Exile Experiences ‘Religionis causa’ and the Transmission of Medical Knowledge between Italy and German-Speaking Territories in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century

Italian physicians Girolamo Donzellini, Marcello Squarcialupi and Taddeo Duni (the latter from the Canton of Ticino but Italian-speaking and with an Italian training) are known to historiography for their religious heterodoxy and their peregrinations on the European territory during the second half of the 16th century. Their experience as "religionis causa" exiles was significantly characterised by cultural-scientific, professional and amicable relationships with their German-speaking colleagues. During the second half of the sixteenth century, they had personal and epistolary relationships with some of the most important figures from the cultural reality of the time, such as Joachim Camerarius the Younger from Nuremberg, Johannes Crato von Crafftheim from Breslau (Wroclaw, Poland) and Theodor Zwinger from Basel. Such epistolary correspondence proves to be an important source for the reconstruction of both the instruments peculiar to the circulation of knowledge during the sixteenth century and of the related dynamics (sociability, exchange of gifts, friendly bonds, professional update). Furthermore, such letters tangibly testify to the exchanges, between Italy and German-speaking territories, of objects and instruments useful for practising the medical profession or suitable for medical-botanical studies: seeds and "specimina" of plants, cuttings, "simplicia" of vegetal, animal or mineral origin, medicine recipes, pharmaceutical preparations, handwritten or printed texts, observations, sketches and findings. Nonetheless, the letters were used as a privileged means for managing and enriching the medical-technical knowledge and for holding debates on specific pathologies or particularly complex clinical cases. The close network of relationships developed by Donzellini, Squarcialupi and Duni with the German-speaking world, their religious and professional paths and the "forma mentis" specific to the "medicus-physicus" not only reveal close links between “religion”, “medicine” and the entire organisation system of knowledge, but also an ethical-social code, tacit but binding, followed by the members of the "Respublica medicorum".