Passing on Secrets: Interactions between Latin and Vernacular Medicine in Medieval Europe

Passing on Secrets: Interactions between Latin and Vernacular Medicine in Medieval EuropeAuthor(s): Elizabeth W. MellynSource: I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, Vol. 16, No. 1/2 (Fall 2013), pp. 289-309Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Villa I Tatti, The Harvard Center forItalian Renaissance StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/673407 .

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LATIN AND VERNACULAR IN QUATTROCENTO FLORENCE AND BEYOND

Passing on Secrets: Interactions betweenLatin and Vernacular Medicine inMedieval Europe

Elizabeth W. Mellyn, University of New Hampshire

ARE THE EYES WINDOWS onto the soul? Is character written into features of

the face? Do courage, cowardice, reason, rashness, vice, or virtue betray them-

selves in the color of the skin, the timbre of the voice, the coarseness of the hair,

and the movements of the limbs? In the thirteenth century, some of Europe’s

leading intellectuals took up these questions in their revival of physiognomy, the

ancient study of the relation between a man’s external features and his inner

nature.1 No less a figure than Roger Bacon (ca. 1214–94) praised the “great

beauty” and “utility” of this newly discovered scientia for its ability “to reveal the

character of men” that lay concealed beneath the skin.2 But Bacon was no deter-

minist. He wanted his scholarly, Christian audience to understand that biology

was not destiny, as a charming story (historia pulchra) he found in Philip of Trip-

oli’s 1232 Latin translation of the Secret of Secrets could attest. Two of Hippoc-

rates’s students bring a portrait of their teacher to Philemon, the local physi-

ognomist, to test his skill:

Contact Elizabeth W. Mellyn at the University of New Hampshire ([email protected]).I would like to thank Andrea Rizzi, Eva del Soldato, Jane Tylus, John Ondrovcik, and two

anonymous readers for their helpful comments. An earlier version of this article was presented inWashington, DC, at the 2012meeting of the Renaissance Society of America. Special thanks go toDavidLines for his feedback, Eugenio Refini for sharing his critical bibliography on vernacular Aris-totelianism, Allen Grieco for sharing his extensive knowledge on the history of food and wine, and LisaKaborycha for alerting me to the existence of Lapo’s text in the first place.

1. Elizabeth C. Evans, “Physiognomics in the Ancient World,” Transactions of the AmericanPhilosophical Society 59, no. 5 (1969): 1–101, 5.

2. Roger Bacon, Secretum secretorum cum glossis et notulis, in Opera hactenus inedita RogeriBaconi, ed. Robert Steele (Oxford, 1920), pt. 5:165. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are myown.

I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, volume 16, number 1/2. © 2013 by Villa I Tatti: The Harvard UniversityCenter for Italian Renaissance Studies. All rights reserved. 0393-5949/2013/1612-0012$10.00

289



“Look at this portrait,” they say, “and tell us the qualities of [the man’s]

complexion.”

The physiognomist accepted the challenge. As he examined the portrait,

he spoke: “This man is a libertine, a deceiver, a lover of sexual intercourse.”

Enraged, Hippocrates’s students retorted, “Oh stupid man, this is the

portrait of a more worthy and honest man than any in this world.” Phile-

mon remained composed, saying, “This is indeed the portrait of the wise

Hippocrates; nonetheless I have shown you what you’ve asked from my

scientia and what I know from it.”

The students returned to their master and told him what Philemon said.

When Hippocrates heard their account, he responded, “Surely Philemon

spoke the truth; he’s off not a jot. Even I [know this] from what I have

considered; I know that this baseness exists and must be rejected; I’ve made

my soul ruler of it. I’ve turned my soul away from these [vices] and I’ve

triumphed by suppressing my desire.”3

This story divulged a powerful secret of nature: physical constitution simulta-

neously influenced and revealed a person’s character, but the desires of the flesh

need not govern the soul. What the scientia of physiognomy unveiled, the scien-

tia of medicine corrected. Man’s material nature was both knowable and change-

able. In this respect, physiognomy and medicine could be seen as integral parts

of moral philosophy; together they offered a person a guide for how to be healthy

and good.

This was not a secret Bacon thought should be widely disseminated. Physiog-

nomy fell within the domain of occult, natural knowledge, to which, Bacon and

his fellow scholastics argued, only “prudent” and “expert” men should have ac-

3. Steele, Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi, 165: “Discipuli siquidem Ypocratis sapientisdepinxerunt formam ejus in pergameno et portaverunt eam Philimoni dicentes: considera hanc fig-uram et indica nobis qualitates complexionis ejus. Qui respiciens composicionem et disposicionemfigure comparavit partes ejus dicens: Iste homo luxuriosus est, deceptor, amans coitum. Ob quamrem voluerunt eum interficere dicentes: O stulte, haec est figura dignioris et melioris hominis qui sitin hoc mundo: Philimon autem pacificavit eos et correxit dicens: Hec est figurae quidem sapientisYpocratis, se hec que quesivistis de mea sciencia ostendi vobis, et quod inde sencio secundum ipsam.Quando ergo pervenerunt ad Ypocratem, dixerunt ei quid fecerunt et quid respondit eis Philimon etejus iudicium. Quibus dixit Ypocras: Certe verum dixit Philimon, nec pretermisit unam letteram.Verumptamen ex quo ego respexi, consideravi hec turpia esse et reprobanda, constitui meam animamregem supra ipsam et retraxi eam ab eis et triumphavi super retencionem concupiscentie mee. Hec estitaque laus et sapiencia Ypocratis ex ejus operibus, quia philosophia nichil aliud est quam abstinenciaet victoria concupiscibilium.”

290 | I TATTI STUDIES IN THE ITALIAN RENAISSANCE FALL 2013



cess.4 But the secrets of physiognomy did not remain sealed within academic

circles for long. As early as 1257, one Aldobrandino of Siena, an Italian physi-

cian working at the royal court of Provence, dedicated the fourth book of a reg-

imen of health he was writing for Beatrice of Savoy (1205–67) to that most

beautiful and useful science of physiognomy.5 “Through the lessons and teach-

ing of wise men,” he told Beatrice in her native French, “men might become

good and do something other than what their nature would lead them to do.”6 Al-

dobrandino did not refer to the Hippocrates anecdote, but his message was sim-

ilar: the key to refashioning one’s nature lay in attention to the proper nourish-

ment (norreture)—physical and spiritual—of the body. The secret Bacon thought

should be kept among philosophers, Aldobrandino passed on, at least implicitly,

to the countess of Provence.

