Paolini’s Hebdomades
Digited Hebdomad supports a single research project. It is a close reading of two books from Fabio Paolini’s Hebdomades (Venice, 1589), a vast treatise built on the number seven. Paolini was a Venetian humanist and physician. He also served as a public censor (Pubblico Revisore) for the Riformatori dello Studio di Padova, the body that licensed and censored texts in the Venetian Republic. His Hebdomades is a commentary on a single line of Virgil, set out across seven books of seven chapters each.
Seven books, three of them substantial
Of the seven books, three carry the argument: Book IV on the body, Book VI on nature, and Book VII on the divine. Read together, they articulate what I take to be an integral anthropology, in which body, nature, and the divine are held in relation without being collapsed into one another. Select a book to see where it sits, and which phase of the work takes it up.
Three of the seven books carry the argument: Book IV on the body, Book VI on nature, and Book VII on the divine. Read together, they articulate an integral anthropology, in which the three are held in relation without being collapsed into one. Select a book to see where it sits in the work.
The numerals are keyboard-reachable: tab to a book, then press Enter.
The existing scholarship on the Hebdomades, from D. P. Walker’s 1958 study to Grantley McDonald’s 2012 article, has concentrated almost exclusively on Book II, on music, and on the Ficinian magical tradition that Paolini inherits and extends. This concentration is legitimate, but it has left most of the book unread. No critical edition exists. No monograph exists. Five of the seven books are untouched in modern scholarship.
What Phase A is about
This project takes up two of those neglected books: Book IV, on the human body, and Book VI, on nature. Read together, they set out a theory of correspondence between the human body and the natural order. It is a microcosm-macrocosm anthropology, rooted in the Neoplatonic tradition that Paolini inherited from Marsilio Ficino. Paolini did not simply repeat Ficino. Where Ficino prescribed a way of life, Paolini builds an architecture. The aim is to recover that architecture, and to place it precisely in late-sixteenth-century Venice. It was a moment when natural philosophy, medicine, and theology were being pulled apart by the Counter-Reformation, yet still spoke to each other in the work of a lay humanist.
What Phase A is not
The project is not:
- a study of the Hebdomades as a whole (five books stay outside its scope: I on rhetoric, II on music, III on the soul, V on arithmetic, VII on theology);
- a claim about the continuity between Renaissance and modern medical thinking;
- a defence of Neoplatonism, nor an exposure of it.
It is an attempt to read two sixteenth-century books as carefully as possible, in their own language and on their own terms.
Method and sources
The method is philological close reading, combined with the history of medicine and of natural philosophy. The primary sources are Paolini’s Hebdomades in the 1589 Venetian edition, accessible on Internet Archive; a personal transcription I made of the indexes of all seven books during 2015 to 2016; Marsilio Ficino’s De vita libri tres in the Kaske-Clark bilingual edition; and the contemporary Italian medical literature, including Girolamo Mercuriale’s De arte gymnastica in Concetta Pennuto’s critical edition, Girolamo Fracastoro’s De sympathia et antipathia rerum, and selected passages from Jean Fernel’s Universa medicina. The secondary sources are anchored by four works: Walker 1958, Copenhaver 2015, Hirai 2011, and the recent work of Christopher Celenza on the Italian Renaissance.
How the reading proceeds
Phase A began in 2026 and will run for as long as the reading needs. I am a teacher, and this notebook is kept alongside that work, so the pace is deliberately sustainable: a new entry every two weeks, with a longer essay when a part of the argument settles. I would rather read two books slowly and well than hurry through them to a deadline.
The work moves through Book IV, on the body, and Book VI, on nature, towards the correspondence the two share. Orientation and corpus-fixing come first, then each book in turn, then a synthesis on the microcosm-macrocosm claim. I am not pinning those stages to particular months; the notebook marks each turn as it comes.
In time, the reading will take the form either of a short monograph of around 40,000 words or of a sequence of published articles. That decision is left until the reading of both books is well advanced.
What comes after
The Hebdomades is a large book, and Phase A covers only two of its seven parts. Two further phases are already in mind, though I am not dating them yet. Phase B would take up Book VII, on the divine, never studied closely before, and revisit Book VI through it. Phase C would draw Books IV, VI, and VII into a single integrated reading. Whether and when they begin is a decision for the end of Phase A, in the light of what the reading will have taught me. Readers of the notebook will be the first to know.
Institutional context
I am preparing this project as a candidate for a rattachement as chercheuse associée at the CESR, the Centre d’études supérieures de la Renaissance in Tours. The CESR is the natural institutional home for this work, particularly in its research axis on “Faire et savoir-faire à la Renaissance” and in the medical-historical research of Professor Concetta Pennuto, who directed my Master’s work in 2015 to 2016 and who is the first reader I hope to have on this new phase.