science and medicine in early modern venice 731
indeterminate in the early modern period. Possession was treated with
purgatives as well as with prayers.82 as denunciations grew more com-
monplace, the inquisition placed a higher burden on providing evidence
for malificio, and turned to physicians to provide it.83
arguments over the existence of witchcraft continued well into the 18th
century. The debate broke out publicly in the 1740s when the Venetian
erudít Girolamo Tartarotti published a treatise on witchcraft titled Con-
gresso noturno delle lammie [night congress of the Witches, 1749]. it was
no mere academic exercise, for, although sorcery trials had decreased in
Venice, they had not entirely ceased. Tartarotti did not deny the existence
of demons; he argued, however, that most instances of alleged witchcraft
were simply cases of superstitious beliefs. almost immediately, the Vene-
tian patrician Scipione Maffei weighed in with a treatise, De Arte magica
dileguata [The art of Magic dismissed, 1749], in which he unequivocally
rejected the reality of magic and demonic power.84 The debate opened up
by Tartarotti and Maffei continued, unresolved, for several decades.
The Scientific Underworld of Early Modern VeniceScientific activity in early modern Venice was not limited to the
universities and the official institutions of the republic. in addition to
physicians, surgeons, pharmacists, and mathematics teachers, Venice
was the home of dozens of alchemists, distillers, and empirical healers.
Together, they comprised a throng of experimenters who followed the
path laid out by alessio Piemontese, italy’s prototypical “professor of
secrets.” alessio’s Secreti (a work actually by the Venetian popular writer
Girolamo ruscelli and published in 1555 under the pseudonym of alessio)
told of an assiduous collector of alchemical and medicinal “secrets,” that
“alessio” chose to publish for the benefit of the world.85
leonardo Fioravanti (1517–c.1590), italy’s most famous professor of
secrets, lived in Venice for more than 15 years, and his voluminous writ-
ings, all published by leading Venetian presses, provide a glimpse into
82 Guido ruggiero, “The Strange death of Margarita Marcellini: Male, Signs and the
everyday World of Pre-modern Medicine,” American Historical Review 106 (2001), 1141–58.
83 Jonathan Seitz, Witchcraft and Inquisition in Early Modern Venice (cambridge, 2011).
84 on the debate, see Jonathan israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making
of Modernity 1650–1750 (oxford, 2001), pp. 401–03.
85 on alessio, see William eamon, Science and the Secrets of Nature: Books of Secrets in
Medieval and Early Modern Culture (Princeton, 1994).