In our eighth episode, Dr. Clément Godbarge explores the writings of Filippo Cavriana, a sixteenth-century Italian physician and spy who worked at the court of France for many years. What was the nature of the relationship between plague and civil war, according to Cavriana? What did this learned physician think of aggressive medical treatments? The answers might surprise you!
Contributor
Clément Godbarge is a research fellow at the Warburg Institute and at the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence. His research focuses on science and statecraft in early modern Europe. In his forthcoming book, he examines how doctors embedded at the courts of sixteenth-century France and Italy promoted themselves as political experts of a new genre.
Further readings
Clément Godbarge, “Rhetoric, Medicine, and the Body,” in Cambridge History of Rhetoric, ed. Rita Copeland and Peter Mack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021).
—–, “Hippocrates for Princes: the Retratti d’Aphorismi of Ippolito de’ Medici,”
in Renaissance Rewritings, ed. Pfeiffer, Helmut and Irene Fantappiè (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017).