The large number of extant copies of Aldobrandino’s text attests to its popu-

larity beyond the Provençal court. Some seventy-four complete or abridged man-

uscripts of the Régime in French survive, forming the basis for subsequent trans-

lations into Catalan and Flemish. The work spread also to Italy, where at least

fifty Italian translations are extant.7 One of those translations became part of a

practical medical manual that a Florentine merchant named Lapo di Nero Corsini

was copying for his household as the last days of the year 1310 turned into the

first days of 1311.8

Lapo’s version differed in important ways from Aldobrandino’s original. Like

Aldobrandino’s text, the first three books of Lapo’s manual described the body’s

constitution and outlined for its readers practical strategies for maintaining

health on a daily basis through different seasons of the year and during different

stages of life. In the fourth book, however, Lapo, merchant and amateur copyist,

came upon that same really charming story (gran bella istoria) about Hippocrates

4. Steele, Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi, 165. See also William Eamon, Science and theSecrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, NJ, 1994), 5.

5. Louis Landouzy and Roger Pépin, Le “régime du corps” de Maître Aldebrandin de Sienne: Textefrançais du XIIIe siècle (Paris, 1911).

6. Ibid., 193: “par les ensegnemens et por le doctrine des sages hommes, devienent bon et fontautre cose que lor nature n’aporte.”

7. Sebastiano Bisson, Lada Hordynsky-Caillat, and Odile Redon, “Le témoin gênant: Une versionlatine du Régime du corps d’Aldebrandin de Sienne,” Médiévales 42 (2002): 117–30, 119; RosellaBaldini, “Zucchero Bencivenni, La santé del corpo: Volgarizzamento del Régime du corps di Aldo-brandino da Siena (a. 1310) nella copia coeva di Lapo di Neri Corsini (Laur. Pl. LXXIII 47),” Studi dilessicografia italiana 15 (1998): 21–300, 25; Marilyn Nicoud, Les régimes de santé au Moyen Âge:Naissance et diffusion d’une écriture médicale, XIIIe–XVe siècle (Rome, 2007), 953–88; DonatellaLippi, Díaita: The Rules of Health in the Manuscripts of the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana (Florence,2010), 80–81.

8. Baldini, “Zucchero Bencivenni,” 86.

Passing on Secrets | 291



and the physiognomist that Bacon had discussed forty years before. If Bacon

thought physiognomy was a secret, an esoteric scientia to be guarded by a learned

audience, it was poorly kept. At the same time that Bacon was reading and writ-

ing about physiognomy, the secret of medical physiognomy was already circulat-

ing among European courts for practical use in several different forms. From there,

it would spread to urban households like Lapo’s.

This essay uses the transmission of medical physiognomy between scholarly

and nonscholarly milieux during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to chal-

lenge enduring dichotomies in the history of medicine that draw overly sharp

distinctions between academic and nonacademic communities, Latin and vernac-

ular textual traditions, and the ages of manuscript and print. Historians continue

to argue that during the Middle Ages, scientiae like physiognomy, which claimed

to divulge nature’s secrets, were the province of natural philosophers operating

in a purely academic realm.9 These books of secrets were written in Latin and

transmitted in limited manuscript copies to a select learned few. A vernacular tra-

dition existed, but it really was not until the sixteenth century that nonacademic

authors began to reveal secrets of their own. By that point, “professors of secrets,”

as one contemporary called them, railed against the esoteric knowledge of schol-

ars to champion instead empirical knowledge aimed at unveiling nature’s myster-

ies for the practical use of a wider public.10

The presence of the Hippocrates anecdote in a vernacular and mercantile con-

text raises questions about the nature of the boundaries that allegedly existed be-

tween Latinate academic and vernacular nonacademic audiences in the Middle

Ages. In some respects, these boundaries are vestigial features of older paradigms

in the history of science and medicine that historians began to demolish begin-

ning in the 1980s and ’90s. During those decades, the history of medieval and

early modern medicine took a practical and then a domestic turn. There was a

welcome shift in focus from the university lecture hall and academic study to the

medical marketplace, apothecary shop, and household kitchen.11

9. William Eamon argues for maintaining a sharp division between Latin and vernacular culturesof knowledge in the Middle Ages in “On the Skins of Goats and Sheep: (Un)masking the Secrets ofNature in Early Modern Popular Culture,” in Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe, ed.Timothy McCall, Sean Roberts, and Giancarlo Fiorenza (Kirksville, MO, 2013), 54–75 at 59.

10. In the Piazza universale di tutte le professioni del mondo of 1585, a comprehensive survey ofprofessions and trades in sixteenth-century Italy, Tommaso Garzoni, an Augustinian monk and socialcritic, noted the appearance on the social stage of i professori de’ secreti. William Eamon makes thisargument in Science and the Secrets of Nature. See also his more recent article, “How to Read a Bookof Secrets,” in Secrets and Knowledge in Medicine and Science, ed. Elaine Leong and Alisha Rankin(Burlington, VT, 2011), 23–46.

11. Important works that have shifted our focus from physicians to a broader range of medicalpractitioners and the consumers of their services are Katharine Park, Doctors and Medicine in Early




Armed with new sources and new ways of thinking about them, historians

pushed the learned physician from his perch atop a professional pyramid to re-

situate him within a pluralistic and competitive market for health care. He be-

came one practitioner amid a large and motley group of men and women selling

a range of healing products and services to male and female clients from different

social classes. His university education gave him some measure of authority, but

he still had to compete for clients with surgeons; apothecaries; empirics; cunning

men and women; alchemical, astrological, or occult healers; remedy sellers; tooth

drawers; snake charmers; and charlatans in a market that tended to reward effi-

cacy over status or occupation. More recently, historians have moved from the

medical marketplace into the household to try to capture something of the day-to-

day business of health in medieval and early modern families. This literature has

converged with an ever-growing scholarship on the sixteenth-century genre of

popular scientific writing known as books of secrets.12 In this context, the term

“secret” refers most commonly to a therapeutic recipe that ordinary men and

women exchanged in letters or found in printed books of secrets that exploded

onto the European scene with the advent of print. At least for the sixteenth cen-

tury, historians have found that a woman armed with mortar and pestle in her

kitchen or convent pharmacy was just as engaged in medical activity as the male

physician with his urine flask at the bedside.13

But dichotomies in history die hard. Despite the emergence of this thriving

and evolving scholarship for the sixteenth century, boundaries between the Lat-

inate scholastic world of medieval universities and the vernacular nonscholastic

Renaissance Florence (Princeton, NJ, 1985); Harold J. Cook, The Decline of the Old Medical Regime inStuart London (Ithaca, NY, 1986); Michael McVaugh, “Bedside Manners in the Middle Ages,” Bulle-tin of the History of Medicine 71, no. 2 (1997): 201–23; Laurence Brockliss and Colin Jones, TheMedical World of Early Modern France (Oxford, 1997); Matthew Ramsey, Professional and PopularMedicine in France, 1770–1830: The Social World of Medical Practice (Cambridge, 1988); GiannaPomata, Contracting a Cure: Patients, Healers, and the Law in Early Modern Bologna (Baltimore,1998); Heikki Mikkeli, Hygiene in the Early Modern Medical Tradition (Helsinki, 1999); AndrewWear, Knowledge and Practice in English Medicine, 1550–1680 (Cambridge, 2000); David Gentilcore,Medical Charlatanism in Early Modern Italy (Oxford, 2006). In Secrets of Women: Gender, Genera-tion, and the Origins of Human Dissection (Brooklyn, NY, 2006), Katharine Park demonstrated thatdissection, a practice scholars have tended to study in a professional or academic context, developedout of a set of cultural practices that had nothing to do with medical instruction. New scholarship ondomestic medicine is incredibly rich. For a comprehensive and current bibliography as well as someof the most cutting-edge research, see Leong and Rankin, Secrets and Knowledge.

