on Manfredi, and offering a good overview of Manfredi’s teaching and his published and unpublished work. While it fulfills its aim of providing a short biography of a lesser-known figure of the Italian Renaissance, however, the book could have been more ambitious in its aims and results. We 643R E V I E W S This content downloaded from 129.215.19.193 on Mon, 17 Mar 2014 05:52:39 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp certainly gain better knowledge of Manfredi’s activities, and particularly of his involvement in Bolognese publishing enterprises (53–65) and his attempts, which were met with some success, to gain the patronage of Giovanni II Bentivoglio, to whom he dedicated all but one of his books, but we still lack much of the context surrounding his teaching and writing within a Bolognese, and to a greater extent, Italian context. This may be due to a lack of documentation, but judging from the introductory sections that preface the more analytical aspects of Duranti’s work, where he reads and analyzes Manfredi’s medical and astrological works, it seems more likely that this was a conscious choice by the author. Establishing an intended audience for such a book is not easy: historians of medicine and astrology will find the book relatively useful as an introductory work on a lesser-known author, but they will be hard-pressed to place Manfredi and his work within the broader context of Renaissance medicine. While attempts in this direction are sometime present, like in the case of Manfredi’s Trattato della pestilentia, they are immediately abandoned in favor of the functional use of secondary sources in lieu of primary texts, thus providing a rather hasted and superficial picture. More significantly, especially for an international readership, Duranti’s broad contextualization is grounded almost exclusively in Italian scholarship, some of which is rather dated or very general (notable by its absence, however, is Andrea Carlino’s La fabrica del corpo. Libri e dissezione nel Rinascimento), while completely ignoring important studies in English by Nancy Siraisi and Katharine Park on medieval and Renaissance anatomy and medical university teaching, and by Laura Smoller, Robert Westman, and Darrel Rutkin on medieval and Renaissance astrology. MONICA AZZOLINI University of Edinburgh R E N A I S S A N C E Q U A R T E R L Y644 This content downloaded from 129.215.19.193 on Mon, 17 Mar 2014 05:52:39 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp