[...] Exotericarum exercitationum liber quintus decimus, de subtilitate, ad Hieronymum Cardanum. In extremo duo sunt indices: prior breviusculus, continens sententias nobiliores: alter opulentissimus, penè omnia complectens. Lutetiae, ex officina typographica Michaelis Vascosani, via Iacobaea, ad insigne Fontis, M.D.LVII

“THE ONLY BOOK REVIEW EVER KNOWN TO UNDERGO TRANSFORMATION INTO A TEXTBOOK” (GRAFTON)

4to (214x145 mm). [4], 476, [31 of 32] leaves. Lacking the final blank. Collation: *⁴ a-zz⁴ A-ZZ⁴ Aa-Mmm⁴. With several woodcut illustrations and diagrams in the text. Roman, Greek and italic types. Colophon (Lutetiae Parisiorum, imprimebat Michael Vascosanus, 1557. Mense Iulio) at l. Mmm3r. 18^th-century mottled calf, gilt spine with double morocco lettering piece, red edges, marbled endleaves (joints and spine restored). Ownership inscription on the title page hardly readable: “Nunc Ludovici de Thefut […] Empto ex bibliotheca M Baptistae Mussi 1582”. Pale stain at the end of volume. A very good copy.

First edition, issue with Vascosan's name both on the title page and at the colophon (a few copies of this edition survive with the name of the typographer Fédéric Morel on the title page).

“Scaliger was proud of his dispoutations nature. In the Exotericarum exercitationum (1557) he wrote: ‘Vives maintains that silent meditation is more profitable than dispute. This is not true. Truth is brought forth by a collision of minds, as fire by a collision of stones. Unless I discover an antagonist, I can do nothing successfully'. As Scaliger made his reputation by an attack on Erasmus, so he confirmed it with a spirited critique of Cardano's De subtilitate libri XXI. The Exotericarum exercitationum runs to well over 1,200 pages. When Cardano failed to reply immediately, Scaliger, believing a false rumor that Cardano had died, was stricken with remorse and wrote a funeral oration in which he repented for the onslaught on his late opponent. Ironically, Cardano published his reply [Actio prima in calumniatorem librorum de subtilitate] two years after Scaliger's death. Scaliger based his critique on a reprint (Lyons, 1554) of the first edition of De subtilitate, rather than the revised second edition (Basel, 1554) (perhaps because of difficulty of access to the latter). The full title of the Exotericarum exercitationum implies that the critique is merely the fifteenth book of Scaliger's philosophical exercises (the first fourteen remained unpublished). Following its target, the work ranges over the whole of natural philosophy. In astronomy Scaliger ridiculed Cardano's stress on the astrological significance of comets; and he denied that the world's decay is proven because the apse of the sun was thirty-one semidiameters nearer the earth than in Ptolemy's time. Scaliger also rejected several of Cardano's beliefs in natural history: that the swan sings at its death; that gems have occult virtues (‘a flea has more virtue than all the gems'); that there exist corporeal spirits that eat; that the bear forms its cub by licking; and that the peacock is ashamed of its ugly legs. Like Cardano, Scaliger was aware that lead and tin gain in weight during calcination, although he preferred to explain the increase as a result of the addition of particles of fire to the metal. In order to refute Cardano's theory of the origin of mountain springs, Scaliger used the strange argument that the sea is not in its natural place, since earth should be nearer than water to the center of the earth. Consequently, seawater presses upward, emerging sometimes through superior earth as a mountain spring. This view, of course, failed to account for the difference in salinity between sea and mountain water. Scaliger casts aside Cardano's Aristotelian view that the medium is a motive force. This view is refuted experimentally when a thin wooden disk, cut from a plank, is set to spin within the plank. According to Scaliger, the air between the disk and the surrounding plank is insufficient to act as a motive force, as postulated by the Aristotelians. Instead, as an admirer of Parisian dynamics, Scaliger preferred to use the impetus theory (whịch he called motio). Following Albert of Saxony and Jean Buridan, Scaliger stated that accelerated motion is a result of a persisting gravity within the moving body. This gravity generates from instant to instant a new impetus, which, intensifying, produces acceleration. The impetus, although evanescent, is an efficient cause, and as such need not be coterminous with the effect. The Exotericarum exercitationum won a celebrity that survived its author's death. Lipsius, Bacon, and Leibniz were among its later admirers; and Kepler, who read it as a young man, accepted its Averroist doctrine of attributing the movement of each star to a particular intelligence” (P.L. Rose, in: “Dictionary of Scientific Biography”, vol. 12, New York, 1975, pp. 135-136).

“The most savage book review in the bitter annals of literary invective. Julius Caesar Scaliger, another vain and articulate natural philosopher of Italian origins, devoted more than 900 quarto pages to refuting one of Cardano's books, De subtilitate, and promised to return to the subject at still greater length. Though Scaliger died without producing more than a fragment of this promised polemic, his Exercitationes became a standard work in university curriculums; perhaps the only book review ever known to undergo transformation into a textbook” (A. Grafton, Cardano's Cosmos, Cambridge MA-London, 1999, p 4).

Julius Caesar Scaliger was the son of the miniature painter Benedetto Bordone of Padua. In his youth he joined the Franciscan order at Venice for a time and later frequented the printing house of Aldus Manutius. In the years 1509-1515 he served as a soldier in the wars of Italy and then studied at the University of Padua, graduating in 1519. Subsequently he must have studied medicine, the profession he was practicing by the mid-1520s. At the end of 1524 Scaliger migrated from Italy to southwest France in the service of Antonio della Rovere, who had received the bishopric of Agen. Scaliger married, settled, and raised his family there, earning a solid reputation and a comfortable living from the practice of medicine and participating, despite his isolation, in literary and intellectual life. He achieved so much distinction that at his death he had the highest scientific and literary reputation of any man in Europe. His polemics against Erasmus and Girolamo Cardano gained notoriety. His Poetices libri septem, built on Aristotle's theory of literature, greatly influenced French classicism in the seventeenth century and is today the most widely studied of his works. At a certain moment of his life Giulio Bordone reinvented himself as Julius Caesar Scaliger, a scion of the clan (the della Scala) that had once ruled Verona. The humiliating truth leaked out before the end of the sixteenth century, but Joseph Justus Scaliger, the famous son of Julius Caesar, defended the imaginary descent of his father and himself. The question remained open until the research of Miriam Billanovich (Benedetto Bordon e Giulio Cesare Scaligero, in: “Italia medievale e umanistica”, 11, 1968, pp. 187-256) established the singular identity of Giulio Bordone and Julius Caesar Scaliger (cf. G. Patrizi, Della Scala, Giulio Cesare, in: “Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani”, vol. 37, Rome, 1989, s.v.; see also V. Hall, Life of J. C. Scaliger 1484-1558, Philadelphia 1950).

Adams, S-579; USTC, 152271.

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