Daniel Sennert and the University of Padua: Circulation of Medical Knowledge and Scholars across the Confessional Divide in the Seventeenth Century

This paper analyses a set of correspondence between the representatives of the University of Padua and Daniel Sennert (1572–1637), the renowned professor of medicine at Wittenberg. Sennert was a great synthesizer, attempting not only to harmonize Galenism with the “new chymical” medicine of Paracelsus, but also to reconcile Aristotelianism with atomism, positing a corpuscular theory of animated “seeds” to account for the origin of life. The letters reveal frequent gifting of books as an expression of scholarly generositas, the accommodation and the inconsistency of confessional limitations at Padua, as well as tragic events such as the premature death of Sennert’s son of plague in 1630/1 whilst he was studying at the University and the subsequent disposal of his personal effects. The correspondence also brilliantly demonstrates the interplay between texts and to what Mordechai Feingold has called the “confabulatory life” of the scholar, the diffusion of scientific knowledge through informal discussion with colleagues.