Somniorum synesiorum, omnis generis insomnia explicantes, libri IIII. Per Hieronymum Cardanum Mediolanensem medicum ac philosophum. Quibus accedunt, eiusdem haec etiam: De libris proprijs. De curationibus & prædictionibus admirandis. Neronis encomium. Geometriae encomium. De uno. Actio in Thessalicum medicum. De secretis. De gemmis & coloribus. Dialogus de Morte/Humanis consilijs, Tetim inscriptus. Item ad Somniorum libros pertinentia: De minimis & propinquis. De summo bono

Two parts in one volume, 4to (210x160 mm). [44], 278, [2]; [36], 413, [3] pp. Collation: α-δ⁴ ε⁶ AA-ZZ⁴ AAa-MMm⁴; α-γ⁴ δ⁶ a-z⁴ A-Z⁴ aa-ff⁴. Leaves ε6 and MMm4 are blank. Leaf α1 in part two bound after δ6. Colophon on l. ff3v. Printer's device on l. ff4v. The second part opens with a section title. With two woodcut diagrams in text. Roman and italic types. Woodcut initials. Modern full leather, spine with five raised bands and gilt title. Repair to the outer of the title page of part two. Copy skillfully washed bearing a few marginal annotations and reading signs in two different old hands.

First edition (reprinted by Petri in 1585) of this collection of texts by Girolamo Cardano, which includes the first appearance of his work on dream interpretation and the final version of his bibliographical study on his own works.

Like astrology, the art of interpreting dreams occupied Cardano for a long time. As early as 1543, while writing his first, elaborate autobiography, he emphasized the role dreams played in his intellectual life. His work in mathematics during the 1530s and 1540s, for example, was based in part on his skill and diligence, but also in part on luck, “for through my dreams I made many discoveries. Moreover, they encouraged me to continue seeking solutions, which in this case never eluded me.” Another dream from the same period encouraged Cardano to continue writing, in such an imperious manner that “its image continues to trouble me.” Yet another led Cardano to write about the life of Christ and terrified him to such an extent that he did not dare to publish the text. Another convinced him to learn Greek. The idea that knowledge obtained through dreams could supplement the experience acquired while awake was corroborated in Cardano's eyes by authoritative sources. Galen had affirmed this. A whole series of dream interpretation manuals also assured him that from a careful and systematic study of dreams, one could derive the principles for interpreting them, generally viewing them as clues to the immediate future rather than, as they would be for Freud, keys to understanding the dreamer's past mental states. Thus, early in his career, Cardano set out to develop dream interpretation into a well-structured predictive art. In Somnia Synesia, which remained unpublished until 1562, he recounted a long series of his own dreams in a detailed, meticulous, and often fascinating manner. He also devised an elaborate and plausible explanation for the predictive power of dreams. Recognizing that dreams took various forms and had many different levels of clarity and obscurity, Cardano emphasized that both the cause and the object of a vision must be clearly determined for a dream to become truly clear. Only when the stars inspired a vision of a person or object already known to the dreamer could the interpretation achieve certainty. Cardano celebrated the powers of this art with the utmost enthusiasm, while at the same time warning against its abuse by the incompetent. Like astrology, Cardano's art of dream interpretation required of its practitioners knowledge derived from experience, profound wisdom, and a sense of personal honor. Unlike astrology, however, dream interpretation was not always based on a well-articulated and coherent set of technical principles. Cardano did not believe that dreams were always caused by the predictable movements of the stars and planets. Instead, he tended to explain these fleeting and unpredictable glimpses of the future by attributing them to inspiration from supernatural beings. Like his astrology, Cardano's belief in other channels of communication with divine beings was at least partly inherited. His father, Fazio, for whom he had great respect, had believed he possessed the power to enter into direct contact with God and his angels (cf. A. Grafton, Cardano's Cosmos, Cambridge MA-London, 1999, pp. 165-166).

“Girolamo Cardano conceived and outlined his four books on dreams according to Synesius' philosophy between 1535 and 1537. Originally divided into ten books, the volume underwent subsequent modifications until it was published in 1562. We know from Cardano's own testimony how the key episodes in his life were always heralded or accompanied by dreams. From this point of view, the 1562 summa on dreams reflects one of the most critical of such moments. As Jean-Yves Boriaud explains in the introduction to his new Latin edition and French translation of Somniorum Synesiorum libri quatuor, in the year prior to the composition of this work, Cardano was undergoing intense dream activity as a result of the tragic execution in 1560 of his son Giovanni Battista, who had been charged with poisoning his wife. From that moment on, the death of his son would represent a watershed moment in both his life and literary career. For this reason, too, Somniorum Synesiorum libri quatuor deserves to be considered as one of Cardano's most important writings” (G. Giglioni, Synesian Dreams. Giacomo Cardano on dreams as means of prophetic communication, in: “Bruniana & Campanelliana”, XVI, 2, pp. 575-584).

