Product Description

Girolamo Fracastoro (?1478-1553) was a doctor and scientist, as well as a poet. He was born in the northern Italian city of Verona, into a prominent local family. Verona is at one of the crossroads of Europe so that, even though Fracastoro spent his whole life in that vicinity, he could maintain a wide circle of friends and correspondents, and keep abreast of national and international affairs. Two cataclysmic events - the European voyages to the New World, and the sudden appearance and rapid spread of syphilis - are the combined themes of his greatest literary work. The Syphilis, dedicated to Pietro Bembo, became one of the most celebrated poems of the Renaissance. Soon after its publication (in 1530) Fracastoro was hailed as a major Latin poet, even as an equal of Virgil.

In the first two books of Syphilis Fracastoro not only describes in vivid terms the symptoms and known cures for syphilis, but also presents for the first time his theory of 'contagion', a major breakthrough towards modern understanding of the spread of disease. He was later to write an influential scientific prose treatise De Contagione. The third and final book of the Syphilis gives a highly mythicised narrative of the landing of Columbus in the New World. His reason for including this American material was not, as we might suppose, that syphilis was brought from the Americas to Europe, but rather that the New World provided Europe with one of the more useful remedies for syphilis, an extract from a native American wood, guaiacum. In spite of its poetic mode, Fracastoro's account draws in some detail on contemporary sources for the European discovery of the New World, as Eatough illustrates in his notes.

This edition offers a 35-page introduction, text with facing literal English translation, explanatory notes, an appendix which prints some contemporary tributes to and critiques of Fracastoro, and a full word-index of the poem.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2336651 in Books
• Published on: 1984-03
• Original language: Latin
• Binding: Hardcover
• 303 pages

Giornale filologico ferrarese 7 (1984) 91-93
Bene fecit Goffredus Eatough interpres quod poesin illam ad verbum Anglice expressit; quod cum fecit, interpretatio quasi commentarius quidam est factus viris etiam Latine rudibus utilis. Uberrimis in adnotationibus utile dulci mixtum videmus. ... Deinde commentatorem non laudare non possumus quod suis locis attulit quae verba, quos numeros Petrus Bembus et J.C. Scaliger, viri docti, minus probassent, quosve versus paulo immutandos proposuissent. Interiores enim litteras hinc licet introspicere et ipsum artificium poeticum saeculi sexti decimi perspicere. ... His omnibus libri partibus verborum index, machina computatoria generatus, subnexus est; qui quantam utilitatem viris poeseos neolatinae studiosis afferat, nemo est quin videat.

Genitourinary Medicine 61 (1985) 285
This work will become part of the essential library of anyone who studies the history of medicine or the history of the sixteenth century.

Neo-Latin News 32.4 [Seventeenth-Century News (1985)] 54-5
... this is a fine edition of a fine poem, one worth reading by any serious student of the Renaissance. (Neo-Latin News 32.4 [Seventeenth-Century News (1985)] 54-5)