Enikő Békés: The role of citations of ancient authors in a medical-astrological context. Galeotto Marzio and his De doctrina promiscua

The lecture will discuss a medical-astrological treatise De doctrina promiscua, composed by a famous Italian humanist Galeotto Marzio around 1490. The text will be analyzed in a broader context of humanistic education. Galeotto's strategy of reusing Classical authors will be discussed in connection to the function of these references in the author's argumentation.

The aim of the lecture is to present the results of a critical edition of Galeotto Marzio’s De doctrina promiscua. The fifteenth-century Italian humanist completed his medical astrological treatise around 1490 and dedicated it to Lorenzo de’ Medici. During the identification of the frequent references made by Galeotto to ancient authors, I became interested in the humanists’ citation technique and in the method, as they use the quotations taken from Classical texts. In this lecture I will show some examples of how Galeotto inserted the literary texts in the context of his own work and what was their function in his argumentation. Finally, this method will be discussed in the broader context of humanistic education.

Enikő Békés, PhD, is a research fellow at the Institute for Literary Studies, Research Center for the Humanities, Budapest.