In a passage of the De libris propriis written shortly before dispatching his manuscript of the work with a group of other texts to Heinrich Petri in Basle, Cardano states that by 1561 he had “produced three hundred books (i.e. sections of publications) which in manuscript filled 3,300 folia; this compares with the number of 100 declared in the ‘tabula' of 1538; 158 declared in the 1544 edition of the De libris propriis; 184 in the 1557 edition, and 219 declared in the De vita propria written in 1576. The discrepancy between the 1562 and 1576 figures can be explained by Cardano's destruction in 1573 of 120 books after his encounter with the Inquisition. Taking this into account, we can safely conclude that Cardano had composed nearly all of his writings by 1560, even if many of them were in an unfinished state. From the outset, the main purpose of writing the De libris propriis was to record for posterity the name, contents and location of manuscripts which Cardano thought in publishable or near-publishable condition, and to advertise their existence; in 1557, he (mistakenly) thought that it would take him three months of writing and a further four years of correction to see all his works printed [1557/76]. Given that they include all Cardano's future plans for publishing, the various editions of the De libris propriis may seem to be the ‘crest' or ‘final flourish' [umbilicus] of his writing as he himself said they were; but I think that they were neither that entirely, nor only that. Among other things, they made Cardano articulate a major problem in his vision of knowledge; and they forced upon him the role both of theoretician of textual interpretation and that of self-interpreter […] [Regarding the literary models of the De libris propriis], in 1544, Cardano quotes the autobiobibiographical works of Galen and Erasmus as the instigation of his writing the De libris propriis; given the higher degree of autobiographical material included in 1557 calling for commentary on his own actions as opposed to books, Cardano extended this list to include Augustine, Jerome and Cicero [1557/61]. But what he does not declare is that his account of his books by title, incipit, length, contents, motive for writing, genre, order of reading, utility and intended readership is in fact the adaptation to his own works of a common scholastic practice: that of accessus ad auctores, widely practiced in late antique and medieval commentary, which he might have met as a student at Padua in Haly Abbas's commentary on Galen's Tegni or Averroes's on the Physics of Aristotle […] [The] first version [of the De libris propriis] is the bare tabula or list of works of the 1538 privilege to the Practica arithmetice, which acted successfully as an advertisement, as Cardano himself notes. It attracted the attention of the Nuremberg publisher Joannes Petreius, who, having started to publish for Cardano in 1542, printed in 1544 the first book with the title De libris propriis as an appendix to two other texts […] The 1557 De libris propriis is about seven times longer; it is in fact the amalgam of two compositions, the De libris propriis eorumque ordine et usu, and the De mirabilibus operibus in arte medica factis, which Cardano later removed and published with other more suitable works. It was entrusted to Guillaume Rouillé, who remained one of Cardano's French publishers for nearly a decade […] The 1562 De libris propriis is a yet lengthier work which introduces revisions, excisions, additions to all the above sections, and includes, as well as a repeat of the accessus (which had already been the organising principle of the first part) a long essay on the various arts, their subdivisions, and Cardano's contribution to each of them. The sections on reactions to his works by other authors and the advisability of avoiding polemic are lengthened, and the central point, that authors serve not the authority of others or themselves but rather truth, heavily underscored. The publisher of the 1562 De libris propriis was Heinrich Petri, with whom Cardano had quarrelled in 1558, but who continued to print his works until 1578. Petri is congratulated by Cardano for producing the nearly perfect 1560 edition of the De subtilitate […] The last account of his writings, which was composed at the very end of his life, constitutes chapter 45 of the De vita propria. A new classification of his works is given, and another accessus; but nothing is said there about his relationships with later publishers in Bologna (Alessandro Benacci) or Rome (the Bladio presses) […] Different genres of writing have associated with them not only different readerships, but also different styles and different content. The last section of the 1562 version of the De libris propriis is a classification of all disciplines into their constituent parts, including their styles and characteristic methods of proof. Cardano lists his contribution to each in turn; sometimes it is that of a humanist (as in the case of music, which he restores ‘from the ultimate ravages of age and neglect') sometimes that of an innovator or completer of a science (as in the De tuenda sanitate, about which ‘either Galen did not write, or his writings have been lost'). Cardano's map and subdivision of all the arts is a innovative, if not eccentric, one which shows off his contributions in their best light. A number of major preoccupations emerge in the 1562 De libris propriis, which focus on the whole field of human knowledge and Cardano's place in it. He is of course aware of his own polymathy, which his enemies, as he says in 1544, describe disparagingly as ‘varietas' [1544/55]; but by his later assessment of his own work he is more of an encyclopaedic writer who takes great care over the compoition of his works […] His reflections upon himself in the De libris propriis do not just concern his books; Cardano gives his reader an account of himself as a person as well as a disembodied intellect. Much more could be said about the evolving moral content of these texts and the evolving practice of autobiography than I have been able to indicate here. What emerges as the De libris propriis of 1562 is a rambling bibliographical narrative punctuated with excursuses on Cardano's major obsessions: the injustice of the world, the non-coincidence of erudition and virtue, the fate of his son, the need for stoic fortitude, the evils of the pursuit of riches, preferment and power, the fear of poverty, the legitimate desire for moderate degrees of fame and material benefits. His process of self-interpretation brings him therefore to the realisation of his enduring self and its inner life in the midst of an unstable universe. Paradoxically, he suggests at one point that the ideal form for expression of such personal material which is ‘implicata, reflexa in se, et quasi circumvoluta' [1562] is the dialogue, but he does not choose to use it himself […] Unlike many (but not all) academics of his age, Cardano knew how to insert himself into the world of books. The three discursive versions of the De libris propriis which he published were innovation, coming as they did from the pen of a parochial Milanese who used the printing press to turn himself into a European figure. They demonstrate the connection between that technology and the emergence of self-exploration, for, as Cardano himself points out, the fixed form of print did not only allow himself to look at an image of himself as Narcissus did (Narcissus being his chosen image for the ‘sapiens scripta sua perlegens': 1562); it also allowed him to add to that image, to revise it, and to reconfigure it. The printing process, whose product is fixed but whose type is moveable, mirrors therefore in a certain way the paradox which dominates the intellectual content of these books: that of the eternal world of thought which at the same time is ever-expanding and changing, subject to the same restless revisions to which Cardano subjected his own De libris propriis” (I. Mclean, Interpreting the De libris propriis, in: “Girolamo Cardano. Le opere, le fonti, la vita”, M. Baldi & G. Canziani, eds., Milan, 1999, pp. 14-33).

