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Janus Cornarius

Janus Cornarius (ca. 1500 – 16 March 1558) was a Saxon humanist[1] and friend of Erasmus.[2] A gifted philologist,[3] Cornarius specialized in editing and translating Greek and Latin medical writers with "prodigious industry,"[4] taking a particular interest in botanical pharmacology and the effects of environment on illness and the body. Early in his career, Cornarius also worked with Greek poetry, and later in his life Greek philosophy; he was, in the words of Friedrich August Wolf, "a great lover of the Greeks."[5] Patristic texts of the 4th century were another of his interests. Some of his own writing is extant, including a book on the causes of plague and a collection of lectures for medical students.[6]

Life and career

Details of the life of Cornarius are taken in large part from the Latin biography by Melchior Adam in Vitae Germanorum medicorum ("Lives of German Physicians," 1620).[7] Cornarius was born Johann or Johannes Hainpol,[8] the son of a shoemaker, but adopted his fashionably Latinized name by the time he reached age 20.[9] The toponymic Zuiccaulensis ("of Zwickau") is sometimes added. His name may appear as Giovanni Cornario in Italian,[10] Jano Cornario in Spanish,[11] Jean Cornario in French,[12] and Janus Kornar in German.[13]

Cornarius began his education at the Latin school in his native Zwickau. He studied with Petrus Mosellanus at Leipzig, matriculating in 1517 and earning a bachelor of arts degree in 1518.[4] He enrolled at the University of Wittenberg in 1519, where he earned a master's degree (1521) and a license in medicine (1523).[14] He thus would have been at Wittenberg when the Zwickau Prophets, an anti-authoritarian Anabaptist movement from his place of birth, attempted to seize power in 1521. They were successfully opposed and rendered ineffective by Martin Luther in 1522. That Cornarius condemned the Anabaptists is clear from his later book on plague, in which he argued that a particular epidemic in Westphalia was sent as punishment from God for their heretical activities.[15]

After experiencing these political and spiritual upheavals, Cornarius set out on a "soul-searching journey" around Europe,[16] visiting Livonia, Sweden, Denmark, England, and France. While he was looking for work, he settled for a time in Basel, where he gave lectures on Greek medicine at the University of Basel. There he began his efforts to restore the study of the Greeks, whose works, he believed, had been neglected during the Middle Ages in favor of Arab medical authorities. In 1527–28, he was a physician to Prince Henry of Mecklenburg.[4] Returning to Zwickau in 1530, he established a medical practice and married the first of his two wives; she died not long after. With his second wife, he had four sons. For the remainder of his life he was a physician and professor of medicine as well as a prolific editor and translator.[17]

Intellectual milieu

Erasmus

Cornarius came to know the great humanist Desiderius Erasmus while living in Basel, and was encouraged by him to persist with his work in translating Greek texts into Latin; at the time, ancient Greek was little known, but Latin was still in living use as an international language among scholars for such purposes as letter-writing, informational or philosophical essays, and even some literary compositions.[18] Erasmus wrote to him around the time Cornarius was resettling in Zwickau, addressing him as ornatissime Cornari ("oh-so-refined Cornarius"). Of his translation of Hippocrates, Erasmus effused, "The genius is there; the erudition is there, the vigorous body and vital spirit are there; in sum, nothing is missing that was required for this assignment, confronted happily, it would seem, despite its difficulty."[19] The junior philologist was so pleased by Erasmus's many compliments in this letter that sixteen years later he proudly quoted from it in the introduction to his Latin version of Hippocrates. At the same time, his intellectual independence is indicated by his willingness to set aside the translations of Basil and Galen made by Erasmus in favor of his own.[20]

His work as a philologist was not merely academic or text-oriented, but animated by a commitment to teaching. Melchior Adam wrote that Cornarius "tried to render the Greek physicians into Latin with a translation that was not vague and confusing, but lucid and fully articulated."[21] His goal, as Cornarius himself stated in his commentary on DioscoridesDe materia medica, was first to read and hear the author in Greek, and then through translation to enable his medical students to hear and read him in Latin.[22] A scholar of Byzantine studies took a more dismissive view of Cornarius as one of the "Renaissance humanists, fully confident that dissemination of a revered classical text would better mankind’s lot," motivated by "a contempt … for the brutish peasant and his slovenly practices."[23]

