Heterodoxy in Natural Philosophy and Medicine: Pietro Pomponazzi, Guglielmo Gratarolo, Girolamo Cardano

Abstract There were, of course, mute inglorious heterodox thinkers in the early modern period whose speculations were lost on the desert air: Carlo Ginzburg has given a fascinating account of one such village philosopher in The Cheese and the WormsBut this study is about those who achieved notoriety or fame through the various means of disseminating knowledge available to early modern writers. The most celebrated of these means was the printing press: reformers such as Luther and Calvin and thinkers such as Girolamo Cardano showed themselves to be very conscious of the power of this medium.2 Manuscript circulation of lectures and monographs, and the com munication of ideas through epistolary exchanges and personal encounters were also effective, as the case of Pomponazzi will show; one of the reasons why early modern scholars and librarians expended so much effort in the pursuit of the unpublished Nachlass of innovative writers (such as Paracelsus, Cardano, Harriot, and Descartes) was because it was suspected that it contained their most radical and explicit speculations.