12. See Eamon’s introduction to Science and the Secrets of Nature.13. See Alisha Rankin, “Duchess, Heal Thyself: Elizabeth of Rochlitz and the Patient’s Perspective

in Early Modern Germany,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 82, no. 1 (2008): 109–44; and SharonT. Strocchia, “The Nun Apothecaries of Renaissance Florence: Marketing Medicines in the Convent,”Renaissance Studies 25, no. 5 (2011): 627–47.




world of the medieval household remain.14 These are not easy boundaries to

cross. There are comparatively few sources that shed light on domestic medicine

during the Middle Ages relative to the enormous print tradition that takes off es-

pecially after 1550. Furthermore, it is only recently that scholars have turned from

the copious Latin output of learned physicians to hunt for household medical

manuals and recipe collections. And even when historians are fortunate enough

to chance upon a cache of documents that invite them into medieval domestic

medical practice, it is difficult to see how the healing of the household related to

the theoretical medicine of Europe’s centers of knowledge.

Lapo’s manual is only one site of investigation, but it is a rich one. It offers a

rare glimpse of the winding path that ideas and texts took as they traveled be-

tween academic studies, royal courts, and household libraries. Far from rigid or

impermeable, the boundaries between these different communities were flexible

and porous. Lapo’s manual also highlights the prominent role that Greek, and by

extension medieval, medicine opened to medieval men and women in the man-

agement of their own health. As Sandra Cavallo has argued for the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries, even in the fourteenth century, “the daily management of

health was a domestic affair and the household a site of medical knowledge.”15

Much of that knowledge was dietary. To maintain the body by eating well was a

large part of a household’s daily health routine, and, as Lapo’s manual illustrates,

one that did not necessarily require the therapeutic ministrations of a learned

physician who enjoyed special access to the mysteries of arcana natura.

Roger Bacon and his ilk may have thought that nature’s secrets were best kept

under wraps, but, between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, they were in-

creasingly being revealed through the piecemeal transmission of natural knowl-

edge in vernacular manuscripts destined for courts and households. What clever

sixteenth-century printers, their hired pens, and “professors of secrets” would

repackage as “secrets of nature” wrested from academic precincts were already in

14. These dichotomies are visible in Karma Lochrie’s thought-provoking book Covert Operations:The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia, 2011); and Martin Porter, Windows of the Soul: Physiog-nomy in European Culture, 1470–1780 (Oxford, 2005). Sandra Cavallo criticizes the tendency tomaintain such sharp boundaries in “Secrets to Healthy Living: The Revival of the PreventativeParadigm in Late Renaissance Italy,” in Leong and Rankin, Secrets and Knowledge, 191–212.

15. Cavallo, “Secrets to Healthy Living,” 192. Cavallo’s article is based on a much larger digitalproject exploring households as key sites of healing, medical experimentation, and exchange. See“Healthy Homes, Healthy Bodies in Renaissance and Early Modern Italy,” Royal Holloway, Univer-sity of London, Department of History, http://www.rhul.ac.uk/History/Research/HealthyHomes/proj_events_past.html. New scholarship on domestic medicine is incredibly rich.




Lapo’s time part of a larger self-help literature centered on hygiene and diet that

was increasingly accessible to a growing urban, commercial elite.

* * *

The grandissima scienza of physiognomy that Lapo copied into his medical

manual in the fall of 1310 had roots in an ancient physiognomic tradition dating

back to the third century BC. Four texts carried systematic treatments of the sub-

ject into the medieval West in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries: (1) the De

physiognomia Liber, an anonymous fourth century AD Latin translation of a no-

longer-extant Greek work called Physiognomonika; (2) another Physiognomonika,

a third century BC Pseudo-Aristotelian work that was translated into Latin by

Bartolommeo of Messina in 1262; (3) a chapter on physiognomy in book 2 of

Rhazes’s (865–925) Liber ad Almansorem; and (4) the Kitāb Sirr al-asrār, a mid-

tenth-century Arabic work that was translated into Latin as Secretum secretorum

or Secreta secretorum (Secret of secrets) first in a partial version by John of

Seville around 1125 and then in full around 1230 by Philip of Tripoli.16 The tradi-

tion also seeped into the medieval globus intellectualis through less direct means.

Although it was eventually demonstrated that Aristotle was not the author of

the Physiognomonika, he wrote at some length on the topic in the Analytica priora,

De anima, Historia animalium, De partibus animalium, and De generatione ani-

malium.17

Physiognomy quickly found fertile ground in European courts and universi-

ties where interest in the Aristotelian libri naturales thrived.18 It fed too the grow-

ing intellectual fascination with uncovering and exploiting nature’s hidden se-

16. The best study for the transmission of the physiognomic tradition in the ancient worldremains the work of Elizabeth C. Evans, in particular her 1969 article “Physiognomics in the AncientWorld.” Richard Förster has mapped out the ancient and medieval tradition through its key texts inScriptores physiognomonici Graeci et Latini (Leipzig, 1893). See also Jacques André, trans. and ed.,Anonym Latin: Traité de physiognomonie (Paris, 1981). A good recent summary of medieval andearly modern traditions can be found in Mahmoud Manzalaoui, Secretum Secretorum: Nine EnglishVersions (Oxford, 1977), and “The Pseudo-Aristotelian Kitāb Sirr al-asrār: Facts and Problems,”Oriens 23–24 (1974): 146–257; Stephen J. Williams, The Secret of Secrets: The Scholarly Career of aPseudo-Aristotelian Text in the Latin Middle Ages (Ann Arbor, MI, 2003); and Porter, Windows of theSoul. The best work on the reception and transmission of the physiognomic tradition in the MiddleAges and its relevant bibliography is by far that of Jole Agrimi, most of whose articles on the subjectare collected in the volume Ingeniosa scientia nature: Studi sulla fisiognomonica medievale (Florence,2004). Agrimi reminds readers that the version of the anonymous Latin De physiognomia Liber thatthirteenth-century scholastics used was missing secs. 81–133.

17. Evans, “Physiognomics in the Ancient World,” 7.18. Charles B. Schmitt and Dilwyn Knox, eds., Pseudo-Aristoteles Latinus: A Guide to Latin Works

Falsely Attributed to Aristotle before 1500 (London, 1985); Jill Kraye, W. F. Ryan, and C. B. Schmitt,eds., Pseudo-Aristotle in the Middle Ages: The Theology and Other Texts (London, 1986).




crets. The court of Frederick II was particularly congenial to such efforts, so it is

no surprise that Michael Scot (ca. 1175–1232) dedicated a Liber phisionomie to

the emperor around 1230. Physiognomy, he noted in his dedication, could be

traced back to remotest antiquity, when the most powerful men showered its

practitioners with honor and glory.19 More important, Scot tried to legitimize phys-

iognomy by including it within scientia naturalis, thereby cleansing it of the de-

terministic and magical components that tended to dog divinatory sciences like

astrology.20 These efforts were not always rewarded, nor were they made easier

by the circulation of the anonymous Latin De physionomie Liber and Barto-

lommeo of Messina’s translation of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonika.