Leonhart Fuchs

Like the physician and botanist Leonhart Fuchs, Cornarius devoted himself to reviving and perpetuating the classical tradition, seeking to restore both the texts and practice of Greek medicine, which they felt had been eclipsed during the medieval era by Avicennism; Cornarius did not, however, reject the study of Arabic texts and seems to have known the language.[24] While Fuchs approached Galen’s work on medicinal plants as a methodology, Cornarius, grounded in philology, believed Dioscorides’ knowledge of plants resided in accurately capturing the original author’s voice and words, and the two engaged in a vigorous intellectual debate over the value of illustrations in books.[25] With his sometime collaborator Andrea Alciati, Cornarius treated the emblema or image as a verbal construct, and in his index to Dioscorides refers to his own verbal description of a plant as a pictura. In his commentary, Cornarius insisted that pictures were of no benefit to readers who had never seen a particular plant vivam et naturalem ("alive and in nature"), arguing that the static quality of an illustration was misleading, since plants change according to their environment. Thus he stated:[26]

My intention is not to gorge the eyes, but to nourish the mind and spirit, and to quicken critical thinking.

Works

The majority of Cornarius's books were published through the printing house of Hieronymus Froben and Nicolaus Episcopius. For a thorough overview (in French), see Brigitte Mondrain, "Éditer et traduire les médecins grecs au XVIe siècle: L'exemple de Janus Cornarius," in Les voies de la science grecque: Études sur la transmission des textes de l'Antiquité au dix-neuvième siècle, edited by Danielle Jacquart (Paris 1997), pp. 391–417.

Cornarius's complete works were listed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum, an index of books prohibited by the Roman Catholic Church promulgated the year after his death. As in the case of several other northern Protestant scholars, general content or scientific controversy was less at issue than religious conviction. Writing that could be regarded as anti-Catholic was held to contaminate other works that might be in and of themselves unobjectionable.[27]

Works are listed below in chronological order of publication, except that editions and translations from the same author are grouped.

