Pietro d’Abano

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Pietro d'Abano bigraphy, stories - Italian scholar

Pietro d’Abano : biography

1250 – 1316

Pietro d’Abano also known as Petrus De Apono or Petres Aponensis, or Peter of Abano (c.1257His date of birth is also given as 1246 and 1250.Premuda, Loris. "Abano, Pietro D’." in Dictionary of Scientific Biography. (1970). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Vol. 1: p.4-5. – 1316) was an Italian philosopher, astrologer and professor of medicine in Padua.Kibre, Pearl & Siraisi, Nancy G. (1978) Science in The Middle Ages, ed. David Lindberg, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. p. 135. He was born in the Italian town from which he takes his name, now Abano Terme. He gained fame by writing Conciliator Differentiarum, quæ inter Philosophos et Medicos Versantur. He was eventually accused of heresy and atheism, and came before the Inquisition. He died in prison in 1315 (some sources say 1316) before the end of his trial.

The Inquisition

He was twice brought to trial by the Inquisition; on the first occasion he was acquitted, and he died before the second trial was completed. He was found guilty, however, and his body was ordered to be exhumed and burned; but a friend had secretly removed it, and the Inquisition had therefore to content itself with the public proclamation of its sentence and the burning of Abano in effigy.

According to Naude:

Apse with his sarcophagus.

Barrett (p. 157) refers to the opinion that it was not on the score of magic that the Inquisition sentenced Pietro to death, but because he endeavoured to account for the wonderful effects in nature by the influences of the celestial bodies, not attributing them to angels or demons; so that heresy, rather than magic, in the form of opposition to the doctrine of spiritual beings, seems to have led to his persecution. To quote Barrett:

Biography

He lived in Greece for a period of time before he move and commenced his studies for a long time at Constantinople (between 1270 and 1290). Around 1300 he moved to Paris, where he was promoted to the degrees of doctor in philosophy and medicine, in the practice of which he was very successful, but his fees were remarkably high. In Paris he became known as "the Great Lombard". He settled at Padua, where he gained a reputation as a physician. Also an astrologer,An important text, Astrolabium planum in tabulis ascendens, was attributed to him. he was charged with practising magic: the specific accusations being that he got back, by the aid of the devil, all the money he paid away, and that he possessed the philosopher’s stone.

Gabriel Naude, in his Antiquitate Scholæ Medicæ Parisiensis, gives the following account of him:

He carried his enquiries so far into the occult sciences of abstruse and hidden nature, that, after having given most ample proofs, by his writings concerning physiognomy, geomancy, and chiromancy, he moved on to the study of philosophy, physics, and astrology; which studies proved so advantageous to him, that, not to speak of the two first, which introduced him to all the popes of his time, and acquired him a reputation among learned men, it is certain that he was a great master in the latter, which appears not only by the astronomical figures he had painted in the great hall of the palace at Padua, and the translations he made of the books of the most learned rabbi Abraham Aben Ezra, added to those he himself composed on critical days, and the improvement of astronomy, but by the testimony of the renowned mathematician Regiomontanus, who made a fine panegyric on him, in quality of an astrologer, in the oration he delivered publicly at Padua when he explained there the book of Alfraganus.

Other reading

  • Francis Barrett, (1801)
  • Premuda, Loris. "Abano, Pietro D’." in Dictionary of Scientific Biography. (1970). New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. Vol. 1: pp. 4–5.

Writings

In his writings he expounds and advocates the medical and philosophical systems of Averroes, Avicenna, and other Arabian writers. His best known works are the Conciliator differentiarum quae inter philosophos et medicos versantur (Mantua, 1472; Venice, 1476), and De venenis eorumque remediis (1472), of which a French translation was published at Lyon in 1593. The former was an attempt to reconcile Arab medicine and Greek natural philosophy, by answering questions concerning anatomy and physiology. This style of though was called the Paduan School for Medical Dialectics. It was considered authoritative as late as the sixteenth century.