The Book of My Life

By Girolamo Cardano
Translated from the Italian by Jean Stoner
Introduction by Anthony Grafton

A bright star of the Italian Renaissance, Girolamo Cardano was an internationally-sought-after astrologer, physician, and natural philosopher, a creator of modern algebra, and the inventor of the universal joint. Condemned by the Inquisition to house arrest in his old age, Cardano wrote The Book of My Life, an unvarnished and often outrageous account of his character and conduct. Whether discussing his sex life or his diet, the plots of academic rivals or meetings with supernatural beings, or his deep sorrow when his beloved son was executed for murder, Cardano displays the same unbounded curiosity that made him a scientific pioneer. At once picaresque adventure and campus comedy, curriculum vitae, and last will, The Book of My Life is an extraordinary Renaissance self-portrait—a book to set beside Montaigne's Essays and Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography.

Read the introduction (PDF)

Reviews

My favorite Renaissance autobiographer is the cranky Girolamo Cardano.
— Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World

His autobiography, De Propria Vita, which Cardano wrote in Rome shortly before his death, is the book which keeps his name alive for us both as a writer and as a personality . . . Cardano wrote not just because he was a scientist who had to communicate the results of his research, or a polygraph bent on contributing to a universal encyclopedia, or a compulsive scribbler obsessed with filling page after page, but also because he was a genuine writer, who tried to capture with words something that appeared to elude them.
— Italo Calvino, Why Read the Classics?

Also see:

The Anatomy of Melancholy By Robert Burton Introduction by William H. Gass One of the major documents of modern European civilization, Robert Burton's astounding compendium, a survey of melancholy in all its myriad forms, has invited nothing but superlatives since its publication in the seventeenth century.

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