Pietro d'Abano

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Pietro d’Abano was an Italian physician, philosopher, and astrologer of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, remembered both for a serious attempt to reconcile medicine with natural philosophy and for the darker reputation that grew up around his name after his death. He was born around 1257 in Abano, near Padua, studied in Constantinople and Paris, and spent his working life as a physician and teacher at the University of Padua, then one of the great centres of medical learning in Europe.

His major work, the Conciliator differentiarum philosophorum et praecipue medicorum — the “Reconciler of the differences between philosophers and especially physicians” — set out to settle, point by point, the contested questions where the medical authorities of his day disagreed. The method was Aristotelian and the materials were largely Arabic: Pietro worked from Galen by way of Avicenna and the Arabic commentators, and his confidence in the powers of nature, the heavens, and human reason placed him close to the Averroist philosophy then under suspicion in the schools. Threaded through the medicine was astrology. He held, as much learned medicine of the age held, that the movements of the heavens bore on the body’s health and on the course of disease — a doctrine that to him was natural philosophy, not sorcery, but that lay near the edge of what the Church would tolerate.

That edge is where the historical man becomes a legend. Pietro was brought before the Inquisition, on charges that touched both heresy and magic; the sources are not entirely clear, but it appears he was tried more than once, and that he died around 1316 before a final sentence could be passed. Later report held that his bones were condemned and burned in effigy after his death. Whatever the facts of the trials, the charge stuck to his memory. By the Renaissance his name had become a byword for the learned magician, and the Heptameron, a compact handbook of angelic and planetary conjuration, was circulated under his name — almost certainly a later attribution rather than his own work, though it carried his reputation for centuries and fixed him in the grimoire tradition as a master of ceremonial magic.

The two Pietros are worth holding apart. The first is a documented figure in the history of medicine and the transmission of Greek and Arabic science to the Latin West, whose astrology was of a piece with the natural philosophy of his time. The second is the magus of legend, assembled partly by his accusers and partly by later occultists who found a useful patron in a physician the Church had feared. The reputation outran the man, as it often did for those whose learning ran ahead of what their age could comfortably name.

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