CHAMPIER, Symphorien. Campus Elysius Galliae amoenitate refertus: in quo sunt medicinæ compositæ, herbæ et plantæ virentes: in quo quicquid apud Indos, Arabes, et Poenos reperitur, apud Gallos reperiri posse demonstratur.  Lyon: Melchior & Gaspard Trechsel, 1533.                                                                 

 

[bound with:] Periarchon id est de principiis utriusque Philosophie, in quo præclarissima quæq[ue], et digna lectu quæ Galenus in demonstrativis sermonibus, et Aristoteles in libris naturaliu[m] disciplinarum, ac Timaeus Locrus et Plato in libris de universo scripserunt, breviter, claréq[ue] et placido stylo pertractantur atq[ue] declarantur sententiæ... Lyon: Melchior & Gaspard Trechsel, 1533.

 

[and:] Hortus Gallicus, pro Gallis in Gallia scriptus, veruntamen non minus Italis, Germanis, et Hispanis, qua[m] Gallis necessarius. Lyon: Melchior & Gaspard Trechsel, 1533.                                           

 

3 works bound together, 8vo (160 x 105 mm), pp. [viii], 135, the author’s woodcut arms to verso of title and to p. 70;  63, [1], woodcut arms to p. 63; [xii], 83. Woodcut printers’ device to each title. Some very light browning. Contemporary limp vellum portfolio binding, endpapers lifted revealing an interesting binding structure with pink tawed calf bands and a substantial fragment of a probably 13th-century illuminated text manuscript, manuscript title on spine and lower edge. A very attractive copy in a lovely contemporary binding.

 

First edition of two of the most influential and characteristic works by the renaissance physician and humanist, Symphorien Champier, colleague of Michael Servetus and François Rabelais at the Schools of Medicine at Lyons.

 

In the Campus Elysius Galliae and Hortus Gallicus, Champier sought to reform the French pharmacopoeia and material medica, insisting that France had all the medical resources it needed in the form of herbs and medicinal plants without recourse to the exotic remedies espoused by the Arabic medical tradition. In doing this, Champier links politics, culture, medicine and horticulture in praising the new cultural fertility of France (the Hortus Gallicus is dedicated to King Francis I). He cites various drugs known to be "pernicious and venomous" to Europeans, albeit perfectly suited to the inhabitants of other regions and other times (cf. Cooper, Inventing the Indigenous: local knowledge and natural history in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge, 2007). Champier's thesis derives from his deep antipathy to the Arabic medical tradition: several of his many earlier works sought to purify Galenic and Hippocratic medicine of Arabic influence partly in the belief that by stripping away latter Arabic influence the physician was drawing closer to the pure Classical origins of western medicine. It also expresses his persistent critique of the occultist tradition, so deeply ingrained in medical theory and practice  at the opening of the Renaissance.

 

Champier's Renaissance attitudes to medicine may not have been original but they were certainly influential. Lyons was one of the most important centres of the Renaissance in France (witness his prominent contemporaries) and he was very prolific, writing or editing at least 45 individual books. Many of his works are had to classify and their very diversity is typical of the spirit of the age. He has been criticised for attempting to uncover the truth by simply piling authority upon authority, drawing from history, poetry, philosophy, magic and medicine without distinction. This approach may be alien to the modern mind, but Champier wrote at the very beginning of the scientific Renaissance and his works are highly characteristic of the humanist cast of mind. "He shared with many humanists the capacity for oratorical exuberance. So that when Scaliger called him 'insolens, tumens, turgens,’ perhaps this spirit should be interpreted as an indication that he was full of the 'spirit of the Renaissance,' that rare gas which the historical laboratory has never yet succeeded in holding in solution" (Thorndike).

 

The three works here have separate titles but were almost certainly issued together. The Campus Elysius contains several additional tracts: De sanguinis missione; Epistola J. Champerii avunculo suo Symphoriano (dated 25 June 1532); Speculum medici Christiani (dedicated to Champier's son Antoine) and De Theriacâ gallicâ. The Periarcha is dedicated to Charles de l'Estang, protonotaire of Saint-Siége. Each work is notable for the careful typography characteristic of Champier's printed works: he worked closely with his printers (Dumaitre, Histoire de la medecine et du livre medical, p. 195).

 

Symphorien Champier, was born into a bourgeois family at Saint-Symphorien-sur-Croise, near Lyon and studied at the University of Paris before 1495, when he matriculated at the medical school of Montpellier, which granted him his doctorate in 1504. He taught liberal arts in Grenoble and took a doctorate in theology in 1502. In 1509 he was appointed physician to Antoine Duke of Lorraine, who brought him to Nancy. Champier followed the duke several time to Italy, where he was involved in the battles of Agnadello (1509) and Marignano (1515). During his stays in Italy he won recognition as an academic teacher from the University of Pavia. In 1519 he became an alderman in Lyon, and for the last twenty years of his life he was at the center of the cultural Renaissance of that city, while simultaneously promoting the study of medicine by helping to found the College of the Holy Trinity and sponsoring translations of, and writing commentaries on, the works of Hippocrates and Galen.

 

Durling 934; Wellcome 1433; Baudrier, H.L. Bib. lyonnaise, XII, p. 240; Allut 39; Symphorien Champier and the Reception of the Occultist Tradition in Renaissance France. by Brian P. Copenhaver.

 

PRICE: £7500