Both drew the ire of religious conservatives for what seemed like bald determin-

ism.21 In Bartolommeo’s phrasing, “souls follow bodies and these very souls are

not insensible to the movements of the body.”22 In other words, the body played

a major role in molding the natures of men.

Like Michael Scot, Albertus Magnus (1193/1206–80) sang physiognomy’s

praises while remaining sensitive to concerns about determinism. In his com-

mentary on Aristotle’s De animalibus around 1262, he noted that physiognomy

opened the door to biological anthropology—a science of man modeled on Aris-

totle’s science of animals. Still, he cautioned against taking the comparison be-

tween animals and men too far. While zoological physiognomy accepted the idea

that physical attributes revealed and determined an animal’s nature, anthropo-

logical physiognomy did not. Among men, physiognomy helped identify a per-

son’s natural inclinations, but the task of reining in the passions was ultimately

the job of human will and reason, aspects of the soul that were not dependent on

the body.23

The Arabic physiognomic tradition neutralized the problem of determinism,

by explicitly linking together physiognomy, Aristotelian ethics, and Greek medi-

cine. The Secret of Secrets, one of the most popular Aristotelian pseudo-epigraphs

of the Middle Ages, illustrated this connection with the Hippocrates anecdote,

19. Jole Agrimi, “Fisiognomica e ‘Scholastica,’ ” in Ingeniosa scientia nature, 3–36, 21.20. Jole Agrimi, “La ricezione della Fisiognomica pseudoaristotelica nella facoltà delle arti,”

Archives d’histoire doctrinale e litteraire du Moyen Âge 64 (1997): 127–88, 128.21. Williams, The Secret of Secrets, 280–89.22. Bartolommeo of Messina’s translation of the Pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonika is in

Förster, Scriptores Physiognomonici, 6–91, 6: “Quoniam et animae sequuntur corpora et ipsae secun-dum se ipsas non sunt impassibilies a motibus corporis.” See also Joseph Ziegler, “Text and Context:On the Rise of Physiognomic Thought in the Later Middle Ages,” in De Sion Exibit Lex et VerbumDomini de Hierusalem: Essays on Medieval Law, Liturgy and Literature in Honour of Amnon Linder,ed. Y. Hen (Turnhout, 2001), 159–82, 161.

23. Agrimi, “La Ricezione della Fisiognomica Pseudoaristotelica,” 141.




which did not exist in the other physiognomic works available to medieval scho-

lastics.24 Origins of the text remain mysterious. Arabic versions purport to have

been translated from Greek, but no Greek original exists.25 The text that came to

be known as the Secret of Secrets in the West was translated from Arabic into

Latin first around 1120 in a partial version preserved in about 150 manuscript

copies, followed by a full version in 1232 extant in over 350 copies.26

The alleged author of the text is Aristotle, in the form of a long letter of advice

to his former student Alexander during his campaign in Persia. It is for the most

part a mirror of princes, but there are also sections on health, astrology, and

methods for harnessing nature’s secret powers through alchemy, the fabrication

of talismans, or the use of herbs and stones. The section on physiognomy fol-

lows a regimen of health based on the principles of Greek medicine, namely, that

the human body was thought to be composed of humors whose eukrasía (good

temperament) constituted health and whose dyskrasía (bad temperament) caused

illness. In this system, health and illness were relative states of greater or lesser

equilibrium.27 Since the body constantly teetered between these states, the man-

agement of health was a daily affair, and processes of prevention were on equal

footing with processes of cure. For Galen, physicians prescribed corrective health

regimens to combat disease, but much of their time was taken up with recom-

mending daily regimens along the lines of what the medieval Arabic and Eu-

ropean heirs of Greek medicine would call the six nonnaturals, factors affect-

ing body and mind that were not part of the body itself: the environment and

24. A story much like this one comes down to us in Cicero’s De fato 5.10 and Tusculanaedisputationes 4.80. In this version, Socrates rather than Hippocrates is the wise philosopher andZopyro rather than Polemon, the physiognomist. See Maria Michele Sassi, “Fisiognomonica,” in LoSpazio letterario della Grecia antica, ed. Giuseppe Cambiano, Luciano Canfora, and Diego Lanza(Rome, 1993), 1:430–48, 436.

25. In a second prologue to Arabic versions of the work, the supposed translator Yahya ibn al-Bitriq, a famous ninth-century translator of Greek philosophical works into Arabic for the Abbasidcaliphs in Baghdad, claimed that he translated it from Greek into Syriac and from Syriac into Arabic.See Williams, The Secret of Secrets, 8–9.

26. For the history of the reception and diffusion of the Secret of Secrets in the West, see M.Grignaschi, “L’Origine et les metamorphoses du Sirr al-asrar,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et lit-téraire du Moyen Âge 43 (1976): 7–112, and “La Diffusion du Secretum Secretorum (Sirr al-asrar)dans l’Europe occidentale,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 47 (1980): 7–70.Manzalaoui, Secretum Secretorum; Williams, The Secret of Secrets, and “The Early Circulation of thePseudo-Aristotelian Secret of Secrets in the West: The Papal and Imperial Courts,” Micrologus 2(1994): 127–44.

27. Park, Doctors and Medicine, 116–17. See also Per-Gunnar Ottosson, Scholastic Medicine andPhilosophy: A Study of Commentaries on Galen’s “Tegni,” ca. 1300–1450 (Naples, 1984); and M. R.McVaugh, Medicine before the Plague: Practitioners and Their Patients in the Crown of Aragon, 1285–1345 (New York, 1993), 150.




climate, diet, evacuation and retention of bodily substances, exercise and rest,

sleep and waking, and the passions of the soul.

The Secret of Secrets passed on to its readers a powerful secret indeed. To

know the world hidden beneath the skin, to know how it interacted with its sur-

roundings, and to know how to feed it and care for it was not merely to know

how to ward off disease. The science of physiognomy urged its readers to acti-

vate natural knowledge. It reinforced the idea that a material connection existed

between soul and body and that strategies aimed at preserving physical health

played an important role in steeling the soul against the whims of the flesh. In

this respect, the Hippocrates anecdote found in the Secret of Secrets was also a

moral exhortation. The person who did not nourish him- or herself properly

imperiled body and soul. The person who ate and drank in excess or ate and

drank things that were inimical to his or her complexion risked both physical

and moral decline. In the Secret of Secrets, physiognomy was a scientia; it

revealed nature’s hidden secrets. But it remained toothless without the applica-

tion of the medical principles outlined by humoral medicine, medicine as em-

bodied by Hippocrates. This was the lesson Lapo learned from the anecdote he

copied in 1310.

