Heretical Physicians in sixteenth-century Italy: the Fortunes of Girolamo Massari, Guglielmo Grataroli, and Teofilo Panarelli

Renaissance knowledge was not composed of disparate, specialist disciplines. In particular, medicine and religion were strongly interconnected, and in times of intellectual crisis, the turmoil occurring within one field could affect the other. Considering this, it is worth examining the intersection between the scientific and the religious, choosing Italian physicians as the primary characters of study. This paper considers the religious and scientific paths of three sixteenth-century heretical physicians who spent their lives in the Veneto and/or, during their religious exiles, in Basel. Taking into consideration these case-studies, I will discuss the extent to which “outsider” physicians could contribute to the rise of new conceptions of science and religious discourse.