Girolamo Cardano, a native of Pavia, was the illegitimate son of a learned jurist of Milan, himself distinguished by a taste for mathematics. He was educated at the University of Pavia, and subsequently at that of Padua, where he graduated in medicine. He was, however, excluded from the College of Physicians at Milan on the ground of his illegitimate birth, and it is not surprising that his first book should have been an exposure of the fallacies of the faculty. He set up a medical practice near Padua in the village of Saccolongo. In 1534 he moved with his family to Milan, where he took up teaching duties at the schools founded by Tommaso Piatti for instruction in Greek, astronomy, dialectics and mathematics. In 1545 he produced his greatest mathematical work, Ars magna, in which he presented many new ideas in algebra, including the solution of the cubic and the quadratic. At the same time that Cardano took up his mathematical teaching duties, he maintained his medical practice and saw his status in that profession grow to such proportions that he soon enjoyed a reputation second only to that of the great Andreas Vesalius. In 1543 he accepted the chair of medicine at the University of Pavia, holding that position until 1560 with a seven year hiatus from 1552 to 1559. The year 1552, in fact, found Cardano in Scotland treating the Archbishop of Edinburgh, an indication of just how far his reputation as a physician had reached. The rest of his life, however, was overshadowed by a series of calamities. In 1560 his elder son, his favourite, was executed for having poisoned his wife. His reputation and his practice waned. He addicted himself to gaming, a vice to which he had always be prone. Cardano was forced in disgrace from Milan, ultimately securing a professorship of medicine at the University of Bologna. Troubles revisited him in 1570 when he was imprisoned by the Inquisition for the heresy of casting the horoscope of Jesus Christ. Having cast his own horoscope and having predicted that he would live to the age of seventy-five, Cardano committed suicide on September 21, 1576 (cf. M. Fierz, Girolamo Cardano, 1501-1576. Philosopher, Natural Philosopher, Mathematician, Astrologer, and Interpreter of Dreams, Boston, 1983, passim).

VD16, C-928; Adams, C-692; Wellcome, I, 1305.

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