Hippocrates
Dioscorides
Galen
Convivial Greeks

Selected bibliography

References

A page from the 1551 Froben edition of St. Basil's collected works, edited by Janus Cornarius and Julius von Pflug (from Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen)
  1. ^ Carmélia Opsomer and Robert Halleux, "Marcellus ou le mythe empirique," in Les écoles médicales à Rome. Actes du 2ème Colloque international sur les textes médicaux latins antiques, Lausanne, septembre 1986, edited by Philippe Mudry and Jackie Pigeaud (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1991), p. 160.
  2. ^ John E.B. Mayor, "Helmreich’s Marcelli de medicamentis liber," Classical Review 4 (1890) 218–219.
  3. ^ Richard J. Durling, "Girolamo Mercuriale’s De modo studendi," Osiris 6 (1990) p. 182.
  4. ^ a b c P.S. Allen, Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), vol. 8 (1529–1530), p. 250.
  5. ^ "Grosse Liebhaber der Griechen," p. 137 in Kleine Schriften in lateinischer und deutscher Sprache (Halle 1869), vol. 1.
  6. ^ Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, Contemporaries of Erasmus: A Biographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation (University of Toronto Press, 2003), vol. 1, pp. 339–340.
  7. ^ Melchior Adam, Vitae Germanorum medicorum (Heidelberg 1620); life of Cornarius excerpted (in Latin).
  8. ^ Also named as Haynpol, Heynpul, Hagepol, Hagenbut, and Hagebutte; discussion of name with Thomas Gloning (in Italian and French) at "Cornarius Janus — Haynpol Johann".
  9. ^ Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, Contemporaries of Erasmus (University of Toronto Press, 2003), vol. 1, pp. 339.
  10. ^ Fortunato Federici, Degli scrittori greci e delle italiane versioni delle loro opere (Padua 1828), p. 104.
  11. ^ Otis H. Green and Irving A. Leonard, "On the Mexican Booktrade in 1600: A Chapter in Cultural History," Hispanic Review 9 (1941), p. 36.
  12. ^ Maximillian Niedermann, Marcelli De Medicamentis Liber, "Corpus Medicorum Latinorun" vol. 5 (Leipzig 1916), praefatio p. xiv, of the handwritten note on the manuscript of Marcellus used by Cornarius.
  13. ^ Friedrich August Wolf, Kleine Schriften in lateinischer und deutscher Sprache (Halle 1869), vol. 1, p. 137.
  14. ^ Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, Contemporaries of Erasmus (University of Toronto Press, 2003), vol. 1, pp. 340.
  15. ^ Vivian Nutton, "The Reception of Fracastoro’s Theory of Contagion: The Seed That Fell among Thorns?" Osiris (1990) p. 214.
  16. ^ Sachiko Kusukawa, "Leonhart Fuchs on the Importance of Pictures," Journal of the History of Ideas 58 (1997) p. 424, drawing on Otto Clemen, "Janus Cornarius," Neues Archiv für Sächsische Geschichte 33 (1912) 40–45.
  17. ^ Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, Contemporaries of Erasmus (University of Toronto Press, 2003), vol. 1, pp. 339–340.
  18. ^ a b Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, Contemporaries of Erasmus (University of Toronto Press, 2003), vol. 1, p. 340.
  19. ^ Adest ingenium, adest eruditio, adest corpus vegetum et animus vividus; denique nihil deest quod ad istam provinciam quamvis difficilem feliciter obeundam requirendum videatur.
  20. ^ P.S. Allen, Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), vol. 8 (1529–1530), p. 251, note to line 10.
  21. ^ Conatus est Graecos illos medicos facere Latinos non obscura et perplexa, sed perspicua et explicata translatione.
  22. ^ Hoc vero tandem post maximos huc impensos labores, mihi primum ut et legerem illum [Dioscoridem] et audirem contigit: nunc per me etiam aliis rei medicae studiosis continget, si qui forte nostra lingua latine loquentem illum audire, aut legere volent (Dioscoridae ... de materia medica, a2v).
  23. ^ John L. Teall, "The Byzantine Agricultural Tradition," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 25 (1971), p. 41.
  24. ^ Brigitte Mondrain, "Éditer et traduire les médecins grecs au XVIe siècle: L'exemple de Janus Cornarius," in Les voies de la science grecque: études sur la transmission des textes de l'Antiquité au dix-neuvième siècle, edited by Danielle Jacquart (Paris 1997), p. 416.
  25. ^ Sachiko Kusukawa, "Leonhart Fuchs on the Importance of Pictures," Journal of the History of Ideas 58 (1997) p. 426, with reference to Eberhard Stübler, Leonhart Fuchs: Leben und Werk (Munich 1928), pp. 102–110.
  26. ^ Dioscoridae ... de materia medica, a3v; Sachiko Kusukawa, "Leonhart Fuchs on the Importance of Pictures," Journal of the History of Ideas 58 (1997) pp. 424.
  27. ^ Paul F. Grendler, "Printing and Censorship," in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, edited by Charles B. Schmitt et al. (Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 46.
  28. ^ Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, Contemporaries of Erasmus (University of Toronto Press, 2003), vol. 1, p. 340; P.S. Allen, Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), vol. 8 (1529–1530), p. 250.
  29. ^ Verzeichniss allen auf der Stadt-Bibliothek in Bern (Bern 1811), vol. 1, p. 362.
  30. ^ Richard J. Durling, "Girolamo Mercuriale’s De modo studendi," Osiris 6 (1990), p. 184.
  31. ^ Frank Hieronymus, "Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen." Archived 2012-06-05 at the Wayback Machine
  32. ^ Frank Hieronymus, "Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen." Archived 2012-06-05 at the Wayback Machine
  33. ^ Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, Contemporaries of Erasmus (University of Toronto Press, 2003), vol. 1, p. 340; Frank Hieronymus, "Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen." Archived 2012-06-05 at the Wayback Machine
