Renaissance: Girolamo Cardano's “The Book of My Life”

Introduction

The Renaissance mathematician and physician Girolamo Cardano wrote his autobiography in 1575. The name of the book was “The Book of My Life” (De vita propria liber), that scholars regard as a model of scientific self writing which predicts the 20th-century type, though the text is typically compiled of analytical essays.

Girolamo Cardano was a milanese physician, mathematician (Ars magna, 1545), inventor (e.g. gimbal-mountings for use at sea) and an influential writer (De subtilitate, 1551) on natural Magic. The last was the search for explanations of phenomena that could not be accounted for experimentally: magnetism, climate, the functioning and psychological effect of the senses, the properties of herbs, and so forth. Natural magic veered between true science and mere superstition, and Cardano's temperament, which led him to practise astrology and the divination of dreams and omens, held the extremes in an uneasy but fascinating balance(Cardano, 152). This paper discusses Girolamo Cardano's book “The Book of My Life” (De vita propria liber) to understand the Renaissance era and western civilization.

Discussion

Girolamo Cardano (1501- 1576) always thought that his medicine was better than his astrology. As “The Book of My Life” details in his splendid new book, Cardano spent the greater part of his life perfecting and polishing his astrological skills in order to please patrons, explain events, and ultimately explain himself to anyone who cared to understand him. (Morley, 125)

English-speaking readers have had remarkably little knowledge of this fascinating late Renaissance figure. While his autobiography, “The Book of My Life”, was translated into English in 1931 and is considered one of the classics of this Renaissance genre, very few studies have made Cardano accessible, let alone comprehensible. Cardano's book adds considerably to the portrait of Cardano initiated in Siraisi's book by examining astrology as the other significant practice in his life that allows us to follow his career in its entirety. In doing so, he also invites us to examine the place of the astrologer in late Renaissance society. Comparing Renaissance astrologers to modern-day economists, Cardano presents them as experts in the science of subjectivity, contentiously immersed in the technical details of an ancient discipline and attempting to create rules that might render comprehensible the vicissitudes of fortune. While Renaissance humanists probed the effect of fortune in human history in order to understand the shape of contemporary politics, so, too, astrologers reminded their clients that a “geniture” outlined possibilities but not certainties in the interpretation of one's life. (Cardano, 85)

No individual completely typifies his age, yet it may be useful to focus for a moment on the way in which the various philosophical traditions converged in a single person. As a case history of this sort, we may take the thought of Girolamo Cardano (1501-1576), an Italian medical man and mathematician. Cardano was living in the late, established phase of the Renaissance, when the discussions of Plato and Aristotle's works were recognized on their whole, as were Galen and Hippocrates. The Greek commentators ...