The Gentleman, the Virtuoso, the Inquirer - Cambridge Scholars ...

CHAPTER ONE
LASTANOSA AS AN EXAMPLE OF HIS TIME:
NATURAL HISTORY AND MEDICINE
HAROLD J. COOK
Is it possible to summarize what has been uncovered and reported about
Lastanosa in the past few years? It may not even be possible to sum up a
life of someone we have known well in person, much less someone from
long ago who appears to us only through a few remains from his material
life. Some of those remains have preserved the traces of his hand in the
words he wrote on paper, and the words in turn preserve traces of what
people like to call his thoughts. Most authors are tempted to look into the
crystal ball provided by these pieces of evidence and have tried to see a
person in it. But although it is tempting to think that in that glass globe we
are seeing shadows of his life, what each of us sees may only be
misshapen reflections of our own worlds. It is therefore sometimes
preferable to compare the indications of Lastanosa’s life to the remaining
traces of other persons of his time who engaged in activities similar to his.
In this way, Lastanosa becomes an example of the world of which he was
a part. Or to put it in terms he himself might have used, he is a microcosm
in which we can see the macrocosm. Of course this approach may simply
be wrong: he may have been a completely unique individual who lived his
own life as if only his life mattered, not being a very good example of
anything very much. But by making comparisons between himself and
others, and noting the differences, we can glimpse a few indications of the
particular possibilities and limitations of his own situated life and even,
perhaps, gain some sense of his conscious aims and intentions.
The possibilities for comparing Lastanosa to other figures in his period
have arisen because of the very special nature of the conference from
which the papers in this volume are drawn. The conference in turn
depended very much on two kinds of historical activity: some remarkable