By the fourteenth century, both short and long versions of the Secret of Se-

crets had secured a modest although not insignificant place in the scholastic

world of the Middle Ages. The part on physiognomy was particularly popular

and even circulated as a separate text. Together with the anonymous Latin De

physiognomia Liber and Rhazes’s physiognomy in the Liber ad Almansorem, it

helped generate scholarly debate on the relationship between the body and the

soul. Roger Bacon thought the Secret of Secrets so important that he redacted

and glossed Philip of Tripoli’s 1232 translation of the text in the 1270s. As noted

above, in his commentary on Philip’s text, he praised the “great beauty” and

“utility” of the scientia for its ability to reveal “the character of men.” More than

that, it helped those who applied its teaching to distinguish men who should

be sought out from men who should be avoided.28 Still, Bacon expressed some

concern about physiognomy’s proper use, perhaps, as Stephen Williams has sug-

gested, to defend it against accusations of determinism.29 Nonetheless, Bacon’s

discomfort with the power inherent in physiognomy was not a barrier to its dis-

semination among a wider audience. While physiognomy attracted negative at-

tention from conservative thirteenth-century theologians, by 1300 some clerics

28. Steele, Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi, 165.29. Williams, The Secret of Secrets, 284.




were using its principles in commentaries and sermons.30 For the famous Do-

minican preacher Giovanni da San Gimignano (d. ca. 1333), there were impor-

tant similarities between physiognomy and biblical exegesis. As the physiognom-

ist reads and interprets the signs of the body so, he argued in his sermons, the

preacher reads and interprets scripture to uncover its hidden meaning.31

Physiognomy was similarly being absorbed into the emerging tradition of

practical health manuals that flourished first and in greater numbers in Latin but

appeared also in European vernaculars in the second half of the thirteenth cen-

tury.32 For one, the regimen of health in the Secret of Secrets and its account of

physiognomy appealed not only to Europe’s intellectual elite but also to a non-

academic audience eager to learn about nature’s mysteries and to apply that

knowledge in daily life. Vernacular translations of the text in Middle English,

Anglo-Norman, Old French, Provençal, Italian, Dutch, Middle High German,

Castilian, and Hebrew followed on the heels of its translation from Arabic into

Latin, beginning as early as the thirteenth century.33

The Hippocrates anecdote in Lapo’s manual thus came from the Secret of Se-

crets. But Lapo accessed it through an Italian translation of Aldobrandino of

Siena’s Régime du corps, the first regimen of health written, not copied, in a Euro-

pean vernacular.34 Little to nothing is known about Aldobrandino of Siena, in-

cluding why he spent most of his medical career in France. As his name suggests,

he was probably born at Siena around the turn of the thirteenth century and

died at Troyes on the eve of the fourteenth. According to the prologue of the text,

the Countess of Provence, Beatrice of Savoy, asked Aldobrandino to prepare a

health manual that she could take on her travels to visit her daughters who had

married into the royal courts of France, England, and Naples, respectively.35 He

produced for her in French the Régime du corps, a health manual in four books

that outlined the day-to-day steps a person could take to prevent disease.

30. Ziegler, “Text and Context,” 164.31. Ibid., 164–65.32. See Nicoud’s appendixes in Les régimes.33. Williams, The Secret of Secrets, 1; Steele, Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi, xxxi–xxxvii;

Manzalaoui, Secretum secretorum, xxii–l.34. Scholars generally agree that Aldobrandino composed the work in French and that Latin trans-

lations were made later. Landouzy and Pépin, Le “Régime du Corps,” li; Baldini, “Zucchero Bencivenni,”21; Nicoud, Les régimes, 699; Bisson, Hordynsky-Caillat, and Redon, “Le témoin gênant,” 118.

35. Margherita married Louis IX of France; Eleanor, Henry III of England; Sancha, RichardPlantageanet, Duke of Cornwall; and Beatrice, Charles of Anjou, king of Naples and Sicily. Somemanuscripts feature different dedicatees, including Blanche of Castile, Louis IX’s mother, Louis IXhimself, one Benedetto of Florence, or Emperor Frederick II. Baldini, “Zucchero Bencivenni,” 22.




Aldobrandino insisted that the purpose of the regimen was not therapeutic

but prophylactic. It taught its readers not how to cure disease but only how to

guard the body against it. This is an important distinction because it highlights

the difference between academic and household medicine. While learned phy-

sicians restored the body’s balance once it had been lost—the definition of dis-

ease—ordinary men and women were responsible for maintaining the body’s

balance. The knowledge and strategies for maintaining and restoring health

were largely the same; both involved the application of the six nonnaturals. What

differed was the division of labor, the presumption being that it took greater

knowledge and authority to cure a disease correctly. The day-to-day maintenance

of health was relatively straightforward; setting aright what had been destabilized

because of poor diet and slovenly behavior was muchmore difficult.

The ideas animating Aldobrandino’s text were Greek. They resembled most

closely the lessons contained in the Hippocratic Epidemics and On Airs, Waters,

and Places: the internal world of humors was extremely susceptible to the world

outside the thin layer of flesh. Climate, season, region, quality of air and water, all

of these environmental factors had profound effects on the body. They were

passed on, however, through the voices of that tradition’s Arabic interpreters in

Latin translation from works that Aldobrandino likely encountered in the course

of his medical education.36 The first two books came mainly from Avicenna’s

Canon—the cornerstone of medieval medical education—with some borrowings

from the tenth-century Persian physician Haly Abbas and Rhazes. Book 1 lays

down the basic guidelines for preserving health through the six nonnaturals.

Book 2 is a manual of hygiene for important body parts and organ systems. The

third book on dietetics drew wholly from the ninth- and tenth-century Jewish phy-

sician Isaac Israeli’s Diaetae Universales, while the fourth book is a complete and

literal reproduction of the physiognomy contained in the second book of Rhazes’s

Liber ad Almansorem.37 Despite its learned roots, Aldobrandino’s treatise cap-

tured the basic rules of dietetics and hygiene in simple, unadorned, nontheoreti-

cal language, relaying to its courtly audience the fundamental tools of preserv-

ing health. At the same time, all the knowledge contained therein was based on

the best and most current medical knowledge universities and their medical fac-

ulties had to offer. Again, what separated Aldobrandino from his courtly audi-

ence was not access to natural knowledge but how it should be applied.

36. Nicoud, Les régimes, 21. Nicoud argues that dietetics was part of a university education and arequirement for a bachelors degree.

37. Landouzy and Pépin, Le “Régime du corps”; Danielle Jacquart and Françoise Micheau, Lamédecine arabe et l’occident médiéval (Paris, 1990), 114.




