«Polished and filed according to the right sence of the author»: domesticating Leonardo Fioravanti’s Del reggimento della peste in Elizabethan England

In the Summer of 1579, while England was facing an umpteenth attack of the plague, London printer John Allde enriched his catalogue of publications for sale with a new title: A Joyfull Jewell. Contayning aswell such excellent orders, preseruatiues and precious practises for the plague. The text was the English translation of Del reggimento della peste, a short treatise published in 1565 by the renowned Bologna physician Leonardo Fioravanti (1517-post 1583). This essay is devoted to the translating history of this work beyond the Channel: by emphasising corrections, retouchings and omissions, the contribution aims at pointing out the ways in which the translator Thomas Hill adapted Fioravanti’s work to a different cultural and pedagogic context. In particular, the article intends to highlight the ways in which Fioravanti’s taste for the marvellous, which is an important part of his narrative talent, is systematically omitted by the translator. Hill eliminates the paratexts (in which Fioravanti discussed, also through interlocutions with the physicians of his time, the difficult triangulation between medicine, mirabilia and preternatural events: early modern Europe was accustomed to include divine wrath among the causes of plague); but then he also omits a large number of chapters not directly related to the central theme (“secreti di natura”, “ragionamenti sopra i pianeti”) that the Bolognese physician had inserted “per dilettatione di molti”. The final purpose of this contribution is therefore to analyse the omission and manipulation strategies underlying the ‘migration’ of the medical text, to show, even in a territory other than a purely narrative one, the anaesthesia of the mirabile. The translational operation that transformed the Regiment into the Jewel produced a meagre and, in some ways, impoverished recipe book of remedia, in which the equilibrium sought by Fioravanti between the delightful and the useful was decidedly unbalanced in favour of the latter.