David Gentilcore

“All that pertains to medicine”: Protomedici and Protomedicati in early modern Italy

Analyse de la legislation de la pratique medicale au cours de la Renaissance en Italie ainsi que des activites et du role du protomedicato

‘Adapt Yourselves to the People's Capabilities’: Missionary Strategies, Methods and Impact in the Kingdom of Naples, 1600–1800

At a time when European missionaries were active in the New World to capture the souls of the ‘heathen’ for Catholicism, their confreres were conducting missions throughout Europe itself. For more than two centuries these missions – variously known as internal, parish or popular – were a crucial aspect of religious life, with numerous religious orders and congregations seeking to weave a fabric of evangelisation and catechetical instruction in areas of Europe that were nominally Catholic but were in many ways cut off from orthodox Tridentine Catholicism. This was particularly so in isolated areas on the European periphery. Southern Italy is a case in point. The persistent absence of an efficient parish structure and the dominance of a rather worldly collegiate clergy in the Kingdom of Naples left a large gap in organised religious life in the years following the end of the Council of Trent (1563), a gap that the missions attempted to fill. The mobilisation of preachers, confessors and instructors was vast, concentrated and unceasing. Such is the significance of the missions that they have been identified as the ‘most characteristic and important’ phenomenon of Italian religious history in the seventeenth century. One way to examine their scale and impact would be to map the areas missionised by the various congregations. But this serial approach would tell us very little, other than the fact that all of the towns and villages were visited, most of them repeatedly, over the centuries. Moreover, the varying quality of the surviving records would permit only partial results.

Taste and the tomato in Italy: a transatlantic history

The experience of the arrival, reception and success of New World products in Europe – tomatoes, maize, potatoes, chillies, etc. – is a unique event in the culinary history of the continent. The assimilation of each foodstuff has its own distinct trajectory. This article explores how the tomato gradually and slowly came to dominate Italian cookery and food exports, after inauspicious beginnings in the 1500s, by following the tomato’s itinerary, back and forth across the Atlantic. We do this through the medium of “taste”, analysing the role it had to play in shaping the different stages of the tomato’s Italian history.

Louis Sambon and the Clash of Pellagra Etiologies in Italy and the United States, 1905–14

This article explores the extent to which the bacterial concept of disease acted as an obstacle to the understanding of deficiency diseases, by focusing on explorations into the cause of pellagra in the early twentieth century. In 1900, pellagra had been epidemic in Italy for 150 years and was soon to become so in the United States, yet the responses of medical investigators differed substantially. To account for these, the article reconstructs the sharply contrasting reactions to a provocative theory proposed by Louis Sambon. Applying a tropical diseases approach to pellagra, Sambon argued that pellagra had nothing at all to do with maize consumption, as the Italians had long thought, but was caused by the bite of a parasite-carrying insect. Italian pellagrologists, involved in a dogmatic quest for a toxin in maize, and with pellagra rates there on the decline, marginalized the Sambon hypothesis. By contrast, in the United States, with pellagra on the rise, the dominant infectious paradigm put Sambon center stage, his proposed etiology shaping the earliest American investigations. When the deficiency disease concept gained currency in 1913, the relatively closed world of Italian pellagrology was wrong-footed, while the more open-ended U.S. community was better able to follow up the new lead. The article discusses what these shifts and the resulting controversies reveal about the medical contexts. The actor-centered approach, with reaction to Sambon’s intervention as a kind of test-case, is the key to understanding these controversies and why they mattered.

Caught Between Unorthodox Medicine and Unorthodox Religion: Revisiting the Case of Costantino Saccardini, Charlatan-Heretic

This chapter revisits the thoughts, words and deeds of an early seventeenth-century Italian charlatan, Costantino Saccardini, executed for heresy in Bologna in 1622. It has two aims: to explore the microhistorical approach, since Saccardini was the subject of an early microhistory by Carlo Ginzburg and Marco Ferrari; and to do this by relating Saccardini’s understanding of medicine and religion in the light of my own work on medical charlatanry in early modern Italy. Saccardini was a religious radical; but was he a medical one, too? Historians have been tempted to relate Saccardini’s radical religious views to his presumed radical medical ones, drawing into this mix his dual ‘negative’ roles as jester and charlatan. And yet there is little in either of these two occupations that could have foretold or led to Saccardini’s fate. Far from being ‘dangerous’ or even liminal, his medical activities had official recognition and sanction via inspection and licensing. Saccardini’s performances, medicines and treatment strategies, and his printed chapbook, give little clue to the fate that would befall him.

The Levitico, or How to Feed a Hundred Jesuits

This article examines the structure and content of what Jacques Revel called a new modele alimentaire. It does so by reconstructing and analysing the dietary habits of the Roman Province of the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits, during the seventeenth century. This is made possible by a cluster of archival and printed documents here assembled and studied together for the first time: the financial accounts of the Collegio Romano, the Jesuits’ flagship educational institution, which give annual expenditures on different categories of food; the regulations of the Collegio regarding diet and the maintenance of health; the Levitico, which provided a day-by-day, month-by-month meal plan for the Roman Province, including recipe outlines and portion sizes; and the manuscript recipe collection of Francesco Gaudentio, lay Jesuit at the Collegio’s infirmary. These are integrated with other secondary research into the practices of Jesuits elsewhere in Italy, as well as those of other religious orders during the Counter-R...

Bread of Dreams: Food and Fantasy in Early Modern Europe.

In a rich and engaging book that illuminates the lives and attitudes of peasants in preindustrial Europe, Piero Camporesi makes the unexpected and fascinating claim that these people lived in a state of almost permanent hallucination, drugged by their very hunger or by bread adulterated with hallucinogenic herbs. The use of opiate products, administered even to infants and children, was widespread and was linked to a popular mythology in which herbalists and exorcists were important cultural figures. Through a careful reconstruction of the everyday lives of peasants, beggars and the poor, Camporesi presents a vivid and disconcerting image of early modern Europe as a vast laboratory of dreams.