His Régime reflects the growing interest in preventive medicine—what Sandra

Cavallo has called the “preventive secret”—that appeared on the European scene

in the second half of the thirteenth century.38 European courts were particularly

receptive audiences to medical advice, especially as it intersected with other bod-

ies of knowledge, including astrology, alchemy, magic, and physiognomy.39 Like

the Secret of Secrets and Aldobrandino’s Régime, regimens of health were often

dedicated to individuals of high standing, as a way of serving a patron or per-

haps acquiring patronage, but quickly came to reach and serve a larger popula-

tion.40 Arnald of Villanova (1240–1311) addressed a regimen of health to James II

of Aragon, which subsequently became the most widely diffused dietetic text in

Latin during the Middle Ages. During the late thirteenth and first half of the

fourteenth century, some of Europe’s most illustrious doctors wrote them, for ex-

ample, William of Saliceto’s (ca. 1210–1276/1280) the Tractatus de salute corporis

and Maino de’ Maineri’s (d. 1368) the Regimen sanitatis.41 Through Marilyn

Nicoud’s pioneering work, we now know that from the middle of the fourteenth

century to the end of the fifteenth, regimens of health were plentiful in Europe.

Demand for them was fed in part by the growth of an urban audience eager for

prophylactic health strategies as well as by the arrival of plague and its cyclical

occurrence.42

Aldobrandino’s text circulated throughout Italy in three separate Florentine

translations. The most widespread by far was that of Zucchero Bencivenni. Like

Aldobrandino, we know little of Bencivenni, other than what later copyists of his

work have said of him. According to these reports, he was a Florentine notary

who acted as a copyist and translator between 1300 and 1313. In 1300, he trans-

lated Rhazes’s Liber ad Almansorem and, in 1313, John Sacrobosco’s De sphaera

mundi from Latin into Florentine. He translated Aldobrandino’s Régime in May

1310 as La santà del corpo, perhaps, as one copyist suggested, while living at the

papal court in Avignon.43 For the most part, Bencivenni’s translation was faith-

ful to Aldobrandino’s text. But, as other medieval translators had done before

him, he filled out his version with the works of other authors. He referred, for

38. Cavallo coins this term in “Secrets to Healthy Living.”39. See Chiara Crisciani and Gabriella Zuccolin, eds., Michele Savonarola: Medicina e cultura di

corte (Florence, 2011).40. Pedro Gils Sotres, “The Regimens of Health,” in Western Medical Thought from Antiquity to

the Middle Ages, ed. Mirko D. Grmek (Cambridge, 1998), 291–318, 300.41. Nicoud, Les régimes, app. 1.42. Ibid., 690.43. Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, 2224. Cited in Baldini, “Zucchero Bencivenni,” 25.




example, to the Opus agriculturae of the late Roman author Palladio in the dis-

cussion of waters; in the chapters pertaining to fruits and herbs, he drew from

the Ruralia commoda of his contemporary Pietro de’ Crescenzi; he was familiar

with a copy of Albertano da Brescia’s Trattato della dilezione from 1274 in the

section on aging that concluded the first part of the Régime.44 These interpo-

lations showed Bencivenni’s familiarity with ancient and contemporary scholarly

work, while simultaneously underscoring the profound influence the environ-

ment had on the body, from the vicissitudes of climate to the character of am-

bient air, winds, and waters.

Bencivenni also used the Secret of Secrets to enrich Aldobrandino’s text. It was,

after all, the work that furnished him with the Hippocrates anecdote. Since Ben-

civenni had already translated Rhazes’s Liber ad Almansorem, he would have

known that Aldobrandino had taken the treatment of physiognomy in its en-

tirety from that crucial encyclopedic work. Bencivenni decided to add an intro-

duction to this part by translating the Hippocrates anecdote into Italian from

Philip of Tripoli’s Latin version of the Secret of Secrets and then interpolating it

into his Italian translation of Aldobrandino’s originally French Régime.45 Given

his generally noninterventionist approach to Aldobrandino’s text, this is a signifi-

cant addition. Any number of reasons could have prompted Bencivenni to include

the Hippocrates anecdote. Perhaps he thought Aldobrandino’s discussion of such

an important subject was incomplete, or perhaps he wanted to show his own so-

phistication, or perhaps he wanted simply to entertain his readers. I want to ar-

gue, rather, that he included it because he wanted to emphasize the importance

not just of physiognomy but of a practical medical physiognomy.

Aldobrandino’s text made an implicit connection between the maintenance

of bodily health largely through diet and hygiene; Bencivenni made this connec-

tion explicit, both by including the Hippocrates anecdote and by embellishing

Philip of Tripoli’s translation of it. In Philip’s version, for example, when Hippoc-

rates’s students heard the negative assessment of their teacher’s physical char-

acteristics, they said to the physiognomist, “Oh stupid man, this is the portrait of

a more worthy and honest man than any in this world.”46 Bencivenni amplified

that reaction. In his translation, the students said, “O, stupid, crazy man without

44. Baldini, “Zucchero Bencivenni,” 41–51. For an excellent study of medieval and Renaissanceagronomy, see Mauro Ambrosoli, The Wild and the Sown: Botany and Agriculture in Western Europe,1350–1850, trans. Mary McCann Salvatorelli (Cambridge, 1997).

45. Förster, Scriptores Physiognomonici, 187–91.46. Steele, Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi, 165: “O stulte, haec est figura dignioris et

melioris hominis qui sit in hoc mundo.”




any sense, how simply you’ve judged this portrait, for this man is one of the most

wise, the most decent, the most good of all men and philosophers. He’s peace-

loving and full of all the good virtues; he’s morally upright and chaste.”47 The

decision to vary language here could have been intended to entertain. The stu-

dents’ impassioned defense of their master borders on the comical. But this lan-

guage also allowed Bencivenni to accentuate the principles and importance of

preventive medicine. The students honored a superficial image of their master

without understanding the deeper substance of his scientia. In so doing, they

failed to grasp physiognomy and medicine’s basic lessons. Physical appearance

revealed predisposition, but that truth ran only skin deep. Physiognomy made

the soul legible through a grammar of the body, but it was not enough to know

how to read that grammar. One needed also the capacity to refashion or recon-

figure it through the proper application of Greek and, as this text seems to imply,

specifically Hippocratic medicine. Readers like Lapo may have found the stu-

dents rash and a bit ridiculous, but, armed with Bencivenni’s lively rendition of

the Hippocrates anecdote, they were unlikely to make the same mistake.

The purpose of the story in whatever form was to tell anyone who cared to

read it how to put the soul in charge of even the weakest of fleshly vessels—one

of the most important ends of moral philosophy and, it would seem, medicine

itself. To make this point clear to his audience, Bencivenni concluded the open-

ing section by saying, “this then is the greatest praise of the wise Hippocrates’s

knowledge (sapienza), that the science of physiognomy [is] nothing if not absti-

nence and victory over vice and carnal desire.”48 To put it another way, physiog-

nomy and its companion science, medicine, could help even someone physically

disposed to viciousness onto the path of virtue. Whether he was a learned physi-

cian, an eminent member of a court, or a merchant like Lapo, the wise practi-

tioner of Hippocratic physiognomy could counteract whatever complexion nature

foisted on him. More important, it was his or her moral responsibility to do so.

