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Vesalius and the Reading of Galen's Teleology*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Nancy G. Siraisi
Nancy G. Siraisi*
Affiliation:
Hunter College and Cuny Graduate Center
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Extract

Sixteenth-century approaches to the world of nature remained resolutely bound to ancient texts. Hostility to the medieval past, new theories, new experiences, and new information were evidently abundantly present. But medieval predecessors were far more likely to be criticized for failure to understand ancient authority than for slavish dependence on it; dissatisfaction with intellectual tradition was apt to express itself in form of a call for return to the ideas of ancients who preceded the standard school authors in time; and in every branch of natural philosophy, natural history, and medicine, examination of the writings of ancient Greek authors was a major, perhaps the major, part of the task of the investigator. Innovators — some of them very bold and some very eccentric indeed — reworked, recombined, and criticized the ancients, or measured their teachings against modern experience; but they seldom ignored them.

Type
Studies
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 50 , Issue 1 , Spring 1997 , pp. 1 - 37
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1997

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Footnotes

*

My research on Vesalius has been assisted by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Science Foundation. I am very grateful to Brian Copenhaver, Anthony Grafton, and Vivian Nutton for comments on an earlier draft of this essay.

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