ABSTRACT
Nicknamed the Saxon Pliny, he was primarily a humanist scholar concerned with reviving and extending ancient learning through direct observations of life, places, and things without reference to hidden meanings. A flourishing school teaching career in Zwickau was cut short in 1522 after his reform-minded Catholicism clashed with the views of radical Protestants. He switched briefly to theology and then medicine, soon joining the team in Venice preparing Latin translations of the works of Galen (second century) and Hippocrates. His interest in minerals and their medical applications whetted, he visited mining districts in the Austrian Alps before settling in ore-rich areas of Bohemia and Saxony as town physician at Joachimsthal and later Chemnitz. Agricola’s plan to annotate the works of Dioscorides and Galen expanded to elucidate everything about minerals, German mines, and metalworking in the light of the body of knowledge also found in other authorities, such as Pliny and Theophrastus. In particular, their scientific terminology needed to be clarified and standardized, and Agricola’s major works featured glossaries listing Latin and Greek terms with German equivalents.
