Preface

4John Caius’ autobibliography, De libris suis/De libris propriis, An Autobibliography, is a remarkable document that has not received the attention that it deserves. First published in 1570 as the last work in a volume concerned more with natural history, it was reprinted with corrections in 1729, and again in 1912 in the volume of his works edited by E. S. Roberts, Master of Gonville and Caius College, to celebrate the 400th anniversary of his birth. Samuel Jebb, the editor of the 1729 edition, thought it important not to forget his achievements, especially as they showed the vigour of the Classical Tradition within medicine, and most notably at the College of Physicians of London. ¹ But compared to his other tracts, it seems to have been little read, and in an increasingly Latin-less age, its complex High Renaissance Latin adds a further obstacle to understanding its message. Nor has it always been well served by its admirers. John Venn, whose detailed biography prefaces Roberts’ edition, described it simply as ‘a minute account of his writings, both published and unpublished’, a description that is partially misleading and hardly likely to attract readers who lack an interest in bibliography. With greater justice, another devoted Caian, Philip Grierson, declared in his introduction to the inventory of Caius’ library that it was ‘one of those tantalizing works that never tell one quite enough’. It is true that it deliberately leaves out or abridges large parts of Caius’ life, most notably the refounding of his Cambridge College and his activities at the London College of Physicians, which can be reconstructed from other sources and from what he wrote elsewhere, but these local initiatives were, in Caius’ view, secondary to the importance of his publications on the international stage. Nor does this treatise fit easily into the history of autobiography, in part because its self-fashioning is not as obvious as in many other medical lives. Besides, Caius was no Erasmus, no Thomas More, and the life of a scholar does not hold out much promise of excitement. His conservatism and, until very recently, the denigration of the standard medical theories of his age as outdated and dangerous to patients, deterred medical historians from investigating his life and writings further. His religious views and the catastrophe of his last months also diverted historians until very recently from setting him in his proper Cambridge context of the 1560s and 1570s.