The placement of the Hippocrates anecdote is also crucial, following as it does

the part of the Régime that addressed the general qualities of food and drink and

the particular characteristics of wild and domesticated meat and fowl, vegeta-

bles, fruits, herbs, fish, cheese, and spices. One learned, for example, that meat of

47. Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana Pluteo, 73.47, fol. 89r: “O, istolto matto senzaalcuno senno come semplicemente hai giudicata questa figura impercio che egli è uno de più savi depiù discreti et de piu begnigni che alcuno altro filosafo et humile et pacifico casto et pieno di tuttebuone virtudi.”

48. Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana Pluteo, 73.47, fol. 90r: “Questa è dunque lagrandissima lode della sapenzia astinenzia del savio Ippocras impercio che il scienzia di fisonomianiuna altra cosa è se non abstinenzia et victoria contro a vizii et contra la carnal volontade.”




the hare is drier than the meat of other wild animals and produces melancholic

blood. For this reason, people with a dry complexion should avoid it because it

nourishes them little and can actually be inimical to health.49 As a reference work,

the Régime was not necessarily read from cover to cover; it was more likely con-

sulted for specific information as needed. Still, the Hippocrates anecdote exhorted

men and women to apply the dietary knowledge that the Régime imparted; the

knowledge of physiognomy was of little use without the knowledge of nourish-

ment (notritura) and its basis in humoral medicine.

In light of the dynamic interplay between academic and household medicine

that the transmission of medical physiognomy illustrates, it is time to rethink the

efficacy of Bacon’s claim that ordinary men and women should be categorically

denied access to the secrets of nature. The preparation, circulation, and adjust-

ment to Aldobrandino’s Régime stands in sharp contrast to the attitude Bacon

expressed in his Opus Majus:

The wise have always been divided from the multitude, and have veiled the

secrets of wisdom not only from the world at large but also from ordinary

philosophers. Aristotle says in his book of secrets that he would break the

celestial seal if he made public the secrets of nature. For this reason the

wise, although giving in their writings the roots of the mysteries of science,

have not given the branches, flowers, and fruits to the rank and file of

philosophers. For they have either omitted these topics from their writings

or have veiled them in figurative language. Hence, according to Aristotle,

the secrets of the sciences are not written on the skins of goats and sheep so

that they may be discovered by the multitude.50

In writing his Régime in the vernacular, Aldobrandino gave his courtly au-

dience direct access to academic knowledge; he asked only that they respect the

proper division of labor that recognized the therapeutic role of learned physi-

cians and the prophylactic role of ordinary men and women. What was more, he

taught them how to read and interpret the signs of the body so they might come

to know their own natural inclinations and predispositions. Aldobrandino may

not have intended the knowledge contained in his Régime to circulate among a

broader, less lofty audience, but that is precisely what happened. Once out and in

the hands of a middling, commercial class, it was augmented and adjusted as its

49. Cited in Baldini, “Zucchero Bencivenni,” 145.50. Cited in Eamon, “On the Skins of Goats and Sheep,” 58.




readers saw fit. While Bencivenni made important interpolations, Lapo appended

a work called The Virtues of Rosemary to his version of Aldobrandino’s Régime,

further augmenting the dietary knowledge he found there.

It is important to acknowledge that Bencivenni’s version of Aldobrandino’s

Régime was by no means on the bookshelf of every Tuscan household elite. Still,

as Marilyn Nicoud has shown, regimens of health, herbals, dietetic manuals, rec-

ipe collections in general, and books laying down the rules for preserving health

were becoming increasingly more common in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century

Europe. The daily management of health was surely a domestic affair, but one

very much informed and shaped by learned medical knowledge.

What Aldobrandino started in the fourteenth century, gathered speed in the

fifteenth. In 1293, for example, the Florentine doctor Taddeo Alderotti composed

a regimen of health in Italian for his friend Corso Donati (ca. 1260–1308), the

controversial leader of the Black Guelphs. Taddeo subsequently translated the

work into Latin.51 The fifteenth century saw too the translation of Aldobran-

dino’s Régime into Latin. Regimens of health could be written in or translated

into the vernacular for a lay audience or written in or translated into Latin as

teaching manuals for a broad audience of medical practitioners. In the fifteenth

century, Michele Savonarola, court physician to the Este, transformed a number of

his Latin practical medical works into nonacademic versions directed to a broader

lay readership.52

Practical medical manuals and dietary regimens like Aldobrandino’s Régime,

Taddeo’s Libello for Corso Donati, and Michele Savonarola’s Libreto de tutte le

cosse che se magnano bridged the medicine of the universities to that of the

courts and households, crossing linguistic, status, and professional boundaries.

The medical world of the university, the medical world of the court, and the

medical world of the household were part of the same preventive medical cul-

ture. They did not exist in separate realms but rather overlapped and interacted

through a complex Latin and vernacular textual tradition. Bencivenni’s transla-

tion of Aldobrandino’s Régime and his borrowing from the Secret of Secrets to

enliven that text demonstrates how connected people with no formal academic

training could be to the world of learned medicine. While passing nature’s secrets

on even to the unlearned might have given Roger Bacon some pause, physicians

like Aldobrandino passed them along freely to laymen and women in their own

51. On transitions between Latin and vernacular in the works of Taddeo Alderotti, see SoniaGentili, L’uomo aristotelico alle origini della letteratura italiana (Rome, 2005), chap. 1.

52. See Gabriella Zuccolin, “Nascere in latino ed in volgare: Tra la Practica ed il De regimine,” inCrisciani and Zuccolin,Michele Savonarola, 137–210.




idioms and languages. Then laymen like Bencivenni and Lapo read, used, and

passed them on in their turn.

Aldobrandino and his fellow physicians were not giving up their authority,

threatening their livelihood, or diminishing their professional standing by uncov-

ering the hidden world that lay beneath the flesh to men and women unschooled

in theoretical medicine. Like their Greek and Arabic forerunners, authors of re-

gimina sanitatis maintained that hygiene, dietetics, and therapeutics were com-

plementary aspects of medicine. The ancient separation between preventive and

therapeutic practices meant that physicians had long recognized the role that

ordinary men and women played in the management of their own health, while

still staking a professional and proprietary claim to curing disease. They did so in

the more scholarly genre of medical writing called consilia, collections of con-

sultations with patients on specific diseases in which doctors prescribed curative

therapies and that developed alongside the regimens of health.53

Multiple groups—elites at court, men and women in their households, and

physicians in their learned and professional milieux—were not necessarily at

odds with one another. They played complementary roles in a broad cultural, phil-

osophical, and moral understanding of health that embraced dietetics, hygiene,

lifestyle, and environment on the one hand and a more focused fight against

disease on the other. Medical practitioners certainly could guide men and women

in creating or adjusting preventive strategies, but they were not strictly neces-

sary. Regimens like Aldobrandino’s suggest that if therapeutics was the primary

domain of the physician, prevention began with the individual. Zucchero Ben-

civenni used the story of Hippocrates and the physiognomist to drive that point

home so that someone like Lapo could make practical use of it.

