Science and Medicine in early Modern VeniceWilliam eamonin 1400, Venetians saw their world as a compact, bounded, and ordered
space. Their intellectuals knew, as did scholars elsewhere in europe, that
the universe described in the books they read in the university was the
universe that actually existed. Venice itself was an enclave protected
by the sea, and for most Venetians, the world beyond the lagoon was
unfamiliar, or known only by the foreigner merchants who visited the
city to trade, or perhaps by reading the Venetian merchant Marco Polo’s
much-embellished account of his travels in central asia.1
By the end of the century, Venetians saw that intimate and familiar
world splitting apart. The discovery of new worlds beyond the oceans
revealed that they occupied only a tiny corner of the known world, now
expanded by tens of thousands of miles. Soon a new cosmology came into
being, one whose center was not the earth, humankind’s abode, but the
sun, around which the earth and the planets revolved.
other changes were afoot as well. a commercial revolution had thrust
italy squarely into the global economy; with considerable justification,
Venetians saw their city as being at the center of it. a new world of goods
gave rise to new ways of knowing, methods having to do with experi-
ence and experiment rather than textual hermeneutics.2 nature would
be discovered not merely in books, intellectuals confidently asserted, but
by manipulating the world using the techniques supplied by navigators,
alchemists, and craftsmen.3 By 1600, no one but the most diehard conser-
vative would have believed that all important truths could be found in
books, or that the ancients knew all there was to know.
1 on renaissance Venetians’ sense of space, see alberto Tenenti, “The Sense of Time
and Space in the Venetian World of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth centuries,” in J. r. Hale,
ed., Renaissance Venice (london, 1973), pp. 17–46. recently, historians and archeologists
have challenged whether Polo went to china at all. See, for example, Frances Wood, Did
Marco Polo Go to China? (Boulder, 1998).
2 Harold cook, Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch
Golden Age (new Haven, 2007).
3 Paolo rossi, Philosophy, Technology, and the Arts in the Early Modern Era, trans.
S. attansio (new york, 1970).