Library › Latin: Letters › Epistola ad Wilibaldum Pirckheimerum
This letter from Jakov Baničević is addressed to Willibald Pirckheimer, the Nuremberg patrician and humanist. Banisius thanks him warmly for a letter describing remedies that he hopes will restore his ability to walk. He reports that he is already using them with his physicians’ approval, though they have removed the spodium and half the camphor, which he intends to restore, since the burning in his kidneys has not yet subsided. After only four days of the ointment he feels some relief, and if he recovers he will owe Pirckheimer his feet, hands and head.
The letter illustrates the friendship between Banisius and Pirckheimer, part of a wider circle that included Albrecht Dürer, and the way humanists exchanged medical advice as well as learning. Its frank account of Banisius’s illness and treatment gives a glimpse of Renaissance medicine in practice. It also shows the warmth and wit of humanist epistolary Latin in a personal rather than diplomatic setting. The letter opens with the Christogram IC XC, as do Banisius’s letters to Dantiscus.
About this edition. The Latin text comes from Croatiae auctores Latini (CroALa), University of Zagreb (edition: Neven Jovanović, Kolovoza 2012), through Corpus Corporum (University of Zurich), licensed CC BY 4.0. Every word has been analyzed with LatinCy, a neural language model for Latin — click or tap any word for its dictionary form, part of speech, and complete morphology, together with the full entry from Lewis & Short’s A Latin Dictionary.