* * *

Recent scholarly focus on the popularity of secrets, the rhetoric of secrecy, and

the volume of secrets literature made possible by print in the sixteenth century,

although rich and provocative, has obscured the particular contours and vari-

ety of the medieval tradition of natural secrets that passed between and among

a variety of linguistic communities and social groups. William Eamon, Karma

Lochrie, Timothy McCall, and Sean Roberts have persuasively argued that, in

many respects, the rhetoric of secrecy was more important than the content of

any given secret. The “revelation” of putatively arcane knowledge among a se-

lect group could be used to forge social bonds or underscore power relations by fix-

53. Jole Agrimi and Chiara Crisciani, Les Consilia Médicaux (Turnhout, 1994).




ing boundaries between those who were granted access to privileged knowledge

(insiders) and those who were denied such access (outsiders).54 As Eamon has

also shown through a number of studies, charlatans employed a rhetoric of se-

crets to build a market for their nostrums. In their hands, the unveiling of secrets

did not so much create a privileged community of readers but rather exposed the

exclusionary tactics learned physicians had used to maintain oppressive epistemo-

logical structures that deprived ordinary men and women of knowledge that

might be of great use to them.55 This rhetoric created and maintained a thriv-

ing “economy of secrets,” a marketplace of secrets,” a “trade in secrets,” or a “cur-

rency of secrets.”56

There are two problems here. First, in reality, the intellectual boundaries that

existed between scholars like Roger Bacon or physicians like Aldobrandino of

Siena and the notary Zucchero Bencivenni or the merchant Lapo Corsini were

permeable and the flow of ideas between them fluid. In following the transmis-

sion of the Hippocrates anecdote, we catch academic authors in the act of break-

ing linguistic sound barriers by passing their Latinate scientiae on to lay readers

in the vernacular. But we also see vernacular consumers of these scientiae in the

act of recasting or reconfiguring them as they passed them on in their turn. It is

important to bear in mind that what sixteenth-century medical writers marketed

as secrets were, for men and women like Lapo, little more than the basic princi-

ples of everyday diet and hygiene.

Lapo’s manual too reveals the perils of reifying secrets. To be sure, in the

sixteenth century, the term “secret” was often considered synonymous with “rec-

ipe,” and many referred to therapeutic medical recipes. But, while scholarly focus

on an economy of secrets has richly captured an important aspect of sixteenth-

century European court and print culture, I would argue that it is less useful for

considering domestic medicine in the Middle Ages. In a recent article, Sandra

Cavallo argued that scholars who narrowly define secrets as recipes communicat-

ing therapeutic remedies overlook the long-standing medieval tradition of pre-

ventive medicine that had been an integral part of both learned and domestic

culture since at least the thirteenth century.57 To be sure, some recipes expressed

54. Lochrie, Covert Operations, 93.55. Eamon, “On the Skins of Goats and Sheep.”56. See William Eamon, The Professor of Secrets: Mystery, Medicine, and Alchemy in Renaissance

Italy (Washington, DC, 2010); Daniel Jütte, “Trading in Secrets: Jews and the Early Modern Quest forClandestine Knowledge,” Isis 103, no. 4 (2012): 668–86; Timothy McCall and Sean Roberts, “Intro-duction,” in McCall, Roberts, and Fiorenza, Visual Cultures of Secrecy in Early Modern Europe, 4.

57. Sara Pennell, “Perfecting Practice? Women, Manuscript Recipes and Knowledge in EarlyModern England,” in Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing, ed. Victoria E. Burke and Jona-




a novel spirit of experimentation by adjusting old or positing new therapies for

specific symptoms. The majority of medical recipes, however, instructed people

how to maintain good, or at least how to avoid bad, health. Moreover, they were

typically parts of regimens of health, that genre of medical writing that presented

strategies for fending off rather than curing disease.

Marilyn Nicoud has made significant inroads into recapturing the vibrant

textual tradition of preventive medicine, hygiene, and dietetics that existed in the

late Middle Ages. Similarly, through his extensive studies of food and wine, Allen

Grieco has shown for medieval Tuscany that members of the merchant class

made decisions about what food to eat and what wine to drink in accord with

dietary rules that were based on the principles of humoral medicine.58 It is to

efforts like these that we should go to understand the world of vernacular, do-

mestic medicine, its rhythms and practices, and how it interacted with the Latin-

ate academic world of universities in the Middle Ages to temper the rhetoric of

scholastics like Bacon or the bombast of Eamon’s charlatans.

The therapeutic secret may have come of age in the sixteenth century, but, by

the mid-thirteenth century, the preventive secret was out. Long before the advent

of print, learned medical practitioners divulged preventive secrets of the body to

a lay audience that in turn generated a rich and vibrant manuscript tradition that

consumed and communicated these secrets at home. The preventive secret circu-

lated first among an aristocratic, courtly audience but moved as quickly as manu-

script culture would allow into the households of the urban, commercial elite.

This preventive secret allowed a person like Lapo to have an active role in pre-

serving his own health.59 Indeed, he had a moral responsibility to do so; the care

of the body, as Hippocrates argued in the physiognomy, was part of the care of

the soul. Preventive medicine was an integral part of living a moral as well as a

than Gibson (Aldershot, 2004), 237–55; Elaine Leong and Sara Pennell, “Recipe Collections and theCurrency of Medical Knowledge in the Early Modern Medical Marketplace,” in Medicine and theMarket in England and Its Colonies, c. 1450–c. 1850, ed. Mark S. R. Jenner and Patrick Wallis (NewYork, 2007), 133–52; Elaine Leong, “Receipt Books, ca. 1575–1800, from the Folger ShakespeareLibrary,” editorial introduction, http://www.ampltd.co.uk/digital_guides/receipt_books_from_the_folger_shakespeare_library/editorial-introduction.aspx; Allison Kavey, Books of Secrets: NaturalPhilosophy in England, 1550–1600 (Urbana, IL, 2007); Jo Wheeler, Renaissance Secrets, Recipes, andFormulas (London, 2009).

58. For the most recent and comprehensive statement of this argument, see Allen J. Grieco,“Medieval and Renaissance Wines: Taste, Dietary Theory, and How to Choose the ‘Right’ Wine(14th–16th Centuries),”Mediaevalia 30 (2009): 15–42.

59. This point is also made by Nicoud, Les régimes; Lippi, Díaita; Cavallo, “Secrets to HealthyLiving.”




healthy life. Therapeutics may have been the province of medical practitioners,

but prevention began with the choices and habits of individuals. Lapo would

have understood perfectly a maxim that came to prominence in the late sixteenth

and seventeenth centuries that said, “a man cannot have a better physician than

himself.”60

60. Mikkeli, Hygiene, 88.




Passing on Secrets: Interactions between Latin and Vernacular Medicine in Medieval Europe

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