Girolamo Cardano: university student and professor

Abstract

The encyclopaedic range of Girolamo Cardano's work represents a magnificent document of the intellectual life of the universities in sixteenth‐century northern Italy, in particular Pavia, Padua and Bologna. Cardano (1501–76) studied medicine and philosophy in Pavia from 1519 to 1523, and later in Padua, where he obtained the doctorate in medicine in 1525. He taught at the universities of Pavia (from 1543) and Bologna (from 1563). The arrest by the Inquisition in 1570 put an abrupt end to his academic career. This article focuses on some of the medical commentaries written by Cardano during his professorship in Pavia and Bologna (mainly on Hippocrates, but also Avicenna, Averroes and Mondino de' Liuzzi). They shed important light on our understanding of the contemporary academic milieu. A recurrent motif in Cardano's teaching material is whether and to what extent prudentia, understood both in a ‘medical’ and a ‘civil’ sense, could be taught, and taught while commenting upon medical auctoritates.