xl INTRODUCTION

real and that Fracastorius was honest. Mencke, his erudite
biographer, says that Fracastorius acted "not as a doctor, but
as the Pope's man', and that he regarded disobedience to the
Pope's instructions as a scelus furpissimum et inezpiabile, & vile
and inexpiable sin, from which we may conclude that Mencke
was a Protestant. He adds that Fracastorius was paid a high
fee for his attendance at Trent. 'This incident seems to have
ended his connection with the Council, transferred to Bologna
till 1551, when it returned to Trent under Pope Julius III. Any
attempt to decide the difficult question of the good faith ''as a
doctor' of Fracastorius, must take into account two things.
Unless his own flatteries of the Pope, in his dedications and here
and there in his poems, are wholly insincere, he regarded an
order from the Vatican as a divine command; and he was more—
over the last man, such was his fear of contagion, to stay in a
city where there was a contagious epidemic.

Religious Orthodoxy

Some of his biographers detect in the later works of Fracas—
torius an increase in religious orthodoxy, and say that he took
refuge in blind faith in the doctrines of the Church. It is
obviously impossible to measure and calculate any man's pri—
vate beliefs, especially at a distance of four centuries.  We can
only say that in the latter part of his career, literary conven—
tions had changed. Literary Paganism had gone out of fash—
ion, as Humanism declined in Italy. Under the Popes Leo X
(1513—1521,) Clement VII, and Paul III, it was almost a literary
solecism to refer to divine personages except under the disguise
of names drawn from Roman mythology, and in such writers
as Bembo, the Deity figures as "the immortal gods'^. But,
partly influenced by the German Reformation, the Church,
in the last years of the Papacy of Paul III, determined that
Paganism must be suppressed. Even the study of Greek,
since it led men's minds away from strictly theological litera—
ture, became suspect. In the last decade of the life of Fracas—

 

the Council was removed from Trent "*on the pretext of the plague",
is too vague. Some historians, e. g. Rossi, say that, at the request
of the Pope, Fracastorius predicted from his knowledge of astrology,
that in the autumn of 1547 there would be in Trent a dangerous
epidemic of the plague, which however, did not occur. I know of
no good authority for this.