  34. ^ L. Guinet, "Emile Littre (1801–1881)," Isis 8 (1926), p. 89; see also Jacques Jouanna, "Sur les nouvelles éditions d'Hippocrate au XVIe siècle: Les notes marginales de Janus Cornarius dans l'Aldine de Göttingen d'Hippocrate et leur importance pour l'établissement du texte des ‘Épidémies’ V et VII" in Homère chez Calvin, Festscrift for Olivier Reverdin (Geneva 2000), pp. 361-370.
  35. ^ Frank Hieronymus, "Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen" Archived 2012-06-05 at the Wayback Machine; Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, Contemporaries of Erasmus (University of Toronto Press, 2003), vol. 1, p. 340.
  36. ^ Frank Hieronymus, "Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen." Archived 2012-06-05 at the Wayback Machine
  37. ^ H.B. Lathrop, "Janus Cornarius’s Selecta Epigrammata Graeca and the Early English Epigrammatists," Modern Language Notes 43 (1928) 223–229.
  38. ^ P.S. Allen, Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi Roterodami (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), vol. 8 (1529–1530), p. 499, note 28.
  39. ^ William E. Sheidley, "George Turberville’s Epigrams from the Greek Anthology: A Case-Study of ‘Englishing’," SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 12 (1972) pp. 71–84; Jesus Ureña Bracero, "Diego Hurtado de Mendoza y las selecciones de la Antología Planudea," Florentia Iliberritana 10 (1999), 303-330, with an English summary, and Irving P. Rothberg, "Hurtado de Mendoza and the Greek Epigrams," Hispanic Review 26 (1958) 171–187.
  40. ^ Isidore Silver, "Ronsard Comparativist Studies: Achievements and Perspectives," Comparative Literature 6 (1954), p. 153, note 19.
  41. ^ Frank Hieronymus, "Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen" Archived 2012-06-05 at the Wayback Machine; Luigi Tartaglia, "Intorno alla traduzione latina di Aezio curata da Ianus Cornarius," in Histoire et ecdotique des textes médicaux grecs, Actes du IIe Colloque international Paris 24-26 mai 1994 (= Storia e ecdotica dei testi medici greci: atti del II Convegno internazionale Parigi 24-26 maggio 1994), edited by Antonio Garzya et Jacques Jouanna (Naples 1996).
  42. ^ Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York 1923), vol. 2, p. 566.
  43. ^ George Helmreich, Marcelli De Medicamentis Liber (Leipzig 1889), pp. iv–v on Cornarius's edition; John E.B. Mayor, "Helmreich’s Marcelli de medicamentis liber," Classical Review 4 (1890) 218–219; Maximillian Niedermann, Marcelli De Medicamentis Liber, "Corpus Medicorum Latinorun" vol. 5 (Leipzig 1916), praefatio pp. v–xix on the ms. history; Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science (New York 1923), vol. 2, p. 576; Ernest Wickerheimer, Manuscrits latins de médecine du haut moyen âge dans les bibliothèques de France (Paris 1966), pp. 70–72, cited by Carmélia Opsomer and Robert Halleux, "Marcellus ou le mythe empirique," in Les écoles médicales à Rome (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1991), p. 161.
  44. ^ Frank Hieronymus, "Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen" Archived 2012-06-05 at the Wayback Machine; Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, Contemporaries of Erasmus (University of Toronto Press, 2003), vol. 1, p. 340.
  45. ^ Stefania Fortuna, "Galen’s De constitutione artis medicae in the Renaissance," Classical Quarterly 43 (1993) 302–319, p. 312.
  46. ^ John L. Teall, "The Byzantine Agricultural Tradition," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 25 (1971), pp. 41–42; see also J.M. Olivier, "Le codex Aurogalli des Geoponica," Revue d’histoire des textes 10 (1980) 249-256.
  47. ^ Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, Contemporaries of Erasmus (University of Toronto Press, 2003), vol. 1, p. 340; Frank Hieronymus, "Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen" Archived 2012-06-05 at the Wayback Machine.
  48. ^ Frank Hieronymus, "Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen." Archived 2012-06-05 at the Wayback Machine
  49. ^ Frank Hieronymus, "Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen." Archived 2012-06-05 at the Wayback Machine
  50. ^ Frank Hieronymus, "Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen." Archived 2012-06-05 at the Wayback Machine
  51. ^ Wilhelm Pökel, Philologisches Schriftseller-Lexicon (Leipzig 1892), p. 50; Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, Contemporaries of Erasmus (University of Toronto Press 2003), vol. 1, p. 340.
  52. ^ Frank Hieronymus, "Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen." Archived 2012-06-05 at the Wayback Machine
  53. ^ Wilhelm Pökel, Philologisches Schriftseller-Lexicon (Leipzig, 1892), p. 50.
  54. ^ Frank Hieronymus, "Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen." Archived 2012-06-05 at the Wayback Machine
  55. ^ Richard J. Durling, "Girolamo Mercuriale’s De modo studendi," Osiris 6 (1990), p. 181.
  56. ^ Michel Jeanneret, A Feast of Words: Banquets and Table Talk in the Renaissance, translated by Jeremy Whiteley and Emma Hughes (University of Chicago Press, 1991) p. 72, note 15; Verzeichniss allen auf der Stadt-Bibliothek in Bern (Bern 1811), vol. 1, p. 361; Friedrich August Wolf, Kleine Schriften in lateinischer und deutscher Sprache (Halle 1869), vol. 1, pp. 137–138; Jakob Gronovius, Thesaurus antiquitatum Graecarum, vol. 9, pp. 1–20.
  57. ^ Vivian Nutton, "The Reception of Fracastoro’s Theory of Contagion: The Seed That Fell among Thorns?" Osiris (1990) p. 214; Peter G. Bietenholz and Thomas B. Deutscher, Contemporaries of Erasmus (University of Toronto Press, 2003), vol. 1, p. 340.
  58. ^ Frank Hieronymus, "Griechischer Geist aus Basler Pressen." Archived 2012-06-05 at the Wayback Machine
  59. ^ David J. Murphy, "The Basis of the Text of Plato’s Charmides," Mnemosyne 55 (2002) 131–158, especially pp. 154–155; see also G.J. Boter, "The Hassensteinianus of Plato," Revue d’histoire des textes 18 (1988) 215-218.