Pharmacy as a centre for Protestant reform in Renaissance Venice

Abstract

This article reveals the importance of the Renaissance pharmacy for the history of the Reformation. Focusing on the case of a Venetian apothecary and physician, Gian'Battista Gemma (1537–1608), the article highlights the role of Venetian pharmacies as sites of religious and scientific innovation, as well as healthcare provision and poor relief. It argues that a pharmacy was one of the most conspicuous and radical centres for unorthodox belief in Renaissance Venice. Drawing on recent studies of medical networks, spaces and identities, and questions related to cultural transfers, the article examines the way in which contemporary apothecaries and physicians integrated their religious pursuits into their professional activities. Like contemporary preachers, schoolmasters and master printers, Venetian men of medicine emerge as a particularly energetic group of cultural brokers who were able to give their reforming ideas broad influence through a variety of social, economic and professional means.

Mapping Heresy in Sixteenth-Century Venice

“…The choice of focusing on heretical practices more than religious doctrines is instrumental in unveiling the daily dimension of the heterodox movement and the patterns of Venetian heretics' secret sociality. With this in mind, on the one hand, this paper reconstructs the map of the commercial places (most of all, bookshops and pharmacies) which represented safe shelters for prohibited books and heretics, with their location in the city (Grendler 1975;De Vivo 2007a;Salzberg 2014;Kostylo 2015Kostylo , 2019. 2 On the other hand, it traces the wider spatiality of heretical hotspots in the city as it emerges from its sources: where did heretical conversations take place?…”